Yoshii Shinobu and Qin Qiquan: The Footsteps of Two Cats

Before meeting Qin Qiquan and Shinobu Yoshii, I read "The Footsteps of Mao" sent by the editor. It was a Chinese essay by Shinobu Yoshii, which was about Yoshii's study in China in the 1990s. After returning to Tokyo for a year, my desire to "go back to China again" intensified. Later, Yoshii called the longing "a fever." When it comes to the role cats play in this, it’s a bit mysterious. According to Yoshii's recollection, during a break between two exams for the "Chinese Government Scholarship" organized by the Japan-China Friendship Association, she saw "two cats appeared downstairs, one was black and the other was gray, playing with each other and biting each other." Ah, chase, and in a blink of an eye, she ran behind the wall of the building and disappeared." At that moment, she seemed to receive a password from the god of destiny, and suddenly felt that she would pass the exam and go to China. "This kind of thing. Unfounded self-confidence, just like the enthusiasm of young people when they say "I want to be a celebrity" or "I want to travel around the world". Youthful, lonely and narcissistic."

Somewhere near Sanyuan Bridge in Beijing. At the ice rink in an upscale community, I met Qin Qiquan from Shanghai, China, and Shinobu Yoshii from Ibaraki, Japan, for the first time. The bright sunshine poured down from above the blue ice rink, and the air smelled unusually clear. They had just finished shooting and were in a good mood. They were having a polite conversation with Xiao Wei, a photographer from Hong Kong.

The plan to go to their home for an interview fell through. "The previous house was repossessed by the landlord, and I just moved to a new home. It's still a bit messy." They declined apologetically.

Gingang walked out of the ice rink in the Korean style. Yoshii's hair was still messy. He was wrapped in a shawl and sunk into the booth of the pizza shop, feeling briefly tired and silent. When I was about to interpret her attitude as resistance to the interview, Qin Qiquan asked her gently: "Did you fall into confusion?" She laughed and admitted that she was in pain from the fall.

They insisted on completing the filming at the ice rink, although their friends told us that they are very quiet people. It's probably the artistic conception of two people who like to skate alone on the ice rink: although they are rotating in the same world, they are two different asteroids, spinning along their own orbits. These are the steps of two cats.

This image kept coming to mind during my conversations with them. After "Four Seasons Bento" became popular on Douban, Yoshii was generally regarded as a "Chinese daughter-in-law from Japan" who "made her love for her husband into a bento", and outlined the image of a traditional Japanese virtuous woman in the public eye. However, the Yoshii in front of me is like a cat, lazy, independent, aloof and alienated. She protests against the media's "stereotype" portrayal of her, and resists the topic being directed towards "food", "lunchboxes" and "eating". One word she repeatedly emphasized: "truth" was revealed in her repeated "corrections" to the questioner.

"The rice I cook is not as beautiful as the dishes cooked by others on the list. I am not that particular." Yoshii said, "The state of the food in the magazine is very fake. I feel very uncomfortable. What’s more, too much media attaches too much importance to cooking. Think about it when you were a child, your mother cooked for you, it was a natural thing, it was life, there was no need to make it very beautiful. Let me show you. I didn’t think much about cooking after I published the lunch book. I talked a lot about eating to the media, but I felt it was a bit fake to talk about my life or my love for my husband. I am not free, and I don’t like to pretend that my life is beautiful.”

The media’s whitewashing reports are just “romantic lies”, which is enough to make Yoshii and Qin tired, and they would rather live in the world. In "The Truth of Fiction."

This "truth" is a bit surprising, especially Qin, a holder of the enviable "beautiful" "Four Seasons Bento". In fact, he often gets frustrated because he has to wait for Yoshii to prepare a bento for him. I was late, so I had to take a taxi. As a result, "the taxi fare was more than 30 yuan." In terms of cost, "eating a bento is quite expensive." Still, Qin is willing to compare the bento to a "hundred-dollar burger." This allusion comes from flying enthusiasts: pilots often use helicopters to go to an island to buy burgers. The burger itself is very cheap, but after including the cost of the flight, it becomes an expensive burger worth a hundred dollars. He wanted to use this story to illustrate the relativity of price, value and emotional added value. "Later I thought about it and felt that even if I was late for work, it was still worth waiting for the lunch box. The value standards fulfilled in marriage are completely different from those in a utilitarian society."

"Eating is the most important thing in our relationship. One ring." Qin concluded.

But Yoshii disagrees. After listening patiently, she suddenly realized: "That's right, then you can just tell me directly from now on. In this case, you can just buy it and eat it in the future. You really don't need to take it so seriously or think too much."

< p> "I can't imagine myself being like the saury in the tank, letting the school of fish decide the direction of the individual." Yoshii once said. In the eyes of most people, this girl has always lived a turbulent life. When she was studying in college in Japan, unlike other classmates who chose to study in Europe, the United States, and Australia, she went to Chengdu, China, to be an international student for a year. After returning to Tokyo, she still missed China and worked three jobs at the same time, dreaming of returning to China one day. At one o'clock in the morning, the jazz bar where she served closed. She returned to the group rental house, took out the ingredients with her name on them from the refrigerator, and made herself a nutritious and steaming midnight snack.

It is these elegant prose about food that are permeated with "real" life that have given her more and more readers in China.

It has been ten years since I returned to mainland China again. After her dream of going to China to study Chinese medicine was put on hold, she left Tokyo and went to Taipei to work and live for six years as a "substitute case". She also lived in Manila for several years until she came to Beijing, met Qin, and went to Shanghai. I got married, lived there for a few years, and then returned to Beijing again.

She has long been accustomed to living like a legless bird. Although she often wakes up at four in the morning, "fresh rice balls just delivered to the convenience store and canned black coffee in the insulator appear in front of her eyes like ghosts." ", curled up in the quilt, she listened to her husband's breathing and "waited in vain for the sound of the Asahi Shimbun's newspaper delivery motorcycle."

"Stability is not important to me. What I care about is comfort." Yoshii said. Escape from Tokyo may be to escape from the procedures that Japanese society has already set for itself: mainstream ideology and mainstream lifestyle. There is already one person in the family who is responsible for this: Shinobu Yoshii's sister. After graduating from college and working hard in a big company, you gain some things and lose others. "My sister got what she wanted. She also paid the price and lost her freedom. That's fair." She knew what she didn't want long before she knew what she wanted.

Qin is her ally on the road to escape, and their marriage is a perfect fusion of values.

Yoshii and Qin started out as good friends. Seven years ago, Yoshii worked as an economic news reporter and editor for a Japanese media in Beijing. She met Qin, who was on a business trip from Shanghai to Beijing, at a French friend's farewell party, and they talked about Japanese literature and culture. This farewell party became their beginning.

A year later, Yoshii moved to Shanghai. They got married and rented a villa on the second floor of a lane on Gao'an Road near the Shanghai Library. Later, they rented the Clemen Apartment on Fuxing Road. The income of freelance writers is unstable and life is inevitably a bit tight, but they are unwilling to leave the cultural center of the city. According to the memories of their classmates, they once considered renting a house in Jiaxing to save living costs. I looked at the house, but nothing happened in the end.

For nearly three years, both of them were freelancers. In order to avoid looking at each other all day long, Qin began to go to the library to read and write every day like working, while Yoshii stayed at home. "This is good. It's convenient for me to clean." After living like this for a long time, Qin felt that he had become a little cynical and decided to make a change and go to work.

In Shanghai, Yoshii learned to cook Chinese food from her neighbors in the apartment, but she could never stand the humid climate in Shanghai. She seemed to feel uncomfortable just talking about it: hot and humid summers, winters that were bone-chillingly cold. . She endured it for several years, until a job opportunity from Beijing moved Qin's heart, and they decided to move away from Shanghai. For Yoshii, she is back in Beijing.

Getting married means that from now on everything will be decided by two people. As long as ***consciousness cannot be achieved, it is 50% of the opposition. On the surface, Yoshii and Qin can always reach a common understanding wherever they live, but behind this common understanding there is always someone who makes a compromise.

Coming back again, Beijing is no longer what it used to be. The air quality often reaches the point where people cannot survive, and the mood plummets like the weather. However, fortunately, she began to slowly write the "Lunch Box" series on Douban, which gained a lot of popularity and started to have new writing plans. For Qin, moving to Beijing was the first time in his life that he had left his hometown and lived independently in a completely unfamiliar city. His job in Beijing was changed from Douban to a foreign company. He gradually adapted to the work and made many friends. However, the air became the object of common hatred that they had to face for a long time. As their friends around them left Beijing silently one after another, they had the idea of ????going to live in Japan.

What is surprising is that after six or seven years of marriage, Yoshii has become more and more proficient in Chinese, but Qin’s Japanese has always been poor. Yoshii does not feel that he is accommodating Qin, "I am interested in Chinese, so I will learn Chinese. If he is not interested in Japanese, there is nothing he can do." However, if he wants to move to Japan, this is also called a problem. Yoshii joked: "You have to learn Japanese well when you go to Japan, otherwise you will have to wash dishes in a restaurant."

Yoshii regards Qin as his best friend. She would say things to him that she would never say to anyone else. "There is only one person like him in the world. I find it quite difficult." She said slowly and solemnly. Although Qin frankly said that his best friend is an old friend in Shanghai for many years.

She does not make friends easily, and is surprised that the Chinese call her "my friend" when she has just met her once. She thinks that the Chinese equivalent of "friend" in Japanese is " Know people”. As a "miss who thinks too much", she often feels offended by Qin's Chinese "friends", which is one of the sources of conflict in her relationship with Qin. Because of these misunderstandings, explanations and caution are inevitable in their daily conversations. "Chinese people really don't think too much." Qin said with a smile, and these comforting words have almost become his mantra. And Yoshii told me that in any intimate relationship where one seems to be stronger than the other, there must be some kind of force invisible to outsiders that maintains the balance.

In their words, it is best to maintain a little "tension" in an intimate relationship. If there are no boundaries, there will be transgressions.

They hate being "bound" and are described by friends as "a somewhat mysterious couple". They rarely appear in social situations at the same time. Even when facing same-sex friends, they mostly choose to communicate one-on-one. Yoshii resented the idea of ??husband and wife appearing in front of everyone as a social unit, and even more resented the couple-style narrative in which "we" replaced "me". No matter how close we are, we will never be like conjoined twins. The independent personality of "I" seems to have never been lost or lost in their marriage.

As the most difficult practice in the world, differences and frictions are naturally inevitable in this "real" intimate relationship. Yoshii said that the difference between the two of them is not the difference between Chinese and Japanese cultures, but the difference between two individuals. Just as the attraction between two people is not the exotic attraction between people of different nationalities, but the attraction between two individuals, the friction between the two people’s living habits is not the friction between the living habits of people from different nationalities, but the friction between two lives. Friction between ordinary people with different habits.

Then, this relationship will naturally face boredom between two individuals. Making different lunches for her husband every day cannot overcome boredom, nor can the staggering of living and writing spaces, a little bit of alienation and tension. They must have gone through detours and had moments of complaining about each other. After experiencing those, Yoshii said that the secret may be: "Do your own work well first" and "Don't focus on the other person", so that they can maintain their relationship. A suitable "rhythm". In the final analysis, you must first overcome your boredom with life itself, your insecurity and your dependence on the other person.

The fever of youth heals over time, and the two independent individuals slowly learn to live together. Qin likens their marriage to "English afternoon tea." Although it is only a short pause between intense work, this short pause must be happy. But Yoshii disagreed. She commented, "Isn't that a superficial relationship?" She understood marriage to be a "deep, deep" connection.

They have reached a consensus on "not doing anything" and have given up the pursuit of "romantic lies" such as "a better partner". They also have enough desire to deify this foreign love. Immunity. When it comes to their "only soul mate", they are even more willing to be shy about it.

"Speaking of the only one, can you tell me that story in Africa?" Qin said to Yoshii.

So Yoshii spoke slowly:

"It is very accidental for a person to find a marriage partner or a soul mate. Why do so many Japanese marry Japanese people? Japanese people Is her soulmate Japanese? Because they both live in Japan, the chance of meeting her is relatively high. In fact, her best companion in the world is probably in Japan. Somewhere in Africa. But because she was in Japan and had never been to Africa, it was impossible to meet him. She lived in Japan and fell in love with a Japanese man, believing that this man was her soul mate and the best marriage partner. . So I think marriage and love are very, very random things. Once you find the other person, don’t try so hard to test the other person’s love - I think he/she will definitely find a better one. ”

"I feel the same about this." Qin responded, "Life is already very confusing. Why do you do that if you meet someone who is okay? I think of a story from my childhood. A child, his father asked him I went to buy matches and told him to make sure that every match was of good quality. So he tried every match in the box. Of course, the quality was good, but he couldn't use it if he really wanted to. The most suitable and only one, logically speaking, is to keep trying. Otherwise, we should not hold the most suitable to the supreme position." "I really feel that way," Yoshii said with emotion. . This was the most consistent moment during the entire interview. "Too many movies now say that this is the only lover and the right one. I think this is a fantasy. Why do so many people get divorced? Because they don't understand this. Of course, I can understand the situation where divorce is caused by really being unable to maintain a marriage. . It’s not good to pursue perfection too much. People are not perfect.

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