SECOND week in April, light rain falling, the wet pavement reflecting neon lights — a typical spring evening in Tokyo. I waited for my friends in front of the Asakusa Kannon Temple on the banks of the Sumida River, the oldest part of town.
No cherry trees in sight, but plastic boughs festooned with shiny pink mylar blooms framed the temple’s famous arcade, and the petals shivered with the strike of each raindrop.
I recognized Norio Muroi and Nobuki Yamamoto coming down the block, even under their umbrellas. Muroi, slender and fine-featured; Yamamoto, squarely built and grinning big. The three of us bowed, shook hands, and looked at each other. I see myself in a mirror every day, but I didn’t really see the passing time until I looked at friends I hadn’t seen in 10 years.
“You are old,” Yamamoto said.
“You are, too,” I replied.
When we first met, Yamamoto, Muroi and I were in our early 20s. Now, meeting for the third time, we were all well into our 40s, thicker and grayer.
Down the street, we shook out our umbrellas in front of a weathered wood-and-paper building with lanterns framing the doorway. We stepped out of our shoes inside the entry, bowed to the welcoming cries of the owner and found a table at the back. We sat cross-legged on the floor.
The restaurant served okonomiyaki, a savory pancake cooked with meat and vegetables. “Okonomi” means “as you like” and “yaki” means to “heat” or “cook.” The base of okonomiyaki is a flour-and-egg batter with shredded cabbage. A large electric skillet was built into the table. We ordered a pitcher of batter and platters of seafood. Adding fresh prawns, scallops, octopus, squid and green onions to the batter, we made our dinner. As we ate, we parsed the years. Muroi works as head librarian at an English-language daily paper in Tokyo, and Yamamoto, an artist and teacher, lives in a cabin in the mountains outside of Iwaki City.
In Tokyo, the cherry blossoms were halfway gone, but in the mountains, Yamamoto said, all kinds of spring flowers were in bloom. We agreed on a plan. After Muroi’s shift ended the next afternoon, we would load into his truck and meet Yamamoto at his hermitage.
During the days the cherries blossom, Japanese people take time off to picnic and drink under the trees; it’s an annual event that has no equivalent in the United States. Even with the flowers fading on a Friday morning, Ueno Park — renowned for its 1,000 cherry trees — was crowded with bloom-viewers sitting under the branches, drunk with spring. Every breeze shook down a shower of petals.
This was not a typical Tokyo spring day. The sky, instead of cloudy or smog-stained, was robin’s-egg blue. The ancient weeping cherry outside the Kiomizo Kannon Temple was in full-on glory, drawing a crowd as if it were a high-wire circus act.
On a spring day like this one in 1689, Matsuo Basho, Japan’s most celebrated poet, stood in this same place. He was about to set out on a nine-month pilgrimage from Tokyo that would take him across Honshu, Japan’s central island. The concise book he wrote about the odyssey — “Narrow Road to the Interior” — is my favorite piece of travel writing. “The moon and sun are eternal travelers,” he begins. “Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat, or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself home.”
“Narrow Road” is infused with a special Japanese concept: Mono-no-aware — an appreciation of the tragic beauty of ephemeral things. In the Japanese language of metaphor, sakura — cherry blossoms — symbolize the fleeting, fragile nature of life. This was easy to see as I sat on the curb with everyone else, watching the petals fall to the ground.
Basho was in his mid-40s when he set off on his journey. In those days, that made him somewhat elderly, and as he departed, he wistfully considered the possibility that he wouldn’t make it back. “Summit of Fuji vague, crowns of blossoming cherry at Ueno and Yanaka, when would they — and would they — be seen again?”
Muroi and I weren’t wearing straw sandals or leading a tired horse when we set off. We were in an Isuzu SUV, blazing down Tokyo’s many-laned, frantic freeway system toward Iwaki City. Rush hour, in its own modern and not very poetic sense, raised awareness of life’s precariousness. Seventeenth century or 21st, it doesn’t matter: When you leave one place for another, who can say you’ll ever make it there or make it back? That question underlies every journey.
It was after 10 by the time we finally got to the narrow valley in the mountains where Yamamoto built his little log home. Inside, it might have been a hunter’s shack in Minnesota if the furniture hadn’t been so small and low to the ground. He mail-ordered the cabin — pine logs and all — from Finland.
Dinner was rice, roasted snails, fresh spring cucumbers and brook trout that Yamamoto caught in the stream just outside the cabin. Yamamoto grilled the gutted trout whole on wooden skewers, and we ate every crunchy bit — from head to tailfin.
We looked at photos of Yamamoto’s artwork, a variety of mind-bending installations. In one project, secretly and at night, he placed a watertight phone booth on a busy sidewalk and filled it with water and goldfish. The next day, he took photos of people’s reactions. In the photo he showed us, two bewildered schoolgirls stood with their palms pressed to the glass, watching goldfish swimming around the free-floating handset.
In the morning, we drank coffee, then toured the property, an acre clearing surrounded by a pine plantation. The artist’s jumpy black dog Kuma (Bear) circled us happily, like an erratic satellite. The plum bushes in the yard bloomed white, and thimble-sized lavender katakuri — trout lily — carpeted the ground.
Artwork was scattered around. The prank telephone booth, now empty, rested on its side by the driveway. In the ramshackle studio behind the cabin, a wheelbarrow brimmed over with plaster casts of open hands. In front of the porch, a window-sized plastic box filled with water offered up a reflection. It looked like a piece of the sky had fallen to the ground.
Mid-afternoon, we had to part company. Yamamoto had an art class to teach in Iwaki City, and Muroi and I had another set of friends to visit, near Nikko in the Japanese Alps. I didn’t know when or if I would see my friend or his home again.
As we pulled out, Yamamoto said, “See you in 10 years.”
We traveled back roads. Early evening, coming into the town of Yamatsuri, we encountered a spectacle of overwhelming beauty. Muroi was already pulling over as I chanted numbly, “Stop the car, stop the car.”
More than 100 cherry trees in full bloom lined the road. The petals on the flowers radiated pink light, while behind them, the dark shoulders of the mountains leaned into the dusk.
We staggered out of the car, unpacking our cameras. The smell was as sweet as the sight.
Until I stood in a whole grove of cherry trees — big as oaks — burning with the flame of spring, I didn’t understand the Japanese passion for cherry blossoms. This was a beauty so intense it hurt; I was already grieving the moment’s passing before it was gone.
