How Long the Lonely Road

I’m working on leaving the living. —Modest Mouse Jean told me once that the Japanese are obsessed with the ephemeral—“Can I say that?” “Yeah it’s the same in English.”—that what is fleeting and soon to die is all the more apparent and beautiful for the immanence of mortal fate. The cherry blossoms bloom but once a year in Japan, and then for only two weeks before falling gloriously, dying violently at the height of grandeur and without the long, slow rot that follows the Springtime of life. The weather bureau announces the dates so all can plan a suitable hanami , or “flower viewing”—generally a picnic or excursion to some famous place where the sakura trees line the way with pink and black against the blue. But Fall had arrived when I had, with her full colors and her wintry breath. In that time of year, the Japanese will travel hundreds of miles to see a sight by autumn’s red-gold light, and how the leaves change over the temples and shrines, and how they carpet the ground. Such ...

Things never work out like you think they will, but that's what makes life interesting. —Haruki Murakami I hardly slept aboard the five hour ferry to Takamatsu. The sleeping room on-board was divided into a few sectors of tatami mats on which one might lie, but the lights were bright and there were children chattering in the corner, and I was invigorated by the sense of leaving on an expedition. Shikoku is an island sacred to Japanese tradition. Kansai and Kyūshū girdle the northern side, creating the mild Inland Sea between, and the south is exposed to the Pacific. Eighty-eight temples ring the wooded coast, and most Japanese wish to see them all one time in their life. The center of the island is mountainous and seamed with valleys cut out by the country’s cleanest rivers. I was awake when the boat arrived in port, though the sun had not yet risen; and I shouldered my bag, lighter then because of all I had left at Jean’s garret in Osaka, but stuffed full of his arctic weathe...

Shōbu wa mizumono da. Gain or loss is a matter of chance. —Japanese aphorism From his apartment in Saint-Denis , that rampant commune in northern Paris, to whence Jean Fourquet returned without his motorbike after we traveled together in Syria and Egypt one year ago, the errant Frenchman had crossed Europe and Russia, and he presently occupied a garret in a hundred-year-old house in a neighborhood of restaurants, bars, and quiet domiciles near the Taisho Stadium of Osaka. We met with great cheer at the Taisho station, even though I was a half hour late, and bought sushi, eggs, oden , and beer from a supermarket that was lit up like a pachinko parlor, to take back to Jean’s house. It was a wonderful, creaking building of narrow corridors, steep stairs, and simple rooms a few tatami in size. The old landlady was away in Okinawa, and he shared it in her absence with a busy and invisible young man and a young hippie couple who spent most nights cooking, reading, drawing, strumming, and ta...