🦊 Tales of reading
Within a week, I will take the Japanese language proficiency exam. In 2022, before coming to Japan for the first time, I tried it and did not pass. This time, after a year of classes in Tokyo (and a six-month break in Brazil), I will try it again.
Last week, we took a mock test at school, and my score was not high enough to pass. I was not surprised by this result, as I am clearly aware of my difficulty with the Japanese language. During the mock test, I made most of my mistakes in the reading comprehension section.
However, I really like to read.
As a child and teenager, during the summer holidays between December and February, I would take a bunch of books with me to the beach and spend entire days just reading. I would devour hundreds of pages per day, book after book, and never get tired of it.
I liked reading so much that when a bookstore opened near the beach house, I started going there every day just to see the available titles and consider what my next reads would be. It was by following this passion for reading, by the way, that I met a guy who flirted with me and eventually helped me unlock the doors of my own closet.
It was December 2005, I was halfway through college, and until then, I had only kissed a girl (I tell this story in comic form here, in English). Although I knew internally that I liked men, I thought this was something that only happened at home, and that outside I could “be normal.” I had no positive references about homosexuality and couldn’t imagine a life in which I was gay.
When I discovered the bookstore at the beach and started going to it, I met one of the attendants, a handsome and outgoing guy who quickly made it clear that he was interested in me. We eventually tried to arrange a meeting at my house, but due to fate, it didn’t happen, and after that he distanced himself from me. In the midst of this context, I had my first sexual experience with another man, and my perception of myself has been transformed.
I no longer needed to imagine a life in which I could be gay: that life had reached me and proven itself on its own.
When I decided to come to Tokyo for the second time, I knew I would need to be more proactive in building a social life. Big cities tend to be lonely, especially for adults, since everyone is busy or already has their own social circles.
Because of this, I decided to bet on two areas I am passionate about: games and queer people. I created a group called “queer nerds tokyo” to go out together, play games, go to the movies, etc., and started attending events published on sites like Meetup, participating in language exchanges, more gaming sessions, and even improv classes.
This strategy has proven to be very fruitful, because when I am doing things that involve topics I am highly interested in, everything flows more smoothly. As obvious as this is, it also seems very easy to forget.
Learning Japanese is fun, but studying, not so much. I like taking classes, but not in the quantity I have per week, and the excessive focus on grammar disconnected from consistent practice ends up diminishing my enthusiasm for studying. However, I need to improve my reading skills to have a chance of passing the proficiency test next Sunday.
So I decided to honor my child and teenage self. I bought an book written entirely in Japanese and set out to read it. I decided I would read sentence by sentence, page by page, trying to capture as much meaning as possible before going back and researching the meanings I was missing.
I marked in yellow what I didn’t understand and kept reading. I understood fragments of the story, enough to get excited when I went back a few pages and started researching the unknown expressions.
It is a slow process of discovery and reflection filled with pleasure. I am discovering the story of Naguisa, a man who hosts a cooking show and is unsure if he is gay or bi, but has a certain fetish for voices. Or at least that’s what I understood so far. I want to know more about this story; I want to be able to read this entire book written in Japanese, and that motivates me.
Is this the best way to study for the proficiency exam? Probably not. However, more than passing the exam, what I want is to be able to communicate in Japanese and develop my text comprehension skills. And this is not something I will be able to do if I am not motivated by my studies.
Therefore, I will continue learning to read better.
Before concluding today's letter, I want to recommend two texts:
Temos nosso próprio tempo (We Have Our Own Time) by
, about the process of becoming a proud gay writer (it is in Portuguese, but I recommend reading it with Google Translate).- , about how supporting others also helps us cultivate good communities.
I have been thinking a lot about how I can cultivate in my life the things that make me excited to be alive. In this text, I mentioned a few: games, queer experiences, and (reading) stories. I am also passionate about supporting humans in developing their own capabilities, particularly writing.
Hopefully soon I will have some news to share about this. 😊
With love,
Tales