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

On the car ride home, I sat in the back next to him and held his hand. A hand I should have held much earlier. Later, at home, I heard him tell my mom, Craig held my hand. He was crying. This dumb thing, this holding of an old man’s hand. I knew he would soon be gone (and he was).

We cheers our coffees and he says, You know where that comes from, aye—the Brits, pewter mugs, and slammin’ ’em together so a wee bit of my ale goes into yours and yours into mine and we know there’s no poison in either one.

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

My greetings on the Peninsula feel like a palinode to the words of that kid on the bus, those dumb books, whatever fears had been elevated back across the ocean. What we learned as kids, I have tried to shed like the skin of a snake, though I know it well still. Know it is embedded in my heart, in the hearts of many of us from that town. In

The more I breathe this Peninsula air, the more I realize that it would have been so easy to have elevated my father as a child. This shocks me, the first time I feel this on the road: the space in my heart for forgiveness—forgiveness! The moment I felt that was like getting hit in the head with a basketball—a freakish pang, a dull ache in the

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 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,

They are a comedic duo. She slaps his forehead. Their love is hard-earned and everywhere.