The Winter Project

16. Minoru

Minoru spent two incredible weeks in the city of Tokyo before he felt that he was ready to say goodbye to such a beautiful place. He ate more food than he had ever thought possible; he met strangers in bars and drank with them until the sun came up. He walked miles and miles of endless city streets, smoking grape flavoured cigarettes and talking to anybody who was willing to listen.

After these two weeks, he felt ready to continue his journey. He took a train to Kyoto that he thought would terrify him due to their notoriously high speed, but was incredibly impressed to note that it was clean and spacious, equipped with smoking rooms and filled with polite and quiet Japanese citizens. The speed of the train felt like nothing as he sat in his seat, the only sign of it coming from the landscape soaring past the windows.

He had planned to meet his cousin Atsushi at the train station in Kyoto, who he hadn't seen since he was a toddler. Atsushi spoke very little English, but met Minoru at the station and accompanied him onto another train and then walked with him for twenty minutes to his grandparent's house. His grandparents lived in a town called Otsu, just north of Kyoto. Minoru had not seen his grandparents since he was very young, and they also spoke very limited English, yet he had never felt more welcomed than when in their home. They prepared food and asked him questions in broken English about his travels in Tokyo and his flight, his family back home and his career. They asked him if he had a girlfriend, to which he politely said he did not. They sat cross-legged on the floor and ate fresh fish and noodles. Before long Minoru's uncle, his very attractive and young-looking wife and Atsushi's younger sister had come to join them. They drank beers and Minoru noticed at some point during the night that they were no longer trying to speak English as the alcohol took over their senses. He fell asleep on the floor of the guest bedroom with nothing but a hard pillow for comfort and the memory of a shrine containing photos of the family on the wall.

He found himself awoken at an ungodly hour of the morning by his grandmother. Normally this would have infuriated him as he was not one to wake up with ease in the morning, but out of respect for his overly polite family he woke up and chose to sit with them to eat breakfast. His grandmother had already been up since the crack of dawn to prepare boiled carrots, broccoli, sausages, toast and potatoes accompanied by miso soup and green tea. He was aware that the sun had only just risen as he had finished his meal, and he felt unusually wide-awake.

He asked his grandmother how to best spend his time in their town and she suggested that he could cycle with his grandfather's bicycle. Feeling fully awake now from his large breakfast, he decided to do something he had never done back home; leave the house at an early hour for a reason other than going to work.

He collected the bicycle from the front of the house and followed his grandmother's directions. After only a few short minutes cycling through the streets he found himself by the water. The cold morning air was stinging his cheeks but he was so immersed in the beauty of this little town that he was no longer considering how cold he was or how early it was. He put on his headphones so that he could listen to music as he began to cycle along the edge of the lake. He felt so intensely happy in the moment as he was alone and at peace, something he hadn't felt in years, if ever. The surroundings were consistently beautiful and he was amazed at how much he remembered from when he was a small child visiting Japan with his father, but this time he had the ability to do as he pleased without parental guidance. He must have biked for hours without thinking of anything except for his internal happiness and the physical surroundings. He passed buildings, hills and mountains, all the while taking brief moments to look over at the water and how it glistened under the rising sun. Occasionally he would be snapped out of his thoughts by another cyclist shooting past or a car beeping on the adjacent road.

He passed over bridges that took him over sections of the water. He saw a building that resembled a pyramid, and remembered how he and Hitoshi had questioned what it was when they were small and came up with elaborate theories about how it was a government testing site or an alien spaceship that had crash landed. He questioned it still as he did not have the energy to travel across the entirety of the lake, and made a mental reminder to visit it another time.

As the sun passed over the centre of the sky and began to descend back down towards the mountains, he chose to turn around and head back to his grandmother's home. Once he had made his back way, he was sweating and exhausted. His entire family was gathered there and waiting for him, ready to take him out to a restaurant and show him their local cuisine.

At the restaurant, his grandfather ordered a large selection of dishes and they sat and ate, taking samples of food from each bowl. His grandparents and cousins watched gleefully as he tried dishes that he wasn't even sure what they contained, and would clap and cheer every time he smiled in satisfaction. He was now completely drained, not from the long journey of cycling, but from finding complete and true contentment.