|
|
My Trip to Japan
Japan to me was like an exclusive club with its members living their own lives, their own language, dance and song. A group of islands in the middle of the ocean. So far from the mainland, from the masses. A sophisticated society, where people are able to experiment with life and all it has to offer. They touch and tease it like a cat with a ball of fur. Girls in school uniform on adult magazine covers, multi-coloured handphones, painted manhole covers - they are all part of this fondness to take things to the limits.
It was like getting lost in an empty parking lot. Was this a genuine feeling felt by any visitor to this country or just an inferiority complex that I had carried along with my baggage? Was there perhaps something missing inside me that needed to be healed? Perhaps it needed the love of someone whom I had love for to change the ugliness inside me into something beautiful.
The journey from Tokyo begins easily enough on the Shinkansen, one of the fastest trains in the world. It moves along a straight track that cuts through hills and valleys standing in its way. Inside is clean, quiet, sterile.
I am still recovering from a flu and my cough is amplified in the pin drop silence confines of the train much to the dismay of the elderly lady seated next to me.
From my window seat, I capture the beauty of the world whizzing past me. The high speed of the train does not afford a second look while the faint murmur of the screeching of wheels on the tracks begins to grind at my heart.
We lie and sometimes even to ourselves to make our mundane lives more interesting. However there comes comes a time when the mind stops lying to you. When the pieces of the jigsaw of truth assemble so perfectly that tricks can't be played any longer. I swallow my sadness which pierces my insides like a million shards of glass. I know that the end of the fantasy is near and there is nothing I can do to stop it from coming.
The train
arrives in Shizuoka, a pretty town with pleasant weather and
narrow but navigable streets and a view of the mountains from the
main road. I ask myself, why should anyone look beyond its
borders?
It is still early inside the off-white interior of the station which greets me like an unwanted child. Here, waiting for two long hours, was surely the loneliest moments in my life. Alone for many reasons. I didn't know anybody. I couldn't understand their language. No one would care if I wasn't there. No one would miss me if my body was not present. I imagined for a moment not even Emi.
Realization had stepped in. The realization that Emi was comfortable in her own zone, her wonderful town and its wonderful people. All my hopes of being together with this lovely woman vanished as I walked on the shiny white surface of the station.
She said she finished work at 7.30 and would meet me at 8. It was clear I wasn't top priority, even though I was a stranger to this town, not knowing anybody, not being able to speak to anybody.
Should I blame myself for what has happened? Was I merely a source of attention that fed a curious spirit leading me on to believe in my own lie? Couldn't she have put a stop to it? Or was she forced into keeping up the correspondence? Why then did she still keep in touch with me? I refused to believe that there was nothing in me that was worth falling in love with. That perhaps I had a uniqueness that was rare enough to be longed for.
She arrives late in all her splendour. We shake hands in a friendly fashion, as if we were business associates all over again. The death of the fantasy and a wake up call to reality.
Over dinner she tells me that it has been a one way street from the start. That it was all my making and I had myself to blame if I was disappointed. I did feed the fantasy, but surely one is allowed to dream? How else can the unattainable become attainable? I had told myself all along that if I tried hard enough, things would work out. That the feelings I had for her would be reciprocated. At times it may have bordered on such.
What's the point of being angry at this point? It's too late for apologies or reasoning. All the messages that I had sent and received started eating my insides. It is over just as simply as it had begun. She directs me to a capsule hotel with a coffin-like compartment for a bed signaling a surrealistic death for a surrealistic dream. Our last few minutes together ticks quickly.
We part as friends but it is one where both of us know we will never be in contact again unless by a miracle. I do not blame myself for what I did. I was lonely and lonely men do strange things. We met as strangers and we depart as strangers.
She and her bicycle dissapear down the yellow-lit streets of Shizuoka.
