Realized if they just used tatami mats everywhere, they wouldn’t need slippers, could be done with the on-again, off-again annoyances, and the messiness of slippers splayed in front of doors to guest rooms, sullying the otherwise perfect lines of their hallways. Thoughtful decisions like these; God, I love this place.

Kii is as good a place as any to meditate on the past. Folks here cultivate a healthy relationship with decay. The right storm could wipe it all clean overnight. And that’s fine, they seem to say, and sometimes outright say it.

The timing feels right to work things over, things I’ve been ignoring for nearly a lifetime, and know of no better way to do so than to move my feet.

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.

Before I can register what he said, he continues with more fluency: She just appeared seven years back. Wanderin’ the country, needin’ a job, somehow…found us. Not a daughter but like a daughter. Time passes, life moves, and that’s what happens: Things become…other things.

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.

You know that mindset, Bryan. You lived it out more fully than I ever did. Spend youth in our scarcity mindset—a mindset where we have little value, are shown little value, where we don’t feel protected, where we feel like it could all slip away with one wrong move—and the voice never really disappears. Somewhere, in a corner of our minds, is a lit

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

I had none of this blood in me, the blood of these violent, small people. And yet—and yet (and yet (and yet))—goddamn was I worried it was there, somewhere under my skin, the hint of their fuckery, the stink of those farts. Osmosed from the fumes of the town? How could I be sure I was free?