a letter from ohio, a letter from japan

to the obāsan at the breakfast café

This week I'm at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, wrapped in a leafy quad at Kenyon College, sleeping in a bare dorm room. It's my first time at a writing program like this, and it's presented a potent a cocktail of feelings: eagerness and inspiration and pride mixed with gut-wrenching insecurity. 

Mostly, though, it’s affirmed how grateful I am to write, and how deeply I know that I want to write, whatever shape that path may take. 

It feels fitting to share an essay that I’ve been writing and revising for months. After visiting Japan last fall, I began writing a letter to a stranger, which grew into something much bigger than I expected—an essay about kinship, care-taking, and the generosity and loneliness I found in Japan. 

I’m tremendously grateful to Aube Rey Lescure, whose vision and expertise shaped the piece into its final form, and to my dear friend Anam, who encouraged me to submit to OffAssignment in the first place. 

Here is an excerpt from the essay, which you can read in full here. Thank you for reading!

I arrived in Kanazawa just in time for the maples to turn scarlet. I walked through the old town, past tatami shops and teahouses, scanning my memory for half-recalled words. Mono no aware: precarious beauty. Kōyō: the vivid pause before the trees are bare. 
 

My trip had begun two weeks earlier in Tokyo, where I moved through the city as part of the crowd. Japan struck me as a generous and lonely place: strangers offered an umbrella in a downpour, a seat at a full izakaya counter, an extra pour of sake. I received each gesture from a respectful distance. In a basement dessert shop, I sat in communal silence around a pot of zenzai, speaking only to say “sumimasen.” Excuse me. The owner said I was a rare foreigner, and I did not ask what he meant. I thought of uchi–soto: the division between in-group and out-group, familiar and foreign, me and you.
 

I was en route to Suō-Ōshima, the tiny island near Hiroshima where my great-grandparents were born. My family has roots in Japan, but for generations, we have been Nikkeijin: absent sons and daughters. We descend from migrant farmers, people pushed away by famine and pulled toward the promise of work. After leaving Japan in the early 1900s, my great-grandparents landed in Hawai'i and decided to stay. 
 

I grew up on Oahu, speaking English at home and learning Japanese in school. For seven years, I dedicated myself to the language, contorting my mouth into a disciplined shape. I am yonsei—fourth-generation—and hāfu—half-Japanese, half-white. I studied to compensate for those qualifiers, the hyphens that separate me from a homeland. 
 

When my grandparents were alive, we would gather at their house for Sunday dinner—fifteen of us huddled around overflowing plates. We spoke very little, and only about uncomplicated things: “Where did you buy the sashimi?” “The cantaloupe is sweet—is it still on sale?” No one else seemed bothered by the distance between us. Perhaps to them, it felt like relief. But to me, it felt like isolation. 
 

I came to think of our silence as a container, a place to hold decades of loss. It pained me to imagine the grief my grandparents had buried. I knew only fragments: Grandpa’s brother had been murdered while at home with his kids; Grandma’s mother had left, escaping to another island and another life. No one spoke of past generations beyond that, not even in passing. That history was lost somewhere in the 4,000 miles between Hawai'i and Japan.
 

After my grandparents died, I began digging. I longed for a lineage, a tether to the past. In a box of old photos, I found a family tree, written in my grandfather’s script. Beside his name was a half-sister he’d never mentioned—and a branch of our family that remained in Japan. I could go there, I realized. I could visit the island, the village, the ancestral home.
 

When I left for Japan, I expected to love it the way I loved my family—quietly, from a distance. I stood on the threshold, asking to be invited inside. 

Read more at OffAssignment.