The Hero's Journey is Bullshit
The ephemeral nature of emotions and time
Last night I read the short story “Bee Honey” by Yashimoto Banana (Banana Yashimoto, in English ordering). I have this big book of Japanese Stories and was trying to read them in chronological order but then flipped to Banana’s page, to her story. Many years ago (but not too many) I was a thirty-something undergrad at Syracuse University. I moved to Syracuse after trying (and very much failing) to hike the Pacific Crest Trail (a story for another time). Before that, I’d lived in Berkeley and worked in SF as a nanny, and before that, I’d worked in Seattle as a nanny. Before that, I’d been a firefighter in Alaska, and that was the summer my mom died.
I really love San Francisco. I was homeless there as a teenager, and that’s when I first started really knowing the city. Its sidewalks and awnings and all its nice restaurants which I only saw from the outside, my reflection painted on their bright, clean windows, which also revealed their patrons, spooning soup into their mouths, daintily slicing into chicory salads. I rolled on carpets inside mildewy apartments and smoked weed and did lots of other things in stranger’s houses, and explored the city’s crevices and dark corners.
San Francisco, then and every time I lived there or visited, has retained an aura of inaccessibility, not unlike Seattle does for me now. It’s basic economics. I was homeless here in Seattle and homeless in San Francisco, and never have I existed in either city while also feeling financially secure. I have always lived in run-down apartments with shady landlords or pieced together housing or lived with roommates and have always struggled to stay afloat, both here and in San Francisco.
In 2011, when I was living with roommates in Berkeley, near the Ashby BART, I’d ride my bike and take the train over to SF, ride through downtown and up to Pacific Heights, where I worked for a sweet family. It was shortly after my mom died, maybe a year and a half, and I was years away from understanding who I was in the world without her. I had a lot of hope, though. I loved those bike rides, my headphones, passing other cyclists and pumping my legs and lungs up hills. It was before I went back to college, and my idea of myself as a writer was unfolding. I took a class at the SF Grotto. I wrote in my journal a lot. I dreamed my life could be whatever I wanted it to be.
Much like now, my ideas of what my life can be and what it is exist far from each other, mostly because I am scared of people in general and still am working through that. It’s much better now, but back then I was wading through the new world, after my mom’s death, with no skin at all. Her death stripped everything away. Everything I was before her death was gone — my defenses were gone. Going to the grocery store was painful. I tracked people’s expressions closely for rejection. I pulled over and sobbed when someone flipped me off in traffic. I scanned my world for order and found none. I longed for connection but balked at too much attention.
So, at that time, being an invisible person in the city felt potent. Rich. I loved the sound of the BART as it screeched underground; the pneumatic hiss of its opening doors and all the smells of San Francisco, which were achingly familiar and made me remember my younger self, so fragile and strong. I loved the Golden Gate Bridge, the salt air, muted sounds in the fog. One of my favorite places in the city was Japantown. I loved walking to the Peace Plaza and then into the gallery of shops, infused with the smells of sushi and ramen. Once, I bought a bonsai tree there and carried it with me all the way home to Berkeley. People really love bonsai trees, I found out. So many people smiled at me that day.
I still love Japantown, though I haven’t been there in years. After I headed to Syracuse I returned to California every summer to work as a landscaper for a new age retreat center in Big Sur. On my way to and from both places (San Francisco and Syracuse), I often stayed with friends in the city and went on long, long walks, huffing up and down the hills, remembering my time in the city and sensing into my shifting life. I knew things were changing. Now I know things are always changing.
In Japantown there’s this great bookstore (a few of them), and at that bookstore I picked up a book by Banana Yashimoto, thinking I wanted to read it, but it was written in Japanese. So, I set it down and looked fruitlessly for an English translation.
What I’m saying is that I’ve always wanted to read Yashimoto’s work. Is it her name? Banana? (a name she chose herself) Maybe. No. It’s because she’s a Japanese woman, and while I’ve read the stories of countless straight white men and women, stories by people outside of those two categories were unfortunately sparser. And one can find stories by Japanese men but less by Japanese women (translated into English). Since I was a young reader I have always sought books that were outside of my frame of reference, wanting to expand my understanding but also reveling in the narrative and structural differences in storytelling.
As a writer I wasn’t raised solely on the stories of white people, and I’m grateful for that. I always had a drive to seek out stories from people with lives different than mine in as many ways as possible. And as my current writer self, while I value rereading certain stories, I believe that true creative growth happens when we read stories that challenge us. Structurally, narratively, content-wise. Whatever.
Yoshimoto’s story isn’t like an American story. American stories, speaking (oh so) broadly, are like rollercoasters. Or, rather, triangles? I once assisted a peer in a creative writing class who called them “epiphanic moments.” His whole teaching philosophy was the epiphanic moment. He taught his students to look for that. But my favorite stories often lack epiphanies. Or, rather, their epiphanies come and go, just like they do in real life. Nothing special. Transformational, but not.
In “Bee Honey”, a story narrated in the first person, our protagonist is visiting Buenos Aires. She’s staying with a peripherally orbiting friend who never fully lands in the story. She’s in the plaza, exchanging glances with pickpockets, then remembering someone. It’s not clear who it is. An ex-husband? Ex-boyfriend? It doesn’t matter. What I love about this story is its lack of focus on singular character development — the story is interested in the narrator’s experience, and everything orbits the narrator, affecting her but not diving into the story. It’s also interested in a kind of aura. A vibe. A sense of nostalgia. The entire story is, in its way, an open question, proposed by the narrator and the story itself.
The narrator, following her friend’s advice, goes to the plaza one day to see a procession of mothers wearing white scarves, all of them having lost their children to the Junta. Their children, missing. No resolution. The narrator reflects on the passage of time, and how a procession of white scarves can turn the ephemeral nature of grief and sorrow physical. Those white scarves represented something intangible, and yet the scarves themselves were real. She imagines herself into one of the mother’s lives — as a woman with a son, whose son leaves one day and never returns. Then thinks to what she herself was doing then, when that son disappeared.
“I was living in Japan then, living at home with my parents, rebelling against them, staying out until morning, doing things, when this happened, here, on this earth. It’s too big, too much — I felt as if I might faint.
I thought.
Why, right now, here under this languid, overcast sky, are all these afternoons we live, theirs and mine, intersecting in this way, in this unremarkable plaza?”
She recalls her mother, making a special drank when she was sick as a child, “bee honey.” And then, her mother’s reaction to her divorce. Her own reaction to her cat dying when she was younger, her mother running her hands through her hair to comfort her. She reveals her husband’s daily phone calls, and reflects on his lover, who she cannot hate.
And then, the end of the short story. The narrator purchases a shirt whose proceeds benefit the mothers. One of the mothers fusses over the size. The narrator thinks: will I ever be a mother? “I bought the t-shirt, said thank you and left the plaza” is the last sentence. There is nothing that shuts the story, except for her leaving the plaza. But the narrator is changed.
Increasingly, I am drawn to stories with no conclusions. A conclusion is false. I think of the memoir structure I so often see: the hero’s journey narrative. Human sets out on quest. Human encounters obstacles. Human overcomes obstacles. Human is triumphant.
And yet, this isn’t true. It is never fucking true. Right? There is no closure. Not even death is closure, because when someone leaves the world their life reverberates in the hearts that surrounded them while they were here. And every triumph we experience is followed by something that is no longer a triumph. We can’t live at the top of the hill. We can’t constantly be winning. We’re lucky if we get to win at all.
With love
Stacy