Postcards from Japan

Prelude

We come from nothing and are headed for nothing. In between, we are something. This something is what we call life.

There was a time when I was obsessed with measuring this spark between the darkness that comes before us and what comes afterward.

I thought of existence as a sort of bag more or less filled with hours, days, months and years, and it made me anxious to think that every minute lived was one minute less in the countdown toward some place I didn’t know.

I wasn’t in any hurry to get there either.

I hadn’t yet understood that a few seconds of intense happiness leave a deeper mark in the spirit than a lifetime of monotonous waiting.

Until I was thirty-seven I lived in a prison cell of solitude I had built myself, brick by brick. Having closed the walls around me, I buried the key so no one could get in.

Then a stray cat came along, managed to dig up the key and, with his feline wiles, made me open up to the world. I’ve been sharing my life with him—Mishima is his name—ever since, together with an assortment of oddballs encountered along the way.

I live in a flat in the Barcelona neighborhood of Gràcia. My elderly upstairs neighbor, Titus, writes inspirational books, and I sometimes help him out, when my teaching commitments at the university allow.

Mishima led me to him, and brought back Gabriela. I’m in love with her, though I know almost nothing of her past—or even of her present when she’s not with me. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t want to live with me. So now I’m forced to be trendy: one couple, two flats.

Once I had a friend called Valdemar: an eccentric physicist who was exploring the dark side of the moon, but he vanished one day, leaving his telescope set up in Titus’s kitchen.

He also left us a manuscript detailing the results of his research along with an unfillable vacuum—the kind left by people who mean something to us.

When Titus and I start missing him, we set up the telescope in Titus’s kitchen again and point it at the moon, as if Valdemar had found out how to get there and would be sending us signals any moment.

He’ll be back one day, or we’ll go back to him because all of us are together in this great, always simmering cosmic cauldron in which no ingredient is wasted.

Over time I’ve learned that solitude isn’t the way to go about discovering yourself.

You do that through other people. Once you’ve given up everything, it’s relatively easy to climb a mountain and sit there doing nothing, letting the days slip by.

It’s more difficult—indeed it’s the supreme art—to have a relationship with someone who’s different from you.

This is where your skills reveal your true measure as a human being.

I suppose I’m just a novice, because I’m always surprised by decisions made by the people around me. Around me can be taken in the broadest sense, as I was about to find out that first morning of June when I went downstairs and opened my letter box . . .