you only like me when I do my tricks for you
It was only when it rained today that I felt this city to have shrugged off, however briefly, its tiresome plague of strangers. The elements left the streets blessedly bereft of humans. Few things restore dignity to a place like rain does.
Battered by wind and water, the cherry blossom trees all over the city began to resemble sorry, shorn sheep rather than popcorn-covered branches, shedding petals by the thousands. They caked the pavements in pink and white, or were borne away hastily downstream in rivers and canals. Raindrops thudded and clattered on our plastic umbrellas as we walked through empty gardens, and pooled in half-unfurled scarlet buds like diamonds. There were but a few of us to bear witness to their charms.
I had arrived a few days prior to this city I once called home. It was sunny, it was spring, it was swarming with strangers. For the first two days I wended along familiar paths, leading a walking tour for my guests the way I have done for the last three years. I return to the same work every spring and autumn, so my visits are marked by repetition, a small-scale Groundhog Day of sorts. Parts of it had all the weariness of a pilgrimage with little of the reward. We visited a Tourist Destination and left shell-shocked at the sheer heaving masses of human bodies wielding cameras and phones, so at odds with the expectations of serenity that lures everyone here. I don’t live here anymore but feel a certain grief for this city and its changes. More so for many of its inhabitants, whose lives seem woven into this display of commodified, calcified culture.
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. – Joan Didion
The first few times I returned I delighted in seeing the city as I knew it. Then I drifted, temporally, further downstream from the source. Before I knew it an elegiac mood had begun to creep over subsequent visits back here. I only saw changes in flashes and jumps, in spring and autumn, and this year it was clear that the city I knew was becoming a city I knew less.
It has become a pilgrimage of sorts to catch up with these bars and cafes, making the rounds a routine in itself – as much out of love for them as for a kind of reassurance that I exist here in the flesh. Convincing myself of relevance, I suppose. To feel that déjà vu, to bridge the growing chasm between past and present, reconcile the multitude of cities in memory that resurface to my consciousness, these once-submerged spectres demanding attention. Their owners are as warm though the lines on their faces grow more pronounced every year. When I slipped back into old haunts this time I felt more keenly the weight of my past selves, saw them as ghosts lurking in the chairs of my favourite cafes. She laughed gently, the lady behind the counter of my jazz bar, and I heard at once all her laughs over dozens of visits.
Entangled in the streets, temples, river banks, and teahouses of this city are emotions that bleed unbidden into the present. Melancholy for past decisions. Compassion for a younger self, the one who chose to leave in order to finally write her own narrative, rather than let the tides carry her where they would. But sometimes, as in the last few days, delight – the joy of finding new corners of the city to make one’s own.
To live somewhere is wholly different from visiting. You are no longer privy to the seasons or rhythms of a place, nor the reassuring, quotidian details of one’s existence in a particular neighbourhood. Change in itself is not cause for grief. Is it not also the wistfulness of not having loved this city enough to stay and live alongside its shifts? "Sustained proximity is the best route to the soul of someone." So it is, too for a city.
But this is what happens when you move away from places you love and then revisit. When you pack up and move often enough, your heart shatters many times, unaware of the full extent of its brokenness. Leaving unwittingly inflicts a kind of trauma on yourself that reveals its face only later, an injury whose aches blossom a season or two later deep in your bones.
People sometimes ask me if I prefer my city now or my city then. That question misses the point entirely; I left when I had to, in order to become the person writing to you now. Still, I do know this much: you never find out just how much you love somewhere until you leave.
FLORY'S VENTURES (STUFF I'M UP TO)
A FEW THINGS I've been inundated with work – a real blessing for a freelancer, if one considers the implications of that life otherwise – and any free time I have is spent spacing out, walking, talking to friends, inundating them with endless puns. (If you didn't already know, I have the humour of a 10-year old boy.) Consequently, creative writing has taken a backseat in the last few weeks.
One change I'm hoping to make soon: migrating this newsletter to Substack, inspired by Emily Ding. She lives the way I can only dream of, chasing stories deep into parts less trodden. Watch this space!
EAT WITH ME It's spring! I have taken many visiting groups around Tokyo and Kyoto, and thus far have enjoyed their company immensely. I do eating and walking tours in Tokyo - so here's where you send your Japan-bound friends. (Or you can forward this newsletter to them.)
JAPAN TRAVEL CONSULTING This is exactly like it sounds. Need to ask me burning questions about interesting places, rail travel, or what to include in your holiday? Ask for me (or one of the other excellent folks) at Japan Travel Consulting.
Send to a loved one? I have a favour to ask of you: if you enjoyed this missive and think someone else would love to read my writing, please forward it on to a friend with a note, and they'll receive the next one!
In the age of social media and instant gratification, an honest recommendation means a lot when seeking readers. Thank you <3
A handwritten letter feels ever more special in the age of smartphones and instant messaging. What joy it is, to yank open the creaky-hinged mailbox and find snail mail written especially for one! The past few months of purple-inked envelopes brightens up what has otherwise been an endless stream of bills.
Why write a letter? There are some sentiments that can only breathe freely on paper, some emotions better declared in a letter, some trains of thought best meandered through in paragraphs rather than conversations. It forces one to clarify positions, and supplies a jolt of courage to make oneself vulnerable on paper. It reveals facets of a person that might otherwise be inaccessible only through talking. Most importantly, to paraphrase A's observation during one of our chats, letter-writing is a way of spending time with someone when they are not present in person.
How I write a letter is more or less how I write my newsletters. Sentences arrive while I am in the bath or on the train, and I scribble them into a journal. I might even draft part of the missive right there. If no pen and paper are at hand, in they go onto the phone. Then onwards to transcribing these fragments into a text editor on the laptop – composing, editing, deleting, rewriting. Finally I copy this out onto several sheets of paper. As far as I can remember, I have done this for every handwritten letter for the last decade.
This is not to say that I have regularly sent letters for all that time, though each one of them has had cause to be written. In the last few months I have written letters to two and postcards to a few more, and before that, hardly since I was 14. An informal poll among friends who write letters suggests that this fastidious approach is not especially common. But it does help to clarify my thoughts. And anyway, if I am to send a letter, it should be a pleasure for the recipient to read, and so it behooves one to compose carefully, always with them in mind.
Writing letters these last few months reminded me of a small box of letters in my family home. These were letters from schoolmates passed between us over a short timeframe. I last read them some years ago, but could barely stand to digest their contents, struck senseless by their honesty and sheer wretchedness. They are adolescent angst writ large – how lonely and unhappy and uncertain we were! The trouble with not keeping in touch with virtually anyone from that time in my life is that there is no one to verify the details of such undertakings. I hastily returned the letters to the drawer. Now those years are further behind me, so perhaps the time has come to face them again with the candour they deserve. But that's another story for another time.
WHAT I'VE BEEN READING
How to Write a Novel (Fold Magazine)
Touch (Granta)
Kinship and Trauma (Ploughshares)
Should Art be a Battleground for Social Justice? (The New York Times)
The Banality of Empathy (The New York Review of Books)
A FEW THINGS I'VE WRITTEN