Excerpt from: “Hanami”

People ask about the cherry blossoms, once they know where I’ve been. I tell them what others have told me: how in Kyoto, each April, the trees fill with blossoms and then these blossoms fall, drifting on the wind like rain. What I don’t say is how the blossoms get stuck in your hair and to your clothes and turn to mulch on the sidewalks. I tell it like the courtesans told it—how you wait all year for the few days in which the blossoms fall, and if you miss those days (if you’re sick, or have a hangover, or stay in sleeping) you’ve missed everything.

What people want to hear are stories. They want adventures. Instead, I describe what I’ve seen on postcards—the same postcards I’d sent some of them—with painted geisha and maiko playing stringed instruments it says on the back are called samisen. What I really remember of Kyoto are the flashing neon lights in the center of the city, the magazines, the convenience stores, the vending machines. I remember being naked on a wet rice-mat with someone who didn’t even speak Japanese. To be sure, it wasn’t what I came for. Where were the shrines, the temples, the sitting Buddhas made of dull gold? They were all over, everywhere, and yet I hardly remember seeing them.

This is what I know: A taxi driver will wait patiently while you are sick in the road with the door open. Bartenders don’t card and so if you want a Sex on the Beach, ask for a Sekksu Bichu, but know that it’s much stronger than it was back home. This is a city where the streets are safe; a girl alone at night will not be bothered. In fact, you can run through the streets at night, alone, crying, and if you’re a gaijin—pink-faced and light-haired and foreign—no man will call out lewd things to you, or any things to you. You can keep going until you reach the Kamo-gawa river, or you can just turn around and make up your mind to go home.

(2002, Orchid)