Goodbye to Isseki

My futon still lies flung in the centre of the room, surrounded by piles of what can only be described as junk. Two bouquets of flowers from the first and last night of the play have filled my room with the scent of a grandmother's wardrobe. My old script is flung at the door. Post is piled up in the damp space for shoes at the entrance. I don't quite dare to look in the fridge. The place has the feel of hurried departure.

I have landed heavily back to earth, fresh from the airport, bewildered by a sense of not needing to be somewhere. And utterly disconcerted.

This morning, four am I walked the streets of a little town on the west coast of Japan. The rain had stopped and smeared the streets with smudges of flourescent reflections. It was still night. I was alone.

That previous morning we had arrived from further south, like one giant school trip meandering through local stations and shinkansen stops and airports. Then we'd helped heave twenty life size coffins up to the four floor of the theatre. We'd rigged the lights. Tapped down the flooring. Marked out the set. Built twenty trees and a magical forest that sat beneath a swinging array of the instant atmosphere of gels and gaudy lights. We'd lovingly picked all the dirt and dust from the black netting of the floor, shared our breakfast, lunch and dinner bentoes. Completed a tech rehearsal. Recleaned the theatre. Warmed up. Psyched up. Acted our parts. Thanked our audience.
We'd all shed tears, either on or off stage. Sweated our way through the get-out. Untapped, unrigged, unmarked, unbuilt our set and returned the stage once again to its dull grubbiness, with only a few white plastic leaves to show that anything out of the ordinary happened that day. As we re-loaded our trucks with all the paraphenalia, the rain fell again, and it felt like we were some swarming mass of ants, moving together as one to load, tie up and once again clean the theatre we were about to leave behind.
The evening ended with draft beers on a tatami floor, ravernosly devouring the little plates of fish or salad or rice we all shared. But unlike every other day of the past week, yesterday we weren't about to do the whole thing over again the following day. Or atleast, all that is left to do is the final packing up in our home theatre space here in Tokyo tomorrow.

And, finally as the day tumbled to a noisy, exhausted close I realised that everyone had clumsily disappeared into the night. And that there was a marked absence of goodbyes. My ability to say goodbye is fundamentally mindblowing rubbish at the best of times. They are without doubt close to one of my absolute all time least favourite things to do. But, when it is goodbye saying in Japanese.... well, my mind just goes a stark blank. And before you know it, the moment is gone. And the opportunity to tell Isseki how wonderful they are, and how grateful I am to them is gone too. And all of a sudden it felt as though all of the last three months of rehearsing and finally being on the 'inside' of a Japanese group were over.

And with that, so too were the friendships I had assumed I had built. Despite my appalling Japanese. Despite my nasty 'foreign ways; like eating an apple without a knife and fork, or wearing odd socks (a fact that was commented on by absolutely everyone, constantly), or my stubborness in refusing to do the 'female' jobs, just because when someone laughs in your face, and says 'oh no no... that's ok, becky a man should take this heavy tree/box/nondescript audio box', the last thing I feel like doing is letting a man take that box. Especially when that designated man is in fact shorter and scrawnier than you in every way. But despite all these oddities, I felt like my life was intertwined with Isseki's. And that I had moved from being a foreigner and group outsider, to being Isseki's 'foreigner'. But the problem with Isseki, like much of Japanese society it seems, is that as the group is the overwhelming force, there just isn't that much space for anyone outside of it. It's easy to feel as though the past three months has just been an exercise in 'public nicety'. Me and my bad Japanese have been humoured for three months because that's been the obligation, and now it has shifted, the cogs and wheels that are this theatre company move on... and with it, I am no longer entitled to the priviledge of membership.

And so, finally, I was alone on the streets of yamguchi ken. And that nasty 4am feeling crept in. Maybe a couple of weeks of no-english was taking it's toll. And suddenly the world seemed a very empty place. And not having a group to belong to kind of awful. And Japan seemed bewildering and friendships utterly confusing.

But this story has a happy ending.

Through the power of my beloved phone, a friend and I chatted the 5am hours away. To speak english to someone who knew me and could transport me across the world to sit simultaneously with her in her attic bedroom on an early evening in British Autumn. And then to sigh and to be whisked together back to our eighteen year old selves in South America. Compared the the superficiality of speaking in a language you have yet to master, to people you are only on the edge of getting to know, it's like drinking real coffee after months of instant.

And as dawn whisked closer and an email from a friend in Germany arrived I realised that somewhere along the lines I'd got over-dependent on the future. Perhaps it's a sign of what I lack in Japan - friendships that extend from this moment forward. Yet maybe Isseki's non-descript goodbye and unnerving end of my time with Isseki, unceremonious and blunt as it was, in fact shows the value of the friendships and connections of the moment. It felt like the rug of the last three months had been pulled away and out from under me. But, maybe more than the goodbyes and the ceremonies, maybe trusting that that feeling of connection I experienced with every conversation, every slow painful conveyance of meaning, were real, or as real to Isseki as they were to me. And that is enough. In and of itself. I don't know what I quite expected or hoped for - an invitation to join the company perhaps. A promise of friendship beyond this moment. But if you value and love the present, that is enough. You can make a friend in a morning. A soul mate in the exchange of a twinkle in the edge of another's caught eye. And to want beyond that is perhaps my own desire for security here. And is not necessarily the point of the last three months.

Maybe in small quiet ways a promise of future meetings, connections are there. And the sadness I feel at the end of this period is that the chance of being an ant in Isseki's exhausting all consuming world is not. And maybe that was one of the things that I most valued about my time there; the joy of work for the sake of work, whether it be menial, mindnumbing, inefficient and unpaid - working for and with that group was enough. It made me understand a little of why monks sometimes have 'working meditation'.

So I am returned; to a room on the edge of western Tokyo. To another new beginning of my time here. And the flowers and the junk rest uneasily beside my luggage.