Dear Satsuki,
Our first meeting was such a rare occurrence. Freezing that day, wasn’t it? I couldn’t believe you stood to face the blow from the river for so long. When I saw you, a shudder ran through me like an axe stroke through a rotten timber, revealing the unwilted heart wood to its beholder. Normally, I wouldn’t offer to buy a cup of beef soup to a stranger. That would be too bizarre. But something about you reminded me it was what Kami would do. I suppose at that moment I really missed him.
I have a theory about people and relationships: we are intuitively drawn to those that match our spirit. It’s like no logic, and can’t be helped. When two fitting souls recognise each other, they just know it before they even speak. One is like a grasshopper, the other grass; one like fish, the other pond. It’s magical.
Everything we live with is an art of fate. It’s hard to imagine a life not believing it. For me, it would be so dull, so mechanic. People don’t choose things. Things choose them. I think in the same way loving someone is a destined thing. Sometimes it ends in a beautiful friendship like ours, sometimes it ended in tragedy; on the latter, I will say no more.
Some memories that formed a part of us also ceased to be when love died, for which we went into an eternal world made of multiple, split realities. In one most obvious way we move on; in many others we never do. Sadness has already been stamped on us, simmering, leaking into our heart from time to time. We who remain alive have an uncanny melancholy. We cope with it by living as though we have two distinct personalities. There is one that is lively, boisterous and jolly. On the surface, we deal with ordeals and pull ourselves up with life-pumping strength. We seem cool and nonchalant, joking around like we are having the best time. And there is another that is delicate, soft, like a flower pedal that couldn’t resist the slightest breeze, scattering in the air.
I have wished I wasn’t as complicated as I am. I wondered, too, why I have so many feelings so few can relate? Why does everyone seem to be slowly harvesting the fruits of life, when I am still not very much further from where we started, frozen, flustered, waiting? Satsuki, now, I really want to mention a few of my favourite Japanese writers. They have the power to alleviate me, maybe you too, only if for a short time. They write so truthfully and subtly about loneliness, about trauma, about loss. I can never be overwhelmed. I need the acknowledgement that we often move forward no less damaged, only lonelier and still desperate for love. Yoshimoto is a beautiful writer. She reassured me a thousand times that this complexity can exist and should. It made one more learned for life. Go love and hate your parents, she says. Be depressed and be indifferent to people’s sympathy for a little while. Dare to defy cliches. And she is just so bloody funny. Read everything she writes. I will mail you a few copies if you want.
This letter won’t be all gloom and doom. You know what I am. When life feels like chewing a chunk of dry candle, you at least have to cultivate some sort of private spirit no one has power to, like a sense of aesthetics related to good music, or good books you emotionally reply on. We could then look at loss from a different perspective. Even for a short time. I read Yukio Mishima’s Patriotism, in a cold, cloudless afternoon after Kami’s funeral. It was about the love of a couple before they committed seppuku. The exquisite prose made the story sound gorgeous. It’s not like I approve of this brutality or anything. But seeing Mishima presenting them dealing with death in such unwavering, glorified dignity made me weep hard to the end. It reminded me that perhaps with even no possibility for closure, it is enough to have lived.
Sometimes you just needed a beautiful sadness in order to get out of one. Ironic, isn’t it?
I am running out of time for this letter. I also struggle to finish my third novel. Somehow the protagonist stopped talking to me in my dreams. How strange! I saw him last night at an ice-cream truck. He bought me a vanilla-brownie favour but went on ignoring all my questions. Was that bribery? If so, it was too sneaky. No wonder I woke up with a heavy headache.
P.S. Your cinnamon rolls were amazing. The best I ever had.
Q.
5th Dec 2031
at Ming He Gong Road,
North Queenland
Siming Lan 