In 1988 I was an awkward, dreamy kid with clumsy elbows and scraped knees, and Japan was a place I'd never even thought about. Impossibly far away and altogether foreign, it seemed fantastical.
I had no idea back then that as an adult I'd keep being pulled back — first by coincidence, next by work, then love, and afterwards simply by the desire to once again see cherry blossoms falling like snow or freshly planted wet rice paddies reflecting the evening sky.
Back then, I knew nothing about the country, but my mother, sister and I had Japan Airlines tickets to take us from our home in Adelaide, South Australia, to visit my maternal grandparents near Toronto in Ontario, Canada. It sounded like a long trip, but my mother told me we'd be visiting a relative en route. She had called her cousin Cathy, a freelance translator living in Takamatsu (in Kagawa Prefecture, on the island of Shikoku), and so — armed with Japanese-language cassette tapes — we were to have a 10-day stopover in Japan.