31°08′36″N 121°48′19″E

For thirteen years before I boarded Delta flight DL296 from Shanghai to Narita, the journey lived at the back of my mind. It was always there, calling out to me, thrusting itself into my conscious awareness through any gap it could to color my thoughts with longing.

Some things have an irresistible draw. They put you in a decaying orbit and eventually you go crashing headlong into that very thing. The landing is rough. All of a sudden, you’re tumbling ass over teakettle, wondering what happens next.

Three times before I moved to Japan, I visited. Each visit confirmed what my gut told me: this was where I needed to be.

Gut feeling will often get you going in the right direction. But as great as it is with gist, it seldom delivers the details. Those are up to the individual.

So you go looking for answers. This process can be captivating. A loose thread at which you can’t help but tug, curious to see what happens when you do. So you pull, you get an answer, and you go searching for the next thread.

That flight landed at Narita five years, nine months, and seventeen days ago. Two thousand one hundred nineteen days of looking for answers and sorting through details.

I’m where I need to be, though most days I still feel lost. Which is fine, because I finally understand that it’s not about finding the path to follow, it’s about creating your own.

35°44’2″N 139°36’41.35463″E

Sneakers are a more powerful antidepressant than any drug. When loneliness intensifies or panic attacks cause the walls to close in, I strike out. All I need are my shoes and the knowledge that, as long as I keep moving, the shadows can’t catch up.

April 2015 is an idle month waiting on paperwork and settling into a new home in an endlessly large city. No legal status to work until the paperwork comes through, no income for a month after the work begins. Each day is empty, formless.

My apartment is small in a way I don’t yet know how to work with. Cozy, but perplexing. It’s long and narrow, like someone furnished a hallway. The bed frame squeaks and shifts. The upholstered chair is fraying badly.

I am also fraying badly. I need help. I need answers.

All the time in the world with nothing to do but keep the bad feelings away. Not a spare yen for entertainment, either. But walking is free, and getting intentionally lost is the best way to explore.

I start picking directions and just going out to see what I find, wandering for many hours. In this way, I develop an intimate sense of the city. More than just finding interesting places: understanding them in context.

But best of all is that it brings me joy when very little else does. It reinforces my love of Tokyo and its innumerable little curiosities that can only be found by stumbling upon them.

35°44’5.5464”N, 139°36’49.2912”E

It’s not as if I didn’t know the apartment was small. I had seen the pictures and floor plan. But when I opened the door for the first time, a wave of near-panic washed over me. I’d seen walk-in closets of a similar size.

I had to make a choice: I could let myself slip into pessimism, or I could lean into the experience and get excited about it. I chose the latter.

Yes, it was small, but it was mine. Finally here in Tokyo, in my own place, and less than 24 hours after arrival.

I wouldn’t normally sign a lease before seeing an apartment in person, but I’d made the arrangements before entering the country and had to commit months in advance. It also wasn’t easy to arrange, as I didn’t yet have a job or visa, but I made it happen.

I also decided I wasn’t going to let myself think of it as cramped. Despite its size and proportions, I was going to make it cozy. I kept rearranging it until it felt right.

It’s entirely too easy to let my brain turn the world into a very negative version of itself. I can’t always stop it, but sometimes, putting in deliberate effort prevents that switch from being flipped, and that makes all the difference. It certainly did that day.

Though I’ve since moved elsewhere, I’ll always miss that first apartment. Life there wasn’t always easy during that time, but I always felt at home.

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A note to readers

I want to express my appreciation to everyone who’s signed up to the mailing list or is reading this on the blog. I’m excited to see where this goes. And you might think being just 3 posts into 105 for the year would be intimidating, but it’s not…especially.

What’s intimidating is putting out writing twice a week, whether I’m satisfied with it or not. What’s intimidating is knowing that, while I’m sure some of these posts will end up being quite good, some of them will also just not work well at all. That’s just how life is, especially when you’re in the midst of trying to grow a new skill. Gotta get through the bad stuff to get to more of the good stuff.

And this, finally, is one of the reasons I so sincerely appreciate your being here. If it were just me writing and sending it out into the void, it would be a lot harder to carry through with this project. Your presence keeps me accountable and motivated, because I don’t want to disappoint you, and I don’t want to ask you to read bad writing.

So yeah, thanks for being here.

35°44’20.652”N, 139°35’50.226”E

There was a sad-looking plastic bag on the landing in front of my apartment door. The contents were mixed: the tray from a convenience store boxed lunch, an empty cigarette pack, two PET bottles, and several beer cans.

The bag itself was filthy and looked much older than its contents, as if it had been pulled from under a shrub, where it had sat undisturbed for years.

On the outside of the bag was one of the red and white stickers used by the city to tell you you’ve made a mistake with your garbage. If you put recycling out on burnable trash day, for example, or separate your refuse incorrectly, you’ll get such a sticker.

This sticker indicated that the bag’s contents were mixed and could not be accepted as-is.

I didn’t know whose garbage it was, but it wasn’t mine. Someone did, however, go to the trouble of carrying it up to the second floor to leave it on my doorstep, making it my problem.

The next day, with help from a friend, I composed a brief note in Japanese. I wrote it very carefully by hand. With the note taped in place, I returned the bag to the trash area in front of the building.

The note, in essence, read:

Blaming the foreigner is a dick move. This is not mine.

– Apt. 201

I have no idea if the note it was ever read, but the bag disappeared and I felt better. Not my trash, not my problem.

35°40’13.443″N, 139°41’42.99″E

It wasn’t immediately clear that anything strange was happening. We had just walked over the pedestrian walkway from the event plaza to Yoyogi Park on a lovely, early spring day. But as we made our way further into the park itself, the sound of crows took over.

Not just the sound of a few, which is a common enough thing in Tokyo, but the collected cacophony of hundreds, all seemingly determined to demonstrate the maximum volume of sound producible per lungful of air.

They occupied a group of trees that surrounded a vernal pool. Branches densely packed with glistening, black-feathered bodies. Branches sagging under the weight.

In the pool’s ankle-deep water, two crows were fighting. They were already tangling when we arrived, and still with some vigor. Over a short time, however, they visibly tired–first equally, but then one more than the other.

Not long after, one crow stood fully atop the other, forcibly submerging its head. Briefly and weakly, a sopping wing flailed, then stopped.

The noise also stopped. The birds all went silent when the weaker crow succumbed.

Slowly, they began to fly off in various directions. All the nearby humans whispered to one another, gesturing to the dead crow lying still in the water, wondering what they’d just seen.

35°44’27.297″N, 139°36’58.8348″E

The train platform felt like a floating boat dock, surging and swaying underfoot. This was bad. I struggled to keep my balance, trying hard not to stumble while standing still. The surrounding people must have thought I was drunk, which wouldn’t have been out of place on that Friday night in Roppongi.

During my last class, as my student was working on a listening exercise, I had nodded off. It was a micro sleep, lasting only a second, but when I snapped out of it, some parts of my brain remained asleep. I had tunnel vision, and strange shapes hovered in the periphery. I heard things I knew weren’t real.

When insomnia becomes severe, your reality distorts, turns itself inside out. I knew I was becoming irrational. I knew I was falling apart. My ability to think clearly was disappearing. In this state, I couldn’t communicate clearly enough with my girlfriend, and she disappeared, too.

The hallucinations scared me, but they refused to disappear. Instead, they followed me home that night. And then, nearly home, I blacked out entirely. I was leaving the train station, and then I was unlocking my door. I had no memory of the intervening fifteen minutes. This scared me.

The blackout was the last straw. I collapsed on the bed, sobbing. The sleep deprivation had fully broken me. I cried harder and for longer than I’d cried about breakups or deaths. I cried myself sick. And eventually, finally, I cried myself to sleep.

35°48’09.2″N 138°18’43.7″E

In sleep, our world balloons endlessly as our dreams spin fibers of imagination into vast tapestries of otherness. These are dotted with peculiar structures of meaning, the significance of which flees quickly upon sleep’s end.

There is a liminal space between wakefulness and sleep that flickers into existence to temporarily bridge the two worlds. A door opens to the waking world, and the sleeping world begins to leak out, slow and fast all at once, like a somnolent, ground-hugging cloud.

These clouds expand rapidly into the conscious mind before contracting, pulling tracts of the real world into the ether. Later on, the doors may open again, affording us a keyhole view of the conscious world through a heavy fog.

I sometimes find myself partly awake in the dead of the night. The physical space around me is distorted, stretched into impossible proportions. My girlfriend, while only centimeters away in our small futon, seems impossibly far.

A great expanse stretches out between us, dark and populated with strange shadows. I worry that she is too far away, and I don’t understand how we wound up in this situation. But then, with great effort, I extend my arm toward her. It elongates into the darkness, stretching across the vast, sleepy valley until it finds her.

I pull her to me and the distance closes until she is finally right there once again, next to me and sleeping peacefully, wholly unaware of either our separation or my struggle to get her back.

35°51’04.9″N 139°39’16.3″E

How many organisms does it take to make a bowl of soup? If it’s miso soup, the answer is usually around nine. Surprised?

Most mornings, I make miso soup for my girlfriend’s breakfast. Quick and easy, I’ve made it a thousand times and could probably do it in my sleep. It seems as uncomplicated as a dish can be, but lurking in the bowl are many stories.

Today’s story: every living thing needed for that bowl of soup.

The soup base is made with konbu (edible kelp, mostly from the family Laminariaceae) and katsuobushi, which are flakes of dried skipjack tuna (Katsuwonus pelamis) shaved so thin they’re translucent. But in to make those, you also need wood to smoke it (which could be oak, pasania, or castanopsis) and Aspergillus glaucus to ferment it.

So that’s four organisms already.

Next, consider the miso paste, which is the other component of the basic soup, as well as a staple throughout Japanese cooking. Made primarily from soybeans (Glycine max), you also need Aspergillus oryzae to ferment them, and a medium on which to initially propagate the fungus. This is usually rice (Oryza sativa) or barley (Hordeum vulgare).

Three more, for seven so far.

So that’s the basic soup, but it nearly always has some solids in it. Thin slices of green onion (Allium fistulosum) are nearly universal, as are the pieces of wakame (Undaria pinnatifida), the tender green seaweed that glides on the currents in your bowl. Finally, some tofu.

This last one is a freebie, as it’s made from soybeans, and we have already counted them. Still, that’s two more. A total of nine organisms required for one supposedly simple bowl of soup.

Everything around us has stories to tell. Even the seemingly mundane elements of everyday life can explode with detail if we give them the attention they deserve and let them speak to us in their own voices.

When I make miso soup early in the morning, sometimes before sunrise, it’s easy to fall into the familiar rhythms of it. Slicing the onion, preparing the broth, and mixing in the miso such that there are no unincorporated lumps. As I cook, I consider every part of it, and for every new way I learn to think about this dish, it tells me new stories.

Even a simple breakfast can reveal the world to you. You just have to listen.

35°51’04.9″N 139°39’16.3″E

Slipping on my hanten¹ and loosely tying the front is now second nature. I barely even notice having done it. I sit on the floor and extend my legs under the skirt of the kotatsu², but do not turn it on. I am warm enough without it. On the edge of the table is a small, battery-powered camping lantern. In my lap, a notebook. In my hand, a fountain pen, the gold nib of which, like the wet lines of ink that trail from its tip, glistens in the lantern’s light.

To my right, a sleeping cat. He stirred briefly when I sat down, blinking slowly as he evaluated me, before settling in again. His right front leg is extended toward me. His soft little paw, with the tufts of fur between the toes, is just barely touching my leg. The touching is intentional, I am sure.

After 90 minutes of reading and no sleep, I came out here to write. Though I would prefer sleep, I am glad, at least, to enjoy this special quiet that only exists in the dead of the night.

The only sounds I hear are the noise of the pen on the paper and the cat’s occasional long, happy exhalations as he sinks comfortably into a freshly adjusted position, continuing to sleep more happily than I think I ever will.

35°51’04.9″N 139°39’16.3″E

About thirty years. That’s the average lifespan of a house in Japan. The day a new home is finished is the day it begins depreciating. Within twenty years or so, the value of the structure will be zero¹.

Houses are essentially viewed as disposable², and the market for used houses is virtually nonexistent.

In cities, where demand for housing is high, there is a pattern of demolition and rebuilding. Property prices can be extremely high, and people also want to minimize their tax liability, so a site formerly occupied by a single house is commonly divided into three or four plots, on each of which will be built a tall, narrow house.

Within three blocks of my apartment, I can think of at least twenty houses that have been demolished in the three years that I’ve lived here. Every house that’s disappeared has been in perfectly good condition. Every one of them was replaced with multiple new houses crowded into the same lot.

Outside the cities, though, huge numbers of houses sit vacant. Some are simply abandoned, while others are still owned by the families of deceased relatives who are unsure what to do with them. Others still are owned by municipalities and are available for sale, but would-be home buyers are largely uninterested.

A few months back, we spent a weekend in Yokosuka, a city on the Miura Peninsula in Kanagawa Prefecture. There, the hills were littered with empty houses. We met a local photographer who had bought one of these houses from the city for about a million yen³ and restored it himself. He was kind enough to give us a tour. It was the most comfortable and charming home I’ve ever entered in Japan.

For us, it was an inspiration. We are planning our exodus.

Perhaps to Yokosuka, or maybe to Hanno, Sayama, or Chichibu. Maybe to somewhere near Kawagoe or to Komoro.

If I changed jobs and worked myself nearly to death, it’s possible we could eventually buy a house in or near to Tokyo. One of those bland new structures on a postage-stamp lot with a forty-year mortgage.

Or, we could start our own small businesses, buy one of these older houses in the relative countryside for next to nothing, and build our lives there.

I find this to be a simple choice to make.

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35°39’43.8156″N 139°43’53.2128″E

Yesterday was my last day of work at the English-teaching Job I’ve had since May 2015. Or, it would have been, had they given me any classes. Instead, I got my farewell, a final middle finger, in the form of an empty schedule.

Over the last year, while COVID-19 gutted class volume, a lot of my work days were marked EDO on the daily schedule emails I receive. This stands for emergency day off, the company’s shorthand for “we don’t have any classes for you, so you can stay home and content yourself with 60% of your normal pay.”

I get it. The pandemic has been awful for business. There simply haven’t been enough classes to go around. I’m glad they could at least pay the 60% on the days when they couldn’t supply us with enough work.

But I also know that they wouldn’t even offer us that if they weren’t legally obliged. They already pay teachers the lowest they legally can, after all.

I should have left years ago, but I didn’t. The similarities between working for that company for so long and staying in previous, emotionally abusive romantic relationships are notable. I’m glad I’m done with that place, but feel a fool for having stayed so long.

When my schedule for February 4 arrived marked EDO, it felt like a parting shot. It never mattered that I worked there, least of all in the end.

I’d like to have said goodbye to my friends, though.

35°44’6.4032″N, 139°37’11.2764″E

It’s like an impossibly large machine has just switched on, far enough away that the actual noise of it is gone, but the low rumble of its vibrations carry through the ground and into your body.

When it happens, you’re not sure whether you’re feeling it or hearing it. Somehow, it’s both, and it’s building.

This doesn’t last very long—only a second or two—and then the shaking begins.

The building’s wooden frame groans and chatters as it shifts abruptly. The drinking glasses on the shelf clink together rhythmically, and the water in the cat’s dish sloshes gently against the sides. The light above the table swings pendulously, its cord squeaking in the socket. Below it, the cup full of chopsticks rattles.

When the movement subsides, the apartment resumes its former hush, and the soundscape returns to ordinary patterns with the neighbor’s water heater cycling on and the cat begging for food, unimpressed by the quake.

35°43’37.2144″N, 139°36’52.6752″E

When we no longer need something, we stop paying attention to it. And when we stop paying attention to it, it begins to fade out in our active awareness. In time, it may become wholly invisible, transparent to the point of vanishing, despite not having actually changed.

This is a sort of inattentional blindness on the part of the observer.

With phones in the pockets of nearly everyone now, pay phones are vestigial organs of the urban organism. They’re tools of communication set fast in place, left over from a time before telephones learned to grow legs and walk around.

But in Japan, even in 2021, there are many more pay phones around than you’d expect, and their apparent quantity balloons wildly once you pay attention to them.

In 2015, I took a picture of a telephone booth in a small park near my old apartment. I liked the way its glow illuminated the tree next to it.

After I developed the film and finished the image, it occupied my mind persistently. It compelled me to seek out and photograph other phone booths with regularity.

I’m still photographing them. Every time I see one I like, no matter where I am, I take a picture with my phone and save the location for reference, with the sincere hope that I’ll be able to return later with a tripod and proper camera.

When I talk about this fascination with people in Japan, they’re surprised I can find any to photograph. I haven’t seen one in years, they’ll say, just before I point out the one in front of the building that they’ve walked past dozens of times.

After these conversations, I’ve had some people remark that they’ve begun to see phone booths everywhere they go. They say this with some amount of amazement, as if I’d caused phone booths to sprout like bamboo shoots back into the world.

If thousands of telephone booths can go from invisible to everywhere without actually changing, just imagine what else we’re not seeing, simply because we’ve never thought to look for it.

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To see images from my ongoing personal project photographing telephone booths, please see the gallery on my main site: Fade Out (davidrmunson.com).

35°47’20.709″N, 139°9’20.0124″E

Normally, this road would be busy with weekend visitors, but today it feels as if we have the mountain nearly to ourselves. For this, I can thank the weather.

The canopy of the forest is dense and the understory only sparsely populated with smaller plants. Even on a sunny day, this place would be fairly dark. And on this day, thick cloud has encased the mountain, filling the space between the trees with a heavy fog that eats up light and sound. It is a murky, dimly lit world where trees recede into an indistinct distance and the forest is holding its breath.

Halfway up the mountain road, we stop to take a rest. We are surrounded by cedar trees large enough that we’d need a third person if we wanted to put our arms all the way around the trunks.

On the top of this mountain, there is a shrine that’s been there for centuries and has a history much older than the buildings themselves. It’s one of the rare place where they practice futomani, an ancient form of divination. Thought to go back to the Jomon period, it involves heating the shoulder blade of a stag until it cracks, and reading the lines thus created.

Farther down the mountain, there are neither ancient shrines nor burnt stag bones. There are only the massive trees, the road, and the two of us, feeling tiny amongst towering cedars, cloaked in silence.

35°51’12.0″N 139°39’18.8″E

There are many rabbits in this place. It is a shrine dominated by them. Some of them are doing jobs more commonly held by foxes or lion-dogs, while others hide in corners of carvings or sit under shelters, relaxing in their old age.

A family of rabbits stands guard at the entrance, flanking the path and keeping watch from above. Another, much larger rabbit sits patiently above a carved stone trough filled with cold, clear water.

The water that flows from this rabbit’s mouth is used to cleanse and purify. Early in the morning, when most people are still asleep, the shrine is hushed, and the flow of the water joins the rustle of the trees to gently fill the air with sound.

Every day, people come to be purified with this water and to pray. On some days, only a few dozen come. On festival days, throngs of thousands too numerous to count crowd and jostle one another.

One by one, they pick up long-handled dippers and scoop water from the trough. They rinse their hands and their mouths with it, before continuing on to the worship hall to pray.

At every hour, by daylight and starlight alike, the rabbits watch over this place. Humans come and go, and appear to run the shrine, but in the end it belongs to the rabbits.

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The shrine near my apartment is Tsuki Shrine, or Tsuki Jinja. Though written with different kanji, this tsuki (調)and the word for moon (月) are homophones. Japanese folklore includes the story of the rabbit in the moon, which (as best I can tell) is how this shrine wound up with rabbits instead of the much more common foxes or dogs. It is my favorite shrine, and the rabbits are one of my favorite things about it.

The featured image of this post is available as a print. Get a 50% discount off list price with the code “SOMEWHERE” at checkout.

35º44”57.27’N 139º44”44.45’E

1. Lifting

If a train is crowded enough, there can be a phenomenal amount of physical pressure exerted on standing passengers. On three different occasions, my feet have lost contact with the floor of a train due to the pressure of the shifting mass of bodies as we rounded a curve.

2. Commuting in Parallel

In Tokyo, there are often trains running on parallel tracks. At times, you can see clearly into the next train as it runs next to yours at the same speed, just a few meters away. You sometimes make eye contact or notice interesting things about the strangers in the other train as they look back at you. Nobody ever waves.

3. Flipped Relationships

Sometimes I can’t quite make it to my desired car on the train before the doors close, so I get on and begin walking down the length of the train on the inside. If I’m walking opposite the direction the train is travelling, there is a brief moment when it begins moving that I am walking forward but the platform out the window seems stationary, giving the curious sensation that the floor is travelling beneath me, rather than me travelling across it.

4. The Mountain

From where I live in Saitama Prefecture, Mt Fuji is sometimes visible. You need clear weather, though, and you need an elevated position. Most of the time, if I can glimpse the mountain, it’s from the train as I commute into Tokyo. I consider a clear sighting as a good omen for the day.

35°51’13.2228″N 139°39’23.529″E

There is a bench that I think of as my bench, in a park that I think of as my park. If I am not at home, not at work, and not walking around, there’s a good chance I’m sitting on my bench.

I first visited the park nearly six years ago, on the day I moved to Japan. A friend brought there me to join an evening cherry-blossom party. Several years later, when I moved from Tokyo to Saitama, I realized happily that it was only a two-minute walk from my new home.

I go there nearly every day, whether to read, to write, or just sit and let the world do what it will as I watch. It does a lot, but what I most enjoy in the park is to see the different categories of people who cycle through the park as the day progresses.

Retirees do calisthenics in groups early every morning. Preschool classes and mothers with young children arrive in the mid-morning or early afternoon, playing cheerfully and sprinting across the open spaces with glee.

Dogs and their humans congregate in the early evening. In the late evening, couples and exhausted office workers alike steal a few quiet moments before heading home.

You’re apt to find me there at any time when I don’t have good reason to be anywhere else. Usually, I’ll have with me something to read, a notebook, and a pen, though sometimes they just sit by my side. The park is diversion enough on its own.

35°44’22.8768″N 139°36’15.6708″E

The last Saturday of May 2016. It is after midnight, and the two sounds most prominent to me in this moment are the hum of narrow, high-pressure tires on smooth asphalt and the soughing of the balmy, late-spring air flowing gently past my ears. I am keenly aware of the hush of my surroundings as I roll slowly, meanderingly through my neighborhood in the dead of the night.

Back in university, as a visualization to help me focus on my goal of living in Japan, I imagined and wrote a scenario very similar to this. The bicycle is a bit different, owing to a decade of evolving tastes, and I’m in Nerima rather than Shinjuku, but the impulse and action at the heart of it are the same.

In the right circumstances, riding a bicycle may become trancelike. The machine below you becomes a transparent conduit for a singular physical experience that is something like a flow state.

For me, this means riding late at night when the streets are empty. This means riding at a deliberately slow speed. And finally, this means doing so on a track bike.

One gear, so no shifting. No freewheel, so no coasting. Your legs are how you go and how you slow. It is the simplest, most direct experience available on two wheels.

I have no destination, just an urge to be in motion. I follow no particular route, though I nearly always turn in the direction of any cats I see crossing the street. I stick to the smallest, quietest roads I can find and continue until the urge to move transitions into an urge to be still.

On this night, I eventually find myself lying still on a park bench just a short distance from my apartment, watching the daphne-scented wind blow a zelkova’s branches to and fro, showing and hiding Orion’s belt behind fresh spring leaves.

35°51’04.9″N 139°39’16.3″E

I need faster shoes. Not shoes that make me faster at running or anything like that, but shoes that are faster to put on and (especially) to take off. Living in Japan, I often have to remove my shoes, and if you’re waiting for me, I feel bad for you.

Part of the problem is that my manual dexterity goes out the window when untying shoes under pressure. It’s as if my hands turn into clumsy, Johnny Tremain fleshmittens and perfectly normal knots go all Gordian for no apparent reason.

If I enter the apartment before my girlfriend, for example, she is left to stand there watching me fumble in the entryway under duress until I give up and just pry off my still-tied shoes.

On top of that, I rarely remember to untie them after taking them off, so the awkwardness of waiting on shoelace bungling is simply delayed until departure time, often with the additional pressure of having a train to catch (for which I’m already at risk of being late).

I have one pair of slip-on shoes and some sandals, but those will only get me so far in daily life. I’ve considered replacing the laces on some shoes with elastic to affect a sort of slip-on conversion, but I’ve had this idea for years and I still haven’t done it.

Loafers are theoretically an option, or at least would be, if they weren’t clearly outside my sartorial Overton window.

Boots that zip are automatically out, as well. Much as I dislike being awkward and slow, it’s still better than accepting any shoe with a zipper, a feature no shoe should have.

I think about this intensely, but only in the moment, forgetting about it soon after entering my apartment. There are solutions, but they require going to the store, and right now I don’t feel like putting on shoes.

35°44’37.84″N 139°36’48.89″E

If ghosts exist, I am likely in their midst, sitting as I am between the main hall of a seventeenth-century Buddhist temple and the large cemetery just next to it. If they’re here, though, they’re not letting on.

The ghostliest things here are the plum blossoms, which I know aren’t glowing, but all the same somehow seem to be transmitting from within the moonlight falling on them from above. Behind them, everything recedes quickly into blackness. And in front of them, the stone pavers of the walkway shine clearly.

I have been sitting here in the darkness, in the dead of night, for about thirty minutes now. There are no lights on anywhere nearby, and most of the ambient light is coming from the moon. I knew where to sit and could find the place easily enough, despite the darkness, because I had made a plan in daylight to visit these blossoms on a clear night if I could.

Our eyes will adapt much better to very low light than we might expect. They need time, is all.

After 10 minutes in the dark, I could already make out my surroundings more clearly. Now, after half an hour, what I see before me seems much more like a painting than the material world I know it to be.

Moonlit surfaces reveal contours of temple buildings that I had never noticed in daylight. The stone lanterns and statues lining the path seem poised to come alive.

The trees rustle quietly in the cold breeze and sway ever so slightly, whispering something I am not wise enough to understand. Or maybe I simply don’t know the language. It’s entirely possible that they are murmuring with the nearby dead.

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NB: If you like this post’s image, you can buy a print of it here. Use code “awesome” for 40% off at checkout.