I bought the plane ticket in April of that year. I was still one half of a whole then, if mostly due to inertia. “Do you want to go?” I asked, and he said he wasn’t sure, and I said the $600 seat sale wouldn’t wait forever, and he asked did I actually want him to be there, and I said he could come if he wanted but I was fine going alone.
He didn’t go. I didn’t know yet how important my going would be.
This edition of the newsletter is a little different. No real story to tell, just writing. Vignettes from a trip that is now almost one year behind me, but from which I still haven’t fully unpacked. It’s a long one, sorry. But hey, I did say this would be a personal newsletter, and this is about as unvarnished as it gets.
The trip was set to last two weeks, with my birthday set right in the middle. That was the plan, a birthday adventure. I booked the flight out for Nov. 11. Remembrance Day. Anyone who follows me already knows the main beats of what happened next, so let’s get them out of the way quick.
In September, my dad suddenly got sick.
On Oct. 4, he died.
On Nov. 9, a few hundred people gathered at an estate just outside the city to remember. Not a funeral, because dad didn’t want that, but a celebration of life.
Less than 48 hours later, I was on a plane, alone. Relieved to leave everything behind.
— — —
The first few days whip by in pictures salvaged from speeding trains. A mountain. A moat. Pickled turnips in tiny bowls. A castle, destroyed in various wars and rebuilt to look old. I wander through streets without object. My mind is settled and blank.
The work of the soul is to search for what is real. But what is real? Something that is authentic. What is authentic? That’s harder to answer. You can peel back the layers, but it takes awhile to reach the core. By the time you get there, you may find the word now rings hollow, having ceased to hold meaning at all.
So: what meaning is real, and what is constructed? Is the satisfaction of sipping a tiny plastic bottle of white wine on the plane authentic? How about the surge of peace that soaks into your bones when the plane touches down in Osaka? Is the anticipation you feel to reunite with old friends authentic, or the hope for new ones you might meet?
A clothing store. A valley. The smell of fried shrimp wafting down a narrow back alley. A train station. A memory of being here before, when you and everything around you seemed just a little… more. A little more solid, a little more easy, a little more certain of what “meaning” actually means.
You want to know something strange? I’d been to Japan half a dozen times, and never once touched the sea.
— — —
Early in the trip, I start a diary with exactly one entry.
Thursday, November 14, 2019
Fukuoka
At a hotel bar clad in leather, either real or a compelling faux, playing American jazz.
The shinkansen are the most beautiful machines. They race along the ground at 300 kilometres per hour, white snakes piercing the valleys between the mountains, tracing the human texture of Japan. From Osaka to Kobe, from Kobe to Hiroshima, and from there to the edge of Kyushu, the southern island, where the slate grey of the clouds echoes the white-capped grasp of the sea.
At the hotel bar, the man in the business suit asks, in stilted English, whether you are busy. You pretend not to hear him. You are in fact quite busy getting drunk enough on white wine to forget about where you came from and what you left, or didn’t leave, behind. But you’re not supposed to say that, especially in your broken Japanese. “Sengetsu, watashi no chichi ga shinimashita. Aishiteiru. Totemo, itsumo aishiteiru.”
There are many things you are not supposed to say.
For instance, you are not supposed to say you came to Japan to find yourself. You are not supposed to say this in deference to the blinding whiteness of that statement, the structural flaw that undergirds the concept that the Self is both something that can be lost and, by correlation, one that might be found after one has drunk their fill of someone else’s culture. The Self, in this depiction, becomes just another colonial treasure extracted from the ages, its theft celebrated and framed as a sort of liberation, like a Rosetta Stone for the meaning of life.
Or something like that.
Yet when white women — and it is, almost invariably, white women — talk about finding themselves abroad, what they really mean is that they are seeking a personality that will be worthy of love, believing that travel will make them more interesting, more wise, more attuned to a force beyond themselves. It does not. It just makes you someone that won’t shut up about this shinkansen, that bowl of ramen, and the mountain you once climbed outside Kyoto.
Besides, as a wise person once said, the personality is not the Self. It is, rather, just a series of strategies the Self develops to get its needs met. Those strategies serve you for a time, until one day they don’t, and from that moment on you are convinced that the key to getting them back in working order is to Find Yourself, by which you mean finding a way to become someone else. Someone more brilliant, more radiant and, thus, more loved.
What do you really need? You don’t know. Maybe it’s simple: a home. A sense of belonging. A bond that transcends time and distance, supplying the answer to every question. The reason you try. The reason you thrive. The reason, ultimately, that you keep forging ahead.
When you had all that in your father’s love, how do you replace it?
Oh no. Oh God, no, no no. We can’t go there yet.
You are also not supposed to say that, when the wings of your plane bit the air and lifted off Canadian soil, you wondered if it would be the last time you saw it. And you are definitely not supposed to say that, when you settled into your seat and drifted off into gentle reveries about the trip ahead, you thought, with a gentle calm, that you have options on how it might end.
You might fly home again. Or else, once you have Found Yourself somewhere between Tokyo and Nagasaki, you might smile, and leave your suitcase packed neatly on the hotel bed, and then you might put on your best little black dress and walk into the ocean.
And the jazz on the radio is singing: “take my heart, and please don’t break it.”
Hearts don’t actually break. They’re just eroded, like the beloved toe of some sacred statue, the friction of a thousand passing hands slowly rubbing them away.
— — —
The old Norwegian man finally gets the hint that I don’t want to go to another bar with him, and leaves. I like the bar much more than his company. The bar is slightly smaller than my bedroom and smells like pilsner and ash. He said that immigration is destroying the West. The bar’s bathroom is out a back door and down an alley and up two flights of stairs so narrow I have to turn sideways. He said the Americans are too mean to their president. The bar is joy, compressed. The Norwegian? He’s just sweaty.
A young Japanese man slips into the Norwegian’s vacated seat. He has curious, gentle eyes. He points at my tattoos; he’s been eyeing them all night. They’re comparatively uncommon in Japan, which, in another of its many apparent contradictions, boasts both one of the world’s most beautiful tattooing traditions, and also a lingering stigma against ink: to some of the older generation, tattoos still bear a sense of disrepute. A yakuza thing.
Not to this man, though. “Wolf,” he says, with a certain hesitation, his tone halfway between statement and question, not confident that he’s selected the correct English word for the canid that decorates my left arm. I grin, and nod. He rolls up his sleeve to show me the tattoo that prowls over his skin, a detailed black-and-grey lion.
Now we are tomodachi, we are friends. He beams, and offers me a cigarette.
Our conversation is halting but determined. He speaks almost no English, though his friend, who is Korean and fluent in all of our languages, sometimes steps in to help. I can read Japanese better than I understand or speak, so when we run out of words in common, which is often, we type notes on my phone to convey what we mean.
お仕事は何をしているの? - What do you do for work?
新聞の記者 - I’m a newspaper journalist.
何を探してたの? - What were you looking for?
トイレ笑 - The bathroom lol
Someone hands me a bowl of cake. It is a birthday. Whose birthday? I don’t know, but now I have this cake, so I get to be witness to this birthday that is out in the world for all to share. The cake tastes like strawberries and cream and also the cigarette smoke wafting by. It’s the best cake I’ve ever eaten in my life.
The young man and I take Instagram selfies at escalating stages of personal disarray. The bartender cranks up “Gangnam Style.” We throw our arms around each other and burst into dance. Unlike the Norwegian, my new friend wants nothing more from me than this. He staggers out for a smoke in the salt-kissed night air and somehow, in the crush of people squeezed into the bar, I do not see him again.
“That man, he’s a really good person,” his Korean friend tells me.
Yeah, I reply, I can see that he is.
The next morning, I wake up to remember that somewhere in the bottom of our fourth or fifth glass, we’d added each other on Instagram. But we never again interact. After a few months, I hit “unfriend.” It’s not a rejection. It’s just that there’s nothing else we could have given to each other than we already had.
— — —
You haven’t truly lived until you’ve spent most of your birthday naked, sunk up to your neck in boiling spring water, face slathered in steam. Pretending you don’t notice the discreet sidelong glances of the septuagenarian women huddled on the other end of the bath. They mean no harm: it’s the tattoo thing again. Most of Japan’s public baths forbid tattooed people from entering, but here, in Kinosaki, a resort town for most of its 1,300-year history, all seven baths welcome inked visitors to strip down and slide in.
The water is supposed to be healing. I don’t feel healed, though I do feel very clean.
It rained all day on my birthday. In the morning, a planned hike up the mountainside turned into a damp cable-car ride to the peak. From the top, I could see miles of deep green pines, flecked with orange and red leaves. Far below, the town of Kinosaki clung to its narrow valley, smothered with silvery fog. Nothing more than a few streets lined with old shops and wooden ryokan inns, winding towards the ocean beyond.
Well, there it is then. So what’s the plan there, birthday girl? What’s the decision?
On my way back to my ryokan, I notice a bar down the street. After my last bath, I take off my yukata and put on real pants, and wander over for a drink. The owner is a woman of indeterminate age, shoulders straight and elegant, black hair streaked with grey. I order a glass of wine. She hums for a moment, then fiddles through shelves full of whiskeys and shochu until she finds one bottle hidden in the back, a bitterly dry red.
She serves it over ice, in a short tumbler. I love her for this, and try not to laugh.
Soon, she slides a microphone on the bar and politely asks if I want to sing karaoke. I just smile and shake my head. There are nights to let the performer inside me run free, but the only song I want to hear tonight is one that I’ll sing to myself, when I’m ready.
Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday dear Melissa, it’s time to walk away from the sea.
— — —
My friend Jake knows where to get the best ramen. Just wait, he says, you’ll see. It’s a 15 minute walk from the bar where we sang karaoke, because somehow everything worth doing in Osaka is a 15 minute walk from where you already are. Don’t ask me how that works, on a spatial level. It’s just how things happen to be.
The night is unseasonably warm. When darkness first fell on Osaka, I stood on the roof of the bar Jake owns in the warrens of Namba, shoulders bared in a tank top in late November, marvelling at how the temperature and lack of wind balanced so gently I couldn’t feel the air on my skin. He made me mystery drinks that tasted like candy. I sipped them alone while he worked, looking into the winking eyes of the featureless concrete buildings that stand vigil over the city. Then we drank. Then we sang. And then we went hunting for noodles.
The ramen place is crowded at 3 a.m., but without the long lines that sometimes mark it by day. We buy a ticket at the vending machine outside, and hand it to the attendant when we walk in. The bowls arrive within seconds. The broth is thick. Big gobs of fat glisten on its surface. This is food for when you’re inebriated enough to know nothing beyond what the body craves, but not so far gone that you will forget it.
“Oh my God,” I say, attempting to gesture at the ramen despite having questionable control of my limbs. “You were right. This is amazing. It’s… just… soooo… beautiful.”
At that point, I cried more over that bowl of ramen than I did when my father died. Which isn’t saying very much, to be honest. A few errant tears. I was still mostly numb, at that time.
We take a meandering walk back to Namba. The streets of Osaka glisten in what is left of the darkened neon lights. We talk about all the quiet things in life. I trust Jake in the way you trust someone when there is nothing binding you except what you brought into that moment, which are the same things you will take away when you leave.
It was a perfect night, I tell him. Everything I needed. A gift given and received.
It isn’t hard to hug goodbye and tumble back into my hotel room for the last time. We’ll wander through Namba again, Jake and I. There are people in your life you don’t worry about missing, because you know you’ll always find them another day. Across years, across oceans, and when the time is right.
— — —
In the end, all of the following things are true:
I did not come back wiser, more interesting, or any different than I had been.
I did not find myself.
I did not touch the sea.
I did not leave my luggage on the bed and also did not purge my grief.
In fact, the denouement of this trip is totally mundane: I flew home and slept, then picked myself up and went back to work again. But before I did that, there was one more story that happened, and now wants to be told.
Just hours before the last leg of my return journey, a friend and I discovered, to our surprise, that we were booked on the same flight. The coincidence was almost too much. What are the odds? Flights booked months apart. Him coming home from British Columbia, me from the other side of the world, and ours an odd friendship that couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Yet here we were, stars not so much aligning as colliding, in a cylinder of aluminum taking off from the coast.
“This has got to be cosmic,” I said, and we just laughed.
He bribed his seatmate to switch with me. (The going rate: one rum’n’coke.) For the next three hours we drank wine, and talked about silly things, and battled for the armrest wielding elbows as weapons. It was the most I’d laughed since my father got sick. It was the happiest I’d ever been coming home from a trip. It was peace at 36,000 feet, and for the first time in my life, I didn’t want the plane to land.
Everyone comes into your life for a reason, even if it’s only to share just one thing.
This is what I cannot stop believing, no matter how hard I remind myself that events are not pre-ordained. It’s just too uncanny, too often. Too obvious how, at every one of life’s junctures, you meet someone else at the same. You learn things from each other that only the other could teach. You walk together for a month, or a year, or a single night. Sometimes, you will walk together for your whole life.
Days before, I’d been wondering why that particular friendship had come to be.
But here is another thought that follows. If we accept the thin premise that everyone enters your life for a reason, then the opposite could also be true: maybe every leaving is meant to happen, too. Maybe you have to trust that. Maybe you have to know that what is for you will not go past you, and what goes past you has somewhere else it’s gotta be. For every first greeting, there will be a last, and this is the way of all things.
and so we go on
taking our strength from the people that bind
a body in motion through time, a mind falling back through space
with a heart like rocks on the shore, slicked and worn smooth by the waves.