Apparitions of the Non-Alien: Philadelphia

In their new lives in this Eastern city the boy and his mother do not speak much. The other new arrivals seem to take immediately to the atmosphere, as if the bustle and shine of the streets was their own long-promised homeland, its secrets already memorized, recited nightly under thin, rough blankets in the desert. They speak faster now, their voices clipped, wise, glinting.

In those first days, the boy had filled his mouth with sweets, and now his tongue felt like it was pulling through swampy water. Continue reading “three”

The old woman walked between the dusty barracks to the office, and in the back of the office there was a door, and behind that door sat a smiling man, with bright red cheeks and hair like a baby’s.

“The war will be over soon,” he told her. “What will happen to you then? What will happen to everyone here?”

She did not answer him. She was too surprised that he was speaking in Japanese. Continue reading “two”

At the back of the shop there is a door, and behind the door there is a desk, and at the desk sits a smiling man. His hair is yellow, thin like a baby’s, and his eyes are green.

The deal he offers you is this.

The world you know is going to disappear soon—you can already feel this—but he can take you to another one. You will have to give up everything you have in this world, but in that other world you can have it all back, and more.

Behind the desk there is another door. All you need to do is to walk through it. But if you are coming, you have to come now.

Continue reading “one”

Wataridori Documentation Video 2019 from Rea Tajiri on Vimeo.

For me, it’s a wet winter afternoon in Seattle, and I am watching a video by an Afghan American artist, Gazelle Samizay, on display in the storefront gallery of the county arts agency. Fear of a government roundup of Muslims brought Samizay to California’s Owens Valley, to the site of one of the U.S. concentration camps that held 120,000-odd Japanese Americans during World War II. My shadow is a word writing itself across time, her video is called. Am I only the shadow conjured by her bad dreams? Continue reading “prologue”