Winter in Tokyo is quite agreeable to me so far. Sunny nearly everyday, a dry and crisp 8 degrees. Most Tokyoites are heard hissing about how cold it is.  I don’t even bother disagreeing anymore; I just smile, nod and say: "I’m from Montreal." That usually does the trick. After nearly 11 months of living in Japan, I had finally learned how to reply in an oblique manner, as is practiced here.

One day when I had no lessons to teach, I decided to go for a photography-excursion.
I went to Ueno Park, my Pentax camera swinging around my neck, making me blend right in with the other tourists [Ueno is on the list of must-see places in all Tokyo guides.] I’ve been to this park several times before, but the last time was in August, when the park’s gigantic manmade lake was simply choked with thousands upon thousands of velvety-green lotus-pads the size of your bicycle-wheel. The odd lotus-flower bursting out from between the giant leaves like a waving pink-gloved hand.
Now, in mid-January, the lake was the color of bronze. Thousands of dried-up lotus-stocks with broken necks weighed down by the pock-marked lotus shells at the tips; the scene looked like a strange rusty forest of antiquitated shower-heads. There was a very active and mischievous population of ducks living among the lotus skeletons. Those birds zipped in and out of the murky waters at a shocking speed. They tried to steal any wrapped food that they noticed sticking out of people’s bags if the bags happened to be set on the ground for even a moment.
I took pictures of the ducks. I ate my sandwich, and drank my take-out coffee, then went back to taking more pictures. As I angled for a shot of an old man painting the ducks, I heard a voice from behind:
"Are you from Italy?"

I turned around and looked down into the face of a short, Asian man in his late fifties, maybe early sixties. He was wearing an odd corduroy cap that resembled that of an English school-boy, and slung across his chest was an over-stuffed and over-used sports-bag of the kind that I only saw back home around Guy-Concordia station.  In his hand he held a bunch of photocopied chapbooks and a thick, dog-eared book: Emerson, selected writings. He glared up at me sideways; his look was friendly and fierce.
"Um, no." I replied," I’m Can--"
"Oh you’re from Montreal?"
I had to stop. I eyed him more seriously now. "Yeah. How did you---"
"Yeah, Montreal...I want to visit there someday..." the old man sighed as though reminiscing about something in his past, rather than his future. His free hand dived into his coat pocket and he began to survey the slow flow of visitors coming to pray at the small temple behind us. His round chin jutted out and he nodded at the scene knowingly.
"Have you been to Canada?" I asked.
"No never! The States, yes. California. Montreal is a good place to live, I think. Because it has artists living there. But Tokyo, Japan...It’s not good place to be. So you like Japan?" He shot me a look, then the shrine-visitors, then me again.

"Well," I was aware of his expectations now; he probably thinks I’m a fresh-off-the plane tourist. "I like some things about Japan, but Tokyo isn’t the healthiest place on---"
"Exactly! No life here! Only robots!" the old man barked as he gesticulated with his free hand at the Japanese who passed us by. "See?! They don’t even look at you and me. No one here talks to each other, no eye contact, no nothing. All robots, I tell you! How can you live here? No, no. Japanese have no heart. No contact, no passion, no invitation! No one invites you to talk, to come over have tea at their house! Not one of them will help you if you ask! They are robots with no face! No passion, no invitation, only repetition!"
"Well," I began, carefully, "I have a few very good Japanese friends and they’ve been extremely kind and helpful to me."
"That’s because you’re Mickey Mouse to them!!" the old man cried fiercely, and dismissed me with his free hand. "You’re a foreigner, so they’re nice to you."
"Well, the friends I was talking about I actually met in Montreal so---"
"You are Mickey Mouse, that’s why."
"So are you Japanese?" I asked, hoping questions about him will spare me being cut off in mid-sentence.
"My name is, but I’m Korean." he answered, but this time his whole demeanor had changed. He spoke more gently, his voice sounded sad and faded, his accent turned very American and he began to shuffle his feet."I wanna change my name, you know? I wanna change it back to my Korean name, or maybe another name, you know?"
I asked him what his Korean name was and he told me, the family name being Kim. His Japanese name was Hideo Asano.
"But Kim, you know; No good for me. Too many Kims in the world." Hideo Asano said with a chuckle. "I want special name like...Caeser! Yeah, or..or Homer. I’m King you see."
"You’re a king?!" I couldn’t help chuckling myself at that bold statement.
"Sure!" Asano brightened and puffed up theatrically. He beat his chest with Emerson’s selected writings and declared: "I’m the King of Kings!"
"Sounds like Jesus." I said slyly.
"Jesus is my king," Asano replied, un-phased. "and I am king of kings!"
"Are you Christian?"
"Of course!" he snapped. "But these, they are superstitious pagans!" He jabbed the air with Emerson in the direction of the shrine. "You see Japanese try to bribe God with gold! They throw money into the shrine before they pray. But I pray for free!" Then he waved his free hand at a BMW SUV parked in front of the monks’ private house nearby. "And that? That’s what happens to their prayer bribes. Monks with expensive cars. "
"You mean the monks drive that?"I asked.
"Of course!"Asano barked.
"How do you know it doesn’t belong to one of the visitors?"
"I know because I live here!" he said. "I pitch my tent over on the other side of park and I keep my stuff in a coin locker, see?" he took out a string with a cluster of plastic-encased locker-keys and rattled them at
me. The park is home to at least 300 hundred homeless people. They live in blue-tarmac tents pitched between trees at the edges of the park. I’ve seen other settlements in other parks around Tokyo, too.

"I’ve been here since July 4th last year." Asano continued." I know this park very well. But I’m sick of it. I gotta leave. I’m a writer you know. I write poetry. I was going to move to Paris, but that evil woman stole everything!!" Asano shook his head and jutted his lower jaw out again. The shuffling feet began.
"What woman?"
"That woman!!" He cried indignantly, as though I should know exactly who he’s talking about. He rattled off a Japanese woman’s name, her age and even her email address in one breath, then proceeded to tell me how, over a year ago, he had met a 53 year-old Japanese woman at a major bookstore and how, after chatting for a few hours, she had convinced him to leave his two travel-bags with her over-night instead of using a locker, or something to that effect. In one of the bags he, kept his laptop, a second-hand thing given to him as a gift from a kind Australian English-teacher he’d befriended, along with the laptop was his passport and his collection of his favourite books. His laptop contained all his final works [some of which he had posted on the web and published already] as well as his latest drafts and sketches. In short, his life’s work and possessions were stuffed into those two bags. He left them with her and went back to meet her the next day.

"But she wasn’t there. She took my bags and gone." Asano said, the anger drained out of his voice after having had to tell this story too many times. "With my passport gone, I had to cancel my ticket to Paris." Asano went on, gloomily. "I had saved months’ worth of money selling my chapbooks to gaijin[foreigners] so I could go to Paris. I was gonna live there and get money from the French government as a ’resident artist’. I had to save up 200$ just to get a new passport, and you know if you were in a foreign country all you gotta do is go to your country’s embassy and they give you a new one easy, but here, nooooo. It was so complicated and long, and I had no address of my own so a nice American gaijin teacher he told me ’You can use mine.’ So I took train up to [names a very far-away suburban station] to his apartment just to check the mail, trains cost too much money. All because of that woman. That’s why I say, don’t trust Japanese! Especially Japanese women!"

"That’s racist." I said in as neutral a tone as I could manage, trying to sound like Data from Star Treck.

Asano just shrugged and shook his body, shaking off my words like the ducks shaking off the filthy lake-water beside us.

"Japanese women is not real woman," he began again, falsely calm, his English slipping a bit. "They act cute, hang around Shibuya [a train-station in Tokyo best known for its giant outdoor TV screens, and insanely crowded street-crossing ,as seen in Lost in Translation] to meet  gaijin men, but then if a man needs help, he turns around from her beautiful face with a knife in his back!"

"Did that happen to you?"

"Yes, sure." he replied, almost mumbling. I got the impression he was embarrassed by that fact. To be defeated by not one but two Japanese women in one life time. "I was married to Japanese woman, but she did same to gaijin man." Here his grimaced and stabbed the air with an invisible knife.

"But I’m strong man; I’m a soldier, a traveller!" Asano’s pride returned to lift him up; he did seem to float a few inches upwards as he lectured himself. "A strong man needs a strong woman!"

"So what’s a strong woman?" I asked.

"A man needs a woman who will kick him back! A man," Here, he held out his hand palm open, ready to list three things off on his fingers. "needs three things, good woman, good wine and good shoes." 

"Good shoes?!"

"Of course!" he cried but looked pleased with himself. "Good shoes are the most important thing! In Japan, people don’t know how to find good shoes, they wear cheap shoes. Americans, I see them, they wear good, expensive shoes. Shoes for walking."

He did have a point there; I had noticed that Japanese young women wear the silliest, most impractical footwear imaginable. Most girls will be seen shuffling around in super-flat, pointy glittery ballerina-shoes that are either far too tight or way to loose. Or they’ll drag themselves on high-heeled, spindly sandals [even in winter!!!] that are one-size too large. Most girls adopt a sort of slack-kneed, duck-walk with the toes turned inward so extremely that the girl looks like she is hobbling rather than walking. The reason for this, I’m told, is that men think it’s cute. Or at least, women think that men find it cute. Japanese men, for their part, tend to buy their shoes one-size too big in order to be able to slip them on and off more easily at an entrance of a home or traditional restaurant.

Our conversation slowly led to Asano taking out some of his latest drafts and reading them aloud to me. As he read, I found that his written English was riddled with mistakes, but later I noticed that what I had initially thought to be grammatical mistakes were actually deliberate; telltale signs of a technique that he used to sublimely poetic effects. And no, his writing, as much as it bent and stretched the rules of English grammar, never once sounded like a fortune-cookie fortune. There was one draft of a poem in particular which had a line talking about touching snow with bear feet which I found particularly haunting.

Then he pulled out some Internet print-outs from a grimy, wrinkled envelope he had in his bag. They were from various blogs and on-line diaries of people who had written about having met him. One person’s blog ended up turning into a bulletin board where people from all over the world posted up a response to his little story about how he met Hideo Asano in Tokyo and how he was called Mickey Mouse in the eyes of the Japanese. The posted replies created a kind of spontaneous I-Met-Asano-Too club, where people who had this one strange experience in common exchanged their opinions and philosophies about Asano..s rants, talents, politics and way of life. A few days after my meeting, I would look up this particular blog to read for myself, and marvel at how many people this guy had not only met, but affected.

Eventually, inevitably, he tried to sell me some of his chapbooks, I hesitated when I saw the price: the book of short stories was 30$, while the haiku book was 10$. I said I was poor today and didn’t have enough money, so he asked for any small change I could spare so he could at least have some dinner. I handed him 6$ in change, he handed me a haiku-book.

A week later, I exchanged a few emails with Asano and asked for a meeting with him for a video interview. In my email I asked him if he could meet me at the same spot at Ueno park at 2 pm, to which he casually accepted with the reply: ..Gotcha. See you there...

Chasing shadows of snowflakes

on the ground

I’m late, so I run across my own shadow

as it stretches itself

ahead of me

and jumps back to second place

each time we pass another street-lamp.

"there is always the fear

of knowing what you really want." 

Like small gods,

ants in mtach-boxes

of steel and speed.

The earth below is a blanket,

a quiet sea and land.

Small green snakes of rivers

threading through,

stitching, binding

the water and earth.

The music piped into my ears

widens the scene below.

A privilaged view

now common-place.

A picture will not impress anyone, these days.

’Did your camera go off by mistake?’

No, I went off by some coincidence,

across continents and an ocean

dotted with clouds

Thoughts

thousands of feet below us

those are all past passengers’ thoughts

down there

Every one of them who looked out

and down,

mouths open in awe

released a small sigh,

a puff of secret disbelief.

No one is intended to see

We must never look surprized,

especially at the sight

of something that

we were not detined by

nature to witness.

Something we are

not worthy of yet.

The Navaho sent shaman

to walk the clouds,

not just anyone

 with a flashing camera in hand,

to greet the gods.

The face on the screen opens

her mouth

but no sound comes.

Today is another time

a silent dialogue

between my body

and my mind’s eye

This the era of

the voiceless

A camera is our

only witness

The only thing to pry

open the windows

into lost selves and

sift through

the wreckage of our dreams.

************

Where are you from, and where are you going?

A feather of breath

the starkness of teeth

a quickening,

with a held back smile

I know something small

is unfurling

between paper ribs

a paper-weight heart

presses down.

***********

Within one day

there are a dozen

thousand lives

that well up before me.

I set them on fire

with magnifying eyes.

the options dwindle,

and the flame

licks itself clean.

my daily mound

of dusty after-thoughts;

I'm still waiting for

a pheonix to emerge.

A few weeks before my twenty-ninth birthday, I discovered that I owed my existence to St-George. 

I always assumed that one's life story ought to begin at the moment of one's birth; but now I was now part of that group of people who can start their story even farther back: the moment of their parents' first meeting.

The potential of my subsequent existence began when my mother, a young woman of twenty-two or so, accepted a lift from a young man driving a red Fiat convertible. She knew him only as a friend of a friend and had noticed him because of the little red car. She also remembered her friend mention that this young man was in his third year in Electrical Engineering at the American University of Beirute, the same university she attended. All this information could not have gone unnoticed; there was a part in my mother's mind conditioned by Arabic culture to keep stock of all the merits that made a young man a good "choice" for marriage. And this part of her mind, consciously or not, must have gone instantly into operation. So far, she liked his lanky dark looks and his exuberant personality, his choice of career promised a decent living, and his choice of a vehicle seemed to please her even more. Only one thing remained unknown; his religion. While they drove down some dusty road in Beirute, she noticed a small laminated portrait of St-George glued onto the dashboard.  This answered her final question; her mother would be happy to hear that her youngest and ninth daughter had found a good Christian engineer. After all, this was still Lebanon in the early sixties, and a marriage between a Christian and a Muslim was a rare incident to be avoided, by both sides, as much as possible.   Little did my mother know that the young man was, in fact, a Muslim. His Christian friend who had sold him the Fiat had put the portrait of St-George there. By the time she found out about the portrait's original owner, it was too late.

Two years later my brother was born, and a few years after that my parents moved to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

My mother was nearly twenty-nine years old when she had me, and my little sister followed five years further down the road. With  five-year intervals between each offspring, our lives lined themselves up neatly unto the temporal line like increments on a ruler. 

 Without any one realizing it, St-George made a re-appearance. Among the few religious objects that my mother had brought with her to Saudi Arabia was a small, laminated, oval-shaped portrait of Saint-George. It hung on the wall beside the mirror of her dresser, and dangling about it was one of her mother's rosaries, made of lavender plastic with a tiny crucified Jesus carved onto the cross. The third object was always in the farthest corner of the dresser, often hidden behind perfume-bottles still in their boxes, clusters of spiky hair-curlers, piles of make-up compacts and a pair or two of broken sun-glasses.

This object was a small wooden shrine containing a metal relief of the Virgin Mary and child Jesus. It was shaped like a shallow house with a tiny ornate tin cross on its pointed roof. It had a small fence made of delicate tin lace-work behind which Mary and baby-Jesus were mounted onto the wooden back-wall. Between the relief of the two figures and the tin lace-work sprouted a tin seashell protecting a small red light bulb, which when lit threw a warm fuscia light onto the holy pair.

A good portion of my childhood was spent with a magnifying glass in one hand and one of these three objects in the other. By the time I was nine years old, I had memorized every inch of their respective surfaces. But St-George's portrait grew less, instead of more, comforting. I became more and more hesitant whenever, out of habit, my hand reached out to unhook the oval picture. If I happened to be near my mother's dresser, my eyes uneasily darted over the wall where the portrait hung and then away again.

Occasionally, I would surmount my uneasiness and study the picture thoroughly. The saint was a young man, a knight in silver armor, mounted on a pearl-white horse. His spear, as thin as a needle, pierced the belly of the sea-foam-blue dragon coiled around the horse's legs. The knight looked down at his dragon as he killed it, and the expression on his young calm face was not one of violence, but of compassion. The dragon in its turn was forever looking up at the saint, its expression as fathomless as that of the occasional salamander that was caught slithering around in our bathtub every now and then.

There were times when my mother caught me studying St-George's portrait, and she would instantly begin telling the story of how St-George killed the dragon.

"There was a terrible dragon terrorizing the nearby villages, and every week a young girl would get kidnapped by the dragon. The people of the villages were very upset to lose so many of their daughters so they asked God for help and He sent them a knight to fight this greedy dragon."

Some times this story took on a darker tone: "The people of the villages were very superstitious and believed that, by giving the dragon one of their young virgin girls as a bribe each month, the dragon would leave them in peace. Saint George believed in God and His power to help him defeat the dragon once and for all so that no more young girls would have to die because of an old superstition. You see how he killed the dragon?" my mother would point to the portrait as she picked up a basket of dry laundry. "God helped him, of course."

There was no sign of God in the portrait, no halloed old man watching from behind a bolder in the background. I asked God for help to find a dragon many times, or at least a horse, but no help came.

I longed to meet a dragon, to look upon his otherworldly face and let his knowledge of a world without God pierce me. I drew dragons instead; dragons, damsels, horses and houses in the woods. St-George was too foreign to me by being a grown man, so I drew the liberated village-girls instead. These girls very rarely returned to their villages, but set off towards solitary houses in the woods where they rode their own horses and met with talking dragons behind St-George's back. In the woods they remained; their yellow hair left untied and their white nightgowns now sporting pink polka dots.

Many years later, the year I turned twenty-nine, a brilliant girl from Calgary named Renée came to live with me for a few months.  We set each other ablaze with talk, and during such late-night or late morning talks she mentioned Joseph Campbell's "dragon analogy". According to Campbell, anyone searching for meaning in his or her life can be likened to a hero fighting a dragon. The dragon in this case is a symbol for whatever prevents a person from achieving his or her highest potential, or, as Campbell puts it, "following your bliss". The hero begins his journey by climbing the sharp scales on the dragon's back starting from the tail up. Each scale represents some obstacle such as social conditioning generating fear, emotional and creative repression, gender roles, etc. As the hero gets over a scale, he climbs higher towards the dragon's head. The last scale is the steepest and sharpest, and it is where most people give up the fight. This scale is the obstacle of Social Duty. It isn't only the hero's family, but society at large which applies pressure to make the hero conform to its rules of conduct. The hero is pressured to give up any personal goals for the sake of fulfilling public ones such as marriage, raising a family and pursuing a financially rewarding career. If the hero resists such pressures, perseveres in his struggle to find his bliss and then follow it, then he will have vanquished the dragon. He will leap off of the dragon's snapping head and onto new uncharted territories; he will finally enter Life in its truest form. Those who fail to pass the last scale will be hypnotized by the dragon; pinned down by its admonishing gaze, shamed into stagnation and nostalgia.

-Serene Daoud, March 2004