And with that he leaned over and cradled John’s head with his shaking hands and gently placed his lips upon John’s cheek. Goodnight, goodnight, he said as he shuffled off to make his call, to keep his promise, to tell his kids about the lovely ham he got to stroke.

Having the yoyū of mind to allow for another’s god in your home—a notion today more important than ever.

Nearly twenty years later, I had built a life in Japan, and came back to visit. We went to our local steak place, the place we always went for special occasions (my visiting being a big one), and ate our well-done—forever well-done—leathery steaks. On the car ride home, I sat in the back next to him and held his hand. A hand I should have held much

That air was bountiful life. I inhaled like I had just surfaced from a shipwreck.

The body acclimates, grows strong. At a certain point on a long walk, the kind of walk where you clock twenty or thirty or forty kilometers a day, day after day—and you get into that rhythm of waking, walking, working, sleeping—you realize that the body is just a machine. You feed it and it turns that feed into steps. The cerebellum does its thing.

The sort of emptiness only revealed when you leave the smallness of your hometown, see the greater world, feel your own void amplified in the abundance of others.

The feeling hit me with the full force of the abundance I felt around me in Japan—of such an elevated baseline of wealth and health.

No need to flatten Yakiyama with a hoe—today we’ve got a highway, a railway, the miracles of modern mobility. And with that, weaker legs, no lost loves on the other sides of mountains, a little less poetry laid atop this unforgiving landscape.

From John I learn that in 1201 the poet Fujiwara no Teika wrote, “This route is very rough and difficult; it is impossible to describe precisely how tough it is.” In reality, tough, but not indescribably so. It’s just steps in the end.