Japan: Postscript

Japan.

“Japan”. Linger on the word a moment. Let it rise and fall like a wave inside your brain. Feel it. “Japan”.

Japan at last.

The day we left it was raining. Very lightly. Mist, imperceptible, the gray sky bending and blending with the sidewalks and streets and lapping against the old, exhausted bicycles still chained beneath the overpass.

Again a train rumbled above me with a sound like thunder.

Would I want to live here? I’ve been asking myself this question since I arrived (there was no resisting it) and I am surprised by the answer:

I don’t think so.

This trip was incredible, an amazing first experience, but for all that I don’t know if I want what Japan means to me – my private, internal Japan of the last twenty years – challenged by living here. Maybe that isn’t fair. Maybe I owe it to the country and to myself to accept it for what it is and not just to protect what I want it to be.

But then again maybe people need ideals and (let’s be honest) delusions – about themselves, a place, another person – to get by; a release valve for the pressure that can build up over the course of a lifetime.

Maybe a healthy adulthood is measured, in part, by the ability to touch both what is and what is not, to walk in both the world as it actually is and the world as you’d want it to be.

It is a difficult thing learning what dreams to defer, what hopes to bury, but when we do so I think we free ourselves to appreciate what we so often take for granted – the miracle of a blooming flower; that the sun is warm and good; the act of giving love and of receiving it; a great book – as affirmations that, yes, there is something precious about life, a mystery that wears no words, a beauty we cannot communicate, a worth that is beyond any value we can reckon.

Drops of rain streamed along the window as the plane I was on broke through the clouds and into the sunshine.

Two hours later, I was home.