Unclaimed Shoes at the Genkan
On remembering, forgetting, and what remains
The Way of the Mirror turns one this summer. It feels like time for a proper reintroduction.
I’ve spent the past year writing essays drawn from old journals, entries that meant one thing then, and something else now. Most of them focus on where reflection leads but rarely on how it happens.
This is the piece that should have been essay number one. The one I’ve been eager, but afraid to write.
I was pouring drams of whisky into two glasses.
One for baba (ばば), my mother-in-law, and one for myself. It was a quiet autumn evening in Kyushu, Japan. A car with a loud, modified exhaust could be heard rev-matching through downshifts.
For long-forgotten reasons, we were talking about the boisterous scene in Kurosawa’s film Ikiru. The supporting cast huddled around low tables full of food and drinks, sharing personal anecdotes, leading to a final reveal of the protagonist. Baba shared the following anecdote.
Many years ago, young Baba hosted a gathering after the wake of a family member in the same apartment where we were sipping whisky. Like Ikiru, the gathering had endured from evening until the next morning. Many stories were shared, secrets revealed, accompanied by ample laughter and drinking.
The next morning, Baba noticed extra pairs of footwear and empty spaces where house slippers should have been. The gathering was such a success that a few attendees left in a hurry in the wee hours of the morning, still drunk, and without their shoes. The genkan, the foyer of Japanese homes where indoor and outdoor shoes are exchanged, looked almost like a crime scene. It took weeks of calling around for the shoes to be reunited with their rightful owners, and for the return of the house slippers.
Baba died a few weeks ago. I will always associate the boisterous celebration of life when I think of her or when I pass through the genkan of her home.
Since her death, I’ve been thinking about the role of memories and how they come together for meaning in our lives. These reflections have led me to recognize how journaling interweaves with the ways we remember and make sense of loss and celebration.
Latency: A Note Left by Someone I Used to Be
I was flipping through an old journal. At the time, I had recently graduated and was acclimatizing to corporate life at one of my first jobs. These early notebooks serve as a bridge between who I was then and the present, illuminating tiny but gradual shifts over time.
There was a long quote, taken from The Wild Sheep Chase, one of my favourite books by Haruki Murakami. It was a monologue-like delivery by Boku, the nameless protagonist, in his exchange with his enemy, or nemesis, the system personified.
The quote in itself is insignificant. Boku and perhaps a bit of Murakami himself proclaim that a threat that was imposed on him is essentially harmless, as he is a person of little significance. He declares that his life is mediocre while hinting at contentment, freedom, and agency. Like most protagonists in Murakami novels, they are the antithesis of traditional life scripts or success marked by career and wealth. His enemy has no power, nor any leverage over him, as Boku simply has nothing to lose.
Back in the present, I closed the journal and reflected on this quote. It’s ironic that young me noticed this, fresh out of university and starting a new job.
For a long time, I was using pocket journals as a commonplace book without the awareness of commonplacing as a practice. Over time, this habit became an act of noticing, capturing anything of interest—like planting a seed, which may or may not bear fruit.
The turbulent emotions ranged from surprise and shock to delight. Encountering this quote decades later—not as the young, naive, inexperienced writer who first recorded it, but as the person I am now, with accumulated experiences, memories, moments of joy and sorrow—was striking in a way that I can’t quite place.
After the emotional rush subsided, like a plot twist reveal, I began to wonder: Had I loosely modelled my life around this quote without knowing it? At that moment, everything seemed to fit—the hypothesis felt likely, and it was poetic that a seemingly inconsequential quote from decades ago had quietly served as my compass, guiding me while I navigated life’s uncertainties.
Wild Sheep Chase was written in the 1980s when Murakami was 33 and just establishing himself as a writer. He is now 77, a perennial Nobel candidate who never claimed the prize, still considered outside the Japanese literary establishment, with a new novel arriving this summer. He has continued writing through all of it.
Journaling Towards a Summit
During quiet moments, I sometimes visualize a nebulous space with memory fragments hovering about. Some fragments linger with familiarity, and others make an unlikely reappearance after having seemingly disappeared forever.
When disparate fragments connect and weave together with a clear thread, it’s one of the greatest joys of journaling that I rarely see discussed. The moment becomes cathartic and elevating: I can witness the mundane moments in my life come together in a new light that helps me understand myself better and navigate upcoming challenges.
I’ve come to think of journaling in stages:
Offloading: brain dump of what we notice, sometimes as a survival mechanism. Many of us pause here, unsure where else to go.
Revisiting: Rereading journals for nostalgia, reliving, and bolstering fading memories. Possibly another destination, or a waypoint.
Coherence: a space for possibilities, where connections emerge across time spanning our lifetime, patterns surface, and new meaning forms. We unlock today’s interpretation from the interplay of past and present.
As a novice writer, I was stuck in stage 1 for years. Only after some time did I feel ready and comfortable for stage 2, and I began rereading old journals. I often screamed into the void and rarely found understanding—a lot of effort, brief relief, some insight, but seldom true reward.
For a long time, I was stuck in the early stages. I’d flip through pages, fall into the trap of reliving the past, and resurface with nothing but a gentle heartache from nostalgia.
Eventually, I faced a curation crisis—too many notebooks to manage. Connections grew difficult with so many entries, and referencing became painstakingly slow.
On rare occasions, I might catch a glimpse of coherence, an opportunity to sidestep my old identity because I am no longer who I used to be. I apply my life’s lessons, observe my past self with empathy, and make connections with other pivotal moments to form new interpretations. Stage 3 is like those Murakami moments: harmless quotes written long ago, now the missing puzzle pieces.
This is the ideal summit where I like to hang. Here, I can remix decade-old entries and juxtapose them with events from last weekend for novel interpretations, blending past and present in a gentler approach to observe myself with less judgment or wincing.
As with most worthwhile pursuits, time amplifies joy. Time moves us between journaling stages as we learn, grow, and accumulate experiences for meaning-making.
Wayfinding
It was around the time of the birth of our first child that I was going through a series of drastic life changes. I was feeling more reflective and intentional than ever before, removing excess, lots of self-questioning, and making life-altering changes for less cognitive dissonance and to be more aligned with our values.
This was also when I deleted nearly all my social media accounts. Somehow, LinkedIn survived, as it was essential for a career. I’m glad I kept it—not for the reasons one might think. The last time I logged in, it felt like walking into a work event where everyone spoke in AI about themselves indirectly.
One of the consequences of getting off these platforms was that I had lost my point of reference when journaling. I felt like an unmoored traveller in need of an anchor. I thought to myself, ‘Is this what it feels like to forget my past?’
For decades, big tech has been making bold claims about the benefits of speed, convenience, and connection. And here I was, using my LinkedIn profile as my last remaining timeline, a wayfinding tool into my own personal history.
Knowing full well that tech is not my friend, I naturally solved my own personal history conundrum by turning yet again to the trusted journal, reaffirming a return to intentional self-documentation rather than leaving more data points for harvesting.
A Cartography of Being
I used to believe that long-term memory, the episodic kind, was somewhat reliable. I realized how susceptible they are to distortions when it’s so malleable. Every recall is a reconstruction. It’s much more akin to a jazz improvisation than to the playback of a recording.
After my epiphany on how I was using LinkedIn, it felt like the floodgates had opened, and I experimented by smashing together timelines of different topics in my notebooks. Where we lived, career moves, unshakable memories, worldly events, preoccupations, and even distractions, to name a few. Not only was the exploration fun, but patterns emerged to help clarify a lot of fuzziness around why I do what I do or think how I think.
Since then, every notebook would have an iteration of these personal exploration maps with combinations of topics based on what I was curious about at the time. Every time I map one out, I am surprised by how much our long-term memory stays hidden until needed.
Don’t take my word for it, slam different timelines together in your journal and see what transpires.
A single memory holds little meaning on its own. Coherence emerges in the space between. This simple spread helps me remember. I ended up shortening it to mnmnc.
Like all maps, it can be referred to anytime, until it becomes outdated. I start from any memory or event that calls for my attention, and move along the circle for connection. Once a circle is exhausted, I slide my finger to a different point in time to explore for connections.
Kitaboshi pencil factory tour, my daughter’s illustrations, and a stash of vintage pencils with JIS logos were all that I needed. Before long, a journal entry became one of my most-read essays.
Everything I’ve written here thus far has been the result of connections. More often than not, when new connections emerge, an idea or hypothesis takes hold that would have otherwise been lost. It remains there to wrestle with for the rest of the day or the coming weeks.
It feels like tugging on a loose thread of a sweater or a boro-style garment that’s been patched up, having been worn all my life. As I keep pulling, different parts of the fabric fold and come together, and an entirely new pattern emerges, only for this specific moment in time. It’s fluid, and it’s always a work in progress.
When I think of Baba, I often wonder how she managed to remain so sharp and whether I am relying on notebooks too much. Our talk that evening moved on from something solemn towards renewal. The next morning, Baba offered up various heirloom pieces that were passed down to her through generations: from urushi kitchenware to a damascene inlay brooch. She had wanted me to keep some of these objects so that they could accompany me through life to earn their keep in the form of memories.
Strip everything away, and what remains of a life is not our prized possessions nor achievements. What remains are memories, what we remember and what others remember of us.
With a notebook, a map, and some heirloom objects accompanying me each day, I look forward to treasuring moments, noticing my surroundings, and making new memories.
✒
Thank you for reading. The Way of the Mirror is a free and reader-supported publication on the beauty of memory making and journal writing. If you enjoy it, you can support my work with a paid subscription.
Wil
If you want to try this
Since the beginning of the year, I have facilitated sessions for journal writers looking to explore their past. It is also an exercise to reflect on our journey thus far in a new light. For the next month, I’d be happy to facilitate private sessions to subscribers who are interested. Drop me a note in chat.
The four suggested categories, though seemingly simple at first, are a great start to uncovering key points from your life you may have forgotten. The decade circles, reminiscent of tree rings, made for a fond reflection as I recalled events all the way back to childhood. I made surprising connections between my early years and my current interests — connections that have inspired me to write a future personal piece based on what I found.
For the experienced journal writers, here’s a one-page overview if you are eager to explore on your own.
Happy Substack anniversary, Wil! Another beautiful essay about journaling and memories. The personal history map and slamming timelines sound interesting. I’m thinking if I should attempt it. I’m also thinking back to my older journals that I had destroyed years ago due to moving and lack of storage. I had wondered if I would have forgotten some of my past with those journals. But I did notice that old memories do surface unexpectedly from time to time. I like to think that our brains do store all memories, archived it somehow, and when the moment is right, brings it out again.
An absolutely fantastic height to hit at your one year anniversary. Looking back over the past year it was aparent that every new post was becoming more and more refined in finality and process. Keep up the great work, Wil.