Need

Ah, life is perverse and messy. Until last month, I had a life going here which I thought was quite nice, furnished with small cute children to teach, a weekend girlfriend, a place to stay, friends, a bit of money in my pocket and then it all fell apart, like a pack of cards. First Kiyono, unhappy in herself, then my kindergarten job, perhaps because I found it hard to hide my dislike of my boss, and from there my conversation school job fell through because they couldn't afford my transport anymore, from there I was empty and naked here again; a few more words stored in my mind, ease of movement, strong legs from walking, 10 kilos lighter from poverty and healthier food, but naked and useless, just the same way I came here. So it felt natural to curtail dreams of staying here, mastering Japanese, waking free and easy in a city not my own, because it was turning out neat and circular, nakedness to nakedness, creation and destruction all in a little photo frame titled "6 months in Japan" which I can revisit at whim through the gold gauze of memory.

But life is perverse and messy and Kiyono has burst back into mine suddenly, this time with need, and suddenly we've switched roles, from me as the supplicant asking to be nursed at her breast and taken with her to bright clubs and dark bars, to her as the one in need. Depression, of course, a huge black one, just like Norico, the girl I first dated. Since February, the fun sucked out of life, her life replaced by acting and rote movements, from work to bar to hangover and back again. This is the sadness in her eyes I could always find glimmering when conversation and movement ceased, when she returned to her own cage to test out the bars once more. This is the sadness I tried in vain to gain permission to, but thwarted by my transience, our difficulties in communicating properly. Talking about pain without being able to use nuances feels artificial, like crying for strangers in a support group. Now, just as the call of home is strong enough to hear, she comes to me and asks help, asks to be loved, asks to be told she's beautiful and worthy of life and she comes close to tears for me. She hasn't eaten in six days, vomits after every attempt, but she drinks and smokes, self-medicating, won't tell her mother or other friends - friends with history far further back than we two - because she must endure, she tells me perhaps precisely because I am leaving and will take her secret with her, she tells me perhaps because I did love her, I do love her, otherwise it wouldn't have hurt me.

For me, being needed is like a light held out, being needed here is validation of life here, it is a point. My children at the kindergarten needed me and I cultivated that because I needed them too, I needed their simple joy at being given life, I needed snotty hugs and gifts of lego blocks. Now, Kiyono needs me and I feel strange, torn more than ever between the comfort and ready, solid conversations of home and the here and now, an ugly foreign city with humanity scattered through it, Kiyono with a simple need to be held and told truths which I cannot stay to confirm.

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The Japanese philosophy of "gambatte" is perhaps simultaneously the strongest and weakest aspect of their culture. Gambatte - endure - means that you should not complain because everyone is suffering; it is impassivity in the face of problems, it is tenacity, strength, politeness, obligation, social contract, but it is loneliness and suicide too.

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Hina's mother cried when I left the kindergarten. The dream of a foreign kindergarten worker filling the gap where the father used to be was just a dream after all.

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