Notes from a Ballet Life: Prologue

I began ballet the way I began piano as a small child: without much say in the matter. My parents enrolled me, and I went along. At the time, I imagined ballet as Swan Lake — all white tutus, long lines, and the kind of effortless grace that seems to belong to another world. What I found instead was the barre: repetition, discipline, and the patient work of learning how to stand still correctly.

It was not glamorous. It was not even especially interesting, at first. But once I had begun, I kept going.

That may be the most revealing thing about my relationship with ballet: I did not arrive through ambition, and I did not stay through sheer passion. I stayed because routine has a way of settling into the body. The weekly class, the familiar corrections, the sound of a teacher’s voice, the mirror, the barre — these things became ordinary, and then necessary. Ballet slowly turned from an aspiration into a habit, and from a habit into a form of continuity.

In that sense, my ballet life feels profoundly Japanese to me: not dramatic, not self-invented, but quietly sustained. I have never been a great ballerina. I have simply been someone who kept returning to the studio, and who never entirely left.