Some selfish benefits of travel writing

Out of a need for inspiration, or more likely just affirmation, I recently pulled out the copy of my novella, The Forty-Seventh Ronin.[1] Though the opening and closing chapters are in Melbourne and Portland, Victoria, respectively, I set Ronin predominantly in Tokyo. I wrote it (or at least this is what I argued in my Masters dissertation) as a way of “accessing” Japan. Much as an author might write in order to understand their own psychology, I was also writing to understand my experiences, and the culture that was the subject of those experiences.

I suspect now that the reasons for responding to my trip with a lengthy, semi-fictional account of my wanderings of Tokyo were both more nuanced, and less sophisticated. I think that what often drives me to write about a place that I am visiting, or about the feelings that I have had, is a need to create something that will last past the experience.[2] Some people travel to Provence and satisfy some Protestant work ethic by building a house on the hills among the olive groves or vineyards. I can travel anywhere, and achieve much the same by writing.

The novella that I ended up writing from my Tokyo trip was also an attempt to rewrite history - to pass my experience as being far more sexy, thoughtful, and concise than it really was. My actual experience was certainly all three of those things - but not as much as I passed it off as in the book. Furthermore, in cleaning up the jumble of events of my twelve months into a 24-hour period in less than 5 000 words, I tried to convince myself that my trip was orderly than it actually was.[3] To be a little gentler on myself, however, I suspect that much of the tradition of writing is about this act of convenient reorganisation and condensing of experience and thought.[4]

When I got back from Japan, I was very much in a funk: I had left behind plenty of good friends, a rich and intense city and the cheapest sushi I would ever have. Writing was one way of dealing with those post-holiday blues. Was it the best, however? Perhaps saving fiercely for a one-way ticket to Tokyo or Osaka - or at the least, enrolling in a Japanese language course - was a much more direct route to ‘getting back’ to Japan. After all, writing a story about my trip was just one more act of distancing myself from the tangible and the visceral, and living my life through fiction - albeit, fiction that I had written. Yet I had come to understood that it was just a matter of time before I left Japan and returned to the 'real world' - I could defer such a decision, but I could not avoid it. In returning to Melbourne to write my Masters thesis on my experiences, then, I had both confronted the reality of my situation, and found a way to console myself over it.

Writing was not the only way I consoled myself in the wake of leaving Japan: I scoured Melbourne’s izakaya restaurants and bars with fellow-Japanophile, Al, in the months following our mutual return from Tokyo. (In fact, work on my Japanese travelogue only really started in earnest when these izakaya expeditions stopped.) These festivals of beer and sashimi cost me dearly, yet they were vital in combating my reverse culture shock. Each shot of sake held off the wave of nostalgia and regret for having left Japan and returning to Melbourne, which suddenly felt like a backwater city. Such gastronomic adventures were also a much tastier and rewarding alternative to visiting a professional counsellor.

My working holiday might have taken twelve months - but trying to articulate what it meant to me took much longer. Two years after departing Narita International for Tullamarine Airport, the majority of which I spent researching and writing for The Forty-Seventh Ronin and the rest of my Masters thesis, titled An Existential Guide to Travel, I walked away from the University of Melbourne with first-class honours. That alone provided much post facto justification for my efforts. It also provided a good deal of closure.

I have a couple of mixes that I compiled while in Japan, sampling from the sounds that captured the feeling of being there and the musicians to whom I listened. I have also a wealth of photographs, first from a point-and-shoot camera, and then from a digital, some of which continue to feature on the walls of my lounge. These, and the novella, all make up my collection of Japanese artefacts – artefacts that feel far more personal than any souvenirs I might have brought while over there. Together, then, The Forty-Seventh Ronin and An Existential Guide to Travel are a take on a place that no longer exists, a design for future journeys, a silent album and mindscape in one.

The Forty-Seventh Ronin by Ash Hibbert | Make Your Own Book

Endnotes

[1] I remember reading in The Australian Writers’ Marketplace (aka ‘The Big Yellow Book’) that until you actually have your ‘novel’ published you should refer to it as a ‘manuscript’ when corresponding with prospective publishers and agents. In this case, however, Lambert Academic Publishers have it in their catalogue, and Wet Ink has published an excerpt. Moreover, I have the self-published copy lying on my desk. I think I can safely say that this is now a novella, not just a manuscript - which means that I can legitimately italicise the title, rather than just leave it in inverted commas.

[2] This might be because I do not normally engage with other people that much (or at least I do not know how positive an impression I do make), and so my impact on the social realm is much like an oar dipping into a lake. In other words, I certainly cause a ripple effect in the world that I move around in, but the waves are quick to dissipate. But even if I was a very social person, short of actually causing other people to write poetry or literature about me and my heroic endeavours, I don’t actually think that would leave anything significant in the land’s that I visit to mark my passing

[3] Even my motivation for going over there was random: my inability to find work locally, an older brother who had mentioned it as a fun thing to do, and my growing self-doubt at the wisdom of studying yet another undergraduate degree in a completely different field. Finally, there was a nagging sensation in the back of my mind that had been building for most of my first degree: that too much of my adult life to that point had been lived vicariously. This had been through the books I’d read for literature studies, the dualisms that I’d debated in philosophy, and the imaginary worlds I’d created myself for creative writing. Maybe, I thought, I was indeed due to go out and actually live life for myself.

[4] I expressed my amazement to my supervisor, for instance, of how we were whittling down together what had been tens of thousands of words of journal notes into a few pages of double-spaced A4. He nodded, and smiled compassionately - but he was a poet, and probably had it a lot worst.