Now that was fast. I’m on the LIRR [Long Island Railroad], going out to visit a friend and I realized that the last entry I made I was in Nagoya, nattering on about food and movies and bicycles and not much else. In some respects I was hoping to leave some more substantial account of the expatriate experience but in the end it was as it always is…a series of fragments, pictures and blog entries, some old papers et cetera that I can hold out and say “here, look…Japan. My life.” The rest is fated to remain inside my head, invisible to everyone around me, gradually fading to be rewritten with new memories as life goes on. I was happy to have moved to Japan again, to once more have suffered in the muggy heat of the summer there. The cicadas were so loud…One time in a park where I rested one morning every branch must have been home to at least five dozen of the fat bugs because the sound was so loud to have been almost a physical sensation. The last week I was there, just before relinquishing my bicycle to my next door neighbor, I took a bike ride around my neighborhood by the drainage ditch in the evening. Bats were flying all around, looping overhead and the lights were going on in the little mom and pop okonomiyaki joints down the street. I rode a lot that summer, to Sakae, to Yagoto. Dispite the pest problem I liked the apartment building, with its metal doors and cement balconies and the most fantastic veiw I have ever had over my railing. Life was simple and interesting and free.
My sister came out to visit. That was the most amazing thing, seeing her in the airport, her hair grown long. I have gotten so used to Japan it no longer seems foreign place to me, but it is a place, as it were, apart. Old connections, old problems are, for the most part, traded in for a new set. However, sometimes the two world brush against each other, and you are reminded about how small the world really has become. It is a strange and wonderful thing to see a your sister, a personage so familiar to you that their sudden appearance in a setting that you though of as being severed from your “other” life makes the whole thing seem like a dream you are having. We had a fun two weeks. My friends at the movie club liked her…the two of us dressed in Yukata and went out for kaitenzushi (sushi train, according to the Australians.) We went to Kyoto and met up with her friend from school. She helped me clean the apartment and put up with me freaking out thinking I had sealed our night bus tickets inside the cardboard box. We ate eel-bowls and went to the Noda’s and did many, many adventures. I love my sister.
Not only that but dad had a business trip in Yokohama and we got to see him too! It was crazy! The three of us all met at Hachiko statue in Shibuya and had dinner with my Japanese family, and then we went back to the hotel the next day. It was one of the big ones in the Yokohama Skyline, right across the street from the big ferris wheel that the show in Hachikuro and other movies. We rode it and I sat with my sister and dad, looking out over miles and miles and thinking…I am happy.
