Honshu – Borderless

By Meredith Stephens

“Please show me your international driver’s licence.”

“Certainly!”

Alex produced the licence.

“This is out of date! I’m sorry but we can’t hand over the car.”

“No! It’s current! It’s valid for five years.”

We scrutinized the licence. The start date was prominently displayed, but not the expiration date. As we squinted to decipher the fine print on page three, we discovered that it had expired three years ago. Alex had thought it would be valid for five years, but it was only valid for one. We attributed it to his light-heartedly referred to “OCD Deficit Disorder”. And that is how a one-week road trip suddenly became a public transport and taxi trip.

This was my first visit back to Japan after having left at the beginning of the pandemic. Alex and I had been deliberating where to spend our honeymoon, and we agreed that the island of Shikoku in western Japan where I had spent over twenty years would be our first choice.

Onigiri. Photo courtesy:
**Mariko Hisamatsu**

There were so many things to look forward to. The first thing I did, before even leaving Kansai Airport, was rush into the convenience store and buy an onigiri flavoured with an umeboshi pickled plum. An onigiri is a triangle of rice, with a choice of flavours in the centre such as fish, seaweed, or the aforementioned umeboshi. It is wrapped in a crisp sheet of seaweed. Before eating it you gently pull away a thin layer of wrapping which protects the outer seaweed from absorbing the moisture of the rice. As you bite into it you can enjoy the three distinct textures and flavours – the piquant centre, the contrasting bland rice, and the crisp outer layer of seaweed. Next, I purchased a mugwort daifuku. This is a Japanese sweet, consisting of a layer of pounded mugwort-flavoured rice around a centre of sweet azuki bean paste. All of this was washed down with a bottle of green tea.

From the above account, it might sound like I was returning to Japan to indulge in simple culinary delights from a convenience store, and maybe this is a possibility I am unwilling to admit to myself. Of course, the main purpose was to reconnect with old friends, the second to reconnect with old pleasures, such as the aforementioned onigiri and daifuku, and the third, to stay in a traditional Japanese house.

After having been refused permission to drive our hire car, we headed back towards the terminal and searched for the railway station. We caught trains out to the UNESCO heritage listed site of Koyasan to enjoy the autumn leaves, and then seven trains and two buses later, to Wakayama station. Finally, we caught a taxi to our accommodation, which turned out to be a house that was over two hundred years ago, dating from the end of the Edo Period.

Jiomaru-an Edo period house. Photo Courrtesy: Alan Noble

The door slid open to reveal an earthen floor. We walked down the hall to the kitchen, left our shoes in the sunken area, and donned the provided slippers. The kitchen opened onto two traditional tatami rooms, with fusuma sliding cupboards, and latticed paper shoji screens leading onto the garden. Beyond the shoji was a narrow hall known as an engawa, with a small wooden table and chair where you could enjoy sipping a drink while looking out over the garden. This was the kind of room I had been longing for during my five years away from Japan.

But we hadn’t had dinner yet and I was longing to ride to a local supermarket to purchase a ready meal.

‘“Do you have any bicycles?” I asked the host.

“Certainly. We have mountain bikes too!”

“You don’t want to go cycling in the dark?” queried Alex. “Not after a long-distance flight, seven trains, two buses, and a taxi ride? Surely not!”

I insisted, and Alex gave up persuading me otherwise. Rather than a mountain bike I chose the mamachari, a vintage bike replete with a shopping basket attached to the front handlebars.

We cycled to the supermarket, as I had done almost daily during my twenty years of living in Shikoku. There we bought sushi and sashimi ready meals, and cycled home, scanning to avoid roadside ditches with sheer drops and no guard rails. Once safely home, we indulged in the much longed for sushi and sashimi, enjoyed the traditional deep Japanese bath, spread out the futons on the tatami, and luxuriated in a deep sleep.

The next morning, we woke to a gentle light streaming through the latticed paper shoji screens. We cycled to Wakayama castle, Alex on the mountain bike and me on the mamachari. We strolled around the traditional garden before entering the castle and then completed it with a visit to the adjacent tearoom, where we enjoyed green tea and a sweet bean paste confectionery.

The following day, we bid farewell to our Edo Period home, and our kind host drove us to the ferry terminal. As soon as I saw the sign in Japanese for Tokushima, I could feel the colour rising to my cheeks. This had been my home in Japan for fifteen of my twenty years in Shikoku, until the day I departed for a routine visit to Australia, just before the international borders were closed due to COVID. Little did I know that the pandemic would prevent me from returning to Japan. I boarded the ferry as I had so many other times after returning from various work trips, but this time I was visiting on my honeymoon. The two-hour crossing readied me for the arrival in my old stomping ground and was heralded by the sentimental music played to signal a homecoming. Alex and I exited the ferry to be met by my old friend and writing mentor, Suzanne. Overcome with emotion, I covered my face with my hands to spare her the sight of my crumpled features and then gave her a hug. Then I went back to covering my swollen eyes and gave her another hug.

Platter of Sushi at Sally’s home. Photo courtesy: Alan Noble

Suzanne drove us to the home of the son of another old friend, Sally, who had kindly offered us a couple of nights’ accommodation. That evening a subset of old friends dropped in to see us and eat sushi. I braced myself for the entry of each friend into the house, trying to compose my features, after an unanticipated five-year interval. My eyes, however, betrayed me. I caught the expressions of those who returned by gaze, and they could sense my relief and excitement of meeting them again. Over five years people’s appearances were a little different. Those who had long hair now wore it shorter. Those with shorter hair had grown it. Those who were curvaceous were now svelte, and those who were svelte were now curvaceous. A child had now become a lanky teenager. I’m sure I must have looked different to them too. What had not changed was people’s smiles, conversation and sense of humour. People who I would normally see a few times over a month were now all present in the same room in the space of a few hours.

A few days later, we took the bus across Shikoku to Matsuyama, where another happy reunion took place of eight friends from six different countries. I was freshly aware of the joys of the expat life, where you can make friends from a greater range of countries, and a greater range of ages, than you would at home.

Ranma Carvings in a traditional room. Photo Courtesy: Alan Noble

I had been craving another stay in a traditional house, and we savoured a room with ranma carvings suspended from the ceiling, letting in light and air flow from the adjacent room. We sat at the kotatsu low heated table on the tatami, and slept on futon, in a room featuring shoji paper screens facing outside and fusuma cupboards where futons were stored. Features which had once seemed so ordinary were now infused with nostalgia.

Family obligations called us back to Australia after only one week of our Japanese honeymoon. A taxi was followed by a bus which took us on the long trek back across Shikoku, driving through impossibly long tunnels, crossing elegant bridges, with views of the sea and mountains. Once we crossed the final bridge onto the largest main island of Honshu, the landscape was transformed into high rise apartments, and dense traffic. We alighted from the bus at Kobe’s Sannomiya Station.

There we asked directions to the airport limousine bus and made a final purchase of onigiri. My favourite umeboshi pickled plum one was not on sale, so I had to make do with a tuna mayonnaise one and a pickled seaweed one. We ran to the bus stop, purchased tickets, and skipped into the bus holding our luggage. There was no time to store the luggage in the hold. Once the bus pulled into the traffic, we knew we could relax after our long and complicated journey. I gently pulled away the wrapping separating the layers of the tuna mayonnaise onigiri and savoured the contrasting flavours and textures. Our fleeting trip to Japan was punctuated by savouring onigiri on both arrival and departure. We bade farewell to this land of delectable tastes, exquisite arts, historic houses, hair-raising bicycle rides, and precious friends.

Meredith Stephens is an applied linguist from South Australia. Her recent work has appeared in Syncopation Literary Journal, Continue the Voice, Micking Owl Roost blog, The Font – A Literary Journal for Language Teachers, and Mind, Brain & Education Think Tank. In 2024, her story Safari was chosen as the Editor’s Choice for the June edition of All Your Stories.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

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By Suzanne Kamata

My son wanted a dog, as boys often do.

But one day, my husband said, “How about a cat?” His high school friend, who was a veterinarian, had an American long-haired kitten to give away. His children had found it abandoned by the side of the road, scared and shivering, and brought it home. It was black – an unpopular colour due to its bad luck connotations. The colour of a witch’s familiar.

“Yes!” my son, now fifteen, said. By this time, he would have been happy with a hedgehog or a salamander – any pet at all.

Although I love cats, I was more reluctant. After all, I’d just bought a brand-new sofa and love seat with some book money I’d gotten. I could just imagine what a cat’s claws would due to those leather cushions.

Nevertheless, my husband and son set out for the vet’s office. They came home later with the kitten cuddled against my son’s chest and all the accoutrements – food dish, cat toys, scratching post, and a multi-tiered tower that my husband immediately assembled.

From the beginning, like a duckling that imprints on the first thing that it sees, the kitten, which we named Sumi (the Japanese word for the black ink used in traditional calligraphy) liked my son the best. My early rising husband may have been the one to fill his food dish every morning, and my daughter sometimes coaxed him into her room for sleeping, but my son was his favourite. Sumi would leap from my lap to greet him at the door when he returned from school, and mew plaintively and persistently at his bedroom door until he was admitted. Sumi was skittish and inclined to hiss at strangers. He’d run away and hide under a bed when my sister-in-law dropped by for a visit. But he crooned a greeting when my son walked into the room. They bumped their heads together with mutual affection.

Of course, I grew to love Sumi as well even though, predictably, he clawed the new sofa, scratched the wallpaper, and regurgitated his food on our freshly installed tatami mats.

My husband tried to discipline Sumi, sometimes by holding him immobile and roaring at him, but instead of becoming docile and obedient, Sumi began avoiding him or hissing in his presence. My husband began to grumble that a dog would have been better.

One afternoon, a couple of years later, my son came home with another kitten. She was a tiny, mewling thing with blue eyes and white fur, with a smudge of black on her face – a Siamese, by the looks of her.

Jio (Suzanne’s son) & Mii. Photo courtesy: Suzanne Kamata

“She followed me,” my son said. He’d been down by the riverbank, pitching a baseball against a brick wall, when the tiny creature had found him. “I couldn’t just leave her there.”

Apparently, she’d been recently abandoned, her trust and innocence still intact. She wasn’t skittish and shy like Sumi. She was adorable, but we all knew that Sumi wouldn’t welcome her, and one cat was really enough. How much more violence could our sofa and wallpaper endure? Besides, my son, a sophomore in high school, was taking off the very next day for a four-day school trip to Tokyo. Who would deal with the kitten?

However, she quickly grew on us humans (though Sumi, now quite large, was terrified of the little ball of fur). We ended up keeping her, and she quickly adapted, co-opting the litter box, happily eating kibble – and tomatoes! And broccoli! — from the same dish as Sumi and hopping up onto the nearest warm lap. My daughter named her “Mii.” But she, too, had a special relationship with my son, her saviour. He taught her to fetch – like a dog! And she came when he called her, like a dog.

We tried to keep her safely indoors. But one day, she managed to escape. Hours later, she turned up, limping. We took her to the vet, who said that she had gotten into a fight. He gave her some antibiotics. For a couple days, she lost interest in going outdoors.

But a week later, she got out again! This time she was gone overnight, I searched all over the neighbourhood, calling her name, but she didn’t come.

That evening, rain started to fall. Suddenly, we heard her distinctive mewling. My son grabbed a flashlight and we went in the direction of her voice. We found her stranded on the tile roof of a nearby house and pounded desperately on the door. Finally, it creaked open to reveal an elderly woman in her nightclothes. I wonder what she thought, seeing two foreign-looking strangers on that rainy dark night.

“Our cat’s on your roof,” my son explained. “Can we go into your yard?”

The woman kindly provided us with a ladder, and we got the kitten down.

As my son began his last year of high school and began thinking about applying to universities in distant cities, we couldn’t help but think about the cats. They’d be so lonely without our boy.

“You should take Sumi with you,” my husband joked, as if any student apartment would allow such a pet. As if a cat would be happy confined to a tiny college dorm.

When he was accepted into a university in the far north of Honshu, in a city without a direct flight to our own, my husband ordered our son to get rid of all the stuff he didn’t need.

“You’ll be gone for good,” he said, “and we don’t want to have to deal with all of your junk.”

I knew that my husband’s gruffness was a front meant to conceal his sadness at our son’s departure. Our daughter would be leaving, too. Our nest would be empty. He was gearing himself up for grief.

“We’ll take Sumi off somewhere and dump him,” my husband said darkly. Sumi glared at him from underneath the table as if he’d understood, but I knew that the threat was empty. The cats would stay. They would keep us company after our children had left.

Already I was imagining the anxious queries from the north about Sumi and Mii, the photos that I would send by smartphone, the joyous meows at the beginning of university breaks.

“We have to keep the cats,” I told my husband, “so that our son will come back.”

Suzanne Kamata was born and raised in Grand Haven, Michigan. She now lives in Japan with her husband and two children. Her short stories, essays, articles and book reviews have appeared in over 100 publications. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times, and received a Special Mention in 2006. She is also a two-time winner of the All Nippon Airways/Wingspan Fiction Contest, winner of the Paris Book Festival, and winner of a SCBWI Magazine Merit Award.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL