#identityandmemory

My goal during my time as Don Bank writer in residence is to finish, or come close to finishing, the short stories I’ve been writing since my move to Australia in 2016. As I write this, the clock has just struck twelve and we have entered a new year, marking a decade since my relocation.

Before migrating to Australia ten years ago in my late thirties, I had already lived in Sydney once, with my family, for three years during my childhood. I was ten then. After those three years, we returned to Tokyo. As a result, I carry glimpses of life as both a first- and second-generation migrant.

I used to wonder why my mind remained so attached to those years—after all, they were only three years. But for a ten-year-old child, three years amount to almost a third of her life up to that point. No wonder my childhood years in Sydney influenced me so deeply; to a degree, they shaped who I am.

The greatest impact it had on me was a vague but persistent sense of anxiety, one that grew stronger after my return to Tokyo at the age of twelve. I felt as though I carried separate selves within me—selves that spoke different languages and were familiar with different place names—yet these two entities were never fully integrated into a single identity.

Twenty years later, with my unexpected return to Sydney after my marriage, the part of me that had been left behind in Australia, frozen at the age I was when we left, came back to life. It was this other self who began writing stories after her return, surprising my Japanese self, who, while living in Japan, had been a researcher of English literature but had never engaged in creative writing.

She began writing as if to compensate for the life she had lost while in Japan, and now I’m trying to make something out of these fragments. One day, a possible title, The Anatomy of Many Selves, came to me, and from there I was able to sketch an outline that could loosely connect these stories.

Now, with stories taking shape from these fragments of memory and imagination, I feel that the work of reconciling my past and present is finally beginning—and that there is still much more to explore.