Yoko was meeting me at 11:30 but before that I went hunting for quirky T-shirts; making use of Japan’s idiosyncratic fashion for what little time I had left.
And I found a few.
One featured a long extract from Treasure Island about Blackbeard the Pirate but with the text arranged into the shape of a skull and crossbones. Another I bought was green with a solar system octopus reaching its eight tentacles out to the planets. Being old school I thought, “Eight tentacles? But there are nine planets,” before I remembered Pluto and its recent demise.
I met Yoko and climbed into her car. It was a box shaped silver Daihatsu that suited her very well, not that she is box shaped. She told me that we were going to a restaurant for lunch and we sped through Nagasaki to a restaurant overlooking the sea.
Our meal was a proper one, unlike I had eaten in a long time. A tray was brought to me with a whole menagerie of Japanese food that looked like a miniature city; bowls and plates of different shapes and contents. It was hard to decide where to attack first: Tempura slopes, Miso lake or Sashimi…. pile of dead fish.
Next, we drove to Yoko’s parent’s house, but just drove there, going in will happen on another day I’m told. We hit a road out of Nagasaki to a place called Sotome.
The road wound tightly along the edge of the sea which spread far enough out to meet the sky. Proper houses dotted the mountains, not the apartment buildings of Tokyo but actual individual houses facing the sea. It was not a landscape I had seen before and yet I felt I had seen it before from films and TV shows.
We were heading to a museum that was right on the edge of a steep hill with almost 180 degree views of the sea.
In the distance large chunks of rock were poking rebelliously out of the sea and in its effort to reclaim them the sea had even worn one into an arch.
The museum was dedicated to Endo Shusaku, a Japanese author who died in 1996. He was also a devoted Christian and the museum had French hymns continuously playing. There were no English explanations, except for the Exit signs and a leaflet which at least let me know whose museum I was standing in and how much I had to pay.
There was a strange window looking out to sea through blue tinted glass.
Its edges were mirrored so that to look left and right you were seeing reflections but it appeared continuous with the real scenery. I am sure there was a point to that somewhere.
I decided that I liked Endo Shusaku because he was smiling in most of his pictures. In one he was even wearing a fake white beard and moustache - the bushy white wise-man beard that everyone from God to Gandolph has had thrust upon them.
After I had looked at all the pictures I sat in a room at the corner of the museum. Two of its walls were large windows looking out to the sea and surrounding hillside. There were comfy chairs too so it was an ideal place for a quick nap – I told Yoko she could take as long as she liked.
I felt unnerved in that room though; it was the view. The sea, in all its enormity of size and crashing violence against the rocks was making no sound at all. The large hawks riding the sea breezes around the museum were also mute. The glass of the windows was so thick that it let nothing in but light.
There was a large piece of glass opposite the window and I took a sillhouetey picture of myself in the reflection.
What with the Christian music playing too it felt eerily like the scene outside was just an illusion, a video recorded in widescreen with no sound. Or like a different world, a Heaven that I was separated from and could never travel to, like when you see a landscape of clouds from a plane window. When Yoko came to fetch me she understood my feeling.
Only now that I re-read the leaflet I was given do I notice that Sotome was the setting for Shusaku’s novel “Silence.”
The café attached to the museum, but not physically, had the same silent vista and French Christian music. It had less effect because of an ice cream float (ice cream floating in coca cola) which one of us was enjoying and the other just envying.
There was a beach which we tried to drive to but all the roads seemed to lead to each other. Eventually we parked and found a beach of large boulders. We stood and gazed at the sea and the sea cockroaches.
This is Yoko gazing at the sea.
Back in the car we drove to a spot that to see the sunset from.
The view is so good that they built a restaurant in the carpark so that you can stare at the setting sun and eat, like popcorn at the cinema.
The restaurant had a great buffet, or in Japanese ビキング, pronounced biking and coming from the word ‘Viking.’ The Japanese clearly see Vikings as men and women who would feast on great meals together, wash it down with gallons of liquid and then queue up to pay at the end. It’s a pretty quirky name for a buffet, but doesn’t help English speakers who come to Japan and struggle to understand the signs, “Biking?” oh it must be about bikes.” I suppose many cultures apply new meanings to words from other languages like this, I mean the word buffet originally meant a type of furniture.
We drove back into Nagasaki and then up to a mountain to see the nightview and a firework display down on the river. There before us were all the lights of Nagasaki from cars, buildings, fireworks, boats sailing in the river and… a lightning storm.
We were definitely in the right place at the right time; my eyes kept darting from fireworks on the right to lightning on the left. The storm was behind some mountains at the edge of the city, the flashes would light up the cloud but occasionally you could see the lightning itself. It was more than spectacular and made up for the rubbishy cloud I had seen at the Hakodate nightview.
Shame I didn’t take any pictures though.
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