The journey to find self-expression through art has led me across several continents and various media.

After I established my career as an editor at the feminist magazine Watashiwaonna in Tokyo, I came to Chicago in 1979 with my husband who was invited to the University of Chicago. While I was waiting to hear about my acceptance to the Art Institute of Chicago, I wrote a short story, Chromatic Body Workshop in English because I wanted to communicate with American people. In 1980 I not only got a scholarship and became a graduate student in sculpture but also published my story at Primavera, a literary magazine based on the University of Chicago two years later. When I began to study at the Art Institute, I forgot about writing.

I worked in various media: sculpture, painting, photography, performance art, video and film. As a final project, I created a performance piece, Nomad. It combined sculpture, poetry, dance and music, and was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1983. A fellow graduate student made a film about my piece, and when I saw it, I realized that in order to convey my vision of the work, I would have to film it myself. I also realized that the film medium allowed me to integrate all these different threads—sculpture, painting, dance, etc.—in the tapestry I intended to weave.

When I returned to Japan in 1983, I had difficulty readjusting to my culture. I suffered from a profound cultural shock. After having experienced the thrill of creative freedom and sexual equality, I couldn't go back to Japan's rigidly defined women's roles and traditional restrictions. I decided to leave my husband and my Japanese culture to realize my dream to be a film director. (At that time in Japan, there were almost no female directors in narrative feature filmmaking.)

In 1985, I came to New York as a self-imposed exile, without a job, friends, or a permanent place to live. As soon as I arrived in the land of the American Dream, I experienced a feeling of displacement. Because of my own despair, I was able to connect emotionally with a group of homeless people living near my apartment on the Lower East Side. My encounter with them was like a love affair. Their problems became mine. My documentary, Inside Life Outside (completed in January of 1988), received a USA Film Festival Grand Prize, and it was shown at the Berlin International Film Festival and Whitney Museum of American Art's 1989 Biennial. It also appeared on PBS as well as Japanese and European television networks. The film represents not only their struggle to survive, but also my own struggle to adapt and survive in America.

In 1989, I conceived a film, The Nail That Sticks Up and started writing a screenplay funded by the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Still, I remained on the margin, with the same sense of alienation. As I emerged from the physical survival level into a more intellectual and emotional level, I was always conscious of being suspended between two cultures.

After I finished writing the screenplay in 1992, I tried to direct and produce the film independently. I concentrated on fund-raising for several years. I got very close three times, but funding became a continual frustration. Nevertheless I kept going until I was completely consumed by it, then I fell into a deep depression.

Through art—in many forms—I have found ways to translate across cultures and to transcend what has felt, at times, like great divides. When I took on the challenge of writing a novel, Forest in F Minor, a companion to The Nail That Sticks Up, with the wish that some day a movie company might produce it, I slowly came out of depression. Because I was writing in English, my second language, and writing a novel is an entirely different endeavor than writing a screenplay, it took me a very long time to finish it. I completed it in 2005 and published it in 2007. I realized English is an inherently more flexible language that allows me to express what cannot be expressed in Japanese—a female's transformation from dependence and subservience to independence and true personal integrity.

I've lived in America for almost 25 years. In August 2006 I had an irrefutable feeling that my life in New York City closed a circle, so I gave all my furniture away and left New York City with the minimum belongings that fit in my small Honda Civic. Since then I traveled wherever the road took me, looking for a new home. In August 2007 I drove into Taos and decided to stay. Right now I feel as though I stand at the confluence where many small rivers meet to become one. I'm filled with quiet passion. With any medium that is available for me, I'll keep singing my own songs of painful and joyful experiences, transcending the personal and reaching universality.