Emptiness

• It is usual here for a foreigner to be treated like a creature from another universe. Instead, emptiness became her passport in Japan, allowing her to become a two-way mirror for our manners and our ways. I came to realise that foreigners do not exist except in the prison cell of some people's minds. And, what a universe of knowledge is wasted in prisons. I would not be able to explain this to a Westerner. An ocean of misunderstanding lies between us. Their phantoms challenge them as much as our phantoms challenge us. We are condemned to be their hallucination as they are to be ours. But what she did was to reflect our own culture back to us as a hallucination.​