Traveling Spain, Packing Up Japan, and Back to Barcelona.

About a month after we came to Barcelona, once the paperwork had settled down, we traveled to Gran Canaria and San Sebastián. I've written about that trip before, but the sunsets we watched sinking beyond the sea as we drove around the island in a rental car, and the tapas and cheesecake in San Sebastián, where we went to about fifteen places in three days, were truly wonderful. Even so, what I felt most when we got back was that there really is something different about Barcelona's climate.

I wanted to keep feeling this climate for longer, but there was something we absolutely had to do, and we had to leave Barcelona for a while. I really didn't want to. We had to go back to Japan.

My wife and I had come thinking we first needed to take care of our place in Barcelona and everything to do with the visa, so we had left things in Japan almost entirely untouched. Moving out of the room we were renting, sorting through our belongings, other paperwork, seeing people we hadn't seen in a while, wrapping up work. There was quite a lot to do, and after talking it over, we decided to go back to Japan for a month. It was just as it had finally gotten warm and summer was properly on its way, and the Tower of Jesus Christ at the Sagrada Família was said to be nearly finished. There were lots of fun-looking events in Barcelona too, but we gave them up for this year and went back to Japan.

Japan was about to enter the rainy season. There was no blue sky like Barcelona's, just thick clouds hanging heavily over everything, a climate that was cool and yet somehow muggy. On the plane I thought through everything we had to do in the coming month and put together a schedule, but it felt far too packed to fit into a month, and honestly, I wanted to run away right then and there. But at the same time, being able to read the signs and have people understand my words felt somehow very comfortable.

The first thing I wanted to do back in Japan was eat. We went to our usual sushi place and our usual yakiniku place, and went out to eat all the Japanese food we'd been craving in Barcelona. Along the way I realized that in Japan, food has become a form of entertainment, and there's a feeling that people are trying somehow to relieve, through eating, the stress they take on in a high-stress society. Of course we were the same: walking through familiar scenery didn't lift our spirits much, and when we wanted something to cheer us up, the first thing that came to mind was food. In Japan we don't have a kitchen to cook in like we do in Barcelona, so we had no choice but to eat out every day, and maybe that's why we felt that way. But somehow, the two of us both felt it.

We spent the first two weeks in Kyoto. I really wanted to go to Okinawa, but there was a reason we had to be in Kyoto, so this time we spent two weeks there, hardly going anywhere else. What we had to do in Kyoto was sort out the things in the room we were renting, see family, and take care of some work.

I thought we'd only kept the bare minimum in our small studio apartment, but when we actually started clearing it out, there was more than I expected. Neither the rules nor the atmosphere were like Barcelona's, where you can just toss things into the bin in front of your building, so we made trip after trip by car to the clean center, the municipal waste facility. Deciding what we needed and what we didn't also takes a fair amount of energy. We need this, we don't need that; my wife and I decided as we went, talking things through and sometimes getting into small arguments.

I looked for cafés to work in, but in Kyoto there are only a handful of cafés where you can settle in and work, and when those are full, it's hard to find anywhere else. Even when I did find somewhere, the air conditioning was so strong it was cold, and when I went outside to warm up it was so muggy I couldn't get anything done. So I spent my days working on subway platforms, riding one train after another for a few hours at a time.

While we were clearing out the room, my wife said, "I don't have many memories of this room, but because we gave up our home and rented just this studio, we could travel to all kinds of places, live in hotels, live in a camper van, and even live in Barcelona. When you think about it that way, this room does have memories."

"Yeah. Maybe the decision we made back then wasn't wrong," I said.

When we had just gotten married, we didn't have a place we were renting in Japan, we weren't working anywhere, and we had no ties or connections at all. So we truly could have lived anywhere and done anything. Tokyo, Kanagawa, Kyoto, Osaka, Fukuoka, and Okinawa, the places we had lived until then. We talked it over for days and days and came up with candidates, but we couldn't decide at all, and we spent our days moving from one cheap lodging to the next, thinking about where to live and why. That day we happened to be staying at a hotel in Kyoto and were heading by train to Hirakata, a city in Osaka. On the way we got hungry, and while we were eating near the station where we'd gotten off, we noticed the place next door was a real estate agency. On a whim we walked in to ask whether we could look for a place, and that was how we ended up renting a room nearby. If we asked ourselves why we were living in a place like this, no reason came to mind. So we stopped asking, let ourselves go with the flow, and decided to start a new life.

The Kansai region was where I had spent my early childhood. It was close to central Kyoto, and my parents lived not too far away, so maybe somewhere in my heart I thought they might be able to help us when we started something. In fact, when we needed a car, my father lent us one he wasn't using, and my mother taught us all sorts of things about an area we didn't know. It's also true that having us nearby gave my parents peace of mind.

As for us, though, even after moving we had no work. We somehow started looking, found part-time and full-time job listings, applied, and actually went to work. But some workplaces just weren't a fit, and I quit one after two weeks. Hard days went on and on; that was how our married life began. Even then, we somehow got ourselves outside and walked in a nearby park, talking about the future ahead of us. Every single word of those talks held each of us up. But even as we talked about the future, it was so far removed from who we were then that we often felt down. During those days of walking in the evening, we stopped in at a café, and that visit would go on to change our lives dramatically. And it's what led to who we are today. Unexpected possibilities and encounters arrive from places you could never have imagined, and your life changes. Riding the Keihan train, I slowly savored this place where we had experienced that miracle. This time, the ride became that kind of journey.

Four years have passed since then, and here we are today. We let go of almost everything that had been packed into this small room, clearing it out as if returning each thing, full of four years of memories, one by one to the land it came from.

If we hadn't stopped in at that café, that day, at that moment, what would have become of us? The thought scares me a little. Feeling the wind in this area reminds me of how little we could see ahead of us then, and how anxious we were. Once we give up this room, we'll have no base here anymore, and we don't know when we'll be back. We might pass through on a train in this area on some errand, but maybe we'll never again get off here and go for a walk.

They say it takes seven years to accomplish one thing. It's been about four years today since the first day I set foot in Barcelona. In three more years, we should have built the foundation for our life in Spain and be starting a new challenge there. Seven years is a very long time. When you've just started something, seven years from now feels so far away, and where you are now is so far removed from the future you're aiming for that it can get you down. But in seven years, life can change. When I picture us four years ago, I believe that.

And that chance can suddenly come from somewhere you can't even imagine right now. Just the way you choose your route for a daily walk can change your life dramatically. I learned that in this place. Imagining seven years from where I am now, it looks like a future I could never reach. But if you keep heading toward it, that future will surely come. Believing that, I decided to clear out this place and move on.

After two weeks in Kyoto, we headed to Tokyo. On the way, we stopped at Sasue Maeda Fish Store in Yaizu, Shizuoka, to eat sashimi. At a Starbucks we stopped at, one of the staff saw our camper van and started talking to us; he said he'd lived in a camper van in Australia too, so we had a lively conversation about camper vans. We passed through Yamanashi and Kanagawa and arrived in Tokyo. In Tokyo we stayed for a week in Akasaka and Shibuya, meeting friends and people we work with, and it was a hectic time.

Looking out from Miyashita Park over a Shibuya that has changed completely, what I thought was that this city is ruled by advertising. Wherever you look, there's an ad placed precisely in your line of sight, and it's not the kind of environment where you can slowly gaze at the sky. Barcelona has almost none of the billboard advertising Japan has, so after spending about two months in that kind of environment, seeing the landscape of this advertising superpower was so much information that I felt I might lose my mind. Even so, we went to each of our places of memory in Tokyo. Some scenes had changed so much that I wondered whether what had happened there was ever real; at others, I felt how young and naive we had been to think that what happened there was the whole world. Walking through Shibuya, I really do think that people in every era draw up their dreams and live out their lives.

It was here in Tokyo that my wife and I met. Until then, we were each living in a corner of this huge city, trying somehow to make our lives better, alone, and having fun. We're the same age, so what was happening in this city in our early twenties, the trends and dreams and illusions of that time, line up perfectly for us. Walking around Tokyo talking about all that hasn't changed at all from when we first met. Spending our time in Tokyo as we always do, during the day I worked from a café inside an office building, watching all the neatly dressed people heading to their offices.

We also saw my wife's parents, showed them photos we'd taken and told them about Barcelona, told them to come to Barcelona at least once, and then headed to Osaka. We spent the last week in Osaka.

Osaka, as always, was bustling with tourists, mainly from Asia, and with the muggy weather on top of that, the atmosphere made me think it was practically Southeast Asia. Osaka is a city with a culture all its own, even within Japan; I'm not too keen on living there, but for a short visit it's pretty interesting. We, too, enjoyed Osaka as short-term travelers.

And then, after a month, we returned to Barcelona. Summer has already begun in Barcelona. The Mediterranean summer has come again this year. Captivated by the summers here, I can finally spend a long summer here this year.

I wonder what kind of summer this one will be. Last year, here in Barcelona, it became a summer that changed my life. This year, I want to make it a summer that changes my life even more.