the kyoto notebooks
Kyoto. March 14, 2011.
The cherry blossoms started three days ago. Just a few at first — a scattering along the canal near Philosopher's Path, like someone had dropped something fragile and kept walking. Now they're everywhere. The trees look like they're burning from the inside, each branch holding its own small, white fire.
I sat in a café in Higashiyama this morning. Three coffees. Two hours. I opened the notebook and wrote: "Tima liked toast cut into triangles."
Then I closed the notebook and watched the light move across the table.
That's the thing about writing. Everyone thinks the hard part is finding the words. The hard part is finding the person who writes them.
---
He had not planned to come to Japan.
The plan — if the formless drift of a man in freefall could be called a plan — had been Sweden. Östersund. A return to the place he'd left as a boy, which was not the same as a return home, because home was a stone cottage on a hill above a valley in Wales where the fairy lights were still on in a small room and the sheets were still tucked and the door was unlocked because Peter had promised: the door doesn't lock.
But before Sweden, and before Japan, and before the airports and the ferries and the trains that carried him further from the cottage with every passing hour, there was the funeral.
He dreamed it still.
Dreamed it more clearly than he'd lived it, because living it had required a dissociation so complete that his body had attended while his mind stayed in the chair — the woven-string chair beside the bed, the chair where he'd fallen asleep to the sound of her breathing, the chair where he'd woken to the sound of its absence.
---
The funeral was held in the small chapel outside Risca, on a Tuesday in May.
He knew it was May because Peter told him. He knew it was Tuesday because Peter told him that too. Peter told him most things in those weeks — the day, the time, the reason it was necessary to stand up, to dress, to eat the triangle of toast that appeared on the plate each morning, cut the way she'd liked it, because Peter's hands remembered even when Peter's heart was breaking.
The coffin was small.
Papa could not think about the coffin. He could not hold the word and look at the object and connect them. The word was for furniture, for storage, for things that held other things. The object in the chapel was not furniture. The object was an impossibility — a wooden container the size of a child because it held a child, his child, the child he had been three feet from when the world ended without making a sound.
Peter stood beside him. Peter, whose face had aged ten years in three weeks. Peter, who had identified remains before and buried a cousin before and carried a fire-iron of grief through every day since and who was now standing in a chapel holding the second funeral that had no right to exist. Peter stood the way he always stood — solid, planted, his weight distributed, his hands at his sides — but today there was a tremor in his jaw, a micro-frequency vibration that betrayed the fact that the bridge was bearing more weight than it had been built for.
Steph was on Papa's other side. She held his arm the way you hold someone who might fall through the floor — not tightly, not loosely, but with the precise pressure that says: I am here and I will not let you go.
Eira was with a neighbour. Steph had decided that Eira should not see the coffin, should not stand in a room whose gravity was too heavy for a five-year-old's understanding. Papa agreed, though agreeing required a cognitive function he was no longer certain he possessed. He was operating on something lower than cognition — something cellular, something that knew how to nod and stand and breathe even when the person doing those things had vacated the premises.
The vicar spoke. The same vicar who served the valley, who had christened babies and married couples and buried old men in this same chapel for three decades. He used words like light and joy and taken from us too soon, and each word landed on Papa like a stone placed on his chest, carefully, methodically, as if the service were a cairn being built on top of him and the vicar was laying each rock with the gentle, terrible competence of a man who did this for a living.
There were people. Valley people. The woman from the post office who had always kept a lollipop behind the counter for Tima. Gwyn from the garage, in a suit that didn't fit, his hands enormous and clean in a way they never usually were. Two teachers from the daycare in Ty Sign — young women in dark coats, their faces holding the particular grief of people who had loved a child professionally and were now standing in the wreckage of that love. James came. He stood at the back with his cap in his hands and he didn't speak and his red-rimmed eyes said everything his mouth could not.
The chapel was small and the people filled it and the coffin was at the front and the light came through the coloured glass in panels of blue and gold that fell across the stone floor like offerings, and somewhere beneath all of it — beneath the hymns and the readings and the murmured condolences — Papa could hear, or believed he could hear, the faint distant sound of the valley breathing outside. The hills. The canal. The river. The world turning on its axis without pausing, without slowing, without acknowledging that a girl named Tima had been removed from it and that the removal had left a hole in the shape of everything.
After the service, people stood in the chapel yard and spoke quietly and held their coats against the May wind. Someone — he would never remember who — put a cup of tea in his hand. He held it without drinking. The steam rose and dispersed. People approached and said things. Kind things, probably. True things, possibly. He heard the vowel sounds without the consonants, the shapes of sentences without their meaning, the way you hear a language you once spoke but have since forgotten.
Peter stayed beside him. Peter, who intercepted the conversations when they lasted too long, who steered people away with the diplomatic skill of a man who understood that the bereaved have a finite capacity for being witnessed. Peter, who at one point stood with his back to the chapel wall and looked up at the sky and closed his eyes for three seconds — exactly three seconds, Papa counted them — before opening his eyes and returning to the work of holding the world together.
Steph drove them home. Peter sat in the front. Papa sat in the back, in the seat where Tima always sat, with Hoppy on his lap — Hoppy, who had been on the pillow and was now in Papa's hands and would not leave his hands for months and months, the plush hippopotamus becoming a talisman, a relic, the stitched and faded proof that a small girlz had existed and had loved a small hippo and that both things were true even though one of them was no longer present to confirm it.
The cottage was cold when they arrived. The fire had not been lit. The fairy lights were on upstairs — still on, always on, no one could turn them off — and the kitchen held the smell of flowers that Steph had arranged on the table before the service, already deepening toward the sweet, thick scent of their own dying.
Papa went upstairs. He sat in the chair. He held Hoppy. The sheets were still tucked. The plushies were still in their positions. The room was exactly as it had been, and it would stay exactly as it was, and the fairy lights would keep burning until the bulbs died because no one — not Papa, not Peter, not Steph, not time itself — could bear to reach across and switch them off.
---
He had tried to tell his grandmother.
Three days after the waking — or four, or five; the days had lost their edges, each one running into the next like watercolour left in the rain — Peter had put the phone in his hand.
"Your grandmother, boy," Peter said quietly. "She should know."
Nain. Åsa. The woman in the red wooden house in Odensala with the garden that sloped down to the meadow and the kitchen that always smelled of cardamom and coffee. The woman who had woven crowns of wildflowers with Tima's small, clumsy fingers helping. The woman who had held Tima on her knee and sung Byssan lul in a voice that sounded like the inside of a forest. The woman who had given Tima a smooth white stone from the shore of Storsjön and said: Bär den nära hjärtat. Carry it close to your heart.
The only blood relative who had ever met his daughter. The only one who had wanted to.
Papa dialled the number. The Swedish country code. The area code. The number he'd known since childhood — the number of the house where summer had always meant something, where the light lasted past midnight and the lake held the sky in its open palm and his grandmother's hands moved with the certainty of a woman who had planted things and watched them grow and understood that growing was not the same as surviving.
She answered on the third ring.
"Hallå?"
Her voice. Warm, slightly breathless, the voice of a woman in her seventies who still walked to the letterbox at the end of the drive every morning because routine was a form of prayer and prayer was a form of continuing.
"Nain," he said.
The word — not the Swedish mormor but the Welsh word he'd learned in the valley, the word Tima had used, the word that carried both languages and both worlds in its two syllables — sat in his mouth and behind it was a door, and behind the door was everything, and he could not open the door because opening it would let everything out and everything was too large for a phone line, too large for language, too large for the small kitchen where he stood with Peter's hand on his shoulder and the kettle cooling on the counter.
"Eric?" She used his given name. Not Papa. "Eric, vad är det?"
What is it.
He told her.
He didn't know how. The words came in a language that was neither Swedish nor English but something broken between them — fragments, splinters, the wreckage of two vocabularies that had each built their own version of the word daughter and now had to dismantle those versions and stack the rubble into something that resembled the word gone. Tima. The chair. The breathing. The silence. He heard his own voice from the outside and did not recognise it — a voice stripped of register, of tone, of the warmth that made it his, reduced to the mechanical function of transmitting information that should not exist.
His grandmother made a sound. A small, exact sound — the sound of something inside her cracking along a line she had not known was there. Then she cried. Quietly, in the manner of her generation — Swedish women of a certain age who had been taught that tears were private weather, not to be broadcast. But this was not a broadcast. This was her great-granddaughter. This was the child she had held and fed and walked through forests with and placed a white stone in her palm as if the stone were a promise and promises could outlast the people who made them.
"Jag kommer," she said. I'm coming.
She didn't come. She was old now, older then when he and her had visited Paris all those ywars back, and the journey involved trains and a ferry and a bus and the crossing of a bridge over a river that divided two countries, and the body does not always obey the heart. But she meant it. She meant it in a way that was more real than arrival, more present than presence. She meant it the way Peter meant the kettle — not as remedy but as witness. As the refusal to let grief go unanswered.
She sent a letter instead. It arrived three weeks later — thin blue paper, her careful handwriting, the kind of letter that belonged to a generation that understood the weight of a written word. Papa never opened it. It sat on the kitchen table, another artifact, another piece of evidence that the world contained people who loved without condition, and he could not open it because opening it would require being a person who could read, and he had stopped being that person the night the breathing stopped.
Peter opened it. Months later, after Papa had gone. Peter never told him what it said. But Peter's face, after reading it, held an expression Papa had never seen there — a softness, a gratitude, something that looked like the discovery that not all families were made of silence.
---
His mother were a different matter.
She were contacted. Monica handled it, or someone handled it — the logistics of notification were managed in those first weeks by people still capable of managing, and Papa was not capable of anything except sitting in a chair and holding a plush hippo and breathing, and even the breathing felt like a decision he had to make each time, as if the autonomic function had switched to manual and each inhale required deliberate intention.
What he knew was this: she were told. His mother, who lived outside Östersund in the countryside, thirty minutes from town by car.
She did not come to the funeral.
She did not call.
She did not send a letter on thin blue paper or any other kind of paper.
She did not say jag kommer. She did not say anything at all.
The silence was not new.
It was the same silence they had always given — the silence of someone who had produced a child the way a factory produces a unit, with mechanical precision and no particular attachment to the finished product. Papa had left Sweden at seventeen. He had crossed the sea and the bridge and the mountains and had built a life in a language they did not speak, in a country they had never visited, with a girl they had never met, for a child they had never once acknowledged as real. He had sent photographs. He had sent emails with subject lines like Her first steps and She said her first word today — it was "more". He had called on their birthdays — theirs, never his, never hers — and the conversations had the texture of customer service interactions: polite, efficient, and entirely devoid of the thing that separates communication from connection.
That's nice, his mother would say. Good to hear you're doing well. Take care.
Take care. As if care were something you took, like a bus or a pill, and not something you gave, like blood or time or the willingness to drive ten hours to hold a child you've only seen in photographs.
They had never met Tima.
Not because they could not. Because they chose not to.
No, your excuses has no weight here.. not here.
He had invited them. Once, in the early days, when Tima was small and new and the world was bright with the particular optimism of a first-time father who believed — with the gorgeous naivety that is both the privilege and the curse of new parenthood — that a grandchild might bridge the distance a son could not. He had called his mother and said, carefully, like someone placing a cup on the edge of a table: There's someone I'd like you to meet.
And his mother had spoken about the weather. And the cost of flights. And the difficulty of taking time from work. And her words had filled the space where an answer should have been the way foam fills a crack — not filling it, not sealing it, just occupying it temporarily while the structure continued to settle.
The answer was no. It had always been no. It would always be no.
To be honest — and Papa had been many things but honest, even with himself, especially with himself — he had stopped thinking of his parents as parents years ago. They were not parents. Parents was a word that described Peter, who had given up his bedroom and his solitude and his quiet life in a stone cottage for a pregnant teenager and a Swedish boy with no money and no plan. Parents was a word that described Steph, who showed up with casseroles and nappies and the unshakeable conviction that no one in her radius would be allowed to fall without someone catching them. Parents was a word that described even Gwyn from the garage, who sent a card every Christmas addressed to the wee one and who had once driven up the hill in the rain to deliver a toy he'd found at a car boot sale because it looked like the kind of thing a clever girl would like.
His parents were not parents. They were a biological fact. A gene sequence. The mechanics that preceded the life, the runway before the flight. He had been born from them the way a stone is born from a mountain — through erosion, through pressure, through the slow geological violence of forces that have no interest in the thing they produce.
Their silence after Tima's death was indistinguishable from their silence before it.
That was the cruelty — not the silence itself, but its consistency. The knowledge that the largest event of Papa's life, the most devastating rupture a human being can endure, had passed through his mothers' world the way light passes through glass: without resistance, without refraction, without leaving any evidence of its passage.
---
Kyoto. March 18, 2011.
There was an earthquake a week ago. Not here — up north, Tōhoku, the coast. The news is constant and terrible. Tsunami footage on every screen in every konbini and every guesthouse lobby. Entire towns erased. There's a number — a body count — that keeps climbing, and people speak it in hushed voices, and the number is enormous and real and I cannot feel it because I have already spent every unit of feeling I possess on a number so small it is barely a number at all.
One.
The woman at the guesthouse asked if I wanted to leave. Go home. Go back to Sweden. She used the word 危険 — kiken — dangerous. She meant the aftershocks, the radiation, the trains that weren't running.
I said no.
She looked at me the way people look at someone who has stopped making sense, which I suppose I have.
I don't know how to explain that I've already survived the worst earthquake. That the ground has already opened. That I've already fallen through. That the aftershocks never stop — they just get quiet enough that you can sit in a café and order coffee and open a notebook and pretend to be a person who writes things instead of a person who was three feet away when the breathing stopped.
The blossoms keep falling. The earth keeps shaking. I keep sitting here with this notebook and Peter's pen. Blue ink. Cheap. Post office pen. I found it in the side pocket of my bag in Tokyo, wrapped in a receipt from Tesco, his handwriting on the back: "Write it down, boy. Whatever it is. Write it down."
I'm trying, Peter. I'm trying.
---
Östersund arrived the way stations arrive when you have been traveling without attending to the travel — suddenly, without warning, the platform appearing outside the window like a fact you had forgotten and were now being reminded of. Papa stood and gathered his bag — the one bag, the same rucksack he'd carried out of the cottage, Hoppy inside, the phone inside and turned off, the clothes he'd worn for two days — and stepped onto the platform and the air hit him.
Swedish air. September air. The particular quality of cold that arrives in northern Sweden at the end of summer, not bitter yet but carrying the promise of bitter, a chill that sits on the surface of things like dew and says: winter is coming and I am its advance party. He knew this air. He had grown up in this air. It had been the first thing he breathed and the last thing he smelled before he left, and now it was the first thing he tasted coming back, and it tasted like iron, like distance, like the ghost of a language he had spoken before he learned to speak.
The station was the same. The small, modest building with its yellow clapboard and the clock that had told the wrong time for as long as anyone could remember. The platform where Nain had waved goodbye when he was seventeen, pressing krona coins into his hand and kissing his forehead, her eyes bright, her hands warm, her voice saying ring mig — call me — as the train pulled away.
He did not go to Odensala.
He could not go to Nain. Not because he didn't want to — every cell in his body wanted to walk through her door, to sit at her kitchen table, to feel her hands on his face, to hear her say his name in the way that only she said it, with the particular tenderness of a woman who had been the only bridge between a boy and a family that had never quite learned how to be one. But going to Nain would mean being held. And being held would mean breaking. And breaking would mean feeling. And feeling was the one thing he could not afford — not yet, not here, not in a country where the silence was the medium through which everything moved and where breaking would produce a sound that no one around him knew how to answer.
His mother's house was the safer option, because his mother's house was safe in the way a void is safe — you cannot fall in a void because there is no ground to fall from.
---
But first he went to the college.
Primrose... That was the name of the place.. Not unlike the flower he loved more then anything in the world. The campus sat on the hill above the lake, its old houses mixed in with the modern buildings — glass and concrete and the particular Scandinavian aesthetic of function masquerading as beauty — arranged in clusters along paths that wound through birch groves. He had studied here. Art and design. Two years before he left, before the ferry and the bridge and the cottage and the girl who drew on the backs of receipts and the man who kept a fire burning and the child who liked toast cut into triangles and red wellies and a plush hippo named Hoppy and the world that built itself around those things, stone by stone, until it was a fortress, until it was a home, until it was the only place that mattered.
He walked the corridors. The art studios were open — he could see through the glass doors: easels, canvases, the familiar smell of turpentine and linseed that is the same in every art building in every country, the universal solvent of creative ambition. Students moved through the halls — young, purposeful, carrying portfolios and coffee cups and the particular energy of people who believe they are building something that will outlast their youth.
He had been one of them. He had been exactly one of them, standing in exactly these corridors with exactly that coffee and exactly that belief, and then he had met a girl online — MSN Messenger, late nights, the cursor blinking, her words appearing letter by letter as if the universe were dictating them — and everything had changed. Not gradually. Not in stages. All at once, the way a key turns in a lock and the door opens and you step through and the room on the other side is nothing like the room you left.
He stood in the corridor outside the studio where he used to paint — oils, mostly, large-scale landscapes that his tutor had called "emotionally ambitious but technically hesitant" — and he looked through the glass at the easels and the students and the light falling through the high windows, and he felt nothing. Not sadness, not nostalgia, not the bittersweet ache of a path not taken. Nothing. The emotional equivalent of white noise. The place where feelings should have been, replaced by a static that was neither pleasant nor unpleasant but simply present, filling the space the way air fills a room — invisibly, completely, without asking permission.
He left the campus and walked down the hill toward the lake.
Storsjön lay in the September light like a held breath — enormous, grey-blue, still in the way that large bodies of water are still, which is not stillness at all but rather a movement so large and so slow that it registers as rest. The lake had been there before the town, before the people, before the language. It would be there after all of them. Papa stood on the shore and looked at the water and thought of Tima standing on this same shore — not this exact spot but nearby, at the picnic place in Odensala — pointing at the lake with her small, decisive finger and saying det är stort, it's big, in the Swedish she'd picked up from Nain like a bird picking up seeds, naturally, without effort, as if language were something you found on the ground and put in your pocket.
The memory arrived without warning and without mercy. It entered him the way a knife enters a body — not from the outside but from the inside, the blade having been there all along, waiting for the angle to shift, the pressure to change, the moment of inattention that allowed it to bury itself to the hilt.
He turned from the lake and walked to the bus stop.
---
His mother's house sat on the edge of a village thirty minutes south of Östersund, where the farmland opened into the broad, flat expanses that characterised the southern part of Jämtland — fields of rye and barley squared off by wooden fences, red barns set back from the road, the particular Swedish pastoral that looks, from a distance, like a watercolour someone has painted to illustrate the concept of lagom: not too much, not too little, the correct amount of everything, including silence.
She met him at the door. His mother. A woman in her fifties whose face Papa saw in mirrors and whose temperament he did not recognise in anything he'd ever felt. She was tidy. That was the word that came closest. Tidy in appearance, tidy in manner, tidy in the way she arranged her emotions on the shelf of herself — each one wrapped in tissue paper and stored in its proper place, never opened, never displayed, never permitted to occupy the living spaces.
"Eric," she said.
Not a question. Not a greeting, exactly. A confirmation. Yes, this is the name. Yes, this is the person. Yes, they are standing on the doorstep. Proceed.
"Hej, Mamma," he said.
She stepped aside. He entered. The house smelled of cleaning products and the faint, starchy scent of potatoes that had been boiled earlier. The hallway was immaculate — coats hung, shoes aligned, a small side table holding a phone and a notepad and a pen arranged in parallel. The walls were bare except for two photographs: one of a sunset over a lake, purchased from a furniture shop, and one of a family he barely recognised — himself at twelve, gap-toothed and squinting, standing between two adults whose expressions conveyed the impression that the photograph was an obligation they had consented to but did not endorse.
Her partner — Lars, or Leif, or one of the monosyllabic Swedish names that conjured quiet men in cable-knit jumpers — appeared from the kitchen. He shook Papa's hand. The handshake was brief and appropriate and conveyed nothing beyond the recognition that handshakes were what you did when someone arrived at your house after a year of not visiting, even when that someone was the son of the woman you lived with and even when that someone had just buried his three-year-old daughter in a Welsh valley eight thousand kilometres away.
"How was the journey?" his mother asked.
The journey. As if the relevant journey were the train from Stockholm, and not the one that had brought him here — the months-long freefall from the chair to the floor to the fog to the station where Peter had held him and said the door doesn't lock and he had boarded a train carrying nothing but a rucksack and a hippo and the dead weight of everything he could not put down.
"Fine," Papa said.
"Good," his mother said. "Your room is upstairs. The left. I've put towels on the bed."
Towels on the bed. His daughter was in the ground in Risca and his mother had put towels on the bed. The gesture was so precisely, so perfectly calibrated to the frequency of her care — a care that expressed itself entirely through linen and logistics and the correct placement of domestic objects — that Papa felt something shift inside him. Not anger. Not yet. Something pre-anger. The tectonic movement that precedes the earthquake but does not yet produce it.
He carried his bag upstairs. The room was small and clean and white. White walls, white curtains, white duvet. A single bed pushed against the wall beneath a window that looked out over the fields. The light was the long, sideways light of Swedish September, lying across the floor in pale strips that would grow shorter each day until the darkness ate them entirely.
He sat on the bed and put the rucksack beside him and unzipped it and took out Hoppy. The hippo was worn. His stitching showed. One eye was looser than the other, giving him a permanent expression of mild surprise, as if he, too, could not quite believe the trajectory his existence had taken — from a toy shelf in a shop in Newport to a crib in a cottage in Wales to the arms of a girl who had loved him without condition to the rucksack of a man who was carrying him through countries and time zones because the girl was gone and the hippo was the closest thing to her that still existed.
Papa placed Hoppy on the pillow and lay down and stared at the white ceiling and the white walls and the white curtains and he understood, with a clarity that felt like cold water, that his mother had decorated this room the way she had decorated her relationship with him: in white, in blankness, in the careful absence of anything that might require engagement or demand a response.
He slept.
He dreamed of the chair.
---
The weeks at his mother's house had the texture of a held breath — a suspension, a pause in the record of being, where the needle rests in the groove and the music stops but the vinyl keeps turning.
They ate dinner at six-thirty each evening. His mother cooked. The meals were competent and nourishing and entirely without character — potatoes, salmon, a salad with a dressing that tasted of nothing, the bread bought from a shop because homemade bread implied a warmth that this kitchen was not structured to contain. They ate in the silence that his mother had perfected over decades — not uncomfortable, not hostile, not the charged silence of people who have things to say and are choosing not to say them. This was a silence of having nothing to say. A silence born not of restraint but of absence. The interior empty, the exterior smooth, the entire architecture of interaction purged of anything as inconvenient as feeling.
Lars ate with the patient steadiness of a man who had found in this woman's blankness a complement to his own. He occasionally commented on the weather or the state of the road or the performance of the local football team, and his mother responded with the appropriate conversational gestures — mm, ja, så — and the words rose and dissipated without leaving any residue, like steam from the potatoes.
They did not mention Tima.
Not once.
Not on the first evening, not on the second, not on any of the evenings that followed — not by name, not by reference, not by the faintest oblique allusion. They did not ask how he was. They did not ask why he had come. They did not ask about the cottage or Peter or Wales or the funeral or the coffin or the small wooden impossibility that had been lowered into Welsh soil while they ate salmon in Jämtland and discussed the weather.
The silence around Tima's name was so total, so perfectly maintained, that it acquired its own density — a field of gravity, a dark mass at the centre of the house that bent the conversation around it the way a black hole bends light. They talked around it. They moved around it. They arranged their lives and their meals and their domestic routines around the shape of a dead child whose name they would not say, because saying it would require acknowledging that she had existed, and acknowledging that she had existed would require acknowledging that they had chosen not to know her, and acknowledging that they had chosen not to know her would require confronting the possibility that the choice was a failure, and failure was a word that did not exist in their vocabulary because their vocabulary had been purged of everything except the neutral, the functional, the clean.
Papa sat at the table and ate the food and heard the silence and felt the dark mass of his daughter's name pressing against his sternum from the inside, and each evening the pressure increased, and each evening he swallowed it and returned to the white room and lay on the white bed and held Hoppy and dreamed.
---
The nightmares came every night.
They were not imaginative. They were not the baroque, surreal nightmares of a mind inventing new horrors — they were replays. Simple, faithful replays of the same event, projected onto the inside of his eyelids with the clinical precision of a documentary made by someone who hated him.
He was in the chair. The woven strings pressed against his palms. The fairy lights made their small, persistent shadows on the ceiling. He could hear her breathing — the tiny bellows of her lungs, the rhythm he had memorised without meaning to, the way you memorise a song you've heard every night for three years. He watched her sleep. The rise and fall. The duvet moving with it. Hoppy beside her on the pillow, his one loose eye catching the light.
Then the rhythm changed.
Not suddenly. Not dramatically. Just — a skipped beat. A held note. A rest that lasted a fraction too long. And he was waking, in the dream, the way he'd woken in the room, and his body knew before his mind, and his hands were reaching, and her skin was cool — not cold, but cool, the temperature of a body that had been cooling for some time but not long — and he said her name and the name entered the silence and did not come back and he said it again and the fairy lights were still on and the plushies were still in their positions and the fire was dead downstairs and the world was exactly the same and nothing was the same and he was on the floor, he was always on the floor, the sound coming from him that was not a cry and not a scream but the sound of a world ending in a small room in a valley in Wales while a man in Sweden woke up in a white bed and stared at a white ceiling and pressed his face into a plush hippopotamus and made no sound at all.
Every night. The same dream. The same chair. The same breathing. The same silence.
The guilt lived in his chest like a stone.
Not a metaphorical stone — a physical one, a weight he felt between his ribs, pressing against his sternum, occupying the space where breath should have been. He was right there. Three feet from the bed. His hand could have reached her. He was her father and he was in the room and she was dying — not quickly, not violently, but quietly, secretly, the way an engine stops running when the fuel runs out, and the chILDS that had lived in the margins of her breathing for eighteen months had found, in that one night, the angle, the moment, the microscopic collapse that turned manageable into fatal — and he was asleep.
He was in the chair, and he was asleep, and she was three feet from him, and she died, and he did not notice.
The reports said unpreventable. The doctors said unpredictable. The coroner said no fault. But the word fault was a legal word and this was not a legal question. This was a father's question, and a father's question is: could I have held her tighter? Could I have kept her breathing? If I had stayed awake — if I had not let the warmth and the sound and the rhythm pull me under — if I had watched, if I had counted every breath, if I had refused to sleep until she woke, would the breath that stopped have continued?
The answer was no. The medicine said no. The science said no. The structure of reality said no, unequivocally, without hesitation: there was nothing you could have done.
But the chair was three feet from the bed. And the father was in the chair. And the daughter was in the bed. And the breathing stopped. And the answer — no, there was nothing — and the fact — you were right there — could not occupy the same body without tearing it apart, and so Papa carried both of them, the answer and the fact, like two stones in the same hand, and the weight of them pressed against his sternum, and the pressing was the guilt, and the guilt was the thing that woke him every night in the white room in Sweden where his mother had placed towels on the bed and did not say his daughter's name.
---
Café in Östersund. September 28, 2010.
Wrote this on a napkin with a pen I found between the seats. First time I've written anything since the—
since.
Outside the window: the lake. Same lake, same water, same mountains on the far side. Tima called them "sleeping giants." Not mountains. Giants. She saw everything as alive. The hills were animals. The clouds were faces. The lake was a mirror for the sky to look at itself. She was three years old and she understood metaphor better than anyone I've ever met.
The coffee here is too strong. It always is. Swedes drink coffee like they're trying to punish themselves for something. Maybe they are. Maybe the whole country is.
I don't know why I'm writing this. I don't know what this is. It's not a diary. It's not a letter. It's just — something. Words on a napkin in a café in a town I left and came back to and don't belong in and never did.
Peter would know what to call this. Peter would say: "Just write it down, boy."
So I'm
---
The morning came in October.
He had been at his mother's house for five weeks. The days had contracted — the Swedish autumn performing its annual withdrawal, the light shrinking from both ends, the mornings darker, the evenings earlier, the space between them compressing like a lung losing air. The birch trees outside the window had turned yellow, then orange, then the colour of old paper, and the leaves fell steadily, piling against the fence in drifts that no one raked because raking implied a domestic energy that this household rationed.
He woke and the grief was different.
Not the fog. Not the numbness, the white static, the dissociation that had carried him through the weeks like an anaesthetic carrying a patient through a surgery they had not consented to. Something else. Something harder. More angular. The fog had burned off in the night and what was left underneath was not the landscape he expected — not the familiar terrain of sadness, the rolling, grey, featureless plain — but something rockier. Something with edges. Something that, when he pressed against it, pressed back.
He lay in the white bed in the white room and listened to the house. His mother was downstairs. He could hear the sounds of her morning — the tap running, the kettle, the radio tuned to P4 Jämtland at a volume so low it was less music than a rumour of music. Lars was in the kitchen too — the scrape of a chair, the rustle of a newspaper, the small domestic percussion of two people sharing a space without sharing anything.
And Papa understood.
The understanding arrived complete, fully formed, the way understanding does when it has been assembling itself in the dark for weeks and finally steps into the light with its clothes on and its argument prepared.
This silence — the silence around Tima's name, the silence around his grief, the silence in which he had been marinating for five weeks — was not new. It was not a response to the crisis. It was not his mother's way of giving him space, of honouring his pain, of performing the Swedish ritual of privacy that substituted for intimacy. It was not about him at all.
It was about them.
It was the same silence they had offered when he left for Wales. The same silence when he'd called to say Nikki was pregnant. The same silence when he'd emailed the photograph of Tima — one day old, red-faced, howling, perfect — and received in return: That's nice. Take care. The silence when he'd sent the video of her first steps. The silence when he'd called on his mother's birthday and mentioned, carefully, like someone releasing a butterfly, that his daughter had learned to say mormor and wasn't that something, and his mother had said mm, ja and changed the subject to the cost of heating.
The silence was not grief. The silence was not respect. The silence was the silence itself — the native condition, the default setting, the temperature at which his parents operated. Tima's death had not created the silence. Tima's death had simply revealed its shape — the way a snowfall reveals the contours of the ground beneath it, the dips and the rises and the places where the earth has subsided.
The worst thing, Papa realised — lying in the white bed, staring at the white ceiling, holding Hoppy against his chest — the worst thing was not that his parents could not grieve. The worst thing was that there was nothing to grieve. They had never known her. They had been given the opportunity to know her — repeatedly, gently, with the patience of a man extending an invitation he already knows will be declined — and they had declined. They had chosen the silence. They had chosen the white room. They had chosen towels on the bed and potatoes at six-thirty and the weather and the football and the flat, clean, empty life that asked nothing and gave nothing and continued, undisturbed, through births and deaths and everything between.
Grief denied by the people who should carry it with you.
That was the phrase. It formed in his mind like a sentence being typed — letter by letter, word by word — and once it was complete it sat there, solid and undeniable, and he knew with the same cold clarity that had accompanied the waking in the chair that he could not stay in this house another day.
He packed the bag. Hoppy. The notebook — a cheap A5 notebook he'd bought at a petrol station on the journey north, its pages mostly blank except for the napkin he'd folded inside it. Peter's pen, which he'd found in the side pocket and had not used since. A change of clothes.
He walked downstairs. His mother was at the table with her coffee. Lars was reading the paper. The radio murmured. The potatoes from last night's dinner were in a container in the fridge because in this house, leftovers were handled with the same scrupulous efficiency as everything else.
"I'm leaving," Papa said.
His mother looked up. Her expression held the same mild, calibrated neutrality it always held — the expression of a woman who had spent a lifetime removing anything volatile from her face, the way you remove flammable materials from a room before striking a match.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
He did not know. He knew only the direction, which was away. Away from the white room and the white ceiling and the silence that was not grief and the potatoes and the towels and the two people who had produced him and released him and never once held him the way Peter held him, the way Steph held him, the way Nain held him, the way a three-year-old girl had held him — literally, physically, her small arms around his neck, her face pressed against his — and said I love you, Papa in a voice that sounded like the morning.
"Away," he said.
His mother nodded. The nod was tidy. Appropriate. The nod of a woman acknowledging a piece of information and filing it in its proper place on the shelf.
"Take care," she said.
He walked out the door. He did not say goodbye because goodbye was a word that implied a relationship in which departures and arrivals were meaningful events, and he had come to understand that his relationship with his parents was a corridor both of them walked through on their way to somewhere else, and neither of them had ever stopped long enough to hang a picture on the wall.
The bus took him to Östersund station. The same platform. The same clock telling the wrong time. He bought a ticket. Not to Stockholm. Not to the ferry. Not west, back to Wales — he was not ready for that, could not be ready for that, the cottage and the chair and the fairy lights and the door that didn't lock were on the other side of the world and he could not face them, not yet, maybe not ever.
He bought a ticket south. To Stockholm. And from Stockholm, he would find a flight. He didn't know where. Somewhere far. Somewhere the silence was not Swedish silence — not the silence of chosen blindness, the silence of a family that looked at a father's devastation and saw an inconvenience in the schedule. Somewhere the silence meant something else.
He sat on the bench and waited for the train and held the rucksack with Hoppy inside and the notebook and Peter's pen and the receipt from Tesco with Peter's handwriting: Write it down, boy.
The train came. He boarded. Östersund fell away behind him — the lake, the bridge, the campus on the hill, his grandmother's red house in Odensala that he had not visited because he could not afford to be held, and his mother's white house in the countryside that he had visited because he could not afford to feel, and both of them receding now, growing smaller through the window, becoming the past tense of places that had never quite managed to be the present.
---
Stockholm Arlanda Airport. October 12, 2010.
Bought a ticket to Tokyo. One-way. The woman at the counter asked if I had accommodation booked. I said yes. I don't. She asked how long I planned to stay. I said I didn't know. She looked at me for a long time and then printed the boarding pass and said: "I hope you find what you're looking for."
I nearly told her I wasn't looking for anything. That looking implies something to be found. That the thing I am doing is not looking but leaving, which is different, which is the opposite — not a movement toward but a movement away from, and the destination doesn't matter because the destination is just the name for the place where the leaving finally stops.
But I said thank you and took the boarding pass and walked to the gate.
Hoppy is in the bag. Peter's pen is in my pocket. The notebook is in my hand. The sun outside the terminal window is the pale, thin, October sun of Scandinavia, already retreating, already giving up.
I am twenty years old and I have buried two people and I do not know who I am without either of them.
---
Tokyo was too loud.
That was the first coherent thought he had upon emerging from the Narita Express into the terminus of Shinjuku station — a thought that formed itself like a fist unclenching, slow and specific: this is too loud. The sound of the city hitting him like a wave — not the gradual approach of noise but the full, immediate, wall-of-water impact of a place where twelve million people occupied the same square kilometres and every single one of them was doing something that generated decibels.
He stood on the platform and let the crowds divide around him the way water divides around a stone — naturally, without acknowledgment, the commuters and travellers and workers flowing past in their dark suits and their quiet shoes, eyes down, earbuds in, each one a sealed unit of private trajectory, and for the first time in months Papa felt a kind of relief that was almost like breathing.
Nobody looked at him.
Nobody knew his name. Nobody knew about the cottage or the chair or the coffin or the girl who liked toast cut into triangles. He was a foreigner with a rucksack, one of thousands, invisible in the way that only true anonymity can make you — not unseen but unrecognised, which is different, which is a form of freedom when recognition has become synonymous with pity.
He spent ten days in Tokyo.
He stayed in a small guesthouse in Minami-ku — a narrow building wedged between a ramen shop and a pachinko parlour, with tatami rooms the size of closets and a shared kitchen where travellers from six continents cooked instant noodles and drank Asahi beer and had the urgent, superficial conversations of people who would know each other for three days and then never again.
It was there he met Rob.
Rob was Dutch — from Amsterdam, the same age as Papa, a tall, loose-limbed man with an open face and a laugh that arrived before he did, rounding corners and entering rooms a full second ahead of his body. He reminded Papa of Peter — not Peter as he was, solid and settled and anchored to the valley like a tree that had grown through stone, but Peter as he might have been at twenty, if Peter had been Dutch, if Peter had been raised on canals instead of hills, if Peter had developed the particular Dutch talent for being simultaneously earnest and absurd, the conversational style that Papa's only reference for — and he was aware this was not a sophisticated reference — was the Goldmember character from Austin Powers, which is to say: confident, slightly ridiculous, and completely impossible to dislike.
There was also Henrik — a Dane in his sixties, lean and quiet, with the posture of a man whose spine had been educated by decades of discipline. He was a tenth-dan Yoshinkan Aikido master — not the flowing, philosophical aikido of weekend retreats and corporate mindfulness programmes, but Yoshinkan, the hard kind, the gritty kind, the kind that shared its lineage with riot police training and Russian ballet in that both demanded a relationship with the body that was equal parts poetry and punishment. Henrik moved through the guesthouse kitchen the way he presumably moved through everything — with an economy of motion so precise it made other people's movements look like rough drafts.
They became, for ten days, a unit — the Dutchman, the Dane, and the Swede, which sounded like the setup for a joke and sometimes was. They walked Shibuya crossing at night, the screens blazing, the crowds surging in their choreographed chaos. They ate yakitori at a standing bar in Shinjuku where the smoke was so thick it constituted a weather system. They went to karaoke — a tiny room in a building with seventeen floors of tiny rooms, each one a sealed capsule of private performance, and Rob sang "Bohemian Rhapsody" with a commitment that bordered on religious and Henrik sang something Danish and melancholy and beautiful and Papa sang — he actually sang, his voice rough and unpractised and surprising even to himself — and for ninety minutes in a soundproofed box in Tokyo he was a person who sang instead of a person who grieved, and the difference was not nothing.
He never told them. Not about Tima. Not about the chair. Not about any of it. Rob talked about his travels with the generous, unselfconscious enthusiasm of a man whose life had not yet taught him that enthusiasm was a risk, and Henrik talked about aikido with the quiet authority of a man who had spent forty years learning that the body's deepest wisdom was in yielding, and Papa listened and laughed and sang and ate and walked, and the three of them formed the kind of friendship that exists only in transit — intense, uncomplicated, temporary — a friendship built not on shared histories but on shared noodles and shared streets and the shared understanding that none of them would ask the others why they were here, because the asking would break the spell and the spell was the only thing making the city bearable.
Papa ate at convenience stores — onigiri and egg sandwiches and the small, perfect triangles of packaging that you peeled in three steps to reveal the rice, and the process of peeling them — one, two, three — became a kind of meditation, a tiny ritual that occupied his hands and his eyes and his mouth and asked nothing of the thing between them.
He walked. Alone, mostly, when Rob and Henrik were occupied or asleep. That was what he did in Tokyo — he walked the way you walk when you have nowhere to be, which is everywhere, which is anywhere, which is the particular aimless purposefulness of a man who is not exploring a city but being absorbed by one. Ueno Park, where the trees were still green but thinning, the approaching autumn present in the light like a stage direction. The Sumida River, which moved through the city with the same patient, dark indifference as the Ebbw, carrying whatever it carried without commentary.
He understood, after ten days, that Tokyo was not the place. Rob made it liveable — Rob made everything liveable, it was his gift, the Dutch capacity for making any circumstance slightly more fun than it had any right to be — but Tokyo was a city for people who wanted to disappear into density, to be subsumed, to become a cell in the organism, to lose the self by drowning it in selves. Papa did not want to disappear. He had already disappeared. What he wanted — if the formless, pre-verbal impulse that moved him could be called wanting — was to find the shape of his disappearance. To locate its edges. To determine where the absence ended and the person began.
Tokyo was too full for that. Too bright, too fast, too present. There was no room for the outline of a missing thing.
He needed somewhere quieter. Rob understood. Henrik bowed — a proper bow, the aikido kind, which said everything it needed to say about respect between men who had shared ten days and a karaoke room and would probably never see each other again, though Rob, being Rob, would prove that wrong months later when he turned up in Kyoto with a backpack and a grin and the same unstoppable Dutch energy, looking for a place to stay.
---
Tokyo. October 19, 2010.
Bought a Shinkansen ticket to Kyoto. The bullet train. 515 kilometres in two hours and fifteen minutes. The speed of it — the way the landscape shatters past the window, Mount Fuji appearing and vanishing like a word you thought you heard but didn't — feels like the speed at which grief travels. Fast enough to distort everything. Not fast enough to outrun.
In the convenience store this morning, I picked up an onigiri and started to peel it — the three-step thing, pull the tab down the centre, peel the sides away from the rice — and I remembered, with a specificity that nearly took my legs out, Tima peeling a banana. She was two. She sat on Peter's lap at the kitchen table and she peeled the banana with such concentrated seriousness, like she was defusing a bomb, and when the peel came off she held the banana up and said "Ta-da!" and Peter applauded, actually applauded, the big hands clapping together, and she bowed, she actually bowed, and the kitchen smelled of toast and the fire was going and the rain was tapping the window and the world was so small and so warm and so complete.
I put the onigiri back and left the shop. I couldn't eat. I couldn't peel. I couldn't do the thing that my hands had been doing because my hands remembered her hands and my hands will always remember her hands.
Kyoto tomorrow. The woman at the guesthouse says the maples are turning. She says it's beautiful. She doesn't know what the word costs me.
---
Kyoto was different.
He felt it stepping off the Shinkansen at Kyoto Station — the shift in pressure, the change in register, the way the air moved differently here, slower, carrying with it the accumulated weight of a thousand years of temples and gardens and the particular Japanese understanding that beauty is not a thing achieved but a thing passing through.
The station itself was enormous — a soaring steel and glass cathedral designed by Hiroshi Hara, a building that seemed to argue with the city it served, all sharp angles and escalators and modernity pressed against the sky. But the moment he walked outside and turned east, toward the hills, the argument ended. The streets narrowed. The buildings lowered. The concrete gave way to wood, the glass to paper screens, and the light — the October light of Kyoto — fell through the gaps between buildings with a quality he could only describe as considerate, as if the sun here had learned to enter a room without slamming the door.
He found a room in Yamashina.
Yamashina — which meant, in a stroke of Japanese naming that delighted him more than anything had delighted him in months, mountain village. Not a mountain. Not a village. A suburb on the other side of Higashiyama, just east of the temple-covered hills, connected to the rest of Kyoto by a train line that punched through the mountain in a tunnel and emerged into a neighbourhood that was neither ancient nor modern but the particular Japanese blend of both — convenience stores beside Shinto shrines, vending machines glowing outside wooden houses, the old and the new coexisting with the easy indifference of neighbours who have long since stopped noticing each other.
The room was in a gaijin house — a foreigner's house — an old building, traditional in its bones but modernised in patches, the way a grandmother might wear trainers: functionally sensible, aesthetically bewildering. There was a Japanese girl who kept to herself and an American man who worked, Papa learned after two bewildering nights, as a host at a host bar in Gion — one of those establishments where women paid to drink with attractive men who complimented their earrings and refilled their glasses and performed the elaborate theatre of attention that the Japanese called settai and the rest of the world called something else entirely.
The American brought his customers home.
The walls between their rooms were paper. Literally paper — fusuma, the sliding screens that in a traditional Japanese house serve as walls, providing the visual suggestion of privacy without any of its acoustic properties. Papa lay on his futon at two in the morning and listened to the sounds of commercial intimacy conducted three feet from his head — the laughter, the whispered Japanese, the particular rhythms of pleasure that transcended language — and he thought: this is not what I need. This is, in fact, the precise opposite of what I need. What I need is silence that holds things, and what I have is a wall made of paper and paste through which another man's performative joy enters my room like weather through a broken window.
But he stayed. For three weeks he stayed, because staying required less energy than moving, and energy was the thing he had least of, and because Yamashina — despite the paper walls and the nightly soundtrack — had one quality that mattered: it was quiet during the day. The neighbourhood emptied when the commuters left, and the streets held the particular stillness of a place that exists primarily when no one is looking at it, and Papa walked those streets in the October mornings and felt, for the first time since Östersund, something that was not numbness and not pain but something between them — a recognition of surfaces. The grey of the pavement. The shape of a persimmon on a tree in someone's garden. The sound of a train entering the tunnel. The world, offering itself in small, manageable pieces that did not require him to feel anything about them, only to notice them, and noticing was enough, noticing was all he could do.
He walked to the temples.
Over the hills from Yamashina, through the forest paths that crossed the ridge of Higashiyama and descended into the old eastern district where the streets climbed toward the temple-covered hills and the shops sold ceramics and matcha and the small, precise confections that the Japanese called wagashi and that looked less like food than like edible weather. He found a café — a small place in Higashiyama with a window table that looked out over the narrow street, run by a woman in her sixties named Yamamoto-san, who served him American-style coffee without being asked and who looked at him, on his first visit, with a gaze that lasted two seconds and appeared to conduct a complete assessment of his condition — the hollows under his eyes, the clothes he'd been wearing for three days, the rucksack that contained a plush hippo and a cheap notebook — and having completed the assessment, she placed the coffee on the table and said: "You are here for the temples?"
"I don't know what I'm here for," he said.
"The temples are good for that too," she said, and turned back to her counter, and the conversation was over, and the coffee was hot, and the street outside held its particular Higashiyama light, and Papa sat and did not write and did not think and did not feel, and the not-doing was, for now, enough.
---
He had bought a bicycle.
A small-wheeled folding bike — the kind that city people used to cross distances too short for trains and too long for dignity, the kind that folded in half and could be carried onto a platform or tucked into a genkan like an umbrella. He bought it because the subway cost money and money was a thing he did not have and would not have for some time, and because cycling was, like walking, an activity that occupied the body without consulting the mind.
Most mornings he rode over the Higashiyama ridge — the forest road, steep and quiet, the bike labouring under him on the climb and freewheeling on the descent into the eastern district. But some mornings — the early mornings, the mornings when the room in Yamashina was too small and the ceiling was too close and the dream had been too vivid — he took the southern route. Down from Yamashina, following the river as it curved south and then west, past the residential streets that gave way to the older neighbourhoods, past the sake breweries of Fushimi with their white walls and dark timber, and then up — up the hill to Fushimi Inari.
He spent more time at Fushimi Inari than at any other temple. Not because it was the most beautiful — though it was, in its way, with its ten thousand torii gates stitching a vermillion seam up the mountainside — but because it was the most patient. The shrine did not demand attention. It did not perform. It simply stood, gate after gate after gate, and you could walk through it for an hour or for five hours and the shrine did not care which, and the not-caring was a form of hospitality that Papa understood better than any welcome.
One morning — early, six-thirty, the light still grey, the air carrying the particular chill of an autumn dawn that has not yet decided whether it is morning or still night — he arrived at the main temple grounds and found them empty. Entirely empty. No tourists, no photographers, no couples posing in rented kimono beneath the first gate. Just the stone foxes standing guard at the entrance — the kitsune, the messengers of Inari, their carved faces wearing expressions of alert, eternal patience — and the vending machines humming their fluorescent hum at the edge of the plaza, and the silence, and the mist sitting on the mountain like something that had been placed there deliberately.
He sat on the low wall beside a vending machine. He was not praying. He was not meditating. He was sitting, which was the closest he could get to either.
Then he saw the fox.
Not a stone fox. A real fox. White.
It came from behind the main hall — from the direction of the mountain, from the darkness between the first torii gates — and it walked into the plaza with the unhurried precision of an animal that has never been hunted and does not intend to start being afraid now. It was small. Smaller than the foxes he'd seen in Wales — the red foxes that crossed the roads at dusk and stood in the headlights with their eyes blazing, wild and wary and ready to bolt. This fox was not wary. This fox moved through the empty temple grounds the way the monks moved through the temples — with ownership, with residence, with the absolute certainty that it belonged here and everything else was visiting.
It was white. Not albino-white, not the white of absence, but the white of something that had chosen its colour — a clean, deliberate, almost luminous white that stood against the grey stone and the dark wood and the mist like a word written on an empty page.
It stopped. It looked at him.
Papa sat on the wall beside the vending machine and the fox stood in the plaza of Fushimi Inari and they looked at each other — the man and the animal, the foreigner and the messenger — and the looking lasted five seconds, maybe ten, long enough for the space between them to become something other than distance, something closer to recognition, the way two strangers on a train sometimes catch each other's eyes and in the catching acknowledge something neither of them could name.
And Papa thought of Cwmcarn.
The forest drive. The narrow road through the trees above the valley, where the ferns grew to the height of a child and the canopy closed overhead and the light came through in patches — spotlights, Tima called them — and they walked, the three of them, Papa and Tima and Hoppy tucked under her arm, through the green tunnel of the drive. And a fox had crossed the path. A red fox, quick and liquid, flowing across the track like something poured. And Tima had stopped. Her hand had tightened in his. Her eyes had gone wide — not frightened, never frightened, this was a girl who named stones and spoke to mountains — and she had whispered: "Papa. Is it watching us?"
"I think so," he'd said.
"Why?"
"Maybe it's curious about you."
She had considered this. The consideration took three seconds — the three seconds during which a three-year-old's brain performs the particular computation that adults have forgotten how to perform, the computation that weighs the evidence and produces not a conclusion but a story.
"I think it knows me," she said. "I think the fox knows who I am."
Tima always loved foxes. After Cwmcarn she drew them — clumsy circles with pointed ears and enormous tails, red crayon on white paper, dozens of them, a population of foxes that lived in a pile on the kitchen table until Peter gathered them into a folder and wrote on the front, in his careful hand: Tima's Foxes.
The white fox at Fushimi Inari looked at Papa for ten seconds. Then it turned and walked back toward the mountain, back through the first gate, back into the vermillion tunnel, its white body moving through the red corridor until it was gone, absorbed into the mist and the wood and the silence.
Papa sat on the wall. The vending machine hummed. The plaza was empty again.
He opened the notebook and wrote: A white fox at Fushimi Inari. She would have said it knew her. She would have been right.
---
He walked the temple paths.
November came and the maples turned. Not the sudden, theatrical autumn of the Welsh valleys — the overnight eruptions of orange and gold that made the hills look like they'd been set on fire by a careless painter — but a slower, more deliberate transformation, the leaves changing shade by shade, day by day, the reds deepening with a patience that suggested this was not a seasonal event but a spiritual practice. Papa walked through them because walking was still the only thing he could do with his body that didn't require his mind to participate.
Kiyomizu-dera on the hill, its wooden platform jutting over the valley like a hand extended toward something it couldn't quite reach. Nanzen-ji, where the aqueduct ran through the grounds and the water made a sound that was neither river nor rain but something exactly between them. Fushimi Inari, with its ten thousand torii gates marching up the mountain in a tunnel of vermillion, the light inside the tunnel warm and pink, the light of a world viewed through closed eyelids, the light of a place that was both inside and outside at the same time.
He walked through the gates. Thousands of them. He walked until the tourists thinned and the path grew steep and the gates grew weathered and the inscriptions on their pillars — the names of businesses and families who had donated them — became harder to read, the kanji eroding under decades of rain and wind, the names of the givers being slowly absorbed back into the wood.
He thought of Peter's pen. He thought of Peter's instruction: write it down. He thought of the notebook in his rucksack, its pages still mostly blank, and the blankness felt like an accusation — the pages asking him for something he did not yet know how to give.
But in the temples, the silence was different.
It was different from the silence in Sweden.
The Swedish silence was an absence — the absence of words, of acknowledgment, of the connective tissue that holds people together. It was the silence of people who had removed their grief from the room and locked the door behind them. It was a closed silence. A sealed silence. A silence that said: we will not speak of this, and by not speaking of it, we will make it disappear.
The temple silence was the opposite. It was full. It was a silence that held things — the smoke of the incense, the resonance of the bell, the sound of water moving through stone channels, the footsteps of monks on wooden corridors. It was a silence that existed because of what it contained, not despite it. A silence that said: everything is here, and being here is enough.
Papa sat on the wooden floor of a small temple — a sub-temple, unnamed to him, tucked into the hillside behind Nanzen-ji, where the moss grew on the stone walls and the garden was raked in patterns that looked like waves seen from very high up — and for the first time since the chair, he cried.
Not the quiet crying. Not the standing-in-a-pub-hoping-no-one-notices crying. This was the other kind. The kind that comes from a place below the ribs and sounds like an animal and leaves you empty and gasping on a wooden floor while the incense smokes and the garden holds its patterns and the silence of a Japanese temple wraps around you the way a grandmother's arms would if she were here, if she could cross the distances, if the body always obeyed the heart.
He cried for Tima. For the toast and the triangles and the stones with names and the red wellies and the supervisor who didn't climb. He cried for the way she said Papa — as if the word itself were a celebration, a firework, a small daily festival of recognition. He cried for the chair and the fairy lights and the breathing that stopped and the waking and the silence and the floor.
He cried for Mama. For the girl on the backs of receipts, the barefoot artist, the woman who had fought so hard to be present and who had walked into the dark on an April night and not come back.
He cried for Peter. For the bridge, the sound, the hands in the pockets, the platform receding, the door that didn't lock.
He cried for himself. The boy from Östersund who had crossed a sea and found a family and built a fortress and lost it all — not to a villain, not to a dramatic catastrophe, but to the quiet, the silence, the slow withdrawal of breath that the world called natural and that felt like murder.
The monk found him later. An old man in grey robes, moving through the temple with the unhurried precision of someone who had been walking these corridors for decades and would walk them for decades more. He looked at the young foreigner sitting on the floor with tears on his face and a plush hippo visible in the open rucksack beside him, and he said nothing.
He brought tea.
He placed it on the floor. He sat down — not beside Papa, but near, at the correct distance — and he drank his own tea and they sat together in the silence that was not absence but presence, two men in a temple on a hillside in a city of temples, one of them very old and the other very young and both of them, in their own ways, practising the art of sitting with what can't be fixed.
---
Then Yusuke.
He met him at an event by the Kamo River near Sanjō — one of those informal gatherings that materialised on the riverbank in the evenings, clusters of people sitting on the stone steps that descended to the water, drinking beer from convenience stores and talking in the mixed Japanese-English pidgin that foreigners and locals used when neither spoke the other's language well enough to be precise but both spoke it well enough to be understood. The river moved through the city the way rivers move through all cities — indifferently, carrying its cargo of light and reflection and the occasional plastic bottle, the current visible in the lamplight as a dark, silken unspooling that made the stone bridges look like they were standing on something alive.
Yusuke was compact, energetic, a man in his thirties whose default state of being appeared to be enthusiasm tempered by the Japanese talent for understatement. He ran a family business — property, renovation, the maintenance and conversion of old Kyoto houses into accommodation for foreigners. Gaijin houses. He was building a new one, he said — converting an old machiya in a neighbourhood Papa had not yet found — and he needed someone to help with the work.
"You look young," Yusuke said, assessing him with the cheerful directness that Papa would come to recognise as Yusuke's primary mode of interaction. "And of healthy body and mind. Do you want to work?"
Papa explained that he had no visa for that. That he was, technically, a tourist, a category of person not legally permitted to earn wages in Japan, a fact that the Japanese immigration system took seriously and that Papa, at this point in his existence, could not afford to complicate.
Yusuke waved the objection away with a gesture that was both casual and precise. "Not wages," he said. "You work. You live in one of my houses. You eat. You have company. As long as you work hard."
The offer landed on Papa the way unexpected things land on people who have stopped expecting anything — with a kind of bewildered gratitude that took him several seconds to identify, because gratitude requires a recognition that something good has happened, and the recognition of good things had been, until that moment, outside his operational range.
He said yes.
---
The gaijin house that Yusuke gave him was in a quiet street near the Philosopher's Path — a two-storey wooden building that creaked in the wind and smelled, faintly, of the decades of meals that had been cooked in its kitchen and the decades of rain that had fallen on its roof. His room was small — six tatami mats, a window that looked out over a neighbour's persimmon tree, a futon that he rolled out each night and rolled up each morning in the Japanese manner that turned a bedroom into a living room with a single gesture. It was more than the room in Yamashina. It was quieter. The walls were thicker. No one brought their customers home.
And the work.
The work was physical in a way that nothing in his life had been physical before. Yusuke's crew consisted of three old Japanese men — Tanaka-san, Mori-san, and a man everyone called Ojii-chan, which meant grandfather, because he was everyone's grandfather, or at least behaved as if he were, issuing instructions with the patient firmness of a man who has been building things for fifty years and has no intention of explaining why the crossbeam goes there and not two centimetres to the left. They renovated houses. Old houses, traditional houses, the wooden machiya and nagaya that had survived the century and were now being converted, repaired, reborn as guesthouses and gaijin houses and the particular Kyoto accommodation that existed in the space between tradition and commerce.
Papa carried wood. He mixed plaster. He learned to use a Japanese saw — the nokogiri, which cuts on the pull stroke, not the push, the opposite of everything he'd learned in Sweden, the blade moving toward the body with each stroke, drawing the material closer instead of pushing it away, which felt, in a way he could not articulate, like a metaphor for something.
The old men did not speak English. Papa did not speak Japanese — not yet, not beyond the survival phrases, the sumimasen and the arigatou and the ikura desu ka that allowed him to navigate convenience stores and train stations without incident. They communicated in gestures, in demonstrations, in the universal language of pointing at things and nodding or shaking heads, and the communication was adequate because the work was its own language — the wood and the tools and the building speaking for themselves in the grammar of construction, where a joint either fits or doesn't and the answer is in the material, not in the words.
He worked hard. He worked the way Peter worked — with his body, with his hands, with the quiet, focused dedication of a man who has discovered that physical labour is the only anaesthetic that doesn't require a prescription. The ache in his shoulders at the end of each day was a clean ache, an honest ache, the ache of muscles used and bones tired and the body finally, mercifully, loud enough to drown out the mind.
Ojii-chan watched him. The old man said little — which, given the language barrier, meant nothing — but his watching communicated volumes. A nod when the joint was tight. A click of the tongue when the line was crooked. Once, at the end of a week, he placed a can of hot coffee from the vending machine in Papa's hand and said something in Japanese that Papa did not understand but that sounded, in its tone and cadence, remarkably like: not bad, boy. Not bad.
It sounded like Peter. Everything, eventually, sounded like Peter.
---
Kyoto. November 9, 2010.
The café in Higashiyama has become a routine. Same table by the window. Same coffee — American style, which here means weaker than everyone else's, which is appropriate because I feel weaker than everyone else too.
Opened the notebook today. Wrote three pages. Not about anything. Not about her. About the rain on the canal path. About the colour of the fern when it's wet, the green that's brighter than any green that exists when it's dry. About the sound of Peter's kettle — how I can hear it from anywhere in the cottage, how it sounds different depending on which room I'm in, like the house is a musical instrument and the kettle is the player.
I wrote about the way Steph says "cariad." The weight of it. Like she's handing you something wrapped in silk.
I wrote about Eira and the climbing frame and the way she said "time is different for children."
None of it is a story. I don't know what it is. It's just pieces. Shards. The things that fall out of your pockets when you turn a life upside down and shake it.
---
He enrolled at a language school.
It was in the centre of Kyoto — a nondescript building on a street of nondescript buildings, which was itself a kind of achievement in a city where beauty was the ambient condition and nondescript required effort. The school happened to be registered with CSN — the Swedish national student loan system — which meant the tuition could be funded without drawing from the budget that was, by November, dwindling toward the kind of number that makes a man count coins at the konbini register and quietly return one onigiri to the shelf.
It was at the language school that he met the Swedes.
Mattias and Martin were both in their thirties — a decade older than Papa, established in the way that people in their thirties are established, with opinions about wine and references to previous decades and the particular confidence of men who have already made their first serious mistakes and survived them. They were in Kyoto for reasons Papa never fully investigated, because investigating reasons would invite the same investigation in return, and his reasons were stored in a locked room behind his ribs that he was not yet ready to open.
Christian was his age. Twenty. Quiet in the way Swedes are quiet — not the hollow, performative quiet of Papa's parents but the genuine, considered quiet of a young man who has not yet decided how loud he needs to be. They found each other the way Swedes abroad find each other — through the gravitational pull of shared vowel sounds in a sea of unfamiliar consonants, the way two pieces of driftwood from the same coast will find each other in a foreign harbour.
They drank at Kokoro.
Kokoro was a pub in Higashiyama, near the international residence quarters where the Swedes lived — a small, low-ceilinged place whose name meant heart and whose atmosphere suggested that the naming had been aspirational rather than descriptive. It served beer and yakitori and the particular brand of warmth that exists only in small bars in foreign cities where everyone is far from home and the distance has made them kinder than they would be in their own kitchens. They sat at the counter and drank Asahi and spoke Swedish — the language falling from Papa's mouth like something retrieved from storage, familiar but slightly dusty, the words carrying their old meanings but landing differently now, as if they'd been translated through the experience of the last year and come back slightly changed, slightly heavier.
He didn't tell them either. Not about Tima. Not about the chair. Not about any of it. He was Eric from Östersund. He liked art. He was in Kyoto because — and here the sentence always ended, trailing off into a shrug or a sip of beer or a change of subject, and the Swedes, being Swedes, did not press, because pressing was not what Swedes did, and the silence around his reasons was accepted with the same easy courtesy as the silence around theirs.
But the company mattered. The human fact of other people — their voices, their laughter, their unremarkable daily concerns about train schedules and homework assignments and the quality of the ramen at the place near the station — the human fact of them was a kind of scaffolding, a temporary structure erected around the building site of his life while the real construction happened inside, invisible, in the journal entries and the temple walks and the work with the old men and the slow, painful excavation of memory that he performed each morning at the café table with Yamamoto-san's coffee and Peter's pen and the notebook that was, page by page, filling with the shards of a life he could not put back together but could not bear to let scatter.
---
Kyoto. November 22, 2010.
Yamamoto-san at the café looked at me with that look she has — the one that conducts a full medical examination in two seconds — and she said: "You are writing?"
I said I was trying.
She said: "Trying is enough. In Japan we say: Nana korobi ya oki. Fall seven times, stand up eight."
I said: "What if you've fallen more than seven?"
She said: "Then you are practising."
---
They went to Nara.
Papa and the Swedes, on a Sunday in late November, the four of them on the train through the southern suburbs, the landscape flattening as Kyoto's hills gave way to the older, broader geography of Japan's first capital. Nara was different from Kyoto the way a grandmother is different from a mother — older, slower, less concerned with appearances, its temples sprawling through parkland where deer wandered freely, hundreds of them, tame and entitled, approaching tourists with the courteous aggression of animals who had learned that humans carried biscuits and that biscuits were worth the indignity of being photographed.
Mattias fed the deer. Martin took photographs. Christian stood quietly and watched the five-storey pagoda of Kōfuku-ji rise against the November sky, its tiers diminishing toward a spire that seemed to narrow into a point fine enough to write with, and Papa looked at the pagoda and thought, without wanting to: Tima would have said it was a rocket. She would have said it was trying to reach the moon. She would have named it — she named everything, it was her way of claiming the world, of making it hers — and the name would have been better than pagoda, more accurate, more true, because a three-year-old's taxonomy is not constrained by the categories that adults have agreed upon and is therefore closer to the thing itself.
He excused himself. He walked to Tōdai-ji — the great hall, the largest wooden building in the world, where the bronze Buddha sat in its dim enormity, its eyes half-closed, its expression conveying the particular serenity of something that has been sitting in the same position for twelve hundred years and has no plans to move. Papa stood in front of the Buddha and felt small — not diminished but small, which is different, which is the feeling of being correctly sized in relation to something that has earned its largeness.
He opened the notebook. He wrote: The Buddha does not fix things. The Buddha sits. Maybe sitting is enough.
He closed the notebook. He rejoined the Swedes. They ate mochi at a stall near the park entrance and took the train home and Papa sat by the window and watched the landscape reassemble itself into Kyoto — the hills returning, the temples reappearing, the city accepting him back in the way that cities accept the people who have decided to stay: without celebration, without objection, with the quiet municipal indifference that is, in its own way, a form of welcome.
He went back to Nara alone.
Weeks later, on a Tuesday, because Tuesdays were the days the crew didn't work and Tuesdays were therefore the days the silence was loudest and the notebook was heaviest and the room was smallest and the only remedy was to go somewhere that was not the room and not the page and not the inside of his own head.
The deer were different on a weekday. Fewer tourists meant fewer biscuits, which meant the deer were less aggressive and more contemplative, standing in the park in loose groups like guests at a party who had run out of things to say but were not yet ready to leave. Papa walked among them. He sat on a bench near the pond, where the water reflected the bare November trees in a mirror that was slightly more beautiful than the thing it mirrored, the way memory is slightly more beautiful than experience, which is the cruelty and the gift of it.
He was sitting there when the daydream came.
Not a dream — he was awake, his eyes open, his hands around a can of warm tea from the vending machine — but something that occupied the space between seeing and imagining, the way heat haze occupies the space between the road and the sky. He saw her. Mama. Not as she had been at the end — not the drifting woman, the retreating woman, the woman whose presence had become a kind of elaborate absence — but as she had been before. Before Tima. Before the cottage. Before any of it.
She was wearing the oversized woollen jumper — the one she wore in the first months, the one that hung to her thighs and smelled of the art studio and turpentine and her. And dungarees, the denim ones, the ones she'd worn when she was still drawing, still painting, still the barefoot girl with the charcoal smudges on her fingers. She was pregnant. Her belly visible beneath the jumper, the small, specific roundness that he had placed his hand against and felt the kick — the kick that was Tima, the first announcement, the first hello from the inside.
She was walking across the park. The deer were around her — not crowding, not begging, but attending, the way animals sometimes attend to people who carry a particular kind of stillness. One of the deer — a doe, young, its coat the soft brown of November — walked up to her, and she bowed. A small bow. The Japanese bow, the one you give to someone you are meeting for the first time, the one that says: I see you, and I respect the space you occupy. The deer dipped its head in return — not a bow, not really, but close enough that the exchange looked like a conversation conducted in a language older than words.
Then she turned and looked at him. At Papa. Across the park, across the pond, across the distance that separated a bench from a daydream. She looked at him and she smiled. Not the complicated smile of the woman he'd known — the smile that always carried something behind it, a reservation, a withdrawal, the shadow of the door she would eventually walk through. This was the other smile. The early smile. The smile from the art camp in Västerås, from the MSN messages at midnight, from the morning she'd told him about the pregnancy and her face had held, for one unguarded moment, the pure, terrified, luminous joy of a woman who has discovered that the future contains a person she hasn't met yet.
She smiled and the deer stood beside her and the November light fell through the bare branches and Papa sat on the bench and held the warm can of tea and the daydream lasted — how long? Seconds. A minute. The length of a breath held and released.
Then she was gone. The park was the park. The deer were the deer. The pond reflected the trees. The can of tea was cooling in his hands.
He wrote nothing about it in the notebook. Some things are not for pages. Some things exist only in the space between the seeing and the saying, and writing them down would flatten them, would press the three dimensions into two, would turn the living thing into a specimen pinned under glass.
But he carried it. He added it to the weight. The smile, the bow, the deer, the jumper, the belly, the kick.
He carried it home on the train.
---
Kyoto. December 3, 2010.
Wrote about the day at Lillsjön with Nain. The day we drove out to the shallow lake and Tima said the water was "speaking Swedish" because it sounded different from the river at home. She was right. Welsh water and Swedish water don't sound the same. Welsh water talks. Swedish water murmurs.
I keep writing about water. Rivers, lakes, rain. The canal. The Ebbw. Storsjön. The bath. The kettle. Even the kettle is water.
Maybe that's what grief is. Maybe grief is water — it goes where it goes, through any gap, under any door, and you can't hold it in your hands but you can't not have it, either. It's just there. It fills the shape of whatever container you put it in. The container used to be the cottage. Now the container is a notebook.
---
They hiked.
On weekends when the work was done — the houses plastered, the crossbeams fitted, Ojii-chan's approval expressed through the absence of clicking — Papa walked. Sometimes with the Swedes, sometimes alone, more often alone, because the walking was not recreational but devotional, a practice that required the particular concentration of solitude. He hiked the trails above Kurama — the old pilgrimage path through the cedar forests where the roots of ancient trees broke through the path like the knuckles of buried hands.
He went to Arashiyama.
Not once but many times — cycling there on the folding bike, following the river west through the city until the buildings thinned and the hills closed in and the water darkened and the bamboo began. Arashiyama was where Kyoto stopped pretending to be a city and admitted it was a landscape, a place where the human and the natural had negotiated a ceasefire so old that neither side remembered the terms. The Togetsukyō bridge — the Moon Crossing Bridge — stretched across the Katsura River with the low, purposeful grace of something that had been connecting two banks for eight hundred years and intended to continue. Papa stood on the bridge and watched the water move beneath him the way he had watched every river since the Ebbw — with the attention of a man who knows that rivers carry things, and that the things they carry do not stop being carried just because the river reaches the sea.
The bamboo grove was behind the bridge, up the hill, through the gate. He walked into it the way you walk into a cathedral — involuntarily slower, involuntarily quieter, the body responding to the scale before the mind has registered it. The bamboo rose around him — forty, fifty, sixty feet — each stem a column, each column swaying in a movement that was not swaying but breathing, the entire grove inhaling and exhaling as a single organism, the sound of it a whisper multiplied until it became a roar, a green roar, the sound of ten thousand hollow stems vibrating in unison. The light filtered through in thin, moving blades — not the dappled light of a woodland but a striated light, a light that had been sliced into ribbons by the close-packed stems, and the ribbons moved across the path as the bamboo swayed, so that walking through the grove felt like walking through light itself, through the internal structure of brightness.
He sat on a bench at the far end, where the path opened into a clearing and the river was visible below through a gap in the trees. A woman was feeding monkeys at the monkey park on the opposite hill — he could hear the sounds, the chatter of the animals and the laughter of children, the two noises indistinguishable at this distance, which seemed right, which seemed like something Tima would have observed: Papa, the monkeys sound like children. Or: Papa, the children sound like monkeys. Both versions. She would have offered both and waited for him to choose and then disagreed with whichever he chose, because disagreeing was not obstinacy but play, the game of a mind that understood that the world was more interesting when you argued with it.
He came back to Arashiyama in every season. In autumn, when the maples along the river turned the hills into a slow fire. In winter, when the bamboo held its green against the grey sky like a promise it refused to break. In spring, when the cherry blossoms on the riverbank made the water pink. Each visit was the same walk and a different walk, the same bench and a different bench, the same man and a different man — each version of him slightly further from the chair, slightly closer to the notebook, slightly more able to sit in a beautiful place without the beauty destroying him.
He hiked Daimon-ji, the mountain behind the city, where the character 大 — meaning large — was carved into the hillside and lit with bonfires during Obon, the festival of the dead, when the spirits of ancestors were believed to return and the fires guided them home. Papa stood on the summit and looked down at the city spread below him — the grid of streets, the dark line of the Kamo River, the rooftops and the temples and the train lines converging at Kyoto Station — and he thought about fires that guide people home and wondered if the fairy lights in the cottage were the same thing, a fire left burning for someone who could not find their way back.
Osaka was different. Osaka was Tokyo's cousin — louder, funnier, more vulgar, a city that wore its appetites on its sleeve and deep-fried most of them. He went with Mattias and Christian on a Saturday night and they ate takoyaki at a stall in Dōtonbori, the octopus balls scorching the roof of his mouth, the neon signs reflected in the canal, the crowds pressing around them with the cheerful density of people who had come to this street specifically to be pressed against other people. Mattias drank too much. Christian laughed more than Papa had ever heard him laugh. And Papa stood in the middle of Osaka's electric chaos and felt, for a few hours, like a normal twenty-year-old in a foreign city on a Saturday night, which was not the same as being a normal twenty-year-old but was close enough that the difference could be set aside, temporarily, like a coat hung on a hook while you ordered another drink.
---
The winter came to Kyoto gently — not the Swedish winter, which arrived like an occupying army, darkening the sky and freezing the water and driving people indoors for five months of fluorescent survival. Kyoto's winter was a lowering, a dimming, a softening of edges. The maples had dropped their leaves and the branches stood bare against the grey sky like calligraphy, each tree writing something in the air that Papa could almost read but not quite.
He wrote.
Not constantly. Not fluently. Not with the ease or the pleasure that he imagined writers felt — the smooth translation of interior to exterior, the thought becoming the word becoming the page. It was harder than that. It was more like excavation — digging through rubble with his bare hands, finding fragments, pulling them out, laying them on the table, trying to determine what they were pieces of.
He wrote about the cottage. Not as a story but as a list — the rooms, the objects, the sounds. The creak of the staircase. The particular rattle of the kitchen window when the wind came from the west. The smell of Peter's whisky. The weight of the front door. The texture of the flagstone floor under bare feet in the morning. Each detail extracted from memory like a splinter from skin — painful going in, painful coming out, necessary either way.
He wrote about Peter. The things Peter said. The things Peter did. The way Peter existed in the world — a solid, warm, reliable presence that asked nothing and gave everything, the human equivalent of a fire that someone has tended for so long it no longer needs tending, it simply burns because burning is what it does.
He wrote about Tima. Carefully. In fragments. In pieces small enough to hold without dropping. Her voice. The things she said. The inventory of her observations — the sheep that was two, the supervisors who didn't climb, the stones with names, the potion tea that turned frogs into mums. Each one a tiny, perfect gem of her consciousness, the artefacts of a mind that had been three years old and already brilliant and already gone.
He wrote about Mama. Less carefully. More painfully. The drawing by the fire. The kick under the duvet. The barefoot girl on the grass at the art camp in Västerås. The receipts. The charcoal. The unfinished portrait of Tima — the mouth and nose complete, the eyes just starting, two curved lines that hadn't yet become his daughter's eyes.
He did not write stories. He wrote material. Raw. Unprocessed. The substances from which, a decade later, stories might be made — if he survived, if he continued, if the notebook and Peter's pen and the table at Yamamoto-san's café and the silence of the temples and the ache of construction work and the companionship of Swedes at Kokoro and the taste of coffee that was weaker than everyone else's added up to enough to build a version of himself that could look backward without falling in.
---
Kyoto. January 15, 2011.
New Year came and went. I didn't celebrate. At the house one of the other gaijin — a French girl who had been in Kyoto for a year and spoke Japanese with the fluency of someone who had learned it the way children learn, not through study but through saturation — she made toshikoshi soba at midnight. Crossing-year noodles. You eat them at midnight to cross from one year to the next. You don't cut them — you slurp them in one long strand because the length represents longevity and cutting them means cutting your life short.
I sat on the floor of my room with the noodles and I thought about all the things that were cut short and I ate the noodles without cutting them because I am twenty years old and I have already lost more than most people lose in a lifetime and the least I can do is not cut the noodles.
---
Rob arrived in February.
He turned up the way he turned up everywhere — announced but imprecise, a text message saying "coming to kyoto!! where are you??" followed by his physical arrival at Kyoto Station four hours later, backpack on, grin deployed, the Dutch energy undiminished by twelve weeks of solo travel through Southeast Asia. He was thinner. His hair was longer. His enthusiasm was, impossibly, even larger than it had been in Tokyo, as if the travelling had not worn it down but sharpened it, honed it to a finer point.
Papa put him up at the gaijin house — there was a spare room, there was always a spare room, the turnover of foreigners in Kyoto's informal accommodation network was constant, a rotating cast of language students and English teachers and backpackers and the particular category of European in their twenties who had come to Japan for reasons they could articulate and stayed for reasons they could not.
They walked the city together. Papa showed him the temples — Kiyomizu-dera, Nanzen-ji, the path through the torii gates at Fushimi Inari — and the showing was different from the walking, because showing requires you to see the thing again through someone else's eyes, and Rob's eyes were the eyes of a man who had never lost anything except his luggage, and through those eyes the temples were not sanctuaries of silence but objects of wonder, beautiful in the uncomplicated way that beautiful things are beautiful when they are not being asked to hold your grief.
They went to karaoke again. Of course they did. Rob would have gone to karaoke during an earthquake. The room was tiny and the beer was cold and Rob sang — he always sang — with the same boundless commitment he brought to everything, and Papa sang too, and this time the singing felt different. Not an escape from grief but a coexistence with it. The grief was there. It was always there. But the singing was also there, and the beer, and Rob's ridiculous dance moves, and the room was large enough to hold all of it, the sorrow and the silliness, the way a temple holds silence and smoke at the same time.
Rob stayed for two weeks. He left the way he arrived — suddenly, cheerfully, with promises to return that sounded genuine because they were. At the station he hugged Papa — the full Dutch hug, both arms, no reservation — and said: "You seem good, man. You seem okay."
Papa nodded. He was not good. He was not okay. But he was something. He was a person who worked and studied and walked and wrote and sang karaoke and drank beer with Swedes and ate takoyaki in Osaka and carried a plush hippo in his rucksack everywhere he went, and the carrying was the thing, the carrying was what he did, and doing it in the company of people who did not know what they were witnessing was, in its own way, a form of survival.
---
Kyoto. February 2, 2011.
Wrote about the canal path today. The walk from the cottage down to Ty Sign. The trees, the fern, the mossy walls. How the light came through the canopy in patches and Tima used to run from patch to patch calling them "spotlights" and performing in each one — a dance, a song, a monologue about the feelings of a particular stone she'd found.
I miss the canal path more than I miss the cottage. The cottage holds the ending. The canal path holds the walking. The walking was always the best part. The going somewhere together, the rhythm of it, the way her hand felt in mine — small and specific and certain, gripping with the confidence of a child who believes that the hand she's holding will never let go.
---
March came and the cherry blossoms came with it.
They started in the south — Kyushu first, then Shikoku, then the Kansai region — moving north through the country like a wave, a front, the sakura zensen that the news tracked the way Wales tracked the weather: the blossoms have reached Osaka, the blossoms have reached Nara, the blossoms are expected in Kyoto by the middle of the month. And they came. First a few, scattered along the canal near Philosopher's Path — the same canal Papa walked every morning on his way to Yamamoto-san's café, the mile-long path along the waterway lined with cherry trees and stone lanterns, where the monks used to walk in meditation and where he now walked in the closest thing to meditation he could manage, which was not thinking, which was not quite the same thing but would have to do.
Then more. The buds opening in clusters, the petals — white, pale pink — emerging with the delicate insistence of something that cannot be stopped and knows it. Within days the trees were full. The branches held their blossoms the way arms hold children — carefully, tenderly, with the awareness that the holding is temporary, that the petals will fall, that the beauty is not a destination but a transit, a passing through.
Papa stood under the cherry trees and thought of daffodils.
The daffodils in the garden at the cottage. The daffodils that bloomed in April — her month, Mama's month, the month the radio played its bulletin and the world cracked and healed and cracked again. The daffodils that came every year because that was what daffodils did, they bloomed because it was time and because no one had told them to stop, and their blooming was both the most beautiful and the most merciless thing about the valley because they did it regardless. Regardless of who had died. Regardless of who was gone. Regardless of the coffin and the silence and the chair and the waking and the white room and the potatoes and the silence and the silence and the silence.
The cherry blossoms were the same. They were the Japanese daffodils — the beauty that arrived without asking permission, that bloomed in the place where grief lived, that fell without apology. The petals drifted down the canal and collected in the eddies and the corners and they looked, from the bridge where Papa stood, like a kind of snow — a warm snow, a snow that was not about ending but about beginning, about the fact that the tree did not mourn the petal and the petal did not resent the falling and the falling was not a failure but a completion, the last act of a beauty that had always known it was temporary.
He stood on the bridge and watched the petals fall and he wept, because the beauty was unbearable and because unbearable beauty was the only honest kind, and because somewhere in Wales — eight thousand miles west, across the ocean and the continent and the mountains and the bridge — the daffodils were doing the same thing, blooming in a garden where a fire had gone out and a door was unlocked and fairy lights burned in an empty room, and Peter was probably standing in that garden looking at the flowers with his hands in his pockets and his jaw set and his heart doing its work, its relentless, loyal, impossible work.
Then the earthquake came.
March 11. The ground moved — even in Kyoto, hundreds of miles from the epicentre, the earth shuddered, a slow, rolling motion that lasted thirty seconds and left the teacups rattling on the shelves and the gaijin house creaking like a ship in a swell, the old wood flexing in ways it had flexed before, in earthquakes the building had survived and would survive again.
The news came in waves after that, each wave larger than the last. The tsunami. The coast. The footage — water moving through streets the way water moves through everything: unstoppably, indiscriminately, carrying cars and houses and lives with the same horrifying ease. The numbers. The missing. The reactor. The country holding its breath.
Papa sat in the café in Higashiyama and watched the news on the small television above the counter and felt the aftershocks — the small, irregular tremors that came every few hours, reminding the ground and the people standing on it that stability was a fiction, that the solid earth beneath their feet was not solid at all but fluid, moving, capable at any moment of opening itself and swallowing what it had built.
He opened the notebook and wrote:
The ground moves. The blossoms fall. The water takes what it takes. And somewhere in a café in Kyoto a man is writing in a notebook with a blue pen from a post office in Wales and outside the window the most beautiful thing he has ever seen is blooming and falling at the same time and the cruelty of it — the cruelty of beauty that doesn't wait, that doesn't pause, that doesn't care who has died or what has been lost — the cruelty of it is also the mercy of it, because the blossoms will fall and the trees will be bare and next spring they will bloom again and the again is the thing, the again is the only thing, the insistence of again in a world that wants to stop.
---
Kyoto. March 21, 2011.
The blossoms are at peak. Every tree a white fire. The petals on the canal are so thick you could almost walk on them.
I wrote about the Ebbw today. Not the river — the walk. The walk with Peter and Tima down the river from the source. She was tired at the end. Peter carried her on his shoulders, her hands in his hair, her voice singing something tuneless and happy. The river flowed beside us and Peter said something about the river carrying everything and I didn't understand it then but I understand it now.
Everything is carried. Not just the stones and the silt and the rainwater. The people. The stories. The songs she sang. The voices she used for the animals. The way she said "prynhawn da" at the daycare gate, the Welsh tumbling out of her like she'd been born to it, which she was, because she was born in the valley and the valley was in her the way the river was in the valley — not on the surface but underneath, in the bedrock, in the part that doesn't erode.
I think I'm starting to understand why Peter said to write it down. Not because the writing fixes anything. It doesn't. Not because the writing makes the grief smaller. It doesn't do that either. The writing does what the river does. It carries. It doesn't stop. It doesn't judge what it carries — stones or petals or the name of a girl spoken out loud for the first time in months. It just carries.
Her name was Tima. She was three. She liked toast cut into triangles and stones with names and red wellies and a plush hippo called Hoppy. She called the mountains sleeping giants and the canal spotlights and the water in Sweden "the speaking kind." She was my daughter and I was her father and I was in the chair and I was right there and I could not save her and the not-saving is the thing I carry and the carrying is the thing I do and the doing is the thing that Peter's pen is for.
I'm writing it down, Peter.
I'm writing it all down.
---
Kyoto. April 3, 2011.
A year ago today she was alive.
I know because I've counted. I've counted every day since the day the counting started. Three hundred and forty days. Five thousand four hundred and forty hours, approximately, if you don't count the hours where I was asleep, and even the sleep was about her because the dream is always the same dream and the dream is the chair and the breathing and the silence.
In the café this morning I opened the notebook and read everything I've written — from the first napkin in Östersund to now. Two hundred and twelve pages. Fragments. Lists. Half-stories. Conversations I remember word for word and conversations I've reconstructed from the weather of their feeling. A description of Peter's hands. A description of the colour green — specifically the green of the canal path fern when it's wet, which I have tried to capture seventeen times and failed seventeen times because language can't do what eyes can do and eyes can't do what memory does and memory can't do what presence does and she is not present and so the green remains, like her, just out of reach.
But here's the thing. Here's the thing I didn't expect.
The pages are not about death.
They're about life.
Every fragment — the potion tea, the canal walk, the sleeping giants, the stones with names, the supervisor who didn't climb, the toast, the wellies, the lullaby, Peter's kettle, Steph's cariad, Eira's climbing frame, the fire, the cottage, the garden, the daffodils — every fragment is a record of living. Of the life we built. Of the family we made. Of the fortress that held.
The fortress held. That's the thing the grief wants me to forget. The grief says: it ended, it fell, the breathing stopped, the fire went out. But the grief is lying. The fortress held. It held for three years. It held through Mama's drifting and Mama's death and the funeral in Woolwich and the drive home and the crib and the rebuilding. It held through first steps and first words and scraped knees and bedtime stories and the woven-string chair and Peter's kettle and Steph's casseroles and Eira's fearlessness and the canal path and the hills and the rain and the fire and the singing and the laughing and the living.
The fortress held.
And the stories — these fragments, these shards, these scraps of napkin and notebook — the stories are the proof. Not that she died. That she lived.
I think that's why Peter said to write it down. Not so I could grieve. So I could testify.
---
Spring moved through Kyoto and Papa moved with it.
The cherry blossoms peaked and fell, the petals drifting into the canal and the gutters and the cracks between the paving stones, the last of them browning at the edges the way paper browns when held too close to a flame. The trees stood bare again for a week, maybe two, and then the green came — the new leaves, bright and tentative and impossibly fresh, the colour of something that has just decided to exist.
He kept working. Tanaka-san and Mori-san and Ojii-chan had accepted him the way old men accept anything that proves itself through repetition — grudgingly at first, then with tolerance, then with the particular warmth that expresses itself not in words or gestures but in the quality of the silence shared during a tea break on a half-finished roof, four men sitting in a row looking out over the rooftops of a city that one of them was still learning to call something that was not home but was not not-home either.
He kept studying. The language school gave him grammar and vocabulary and the structured, artificial conversations of textbook Japanese — Tanaka-san wa Osaka ni ikimashita, Tanaka-san went to Osaka — and the work gave him the real language, the rough, practical Japanese of construction sites, the language of watch your head and pass the hammer and that doesn't go there, the language that arrived not through the front door of education but through the side door of necessity.
He kept writing. The notebook was full — every page used, the blue ink of Peter's pen saturating the cheap paper until some of the words bled through to the other side, mirror-writing, the ghosts of sentences visible from the back like the shadows of the words that had made them. He bought a new notebook. He found a new pen — not blue, this time, but black, and the change in colour felt significant, as if the writing itself was changing, deepening, moving from the blue of sky and distance to the black of earth and ink.
---
Then Children's Day.
Kodomo no Hi — May 5th, the last day of Golden Week, the day Japan celebrated its children. Papa had not known it was coming. He had not been tracking the calendar of Japanese festivals the way the Japanese tracked them — with the quiet, seasonal precision of a culture that understood that festivals were not interruptions of normal life but expressions of it, the rhythm beneath the rhythm, the heartbeat of a country that had been marking these days for a thousand years.
He noticed the carp.
The koinobori — carp-shaped windsocks, fabric fish in red and blue and black and green, strung on poles outside houses and shops and along the riverbanks, their empty bodies filling with wind and swimming through the air with the lazy, undulating motion of fish swimming upstream. They were everywhere. Every street in the neighbourhood had them — poles rising from balconies and gardens, the carp inflating and deflating with each gust, their mouths open, their tails streaming, their fabric bodies rippling in the May breeze like flags of a country that existed only in the air.
The carp were for children. Each family hung one for each child — the largest, black, for the father, then smaller ones, in descending size, for each son and daughter, the whole arrangement a fabric family swimming together through the wind, and the swimming was the point, because the carp — the koi — swam upstream, against the current, and the swimming upstream was courage, and courage was what the festival celebrated: the courage of children, the courage of growing, the courage of being small in a world that was large.
Papa stood on the bridge near the gaijin house and watched the carp swim. There were hundreds of them — thousands, maybe — strung along both sides of the river, their colours catching the May sun, their bodies snapping and rolling in the wind, and the sound they made — the soft, percussive flapping of fabric against air — was the sound of something that should not be able to fly but was flying anyway.
He watched a family stop on the bridge. A father — young, Papa's age, maybe younger — holding a girl on his hip. The girl was three. Maybe four. She wore a red dress and her hair was in two bunches and she was pointing at the carp with the particular urgency of a child who has discovered something so extraordinary that the adult world must be alerted immediately. "Otōsan! Sakana ga toberu yo!" — Daddy! The fish can fly!
The father smiled. He said something Papa couldn't hear. The girl laughed — the laugh of a child whose father has said the right thing, which is to say: the laugh of a child whose father has agreed that yes, the fish can fly, because what kind of father would disagree with a flying fish?
Papa gripped the railing of the bridge. The metal was warm under his hands. The carp streamed and flapped and the girl laughed and the father held her and the river moved beneath them all, carrying its reflections of fabric fish and bridge and sky.
He did not cry. He was learning — slowly, imperfectly, the way you learn to carry a weight that will never get lighter — to stand in the presence of other people's children without the standing becoming a falling. The girl on the bridge was not Tima. The father was not him. The fish were not the animals she named or the stones she talked to or the foxes she loved. But the pointing — the small, decisive finger aimed at something marvellous — the pointing was the same. The pointing was universal. Every child who has ever seen a flying fish has pointed at it with exactly that urgency, and the urgency is the thing, the urgency is what childhood is: the insistence that the world look at what the world has made.
He wrote in the notebook that evening:
Children's Day. Carp in the wind. A girl on a bridge saying the fish can fly. She was right. They can. Everything can, if the wind is strong enough and the mouth is open and you don't mind that the flying is really just falling in a direction no one expected.
Tima would have named them. Every fish. She would have stood on that bridge for an hour. She would have given them families and histories and favourite foods and disagreements about who got to swim in front.
The fish can fly, Papa.
Yes, cariad. They can.
---
Kyoto. June 12, 2011.
Eight months.
I've been here eight months. It feels like eight weeks. It feels like eight years. Time in Kyoto does not behave the way time behaves in other places — it pools and eddies and sometimes runs backward, the way water does in a river when it meets a stone, circling around the obstruction before continuing, carrying what it carries.
I have a life here. That's the strange thing. Not the life I had — not the fortress, not the cottage, not the fire and the fairy lights and the small hand in mine on the canal path — but a life. A routine. A structure. I wake. I work. I study. I walk. I write. I drink beer with Mattias and Martin and Christian at Kokoro and we talk about nothing important and the nothing-important is, I am beginning to understand, one of the most important things, because the nothing-important is the fabric, the connective tissue, the material that holds the days together so the days don't fall through each other into the gap.
Yusuke asked me this morning if I was happy. We were on a roof — his new project, a house near Kitaōji — and the city was spread below us, the temples and the hills and the river, and the sky was the flat, white sky of Japanese early summer, the tsuyu, the rainy season, when the clouds sit on the city like a lid and the air is so humid that breathing feels like drinking.
I said I didn't know. I said I wasn't sure I knew what the word meant anymore.
He said — in his English, which was getting better, which was getting good, which was becoming the particular Yusuke-English that mixed Japanese grammar with British vocabulary and occasionally produced sentences of accidental poetry — he said: "Maybe happy is not the point. Maybe the point is that you are here. You work. You are useful. You build things."
I build things.
I build houses in Kyoto with three old men who don't speak my language and a young man who speaks it imperfectly and a notebook full of fragments and a hippo in my rucksack and a pen that is not Peter's pen but carries Peter's instruction.
I build things.
Maybe that's enough. Maybe building things — houses, sentences, days — is the closest I will come to the fortress. Not the same fortress. Not the stone and the fire and the valley. A different fortress. A temporary one. A fortress made of work and words and the company of people who don't know what they're sitting beside when they sit beside me at Kokoro and order another round.
I'm not ready to go home. Not yet. The cottage and the chair and the fairy lights are still there, waiting, and Peter's door is still unlocked, and the valley is still the valley, and the daffodils will bloom again next spring whether I am there or not.
But I am closer.
I am closer than I was on the platform in Östersund, or in the white room, or in the terminal at Arlanda, or in the karaoke box in Tokyo. Something has moved. Not the grief — the grief is exactly where it has always been, enormous, tectonic, a permanent feature of the landscape of my interior. But something around the grief. Something alongside it. A thin, fragile channel through which the water is beginning to flow again — not away from the source but toward it.
The valley is in the notebook. Tima is in the words. Peter is in the pen. The cottage is in the silence between sentences.
And the silence here — the Kyoto silence, the temple silence, the silence of old men on rooftops and monks on wooden floors and the café in Higashiyama where Yamamoto-san places the coffee on the table without being asked — the silence here is not absence.
The silence here holds things.
I am learning to hold things too.