Tessa Gratton Newsletter #40
A night like this calls for writing. I’m alone for the first time in days, weeks, months, in a 140 year old machiya house in Fushimi neighborhood of Kyoto, Japan. It was warm enough today to open the doors and let a breeze through, but now I’ve got everything closed up except the small screen from the little study that leads directly into the narrow outdoor genkan/garden. I can hear people moving past along the alley this house faces, and cars on the regular road around the corner. The walls are thin, and the tiny restaurant next door just stopped washing dishes—I believe they close early to usher people to the izakaya across the street. This is a tourist heavy area during the day, but once the sun sets it’s only locals and students from the university two blocks south as the tourists get on their busses and one of the two train lines up to the city center and more fashionable neighborhoods with hotels and restaurants everywhere.
Natalie took the bullet train to Tokyo four hours ago to pick up a friend of ours who’ll stay with us for the next four days. Our last four days in Kyoto.
Kyoto is special to Natalie and I because of all the places we’ve been in Japan, this is the one we learned together. We’d both visited separately—Natalie when she was 15 and dying, me when I was an infant, so neither really counts. In 2019 when we came for the Rugby World Cup and a low key grief tour on the one year anniversary of my mom’s death, Natalie and I picked Kyoto for the majority of our 3 week stay because we’d always wanted to visit and we could do it together.
In 9 days we fell in love with the city, especially with the surrounding mountains, the food, the narrow streets, the temples and shrines and ungodly number of stairs. We had so many good days here. So we came back.
This time for a month.
It’s been difficult in the last year, for all the reasons its been difficult for everyone, and also because we’ve been saving. In addition to the hustle of our normal full time writer/contractor lives that pay for Helen Burns’s upkeep, Natalie and I both took an extra job in 2024 so that we could funnel the pay directly into our Japan 2025 fund. We did all the usual but stressful things required to leave our house (and our cats!) for two months in addition to finding places to stay and research and blah blah blah.
The point is, we did it. We made it.
And here I am on a cool early spring night sitting on a cushion in a tatami room writing my newsletter. A tiny bottle of nihonshu (sake) from the conbini around the corner beside me.
We did it. We made it. I am forty-four years old and extremely proud of myself and my partner of twenty-five years.
It’s interesting because I haven’t felt proud of myself in a long time. I used to feel it when I wrote a good line, finished a book, ended a chapter with exactly the right emotional note, cooked a good dinner, called my representatives, made an appointment for my annual physical. But lately I’m always aware that what I’m doing isn’t enough. I wrote a good book, with characters I’m proud of, themes of resistance, genderqueer identity, fun descriptions, cool magic, and on top of all that it’s sexy! But who cares? Is that making the world better? What is there to be proud of? It doesn’t sell enough, my most popular books are the ones I don’t sweat blood for, I dont’ understand, what’s the point? But keep going, this pays the rent. You have to pay the rent before you change the world.
But being proud of myself…has been gone a long time it turns out.
I wonder if it’s age. If it’s wisdom. I wonder if it’s fine to not be proud, to let my frustration with not doing enough not being enough drive me forward.
But I also forgot was it felt like to be proud of myself.
And it’s better than frustration. It’s impetus. It’s positive reinforcement. Isn’t it better to take a step because you want to, not because you can’t go back?
I was born in Naha, Okinawa, in 1980. This was a fact I knew about myself for as long as I knew my name, it feels like. It didn’t mean much, but for most of my childhood it meant I was different from my Kansas peers, it meant I was from an island. I could long for the ocean, for big plants and beaches, for shrines and whales and salt wind. It was only natural!
As a kid, I obviously thought it was fine to wear a kimono for fun, to teach my friends to use chopsticks while eating microwave popcorn, to melodramatically think maybe Shinto was my soul, to take and accept that Japan was mine. Why think otherwise? It took a long time to understand the complications of that attitude. The imperialism of it.
But not as long as it might have. I’ve talked about this before, but when I lived here again as a young teen in the mid-90s, there were a lot of anti-American protests where I lived. Which was on a huge Navy base in Yokosuka. Some Marines in Okinawa had done some heinous things and it fanned the always present flames. American was occupying Japan, and I didn’t know it until I was 15 and caught up off base in a huge anti-American protest. It was the first time I thought, “this is wild, and exciting, and scary, and…oh my god, am I…the bad guy?”
In many ways I was lucky. I experienced that when I was still very malleable. And my parents valued education and argument so it was easy for my brain to jump to shocking conclusions about the layered, complicated political and violent situation.
I came away from that year radicalized. A wee 16 year old queer in 1996, in love without really understanding it, yearning for justice with only the barest hint of why, of what justice meant to me, of how I should pursue it.
At the same time I helped organize a walk out at my DoD high school to protest a proposed uniform policy (our parents were in the military! not us! They chose conforming, not us!) and when we ringleaders were rounded up the principal’s secretary sent me home because my dad was an 0-3, and everybody else’s dads’ were enlisted. It was the most gratuitous and unignorable example of established, hierarchical privilege I’d ever seen in all my 16 years! Taught me a lot about what is bestowed and what is earned.
Japan in the 1990s radicalized me. It made me who I am. The imperialism birthed me: literally in 1980 (ok Mom helped), and politically in 1996.
That’s relevant to this author newsletter because The Mercy Makers is about radicalization. It’s about how people get radicalized against their own interests, or along a parallel path toward selfish goals. It’s about why people begin fighting the good fight when they could very easily not. It’s about love. Yes, and sex.
And Japan is about love for me, too. I met my soulmate here. I know, because the day we met, the day we had our first real conversation at the Kamakura Daibutsu (where we will be again next week), she went home and wrote in her diary “Dear Diary, today I met my soulmate.” UwU!
I don’t know who I’d be without Natalie, my best friend first, soulmate, lover, partner and everything else. She was part of the military industrial complex, too, because of her parents, and she gets it, how weird and strange and upsetting it is to be drawn to a land that we never should have been on in the first place.
There is a whole essay about queerness, displacement, homelands, found family, imperialism, sharing, emptiness, anorexia, justice, first kisses, teenage rebellion, nausea and pride here. When I write a few more books about all that maybe I’ll be able to distill it into the right essay.
But I’m thinking about it. From afar, reading all the same news I read when I’m living in Kansas. Having all the same feelings and working myself into all the same knots.
And climbing a new mountain, finding a new temple, stopping in front of the altar to ring a bell or toss a coin into the slatted box and speak my nembutsu while the wind blows through bamboo and plum blossoms which to be honest I prefer to cherry blossoms for a lot of specific reasons.
Remembering that I can be proud of myself in a moment like this is a reminder that it is still possible to move forward because of something good, not just horrors. The next temple, the next statue I think might be Amida Buddha, the next tap of my Suica card on a turn-style, the next time I take longer than anybody else to tie my shoes in the genkan, the next kanji I learn, the next word I write, the next glint of sun on a still pond, the next fox shrine, the next song a bus sings to tell me to get out. Keep moving, keeping finding the shrine around the corner and not understanding the nuance of why this stone is sacred but pausing anyway, to acknowledge that it is. I don’t have to understand it’s alright to just accept. To breathe, to ground, to this-moment-we-are-alive.
For more detailed reports and all the pictures of gardens and temples and ghosts I’m finding follow my instagram stories, @tessa.gratton. I will put them all into a collection I swear. Soon. Maybe tomorrow.
Also! Star Wars: Celebration is later in April! I’ll be there! If you’ll be there, message me! tessa.gratton@gmail.com
The Mercy Makers comes out June 17th, which is a brief and shocking less than 3 months from now! Preorder! Here are the links, but The Raven is the best and I will sign it for you!
Hopefully there will be one more newsletter while I’m in Japan, or directly afterwards. But seriously, follow me on IG for real updates.
こんばんは! And thanks for reading. <3
Tessa
(I can’t stop laughing at this gif, but also natalie and I made the questionable decision to finish s2 of the JJK anime while in Japan and it was so stressful we were like, maybe we should skip Tokyo completely, and also we will be in Sendai for a week which WHOOPS. I love Gojo like everyone, but Megumi is my fave bc I am married to my own personal Itadori.)