“You can’t cry about summer coming, he says. I could understand you crying about winter. But summer? I can cry about anything I like, she says. He is surprised. Can people just do that, cry about anything they like?” — Ali Smith, Spring
In the folk tale Urashima Tarō, a boy is whisked away by a tortoise to a paradise under the sea, where he doesn’t age. The palace of the dragon king, which appears in other Chinese and Japanese legends, is depicted as a place where the four seasons coexist. When the north, south, east, and west doors of the palace are open, Tarō can see from them spring, summer, autumn, winter gardens all at once. This is how we know this is a utopia, an impossibility.
This strikes me as a disturbing ideal, to face south and see snow, to face north and see full green and hear cicadas. It betrays a confusion about seasons: It’s not just that the shrubs look varied, it’s that the air feels different. What happens at the corner of spring and summer? If you walked clockwise around the palace, would you feel the boundaries of the quadrants? Or would it be a continuous walk through an entire year of emotions?
The body accustomed to four distinct seasons, or a mind used to seeing it in movies, is attached to its internal calendar. My friend A, who’s doing her PhD at Berkeley, tells me about the shock of seeing hydrangeas in the Bay Area in January. California has always confused me, with its eternal warp, a place people move to suspend aging, to live without the yearly death of winter. M, who’s from Colombia, said on a cold February night, “At home there’s no reason to look forward to April.” I nodded, quietly astonished, and gripped my hot soup can from the vending machine to warm my fingers.
四季, the four seasons, has been core to Japanese art and literature since at least the eighth century. It’s also a massive part of consumerism here, store displays turning over with each minor ripple in the air to push new products you need to deal with the outside world. Traditionally, people are required to use set seasonal greetings at the beginning of letters. As one high school textbook unironically explains, Japanese people are fundamentally more in touch with, and live more harmoniously with, the seasons—unlike those dominating Westerners, who seek to bend nature to their will. But as I’ve been arguing lately to anyone who will listen, this strong 四季 consciousness is, first of all, a misnomer. For most of Japan, June is a month of monsoon—that is to say, a fifth season. Also, as the critic Haruo Shirane argues, it’s manufactured. According to Shirane, this long-held idea of Japan’s four balanced seasons was constructed by courtiers in the Heian period, who spent all day inside the palace, waltzing around writing verse about perfect spring blossoms. Sure, The Tale of Genji is full of nature and seasonal references, but did those elite-ass aristocrats ever actually go outside??
Lately my immediate world has been feeling both open and contracted. I have often felt frustrated with friends from high school and college who moved directly to the city and rooted in for life, unwilling to take geographical risks. But the problem of ex-pat life is that the social landscape is constantly shifting. People are too prone to discarding visas and picking up new ones.
Most of the other students from my program, shut out of Japan for the majority of the year, arrived in early spring. But classes have stayed online, and I’m still only meeting people for the first time, a few just yesterday, after graduation was over.
New faces, words, ideas, theories, books, artworks, threading their way through the web of the mind, and even a little bit the heart, so thin, hard to see, but there. The transition is elating, hopeful, painful. The eyes you look at with a steady intensity for a brief moment are gone the next time you reach out for them, boarding planes back to where they came, or onto somewhere new. The heart is still in spring, a turmoil of rapid comings and goings, clouds and buds you try to grasp for. Just at the moment I’ve signed a piece of paper saying yes I will yes commit to this place, the ground is shifting below, my anchors are being dragged up all at once from the ocean floor, and carried away, their gazes out to the rest of the world.
I take the same walk a few times a week and check in on trees and flowers like friends and relatives, many of which I only see once a year, which is regrettably becoming the norm for me. There’s a 16th-century temple near my house that I walk to, and I remember distinctly a day in late March when the grounds went from bare and brown to full and green, seemingly overnight.
But at the same that I’m desperate for things to stand still just for a moment, there is a restlessness. Even this new world has started to feel small, this same walk, changing as it does, narrow and familiar. I wish for home at the same time that I’m agitated, itching for something different. It's been four or five years since I knew with any certainty what I was going to be doing in more than 10 month’s time. Now that the volatility is starting to smooth out, I’m nervous to be the one standing still.
I know the paths well: To the west is the temple, to the north the Olympic park, to the south the river, and to the east the town. So last week on an overcast, humid, unpredictable morning, I started idly up a new diagonal. For this relatively bougie neighborhood, the pathway was rundown, the benches un-sittable and the hedges unkempt. I brushed against an ajisai bush, hydrangeas, which are flowering now. Tap tap a photo. Ohh, another, a sightly unconventional shape, this one. Tap tap. Up the path slightly. Ohh, nice gradient. Tap.
This went on for five hours.
The path eventually gave way to a water path, one of many in Tokyo, this one an urban river overgrown with green. It was sticky out, but not too hot, and I walked farther and farther away from home, listening to Esther Perel lay out in excruciating detail the horrible sexy things that people do to each other in the name of passion, boredom, and self-discovery in her book on infidelity. I had to keep pausing the audiobook to stare at grass, or look up from petals to rewind on someone’s eight-year affair.
I turned south, heading toward the river. The road started to look even less familiar. I came to a huge gleaming mall, surrounded by a menacing criss-cross of overpasses, which in turn gave way to a promenade full of couples and strollers and a bougie Starbucks, which in turn gave way to a vast expanse of untended river bank. It was harsh, raw, and open, no buildings, just people sprawled across broken stairs looking like they might tumble into the river. A guy was passed out. Two friends had several large bags crammed with McDonalds they were digging into. People were in the water, gathering shells. The dirt path was uneven, rocky, dusty, and the river threatened to swallow all the senses. I turned back and high-fived all the bushes of ajisai on the way home, their palms facing up, eagerly awaiting the coming downpour.