A wonderful experience, and a wonderful memory. And yet quite surreal in many ways.
Sometimes I feel as though I slipped sideways into a version of the country that barely exists anymore. Not the neon one in travel blogs, not the tourist one with noh masks, nor the pop culture one with cosplay, rock and roll dancers in Yoyogi kōen, and bosozoku revving through late night intersections.
I experienced all that, of course, but when I think of Japan, I think of the quieter one, the hidden one. The Japan behind the façades and the polite masks, where old timber creaked in the night and even the dust seemed to belong.
I lived as part of a Japanese family in a traditional wooden
house. Dark beams, paper sliding doors, tatami floors that whispered gently
when you walked across them. It wasn’t musty, exactly, but it had that old
Japan smell; a kind of gentle stillness baked into the timber. My father‑in‑law
was a woodcarver who sat cross‑legged downstairs and created objects,
decorations, and statues for temples. Real temples and shrines. It felt like
living inside history, and I felt honoured, as though I was trusted with something
sacred.
Next door was a tiny karaoke bar. The sort of
place where the mama‑san fussed over the patrons while pouring brandies, where
last trains were missed and salarymen sang enka with more emotion than melody.
Younger people sang pop songs, trying to sound like their idols. Occasionally
someone would take a run at an English song. The bar only had five in
total; I know this because I sang only four of them. There was no way I was
going to stand on a stage and sing the fifth, Happy Birthday to You.
The whole neighbourhood was like that. A little worn, a
little out of time, and full of stories that didn’t need telling because
everyone already knew them. It was home. I knew my neighbours and they knew me.
I walked those streets and, for a few years, felt like I belonged.
I looked it up on the internet recently. I felt saddened to
see that much of it has gone. The house, the bar, most of the block. New high‑rise
apartments stand where those memories resided. Memories that now live on only
through those of us who belonged.
But beyond the memories, there’s something else that
survived because I took it with me.
One night in the karaoke bar, I went to the men’s room. High up on the old-fashioned cistern, far higher than anyone would naturally put anything, I noticed the
tiniest corner of something white. I reached up, stretched, and managed to get
hold of it.
A small, laminated photograph. Black and white. About four
centimetres across.
On the back, a rubber stamp of a figure; some kanji and other characters within. No date. Nothing else.
The image itself was strange. A person in darkness, just the arms and part of the chest visible beneath, a burst of light obliterating their entire shoulders and head. It's as if someone had taken the photo just as their flash went off. Or a self-portrait with an instamatic. No other clues. Just a frozen moment
with the context missing.
I remember standing there for a long moment, wondering what
it was. Why it was there. Who had put it up so high. Whether it had been hidden
or forgotten. Whether it was meant to be found. Whether I should leave it where
it was.
For reasons I still don’t understand, I kept it.
A few weird things happened around me in the weeks that
followed, and I briefly wondered if I’d pocketed something I shouldn’t have; a
charm, a curse, a joke, a ritual object misplaced by accident or design. Or was
it something else. Maybe the owner came back for it and wondered where it had
gone. Or, in some weird kind of way, was it left there, intended for me.
I’ll never know.
Life moved on, the curse faded, I left Japan, and thirty‑five
years passed. I haven’t thought about the photo for a long time. Four or five
years, at least. But this morning, out of nowhere, it surfaced in my mind,
clear as it ever was. Quietly. As if it had returned to that karaoke bar waiting for
me to once more notice its corner, patient and unchanged, just biding its time
in the shadows.
I still have it, that small, laminated square. One of the
last surviving fragments from a life that now feels dreamlike, slightly unreal,
as though I lived it in someone else’s memory, or passed through a room I was
never meant to enter.
I do wonder if the photo remembers more than I do. If that
captured burst of light held something I was too far outside the culture to
understand at the time. If the event it froze now exists only inside that tiny
frame, sealed away. If even the players and the photographer have long
forgotten the moment it came from, vanishing into the years and leaving the
photograph, and me, as the final interpreter of an undeciphered moment no
longer anchored to anything or anywhere.
It’s strange, the things that choose not to stay with us. And stranger still, the things that do.
