Middlebury, Vermont, summer of 1978: the beginning of my Japanese language journey. It’s been a rough road.

Two high school boys discover that biomedical research is not to be their path.

A tiny museum on a Kyoto side street opens a window into the world of the kaleidoscope

An American potter in Japan, the warmth of the kiln on a chilly night.

Sometimes it’s the most untranslatable expression that opens a door to understanding of another culture.

There are wonders at our feet. Felicia found them everywhere in the streets of towns and cities of Japan.

Mono no aware: This sense of gentle sadness at the passing of…things…is hard to pin down: life is full of sadness, but what kinds of things are we talking about?

The letter is neatly folded in its envelope where I had taped it into the pages of my journal 40 years ago. But the tape had long since dried out and the letter sits loosely between the pages.

I speak two languages: English and Japanese. It is hard to imagine two languages that could be more different from each other.

It’s late summer and we’re at the Lady Killigrew Café at the Book Mill, a used book store in Montague, Massachusetts. The Saw Mill River is full and flowing fast beside the old mill building. There was once a dam and mill race here, but those were dismantled and removed long ago. Only rapids remain, and the air is filled with the sound of rushing water.

I worked as an English conversation teacher at a steel works in Mizushima, Okayama Prefecture on the Inland Sea in Western Japan. It was there that I acquired a fondness for hot metal, showering sparks, and the earth-shuddering power of the rolling mills.

Uneasily navigating the straits of middle age, I was taking stock of my life and connection to Japan. I was on the ferry from the city of Wakayama on Honshū, the largest of Japan’s four main islands, and Shikoku, the smallest of the main islands.

Kawashima had gone from Fukui, a provincial backwater on the Sea of Japan, to Germany to study pipe organ. Instead, he fell in love with the harpsichord and decided he must have one of his own.

October 2018: Felicia and I were in Kamakura, a few days into her first sojourn in Japan. The weather was warm, but not the unbearable heat and humidity of summer in Japan.