When tragedy hits home for me, that’s when I wish that I knew how to better navigate everything. As a cultural historian or literary critic or whatever one might call it, what do I have to offer? I’m not a doctor, a scientist, an engineer, or even someone physically capable of helping to rebuild a home that’s been destroyed. Even as I study literature, I have no idea how all these threads will come together in my head–I sit trying to take a deep breath, let it all in, find a state of inspiration and practice serenity despite my deep reservations about what it means that I am molding my personality and life to this career. I wonder if I’m okay with that. Get ahead as a grad student, get my Ph.D., land a tenure-track position, and–hopefully–secure tenure in the course of the next 10 (?) years. What else can I do that isn’t asked of me by this career track? What else can I do while I’m already struggling to stay afloat and retain my sanity in a Ph.D. program? What small steps can I start taking, bit by bit, to ensure[sic] that I become the person I want to be? My personal failures and awkwardness as a human being–how do I face them and learn to embrace myself and my work?

I am neither patriotic nor nationalistic, nor do I glorify any place in which I’ve ever lived. I try not to romanticize, and yet Japan matters to me. I may have spent only a few years living there, but I will spend the next several decades of my life researching literature, revolving around Japanese culture, gradually coming to understand more not only about Japan, but also about myself as a person wrapped up in this context. My sadness for Japan–maybe too much about me right now, but hopefully, someday, a lot more.

I have recently started working again on one of my story translations from my undergraduate thesis on a contemporary Japanese writer whose translations thus far in the United States have pretty much flopped as far as I know, but who has a flowing, simple prose attracting me enough that I impulsively devoted an entire academic year to translating and writing about her most recent story collection published that year in 2005.

Now for the first time in months, I feel a glimmer of happiness while reading through and editing, after dragging my feet for a long time on a fairly tedious task. In some ways it’s entirely menial work to go through and tweak one or two words at a time, especially for a piece of work that may or may not get submitted anywhere since I’m still waiting to hear back from the publisher. It’s something like the joy of craft, even as I currently suffer from a crippling fear that I am not intended to be a reader or a writer or anything involved with truly intellectual work.

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