Unbroken life

Everything feels the same but it’s different. Our house has had holes in the floor. Big chunks gouged out of it; rubble went in the black-top wheelie bin outside making it heavy to roll on to the street for collection. And yet, the floor is now smooth. Sanded down and varnished a rosewood colour, so that it is whole. Simply beautiful. No scarring. You wouldn’t have known we’d been through months of walking around damp wood, being careful not to tread on splinters because a mouse had chewed through a pipe (probably to sharpen its teeth) causing water damage to the woodwork beneath our feet. Having knowledge of something bad happening somewhere invisible scares me.

*

I have been on holiday to Japan. The itinerary was already planned, and we had bought our JR Passes in advance, so that we could shinkansen-hop all over the long island. Of course, I loved it, but it’s as if I’m still there – or never went there in the first place – I dreamt it all up. A few days before my flight I caught covid. They were the worst symptoms I’d ever had from the virus; it was my fourth time having it, even though I’ve been vaxxed three times already. I quarantined myself in my fiancée’s family flat in London which was empty. I ate crisps, cheese toasties and drank fluids, drifting in and out of sleep for three solid days. 

While I slept, I became covered in sweat, unbeknownst to me, so that when I awoke, I’d be lying in a puddle the shape of my own body. I would run one foot over the other and the sole would return soaked in cold water produced by me. I knew I was not well, but I had to be on that flight to Japan; there was the important death anniversary of my mother’s, which I couldn’t miss. I would wake up from my feverish sleeps in that foreign bed and doze like an inanimate thing. A slab of something half-alive, like one of the sarsen stones at Stonehenge. An unnatural blue hue was percolating through the blinds, and I could hear noises from the street, distant sirens, the shunt of trains, the soundscape of a city, and I believed for a moment before I fell back to sleep that I was in Tokyo. 

Soon enough I was. How I’d got there was a blur. I exited the airport and headed directly to a friend’s empty apartment in Tokyo, riding aboard a doll’s house aesthetic monorail with dusty pink carriage compartments. I sweated and slept in her bed too. The hue of the morning light was paler but still blue. The noise of the city dropped to a pregnant hum at nightfall, as if God the DJ had lowered the levels on the mixing board. Before I holed-up in her empty home, I had stocked up on crisps, onigiri and strawberry milk from the Seven-Eleven down the street. Days passed. I tested negative. Finally, I arrived in Japan.

It's like a fiction that I’ve visited some of these places because at the time I was sleepwalking. I would take naps at odd hours during the day. Covid made my mind foggy and I was always tired. I remember when I was in New York I was taken to a photo aura fortune teller in China Town. She took one look at my photo and said I was FOGGY: No direction, don’t know what you want, unsure of everything. I nodded like a child who'd had something explained to them they still couldn't comprehend. That was the last time I felt this foggy.

Where did we go? Kamakura with the large-scale statue of the Buddha Daibutsu, gazing serenely across the tops of tourists and buildings towards the glistening ocean. The weather turned lovely and summery, it was like July in England, but it was only April in Japan and the winds could pick and become blustery. We went to Izu Peninsula over winding roads through the verdant foothills of Mount Fuji. I peered into a bubbling pool of water, crystal clear, the colour of acrylic turquoise. Tiny fish darted to and fro across its shimmering mirror-like surface.

I remember fragments – not fully formed memories – but maybe that’s the way it is with holidays. I ate so much delicious food, there was never a moment I felt hunger. We stayed in Yamazaki and climbed a mountain where a famous battle had taken placed between the fighting samurai of feudal Japan. Up this mountain I made my first and only sighting of the uguisu (Japanese bush warbler) whose song had been following us up and down the country.

There was a daytrip to Kyoto where we met up with friends who were staying in the country for a sabbatical. My mother’s husband joined us here after having completed a walk over an ancient passageway through the mountains connecting the old capital Kyoto to Tokyo. We toasted his achievement with a clink of glasses, ‘Kampai!’ Then feasted in a brightly lit fast-food gyoza and ramen bar and drank our fill of tankards of ice-cold beer. The gyoza were pan-fried and crispy, the ramen broth salty and delicious. 

I was enjoying everything but also flagging from the virus. I held on tightly to every moment of happiness, but they would invariably melt away in my fog. Just before I fell asleep in a futon, a creeping worry would lodge itself that I’d wake up the next day in London.

*

The most unbelievable part of our trip was visiting the art island, Naoshima, set in the dazzling blue Seto Seas. To travel there we crossed a gigantic red railway bridge and caught a ferry. What can I say? My experience of the Benesse Art Site was wholly uplifting. I hadn’t expected the contemporary art to be so good.

We hired electric bicycles to explore the island, going up and down steep slopes cutting through luscious scenery. We got tickets to the Art House Project, a collection of old disused Japanese houses which had been renovated by architects in collaboration with site-specific artists, all set within a living village community. I walked into an unassuming house marked on the guide map, and inside it was as elegant as Ryoanji Temple with its famed zen garden. Huge cascading waterfall ink paintings were hung from the ceiling in a dimly lit room with lacquered floorboards, which had been polished to a shine to make it look like the surface of still water. 

We had a timed entry ticket to a place called Minamidera (the old site of a shrine) which was an artwork by the light artist James Turrell. Here I had my “Rothko Moment”. We entered a room that was pitch black. You slide your hands against the wall to feel your way to a seat, as the gentle voice of a museum guide truly guides you in. Then as a group we sat down and waited in silence. Minutes pass. There is absolutely no light. You can wave your hand in front of your face and not see where it is. The museum guide had told us all outside to turn off our phones properly (actually switched off, which I’m sure is a profound experience in itself, for some). 

We wait in silence for something to happen. After five minutes which feels like an eternity a hint of a white box appears in front of us. It is a soft white glow, like the ghost of a blank canvas floating in the near distance. The image grows stronger until we can definitely see a square of white at the end of the room. The guide re-enters the space and tells us in his sotto voice that this light has been here all along. Nothing has changed but our vision. Our perception of the space has changed but not the space itself. 

He tells us we can stand up and walk around the room now, as our eyes have adjusted, we shouldn’t fall over. We gather ourselves and wander about and walk towards the light. When I get there, I put my hand out to touch its surface but there’s nothing there. It’s pure air and I cry. The delight moves me to tears. I feel so stupid and worldly at the same time. This conceptual art has made me realise that if I just sit still and be quiet for once the world will reveal itself to me. I shall be awed. I feel shame and joy course through me, as I wipe away tears before anyone notices, even though they won’t because I’m crying inside a dark box.

*

I come back to myself in my Woolwich sitting room. Things have changed, so I must have gone away. The seasons have moved on and it’s May. The unknown plants on the windowsill have sprouted magenta pink flowers. The holes in my floor are fixed. I’ve recovered from covid, even though I’m still weakened by it. I have memories of a conceptual art island floating in the misty seas of Japan. I’ll believe that I’ve come back from a honeymoon to an unbroken life. 

Yokohama Bay (quarantine hotel)

At APA Hotel & Resort Yokohama Bay Tower, not slept in the bed yet. A totally tiny room with a beautiful view of the glittering lights of Yokohama. 

My destination for the next six days of quarantine, before, hopefully (pray for me because if someone on my flight tests positive for covid then we all get locked up for the entire fourteen-day quarantine duration) I get to move to Obaachan’s house to finish off my time there. At least then I’ll be able to spend New Year’s with the family. 

Obaachan welled up with tired tears of joy when I called her from my hotel room; her shoulders dropped with a sense of relief. She didn’t think I’d be let in and fair enough, I’ve come from omicron infested London. 

I tested three hours before boarding with a Fit2Fly PCR to get the certificate – Japanese authorities love certificates. 

I was standing in line with other Brits who wanted to go abroad, one wrinkly man in a polo shirt and a blue-eyed stare kept banging on about how he had paid £119 for the privilege.

‘They told me come back here for 12:45 – it’s 12:40 now – and when it’s 12:45, on the dot,’ he pulled down his mask every time he addressed us for emphasis ‘I’m marching back in there. It’s bloody chaos, Terminal 2 is.’

A kid whose flight was boarding soon, politely asked us if he could jump the queue and this old man said, ‘Where you off to son?’

‘Zimbabwe,’ replied the clipped accent. 

‘Bloody hell.’

I received my negative test result (yes!) as check-in opened, where I also handed over various other documents. Tellingly, everyone in the JAL queue whipped out plastic sheets containing their physical pieces of paper to get into the country. One of which is a Written Pledge, which waives your rights to privacy if you bring covid into the country. For Japanese nationals (that’s me) their family members can be named and shamed i.e. publicised to the media, if their relative unknowingly brings in the virus in. For a foreign national your visa status can be revoked, also you could be put into detention. So much for herd immunity.

Nevertheless, I was allowed on the flight. The cabin attendants asked us all politely to keep our masks on and refrain from talking. I thought, damn right. Mask up and shut up. Stop the virus. I ate my meal and covered my head with a blanket and slept most of the way. Super tired from the stress of it all. The past weeks had been filled with waiting for a single line to appear on LFTs, cancelling plans, booking scarce PCRs, feeling groggy and foggy from the booster and watching friends drop like flies. 

We arrived in Japan; the red sun was setting. Shadows were stark and long. Uniformed people drove boxy vehicles around the plane for inspection. I couldn’t believe while looking out through my small porthole window that I could see Mt. Fuji in the distance, emblematic, behind the Tokyo skyline. I had landed!

I got tested at Haneda airport again. Currently Japan’s borders are closed to foreign nationals, so everyone there had to be on a Japanese passport or an exceptional visa. There were lines and lines of us being corralled from one part of the airport to another. I downloaded apps via QR code, printed and signed documents. Ticked checkboxes, removed my mask for facial recognition, scanned my passport. Filled out a medical assessment questionnaire. Got given a green tag to attach around my wrist, so I didn’t stray from the flock. Spat into a vial for the covid test. Staff checked my phone had the government apps installed and explained how to use them. 

I stood and queued and sat in front of bureaucrats behind plastic safety screens, who scribbled on my paperwork and directed me to go stand somewhere else. I waited about six hours from disembarkation to receiving my negative test results, phew. Those of us who had travelled on the same aeroplane got sat on socially distanced seats to wait for a bus to take us to our designated government-paid hotel. Destination unknown until we got there. A woman with two children sat behind me said to the bus inspector, ‘Why can’t you tell us where we’re going? I’m honestly scared.’ The tubby man apologised profusely and said he didn’t know why, but rules were rules.

I switched on my Google live location and sent it to my aunt Mariko, so she could track where I was going. Luckily, it was only a half hour drive from the airport and we pulled into Yokohama, a scenic coastal city. We were let off the bus in small cohorts. We sanitized our hands, got more QR codes and a thermometer to verify our daily temperature. I was given a non-smoking room and handed a very much desired bag of food and sent up in a lift to my room. 

I have a king-sized bed that’s more than half the room’s width and a TV that’s almost as large. I have a small writing desk and an excess of mirrors. Even though the TV and bed dominate, when I open the curtains what do I see? A most elegant view of Yokohama Bay, with a lit up cruise ship docked in its placid waters. Not bad at all to hunker down in over Christmas. 

Keiko

You would know by her languid airs that she had all the time and money in the world, well. Not so much of either, anymore.

Grown up in Tokyo, daughter to a wealthy merchant father and an heiress mother, Keiko had never know hunger, nor desire, nor anything that moved her to want. Living a perfect sheltered existence through childhood, attending an exclusive playschool at the age of six and graduating from a ladies’ university at nineteen, the world awaited her with cradling arms. Beckoning her so close to their hearts to become human.

Her looks couldn't be bought, only cultivated like a true pearl, through the harsh revolving grit and grind of a careful, possessive shell.

In her formative years she felt no stress, hands flocked around her to take care of that. Keiko knew how to dress with understated glamour, not an eyelash out of place, lips the shade of roses that flowered and whithered with each season.

Men would tap her on the shoulder as she swanked down Ginza Bouleavrd, as she kept friends in lockets who’d grab any hot-blooded male’s attention: Miss Arashi being one, a JAL air stewardess being another. The 1960’s. Her hair, her make-up, her wider than usual almond eyes that sloped off in to a distinguished smile.

‘Are you free to have tea with me?’

‘May I take you for a dance?’

‘Would you and your friend escort us to a private member’s club?’

She never had to cook a meal for herself, never. Always a new man vying for her attentions. Youth, money, beauty, song, gourmet, dance, evokes the memories of an old lady.

Seventy-six is old by any standard, and yet, as if it were yesterday the melody of the American band and the sequined nightgown of the maitre’d float by, leading you coaxingly, deferentially away to a table.

Handsome face, aquiline bridge, light green eyes, a pilot from Egypt with the manners of a prince. ‘I thought, I would never be so happy again.’

Married at twenty-one to a man, a nuclear scientist of all things, who had won her heart with sweet devil talk. Her simple softness seduced by his slick tongue, it was all a complicated dance and she felt lied to. He died at forty-six leaving her a home that only accrued escalating taxes with age.

But by the sea, everything so green and turquoise blue, it never got cold so the fruit always grew so plump. The spiders were hideous and hairy beasts, butterflies with wingspans she’d never believe. Fruit flies the size of horse flies.

The very tanned surfers, with sculpted bodies would ride the waves each morning, forgetting the storms and Keiko liked to imagine mustering that kind of resolve one day. To approach relentless crashing with forethought and courage, mixed with a thrill of the fun.

Those two years of freedom, working as an elevator girl at the Department Store had finished her. She had been too attractive to not be taken off the shelf, wrapped in one of those sharp-cornered bags strangled in frilly ribbon.

She had never bought a cigarette in her life, yet had always been offered foreign silk cuts out of silk pockets, handkerchief, necktie, studs.

Wondering whether the fish danced with the surge of the wave or got swallowed whole in to a vortex –

Keiko alone liked to watch the setting sun, rise, then set again.

It was called the Land of the Rising Sun, perhaps this was the reason why, purely for her to amount to being at this windowsill.

That was her routine, never lonely looking out to shore.

She would never be sure of herself again in her life.

She fills her face with senses

I have a few heroes in my life and whilst in Japan I met one of them. Her name is Saeko and she doesn’t seem real. We crossed paths when I was 18 or 19, about to set off for university and whilst working as a kitchen porter at a Japanese restaurant in Soho. It was great. I washed dishes, I cut sushi rolls, I sliced raw meat and washed and drained the rice, multiple times. She was a waitress, so she was customer-facing and looked presentable and pretty all the time whilst I looked sweaty and smelled of onions and had my hair scrunched up in a bun under a grubby white cap. We had loads of laughs over the internal restaurant phone as she sent up orders in a funny voice pretending to be a monster or like a mouse and stuff. After work we’d go out and have fun sometimes too. She danced professionally in the arts clubs, there was one in Notting Hill with a strange sloping floor and eerie ultraviolet mood lighting, like a cave for neon night creatures. She had a room in Paddington in a shared flat with too many cables running across the ceilings, and in her own room she had a wardrobe that doubled-up as a mirror the size of a dance studio’s to practice her movements in. Against the opposite wall was her bed and although the whole room was coloured an off-yellow, possibly darkened by the cigarette smoke, there was one pale blue circle painted above her bed. Just off-centre. The blue little moon floated there since she had arrived. Her theory was that someone had painted the whole room yellow whilst leaving a clock permanently stuck to the wall. And so, when a new tenant arrived they had removed the clock and behind it was blue, the original colour of the room. I thought the circle could likely have been painted on top of the yellow for some unknown reason, but I preferred her theory in the end. Because I imagined her staring at the pale blue moon for days - between dancing and the restaurant - and coming to the fixed conclusion that a small wall clock had hung there first and found peace in it. I really didn’t mind, it was a nice feature.

The day was so bright it hurt and I waited outside Harajuku station for Saeko to arrive, she had come all the way from Shizuoka to see me. When she was there standing in front of me it was like no time had passed since - forever - and the moods were all the same, like they always have been, goofy and full of surprises. Lots of corners to turn and things to stare at. We laughed and joked and reflected and found a gluten-free cafe (neither of us have an intolerance it was simply the first thing we found down a busy narrow street filled with too much) and sat down. 

‘How is your singing going?’ She was now part of a few bands in Shizuoka ever since she won her local karaoke contest in her village in the mountains. 

‘I have bookings as a sessions singer for some older people’s ballroom dancing’ she looked wide-eyed and around with a smile forming across her lips, ‘but they are really old’. 

*

I always forget that the Japanese sky looks so different and not only that it feels different. Like flat, like a mass of something rolled-out with a sheen, and it’s clear but a vapour and it goes on for much longer than you would expect it to. Perspectives don’t exist in the distance everything looks flat and right there. Here’s a funny thing that I forgot I wrote when straight off the plane: 

The sky and the sea

Fool me

It’s bigger than any giant

You’ll see

And you know in Japanese the word for ‘sky’ is the same as for ‘air’ and ‘empty’ and ‘open’. It’s that sort of sky that I’m talking about that isn’t just a thing but the lack of a thing. It spreads out to nothingness. We walked and talked and got accosted by a vlogger who made us do a pose and say happy new year to her ipad and arrived at Meiji Jingu - the shrine in the middle of Tokyo - slap bang next to Harajuku filled with fake nails and vloggers. But here it’s another world: serene. At the start of the new year people do Hatsumode, which is the first few visits to a shrine to pay your respects and maybe eat some market food and pull a few fortunes. I love Meiji Jingu because of the trees, there are so many trees there that it feels cool in the summer and warm in the winter and the woodland shot up from seedlings in only 200 years, which I think is impressive in tree terms. I got out two 500 yen coins and bought us a ticket in to the private gardens inside the shrine’s grounds, where we met an old man and a woman who had staked out a kingfisher with their telescope and let us have a look through too. He was cobalt blue with a sash of ginger red round his chest. He flew not too soon after we’d seen him, so I guess we had been lucky. Later on we turned a corner in the woods and there was a flurry of tiny wings, perching and then flapping, perching and then swooping. A small pair of children, brother and sister, had their hands raised and out flat above their heads and the little birds were flocking to their palms to eat some crumbs, then to disappear. They were so excited, we were so excited. A groundskeeper-cum-priest who was passing through said it had become the highway of the birds and told us, ‘If you young ladies place you hands out flat they will surely perch because they think you have food for them’. Saeko went first and soon one hopped on and stopped, had a look and flew off. I did the same and a tiny thing perched on my hand, gently clasping my ring finger as if a twig with her dark delicate feet, she searched and failed to peck and left. It was a joy and the rest of the day continued as it had been set out for us. We laughed and joked and reflected.