you wake up in the morning. coffee, journal, planks. walking the dog in the park. being late to your 9.30 am.
one day after another. and somehow, suddenly you realise your life has had drastic change.
it was a random Saturday and i was still in bed when L. called me. ‘let’s go to Japan’, she said.
‘i have been there’, i said. ‘in 2016. it was my honeymoon, you remember, when i told you i was married once’. it’s funny how my friends always tend to forget this part of my life.
i was not very tempted of doing another 12 hours trip to revisit something that will bring back some painful core memories.
but i wanted to share time with my new group of girls.
‘we fly in 4 weeks. make sure you still have some days left’, she said.
i was thirty in my honeymoon after eight years of relationship sharing the dream of the forever together.
i was struggling with a lot of personal stuff. i was deeply in love and thought i found the one.
he was. until he was not anymore.
now i am thirty-eight and when i landed in narita airport i asked myself if i am the same girl.
better job, better house, better clothes. i do what i want most of the times. have friends that i love all around the world.
‘you are so empowered’, some told me. and despite having this freedom, my friends love and the dream job… sometimes i don’t know if i am empowered or if i am just alone.
i refuse to go into dating apps. prefer to meet people in real life. but doesn’t go anywhere beyond superficial or convenient stuff.
it’s insubstantial. there’s no spark.
‘is he slow?’, G. asked me once about one of my random guys. ‘i don’t think so’, i answered. ‘well, i could count the seconds in between words’, she said.
whatever. my suitcase arrived and grabbed a cab.
the day after i met the girls. we were talking about change meanwhile we were visiting some temples.
C. parisian born and raised, said ‘ten years ago i was living in Milan. five years ago, i moved to Melbs. and i have no idea of what it’s next’.
there some magic in this, i thought. we can plan as much as we want that life will always manage to surprise us.
‘maybe we can have some lead. let’s see what’s our destiny’, T. said.
they call them omikuji. and they are in every temple there.
T. was the first one. ‘you will come back with a lot of treasures by boat’, she read. that’s vague, i thought.
‘do you have another hundred yen? i need to buy another fate’, she said.
there is a moment in life where everything it’s at stake.
should you change country to join your partner?
should you change your life to have a second chance?
will the coworker ruining your life have a heart attack?
we might be asking too much to the gods. made me think about how much we need to validate ourselves expecting some random fate to solve our problems.
the day after i was in Meguro having a drink with Y. he moved to Japan a couple years ago. ‘do you believe in luck?’, he asked me.
‘i do, but most of the times i have always been prepared to take the opportunities whenever they decided to show up’, i said.
after the drinks we were hungry and went to an izakaya that opens until 3 of the night. ‘why French people are so fascinated about this country’, i asked him.
‘well, i guess it all started with Chirac and his love for Japan. he established important commercial deals with them. and as a kid, we were having a full catalogue of manga in TV’ he said.
meanwhile he was explaining this to me, i realised that Japan hasn’t changed that much since the last time.
how can you remain impassible with everything that happened in the last decade?
my friend A. was also there. we met in high school in Compostela. she was doing her honeymoon in this country as well.
she came to my wedding but couldn’t make it to hers. since i live in Australia i struggle to be in some important moments of my loved ones.
‘i am pretty shocked’, she said. ‘why women are behaving with this naif and innocent approach? clothes are super conservative. i get the sun protection and the fear of being tan but no arms or chests are exposed to the light. it’s 35 degrees and we are having 78% humidity rate’.
she has a point. ‘last night i thought of jumping directly into the washing machine. smoking bans in bars have never made it to Japan’, i said.
it’s like a capsule of time. they pressed pause. and decided to ignore the rest of the world.
after tokyo and kyoto, i decided to change part of my itinerary and visit naoshima and teshima.
and had a Stendhal syndrome that hit me hard.
we consume art in any form but it’s not creating any kind of internal emotional storm.
nothing surprises us anymore.
many reasons for this. one of them, i guess, is the infinite scroll where we get all the boobs we want, some cute dogs and a korean asmr about how to clean your home.
and in the middle of this some bits of reality shock. the palestinian genocide. trump being glorified. incels taking pride saying stuff like ‘your body, my choice’ or ‘my kitchen, your workplace’
iraq lowering the age of consent for girls to nine.
this is not just about undermining women’s right. it’s about erasing us.
we deny. it’s too hard to confront. it will get fixed, we think. and we get back to the unsubstantial stuff.
i started by naoshima. i didn’t know what to expect. haven’t done any kind of research.
D. told me ‘try to do the museum islands. was a unique experience for me’.
my friend L. arquitect insisted as well: ‘you can’t leave Japan for the second time without experiencing this one’.
rented a bike to move around the island. first museum was the Chichu one. and cried twice.
the building itself it’s already glorious. you feel in every wall and every shape the amount of time, thought and love.
i entered a room and face the Walter de Maria installation. there’s nothing special at first sight and however everything is special.
the big sphere. the stairs. the symmetry. the silence.
i was raised catholic and never felt Gods’s presence. in this art installation i felt insignificant, understood there is something more and committed to be a better person. and started to cry.
that’s powerful art, i thought.
when i managed to calm myself i kept walking and found the open sky of James Turrell.
was like the instagram epitome made real life. a blue sky. a square shape. happy days. just perfect.
and the last one was a disturbing light installation of Turrell as well. you take some stairs and you walk into a square where the light changes.
you feel like you abandon earth. you are in a unique space with no shape. everything gets blurred. it’s like infinite.
somehow i felt this is how it might feel when you die and you follow the light. and i cried again. what are we doing with our lives, i thought.
did a couple more museums riding my bike and after lunch took a boat to teshima island.
and then i realised how beautiful life is. or how beautiful it could be.
how somebody could conceptualise and create something like that. gave me hope. it reconciled me with life.
never heard about who Ryue Nishizawa is. and i dont have the words to describe what he created.
beyond my architectural awakening and the emotional swing from death to life to spiritual faith, maybe is not that bad that Japan hasn’t changed that much, i thought.
they are consistent. they know who they are.
do i know who am i? maybe it’s me who has changed.
or some parts of myself have woken up.
sometimes we stay in situations that are not the best for us because we can tolerate them.
until they are not. and then is when we decide to change.
thank you Japan, you have been a blast. you showed me i can go through everything in life and somehow, i will always manage to make the most with what i have.