Land of the Rising Sun

by Miranda Moure (United States of America)

I didn't expect to find Japan

"Of course you're here," he said, "where else would I find you?" Ryan and I are sitting on the last two stools of a seven-stool bar in Tokyo. The lights are dim, and both of us are smoking Japanese cigarettes though neither of us should be. Down the stairs and outside is one of six narrow, electrical-cable strewn alleyways of Golden Gai. Beyond that is the brash of neon, the stories-tall billboards, the millions of people headed in and out of the busiest train stop in the world: Shinjuku. I crossed the neighborhood on foot to come here. Having only been in Tokyo less than a day, I wove through the unfamiliar streets dwarfed by futuristic skyscrapers, unsure I was heading in the right direction. But when I arrived, finally crossed the path into this tiny district, it felt like stepping back in time. Golden Gai has yet escaped the post-war revivification of Tokyo due to uproar by its longtime residents, and each tiny saloon is stacked on top of each other and sandwiched in so tightly that it can be hard to discern one from the next. Many of the bars here have been around for 50 years or more, and there are over 200 of them though the entire district is but a few square blocks. Having been popularized in the west, hordes of tourists have descended upon this place for the past several years, and the bartender likely sees us as no different. We are, to him, just one more American, one more Australian, precisely like the thousands of us that must climb his steps every year now to sit at one of his seven stools. "I'm sorry," Ryan says, just over a whisper, "I'm so sorry for everything." He shakes his head, defeated. We haven't seen each other in seven years since we said our goodbyes under the transom of his front door in Melbourne. I vowed to return, but days after reaching New York, he had begun to behave as if my promise wasn't enough. At the bar, we are drinking our dry Japanese lagers; our memories are folding into one another while the city outside seems to disappear. We’re drinking pint after pint, like we might have all those years ago, together in Australia. We remark on how unlikely it is to have found each other here, of all places, at this tiny bar among hundreds in the biggest metropolis in the whole of the world. We know that despite what our surroundings would suggest that we can't go back in time, so we try as best we can to get all of the past out of the way to make room for something else. We don’t yet know that he will walk me home. That together we will wander about in the cacophonous mob of Shibuya on Halloween and ride the Shinkansen past Mt. Fugi. We don’t yet know how we will only part several days later in Kyoto at a more substantial bar, though at a similar wee hour, when he will announce that he must finally leave. We don't yet know that the last thing I'll say to him, just as I had seven years ago, will be: "you are the best thing to surprise me this year." We don’t even yet realize how swiftly dawn can come in its namesake nation when you are busy spanning a seven-year distance, and that we must soon lift from our stools and head out into the kawaii glow of the still busy streets. All we know now, though neither of us has said it, is that once we leave, we will only ever be whatever new iteration we have decided here together. So for now, I drink my pint and imagine that when we do descend those narrow stairs that it won’t be the last time that I see him, that we will have a chance to step into our new future delicately. I hope that even when we are again awash in the hedonistic lights of Shinjuku, that we will be armed with something so familiar that it will point us in the right direction.