“The skyscraper swayed from side to side like a metronome needle. Without moving from where I was, I could see different parts of Tokyo as I waited for the building to split in two and send us flying into space.”
“So what happened?”
“The building remained standing. They make them flexible and with very deep foundations. They’re well prepared.” The man was proud of his adopted country. “Well, actually, there was no transport for a few days. People had to walk miles to get to work. Some slept in the office because they didn’t want to waste working hours.”
“That’s admirable.”
“It certainly is! But you’ll never guess what the collateral damage was.”
I remained silent while he fixed me with a weary wolfish gaze before delivering the punchline.
“The whole city ran out of toilet paper in a couple of hours. You couldn’t get it in any shop in Tokyo.”
“Why?”
“Because everyone rushed out to stock up,” he said. “But not because they were shitting themselves. They remembered the previous earthquake when the shops ran out of supplies—”
But before he could say any more, our flight started boarding.
Waiting for Mount Fuji
After getting through passport control at Tokyo Narita Airport, I lost my way for a few minutes until someone showed me where to find the underground railway platform for my train to Kyoto. I’d just discovered that English is as little known in Japan as Japanese is in Spain.
I stepped into an aseptic office and validated my rail pass. Then I went off to board my bullet train which bypassed Tokyo and required one change along the way.
Once settled in my window seat, I took one of Titus’s books about wabi-sabi from my bag.
The aesthetic ofwabi-sabi is highly melancholic and autumnal. It is an aesthetic that works with organic materials that age with use and, somehow, have their own lives: wood, hemp, rusty metal, rough-woven cloth and ceramics. Surfaces do not need to be polished, trim and regular but, rather, they should be wrinkled, imperfect and unfinished.
Things aren’t permanent, but are condemned to disappear or be transformed, and this imbues them with melancholy charm.
It was difficult to think about that beautifully imperfect world as I sat in a railway carriage rushing along straight tracks. When the train emerged from the tunnel, however, I began to see that wabi-sabi is also present in modernity, although in a rather less poetic form.
The territory between Narita and the immense conurbation of the Greater Tokyo area, home to some thirty-five million people, was a succession of soulless, higgledy-piggledy neighborhoods in which most of the buildings were vertical cubicles with TV antennas, making them look like strange, man-made insects.
Beyond the endless conglomeration of buildings it was possible to glimpse the countryside and mountains in the background.
I’d read once that, in this country, the change from city to unpopulated rural land is dramatic. The Japanese are a gregarious people and like to live clustered together. Very few are attracted by the idea of living in an isolated house in the midst of nature.
Once the bullet train had left behind the ring roads of cities, another Japan began, with cultivated fields and expanses of green that made it hard to believe that this was a nation with a population of one hundred and thirty million.
After changing trains, I was watching out for the iconic Mount Fuji. My guidebook informed me that we would be passing quite close to it on the way to old Kyoto. This was an image that was etched on my mind thanks to a series of childhood comic books, and I was hoping to see it before nightfall blotted out the landscape.
The train was due to arrive at nine fifteen. Although I’d slept very little on the plane, I was too excited to nod off on the train. I divided my time between looking at the views outside, at Titus’s book, and at the other passengers in the carriage. Nearly all of them were tapping out messages on their smartphones or watching movies on their tablets. The men were impeccably dressed, and every single woman looked as if she’d just stepped out of the hairdresser’s. What struck me first about the Japanese people was their appearance of extreme neatness and quiet restraint.
At no point did I catch anyone looking at me, although I was the only gaijin in the carriage. Everyone seemed to be absorbed with his or her own affairs as if the world beyond didn’t exist.
The golden light of evening fell broodingly over increasingly scattered groups of buildings and houses, surrounded by crops and hills, which preannounced the appearance of the legendary mountain.
In a moment of weakness I wished that Gabriela was sitting beside me enjoying these evanescent views. Sharing the beauty of things that elude us and disappear. Like her.
My fellow bullet-train passengers suddenly looked up from their screens to gaze out of the window. They pointed their cameras and phones in the same direction, waiting to capture the peak we’d all been longing to see.
A tear rolled down my cheek as I contemplated the eternal presence of Mount Fuji, transmitting the serenity of an all-seeing, all-understanding giant.
Kyoto
At first sight, Kyoto was very different from what I’d expected. The 1,600 temples featured in theLonely Planetguidebook seemed a long way from the astonishing metal architecture of the railway station with its gleaming roof and lifts leading endlessly upward to high boutique-lined walkways.
