Mr. Children

Need I say more?

The sun this morning, from my bedroom window

What do you do to remember yourself? Who do you talk to? Who do you listen to?

I’m still on the (very) long journey of acclimating to a new place, and remembering past homes of various kinds. I find myself seeking out pictures of lower Manhattan, as well as Cambridge, MA, and my hometown, Huntington, NY, to place myself in the scheme of things. In my mind, I visit Pleasant Street, an actual street I lived on in 2012-2013, near Central Square in Cambridge. I try to remember what I’d see on my walks to Trader Joe’s, what trees grew out from the undulating red brick sidewalk, and where. I look at old drawings — far too many to look at, I can only look at 10 or 20 at a time — and remember past selves, feeling like both me and not-me.

A couple of nights ago, on the way home from seeing We Live in Time, I suddenly had the urge to see if a band I loved in the old days happened to be on Spotify. I had a half-hour wait for the tram, so why not spend it going down memory lane?

I first saw this particular band’s name, MR. CHILDREN, while on an early Friday night stroll around Teramachi-Dori, a shopping mall arcade complex in Kyoto, in 2005. (I was then, as now, new to a city and often at loose ends — but back then, I had a cohort of friends in the exact same boat, and that helps immeasurably!).

Anyway, back to Mr. Children.

I didn’t just do a double-take. I did a triple take. I made sure, in fact, to take a picture. MR. CHILDREN? I couldn’t believe that one of the top bands in Japan had a name that seemed like a bit of a horror side show, or at the very least, described someone who maybe loved children too much? Or what, thought he was a child? Wanted to be a child?

MR. CHILDREN had just put out an album, so there were hundreds of their new CDs on display in a little tower, and a couple of moody-looking, well-shot (it’s Japan, after all) posters for sale. They looked cool enough — but that NAME.

One of the CDs I bought out of sheer curiosity a couple of years after my first encounter with MR. CHILDREN

Oh well. When I moved back to Japan, two years later, in 2007, I decided to pick up a couple of CDs by this Mr. Children to see what he was — they were — all about.

I then, with some immediacy, fell in love with Kazutoshi Sakurai, the main lyricist and singer, whose plaintive passion and easy lyricism is irresistible. I remember talking about him once with someone in Japan, who taught me the word “kasureta” (hoarse) to describe Sakurai-san’s voice. Yes, I love his kasureta-koe, always hoarse with pure, urgent feeling.

This week, I’ve been listening to a couple of albums that I had not listened to for about 15 years. I put this song on today, “Hokorobi” (undone seam) and was amazed that I still knew it completely.

Suddenly, I’m back in my tiny, black, $1200 used Toyota that I’d bought from the father of my then-acquaintance, now one of my best friends, Yuko, in rural Toyama. I’m driving along the flat roads of Kurobe, the mountains off in the distance, rice paddies all around. I’m feeling sometimes forlorn, often frustrated — I have a lot of ideas and a lot I want to share and experience and discuss, and I’m living in a tiny town with one cafe and no movie theatres and almost no “youth” scene to speak of, since most of the youth are off in Tokyo and Osaka. I’m the kind of person who probably would have worked in media and thrived, and I feel a little throttled by my days in this situation.

I’m feeling often confused, sometimes ecstatic. I’m navigating a relationship with the local guy I’m dating, Omi, who’s very handsome and funny, and also absent much of the time as he climbs the Japanese corporate ladder and goes to golf tournaments. I’m living in an apartment I can cross in six steps, with a plastic pre-fab bath and shower all on one pink piece. There are about five Americans in my town and three of them are in serious relationships with local people. There are a couple of English people and Americans one town over, and sometimes we get together and watch “The Mighty Boosh.” I’m so bored some weekends that I’m sad when school gets out on Friday, since I have no plans until Monday.

I’m also reading a book a week, and absolutely love the students I teach every day, and am starring in a bilingual play, and sometimes attending tea ceremony classes, and studying every weekend for upcoming standardized Japanese-language tests.

I’m 22 or 23, and singing along to the kasureta-koe of Sakurai-san.

I’ve written a couple of times before about knitting together past selves, and how much easier it would probably be if I had lived in the same town, or maybe just two or three towns, all of my life, and saw the same people all the time. My life hasn’t followed any recognizable path, and I often find things hard or impossible to translate, literally and figuratively.

Anyway. Once, after I’d come to love Mr. Children’s music, Omi told me he’d be playing in our general area. Tickets had sold out in minutes for the stadium show, but Omi knew where it would be, and we parked within earshot. It was a Saturday evening, and still bright at 8:00. I could make out some of the echoing choruses and the thousands of people singing (gleefully, I imagined) along to them. I thrilled a little, knowing Sakurai-san was in that stadium.

And when I visited Yuko a few years ago, they were doing a “Sakurai Special” on TV, playing two-second clips of Mr. Children songs to see which contestants on the show could identify them. Then they played a medley of his music. I still love him just as much. I’m not unique; he’s one of the most beloved artists in Japan.

Here is Yuko, during that trip. I think we were at the tea house where tea ceremony was created — or that house was across the street.

When I’m out on a limb, as now, and feeling confused and at loose ends, it does tend to be art, music, and literature that reminds me of who I am (aside from friends). I bought a little New Yorker print from a sidewalk vendor before I left, a little miniature of a cover by Tom Gauld. “Reader” is one of my truest identities.

The album X&Y, by Coldplay, is also a reliable way for me to time-travel. I listened to it on repeat when I was at Stanford doing a second-year Japanese cram course before moving to Kyoto. All I have to do is press “play,” and I can smell the fragrant air with all of the Northern California flowers and the palms, the dappled light along the sidewalk as I head into the morning session of class. I can, somehow, feel what it feels like not to have gone to Japan yet, to have that all be a massive exciting blank. I can feel what it was to not know anyone on Stanford’s campus, then; to be making friends with some Japanese academics and their wives that summer, and some of my own classmates. I can remember renting movies from the library to get by, and discovering the movie Maboroshi, which was exquisitely beautiful. I can remember the dorm room I shared with my roommate, Myung-hee, from South Korea, and how a cockroach crawled in through the window one night and I killed it with my shoe and was horrified by the clacking sounds of its legs. It had crawled under a scrap of peeling wallpaper so when I killed it it was stuck there. I can remember a trip into San Francisco and having dinner in Japantown and how one of my new friends got embarrassed when I asked him if he had Korean heritage and he did and I didn’t understand the delicate relationship Japanese-Koreans have with their ancestry. I can remember the cafeteria lunches — one where a new Japanese acquaintance taught me how to say, “I didn’t bring my book with me,” since then my Japanese was simple enough then that I couldn’t even say that, so had said “There are no books” — and when one of my Japanese friends brought me to watch a professional tennis match and then when I went to hug him goodbye, he got very awkward and I found out that hugging in Japan is extremely intimate, and also, he had a wife, whom he had never mentioned.

But mostly, I can smell my morning walk to class across Stanford’s campus, the fragrance and the gentle sun.

So. Who do you listen to to remember yourself? Which albums could you put on and still now every word, after decades of the albums’ gathering dust?

Some photos from the time when I discovered Mr. Children:

Since I believe my friend Katherine is a reader of this newsletter, here’s a picture of us from Miyajima in about January, 2006. I’m playing “old-school man,” which is why Katherine is doing the honor of pouring my drink. Katherine is one of the coolest, most brilliant people I’ve ever met, and writes comics. I don’t know if she’ll want me to share her Substack here, but if she says yes, then next edition I’ll share her Substack. Katherine, I’m sorry about this picture, but also, it was imperative to share it. I’m sorry.

And here’s my host mother, Mariko, with my host sister Hina-chan, as we rode to some station near their house outside Osaka.

And here’s my friend Jim Lamiell.

Jim is one of the most effortlessly funniest people I’ve ever met.

Anyway, the question stands: who or what brings you back to yourself? I’d love to know in the comments.

Oh and this is late, but Happy New Year, Bonne Année, Frohes Neues Jahr (?), and 明けましておめでとうございます⛩🌅。Thank you for reading.