Free Press
Elein Fleiss
Leaving
Dec 12, 2025 ｜ Free Press
Last night I finished the first part of Isaku Yanaihara’s book,”With Giacometti”. It ends with his departure from France in 1956, departure which he had postponed several times. The description of him leaving France and finally going back to Japan after two years abroad is very precise, from taking an airport bus with Alberto Giacometti and his wife Annette, the airport cafe and the airport procedures, him walking towards the plane while Giacometti and Annette are on the airport terrace waving at him, the heartbreaking separation they are experiencing, and then the trip on the plane with many stops, Rome, Tehran, Karachi, Saigon, and finally the arrival. When I put down the book, I burst into tears.
Leaving Japan has been increasingly difficult for me in the past years. I remember saying goodbye to my friend Yukinori after an opening dinner of our exhibition at Top Museum Tokyo in 2020, it was night and we were outside, in Meguro’s modern neighborhood. It was just before Covid crisis and I had a feeling I wouldn’t see him for a long time. I had tears in my eyes. On the plane back I also cried, just like Isaku Yanaihara, and my daughter was looking at me, alarmed.
Thinking about my most recent trip to Japan, last year, I remember the day in Taiza (Kyoto) with Yukinori and a group of friends, walking on main street in the beautiful light, going to visit AAWAA exhibition in Sei Taiza Gallery as well as the space he designed in an old weaving factory. At some point, some of us wanted to have coffee and looked for a place, walking in this deserted little town by the sea, we couldn’t find anything open and ended up buying junk food at the local supermarket, sitting outide on a bench, the five of us in a row. That’s a memory I particularly cherich, a nothing moment that had a Jim Jarmush films’ feeling to it. It makes me very nostalgic to think about it.
When my daughter Clarissa was little, I was buying lots of vintage children’s book. Once I found a large hardcover book by Allen Say, « Grandfather’s Journey ». On the cover there was the image of an Asian man on the deck of a boat, he was dressed in a long black coat and was wearing a bowler hat. I had never heard of this author. The book was about the grandfather of Allen Say who left Japan for California at the beginning of 20th century and his return to Japan later in his life with his wife and daughter. Allen Say made me feel with a few words the nostalgia of exile. This story deeply mooved me. I realized that I also come from an exiled family, on my father’s side. My grandmother was born in Germany, my grandfather in Ukraine, they also lived for seven years in Brazil during the war, which they left when my father was fourteen years old. This is part of me story.
September 30th, 2025
Text and photograph by Elein Fleiss
*Yukinori Maeda,artist name AAWAA
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