Okaeri (2016) & Okaeri II (2018)

Program note:

¨If you happen to visit the house on Beverly Drive, try to open the window just a little.¨

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Compositional idea:

(The following text should NOT be presented to the audience in any form)

Okaeri means ¨welcome home¨ in Japanese. Born in Yokohama, raised mostly in Japan and partly in China, lived in the US where my parents still live, and reside in Stockholm, I have many places I can call a ¨home¨. But the identity of a ¨home¨ is not very clear: What makes home your true home? Is it the geographical location? or people you grew up with? Climate? Smell? Maybe sound?

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One night at my parents place in New York during a hot summer (after a long journey from Stockholm with 6 hours of jetlag), I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. Lazy to turn on the light and the it was totally dark except the faint light from the moon. The window in the bathroom was slightly left ajar, and the stream of heat and subtropical sauna-like smell came in through the window together with extremely loud and intense noise of summer insects. At that moment, I was suddenly transported back to my childhood in Shiomidai, Japanese cicada catching, hurin (Japanese wind chime), and fireworks.

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The summer in Stockholm is very quiet, It was my dream to let my daughter experience the extremely hot and noisy Japanese summer.