London Bonno

Bonnō is a Buddhist idea that means the desires and attachments that cloud the mind and cause suffering. It includes things like greed, anger, and ignorance. In Buddhism, these are seen as the reasons why people stay trapped in the cycle of birth and death, instead of reaching enlightenment. At the same time, there is also the thought that by facing and transforming bonnō, people can actually find the path to wisdom.

When a country girl from rural Wakayama, who had barely managed to master standard Japanese, suddenly started learning English in her thirties and went abroad to study, both physically and mentally all sorts of experiences she had never encountered before began to happen. Each day I found myself quietly amazed at how endlessly malleable life could be, and yet, the speed with which change becomes normal and transparent was surprisingly fast. That is why I wrote many diary-like notes as a kind of record of fleeting moments.

A few years ago, I unearthed my fossilised Twitter account from university days. It was full of trivial things—complaints about someone whose full name I can no longer remember, worries about gaining or losing weight, troubles in love—all so insignificant that they don’t even remain at the edge of my memory now. I laughed at how I had strung together such lukewarm words under 140 characters. At the same time, I felt a kind of affection for that chaos, like an unripe fruit that had not yet learned how to mature. As I scrolled, I thought, “The huge walls I’m facing now, the unstoppable cloudiness in my heart—years from now they’ll vanish from my memory, and my future self will surely laugh at them.” That thought gave me some comfort. I wished I could have had a deeper dialogue with my past self, to clear away the present gloom completely, but a string of short tweets was not enough.

So this book is something like a souvenir from England to my future self—when I’m fifty or sixty, looking back and thinking, “I once decided to study abroad when I was young.” I imagine I’ll still be fussing over little things then, just as I do now. What I’ve written here are mostly mutterings so that the difficulties, weaknesses, and worldly desires I faced in a new country wouldn’t fade into transparency. They are edited from diary-like notes I jotted down whenever I felt like it. The lengths vary, the order is uneven. Most of the time I’m worrying, and I keep brooding over trivial matters, which is why the title is Bonnō—earthly desires.