It took me about four years from the conception of the idea, to finally plucking up the courage to do it - and I’m finally doing it.

It’s called Monogatari: Tales from Japan - a title that I felt was self-explanatory, though pretty cliche if I’m being honest (oh wow, monogatari is the Japanese word for story! How original!). But that’s exactly what the podcast is about, and I decided that being straightforward was probably the best way to go.

I’m equal parts nervous and excited to be announcing this. I’ve never put my myself out in public on this scale. It’s bizarre that someone can just go on Spotify and… listen to my voice now? That’s weird! That’s cringey! I’m a writer, not a podcaster! I have a strange accent!

“But if every other millennial and their grandma has a podcast, then fuck yeah I get to make one too!”…she says, with all the confidence she does not have. I simultaneously hate and am proud of this thing I made (with a lot of help from my ever patient boyfriend), but I still made it, so… here it is.

Monogatari: Tales from Japan is also available on

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

When you’ve never loved, or been loved in a romantic way before it’s difficult to know what’s right. You think love is innocent- it’s holding hands in the cinema, going on cute dates, the occasional grand romantic gesture. After all, everything you knew about love you learned from watching romantic comedies, where unions were always perfect and by the end of the movie there’s no such thing as having made a wrong choice.

So when you finally venture out into the adult world and someone comes along and tells you they love you, you believe them. There was no fluttering in your stomach, no warmth in your chest, but you don’t know what love feels like, and so you think maybe this is it. People say real-life isn’t like the movies, but you wanted to believe in those cinematic happy endings all the same, so you said “okay”. He looked happy, said he was overjoyed, talked about how nervous he was to tell you that and you take it all in.

There was a little voice in your head that said he barely knew you. “But on the other hand,” you think, “no one’s ever told me they liked me before - I’ll take what I can get”.

You let him take your hand and just like that, you stepped out of the world of silly unrequited schoolyard crushes. At eighteen years old you got your first boyfriend. You feel grown up, and a little less out of place.

He writes songs about you, songs inspired by you. He says it was because he couldn’t stop thinking about you. He tells you it’s because you’re the prettiest girl he’s ever met. You’ve never been called pretty, and you’re a little flattered. It’s nice the first few times, but when he continued to say “I like you because you’re pretty” you wondered if he cared about your personality at all.

He doesn’t get the jokes you make. Doesn’t particularly care about the books or the music you like. You thought that was okay because those weren’t dealbreakers. When he started commenting on how he didn’t like that you wore jeans and flannel shirts instead of dresses you respect his opinion and bought new clothes. “Now you look so much prettier” he says.

Because he loved you he made sure he was the only person in your life you could rely on. He whisks you away after class before you get a chance to talk to anyone, saying he wants to take you somewhere. Your conversations with classmates rarely go beyond cordial greetings. He’s insistent, so you leave with him. At lunch he takes pictures of you from across the table, saying how you “look Japanese” while asking you to tilt your head down so your face looks slimmer.

You wanted to have conversations. Talk about things that weren’t his songwriting, his friends, his card tricks, and how you looked. You hoped he would see you for who you were, because you didn’t spend your life reading books just for someone to judge you by your cover.

Despite your reservations, you always took him at his word- that he loved and cared about you, and had your best interests at heart. He was older and knew better, and he was so self-assured that you never thought to question if things really were the way he said they were. So when he got angry and upset with you, you assumed it was your fault. Everything always seemed to be, and he was a ticking time bomb. You’ve seen his anger in full display, and even though deep down you knew it wasn’t normal, what else could you do but to try and calm him down?

You apologise for everything. It didn’t matter if you knew what you were apologising for, as long as it meant he wouldn’t be in a mood anymore. You fulfil all his demands because you didn’t want him to get angry and you’d have to repeat the whole charade again. You drive to him whenever he said he wanted to see you, do whatever he says. It’s taxing, you’re tired, but afterwards he comes around and says he loves you, and all you can say is “okay”.

He tells you that being in a relationship took effort, that he was always putting in an effort for you. Like the time he bought you jewellery you never asked for, or paid for your meals. Never mind that whatever money he had, his parents made. He says that while you did the bare minimum you never went out of the way to make him happy. Besides, you were beginning to gain weight and you were starting to look ugly.

You try harder. Put down your fork when he said “Are you seriously going to finish all that food?”. You forgo family dinners despite wanting very much to be there, just so he wouldn’t feel neglected. You get very good at pretending, that you were happy, in love, that you actually give a fuck.

You keep it up for years. You wanted it to be love, you wanted to believe that someone who loves you couldn’t possibly be an asshole. You’ve had bad times but it wasn’t all bad, was it? But when you think about all hoops you had to constantly jump through, the exhaustion made the decision for you and you wanted to stop being the clown. When you were finally brave enough to tell him you were leaving, he sends you a song he wrote about you just to make the decision harder.

It was naive of you not to consider that the world isn’t filled with rainbows, that bad things happen to good people. You wanted to believe in pure intentions and true love, so you refuse to see things that don’t fit into the narrative. Sometimes it was easier to continue living in the little bubble you created than it was to see things the way they actually were. (It also doesn’t help that it’s really fucking hard to see manipulation when you’re right in the midst of it).

But you walked away. Slightly damaged but more or less in one piece. You grow up.

Sometimes you think about when you were eighteen and you wish you hadn’t been so blind. You wish you had said something to someone, that you had been stronger.

So you do what your younger self couldn’t do, in the best way you know how- you write it down. Because through it all there was something important you learned, that if you had known earlier perhaps would’ve made all the difference. You learned what love isn’t.

Not actually John Lennon , Summer 2013

We will soon be making a brief stop at, Shinjuku. The doors on the left side will open.

Please stand clear of the closing doors

My head spins and I can hardly breathe. The heat, the stench of bodies, the discomfort of a stranger's sticky arm making contact with mine as the train wobbles along the track.

It all makes me sick.

I smell someone's breath. It's stale and I think of the fact that I'm inhaling the fumes coming from a stranger's internal organs and I hold back the urge to retch. Then there's the unmistakeable stench of mildew on clothes that just simply won't dry, made 10 times worse when soaked in sweat.

I hate this.
I absolutely fucking hate this.

In the summer months my daily commute to and from work is the sort of petty hell I would wish on my enemies for all eternity. I spend 12 minutes pressed against a complete stranger who already reeks even though it’s 9am in the morning, and whatever brief reprieve I get when the doors open is quickly replaced by the mugginess of the station’s interior with the body heat of a thousand strangers mixed in.

This summer I spent as much time as I could indoors, my electricity bills skyrocketing from the A/C that was on at a constant 23 degrees. I hate the heat. I hate being involuntarily adhered to strangers. I hate sweat soaking through all my good clothes when all I am doing is standing still. I’m constantly grouchy and depressed and with the arrival of autumn and improvement of my moods I’ve come to suspect that maybe my own seasonal depression came in summer.

Sometimes all of this- the heat, the stench, the rain, the crowd, the sweat, it’s all too much for me. My memories of the summer are nothing but unpleasant, and this summer in particular is overwhelmingly so. Yet, it was in summer when I had made my decision to come to Japan, a summer just as hot and humid, and just as unbearable.

6 summers ago I was in Japan. My best friend and I, we were two young girls of 20 travelling together for the first time, to Tokyo no less. We spent 2 weeks at Meiji University attending courses with others like us who loved Japan, walked around in Jimbocho late at night being silly and loud gaijins who followed cute guys into convenience stores.

We went to a maid cafe, karaoke, Kamakura, listened to lectures on Japanese fashion and technology and all other things that made Japan “cool”. We made sushi and went to an Onsen where we saw strangers naked, wildly gestured at menus, drank a lot of tea. When it was time to part, neither of us wanted to leave so badly that we almost missed our flight (which is a story we both will tell to this day) but by the time we arrived back at the airport in Kuala Lumpur we unanimously agreed that we just had the best summer of our lives.

I had a not-so-healthy obsession, clearly.

Summer 2013

Japan was cool. I loved everything about the 2 weeks I spent. Almost all foreigners say this but I was drawn to this inexplicable charm of Japan. I was fascinated by rice balls and game centres, obsessed with cute characters that personified everything from a prefecture to any random company down the street. Everything was so clean, so orderly. I felt like I had found my people , and a place I could hopefully call my second home.

I didn’t care that it was hotter than my hot and humid tropical home, I decided that I could put up with the seemingly non-existent A/C in public places (back home, no one had ever heard of an A/C being on 27 degrees). I could probably live with having to carry an umbrella at all times because the rain would fall a little at a time throughout the day, unlike our sudden torrential downpours. The crowded trains were cool, it was filled with cute Japanese guys and I could take several minutes being crammed like a sardine in a can if it meant I didn’t have to spend 2 hours in traffic to go somewhere 10km away.

All these factors were minor inconveniences, things that I could overlook with my sakura-tinted Japan-loving glasses. They didn’t matter, because I love Japan and I couldn’t wait to come back, for a longer time this time.

20 year old me saw the bright neon lights in Shinjuku and thought I’d never get sick of the view. The toilets here all have bidets at the push of a button and also speakers that make flushing noises, and I could get used to that.

At 27, I find myself no longer a strange, loud gaijin.

I’ve moved from our spacious family home surrounded by a golf course to a tiny 1 room apartment in an area that is technically, Shinjuku. I’ve made the most of my situation- graduated from university everyone here knows, with a degree that nobody has ever heard of. I found myself a job, tried to fit in to society like a good gaijin - the kind of gaijin Japan likes and wants more of.

I’ve adopted the mild Japanese demeanour, have been able to blend in so well that I often get mistaken for Japanese until they realise my grammar and intonation is not quite right. I learned to operate a fax machine, speak in honorifics however badly. I’m hardly ever late, and am constantly self-aware of my behaviour so as not to cause nuisance to others. I even grumble when innocently unaware foreigners stand on the right side of the escalator.

In the 6 years that I’ve been here I have changed a lot. Being away from family and influences back home has helped me know myself better and carve a personality that is I hope, wholly my own. Spending the peak of my 20s in a culture that fascinated me and was so different from my own helped me think about how I position myself in the world, learn about other people, and expand my horizons, for lack of better expression.

Whether Japan has changed in the last couple of years I’m unable to definitively tell. The onigiris are still neatly lined on the shelves, the trains still packed, and I still drink the same bottled tea every day. Yet I have, and maybe that makes this a classic “it’s-not-you-it’s-me” sort of situation because these small things that used to spark joy in me no longer do.

These days I feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of people in the city, always either rushing somewhere or standing in my way of rushing somewhere. I grow tired of the expectations that I feel society has for me - to be Japanese enough to understand their non-verbal communication and minor nuances, yet gaijin enough to periodically come up with some groundbreaking idea for change(that nobody will adopt anyway, because like me, Japan doesn’t like change). I am resentful of the fact that people like me, people who initially come here because of our love for this place and are trying their damned hardest can be easily dismissed just because - 外国人だから。

It is strange to me because I often see tourists wandering around Tokyo, wide-eyed and enjoying themselves like I had years ago and I unconsciously feel the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’- as if they were here visiting ‘my’ country. Yet it isn’t ‘my’ country, and it never will be.

I’ve been here so long now that I’ve begun to feel like I think the Japanese way. I’ve devoted more time to understanding their culture than I ever did my own that with every year that passes I feel less and less “Malaysian”.

So here I am, with this Japanese-looking face and Japanese-like demeanour, living in a country that despite all that, never became my second home, but definitely not for my lack of trying.

Some days I shut my eyes when I ride the train in the morning, to shut out the strangers’ faces and the train ads. I listen to the train announcements when I don’t have my earphones in, and that is one thing I know for sure hasn’t changed in the many years I’ve been here.

The next stop will be Shinjuku. The doors on the left side will open.

Please stand clear of the closing doors

I squeeze myself backwards into the train, colliding with a bunch of strangers as the train doors shut in front of me, inches away from my nose. More and more often now I can’t help but think that I’ve had enough of squishing myself onto trains, pretending to be okay and trying to meet expectations of being Japanese-enough but also gaijin-enough to continue to thrive.

So maybe my time here is up. Maybe the doors are closing and I ought to stand clear of them instead of rushing on.

If Japan hasn’t changed, I definitely have.

As I look back on The Best Summer Ever and the terrible, sticky mess of this summer, I think maybe I’ve come full circle. Japan never became my second home, but that doesn’t mean my next stop can’t be.

次は新宿駅にとまります。閉まるドアにご注意ください。

Where I come from, the rain is loud.

The first thing that came with the fall of rain was the metallic pattering of raindrops on aluminium roofs, like a white noise machine with the volume turned all the way up. Every raindrop would sound like a soda can that was falling from the sky and landing on asphalt with a resounding clang.

As a child I’d notice the sky darkening and sit by the window waiting for the rain to come. Sometimes it would start so slowly I’d be able to count every rain drop I heard before the crescendo. Other times the tropical storm would arrive without warning, and I liked those the best because the sound would surround us and I imagined it was as if the house we were in was having a shower.

With the rain came lightning, so intensely that it would momentarily light up the house before plunging it into darkness as our circuit tripped. When that happened, it would sometimes trigger the house alarm that blared obnoxiously before we shut it off. If the power went out at nighttime we would bring out the candles and torches and fan ourselves with magazines, while occasionally swatting away the mosquitoes that inevitably appear in the dark. When we talked our voices seemed to echo and travel a little further.

Thunder seems like it used to be louder, because my grandmother would cover my ears when it rumbled. I used to be scared and would cower and seek comfort in the presence of adults, who told me that the loud noises and bright flashes was God telling me he knew I had misbehaved.

Back home, rain brought a myriad of other sounds. The croaking of frogs and toads that always seemed to appear in droves after a particularly heavy shower, water dripping from a spot in the ceiling we never could fix. Strong winds shook our wooden front door that I stood behind, trying to hear the high-pitched air that whooshed through the cracks and and figure out what note it was because it sounded like the wind was trying to sing.

As I grew older I stopped being afraid of thunder, and lightning stopped tripping electrical circuits. I no longer sat waiting for the rain to come, and the sound of raindrops had diminished as aluminium roofs are no longer commonplace.

Still, I would find comfort in the low, dull thump of raindrops on the windshield as I drove, the rhythmic swishing and rubbing of wipers spaced in between. Puddles would form on uneven roads, splashing when a car or lorry would drive past it unaware.

Growing up, these were the sounds of the rain.

As I’m thinking about it I realise that the rain has been silent for years now. I hadn’t noticed when it started happening, but as the sky grew dark I looked out not in anticipation of rain but with a sense of dread, for what I couldn’t tell.

I feel sad when the rain falls, my head thinking of the all the things that went wrong, that will someday go wrong. My heart, my being, is empty.

When I walk in my solitude and feel the rain falling, I find myself hoping the rain would pour. I want to hear the thunder crack, the wind howl. I even hope the electricity would go out so I could light candles and for a brief moment pretend I’m a kid again, when rain made a sound.

Where I come from, the rain is loud.

Yesterday, the typhoon came and went while I slept.

I did not hear a thing.

When I made this silly little website, I didn’t think anyone would care.

That’s because for someone who claims to be a writer I don’t see myself as being particularly eloquent or great with words, and if I’m being honest, even remotely talented. I’m just a girl who never really learned to be good at talking, so I got in the habit of writing things down and sometimes people read them.

When I posted about this silly little website on Facebook I was surprised how many people did care. I knew I had the support of close friends and family, and I was expecting something like 10 Likes and maybe a “Haha” react. 100 people reacted to it. First of all, did I even know 100 people?! And second of all, WHY?

Perhaps partly due to the response that I really didn’t expect, I felt like I had to deliver. I wanted my first post, my first piece of writing on a website where I put “Writer” next to my own damn name, to be profound. I had already called myself a writer in front of at least 100 people, and if I didn’t do something worthy of being classified as good writing then well, I would simply be a fraud who had just exposed herself to the entire internet.

I had been worried. I wanted to be a writer after years of dreaming about becoming one, and I want to land serious writing jobs. If mediocre or god forbid, terrible writing is what potential employers and readers are going to see on here then my entire career would fizzle out before it even had a chance to start (Also I’d already paid for this website for an entire year so I need some sort ROI or validation lol).

Before I even launched this website, I had been working on something that I could eventually post once I had the platform set up. I had multiple drafts that I went back to and edited and rewrote, but none of them seemed right. None of them were good. I had begun to think that nothing I write would be appropriate to post, and I was afraid that the longer I left it, the more difficult it would eventually be.

So instead of perfecting one of my existing drafts, I’m writing this on the built-in blog post editor, sitting at a Starbucks that I’m not leaving until I hammer this out.

I’m drawing from the memory of a young me scribbling in my diary in pen, when proofreading and editing wasn’t a thing and hitting backspace wasn’t an option. That’s how I had written for most of my life, before I knew how to overthink or fuss over grammar, and if being careful with picking and choosing my words wasn’t working for me, maybe I ought to revert to the basics.

I’m just a girl who never really learned to to be good at talking, so somewhere along the way, writing became my way of speaking- and this is what my voice sounds like. Unedited, unplanned.

It’s nice to meet you :)