After eight hours on the plane I was far too tired to run, but I picked up my pace a little, dropped my bags and sank into my mother’s arms. “Hi,” I said. As opening words they weren’t particularly impressive, but her smile said she understood just how exhausted I was. “Hi,” she replied. “How was Japan?” Weary in mind and body I could only gape at her, the images crowding behind my eyes...
...the arrival, so tired, yet so exhilarated, all the effort, the energy, the long hours of selling raffle tickets and sausages and working as many hours as they would give me, and here I was, stepping into a crisp gray Tokyo morning, so far away from everything familiar and normal and safe. “Ohayoo gozaimasu, Nihon,” I whispered as I stepped across the dividing line...
...the city, tall, strong buildings clawing at the sky in impotent fury, yet dignified in their rage. A babble of sound, all completely non-comprehensible to my foreign ears, punctuated by the sound of traffic overwhelming in its intensity, not only beside but above me as well. The people, so many, crowded and confined even in these wide straight streets. They all looked alike, black hair, black eyes. They all looked at me. The tall blonde gaijin girl, what is she doing here? Why does she intrude on us in her non-understanding, her way of life so different from ours? Stranger, their calm cold eyes said. One who is apart...
...the food, all different flavours and beautiful new names and gorgeous preparation. “We eat with our eyes,” said the teacher. But if you only ate with your eyes, you could never really know what it was to taste... Okonomiyaki is best, what they call Japanese pizza in homage to the American Way, but ten times better than those Western equivalents. Or maybe onigiri is best, those small delicately flavoured rice balls, or maybe sushi, dipped in rice vinegar and wasabi... No. The best is taiyaki, fish-shaped sweet cake pastry filled with smooth creamy custard. Taiyaki at the train station, warm comfort through the wet spring drizzle and the cold black alone that descends in those moments when you are brutally aware that you do not belong here with the power and the steel...
...the island, with its bright red gate standing out at sea. “For the purpose of warding off demons,” said my guidebook, but it was unreliable, having been translated from the Japanese and presumably through the Danish. “To please harm these blossoms of joy is not permitted,” it warned further down the page. No demons could find the island home though, serene and peaceful as it lies, emerald-green in a sapphire-sea setting. Between the stalls selling food and souvenirs, on the wide patch of ground set aside for them, and even on the very grounds of the temple itself, the sacred deer grazed peacefully in tranquil contemplation of life. Watching them, I felt my own understanding expand, until my heart felt beyond comprehension and I stopped trying to explain it and just laughed with the pure power of my feeling...
..the shopping, the fun and the worry inextricably rolling together into a tight ball in my stomach. I took to checking my credit balance every day, and part of me watched with cold disapproval at each new purchase, while the rest of me exulted in them, the sheer glory of it all anointing each bauble and souvenir with a radiance far beyond its monetary worth. “After all, I’m buying memories,” I reasoned to myself. “You can’t buy memories,” I replied...
...the stark awfulness of those bare steel rafters, a grim skeleton, a mute memorial to that one despairing flash of damned light, to that heartbeat in which a hundred thousand hearts stopped beating. The despair seemed to crush me there, bowed down with the pain of a sorrow I could never hold. But look! See the granite pillar gently curving, see the girl poised at the very top, the crane of hope balanced on her open hands as she holds them towards the sky. She looks like she will dance at any moment, this girl who loved to run, who died for a war she could not even remember, doomed by that single defining moment, cut down by the insidious pain that crawled through her blood. She is immortal now, this girl, held in the hopes and dreams of children everywhere, even those who do not know her name, or that she lived and loved and danced and ran as all children should live to do... “Sadako-chan,” I whisper, tenderly adding my small paper crane to the thousands that surround her, adding my own hopes and dreams and sorrow to hers...
...the mountains, shrouded in gauzy gray haze, promising secrets revealed if the mists would just pull away for the smallest of seconds... the fragile cherry blossoms that bruised even as I picked them, and I almost cried at the beauty destroyed by my clumsy hand... the firm white futon with its soft heavy cover that gently pressed me into sleep as the wind howled through wooden shutters and down paper-walled corridors... the monkeys that clambered up the walls of their wire-prisons, chattering at us insistently - and in a separate cage, the silent gorilla, who sat in the corner and looked out at us with mournful defeated eyes and did not move or speak... the lights and the rain and the dirt and the grease and the agony and joy and wonder of all the moments lived so intensely they seemed etched into my soul...
...and I blinked twice and picked up my bags. “There’s just so much to tell,” I began, as I stepped across the dividing line into the bright New Zealand day.
I wrote this story almost a year after coming back from Japan. It is based on mostly real experiences, but I have of course used poetic license in my interpretation. I actually sat down and wrote it after Mum complained for the fiftieth time 'You still haven't told us about Japan!'. It's hard to tell anyone about an experience that was so uniquely personal, and yet seemed to stretch beyond me into universal realms of feeling sometimes. This story, if you like, is what I have to say.