V for Vanity

The book of my life is turning another page, the chapter is coming to a close. In little more than a day, I will be (hopefully) on a flight back to Seattle with a proposterous quantity of luggage, dragged across six or seven different train lines throughout the morning and afternoon tomorrow. Luckily, tomorrow (Friday) is not all lost, because due to the international dateline time continuum, I will be able to relive most of Friday in Washington.

It’s a little weird, what I’m feeling right now. Or maybe it is weird that I lack many of the strong emotions that I would normally associate with departure or arrival: anticipating the time to come or mourning what is left behind. Rather, today I had one of the most pleasant walks in life that I have had. Just enjoying being outside in the sun, splashing my face with cool, fresh river water, watching the hawks climb the updrafts, and straining to see Mount Fuji through the haze (and failing). I did walk through Fuji Castle on the way back, which is neither a Castle, nor can you Fuji from it, but go through it I did. I am going to miss this place. The tranquility of the mountains and forests, even when fenced in by countless spiderwebs, is breathtaking. I have truly been able to sit and relax and have a true vacation. The key is focusing on the time you have, and living in that moment. The future and the past are abstract notions. It is the present where we can actually take a step or make a choice, and it is in the present where we must keep a constant vigil against the horrors and phantoms of the past and the tyrannical immediacy of the future. Of course, the urgent things of the future will soon be back on my doorstep, come home. It’s much easier to keep them at bay when in solitude from nearly everything.

I have decided that this will be my final post. I started this upon arrival in Thailand, and I will end it before I return to Seattle. The purpose was to inform and amuse and perplex you, to be sure, but it was also to encourage my own writing and flesh out the experiences and struggles and joys and doubts of life away from what I know. I have done that, for better or worse, and so the primary impetus for my writing is fading away even as I write this. I will continue writing, no doubt, but in a much different medium. I would like to try my hand at writing either a fairy tale or a myth – the scope of which I have not attempted to this point. But I think it is time to step out on a limb, make some mistakes, write bad prose just to have written something, and enjoy the creative splendors of writing. So that is my next step. As for what I have learned throughout my journeys, they are many and therefore difficult to enumerate. I will leave you with one: generosity. Not that I have learned to be generous, but that I have seen other people’s generosity in lavish quantities, and it is striking. Absolutely beautiful. I hope that I may learn true generosity as well. I’ll leave you with a snippet from our (Tom’s and my) hitchhiking journeys.

Taking the train to Kyoto is expensive. Trains are always expensive in Japan, and getting to Kyoto or Tokyo takes $70 or so each way for the slow train, and about $110 for the fast train. Feeling a bit overwhelmed by my thinning pocketbook, I convinced Tom that we should try hitchhiking to Kyoto both for adventure and to save a little money. So, we spent $20 to get out to Kakegawa on the train, saw the Castle there, and found a place to hitchhike. I had the first 15-minute shift, and to no avail. We did get several varied expressions from passerby: driving school instructors raised eyebrows, families with children would smile or wave, older people would pretend to not see us and try not to make eye contact, cute women would smile at us and drive on, Yakuza didn’t have much expression as they had sunglasses on, and younger guys would be genuinely amused and possibly give us a wordless “rock on”. Now it was Tom’s turn. After taking pictures for both of us, I sat down to wait a bit, and some guy in a van slammed to a halt. Tom’s crazy hitchhiking thumb had done it! The guy happened to be visiting his girlfriend in Kakegawa, and lived in Nagoya, about halfway to Kyoto. So we got in quite happily and we were off.

The traffic was horrid, however, as it was Silver Week (a 5 day weekend, and one of the best for good travel weather). A 2 hour car ride turned into 4 and a half. But our guide was rather chipper, and also had a great taste in music (neither Tom nor I disliked any of the stuff he played). There was one song (Human, The Killers) which had an amusing lyric we both enjoyed, “Are we human or are we dancers?” He drove us to a rest area, which on Japanese expressways are major things. There was a grocery store, several food stands, other various businesses, and a Starbucks. He insisted that he buy us coffee. It was absurd. And excellent. Afterwards he dropped us off at the Nagoya train station, and said farewell.

It was already dark, due to the excessive traffic, and we decided against trying to hitchhike in the dark, so we grabbed a capsule hotel and wandered around the city a bit. In the morning, we looked for a place close to the expressway, and to the local train there (it was a bit out there, but the local train was really cheap). After a number of shifts trying unsuccessfully to hitchhike in the sun, we sat down at the Italian restaurant next door for lunch. We were already a bit burned. So, afterwards, and after some advice from people about making our signs bigger, set about trying again. After another thirty minutes or more (under the shade of a bamboo), we gave up and decided that we would train for Kyoto.

On the way back, a guy in a car parked by the road said something to me that had “Kyoto” in it, so I motioned Tom to talk to him. Apparently, he had been on his way to the gym when he saw us two hours before, and saw us again after the gym, during our walk back. He thought we must need some help, so he offered to drive us to Kyoto. I didn’t exactly (or at all, except what was translated) understand the conversation. I still didn’t understand why he was going to Kyoto, as he lives in Nagoya. When it came out that he was going just because that was what we needed, we were shocked. Tom mouthed “Wow!” to me and I responded in unison. That’s a five-hour drive round trip. Amazing! Amazing that he even saw us twice. Call it fate, kismet, luck, providence, or grace (my favorite), it was certainly gracious of him. Incredibly generous. If I knew that was going to be the result, I would have thought twice about hitching – that’s quite a major inconvenience we’ve caused him. But he seemed happy to do it. Wow.

He dropped us off at Kyoto station and we said our goodbyes. We did have other little adventures there (like the one about there being no hotel vacancies upon our arrival), but this is the one that will stick with me.

The weekend was thoroughly enjoyable, though the heat really took it out of us. By Tuesday, we were exhausted. And for the record, we took the train back.

It seems that the longer I take between successive posts, the more daunting the task of actually writing something. I feel that I must atone for the period of absence. But the creative personality in me ebbs and flows, and last week, and the week before, were veritable droughts in this writer’s ink. But they have been restful. There is something eerily peaceful about life in the mountains of Japan, especially when contrasted with The city (i.e. Tokyo). I am closing in on a good rhythm of life here – one of the first true vacations I have had. With Tom at work during the weekdays, I spend my time sleeping, resting, thinking, drinking probably a half gallon of tea every day, reading, writing, and going on adventures through the forested hills.

While writing is coming to life once again, and I have been able to pick up a number of correspondences and flush out my inbox, the greatest enjoyment is most definitely the random adventures. I am staying in a town of a thousand people, roughly, with Tom being the only other gaijin (foreigner) there. Another English-teaching gaijin (Jennifer) lives a village over, but other than, everyone in these parts is quite fully Japanese. A few speak more than a few words of English, but they are often quite shy about engaging in conversation, and I am content in solitude. For once. Usually it frightens me to some extent – I get most of my energy from being around people, and being alone too much can be draining. This time, though, I was really in need of a respite from the busy immediacies of life.

There are some fairly new highways up here that link these villages in the mountains with nearby (1 hour, 40 km) cities Hamamatsu and Shizuoka. (I am in Senzu, which can be found easily with google maps) There are plentiful older roads, which being much narrower and longer, have suffered disrepair due to their lack of use. Some of them had landslides over them (they occur with much regularity, and much of the hillsides have been reinforced with stone or concrete to lessen the risk), others were covered in moss and grasses. One that I happened across had been the victim of quite a large sinkhole, which no one happened to repair. In addition to these roads, there are also gravel forest-service roads (many of which you’re not supposed to drive on), one of which Tom took for a scenic route home. Not meant for little Monica (the name of the car he drives – model is called Minica), I think. There was the constant thuds from large rocks banging against the muffler, and even though it was not yet dark, visibility seemed less than actually driving at night. Fun, though. And we didn’t end up in a ravine, or down a sheer cliff, most thankfully.

But walking, I think, is my preferred route. It gives me time to think and reflect, take pictures, pray, or recite random bits of poetry, just composed. I came up with a couple that aren’t horrible. Not un-horrible enough to post here, of course, but they’re getting there. The tranquility of the cedar forests, laced with thickets of giant bamboo, is unlike anywhere I have been, with the exception of the Olympic Rain Forest (my family has an old house in Quinault). You could walk for days without seeing a soul. The river that flows by Tom’s place is also a wonder. Perhaps an ordinary river to some, for one who has spent too much time in the city (even one so green as Seattle), it is sheer beauty. I followed it for a ways today, found some nice skipping stones, almost fell in whilst hopping across dry rocks, and marveled at just how blue it was. I will miss Japan.

Well, except for the whole sitting on the floor bit. I don’t understand how they can do that. “My joints are freezing up!” Definitely a little bit of Japanese culture that I was not ready for. The cities are an oddity; compared with the subtle tea plantations and empty roads, the over-populated, dreary buildings and constantly pulsating advertisements were a bit much. It is true that I enjoyed sumo, very much so. We saw the first day of a tournament in Tokyo, which started with the most novice initiates and ended with the professional sumos, the last match being the face off of the grand champions of East and West. After the ceremonial beginnings and the throwing of salt (only the professionals could do this – and only they could wear the special samurai topknot), the match only lasts a few seconds (longer matches were rare, but exciting as well). Even with our long lunch break, saw probably 150 matches that day (there were about 220 total), though the best were the last 3 hours. I don’t think I would have appreciated it as much if we hadn’t seen the novices, but the number of various moves and winning techniques, as well as dramatic turnarounds were quite impressive. My favorite of the day was when Asashoryu (the 68th yokozuna) picked up his much larger competitor and through him quite a ways into the aisle, killing a camera (but luckily causing no major damage to the photographer, except maybe a headache the next day). If you go to Japan, see a sumo tournament. Then flee the city.

Back to the present, Tom has arrived back from work, and I think he might show me where a post office is, so I’m off. I think I’ll be back again before I leave Japan. Unless I get eaten by some crazy Japanese bears.