In “Hatagaya Lore,” your story in this week’s issue, a man moves to Tokyo with his husband, who has been relocated there for his tech job. The story is told over the course of a few years, as the two men drift apart and the narrator starts to find—or discover—himself in this adopted city. Why did you decide to tell this story across a long span of time?
The story started as an exercise—my novel “Palaver” will be published in November, and questions concerning community, self-discovery, and intimacy are vital to the book. But the novel is in the third person, which is typically an intimidating vantage point to me—too much power—and I had to learn how to navigate that. I had some trouble accessing the interiority of one of the protagonists from that distance, so one solution was inhabiting their voice and interiority directly in first-person exercises independent from the book. The resulting sketches gave way to a character that was “of,” but not quite “identical to,” a character in the novel. But I was curious about how this protagonist became who he is, in the present tense, and how small events in a life can contribute to these gradual yet titanic transitions in an individual’s sense of self. I feel like these pivotal points are seldom recognized in media res—the fork in the road is oftentimes only discerned well after it’s been traversed.
Just as importantly: one day, in 2018, I was walking around Kōenji after lunch when a Black woman riding a bike passed me down a tight street. She waved as she rode by, turning the corner into an alley. This wasn’t a neighborhood where that sort of thing happens very often, to put it mildly, and I’ve thought about it every week since. The image was another catalyst for this story.
And, as usual, music helped a good deal: while drafting, I was listening to a lot of TAMTAM, bjons, Lady Wray, and wave to earth. During edits, Khalil Fong passed away, and I had his tracks “Twenty Three” and “Oasis” looped throughout and ever since (songs I can no longer listen to without tearing up).
The story is told in five vignettes, each looking at the unnamed narrator’s interactions with a different person. Was there an inspiration—or a model—for this kind of approach?
For sure: crucial models were recent work in this magazine by the late Lore Segal, Teju Cole, and Caleb Crain. These were pivotal to my understanding of possibilities for manipulating time across scenes. Yūko Tsushima’s “Territory of Light,” translated by Geraldine Harcourt; Anne de Marcken’s “It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over”; Tomoka Shibasaki’s “Spring Garden,” translated by Polly Barton; Sang Young Park’s “Love in the Big City,” translated by Anton Hur; and Jazmina Barrera’s “Cross-Stitch,” translated by Christina MacSweeney, as well. All of these narratives, in their own ways, track the development of a person’s sense of self through their interactions with the world outside their protagonist’s immediate perceived trajectories. Their elliptical, subtle, strategic structural decisions clarified my sense of scope and scale.
Two other works were essential: Akira the Hustler’s “A Whore Diary” and Edmund White’s “The Loves of My Life.” These works, both nonfiction, track the development of queer personhood through sex and intimacy. Their language is astounding, and the structural decisions each author makes—eliding time and chronology for emotional weight, sometimes, and slowing it down for similar effects in other instances—really floors me. I haven’t read anyone else like them. So I wondered if a character’s sense of the world, and how they’ve changed over time, could be illustrated fictively in a similar fashion—because this story’s protagonist does change from vignette to vignette. He becomes more open. Less quick to judge. Attempting to illustrate these shifts through scene work as opposed to overt declaration was tricky, but both books helped immensely.
Hatagaya is the neighborhood in Tokyo where the narrator ends up living. What makes this story about “Lore” rather than about some anecdotes that happen to the narrator? Is he building a kind of world out of his senses?
Totally. Because what impacts our trajectories? The stories we tell about ourselves are dramatically determined by the stories and trajectories we have access to, which determine the stories we can tell about ourselves (hence the current U.S. federal government’s bulldozing of education, arts, health care, trans rights, and international relations; this is also where I’m going to plug the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and the lifesaving that they do and have done since 1991 to provide free medical care for injured and ill children who can’t access it via the local medical systems in Palestine and neighboring countries. If you have the means, then supporting them with a regular donation is a rad thing you can do).
The protagonist’s recalibrated senses contribute to that expansion—but his interactions with the world outside himself expand his sense of possibility. Whether explicit or implicit, each vignette is a lesson learned, and those experiences accumulate into new iterations of selfhood as the story progresses. There’s a line in Keigo Shinzo’s “hirayasumi” where a character notes that it’s about writing about your ideals and the types of people you look up to or want to become. The narrator of “Hatagaya Lore” is someone who, despite unexpected developments and loss, still chooses to keep going, and is afforded that choice only because he sees it in the people he meets and the ways in which they change one another. That forward momentum, and the journey to discover it, felt crucial to my understanding of the story, and it’s the kind of character that I enjoy writing.
I think I’m on firm ground that this story ends on a note of optimism—and that, in fact, much of the narrative has a celebratory feeling, even as it deals with weighty subjects. To what degree is this a conscious choice, or a kind of counterprogramming?
I really appreciate how you framed this, so it’ll be a long-winded answer: the story’s tone is a very conscious choice. Deprogramming, even. When I was drafting this story, last year, and wrapping up “Palaver,” I had a bit of a medical incident. Briefly: On what I thought would be a quick trip to the U.S., I was misprescribed medication for a minor infection, had a severe allergic reaction to the meds, was not taken seriously by two different hospitals my boyfriend drove me to until I had seizures at a third, in which I was transported by ambulance from a local facility to a much larger one, only to spend a few months recovering from the ordeal in physical therapy. Immediately before being discharged from the last hospital, a doctor, upon learning that I also take PrEP, told me that if I’d prioritized Jesus in my life then none of this would have happened. It was an educational experience.
But a number of people helped me. My friends. My boyfriend. Chosen family. Folks in my life who I just happen to see regularly, and who are a part of the fabrics of communities I get to chill with. There’s a quote in Hwang Bo-reum’s “Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop,” translated by Shanna Tan, where a character notes the different ways that folks helped him in his ordeals, and it feels remarkably astute: “People around me. When I was trying to be indifferent, they did the same for me. Even though I didn’t say anything, they seemed to sense my feelings, so none of them tried to make a fuss to comfort me or worry about me. I felt like I was being accepted for who I am. I never had to struggle to explain myself, or to reject who I was. And now that I’m older, I’m starting to think like this . . .”
So I wanted to write a narrative in which that gradual impact was illustrated, and also how it could change a person. This was already an ongoing thread in “Palaver.” But I’ve found that the short story is a space where I can highlight sharp, significant turns in a way that feels structurally inconvenient in longer mediums (which, in this instance, felt like a fascinating challenge given that the larger turn is a slower burn). Getting to that point—the epiphany—is narrative to me. Not just the dénouement after the lightbulb’s blinking but reaching the juncture in which a realization can even be made.
In actuality, I am not a particularly optimistic person. I am not optimistic about our global climate catastrophe. I’m not optimistic about an American literary industry whose executives and boards and award committees cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the United States’s complicity. I am not optimistic about the ways in which many Americans have thrown trans folks and disabled folks and undocumented folks under the bus of the government’s fascistic expansions. But I find optimism in a lot of things: a chef at one of the cafés I’m a regular at in Yūtenji is making different kinds of jam lately, and sometimes she lets me try them. I’m optimistic when the bartender at one of my usual haunts in Ueno teaches me gay slang and the conjugations click for me. I’m optimistic whenever I step into a queer bar or sex club or sauna. I’m optimistic about the sakura trees by the station beside my place, and when visitors take photos beside them. I’m optimistic seeing university students—Jewish students, Black students, queer students, international students—protest the United States’s funding of the genocide in Palestine in ways that should put their supposed mentors and university administrators to shame many lifetimes over. I’m optimistic whenever my boyfriend and I try Vietnamese dishes I haven’t had before. A very dear friend in California just had a child: I’m optimistic for the baby, and we are simply going to have to do our best to prevent their hateful country from disintegrating until they can decide if they want to spend their time in it.
There is no world but the one that we share with other people. There is no future that isn’t shared with other people. And we—all of us—are only visiting this shared space for a little while. So maybe this protagonist’s trajectory is a journey from relative isolation, to a context in which he is actively a part of the world. A small world, maybe. But it is important to him. The optimism he shows at the end of the narrative is for tomorrow, and, if anything, I’m writing toward an optimism that I would like to have. ♦
