Almost a year into Japan I took a bicycle ride
along the Hanamigawa to enlarge perimeters
and discover what would ultimately become home.
My original flat was situated among old and old seeming
houses and small apartments along what had been the Tokyo Bay coast, and is now the number 14 Narita-Tokyo expressway.
I passed many weekends riding the faintly deliniated boundary between old and new which runs all the way
to Tokyo, a hint of a hill, old fishing houses and larger
wood walled family enclosures interspersed with condos
and cheaply built apartments. On the other side of the imaginary coast a flat grey wasteland of taller apartment buildings, wide roads, graffiti.
It took me months to discover that the little canal which I crossed on my way to the all-you-can-eat yaki nikku place
was in fact the mouth of a larger and rather well respected river, a place where fishermen and local residents took weekend walks or bicycle rides.
Now my days had color, a zipper opened and revealed a hidden world of farms and trees under the urban jacket, and the further I went the more luxuriant the colors and sounds, at one point around a bend upstream there was no sight but forest, no sound but birds and my mind played tricks that I was in a Japan that had not changed in 150 years. Rounding the bend I came to another suburb.
Yet persistently, crossing this new and smaller suburb, the land yielded a wider flat of rice field, and higher wooded hills, in which nestled inumerable shrines and small farm houses, the people one passed by the river now not so much weekenders but sun darkened farmers or fishermen working and chatting in earthy accents.
Though I ventured far I had not biked so far as the place I took a train ride to, that clear May afternoon, connected, as I later found out by the same umbilical cord river to the Tokyo Bay.
This was the Japan of my dreams, a quiet leafy suburb that petered out 10 minutes from the station into an expansive marsh, connected via cycling course to a larger marsh and finally to the Tono river.
As I walked along the lake side path, amid spaces much greater than I had experienced in Japan, I felt the stress pack of urban life dissipate, enfolded in a landscape not so different from California. Somewhere in short I could call home.
