As Tonya was showing me around her rented apartment in Tokyo, shared with her husband and two young children, she pointed to a steel stovetop kettle. It was black from long usage.

In this multi-themed narrative, the kettle emerges as a locus of intersecting experiences and emotions. It serves the purpose – despite having been purchased in Japan – of a physical reminder of Tonya's pre-migratory past. This was a past in which warmth, emanating from hot tea, was facilitated through electricity, despite Sakhalin Island possessing abundant gas reserves (Henderson and Moe 2016). For Tonya, access to this ‘native’ gas was finally realised once she had crossed the sea to the Japanese archipelago. As her first purchase in Japan, the kettle epitomises the act of Tonya's relocation, embodying her experiences as a cross-border migrant. Here, the ‘intrinsic gathering and enduring capacities of materials’ (Olsen 2010: 110) come into play. Yet, paradoxically, the kettle also mediates the relationship between past and present, and between two locations – Russia and Japan. The kettle ‘pulls in’ and throws these temporalities and spaces together through its concreteness as a device that had received the tangible touch of the Sakhalin gas when Tonya first came to Japan. Additionally, despite its worn-out look about which Tonya warned me, the kettle encapsulates the story of upward mobility. For Tonya, this purchase symbolically ensured access to the gas originally meant for capital cities such as Moscow and so-called first-world neighbours such as Japan.

In this chapter I refer to such narratives as ‘material stories’. In these stories, a material object emerges as a central actor and a meaning-making component; it attracts and accumulates or distances people's experiences, memories, affects, emotions and aspirations. When analysing such material stories, I focus on the practice that is conceptualised here as ‘cross-referencing’.