Mia Kankimäki - The Women I Think About at Night: Traveling the Paths of My Heroes

Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2018 by Mia Kankimki

English translation copyright 2020 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Originally published in 2018 in Finland by Otava as Naiset joita ajattelen isin.

The English-language edition published by agreement with Mia Kankimki and Elina Ahlback Literary Agency, Helsinki, Finland.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition November 2020

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Interior design by Carly Loman

Jacket design by Zoe Norvell

Jacket art Christies Images/Bridgeman Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-1-9821-2919-4

ISBN: 978-1-9821-2924-8 (ebook)

You think you know what a journey can offer you, but in fact that is precisely what you dont know.

KAREN BLIXEN, A LETTER FROM AFRICA, JANUARY 18, 1917

elegant Graces and lovely-haired Muses, come

SAPPHO, CA. 600 BCE

I m M. Im forty-three years old. On countless nights over the years Ive thought about womenand it has nothing at all to do with sex.

Ive thought about women on those sleepless nights when my life, my love, or my attitude is skewed, and it seems there is no end to the dark night of my soul. On those nights I have gathered an invisible honor guard of historical women, guardian angels to lead the way.

The lives of these inspiring night women have not followed traditional paths. They have transgressed boundaries and expectations. Many of them are artists and writers, people doing lonely, introverted work. Most have not had families or children, and their relationships with men have been unconventional. Many have traveled in or moved to foreign countries, and made massive life changes at an advanced age. Some have lived with their mothers their entire lives; some have suffered from diseases and mental disorders; but all of them have followed their passions and made their own choices. These exemplary women have been my plan Bthe one Ill adopt if everything else goes to hell.

One of the women is Sei Shnagon, a writer and court lady who lived a thousand years ago in Kyoto, about whom I wrote my first book. But there are many others. Some nights I lie awake thinking about Frida Kahlo, whose biography I read when I was eighteen. It transformed how I thought about womanhood. Other nights I think about Georgia OKeeffe, who wound up alone in the New Mexico desert painting buffalo skulls and making her first trip around the world when she was in her seventies. I think about Yayoi Kusama, a Japanese woman who, deciding to become an artist, wrote to Georgia OKeeffe to ask her advice, and later, after shaking up the New York art world in the sixties, returned to Tokyo and asked to be allowed to live in a psychiatric hospital. I think of Karen Blixen, who followed her husband to Africa and ended up running a farm on her own. I think of Jane Austen, who, though she lived unmarried in her parents attic in the English countryside, transformed the art of the novel. I think of the poet-artist Ema Saik, who lived in Japan in the Edo period. It is her calm that finally brings sleep to the dark night of my soul.

I wonder where these women found their courage. What advice would they give me, if we could meet? And above all: Could I go exploring in their footsteps?

Ive been on that journey for some time now. And the amazing thing is that I keep finding more and more forgotten night women who churn up my imagination, an ever-expanding network of women who lived in different centuries and different corners of the world, slicing the waves through my brain. They are Marys, Karens, Idas, Nellies, Marthas, Alexines, Sofonisbas, Battistasthey are writers, artists, explorers, depressed spinsters, war correspondents, wives of Renaissance aristocrats.

They are the women I think about at night. At first I thought about them on sleepless nights, in search of strength, inspiration, and purpose for my life; nowanights I stay up specially to think about them, my pulse pounding for them and with them. Why have they come to me, clung to me, swept me up in their lives? Why have I surrounded my desk with their faces? Why do books about them pile ever higher on my floor? Why do I collect facts about them like talismans?

Let me start at the beginning, one picture at a time.

But first let me pack my bag. I have a flight leaving soon.

[LETTER ON A NAPKIN]

Dear Karen,

Im writing this quick note to you on a KLM napkin. Im sitting on an airplane en route to Kilimanjaro, afraid. Im so afraid Im trembling. I keep asking myself how the hell Ive managed to put myself in this situation again. Couldnt I just have stayed home watching the Nature Channel?

The worst thing is, Im not even sure where Im going. I wrote to a certain Finnish man living in Tanzania, someone I dont even know, and he wrote back inviting me to come visit him in his home anytime I like. So Im going. Im hoping hell be at the Kilimanjaro airport to meet my plane, because I dont even know where he lives.

This is your fault, Karen. Could you please send me a bundle of your famous courage? I could surely use it.

Yours, M

T he long and the short of itperhaps more long than shortis this.

Its November of the previous year. Im lying in my ice-cold tatami-floored room in Kyoto, not particularly inclined to clamber up out of my futon bedding at all. My first book was published a couple of months ago, and Ive come here to figure out what to do next. Ive wandered aimlessly down the narrow alleyways of this beloved city, met friends, sat in tearooms, and visited temples glowing with fall colors, but my mind is sludge.

I think: This is my absolute lowest point.

Im forty-two. I have no husband, no children, no job. Ive sold my apartment, Ive written and published my first book, and Ive quit my job forever. Ive stepped into white fog. I am freeand completely adrift.

I havent the foggiest clue what to do next. Where should I go? Whom should I follow? What can a fortyish, familyless woman who has abandoned her work and her home do with her life?

The last few years, to be sure, have been the most wonderful time of my life. Ive lived out of suitcases in Kyoto, London, Thailand, and Berlin. Whenever Ive visited my native Finland, Ive house-sat for friends or holed up in my parents attic. Ive worked on my book and floated in freedom, in that unfathomable feeling of being able to spend my time precisely as I choose.