What a Grotesque Thing a Rose Is
What The Great Gatsby taught me about moving to Japan
What The Great Gatsby taught me about moving to Japan
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic 1920 novel, The Great Gatsby, the protagonist, Jay Gatsby, creates a fantasy for himself. He builds a grand life of wealth, mansions, and parties on Long Island. As the book progresses, narrator Nick Caraway learns more about the mysterious Gatsby and realizes that he created this luxurious life to win back his lost love, Daisy. Gatsby’s thinking was that if he garnered enough attention with his lavish lifestyle, Daisy would notice. Perhaps if he threw big enough parties at his mansion, Daisy would stumble in one night.
Gatsby’s fantasy was so strong and all-consuming that it was at odds with reality. In the end, Gatsby paid the ultimate price for his decision to live in this fantasy. However, there is much to admire in the power of Gatsby’s imagination and his desire to achieve his dreams. He was truly a dreamer, someone who believed strongly in the meaning he gave to things and people.
What if I told you that moving to Japan as a foreigner and The Great Gatsby have a lot in common?
At least, that is what I believe after three short years of living here.
After coming to Japan on the JET Program and being sent to a small, snowy town in Aomori Prefecture, I faced one of the toughest times of my life. The Covid pandemic was still going on, I was brand new in a foreign country with little understanding of the language and culture, and I was as far away from my family on the East Coast of the United States as you could get.
I had to remind myself that this was my choice.
When I thought back to the endless hours I’d spent watching Japanese travel videos on YouTube, or the number of times I’d watched Shinkai Makoto’s Your Name, or the number of times I’d set up my computer wallpaper with pictures of temples and Japanese food and longed for something I didn’t know, I wondered if it was all a lie. Our imaginations are forces of nature, and we easily fall for the lies they can conjure up.
Gatsby and Daisy were together five years prior to the beginning of the novel, but broke up when Gatsby went off to war. Daisy couldn’t wait and eventually married another man. When Gatsby returned, instead of accepting what had happened and moving on, he clung to his dream and created the fantasy that inspired everything he did from that point on.
The JET Program may have one of the best marketing plans in the world. The power of emotion feeds it entirely. The romance of Japan fueled by YouTube, blogs, websites, anime, manga, J-pop-all of these things create an image of Japan that attracts people to something like the JET program. It drew me in, no matter how much I told myself it would be hard and not to romanticize it too much.
So I found myself as Gatsby. You create a vision, an image. You insert yourself into a place you’ve never been, a life you’ve never lived, and it only takes a moment for the dreaming mind to fill in the rest. A small but cozy apartment. A snow-capped mountain in the distance. A grocery store full of delicious food. Maybe you’ll even make some Japanese friends, maybe you’ll even fall in love.
We cling to this soft power, and it propels you through the JET application process and all the ups and downs that come with it. Every minute you spend watching Abroad in Japan or the Japan Guide YouTube channel, or studying Japanese gives you a sense that you might actually be able to make this life work.
There are a lot of artists in the JET Program. It’s full of people who have studied the humanities and are writing books or drawing pictures or playing music. That’s no accident. People with extremely rational minds might see moving halfway around the world for a low-paying job with a built-in end date as a mistake. But the artist’s mind is different. The artist thinks with the soul, and when fed, the soul creates.
Like Gatsby, those of us who can create the most powerful fantasy can live in it for a while.
But unlike novels, reality is strong.
Near the end of The Great Gatsby, Nick reflects on the fact that Gatsby’s dream did not come true. As the last phone call from Daisy never comes, Nick says, “I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.”
There’s always a moment after we come to Japan when we realize that the call will never come. The grocery stores become just grocery stores, the travel blogs bear little resemblance to real life, loneliness creeps in, and the language that was so fascinating to learn now becomes a barrier to doing the most basic things in life.
We realize what a grotesque thing a rose is, cut and scarred by the thorns.
Fortunately, unlike novels, life goes on. It is in this continuation that I feel we have the power to learn from Gatsby’s story. While Gatsby meets his tragic end without ever facing the reality of his life, we have the ability to move forward. Despite being battered and bruised, if we move on, I’ve found that our romance doesn’t quite die. Our minds and dreams are powerful, and in this storm we can even begin to create our own realities.
Often, before you even realize it, you’ve created the life that the old you would have envied. Many times we just don’t stop and give ourselves enough time to appreciate this.
In my personal experience, this growth has its ups and downs. It’s far from linear. There have been times when I have thrown this romanticism away in disgust, but I always come back to the realization that a part of it remains, and will probably always remain in my life. And maybe that is not a bad thing. Because I have had many realizations that things that were first dreams and then delusions have slowly become reality.
I have progressed in my Japanese, made friends, fallen in love, broken up and fallen in love again. I’ve lived and stressed and been happy, gotten married and cried with sadness, been lonely, and realized that life goes on wherever we are.
Unlike Gatsby, I encourage everyone in this situation to accept reality, but don’t let go of the magic that makes this journey and experience worthwhile. Whether it’s for a few years or a lifetime, it’s an experience that cannot be replicated. So believe in the green light, like Gatsby, and while we may see what a grotesque thing a rose is, its petals are still beautiful.
Originally published at http://marcoblasco.com on May 24, 2024.