Reverse culture shock: Reconciliation of the inevitable passage of separate time; the understanding that time passes separately.
Every instinct tells me that home should be as I left it. When I leave for the grocery store, if there are things strewn about the floor when I return, then I have been ransacked, possibly robbed, definitely invaded. But what do you do when you return from countless trips to other grocers, other stores, and find your walls freshly painted? Can you keep your balance on hardwood floors replacing your carpet? What if your belongings were carefully rearranged by other hands or stuffed into closed closets, now brimming with memories?
The newly unfamiliar grins at you from the TV, “Where is your home, now?”
Then steps back, “What is ‘home’?”
Then launches into orbit, “What is yours?”
My home split into two when I told my new friends from new places where I would wake up with a hangover in hopefully no less than 10 hours. It fractured once more when I slid, serenely, into a deep sigh after dinner in my living room, arms stretched across each end of my futon at my house in Chiba. Home was far from home—that place crystallizing in memory. I could see the angles fading; the sharpness of detail now fuzzy under uncounted days away. But was I “away”? Is that the correct word to encapsulate my time in Japan?
The troubling thing about coming home, or what constituted your home for so long, has not so much to do with the palpable changes you witnessed in your own inner-spaces, but with the distressing sensation of sticking your feet into what was once your warm bath and knowing the temperature must have changed. It is not as shocking as it is immediate, uncomfortable. You sit down to immerse yourself, to adjust more adeptly, waiting for the memories to settle you back in place. You wait for time to tell you that you belong.
You see, “home,” to me, had to transcend itself, or all of my previous definitions, to allow my extended presence abroad. In fact, I depended on it. If I returned to America only recognizing one place as my origin, if I conceded to seeing myself as the inheritor of a sole culture, then I had, inexcusably, failed. So, when I was leaving Japan and all of my students were asking me, with purest sincerity, 「いつ日本に帰ってきますか？」“When are you coming back home to Japan?” there was one side of me that softened a smile and wanted to correct them. And the other, more enduring side simply didn’t know what to say, when to tell them. So I said I wouldn’t be back for a while. It was my way of telling them not to wait; I didn’t want to keep them waiting.
The fact remains, though, that the same way my students unconsciously discerned the forged affinity I have with Japan, I began to fully realize it in my leaving.
Wait, where was I going, again?
What should I call that place?
I said I was going back to America. I said I was going home. But I knew better. I had already fashioned another life out of new language on unfamiliar ground. Home was now a white house next to the school, facing the sea. It was a weekly routine. A set of shows. A range of faces. And now I was headed somewhere else.
Yes, I had left one home a long time ago, indeed. Though that phrase merely masks the problem. When I stepped inside my mother’s house after over three years of absence, hauling the remnants of one life into the memories of another, I was confused: eyes skeptical of walls different colors, feet feeling for carpet and finding flooring, hands guiding suitcases around curious furniture. This was not the home I left at all.
But then I understood for the first time.
The problem is that home has left me, too.