Ise Does It - Day 0
04.11.24
My head is full, tension starting to tear ever so gently at my temples, the type of feeling the reminds me of jet lag, even though I’m only two hours removed from home and have been on the ground four days now. I remember: I haven’t taken my meds since I’ve landed in Japan. That would explain — unfamiliar surrounds, new bed and those two hours time difference aside — the trouble sleeping.
When I’m anxious enough for Capital A Anxiety to hit, the first thing that slips away from me is sleep and so I take agomelatine. It’s a kind of anti-depressant that works on the circadian system and helps me stay asleep through the night and without it, Capital A Anxiety is starting to take a hold again.
From Tokyo to Nagoya on the Nozomi Shinkansen Kalia and I sit side-by side on azure blue seats. Because I don’t have to look at her, I see how Tokyo pixelates the landscape, turning it in to an all-white MineCraft. Houses make jagged white hills while apartment blocks stretch out in to rectlinear ridge lines. Roads form the rivers and if you’re lucky a tree or two might pop through. But before long, kilometre-by-kilometre, nature retakes the high ground, hill and ridge bursting green and bushy from houses and fields that crust the coastal plain.
Now, from Nagoya to Iseshi we’re sitting face-to-face on grey velour. Keen to make a good first impression, ancient lessons to look people in the eye when talking to them surface. I feel like I should be asking more questions and I’m failing, flailing.
I met Kalia online on a course called Master Class. It’s one of those gently-not-so-gently transformative experiences that’s hard to explain because so much of it is felt in our bodies. This is the first time we’ve met in the flesh and as I sit there opposite, there’s one particular story stuck in the pit of my stomach.
Two of our classmates who’d completed the course once before decided to go on holiday together. Within the space of a few hours, a massive fight erupted between them. It was quickly resolved but it’s not the way I imagine anyone wants to start a trip with someone they’ve only just met.
While my system is far from steeling for a fight, there’s some kind of pressure building that I need to escape. My eyes dart to face of the woman with the black-and-fluro backpack then come back to rest on the eyes of my friend.
They dart away again, looking out the window to stubbled rice paddies and the simpering, hazy sky. Again they return to Kalia. This time I notice she’s been looking away too. “Are you ok?” her eyes ask. “Am I… you know… O.K.?” mine ask in return. “Are we ok?” is the question we both want answered and in a split second something finally shifts: we’re ok.
I get up and walk to the front of the carriage and watch the driver’s gloved hand sign over and over again how to operate the train to no one but himself. When a colleague comes down the other track, he doesn’t wave, doesn’t even nod. He just keeps drawing his eye from control to instrument to track to schedule and back again with silky smoothness until be brings us in to Iseshi with sub-minute timing. I clock the Japan Airlines bag on the cabin floor and wonder if it’s evidence of a past life or the dream of a different one.
By the time Kalia and I sit down to dinner after trawling for food on a main street that couldn’t be more than 300 metres long, normal service has resumed. The What… ? and How… ? questions that we’ve learned can lead us to connection are flowing, safety assured, comfort successfully carried from the online world in to the real one.
In the clear-headed morning, Aidan drove me to the station in his plug-in Porsche. When the petrol motor wasn’t running and in the moments of silence between us, all I could hear was the taut hum of expensive tyres and the incomprehensible garble of morning radio. I watched the decaying buildings on the edge of Ishioka slip by until something caught my ear.
With the first notes, all swirling minor strings and some plucked Japanese instrument I cannot name, I thought it might be incidental music from You Only Live Twice, the James Bond movie set in Japan. But then a voice — unforgettable — started to sing. It’s Nat King Cole and Autumn Leaves, only this time in Japanese.
The first time I came to Japan in 2016, it was another cover that provided the soundtrack. Ane Brun took Alphaville’s 1984 synth-driven single Big In Japan, set it to a plaintive guitar and sang it with a voice that slips away so gently. It’s only now, having just searched for the history of the song, that I realise its story of drug-fucked delusion was so painfully on point.
Nat’s plaintive too, remembering a summer love that he’s long since said goodbye to. But there’s something soothing here too as he remembers those summer kisses and sunburned hands he used to hold. Gone, but fondly unforgotten, a little bit like some of what I’ve been working to shed these past few years.
An early start tomorrow: we’re off on bikes to see the sun rise over Meoto Iwa, also known as the Married Couple Rocks at the Futami Okitama-Jinja shrine, before starting the first leg of our walk from Iseshi to Tamaru via the Naikū and Gekū shrines around Iseshi. If that sounds like a mess, then you’d be right. This area is known for Shinbutsu-shūgō, or the “jumbling up” or “contamination of kami [shinto spirits] and buddhas” Sounds just about right for this time in my life. A good walk should straighten it all out, right?
Until tomorrow, friendly followers.