Ascending out of Kyoto’s Higashiyama Station just hours from 2025, I noticed a single, shriveled maple leaf on the stairs. Its hue was closer to crimson than it was to cinnamon; that it was there at all seemed as desperate as it is defiant. If autumn doesn’t end, the year can’t either.
Conditions above ground, to be sure, did not seem conducive to the new beginning I’d envisioned for myself. While not heavy, the gentle pitter-patter of drizzle lowered the temperature enough that I wondered whether I would be able to stay outdoors until midnight, let alone to stay awake.
Of course, had I know about the mob scene that would await me to the at Choin-in, where the annual joya-no-kane bell-ringing would begin at 10:40 PM, I wouldn’t have wasted time trying to get glamour shots under the willow fronds (which, against all odds for given the date on the calendar, were still mostly intact).
The line extended all the way from Kuromon gate down to the larger Sanmon gate (which, during normal business hours, was the temple’s main entrance), before turning the corner and snaking all the way up the hill to the Daishoro where the bell resides.
There must’ve been at least 2,000 people (at least half of whom were masked, just hours from 2025, though that’a a topic for another post).
The good news? The line move slowly, but reliably, from the moment I joined it at 8:30 until it reached the bottom of Kuruman’s steps about an hour later. The bad news? It completely stopped then, which confused me: The sign in front of me said the following:
ENTRANCE BEGINS 8:40 PM
RINGING BEGINS 10:40 PM
CLOSED 11:00 PM
I am a patient person, of course; being outside (and standing up, no less) ensured that I wouldn’t fall asleep. On the other hand, while the numerical air temperature was far from intolerable, standing mostly still for over an hour (two by the time the bell ringing began) left me chilled to the bone.
When I finally reached the edge of the Daishoro almost two hours later, I was so delirious that I would’ve been pleased with almost any scene to photograph. I’m not sure what inside me allowed my body to stay where it was, in spite of my mind having wanted nothing more than to leave, but I’m thankful it exists.
If this ends up being a metaphor for 2025, I though to myself, then perhaps what they say about life beginning at 40 actually is true.
I basked in sunshine at I stood on Kyoto Station’s Track 0 waiting for the Thunderbird Limited Express. I smiled and swayed, inhabiting the proverbial bliss as I’d vowed over amontillado the evening before.
Occasionally, a thought would spoil the mood. Why, exactly, is there a Track 0 anyway? Wasn’t it more convenient to reach Hokuriku before the Shinkansen was extended to Tsuruga? Are the passengers behind me going to be mad that I haven’t already gathered my things, and am not as obviously tense as they are?
Yet just like the scattered clouds that appeared in an otherwise pristine January sky failed to dim the sun, so too did I let these intruder float by without paying them any attention.
By the time I reached my destination, Kaga Onsen, I was squinting for bits of blue above me rather than wisps of cirrus or cumulonimbus. Yet as I began exploring the town, I remained determined not to lapse back into doom and and despondency.
This was not entirely easy. After hiking all the way up to the town’s observation deck to find it closed for unannounced repairs, I arrived at the Rosanjin artisan’s cottage feeling unwelcome, in spite of the ostensibly hospitality being shown to me.
“Japa-nee-su te-uh,” the woman said in spoken katakana as she poured a verdant brew into the cup, seemingly a piece of local kutani-yaki, painted with an abstract representation of the tsubaki winter flower.
She seemed to want to speak in English, in spite of my having thus far conducted myself completely in Japanese, but she couldn’t quite get all the way there.
All around me were NO PHOTOGRAPHY placards, in spite of nothing within the house being particularly photogenic, and certainly not intellectual property that anyone would want to steal.
Both the tea attendant and the ticket seller were masked and hiding behind plexiglass; in spite of being so seemingly afraid of germs, they tracked my every move watchfully with their eyes.
Which was just as well: It was nearing 3 PM, which meant that I could begin walking to my overpriced hot spring hotel to check-in. Or, so I thought.
“Please wait over there,” the young woman said in English when I handed her my “Express Check-in” chit, which I’d received upon dropping my bars earlier and was supposed to expedite entry to my room.
Instead, I found myself drinking sake out of a square masu cup while elderly staff escorted the parties that had arrived before me to their quarters, seemingly only one very 5-10 minutes.
For all the love of high-end hotels that exists in the world, I’ve never known more affordable Japanese business hotels to keep their customers waiting, under the guise of rest and relaxation no less.
By the time I got into my room and freshened up, a critical quantity of light had pierced through the clouds, which had now opened over at least half of the sky.
Of course, I had in my mind to photograph Koso-yu, the town’s Meiji-era bath house, only after night had fallen, so that the jewel tones of its famous stained glass might be apparent.
Although less than an hour remained until sunset—I’m narrating the first few days of January, remember—a lot can change quickly in the middle of winter.
And it did: By the time the edifice had fully lit-up, I’d ensconced myself beneath an awning in order to avoid the heavy sleet, whose pellets thudded on the concrete as if they were marble-sized hail.
As I stood at the Yamashiro Onsen bus stop waiting Saturday morning, it dawned on me that I had the place completely to myself—well, minus the chirping of a distant crosswalk, and some actual birds who were much closer.
For all the talk of “overtourism” in Japan, that town belonged only to me, at least for the moment we’re talking about.
Boarding my eastbound Shinkansen a short while later, I tried to make peace in advance of the train passing Toyama. The weather in Kaga, in combination with the forecast for the Noto Peninsula (also torrential rain), had made me decide to cut my losses and take that trip at an unspecified future date.
Mamo-naku, the automated voice announced. Toyama; Toyama des-u.
Out the window, a heavy snow fell over bucolic farm scenes, the kinds that somehow evoke “Memoirs of a Geisha,” even though the movie depicts no such inaka.
Several searches—on JMA; on weathernews; and even on the unimpeachable yahoo.jp 天気—reminded me that the Noto-Hanto’s Wajima City was several degrees warmer, and was in the midst of a downpour. Still, I wondered whether I’d made the wrong decision.
My arrival in Nagano, where I’d be setting off for my “Plan B” excursion, initially reinforced this fear. First because of the people who crowded the station: Foreigners, and the worst kind of foreigners. Nagano in winter is like if REI was a small Alpine country.
Moreover, I arrived at the Alpico bus stop not only to find an utter mob scene, but also that the ticket machine (there still haven’t updated their buses to accept IC cards or credit cards) was malfunctioning. Had the team of technicians working on it fixed it even 10 seconds later than they did, I might not have made it to my destination.
Well, the destination bus stop—I needed to hike an hour through snow in order to reach my actual destination: The towering “Cedar Avenue” of Togakushi Shrine.
On an ordinary winter day, this might not have been a challenge. The path is flat, and while I wasn’t wearing crampon-clad boots like most other travelers (Japanese people, and most foreigners in Japan, always over-prepare for outdoor activities), I’d previously walked the similar trail to the snow monkeys in the “wrong” shoes.
Today, there were two challenges. One was extraneous. The temperature hovered right around freezing; the intense friction of hundreds of chains crunching the snow melted the top layover it. This in turn re-froze, which turned the surface into a veritable skating rink.
The second one was entirely my fault. I was wearing the most-wrong pair of shoes I could: A pair of stylish oxfords that I thought would look better in photos than the sensible Nikes I’d nearly worn instead.
Ironically, I made it through the first half of the trail not only without falling, but also within seeing anyone else. It was only when I entered the home stretch that I started slipping—and, eventually, falling—which unfortunately coincided with the presence of many more tourists.
Who treated me with far more scorn than I believe they should have, especially given that most seemed like the sort who wouldn’t think twice about wearing hiking boots in the middle of Tokyo, or wearing those hideous cargo pants that zip off into cargo shorts.
“It only gets more slippery from here,” one well-meaning but obnoxious woman scolded me when I fell right in front of her.
She was wearing better shoes than me, it was true; she was also morbidly obese and in terrible shape, huffing and puffing as she made her way up a hill that was only a couple of degrees from flat. Frankly, she was the last person who should’ve been criticizing me.
Thankfully, the rest of the path was completely flat; I fell only once more (in other words, four times in total), and that’s because I did a much-too-fast about face as my camera timer was going off. Which meant that everyone else was focused on my amazing photography set-up, not my inadequate footwear.
Nevertheless, as I got up, an incident that occurred four years ago when I was living in Kyoto entered my mind. An elderly woman had face-planted getting off the bus; she not only smashed up her glasses, but badly cut her face. I asked her, in broken Japanese, if everything was all right or if I could help her.
She was polite, but insistent. “Dai jou-bu,” she smiled, even though blood was dripping down her face. Yet she continued smiling through the pain. “Dai jou-bu.”
No one outside my immediate family know this—I never announced it publicly—but I was supposed to take a modified version of this trip exactly one year earlier. The morning of my scheduled departure, me packed and coiffed and about to call an Uber to the airport, I canceled the entire thing.
And you know what? It felt great. 2023, in hindsight, was not a great year for me. I was burnt out and exhausted; yet creatively speaking, I had little to show for it. By contrast, the two weeks I spent at home instead of traveling were regenerative, and at turns healing.
As I prepared Sunday morning to set off for my day trip from Tokyo (where I ended up sleeping after my Nagano forest excursion) to Chiba prefecture, I put on Chelsea Handler’s interview with Mel Robbins.
And while Robbins expectedly plugged her new book “The ‘Let Them’ Theory” (a theory she did not “invent,” even if she was smart enough to capitalize on it), she also touched on wisdom I hadn’t heard before.
I started putting it into practice as soon as the Narita Express I took (in lieu of the slower Rapid Sobu Line) arrived at Chiba Station.
“Onegaishimasu,” I punctuated my Starbucks order for a Hojicha Latte. I rarely drink beverages with milk and even more rarely ones with sugar; instead of thinking about all the reasons I shouldn’t, I just did.
Robbins calls this the “Five-Second Rule,” and it usually applies at more consequential junctures. Such as whether to take a planned trip, or to toss it in the trash can at the last minute.
Like “Let Them,” and her brand of self-help in general, “Five-Second” (which was apparently inspired by a commercial depicting a countdown to blast-off) has its limitations. It implies that hesitation leads disproportionately to “yes” becoming “no,” and that “no” is typically the wrong choice.
A year ago, however, my circumstance was exasperation, not hesitation. There was simply no gas left in the tank.
If anything, my “Blast-Off” moment was pressing the “Cancel” button even when every bit of wisdom I had as a traveler (and the pressure I feel, as a blogger, to travel constantly) pushed me in the other direction.
This year, by contrast, nearly every moment of the trip has been energizing, nearly every day affirming not only of the fact that I’m here, but that I’m here in 2025 instead of 2024.
There are exceptions, of course, one of which came shortly after I picked up my rental car later Sunday morning. The official Chiba Tourism Instagram account had posted about a road where, according to them, a field of daffodils would stands above the sea with a perfect view of Mt. Fuji behind them.
Imagine my surprise when I got there and found only a few flowers (which were miniature ones, no more than a few inches high), any semblance of mountain or ocean behind them obscured by uncleared brush.
Narcissus indeed, I thought to myself, referencing the flower’s scientific name.
The great news is that Mt. Nokogiri, which I’d had on my list for literally years but never could manage to visit, far exceeded any expectations I had of it.
From the rock-hewn Buddha and Kann-on statues, to a view of Tokyo Bay that nearly made up for my daffodil disappointment, I felt as delightful as a full-sized narcissus as it basks in the sun.
And yet as I peered across the water toward Fujisan, I did feel a tinge of unease. A thick smog obscured the mountain; as it turned out, the “Diamond Fuji” sunset I’d penciled into my itinerary took place not in February, but in May.
I felt that it would be a mistake to waste the rest of my day, but also harshly judged myself for the spot I thought to drive instead.
That’s two hours away, I poo-pooed the idea. And over ¥10,000 in tolls, when you add in going back from there to Chiba. Plus, you might not even make it before sunset.
I was thinking about Shin-Nase Beach, an obscure stretch of sand near Zushi City in Kanagawa prefecture. I’d actually been there in June; but it was disappointing.
Firstly, because the afternoon I ended up making it there was completely cloudy. And secondly, because I’d planned to come a few days earlier, one a day that ended up being one of the most brilliant sunsets I’ve recently seen.
But that was a failure of the five-second rule, I reminded myself, thinking back to how I skipped my initial foray to the beach because I was tired and assumed sunset would be mediocre anyway; I’ve since regretted it constantly, almost pathologically.
Today, I noted, is your chance to redeem yourself. And so I pushed through my doubt, entered the phone number of a restaurant next to the beach into the GPS.
I would end up pulling into the last open parking spot literally right as pink and orange were streaking across the sky. If I’d been five seconds later in deciding, I might’ve missed it entirely.
“3, 2, 1,” I said out loud, as I tightened my camera on its tripod and twisted all the knobs into precisely the right position. I pressed the shutter button. Blast-off.
Your normal day is someone else’s dream. I recently heard this, though I can’t remember where, or from whom. But I wrote the statement down because I wanted to make sure I remembered it.
Certainly, it was easy to feel like I was dreaming when I arrive in Ginzan Onsen, one of two hot springs resorts north of Tokyo that would serve as the centerpiece of my trip. I disembarked the Shinkansen into a snowglobe scene; the only memory of a world without feet of snow on the ground were the persimmon trees.
One fruit remained for every 10-12 that might’ve originally sprouted; they looked both squishy and as if they would shatter upon touch. They were like ornaments that didn’t get the memo about Christmas having passed, let alone the fact that this is Japan.
So too did the adornments of my room at Kosekiya ryokan seem to call back to a long-past summer. Above my bed (beds; I had to book for two people in order to get a room here) was a stained glass of Japanese irises, though dim conditions outside meant that it wasn’t particularly brilliant.
As I exited the inn onto the street (there is only one), I noticed staff had desecrated a beautiful fresh flower vase with a bottle of hand sanitizer. I briefly considered discarding it, for the common good, but opted against it for my own mental peace.
The evening was at once magical and anti-climatic. On one hand, the town looked like a postcard, particularly once it finally lit-up. This, of course, happened long after sunset; even though I was more or less dressed appropriately, I was still so frozen as a persimmon by the time I went back inside.
On the other hand, having gotten the proverbial “money shot,” I had little else to do besides take a bath in the ryokan’s Taisho Roman-style onsen. Which, if I’m honest, was a bit dilapidated, especially for the price I paid.
A strange thing happened when I was down there, however. Usually when I use onsen, I spend half the time half out of the water, struggling desperately to handle its temperature.
In this case, however, I was so deeply chilled from the two hours I spent outside that I invited the boiling temperature, as if I was a shabu-shabu bouillon cube in desperate need of dissolving.
I remembered, then, where I heard that my normal day is someone else’s dream. It was a favorite YouTuber of mine, who gave me another kernel of wisdom the next day.
“The people in your life,” she reminded me (and everyone else watching), “are your scaffolding. Don’t take them for granted, but know that they will hold you up.”
People often ask me why I prefer to live in the US (which necessitates up to a dozen transpacific flights every year); this is why. I’d rather suffer from jet lag than the sort of loneliness that comes along when you go months or years without being buttressed.
As it turns out, arriving in Gunma prefecture’s Kusatsu Onsen the next day took me back to a time when my scaffolding was even more omnipresent.
I got a strong whiff of potpourri, the kind that everyone’s mom put in the bathroom in the 90s. I remember how it came in the form of pine cones, in spite of the scent clearly being chemical.
Having dropped my bags at my hotel, I was on my way down to Yubatake, the name given to the hot springs feeding apparatus at the center of town, called as such because its wooden blocks look like tofu.
It was just so utterly strange in the best possible way; once the sun went down and lighting was no longer a concern, I felt confused as to where I might get the best picture.
I initially walked up the icy steps of Kousen-ji, a temple in which I hadn’t place much stock, but whose vermillion five-story pagoda ended up being extremely impressive. From here, the compressed shots I took of the Yubatake gave at least some sense of its centrality to the town, even if some of the details were obscured.
After night fell, and the Yubatake glowed a fluorescent magenta, I felt that I had finally found my money shot. Unfortunately, it was so cold that I couldn’t stick around for as long as I probably should’ve.
Having gotten just a few long-exposure shots, I turned the corner onto the small street that would finally lead me back to my hotel—as I had in Ginzan Onsen, I badly craved a bath—and noticed persimmons tied up on several of the houses.
Like the ones still attached to trees up in Yamagata, they were supple in spite of being frozen solid, seemingly not having gotten the memo about the calendar day. Maybe the people in our lives don’t just hold us up—maybe they literally ward off death and decay.
Shortly before departing on this trip, I re-visited some pictures I’d taken in Guilin, China in the spring of 2019. Although I (like many people) now remember pre-2020 as the halcyon days, I was quite literally living in a black-and-white world.
It had been a grey and smoggy few days, but I added scarcely any saturation or vibrance to give nature an assist.
It was a visual metaphor for how I felt when I woke up in Kusatsu: Exhausted, in spite of having slept all night; burning up and freezing at the same time.
If I’m honest, I was probably as ill as I’ve been in years, but I was in denial about it. I snoozed my alarm (which I almost never do), and reminded myself of my deadline. Your bus doesn’t leave until 9:50—it’s 9 now.
Indeed, I had some DayQuil in my bag, which meant that after the failure of the usual suspects (a hot bath and then a shower; Sugar-Free RedBull; iced coffee; my sheer force of will), Big Pharma got me through in the end.
And it was a long journey to reach the end: A two-hour bus ride to Karuizawa; a 90-minute Shinkansen ride from there to Tokyo; and another bullet train the rest of the way to the Mishima, where I picked up my rental car.
I was completely winded, “help” be damned, by the time I slinked down into the seat of my Toyota. But I didn’t acknowledge it out loud. Or internally, really.
Instead, I focused outside. Like the absolutely massive extent of Fuji’s snowcap, which was at least twice as large as it had been when I saw it from Shin-Nase days earlier, in spite of a few obnoxious clouds hovering above the precipice.
They’ll go away soon, I told myself, in spite of my usual fatalism, and mirroring my refusal to cop to my own condition. By nightfall; tomorrow morning at the latest.
The good news, at least for the part of me that enjoys living a lie, is that nothing about my accommodation situation at Lake Yamanakako could possibly hold me to account.
The mysterious guest house owner had told me in advance that he would be out until nearly midnight; he left the front door unlocked (and my name on that of my bedroom), which delighted me.
He left the music of Jack Johnson blaring so loudly that no other guests could possibly hear me huff or cough. This didn’t delight me—the “artist,” I mean; I loved the noise.
Moreover, since I’d booked said room months earlier, I had a straight on view of the mountain rising over the lake. So I didn’t have to wait out in the cold, increasingly windy afternoon (which progressively became evening, as it does) in order to see whether my predictions about the mountain’s cloud cover would come true.
(This proved especially useful since mine about my physical health definitely did not. I fell asleep before 6 PM; I didn’t wake up for 11 hours after that.)
I can’t say for sure whether or not I felt better; it’s impossible for me to gauge the honesty of my own recollections and notes. But the clouds were definitely gone, which pushed me to get out of bed, grab my camera and tripod (which I’d set up the night before just in case) and head outside while it was still dark.
Perhaps “pushed” is the wrong word, actually—I wanted to get up and at ‘em, and not just because of how badly I needed a Fujisan night sky shot.
I’d hallucinated multiple times about “waking up” into a dream-within-a-dream, which usually ended with me either having bad photos, or dull photos à la Guilin ’19, in addition to the inevitable realization that I was actually still asleep.
Before leaving the guest house, I saw a dusty Tamron lens cap that might’ve belonged to an alternate universe version of myself (Tokina is my third-party lens of choice) and accidentally quantum-tunneled itself through to this timeline.
He also sent a single sepia aviator lens to the Obuchi Sasaba Tea Farm, which I returned for the first time since 2021, and was shocked to find it just as deserted as it had been then.
It astonished me just how vivid the entire scene was, in spite of the tea bushes being notably muted in winter time. Even if the 2019 version of Robert had transmitted his no-fun photo editing sensibility forward five years and 10 months, there simply wasn’t a single pixel in this matrix greyscale enough to accommodate the data.
Things started feeling more sober at Miho-no-matsubara Beach, where the seemingly never-ending anti-erosion work meant I had to walk an extra mile (on rocks and sand, no less) in order to reach my desired perspective. I did it, but to my own detriment.
By the time I got back to the car (and, more importantly, got the car back to Mishima; and even more importantly than that, got myself to my hotel in Tokyo), there was no mistaking my condition. And there was no color left.
Not even the pink behind my eyelids. Just the darkness. I’d say I wondered if I had died, but then I don’t believe I wondered anything during that blackout. I was just gone—dead; dead-asleep; or asleep again within a nightmare of a dream of a nightmare.
I endured another night of hallucinations, but not in the way the previous one had gone. Instead of bad dreams about grey photos and false dawns, I dreamed of not being sick any longer, and woke to my mouth feeling so dry it nearly bled, in spite of one empty water bottle after another piling onto the floor.
I hallucinated—no, I hyperventilated—that perhaps attempting to push through an obvious flu was not only an unwise idea, but one so stupid it could put me in an early grave. (If you’re reading this not, then you know this was not the case.)
I opened my eyes (and, less occasionally, dragged myself to the toilet) so many times I couldn’t possibly tell you. What I can tell you is that I left my room only twice on the calendar day of Friday, January 10.
First, to go to the hotel’s vending machine to search (in vain, in turns out) for Pocari Sweat. I wasn’t sure whether it had electrolytes, but it seemed likelier to satiate my thirst than water alone.
Secondly, to Matsumoto Kiyoshi once it opened. I didn’t want to settle for inferior Japanese cold and flu medication, but I was totally out of my American stuff.
It took me two hours after the store’s opening time to summon both the mental and physical strength for the six-minute walk, which felt like a six-mile sprint in one direction, and a six-day one in the other.
By the time I truly woke up—having fully accepted that my planned Izu Peninsula day trip had come and gone, and (I hoped) ready to make my way over to Chiba prefecture for a second pass—36 hours had passed since I passed out. An instant and eternity: Both were mine (or maybe lost on me).
“It’s no problem, really,” insisted Kotaro, with whom I was walking through the streets of Gion the second Monday of January—the last full day of my trip. With us were his wife and his three-year old son, whose was alternately skipping along on his own, or hitching a ride from one of his parents. “You need to regain your strength.”
Kotaro, whom I’ve known for years both professionally (his sake tour company was this site’s first local Japanese partner in 2018) and personally (I literally photographed his son on his first day home from the hospital), was accompanying me on my question to find the Hatsuyori celebration.
“I found almost nothing in English,” I sighed, noting to him all the different combinations and queries I tried, and even a few Japanese searches I attempted to do in vain. “My plan was just to walk around until I found something.”
(The “something” in question, of course, being Geiko and Maiko parading through the streets of Gion en route to the house of their teacher.)
He typed the name of the teacher in question—Inoue Yachiyo—into the search box on Google.jp. “Funny, it’s the first result that comes up for me.” He tapped the link, which opened Google Maps. The house was apparently in an alley just north of the Tatsumi Bridge, a popular Geisha-spotting location.
As we stood outside the house waiting, I asked Kotaro how their Hatsumode (the name for each Japanese family’s New Year shrine visit) has gone.
He asked me to tell me about my trip, and seemed dizzy trying to fathom how I fit so many destinations (let alone ones as disparate as Kaga Onsen, Chiba prefecture and Lake Yamanaka) into such a short span of time.
“It was easy,” I recalled, noting the current of triumph that had seemed to run under my trip until I woke up in Kusatsu Onsen shivering and achy. “Until it wasn’t.”
Just then, a single Maiko dressed in a celery color strolled out of a cab at the end of the street. The photographers (there were about two dozens in total, mostly men and almost all Japanese) sprung to attention, showering her with flashes and shutter clicks like she was Marilyn Monroe in the Golden Age of Hollywood.
“I think this is our sign to go,” said Kotaro, whose son was apparently very hungry, though still extremely happy and agreeable. “He’s not really old enough to appreciate the ladies yet.” We said our goodbyes, and looked forward to meeting when the weather was warmer and my flu was a distant memory.
Eventually, I made my way back to Tatsumi-bashi itself, which proved a more fertile location, both in terms of the number of Geisha walking across it, as well as being a more beautiful context for capturing them.
Snapping away, I felt almost stupid for having been so unclear about where the event would take place, unsure whether or not I would even catch it. Yet just as my trip (before, again, I got sick), things mostly happened naturally once I showed up, ready for action.
I left the event half an hour later satisfied and grateful—and not just for how that particular chapter had gone. I spent the rest of the afternoon catching up on tasks that had fallen by the wayside during my infirmity, and fell asleep feeling I had left not a single stone unturned.
The night passed quickly; I awoke easily. And as I quietly tiptoed out of my ryokan early the next morning, it dawned on me that I had regained the last of my strength. It was a bittersweet triumph—I was headed home—and a solitary one: No one would have cared, even if someone had been around.
So I stored my relief and my jubilation and my gratitude in my nearly silent steps, my only co-conspirator the centuries-old wood of the Machiya in the same street. And a single maple leaf which, against all odds, still refused to concede to winter, still closer to crimson than it was to cinnamon.
Your normal day, I spoke to the leaf as if it was sentient, is someone else’s dream.
