There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays”

24 September 2023

• Nakajima Park (~1.5h)
• Writer’s conference at Heihoukan (2.5h)

Nakajima Park

I spent the night alone at Cowboy’s apartment. He returned at 9:00 from his night shift.

“Did you do your laundry?” he asked.

“I did last week,” I said, smelling my clothes.

“You shouldn’t wait until they smell…”

The Chinese guy from Mejiro spoke similarly after I’d hiked Fuji-san. Maybe Chinese people were more sensitive to scent than Caucasians?

We ate breakfast and passed the time. At 12:00, he went to sleep. I quietly left after he’d dozed off.

I took the bus to Nakajima Park for today’s business event.

Finally, a proper park in Sapporo. Not too far from the center, it offered a complete escape from the urban downtown. Perfectly blue sky and pleasant temperatures. Not too many visitors, too. No one, even the kids, was louder than the birds chirping all around the park.

A pretty pond and willow trees. Ducks swimming and treading on grass. It was completely and utterly serene. None of Tokyo’s gigantic parks offered such silence, even on this sunny weekend day. The impressive western facade of Heihokan, a hub for events such as today’s. I sat on a bench in front of it at 12:30 and spent the next hour and a half revelling in this picturesque, free spot that made me love Sapporo even more.

“Where’d you go 😣” Cowboy texted.

“I thought you were sleeping!” I replied.

He didn’t read my message. Probably dozed off again.

Writer’s Conference

Today’s event was a talk with one of the most prolific foreign writers living in Japan. She was in her seventies, a black woman from the US, who had immigrated to Japan 48 years ago without intending to. Since then, she’d published fiction and non-fiction about her life in Japan, after writing a daily column for the Japan Times.

In other words, she was living my biggest dream.

The English teacher from Sapporo who the Morioka woman had introduced me to had texted me about this event while I was in Rebun Island. I couldn’t miss such an event. So I’d skipped Wakkanai and taken the ferry and bus back to Sapporo yesterday.

The event was in a small hall, hosted by a senior editor of the Japan Times, and a friend of the English teacher. The latter had told the former about me, and so I’d looked forward to our introduction. Since only twenty or so people were in attendance, it would be an event intimate enough for a conversation.

The other attendees were nearly all from the writing community. Half of them were twenty, thirtysomething foreigners living in Hokkaido, teaching English and stuff, while dreaming of becoming a full-time writer.

I met an English teacher who lived in a tiny town in between Sapporo and Asahikawa, and voluntarily edited an English language online magazine for JETs in Hokkaido. He encouraged me to send them a sample of my work.

One of his friends from Hokkaido was an Israeli man who’d married a Japanese woman and moved to a tiny town nearby to open a Middle Eastern restaurant. Too bad the family had recently relocated to Israel.

I met a girl, married to a Japanese guy, who taught English, sang jazz, wrote 500,000-word novels she was too afraid to share with readers, and lent her voice to the subway announcements. Yes, she was the one behind recordings such as “this train is bound for… please be careful of the closing doors…”

I met an Australian girl living in Sapporo for six years, working in translation, and an Indian guy working in IT in a nearby city.

Then, the lecture. I wanted to jot down every story today’s writer said about her fascinating life, but felt bad writing as she spoke. Some of the details I later recalled included:

• Road tripping through Europe for a year with her husband and newborn daughter.
• Meeting Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in their mansion for a caretaker job interview and beholding the famously gargantuan Taylor diamond ring.
• Moving to Japan 48 years ago for one year and living in a dojo with her husband. After that year, they decided to just stay.
• Living in an old house on a mountain in Shizuoka prefecture with no plumbing. One had to empty the toilet’s waste and light a fire for the bathtub on a daily basis.
• Writing a daily column for the Japan Times on living in Japan as a foreigner, and calling this low paid gig “charity work”.
• Starting her own imprint after failing to find a literary agent and a publisher. (Story of my life)
• Her daughter, working in marketing for Netflix, teaching her how to promote her book on Facebook.

After the talk, I introduced myself to the writer and host. I mentioned taking a 2-hour ferry and a 6-hour bus yesterday to return to Sapporo in time for today’s event. I mentioned my ambition of following in the writer’s footsteps and cultivating a career similar to hers.

She told me she was thinking of visiting Israel. The host asked me to take their photo. That was the end of our conversation.

The event ended, and they left. I managed to give them my business card. They didn’t seem interested to accept it. Unlike the writers my age, living in Hokkaido, who I’d met before the lecture had begun.

I stood in the hall wondering why I’d come all this way. Why I’d expected for something to happen.

I didn’t know why I was changing my itinerary to meet certain people, only for my efforts to go in vain. The live interview the Morioka woman had promised me hadn’t happened; the dinner party in Sapporo for a teaching gig that had turned out unlikely; today’s meeting, in which I’d hoped to discuss career paths with the right people.

“It’s not who you are or what you can do, but who you know,” the writer had said at some point in her lecture, about an acquaintance who had made a hitherto impossible publication of her columns possible.

This was my MA all over again. Studying creative writing at the UK’s most prestigious program, meeting industry people, yet failing to forge a path for myself. For today’s writer, knowing the right people had worked. For me, I doubted even that would help.

The Hokkaido expats and I checked out the Heihoukan’s upper floor afterwards, including a bedroom where Emperor Meiji had slept in. Then the American and Indian guys had to go.

I could’ve spent more time with the Australian girl, but I figured Cowboy was waiting for my return.

Dating is Hard

Back in his apartment, I’d accidentally woken him up.

This turned him quite cranky. Apparently, he hadn’t wanted me to come back. He hadn’t wanted me to leave to begin with. Just stay in his apartment, and be quiet.

I apologized. He was more interested in drowsily watching Taylor Swift videos on his iPad than paying attention to me. As I tried to reach out to him, he muttered that I was hurting him, because I was too bony.

“You smell like curry,” he said.

“What?”

“Did you eat soup curry again?”

I couldn’t understand where he’d picked this scent from, since I’d eaten onigiri for lunch.

“Were you next to an Indian person?” he asked.

I nodded. Chinese people were so sensitive to smell.

After two hours like this, he cooked dinner. We talked about my plans to go to volunteer at a farm starting tomorrow morning, on Monday.

“You should go to the farm on Tuesday,” he said. “You can stay here after I leave.”

On Wednesday, he’d fly home to China to visit his family for the first time in six years.

“Is that your way of saying you want me to stay another day in Sapporo?” I asked.

He didn’t answer.

While he was eating dinner – chicken and broccoli, which he detested – we talked about family.

“Usually people with siblings have at least one photo with them on their Instagram,” he said, surprised to hear I was one of a set of triplets.

“You went through all my posts?”

“Well,” he muttered, “not all of them…”

Last week, he’d said I’d looked different at the beginning of my trip; that it was evident that I’d lost a lot of weight.

I showed him a picture of my brother. His reaction threw me off.

“I don’t think it’s possible to be attracted to both me and my brother,” I said. My brother and I were polar opposites.

“Well,” he smiled, “I’m not attracted to you.”

I thought he was joking. That we were just teasing each other, as usual. Yet I couldn’t read his face.

“That’s what I was gonna say, but…”

I tried to laugh it off, and confided in him that my family didn’t know a lot about me, nor what I was doing.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” he asked.

“No,” I answered truthfully.

“You’re just couchsurfing at people’s places.”

Gone was that cryptic smile on his face.

“God, every sentence that comes out of your mouth today…” I said. “I’m gonna leave tomorrow, and you’re not gonna see me again.”

Such a retort wasn’t serious on my part – more to test his rection. I couldn’t quite catch what he mumbled here, but it was along the lines of “that’s what I want”.

I flustered.

“What?” he exclaimed. “You were so mean to me the day you took the bus.”

“What are you talking about?”

I tried to recall the day I’d left Sapporo at night to Wakkanai. Nothing negative came to mind.

“Oh, why are you holding your plate like that?” he said, imitating me. “I’ve never seen someone use chopsticks like that. Can you even cook?”

Oh. So that was why that night had ended so awkwardly. I couldn’t figure out why he’d felt so distant after dinner, all of a sudden. I had indeed said all those things to him during dinner with his Swiftie friend – yet, from my perspective, these were clearly jokes; some harmless teasing. 

Now, he got up to look in the mirror before leaving for his night shift. I followed him.

“Hey,” I said as he ignored me. “I’m sorry.”

“Too late,” he said, again with that half-smile. Was he serious? Was he playing?

He put on his shoes at the entrance, where all my luggage was in disarray.

“Why are you putting your things there?” he asked. “I have a big place.”

“Yeah, I should organize this mess.”

He opened the door. “So you I won’t see you when I’m back?”

I wondered if this was a hint.

“Do you want to?”

It took him a moment to reply.

“You should do your laundry.”

He half-smiled at me, and left.

I stood motionless in front of the shut door, confused by the entire afternoon and evening.

So I stank? I was unattractive to him? I was mean and repulsive?

Then why had he continued to invite me over?

I sat down in his living room, my mind going a million miles per hour. Should I pack my bags and leave?

I didn’t feel wanted. Malicious mocking and bad scents – two strikes already. Last time I’d met someone like him, one strike was strong enough for the hammer of estrangement to put the nail in affection’s coffin.

Back in late July, I’d vowed to never let someone I liked see me cry as the British and Korean students had. Now, I was making new mistakes.

A few minutes into my remorse, a text message came.

“You should leave on Tuesday,” Cowboy said.

I humphed in frustration. Again that ambiguous behaviour. I needed him to explain his intentions better.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I said so.”

I took this text as a sign. He might be feeling as bad as I was. I just wished he could’ve been more direct.

“Sorry I was mean to you,” I texted. Clearly, I’d crossed the line with him, and owed him a better apology.

“You should make it up for me.”

“How?”

“Stay until Tuesday.”

That was direct enough for me.

I spent the rest of the night doing laundry and taking advantage of my stable Wi-Fi and privacy to call some friends. Two of them in Korea were going through a rough patch.

“This might be a secret, but every morning I pray for a car accident,” one, who had recently started taking meds, said. “Just for something to happen.”

The other, at 19, sounded in the midst of hardships eerily similar to mine at that age. Back then, I’d enrolled in university, found it harder to get straight A’s, all my friends had forsaken me, my social and romantic life was non-existent, and I’d realized that someday, I’d be dead…

It was the only time I’d gone to therapy. That hadn’t really helped… I’d been carrying a heavy balloon with me, to borrow the metaphor from Fiona Apple, ever since my first semester in uni. Ages 20-26 were a period when I’d managed to keep this balloon afloat, until at some point, it had grown in mass, to further weigh me down.

Now, I feared the latter friend had inflated a balloon of their own.

I thought about the friends I’d made on this trip. Out of the nine or so I was still in regular touch with, six had leaned on me during bouts of depression, and insinuated, or even openly discussed, the matter of suicide.

Was this a coincidence? Did our bond disclose something about my own character? It almost felt like an invisible string had drawn our balloons together.

Today’s highlight: finding a proper park in Nakajima.

25 September 2023

• 13:09-14:05 Toyohira post office to Minami Chitose station bus, 14:16-14:34 train to Oiwake station

Cowboy returned at 9:00 again.

The vibe was different today. My apology yesterday might have helped. I’d understood what kind of teasing was acceptable with him, and where the line was.

There was no tension between us this morning. Only a spoonful of healthy taunting. He pointed out my “chopstick arms”. I said he could “use them the right way”.

He said it was obvious that I’d never been in a relationship. Compared to me, he was infinitely more experienced.

We talked about visas. I’d need one if I ever wanted to visit China, and he as well, for Israel. He found out this would bar him from visiting “enemy” countries, such as Iran. The Middle-Eastern conflict was completely foreign to him.

“What time do you have to leave?” he asked. He understood I wouldn’t be able to stay another day.

I’d already made a commitment to the farm, and since two friends had arranged the whole deal for me, I could no longer back down.

As I packed my luggage, he got up from bed, despite being sleepy.

“I’m making sure you don’t steal my umbrella,” he grinned. I’d been itching for his Chromatica umbrella since first laying eyes upon it.

I took the biggest foldable umbrella I’d ever seen instead. He wasn’t using it anyway.

“Make sure to eat at the farm,” he said at the doorstep.

“I’m going to do manual labour for eight hours a day and then eat cabbages,” I said. “Next time you see me –”

“You’ll be an actual skeleton,” he laughed.

“Well, at least I’m not one right now.”

We contemplated each other.

“Take care,” he said.

“You too.”

I left relieved that we’d managed to straighten things out. That there would be a next time.

A Cabbage Farm in Chitose

An hour-long bus and a single-carriage local train ride later, the farming family’s matriarch came to pick me up.

“Mr Kesem,” she said. “Call me Obaachan.” (“Grannie”).

She was 68 years old, with short, greying hair and a height similar in length. She said I was the second foreigner to ever come to her farm. The first was from Hong Kong.

No wonder – Saki and his director friend, who’d hosted me in Sapporo, had volunteered at the farm five years ago. They’d become friends with the family, and visited them whenever in Hokkaido. Now, they had recommended me to the family, and made my coming there today possible. Without them, a Westerner like me was unlikely to do so.

The family’s farm was a half an hour drive from Oiwake station, or a mere twenty minutes from Shin Chitose Airport, through sleepy towns with nothing but houses and convenience stores. Erstwhile schools had shut down due to the rapidly declining birth rate. A car and daily commutes were required for everything.

Especially at the farm. Nothing was walkable. From now on, I would just handle cabbages and sleep.

We had tea and rice cookies in the living room. Obaachan, her two middle-aged sons, and her sister. Once their break was over, they went to work, while I sat in front of the TV.

The family’s farm was a complex comprised of a large house, larger warehouses, and even larger fields. Containers upon containers of picked onions in their back yard; their season had ended before my arrival.

The house was large and surprisingly western. An oak table as if out of England. Even some of my twentysomething hosts had had a low collapsible table in their studio apartment, where we’d sat on the floor to eat.

My room was minuscule, with room just for a bed. A view of the farm and fields and mountains. Sometimes the wind blew so strongly, that I was advised not to open the window.

In the afternoon, I watched TV, for lack of a better thing to do. Without the password to their Wi-Fi, I simply marvelled, as I always did when watching Japanese news, at the contents of today’s reports.

• A bear sighting in Hokudai university in Sapporo for the first time in fifty years
• A weather forecast every five minutes (EVERY FIVE MINUTES)
• Autumn foliage forecasts
• Interviewing citizens who had already started heating their homes and eating hot ramen now that autumn had begun

In Israel, the news was always: new stabbing, new car accident, new nuclear threat, new rape, new murder, new corruption, new protests, constant inflation, rising poverty, religious leaders condemning secular Jews, new heat wave, new violent storm, crime and crime and crime, over and over again, because life there was extreme and dangerous, full of strife and war, and the news loved to add fuel to the flames so as to frighten citizens into becoming glued to the screen and thus increase ratings.

Yesterday, I’d explained to Cowboy why I’d never been in a relationship. Before this trip, I’d never met someone with whom I’d wanted one. And indeed, ever since my arrival to the far east, I’d met a handful of those.

Now, I knew that a return to Israel would ruin everything I’d gain on since February. I enjoyed better job prospects here, more friends, and more opportunities to find love. In Israel, I would live again with my family, suffer from bad weather and war, and lose my social life. Penniless, friendless, dependent on my mom for a bed to sleep in: I ought to find a way to never live there again. I ought to. My life would be over the day I returned there.

At 18:00, Obaachan returned and broke into an endless speech about being grateful for food from nature. Speaking so fast, and using too many unfamiliar words and tough grammar, my head was swimming. An endless stream of words. She never stopped to catch her breath.

「分かりました？」 she asked when the look of bewilderment was clear on my face. “Du yu andesten?”

Then she refused to let me help her cook dinner, so I stood while she continued prattling.

“Two days ago, I ate at ramen at Sumire –” I interjected at some point, while discussing Japanese dishes I liked.

“Eh?” she wrinkled her face in disbelief. “And it was good?”

She didn’t seem to care for the most famous ramen restaurant in Sapporo.  

As she cut cabbages faster and more finely than a chef, we got into the topic of vegetarianism.

“Why did you stop eating meat?” she asked.

“Well,” I said, my Japanese vocabulary too scant for this discussion, “for starters, for animals’ sake –”

“And plants don’t have life in them?” she cut like the cabbage in her hands. “Everything has life in it.”

This Shinto way of thinking was not shared by Westerners.

“Such a delicious cabbage you haven’t tasted before, I believe,” she said. “Now is the best time of the year.”

The more we talked, the more curious I found her way of addressing me – using the most simple and casual forms. Sometimes she called me Kesem-kun, sometimes just Kesem (a distinction reserved in Japan for family and close friends), and sometimes あなた/君 (both mean “you”), which threw me off.

“I can’t go to countries without Japanese rice,” she said later on. “I’ve never been to those.”

“There’s rice in Israel,” I said.

“But it’s long grain, like in India?”

I nodded.

“No,” she shook her head. “I can’t.”

She showed me the miso paste she’d been making on her own.

“This is a Japanese-countryside-grandma’s food,” she said upon serving dinner, “so I don’t know if it will be to your liking.”

Small fish; fried eggplants; miso soup; tsukudani (preserved seaweed boiled in sweetened soy sauce); rice with butter inside it that melted from the heat, mixed with a black, dominant seaweed sauce; and, of course, the freshest, sweetest cabbage I’d tasted.

It was most certainly to my liking.

Every day, before breakfast and dinner, she entered a tatami room with an altar and candles, clapped four times and bowed, over and over again, to Oyasama, the founder of a Japanese new religion called Tenrikyo (and the only female leader of any religion). Then she prayed for her husband’s leg problem. Every morning, she offered Oyasama fresh food and drink. Just like in Buddhist temples.

The two of us ate dinner together. She also served me rice shochu. At 25% alcohol, it was stronger than any sake I’d had.

The kitchen was equipped with a hidden dishwasher, yet she washed the dishes by hand.

Today’s highlights: morning with Cowboy; Obaachan’s food for dinner.

26 September 2023

First Day of Working at the Farm

I went to sleep at 22:00 and woke at 6:00. Even with curtains drawn and an eye mask on, too much sunlight penetrated my vision. I was cold and fatigued, unable to leave my bed. At 7:00, Obaachan called me.

“Keseeeeeeeen!”

Breakfast was miso soup, rice, sunny side up, and cold tea. I found myself scribbling a multitude of new words on my notepad. The kids left to school; I didn’t see them eat or bathe at all. Perhaps they lived in a separate unit, while I inhabited the volunteers’ section of the house.

At 8:00, I received worker’s uniform, thigh-high boots, gloves, and a dusk mask. Ojiisan and I filled steel cages lined with a gigantic bag with okome (husked grains of rice), spreading the pile of okome at the center of the cage to the corners all the while. It was a very dusty task, after which Ojiisan hauled the filled cages with a vehicle. The okome warehouse featured huge machinery to dry the grains, sieve them, and transfer them into the cages.

Meanwhile, Obaachan fed Teddy the Shiba dog breakfast. It included soybeans and plain rice.

Following this, we drove on a truck to the family’s cabbage field. Obaachan, her two fortysomething sons, and her daughter-in-law. For the two hours, they cut grown cabbages, threw them at me, and I neatly placed them in steel cages.

Every now and then a plane would fly overhead. It drizzled most of the time.

Whenever the family began to throw cabbages at me from too far away, one of the sons drove the tractor holding the cages forward. Thus we progressed.

It was very quite a boring and repetitive task, but at least there was an exciting element to endeavouring to catch each cabbage. Almost like playing basketball, which I had, as a child.

When Obaachan stumbled upon a gigantic, fissured cabbage, she sliced it open and let me take a bite.

「甘い！」I exclaimed. (“Sweet!”)

We left the field with seven full cages. My overalls were damp from the dew inside the cabbages. Obaachan and I stood on the tractor’s leg rests and held onto the sides of the vehicle as the son drove us back.

Back in the warehouse, we cleaned our muddy boots, changed back to Crocs, and hung our gloves inside out to dry.

At 10:45, we had tea and snacks. Ojiisan brought out a yellow watermelon. I’d never beheld such a marvel before; as sweet as its red equivalent, but the taste was somehow different, too. Then at 11:00, we began packing the cabbages according to size and weight. I picked up a cabbage from a cage, removed excess leaves, examined it for bugs and dirt, weighed it, and placed it in a small, plastic container.

• 1 kilo or less – no good.
• 1-1.5 kilos – 8 in a container.
• 1.5-2 kilos – 7 in a container.
• 2-2.5 kilos – 6 in a container.
• Fissured – no good.

Handling each cabbage like this and crouching to pack it made my hands cramps and back ache. Picking up the containers, which averaged on 13 kilos, and stacking them up for shipment, was even worse.

“If a cabbage is white, it’s suspicious,” Obaachan said at some point. “Probably fissured.”

I burst out laughing. 

“In Israel, all green cabbages are white.”

It was an excruciating and endless hour that came to a halt at 12:00.

One hour lunch break. Tempura shrimp, rice, miso soup with cabbage in it (「邪道じゃない？」I exclaimed – “isn’t it the improper way?”), a green pepper salad with soy sauce and bonito flakes, and of course, fresh cabbage.

Buddhist Cabbages

After half an hour of resting on the couch, it was time to continue sorting the cabbages. Between 13:00-15:40, I died.

My fingers were pruned with dew. Cramping so bad, I could barely move them. I wasn’t used to such work.

But none of these aches compared to the boredom I befell into. The task at present required little thought, and I found myself operating on autopilot, performing the same moves over and over again, almost like a robot.

It felt strangely Buddhist. Performing manual labour for hours, which exerted my body and bored my mind, I felt déjà vu to my Korean temple stay, at the headquarters of Sunmudo, a Korean Buddhist martial art. With nothing to engage my train of thought, it went full steam ahead, both then and now. My mind began to wander while weighing cabbages, almost as if meditating. I thought about many things in those two and a half hours.

One the one hand, I recognized the rarity of my current circumstances. How many foreigners could say that they worked at a farm in Hokkaido and stayed with a host family? How many had taken turns soaking in the ofuro, each family member entering it one after the other?

Granted, I’d met a few Europeans during Round One who’d volunteered in farms around the Chugoku coast, yet this was through volunteering websites, with families used to foreigners.

This family had invited me into their home, put food on my plate. Top notch vegetables. We shared bath water. Hokkaido’s attractions would always be there for me to visit. But such an invitation – this was the end of the agricultural season. In three weeks or so, Hokkaido would be too cold for vegetables to grow. The time to go to a farm was now.

On the other hand, I regretted this commitment. I’d been feeling physically exhausted from too much hiking and not enough sleep. The past few days in Rebun and Rishiri islands were exceptionally so. Working for eight hours a day at a farm was not an undertaking my body was prepared for.

Most frustrating was the fact that this commitment over sightseeing Hokkaido in one of the best weeks of the year. Fall had just, just begun. Temperatures were mild and tempting. Leaves were changing colour. There were so many famous foliage spots, considered among the best in the country. I would miss most.

Worse was the boredom. There was nothing I detested more. Even hurt feelings were better to nothing at all. It felt like a waste of precious existence. And when coupled with physical exertion, to me, it was torture. My mind had no thoughts to occupy it, apart from the pain of my body.

I already knew that I would value this experience as much as I’d valued cleaning vomit and changing sheets for a month at a party hostel in Busan. These were character-building trials and tribulations one ought to go through. Yet the timing was off. I would’ve opted for one week of farm work, following ample sleep and rest, not during peak foliage.

As I weighed more and more cabbages and placed them in containers, all this frustration was exacerbated by an intense pining for someone who didn’t seem to pine for me.

Who was this guy breaking his back sorting cabbages in a farm while longing for a relationship – for love? Feeling lonely, wanting to party and socialize? Before this trip, I’d avoided intimacy and stayed home, writing all day long. Publishing my novel was my only goal. Now, it wasn’t even the most pressing item on my to-do list.

At 15:45, we had a 15-minute tea and rice cracker break. Then half an hour of more packing, and we were done with cabbages for today.

I helped Obaachan load more cages with okome. She’d wrapped a towel around my neck and into my overalls, and covered my wrists with leggings. Evidently, she was more prudent about dust than her husband.

At 17:20, she told me to go inside the house and enter the ofuro when the automatic voice would announce that the hot water was ready. She went to work some more, but for me work was over.  I collapsed on the couch and then took a hot bath.

After five minutes of soaking inside their fancy bathtub, a tap automatically filled it with more hot water, to meet the desired 41 degrees.

Dinner was miso soup; rice; and yakisoba with cabbage, green pepper, octopus, and a pickled pink thingy that I liked. Obaachan also let me try a juice she’d made herself from some fruit foreign to me in her garden.

We ate just us two again. I had no idea where the other family members were. She spoke once more at length, this time mainly about how I should communicate with my mom more, so she wouldn’t worry about me, and how no one could be happy entirely by themselves.

Today’s highlights: catching cabbages; hitching a ride on a tractor; yellow watermelon; soaking in an ofuro after work.