Posted on Thursday, 01/02/25.

I’m on the Shinkansen, somewhere just before 名古屋, shuttling my siblings and my sister’s boyfriend from 熱海, eventually to 京都, where we will spend a couple days. We’ve split from my mother and David, who will fly to 那覇 from 東京, either seeking warm weather or to be away from us for a while.

The previous three days have been in 伊東, a modestly sized town about halfway down the 伊豆 peninsula, which was suggested mainly to remove ourselves from the dense city, and to which I’d not been. Most of the cities along this coast, like 熱海, are basically onsen towns, filled with oversize (usually gently failing) resort hotels, done in off-white and paint-flaked steel. We stayed in a house, traditionally built maybe in the eighties or early nineties, modern inexpensive accents and finishes giving this away. There isn’t too much to do in 伊東: the onsen, of course, and a few large historical bathhouses closed (as expected) during the new year’s holidays, a few pleasant cafés and izakaya, and a bicycle velodrome open for a tournament (the races only for placing bets, as one would on horses) up in the adjacent mountains. Steam rose from gutters along the main roads: hot-spring run-off from the many hotels. A twenty-four hour grocery store. Birds of prey circling lazily above the unusually warm river bisecting the town to meet the sea. A few herons with yellow feet in truce with other large brown waterfowl.

On Christmas eve, the day my family was set to arrive, I woke up with a bad fever and cough. I had felt this coming, though dismissed it, the previous night during a lab event. I spent the day immobile in my bed, sweating and aching, taking Tylenol at intervals, worrying that I’d caught some sort of encephalitis, pitying myself that I couldn’t go to meet my family or pick up some of the food I had reserved. The next couple of days weren’t much better, my body temperature always poorly regulated and events with family dampened by exhaustion and a lack of appetite. Violent night sweats and caffiene withdrawal, which I put myself through by choice when sick, preferring to switch entirely to water and electrolyte drinks. The kind of fever that makes even leisurely media viewing impossible. I would pace, then lie down, then pace again.

The illness so cleanly separated my work routine and the arrival of my family that the past week has felt quite isolated and pristine. Enjoyment has been limited by my exhaustion, and the need to guide and suggest small itineraries suited to peoples’ desires, but for the most part the difficulties have softened. I brought them to the Ghibli museum, which was playing the same animated short as the last time I went. We ate at a whimsically decorated restaurant near my house run by a pleasant woman who’s infused her own spirits and invited us to a new years’ gathering we would be unable to attend. I basically stopped watching online videos, which may not last, and felt bad about not writing or working, both of which I had been unusually able to do just before the arrival of family: a small but classic instance of the allure of imminently unattainable things.

I realize it’s not unusual for me to be alone at the start of the year—by this I mean not among friends or within non-familial relationships. Something about the inconvenience of this time that is surmounted only by sustained, unnecessary attention among people infatuated or obligated. This is obscured usually, of course, by adjacent family, the torpor of the holidays. Still, at least recently, I see some of the event horizon after my family goes home—see social media feeds filled with the indications of the domestic activities of the people I know, their sojourns with significant others to invariably quaint places. Could be me, I guess, or just quietly think—if some small variable were changed, maybe. I cannot remember the last time I had a decidely domestic Christmas.

The train has just pulled into Nagoya, the third largest city in Japan, and one of the more major stops, meaning that the train car mostly empties and fills, especially as we’re not on the fastest のぞみ, only the local こだま.

The first dream of the new year—the 初夢—is supposed to be portentous, but I don’t remember mine. It’s said to be good to dream of an eagle, or Mount Fuji, or an eggplant. When my family visited 浅草寺 my fortune was one of the worse ones, 凶, so I have felt a little cursed recently, even though I tied it up at the temple and bought a compensatory 守り, just to be sure. The sense of cursedness has basically continued, like the remaining phlegm in my lungs, which rattle sometimes in the mornings. But the longer I sit with it the less calamitous it all becomes. Feeling shunned is a little freeing, adjacent to feeling prideful, as if they shared the same father—both lead to self-destruction lash-outs, maybe, but also suggest some relation to a third set of attributes I could call the urge-to-monasticism. Striking out. Gentle, self-molding psychosis. The feeling of being supernaturally punished is probably also the feeling of having been divinely selected, like a middle-school girl doomed to diaristic invective. The diary is pink, and has a key, and its power is afforded by the fact that most of life is basically not lived outside of the writing, and that most of anything produced is never seen.

In 伊東 I bought a small pack of 干し柿, which I wasn’t able to make this year as the timing was never quite right, and I was a little enmired in depression. We also bought some dried mochi squares, inexplicably decorated with すみっコぐらし characters, for ぜんざい, though these have also remained un-used, and will most likely return to my apartment with me to be fried or boiled some other day. My sister has been combing through 7-11s for new snacks, and each day finds one better than all the rest, she claims. I travel among people who revere 無印良品 and ユニクロ, which I think is probably refreshing, producing and exciting and distant image of the basically okay attributes of where I live. I realize that I’ve compared my December here to previous ones, some coincidence of the weather and being basically an active tourist. This leaves me with the feeling of basic loss and pessimism about my ability to socialize, darkened by the looming (even if false) wall of one’s thirties. The days are short in response to this, I decide.

I keep imagining I might wake up in the night, or the early morning, to write terse and brilliant emails or other copy, and maybe once all signs of illess are gone this is what the year will be like. I will buy only gently obscure sturdy clothing by Japanese designers and pick out one or two nice lamps for my apartment. I will buy a rug and another futon in the imagination I may someday host guests. I’ll book a cabin on the coast for a week in February and watch the DVD copy of “Drive My Car” I bought just a couple of days before Chistmas, because there was no real reason not to, and it was used. I’ll be the toughest 27 year-old on the planet.

We pass a mountain range, the one that separates 名古屋 and the Kansai plain, and some of the distant peaks are kissed by snow, which I haven’t seen yet this year. I think of the fact that 青森 gets the most snow of anywhere on earth—some coincidence of warm, humid air from the East China Sea and the severe chordate mountain ranges of Japan. This is the region about which Snow Country is written, and is where Dazai’s family is from. I’m not sure when I might ever go there.