Morioka
"What a pleasure it is at any rate: while I sit here at my desk on yet another new morning, watching the droplets of rain from the night before on the needles of the spruce outside my window, at the same time I am on the road in northern Japan with my friend the architect, who calls himself a carpenter, after the trade he learned first. He got up very early and, the only foreigner in the hotel, like the other guests ate dark soup and a piece of greasy eel down in the labyrinthine basement. Out on the streets of Morioka, which stretched across the broad valley ringed by hills, there were large hummocks of glare ice, old and black with dirt. The snowy massif, visible in a gap between the hills, rising in one fell swoop from its base to its peak, looked in spite of the distance somewhat like a city on a hill. The architect walks along without a plan; one will take shape in the course of the day and with the still-unexplored environs. He is merely flirting with getting lost, as he did yesterday farther south in Sendai and a week ago on the mountainous paths of the national park south of Nara, and the sight of this urban area, in which even here in the desolate north every corner is built up (passages of only a hand’s breadth, hiding places for cats, have been left between the houses as earthquake protection), gives him the first impetus for this day’s excursion or for the rest of his journey: to find a no-man’s-land, however tiny, in this Japanese plain, linked together into an unbroken surface for habitation or cultivation. A no-man’s-land could comfort him as the rising of the moon might comfort another. It is easy to get lost in a Japanese city, even in Morioka, which is not exactly old, and with this in mind the architect moves with increasing zest through this regional metropolis in which suburban street follows suburban street, and I accompany him. I can feel him better from afar. If I were eye to eye with him, his appearance and his manner would perhaps distract me from him. In his absence I forgot every time what he was like; only his essence counted, free of characteristics and idiosyncrasies."
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