I found myself astray in a dark wood
where the straight road had been lost.
Dante, Inferno
Going to Columbia College changed my life the most. I stopped competing with the boy in the next desk and started competing with Aristotle and Plato, with Rousseau and Thoreau and Rimbaud.
In the middle of the journey of my life, after two years of college, I cast aside the mathematics and physics that had guided me and entered the dark wood of poetry and prose.
“Let’s see them get me to make a bomb out of this!” I chortled as I neatly wrecked my career.
Another big change in my life came from my struggle to learn Japanese. I was learning French while working in the language lab at Brown, which still used magnetic audiotape machines, and another fellow there was studying Japanese. “Hmm, an Asian language,” I mused. “I’m invulnerable, how hard can it be?” I’ll tell you how hard. After I spent six months studying the two 49-character alphabets and starting to memorize some of the 3,000 ideograms that form a basic education in that language, I hated to throw away all that time, so the following semester, I continued. Nowadays when I meet someone who is considering beginning to learn Japanese, I advise them not to start.
My then wife Kanako once asked me why I first came to Japan. I said that when I was a boy, I used to love reading science fiction and I always wanted to go to Mars. However, I realized that I wouldn’t get there in my lifetime so I came to Japan instead.
“What?!!!” she screeched.
“Just kidding,” I said, although I wasn’t. There are no aliens in science fiction stranger than the Japanese, and many science fiction books simply dress up the Tokugawa shoguns in fishbowl helmets and tell the stories that are now familiar to me.
I learned at seven that I was adopted and always wondered who I was, really, so I tried very hard to find that out. I ventured very far away from where I was born and the farther away I got, the easier I could see who I was and who I had become. I obsessively sought international experience and always wanted more than whatever was immediately available. I integrated into other cultures and kept my willingness to eat everything offered. It was only when I got to Japan that I learned what it was to be Jewish.
Why did I start to write these memoirs? One reason is that I have led a varied life and been by turns, auto mechanic, sous-chef, rock star (for 15 minutes), art collector, linguist, real-estate developer, lover, traveler, drunkard, and citizen. I want to tell some of my stories so I can see what drove me; I want to continue my life’s effort of getting far enough away from myself to see who I am.
Some would say that it’s about time.