Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir

A friend, now ninety years old, who has run a gorgeous ryokan on the coast of Kyushu for some sixty years, once told me, hotels are just prepubescent ryokans. “Inns without hair” is the exact quote. And staying here, you feel it wholly—how refined and mature it is compared to your average hotel. The Marriott ain’t got nothing on this place. A baby

thought I knew about omotenashi selfless service—the kind of service that all the expensive inns aspire to, that Japan is so famous for, that customer-above-all knock-your-socks-off service—but

think often of the closing scene from Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru—the story of a dying government employee, working to get a small park made in central Tokyo before he expired.

The last time I saw you we were seniors in high school, walking opposite directions down the street. A street we had walked together countless times. We said hello, but it was obvious that we were both embarrassed. We lacked the emotional intelligence to bridge the fissure.

I put on Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” just to lighten the mood and it only makes me more confused, leaves me marveling at how this incredible recording had been made inside a penitentiary, how this beautiful music could also be so cursed, how all the men whoop and holler when he says he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

I stroll picturesque stream-flanked ippon-uras and watch kids walk before me in zigzaggy lines and think about how adults are so point-to-point specific, but these children try their hardest to stretch out their walks home, ducking into little nooks in the entryways of houses and behind stone walls, poking one another, tugging on tree branches, how

In this way, they are ideal walkers, and have found the true walk. Their walk is a walk of peace, of a collective social decision to allow it to happen. Eyes are on them. Eyes peering out from behind hedges and eyes beside pushed-back curtains. Eyes attached to adults who care, who have the yoyū to care, who watch at a distance. Their freeness of w

what the “Book of John” teaches in its outré ways. Its processes seem so simple, and yet are so effective, that they tremble in—as Peter Matthiessen aptly describes Machapuchare in The Snow Leopard—mysterium tremendum. The “Book of John” contains facts, but it is easy to be fooled. It is not about the facts. It’s about pointing your compass toward

shibui, which translates clumsily as an “impossible cool,” or “aged cool,” or maybe “rusty cool,” or even “somber cool.” Old men in well-proportioned vintage suits are unintentionally shibui. Turn-of-the-century buildings run by folks who don’t know the architectural gem they got on their hands—shibui.