For neesan.

Waiting For Sakura

There is something spiritual about the experience of train-riding. From the time we step aboard the great metal machine to the time our shoes hit the concrete of our destination, we are swept up into a force of nature that we could never hope to understand, something far greater than ourselves. It is the force of hundreds of thousands of shoes – plain tennis shoes and flashy jeweled stiletto heels and scuffed boots and shiny businessmen's leathers, the force of the living sea ebbing and flowing, because the subterranean tunnels of the station are hidden aquatic caverns spilling over with treasure, and the escalators are ladders to heaven.

It is the season of the sakura. There are the little old kimono-clad ladies shuffling through the station, towing crying children resisting the pull of their wrinkled hands. It must have been the same for those little old ladies when they were children of two or three, planting their feet firmly on the road and refusing to budge even with the most tempting reward. But it is different now; the road that they stood on would have been dirt, not asphalt, and the sakura-drenched air that filled their child senses would have been heavy with the promise of war.

I, as a twenty-something sitting patiently on the hard, plastic seat, surreptitiously glancing at the blinking electric train timetable above my head, deserve hardly a glance. Perhaps they pass their eyes over me and dismiss me with the shake of a head, the blink of an eye, as another of the younger generation just muddling blindly through life. Looking with the eyes of a stranger, I would seem, after all, no different from the red-lipsticked girl with the pleated skirt two seats over typing busily on her phone, or the boy leaning against the dirty concrete pole bobbing away to the tune on his headphones. I with my lightened hair and my slanted eyes and Asian face, I who as long as I do not open my mouth, could walk the streets of Tokyo and disappear into the crowd without a word. There is something strangely disturbing about being Japanese without truly being Japanese, and sometimes I feel like shouting that out at the top of my lungs so that they will stop and wonder at the thing that brings me here to the country that is not my own.

The whistle of the train as it pulls into the station is a song. The branches of the sakura trees, dripping with pale pink petals, hanging over the rusted tracks, barely brush the car windows. A few petals will be snagged by the metal horse on its rush out, but that is hardly a loss. Maybe there is even a poet or two placed strategically around the station just for the purpose of catching these things, to write a heartfelt haiku about the brief life of the sakura swallowed up by the progress of technology.

The little old lady and her charges cluster around the silver poles in the center of the aisle, and one of the twenty-somethings looks up from her magazine and graciously rises from her plush seat, gesturing. The little old lady hesitates and then shuffles into the empty spot with a creaking bob of her head, a slight quirking of the lips, a crinkling of the eyes. The wind whistles through cracks in the rubber insulation of the door, and I move closer to the heat, but the wind catches my jacket, my hair, with little grasping fingertips of air.

The next station is painted pink, in honor of the season. The little old lady and her children get off, and a young couple with a sleeping baby gets on. They are going to watch the sakura too, though the clouds that have hung low in the sky since early morning are now turning an alarming shade of gray. The mother points to the sky and says something in a soft tone, and the father places a soothing hand on her shoulder. The baby stirs and swallows. The train creaks forward.

Most of the passengers are asleep or half-asleep, and the ones who are awake stare blankly into empty space. There is something about trains that makes the most friendly of strangers place that personal bubble around themselves and say, this is my space and my space only, and no matter how close you may be forced to come to me on the Yamanote line at rush hour, you shall not violate the sacred law of train conduct and speak to me. There are pink-draped trees all along the boulevard running parallel to the tracks, and I and the others in the seat next to me turn our heads, wistfully following them with our eyes until the train enters a tunnel and they are lost. As one, we sigh.

The young family gets off at the next station, and I wonder if they will make their date with the sakura before it rains. The sky is looking fiercer by the moment, and there are no sakura trees at this station, but the stubby bushes here are bobbing in the wind. Is it worth it now to get off at my planned stop, or shall I just keep on riding through the rain, until it ceases and the sun comes out and then goes down and the moon rises and the sakura trees turn white like droplets of living snow?

The next station comes too soon, and the doors slide open before I am ready, and the rain is pouring down now as I drag my bag behind me out of the light and the warmth onto the cold and the damp of the asphalt station. The lights here are dim and the people huddle in isolated bundles of jackets and scarves and umbrellas and the patter of the rain.

I think of the young family and their baby, and the little old lady in the kimono and her children, and I wonder if their day has been ruined by the unexpected weather. It is a shame, really, to wait so long for the sakura and then not be able to see it as planned, though maybe the mother and father and baby will be just as happy ducking into a small udon shop out of the rain, and maybe the old lady will sort through her long memory and remember that there is a small shrine along the road in which she and her posse can take cover until the rain passes.

And then there are the riders of the train, heading toward some unknown destination, watching as the earth passes by and the voice of the driver over the intercom blends seamlessly with the whistling of the wind through the windows and the hiss of the heat from under the fading seats and the screech of the brakes as yet another station passes and yet another person becomes an ex-passenger. And then there is me, dragging my bags toward the escalator, knowing that I will be asked no questions and wondering what they would say if they knew the truth, and then thinking that it does not matter after all, because even if I truly belonged to this country, there would still be that eternal longing within my heart.

There is one lone sakura tree by the empty station entrance, a juxtaposition of bare black trunk and tiny budding pink flowers against a background of dreary grey. The rain glistens, tiny jewels, on young petals that will remain young forever, drifting slowly to the ground even as I watch, blown by the careless wind, the moving human sea of the train station, like each of us as we clutch our bags to ourselves and hope that our station does not pass us by as we doze.

We are not quite willing to get off the train after all. We all secretly wish that our stop would not come, that we could continue to stare out the window at the sakura that beckons to us like some fleeting wisp of dream which we cling to but never quite understand. It is a figment of someone's imagination of beauty, something that we have waited for all our lives and still cannot touch, though it is right before our eyes. The old lady knows that best. Even as she lays out her plastic tarp on the blacktop under the tree surrounded by trash bins, she can still remember lying under the wild blooming trees covering the green landscape of her childhood.

Riding the train is a game of waiting. We enter the station fully aware of the fact, and yet we still ride. And as we wait for the sign to light up, for the next train to pull in, we are also waiting for the end of the rain, the beginning of the sun, waiting for the click-click-click of the train wheels across the tracks, waiting for the bright skies of our childhood to come sweep us away, waiting for sakura.
 

28 March 2004