coping with ugly feelings
thoughts after reading ‘a perfect day to be alone’ by nanae aoyama
Hello lovely readers! I hope you all had a lovely weekend, and if you’re in England, I hope you soaked up some of the sunshine we had on Sunday! I did some painting in the park with a bestie and had a wonderful time. It inspired me to write a piece about friendship hangouts and the friendship catch-up/scheduled hangouts space we’re in right now. I hate it! I just want to call you up and walk around central London for a couple hours or cackle in a café! But that’s for a future post.
This week I’m discussing a book I started and finished over the weekend, ‘A Perfect Day to Be Alone’ by Nanae Aoyama. Firstly, loved it. Secondly, it called me out. Have a read below <3
As I was reading Nanae Aoyama’s novel ‘A Perfect Day to Be Alone’, I was confronted with a few ugly feelings. The story takes us on a year-long journey in our main character Chizu’s life as she moves in with a 71-year-old woman, Ginko, in Tokyo.
While Chizu is living with Ginko, she’s in a relationship with a boy who clearly doesn’t care about her. When she visits him after moving in with Ginko, a journey that takes “an hour and a half and three changes [on the] train”, he seems irritated by her presence. They had been dating for over two years yet when she finds him half naked with another girl at his lap on her second visit she yells “You make me sick” even though she doesn’t mean it, and makes the long journey home again. And that’s it really.
Chizu doesn’t play an active role in her life, something I struggled with for a long time. I think deep down Chizu knows this.
“Yohei and I had been seeing each other for two and a half years, but we never went out on dates. The previous year we hadn’t even exchanged birthday presents. We’d usually just hang out at his apartment, and while our conversation wasn’t exactly thrilling, we didn’t get into any spectacular arguments either… I didn’t know how or why we’d break up, but it did feel like the end was coming. And if it was going to happen anyway, I was happy to let things take their natural course. There didn’t seem much point in trying to speed things up.”
She doesn’t introduce herself when she first meets Ginko for fear it will be embarrassing. She watches baseball on TV with Ginko even though she doesn’t like it (Ginko thinks she does though). She waits until Ginko introduces herself at dinner on the first night for her to even say her own name. Chinzu is like a feather in the wind. Wherever it takes her, she will go, so light no one would even notice a brush on their shoulder.
Eventually, she has the realisation about just how passive she is and takes her anger out on Ginko, making snide comments about her appearance, constantly remarking about how old she is as if there isn’t any point in trying at that age. “Why go to all that trouble? It’s not like there’s anyone to look at you.” I wanted to slap Chizu several times, Stop being mean to the old lady! I would say in my head. But I also couldn’t help but feel hypocritical.
I’ve had my fair share of mean moments with a family member. It can almost feel like blacking out. They might say the simplest thing (or something on purpose but that’s a different topic) and immediately you want to scream. You exchange some harsh tones, some raised voices, some mean words and then after a while you think where did that come from?
Chizu berated Ginko for using up a lot of her toner. She’d spit that Ginko was so old, it was a bit too late for all this skincare stuff anyway, it’s not going to do anything now. At first, Ginko denied it, but then she simply confessed “I didn’t use that much,” hardly showing an ounce of emotion. In fact, any time Chizu would come after Ginko, Ginko barely reacted at all, she would “chuckle and disappear” or she was too busy knitting or making miso soup from scratch or getting on with her day, which would make Chizu even more angry. She was “weirdly pleased” when Ginko’s new romance, Hosuke, didn’t show up at the house for a while. Ginko didn’t seem too concerned, “I think he’s just busy,” she says. An unbothered queen. And too right because the next day Hosuke started visiting regularly again and practically moved in. Chizu felt defeated.
This is something I can’t relate to. My ugly feelings would always have a fighting partner and sometimes, like myself watching Chizu say and think undesirable things about Ginko, I would have an audience too. “Why are you so mean to her?” “Wow, you’re really rude to her.” “Maybe you should try being nicer to her.”
But I don’t understand why I do it, so why would they?
Maybe it’s the 14-year-long grief I’m carrying around. Maybe it’s the shit that always gets flung at me first, knowingly or unknowingly it doesn’t matter. Maybe I’m just a mean person? Either way, I know Chizu would hate to answer that question because it means she’d have to confront something extremely painful deep within her. Something that triggered her kleptomania as a child, something that caused her to have next to no reaction when her mother tells her that she “may” get married without even knowing she was dating again in the first place.
How did she do it? Chizu must have thought. How does this old lady who can barley get up the stairs without white-knuckling the bannister have it so easy, and have such a happy, content life? Get a new boyfriend of all things with such ease and have it work out so well immediately when I’ve broken up with two guys in the space of a year who have both left me for someone else?
She was surprised when her second boyfriend, Fujita, left her for Itoi, the new girl at work. She wondered how Itoi knew Fujita knew how to figure skate, within only a week of knowing him, when the three of them went on a day out together. But clearly, she never asked him. She just expected things to work out by some magic. That’d she’d fall in love and that’s where her job was done. But along came Itoi, with her smile and genuine interest in Fujita and, to be honest, personality, and whisked Fujita away. Then she would say that’s just how things go in my life; people come and eventually, they get taken away again.
But what did she do to keep them there in the first place?
I used to get upset too. I used to ruminate on why my life was so bland. It took me way too long to realise that I was in the driving seat, something that took Chizu a long time to realise as well. I had to stop watching my life go by like I was a viewer looking up at the big screen at the cinema. I had to write the script and direct the movie, decide what I was going to do that afternoon after class instead of being horizontal on my bed, laptop in face, wondering why I was depressed.
If you want a busy schedule, you have to find events and put them in your calendar. If you don’t like your friends, you have to do the tough thing and tell them how you feel and move on. If you want to go out on dates, (find someone who actually likes you first) plan them together. No one will do these things for you. Your life looks the way that it does because of the decisions you have made.
Chizu realised that in order to get the things she wanted, she had to go out and get them. It was time to leave Ginko’s house; take the full-time job offer and move into the company dormitory; have a space of her own; go out for drinks with her colleagues after work; set goals for herself and start making decisions of her own instead of letting whatever happened, happen.
I don’t think Chizu had many moments of regret after being mean to the old lady but she definitely had a flood of them when it came time to move out. She realised how unnecessarily mean to Ginko she had been and began to feel sad, missing Ginko even before she had officially moved out. She returned the things she had stolen from Ginko’s bedroom, a habit she still needed at the time to create some illusion of control in her life, and left trinkets of her own around the house (the other things she had stolen over the years) as if to make her mark, to leave behind the person she once was, to leave a part of herself there with Ginko.
I’m more aware of my ugly feelings now. Sometimes they still pop out but they’re there for a reason, and it’s my job to figure out why instead of shaking my fist up to the heavens. It’s funny how we can think there is something else controlling us (all those with a strict religious upbringing say aye) but once we let go of that feeling, once we realise we have the power to respond to situations however we want, the less these ugly feelings tend to bubble up to the surface, the more we start to see the beauty of life that everyone else seems to see.
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I like book reviews like this!
I love how you included yourself int he story of the book and back, as if I was somewhere else, zooming in and out. Loved it!