Part 1

Arrival

It’s advised by my soon-to-be employer, A—— Corp, to have my local GP and dentist attend to any chronic ailments before leaving. Although I’ll have full access to Japan’s public health system, my staple over-the-counter pharmaceuticals might be difficult to source or worse, not available at all. I stockpile Ventolin, non-drowsy anti-histamine, cold and flu tablets, Neurofen, and with a view to mitigating those inevitable low points, a couple of my dad’s expired Oxycodone.

I go to the dentist who confirms what I’ve deduced from the bathroom mirror and the ribbon of pain running from my jaw to my neck: I’m grinding my teeth in my sleep—the edges of my teeth are paper-thin and transparent.

The grinding subsides for a few weeks, but comes back redoubled. Neurofen does nothing but give me stomach cramps. Oxycodone does more for finding esoteric meaning in the psychedelic ramblings of Japanese children’s television than it does for numbing out chronic toothache. And so, figuring the grinding is a manifestation of deeply-rooted nocturnal anxiety, I turn to meditation.

It would’ve been fitting, considering where I was, to establish some kind of Zen practice. Zen, however, is deceptively simple and evasive in the way of explicit instruction. For Zen Buddhists, enlightenment comes on suddenly after years of gruelling practice with no intermittent ecstatic moments—a flash of irrevocable insight called Satori. One lets go of any kind of linguistically formed identity and sees the thing in itself: raw sense experience. Or, as a monk-in-training described it to me: everything just is.

To a Westerner with an unrelenting analytical mind, legs that never stop twitching with nervous energy, and cherished memories of my head lolling back in the non-verbal bliss of LSD—this was an appealing prospect.

Cut off from Zen by language, I order volumes of arcane instruction in the Theravada tradition, from a small publisher in Sri Lanka. Each book is subsidized by the Sri Lankan government and costs US$2.50. Theravada is an especially orthodox interpretation of the Buddha’s discourses and as such its texts outline meditative instruction in exacting detail—the kind of rigour one would need in monastic conditions where for a layperson, losing one’s shit is par for the course. In contrast to the consoling tones of Buddhism in the West, Theravada confronts the experience of sitting with one’s moment-to-moment experience in all its absurdity and morbidity. Here’s a section from memory:

During this time you will feel leaden and lethargic, as if under the effect of a heavy sedative, and thoughts of suicide, even prescient visions of your own self-inflicted demise may emerge. This may precede a stream of visual hallucinations alternating between the ecstatic and the grotesque: flying bejewelled pagodas; disembodied limbs rotting and gangrenous; graphic depictions of the sex act; hideously malformed and perfect deities rutting in endless fields of shimmering, sun-bleached wheat. Pay no heed to these visions.

Aside from these weird visions, the basic premise is simple: pay attention, let things be. On the morning I sit down to do this, in earnest, I’m jolted out of my limp approximation of a half-lotus by a jaunty piano tune that begins slowly and builds. The keystrokes are gentle and fluid at first, before turning sharp and curt. Over this tune, a male Japanese voice recites clipped phrases of manic instruction. In the parking-lot beyond my apartment’s only window, a circle of builders flail about in lazy synchrony with the music. They’ll do this every morning for the next three months and manage to build, in this short time, four identical six-story apartment blocks.