Stranger in a Strange Land

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I realize now that this is my home in incidental ways: I can tell when the trees in the park are going to change color, and when the vending machines will change their offerings from hot to iced. I know when my girlfriend will bring out the winter futons from the cupboard, and when her daughter will change her school uniform from white to blue. I read Thoreau on sunny Sunday mornings, as hymns float over from the nearby Baptist church, and think that in our mongrel, mixed-up planet, this may be as close to the calm and clarity of Walden as one can find.

One midsummer day last year, I took Hiroko to Kyoto on the final day of Obon, the traditional holiday in August when faithful Japanese return to their hometowns to pay respects to their departed ancestors--and when the departed ones themselves are believed to return to earth for three days. It is a time of solemn obsequies and traffic jams, as Kyoto comes alive with ghosts and lights.

Heading toward the eastern hills, the two of us walked along a broad avenue of trees, through a receiving line of lanterns. Old, old men walked past in kimonos, half-doubled over, to visit loved ones at their gravestones. Cicadas buzzed, and lanterns began to glow as the sky darkened. We followed the old men through a small entranceway and emerged in a world of shining lanterns as far as we could see, all across the slope above us, zigzagging toward the heavens. Below, at our feet, were the lights of the modern city, cacophonous, fluorescent, a distant hum; above us, stretching toward the heavens, was one shivering sea of golden lights. Then we walked back into town and dined on a summer platform along the Kamo River, while five great bonfires were lit up along the northern and eastern hills, spelling out a Chinese character.

That night I fell into a deep sleep and dreamed myself in a country house in England. Only a few other people were there: some flop-haired schoolboys, a woman who had been kind to me in my youth--and Hiroko. It was a lazy Sunday morning; we were reading the papers and making the occasional witticism. Once we went for a walk in green hills, encircled in mist; once I asked something about Egypt before the war. Somewhere Lou Reed played 'Heroin.' A few half-familiar figures drifted about--the unremarkable languor of a country weekend.

But something in this unexceptional scene felt absolutely right. I couldn't find the words, but as I slept I heard myself saying of the everyday English scene, 'This is my home. This is where I belong. Usually I'm not very sociable, but this is me. This'--the large red-brick houses, the gray afternoons, the musty light and dullness, the sense of nothing special going on--'is who I am.' Words I never thought to say in waking life. But here, suddenly, I could not only feel and see all the days of my childhood, but also taste them, and be inside them, in this distant science fiction land on the night when departed spirits find their way home.

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