Throughout the time I have lived in Japan, the stages of culture shock have been hammered into me so often that I sometimes feel I could recite them in my sleep: honeymoon, frustration, adjustment, acceptance. The model is usually presented as a kindness, and maybe it is one. There is comfort in being told that disorientation has a shape, that loneliness can be graphed, that the strange irritation you feel toward supermarket packaging or city hall paperwork is not a personal failing but a predictable emotional weather system. The classic U-curve model of cultural adjustment is often traced to Sverre Lysgaard’s 1955 work, later expanded into the W-curve to account for reverse culture shock, and it remains one of the most familiar ways institutions explain life abroad to students, workers, and migrants. But the longer I live here, the more suspicious I become of that clean little curve, not because it is useless, but because it is too tidy for the messier thing that actually happens. Culture shock, at least as I have experienced it, is not only the shock of encountering another culture; it is the shock of discovering that your own identity was cultural all along.

Kalervo Oberg, who helped popularize the term “culture shock,” described it as anxiety caused by losing “all our familiar signs and symbols of social intercourse.” That definition is still useful because it recognizes that culture is not only temples, food, language, etiquette, or national holidays. Culture is the invisible choreography that tells us when to speak, when to laugh, how close to stand, how directly to refuse, how much of ourselves to offer in public, and which version of ourselves is appropriate for the room. When those cues vanish, the self does not vanish with them, but it becomes suddenly awkward. You begin to notice your own gestures. You hear the volume of your own voice. You realize that the personality you once thought of as simply “me” was also a practiced arrangement of manners, assumptions, timing, humor, and language. This is the deeper humiliation of living abroad: not that you become someone else, but that you catch yourself in the act of being someone.

This is why Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland feels less like a nonsense fantasy and more like one of literature’s great accounts of culture shock. Alice falls into a world where almost nothing behaves according to the logic she brought with her, but Wonderland is not chaotic in the simple sense. It has rules, rituals, hierarchies, and forms of speech; Alice’s problem is that she does not know how to read them. She tries to make sense of Wonderland by applying the categories of home, and Wonderland responds by making those categories ridiculous. She recites lessons that come out wrong, attends a tea party where time itself has become socially impossible, and finds herself in conversations where politeness no longer guarantees mutual understanding. Her famous question, “Who in the world am I?” comes after her body and memory have both become unstable, but the question is not only metaphysical. It is social. Alice is asking who she can be in a world where none of her usual performances are being recognized.

That question feels painfully familiar to anyone who has spent enough time in another country to move beyond the postcard version of the experience. At first, culture shock can look like confusion about external things: how to use the bus, how to separate the trash, how to read the air, how to survive the thousand tiny scripts of daily life. But eventually, the more unsettling question arrives: who am I when I am no longer fluent in the social world around me? Am I still funny if my jokes do not translate? Am I still competent if I need help making a phone call? Am I still independent if the simplest adult tasks require a friend, a coworker, a translation app, or a deep breath in the entryway of a municipal office? Alice’s shrinking and growing are comic, but they also literalize the emotional proportions of foreignness. One moment you are too much: too loud, too direct, too visibly foreign. The next moment you are too little: inarticulate, dependent, reduced to nods and apologies. Wonderland makes Alice aware of her size because culture shock makes us aware of our scale.

Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life gives language to this theatrical discomfort. Goffman argues that social life is full of performances, not in the sense that everyone is fake, but in the sense that identity is always being staged for an audience. His famous dramaturgical model suggests that we manage impressions, rely on settings and props, and adjust ourselves according to the expectations of those around us; the self, as he puts it, is not simply “an organic thing” but a “performed character” that emerges in social interaction. This idea can sound cynical until you live abroad and realize how mercifully practical it is. Of course identity is performed. Of course we become slightly different selves in classrooms, offices, family homes, train stations, group chats, interviews, and izakaya booths. The difficulty of culture shock is that the stage changes before we have learned the blocking.

If Alice is the story of identity destabilized, then Spirited Away is the story of identity disciplined into performance. Chihiro enters the spirit world frightened, sulky, and helpless, but the film does not reward her with self-actualization in the modern, inspirational sense. Instead, it makes her work. She asks for a job, signs a contract, loses part of her name, cleans what others refuse to touch, learns whom to trust, and slowly becomes someone capable of moving through the bathhouse without being destroyed by it. The plot famously turns on Yubaba renaming Chihiro as Sen; in the film’s logic, taking a name is a form of control, and forgetting one’s true name means losing the possibility of return. But the film is more subtle than a simple warning to “remember who you are.” Chihiro survives because she remembers her name and learns a new role. She does not preserve the self by refusing transformation. She preserves it by changing carefully.

That, to me, is what makes Spirited Away such a powerful coming-of-age story for adults. Childhood stories often imagine growing up as a passage into independence, but adult life abroad reveals a stranger truth: growing up is not something we do once. We may arrive in another country with degrees, jobs, bank accounts, and carefully packed suitcases, only to find ourselves made childlike again by unfamiliar systems. The bathhouse is adulthood stripped of glamour. It is labor, hierarchy, exhaustion, etiquette, debt, dependence, and the need to keep going even when you are afraid. Chihiro becomes competent not through revelation but through repetition. She learns the right words, the right gestures, the right silences, and the right acts of care. This is not false identity. It is practiced identity, and anyone who has learned to inhabit another culture knows the difference.

There is a particular stage of living abroad when you begin to resent the performance. You notice yourself becoming smoother, more careful, more edited. You know when to laugh even if you missed the nuance. You know when to apologize before you understand the problem. You know when to play the role of the cheerful foreigner, the grateful guest, the competent teacher, the confused but trying resident, the person who is fine, really, no worries. It is tempting to imagine that somewhere beneath all of those roles is a pure, untouched self waiting to be recovered, but I am not sure I believe that anymore. Goffman’s work suggests something both more troubling and more freeing: the self is not hidden beneath performance so much as produced through it. We are not only what we feel privately. We are also what we repeatedly do in relation to others.

Sara Ahmed’s writing on orientation helps clarify why this process feels so physical. In Queer Phenomenology, Ahmed describes being oriented as a matter of “feeling at home” and “knowing where one stands,” which is exactly what culture shock disrupts. To be disoriented is not merely to be confused; it is to have the world stop offering itself naturally to the body. Doors, counters, forms, greetings, roads, social expectations, and even silences no longer sit within easy reach. You hesitate before acting because you do not yet know which way you are facing. Over time, however, the body learns. You stop thinking about which side of the escalator to stand on. You bow at the right depth without calculating it. You develop habits that are not quite native and no longer foreign. The world has not become simple, but it has become reachable.

This is where The Velveteen Rabbit enters the conversation, softer than Alice and less grand than Spirited Away, but perhaps more devastating. Margery Williams’s story is often read as a sentimental tale about love, but it is also a theory of identity. The Rabbit wants to know what it means to be Real, and the Skin Horse answers, “Real isn’t how you are made” but “a thing that happens to you.” That line changes when read beside stories of migration, foreignness, and cultural adjustment. We often talk about belonging as though it were a status someone grants you or a feeling you finally achieve. You arrive, you struggle, you adapt, and one day you belong. But The Velveteen Rabbit suggests that realness is neither instant nor self-declared. It happens through use, attachment, wear, repetition, and relationship.

To become real in a place is not the same thing as becoming invisible within it. This matters, especially in Japan, where foreignness can remain visible no matter how long one stays, how well one speaks, or how deeply one loves the landscape of ordinary life. The Velveteen Rabbit does not become Real by becoming pristine or perfectly acceptable. He becomes Real by being loved into shabbiness, by accumulating evidence of relation. In the same way, perhaps living abroad becomes real not when the culture shock graph reaches its final upward swing, but when your life gathers texture. You have a dentist. You know which conbini has the better coffee machine. You have seasonal opinions. You remember your first apartment with embarrassment and tenderness. You know where the snow piles up, which train connection is risky, which coworker will help you read the impossible notice, and which small rituals carry you through the year.

This is why the usual culture shock stages, while helpful, can begin to feel inadequate after enough time has passed. They imply that adjustment is a movement from instability back to stability, as though the goal is to regain equilibrium. Literature offers a different model. Alice does not simply wake from Wonderland unchanged; she has encountered the absurdity beneath manners and language. Chihiro does not leave the bathhouse as the same child who entered the tunnel; she carries memory, labor, courage, and a hair tie made by friends from another world. The Velveteen Rabbit does not become Real by returning to his original condition; he becomes Real by being permanently altered. These stories understand transformation better than diagrams do. They know that crossing into another world is not an interruption of identity but one of the ways identity is made.

Maybe this is the part of culture shock that orientations and handbooks cannot fully prepare us for. They can tell us we may feel euphoric, then frustrated, then adjusted, then accepting. They can reassure us that confusion is normal and homesickness is temporary. They can give names to the weather, which is useful when you are standing in the storm. But they rarely say that the storm may change the shape of the house. They rarely admit that learning another culture also teaches you the contingency of your own, or that performing a new role may reveal the performances you had mistaken for nature. They rarely say that you may become more yourself by becoming less certain of who that self is.

In the end, the rabbit hole, the bathhouse, and the nursery all lead to the same unsettling mercy: identity is not a treasure locked inside us, waiting to be protected from the world. It is made in contact with the world. It is startled into question, trained through practice, worn soft through love, and revised by every place that teaches us how to stand differently. Culture shock is real, but perhaps it is not only a crisis of adaptation. Perhaps it is an education in performance, orientation, and becoming. Alice asks who she is when the old rules no longer hold. Chihiro learns who she can become without surrendering her name. The Velveteen Rabbit discovers that realness happens over time, through relation, and not without pain. After years abroad, I find that more honest than any curve: we do not simply adjust to another country. We are altered by the act of learning how to live there.