All Steeps, No Pours: The Sayamacha Delegates Cast Notes
In which I am woo-rocked by Rooney, put the whole world on my back, and temper the sweet soul flames of near/far-land visitors.
Ever read an entire book—like eight hours of your life—wondering all the while whether it was even any good, whether you’d even remember it a year from now, whether it would even be worth forming an opinion on in advance of or after it appears in conversation in some near or distant future, only to be walloped by the last handful of pages to such an extent as to immediately and permanently alter your understanding of both what a book can do and how the softest parts of your heart function?
Well. Friends. Lovers. I have. I did. Five minutes ago. The streaks haven’t even dried from my cheeks. The river of snivels not yet frozen back over. I’m listening to the hum of the dishwasher and washing machine and wanting to, at once, write letters of thanks to three different people and hire airplanes to write the contents in the sky in three different Sunday afternoons on three different time zones.
The addressees would be my two brothers, neither of whom have ever read these dispatches to the best of my knowledge, and Sally Rooney.
Because this young woman from the Irish countryside just held up, wreaked havoc on, and rearranged how I think about brotherhood. I’m an Arsenal man through and through so I never thought I’d type these words but here they are: thank you Rooney.
Have not wept this hard over a piece of art since Drive My Car plucked me out of grief iron jaw malaise. Have not been this throttled by what tiny, measured words can do to a series of scribbly pages since I was shown how a story can turn on the last page in a reading of In The Cart by Anton Chekov in the Story Club maestro’s book A Swim In A Pond in The Rain, where Marya sees her mother through the blistering light in the windows of a passing train. Have not been able to get these last, no spoiler alert needing, lines of Rooney’s Peter out my head:
“Picture them all there together. To imagine also is life: the life that is only imagined. Clatter of saucepans, steam from the kettle. Even to think about it is to live.”
Even to think about it is to live? Good God, friends. Wipe away the cobwebs and tattoo that one on the piping that leads from my heart to my brain to my mouth to this tented keys. I don’t know if this will hit like this if you don’t have brothers or have complex relationships with them or have lost a parent(s). But if you fit a certain cross section, I think Rooney has done something with this last book (editor’s note after the fact, the book is indeed her 4th novel, Intermezzo) that she has not with any of her others. She has re-inspired my faith in the written word as an artform that, for all its flaws, has no equal in expressing our human frictions.
Now, if you’ll forgive me, I have a frictional story of my own to share.
It started with a simple suggestion. Groaned. From a hovel dug in a mess of blankets.
“You should put the other on your back.”
The crying seas had parted only just long enough to hear it. An eye in a baby storm. My torso had already, strapped to it, a seven-kilogram pile of bones, flesh, snot and jubilation. The last adjective tacked on only because of what just transpired a few moments before the groany suggestion.
This being a dispatch meant to appetize, delight, and tantalize, I shant get into the specifics but to say things had become quite fluid of late. Fluxy. My chest had a warmth spreading around it like an old heater kicking to life after another long summer of dormancy. Despite the mess, the child in question, had calmed after a marathon session of his expressing displeasure. At all things. At the fact of having a physical form to experience all things. At me. Us. You.
But there was another. In this world, my world, there is always another. That other had yet to fully catalog his complaints. While preparing my own fuel to continue the good fight—a modest breakfast toast—the best I could do to satisfy my clientele in the kitchen was to bounce the other. A tap of the foot into mesh. Playing one like the guitar pedal. The other like a guitar.
And only because I thought I heard wrong, I asked askance, “What?”
And again it came, the same suggestion, this time between coos and snorts and froggy ribbits, “You should put the other on your back.”
The laughs came then as they often do these days. Huckles and haws. If I could reach my thighs I’d have slapped ‘em clean off. Shatter thighs, thundered into confetti. I felt like a villain who had just been caught by the hero. Now enchained, I receive the word that my plan to destroy the world had also been foiled. Because I really did think it was a joke. A sick joke.
For, you see, we had only just watched and rewatched and fandangled with our double-baby carrier apparatus the day before. More straps than a gurney. More yanking than a beautician at work on a neglected undercarriage. More leaning than the double cup cough syrup songs of nightmares past. To, on one’s own, strap a baby to one’s back and then another to one’s front and make sure no one’s neck gets snapped and no one trips over into oblivion might as well be the territory of magicians and prison escapees. Not my turf.
Not of tea men. Or not of this tea man. Mind you, as all of this transpired, I hadn’t even had any tea yet. Tealess Dweez. A two-word tragedy all on its own.
In our prior dual harnessing attempts, it required at least two extra hands to secure the monkeys to the tree, their limbs dangling like banana peels with magnetic attraction to any and all hazards around. A slip away from dooms. To do the whole shebang on one’s own, only a day after getting the doctor’s nod of approval for back strapping at all, was absurd. Audacious. Insane.
And so, in this delirious sleep-deprived context, the comment, “You should put the other on your back,” is comedic supremacy. A mic dropper. A feat where a standing ovation and/or keeling over and soiling oneself are two brands of the same apple sauce-flavored applause. Hoots to hollers.
And, of course, it’s also a laugh at death. A narrow escape, celebrated. A life-threatening curse, averted. A trip to the graveyard, finessed.
But as I laughed. A figure emerged from the darkness. Beautiful, yes. Bedheadedly disheveled, yes. And with a pair of hinging hands that a fighter in a ring might use to say, “bring it on.” Within a few moments, both baby dragons were hoisted onto the transport from whence they came. One on back, one on front. And by the time my toast cooled, I looked out the window as her feet crunched the gravel on the driveway, full of baby, dog in one hand, umbrella in the other.
Not even the rain would stop her from stopping these infantitesimal tears. The last thing I saw as she walked away from the house was a grin and cheery song. I don’t know for sure, but I think she was singing in iambic pentamer.
Thanks for your patience. I should say. It’s been some time.
It’s not as if I haven’t been drinking tea.
I recently woofed down several Wazuka matcha lattes with Ahdom and Shiloh as we explored the growing improvements in the organic matcha world (we also went to Kamakura Club a bunch of times and finally got to check out Norm Tea House in Kuramae, which has a great, casual tea counter where you can sample their array of goods). During their trip, we also had some of the best wagashi of my life—mossy and osmanthusy—from Okashimaru, and got to see my neighbor Sergio’s 2024 exhibition in one of several small, charming tea houses that grace the stunning Sankeien Garden on the cliffside fringes of Yokohama city where the town meets the shipping yards. These memories will glow in my heart for a long time, the way my new Yokohama-crafted Chie Kobayashi ryoro glows when the bofura is boiling on top. Another club banger, acquired the night two other tea mates, Daigoro & Kanako San of Tea Master of Little Tokyo fame, came by town to deliver two matching Dodger blue jumpsuits to the twins just in time to see the hearts of the country where I reside and the city I call home celebrate the big one.
It’s not as if I haven’t been writing (& reading).
I’m huffing and puffing on a book that is scheduled to be done at the end of the year. I’ve also been on cahoots with several of attendees of the SWET-shopped Kitakamkura Writer’s Salon to swap stories and notes (including sharing some of my fiction for the first time in several years) and to be genuinely inspired by the work of new friends, including fellow Substackers with sharp Japan POVs like Matt Alt of Pure Invention (a too-rare pairing of well-thought-out analysis/expertise and genuine kid-like enthusiasm) and Hiroko Yoda of Japan Happiness (the deep dives into the Kimono of Shogun alone are worth the subscription). As well as a measured reflection on the spaces where creativity shines through by a favorite visual artist of mine, my friend Marcus Mcdougald. Then, there is The Emerald, which latest episode on FIRE (as in the actual flame, not the acronym for cult investment styles), which had me pulling over on the side of the road to type notes on mid-daycare drop-off. And we can even marvel in my favorite substack poet, pruning his poems into branches that we can swing on as we please: “The Tree” by Anthony Tao of Poetry in Beijing.
It’s also not that I haven’t had joyrides of late either.
These have included a long overdue visit from Alba of Dokodemocha & Kuro-an to collect a couple copies of Eighty Degrees Issue #12, featuring a story I wrote about three tea sessions with her called “Death By Tea.” It’s only available in print here, alongside a usually stunning assortment of tea stories, art, design, and photos. I tried my hand at shoehorning into the story some of my experimental and wavy photo art, but—I think rightly—it was denied first by my subject then by my editor. It’s true. I’m a true beginner in the world of images. The study goes on, but here are the scraps on the cutting room floor.
Alba also whipped up an incredible zine that I hope she shares with the world sooner rather than later. For someone who has English as a tertiary language, I applaud her way with this wishy-washy tongue. She was even nice enough to give me a packet of her self-blended Sayama Cha genmaicha, which I’m enjoying today with my personal trainer. Instead of the dollops of rice producers often throw in to weigh down this economic tea, Alba’s blend has just a dash of the toasted rice, leaving the sharpness of the sencha as the dominant flavor, with just a brush of genmai. It tasted as soft but distilled as the late afternoon fall sunlight when it drips onto our tatami training zone in these lullaby hours.
That tea follows a certain theme of Saitama Cha this week, after I paid a visit to Betana Kun’s counter at A.Drop to cap off (see, cuz his cap needs to be off’ed and replaced with another) a day of wandering around taking photos with Alex and Dan, who thankfully know their way around a shutter far better than I and put up with my incessant questions during my first-ever photo walk. And just yesterday I got to finally set my eyes on Engakuji’s Shariden, where the tooth of the buddha is kept. I prayed to it twice. Once for me. Once for you all. May all of us be students forever.
You see, it’s just that it’s been hard to do all at once and put it together for my own dear readers. For almost two years of substacking, the gathering and dispersing has been as regular as weather—every week or every two weeks—into your inbox my adventurings have cometh. But what’s happening now is the irregularity of certain festering dreams. An influx of visitors and an uptick in fevers. A wavy crash of my sandcastle routines.
This does even account for the sudden, like right this minute, faster than expected delivery of two 2024 Year of The Dragon bulang pu’erh cakes from Aroma Tea House—as recommended by fellow Tea Subber Nick Herman—in Vancouver that I plan to give to the twins on their 20th birthdays in 2044, secretly hoping they don’t even like tea just so I have double the aged goodness to whomever still sips with me by then. Win win.
And, yet, I feel no guilt. After all, I made no promises. Indeed, I don’t even mourn the moments that have passed undocumented. Call it presence as being too present to record its own presence. An okayness when the pencil is a bit too far away for a jot. A choice to leave the camera at home. A soak in the seaside onsen gazing out at all the training that has passed and all that will be needed for the future. A certain submission to exhaustion, when you’re simply too tired to get in a huff about unchecked boxes and unfinished tasks.
But I will say thank you. For reading. Scrolling. Flipping, Caring, for giving these joyrides a little corner of your inbox between promotions and urgent affairs. I recognize my reportage is neither urgent nor promotional. It’s not even consistent outside of its inconsistency. How could tea be anything but what it is? A pause. A break. A foil to all our doings.
I’m grateful to be with you, even if it can only ever be this unpredictable, unequal way. I toast today’s teas in your direction and hope they help you cope with whatever chaos happens in/around/within/beside a ballot box near you.
THE PLUG
What shuts you up?
What blasts you open?
What renders you mute?
What kills your time?
What saves your life?
What unracks your brain?
Here, close your eyes
And lay down.
It’s coming.
That avalanche of all
I would give
Given infinity
Given a single extra instant
Given a glance
With a chance to turn around
Briefly
And still go on ahead.
To be buried
Under the right
Stuff
The light
Stuff
Is to be
Unburdened
At last.
