Nostalgia, melancholia, and the search for belonging: reflections between Tokyo and San Francisco

There’s a kind of quiet that settles in when you live abroad. Not silence exactly. Tokyo is anything but quiet. It’s more of an internal stillness. A pause. I felt it often when I lived there. It wasn’t loneliness. Not really. More like a soft ache. A kind of melancholia that comes from being somewhere that doesn’t quite belong to you and yet somehow feels like home.

When I moved to Japan from Europe, I didn’t have the words for what I was feeling. It wasn’t just culture shock or homesickness. It was more layered than that. I was in between. Between languages. Between identities. Between versions of myself. And strangely, that in-betweenness felt familiar.

Years later, now living close to San Francisco, I happened to meet Nicolas Gattig. He handed me a copy of his book, A Good Place to Leave a Lover, and I remember thinking, “Yes. This is it.”

The stories in this book, some set in Tokyo and some in San Francisco, capture the emotional texture of expat life in a way that’s rare. His characters drift through cities and relationships and moments that feel both fleeting and deeply rooted. I saw myself in those stories. Not literally but emotionally.

There’s one story set in Tokyo that reminded me of sitting alone in a tiny bar, the kind with velvet chairs and jazz playing softly in the background. I wasn’t trying to be anywhere else. I wasn’t trying to be anyone else. I was just there. And that was enough.

That’s the thing about nostalgia. It’s not always about missing a place. Sometimes it’s about missing a version of yourself that only existed in that place. And melancholia, when you let it in, can be a kind of clarity. It helps you see what mattered. What changed you. What stayed.

Now in San Francisco, I still feel that in-betweenness. It’s different but it’s there. This city has its own rhythm of arrivals and departures. People come here searching just like they do in Tokyo. And maybe that’s what belonging really is. Not a fixed point but a feeling you carry with you. A way of being open to the moment even when it’s unfamiliar.

You can find Nicolas’ book here: **https://tinyurl.com/a-good-place**