The Dark of the Old Capital

I barely slept, sitting up with my phone tracking the typhoon. I never aspired to become a weather enthusiast; none of the relevant knowledge successfully entered my head back in high school. The only thing I cared about at that moment was whether the trip we’d planned was still possible. The flight had already been delayed a day. The airline’s notices were vague, and nobody ever picked up at the airport — a profoundly unequal kind of tormented romance. By daybreak the typhoon had passed over, downgraded to a tropical storm, continuing its westward journey inland. Once the projected impact started shrinking, Nicole and I decided to go to the airport as planned and try our luck. It was blind optimism, no question, but since childhood I’ve felt that being with Nicole comes with good luck.

The airport is far from the city, nearly an hour by shuttle bus. Its siting has become the joke that veteran geography teachers deploy to lighten the mood in class. But the experience of sharing a bus with a load of Fuzhou people tends to be equivalent to lithotripsy. I booked a car, picked up Nicole, and headed straight for the airport. The scenery along the way was ready-made material for a low-budget disaster film. I felt very presidential, like someone emerging from a bunker to survey a world already destroyed — the widespread flooding from the rain hadn’t receded, and trees knocked down by the wind were everywhere. But Nicole and I had long since resolved that we had to get to the airport. The driver probably thought the two of us were so determined to catch an international flight under these conditions that we must be going to negotiate some cross-border acquisition, or fleeing the country.

When we reached the highway toll gate, the highway hadn’t reopened. The driver judged that the national road was passable, and also judged that it would definitely be flooded, and that his car couldn’t handle it.

Not long after, we were sitting on the shuttle bus to the airport. The driver had been right. On the stretch of national road near the airport, I looked out the window and briefly felt I was on a ferry.

At the airport we got good news immediately: the ground staff told us the plane would most likely fly, and was currently scheduled. The bad news was that past security, this international departures terminal — which doesn’t handle that many international flights — had nothing to eat. I assume everyone understood the situation, because the airline staff brought us drinks and instant noodles. After eating hastily, I fell asleep sitting up.

When I fully came to, the plane was climbing fast through light rain. Our hometown, so recently hit by the typhoon, had become whole again, and looked as though nothing had happened.

It was the emptiest flight I’ve ever been on. Air Force One probably carries more people on every trip. So empty that I got playful and sat here, then there, except in the places the flight attendant said we couldn’t sit, for balance. I had never imagined a plane could be empty enough that the few people on board would be responsible for the plane’s balance. It was an unprecedented kind of responsibility.

After landing at KIX, I walked through the jet bridge and, through the terminal’s floor-to-ceiling windows, saw the last of a sunset I hadn’t seen in a long time. My first time setting foot in Japan, and I hadn’t expected my first impression to be simply that everything looked exceptionally clear. That level of purity was like putting on a different pair of glasses to look at the world. My looking around turned somewhat greedy, and I forgot completely where I had come from.

Over the preceding months, Nicole and I had planned the trip from two countries through an online collaboration platform. So I had nothing to be nervous about. Besides, the woman beside me had gone abroad to study in her teens, and her travel experience is obviously on a different tier than mine. She seemed to require almost no mental computation to know our every next step. Immigration, which JR ticket to buy, which way to go — none of it required my attention. I only needed to carry a bag or pull a suitcase at the appropriate moments.

An hour and change later, we were standing in the plaza in front of Kyoto Station. Both of us lost the ability to speak at the same time.

Kyoto Station is itself a novel kind of transit hub. Having grown used to the templated train stations back home, you naturally get hit with a “what on earth is this?” It has a grandeur built with modern technique that strikes you at first as entirely unnecessary, and yet you can’t stop looking up at that complicated sixty-meter roof. As the face of a thousand-year-old capital, it looks like a deliberate provocation, engineered specifically to impress people like me.

Look up again and Kyoto Tower stands tall across the street, without any sense of oppression. Its colors read as classical with a streak of mischief, and somehow it also carries the air of not wanting anyone to come up and investigate. And the heavy commercialization all around it was something I’d reserved for my imagination of Shibuya.

None of this looks like an old capital at all.

According to the map, the Airbnb we’d booked wasn’t far from Kyoto Station. I’d heard plenty about how expensive taxis are in Japan, and though I was a little hungry, the urge to explore completely defeated the urge to eat, so we decided to walk. The route on the map was a straight line east — straight enough that I later wondered whether Nicole had chosen the place on purpose.

Before long we were on Shiokoji Bridge.

Suddenly all the noise vanished. As though some formless thing had sucked away everything behind us. All I could hear was the water of the Kamo River. In the summer night it delivered a sudden surround-sound experience, almost too loud. I leaned out to look at the riverbank and told Nicole excitedly that it was exactly like the places in Japanese animation where middle schoolers linger after class.

Crossing the bridge, I felt I had stepped into some kind of barrier.

Like putting on noise-cancelling headphones for the first time. This deadness wasn’t something you took in by hearing alone — the streetlights thinned out too, and as we walked I suddenly felt I was feeling my way forward in the dark. There were only old wooden houses around us, not a single modern building material in sight. Some had soft lights on, at a color temperature that couldn’t have even reached 2700K.

The noise of the suitcase wheels became enormous, and every centimeter of dragging it forward made me feel a little すみません.

Then we discovered that, in all that darkness, we couldn’t find our place.

In the dark, nobody around, no shared language. To say nothing of knowing nothing about how an old capital is laid out.

The worlds in many of the anime Akiyuki Shinbo directed are exactly like this. Apart from the protagonists, there are no passersby anywhere. Watching those works before, I of course understood that drawing crowds is an enormous production expense, and nobody is better than Shinbo at saving money. But standing in a Kyoto residential neighborhood at night, I finally understood that this emptiness was never just a budgetary necessity. Because this world, in the end, has nothing to do with anyone else.

I don’t think I had ever been so calm. I could hear every sound inside my own head.

And I could set down, for a while, all the unhappiness. Went to the wrong university, loved the wrong person, studied the wrong major, got tangled up with the wrong people.

Because at least at this moment, the two of us, who met when we were six, could stand lost in front of the south gate of Sanjūsangen-dō.

I don’t remember how we eventually found the place. That’s too trivial. Our luck was clearly fine.

Once settled, after resting a while, we set out again on those pitch-black lanes, headed for the nearest Sukiya, on a corner in Shichijō.

Nicole likes gyudon.

I ordered one with an onsen egg, buried under chopped scallions. The way the yolk broke and seeped into the rice matched every fantasy I’d had about Japan.

That said, nobody should eat a meal that filling at midnight.

Back out on the road, having not slept all night, I finally couldn’t walk anymore.

Let’s take a cab back.

The car drove for three minutes. We were there. Forty yuan.