A day trip down memory lane

I enjoy venturing out sometimes with only a vague destination in mind and changing plans along the way.  Today was one of those days.  Only 100 metres from home, I bumped into Kishidasan and we had a long chat about our families, the earthquake and getting old.  Next, I boarded the monorail and headed south east, planning to head towards Nara on trains I had never taken before. 

Since those trains were going quite close to the town I first called home in Japan 29 years ago, I decided to take a detour and catch a train heading down memory lane.  Foremost in my mind was whether I would chance to meet the handsome, young man with the toothpaste-commercial smile and smooth, tanned skin who helped me survive my first few, difficult months in Japan.  Would he recognise me after all these years? Would I recognise him?  Despite the fact that he would now be around 60, my memory kindly envisaged him just as he was back then.  As I exited the station, his family sake shop was still there but closed with a “for rent” sign on the door.  A sad sign of the times, I thought: faded paint, faded fortunes and, most likely, some frail family members somewhere, still alive and needing care.

Twenty-nine years ago, fresh from Australia, I couldn’t believe Japanese thought this town, with 5 storey apartment buildings, was in the countryside but it felt quite rural to me too now. I was surprised that I had no recollection of the hiking trails and had never explored any of them when I lived there. This morning, lots of keen walkers were heading from the train station into the surrounding mountains and the large, traditional homes around the station were quite charming. What would life have been like, had we stayed together, I mused.

As I headed in the general direction of the tiny apartment where I first lived, a woman in her 60s offered to show me the way as, like me, she was simply out for a walk with no set destination.   With many new houses and roads, I was struggling to find anything familiar. Finally, I spotted something I could remember - the old post office! Back in 1990, this place was my lifeline.  But now, just like the sake shop, the post office was boarded up and barely recognisable. 

We continued on. They say that our memory for smells is more evocative than what we see. I remember vividly that there was a shotengai, a roofed-over row of shops, with stalls selling all sorts of stinky foods. As a newcomer, my sense of smell was affronted by the unfamiliar pickles, fish and miso that were for sale. I also remember the old pharmacy which supplied me with laxatives for the first few months. Benpi (constipation)was one of the first words I learned out of necessity. Since then, I’ve learned all sorts of useful words in Japanese, such as haemorrhoids and caesarean section. I’m so glad the language comes pretty easily to me now.

Today, even though I was looking through the same eyes that had been here 29 years earlier, there was not one remnant of anything familiar. No shotengai, no pharmacy - just a road I couldn’t remember, some modern apartments and yet another convenience store. I felt quite disoriented as everything was so different to how things had been stored in my memory.  My brain desperately tried to make links between then and now but the communication lines were clearly down.

As this local lady and I walked and talked about all manner of things, I picked up that the siblings and mother of my former lover were still in the area while he had moved to America. Our brief romance was a secret back then and always would be. It was a sweet day of nostalgia, albeit a bit disconcerting that my memory failed me so. As I jumped back on the train to head somewhere else, I felt glad that I’d got off at this station 29 years ago.