Finland

I want to restart my blog. I want to write free and gay, without too much editing, just for fun. The reason why I have been kept starting and quitting this blog is that I have always started to feel that this blog should be more properly written, and always on topic. But I don’t find it fun or genuine, so I stop, always.

We humans are not such linear beings. We are not supposed to make sense all the time. What I need in my life most now is a kind of pointless wandering, time. My photo needs it too. So I hope this blog would be a simple and naked reflection to my life.

I visited Finland last month with my son. Going abroad with him just two of us first time was a dream came true. For me it was perhaps the enjoyable to go through the rituals of traveling just with him this time. I explained him how jet airplanes work and why they fly so high in the sky. We checked our luggage, eat the cute lunch in the plane (yes, Finnair still include green soba buckwheat noodles in their lunch as although their lunch is completely western), breathed in Scandinavian air, and played with snow.

Finland, a country where my sweet home is. I moved to Japan ten years ago.

Why is it that we always expect our hometown to stay the same? Our lives change constantly, plate tectonics shift, world economy and geopolitical situation is in flux, this ebb and flow, moon cycle, and so on.. Nature likes to change. But when we take the journey back home, even when it’s not thousand kilometers in the sky, we expect everything be just like it was when we left, so many years ago.

Of course, it isn’t. During those years of our absence, people have been living their lives, went on and about,  gained age and some of them got sick and passed away. The scenery has changed; it doesn’t smell like it used to. Cracks have appeared on the walls that used to be the foundation of our childhood. What used to be a solid, safe roof is now slightly leaking.

My uncle’s book, “Kolme Huonetta” has a poem in it, “Prelude foreshadows the end of the composition”. Beginning of a winter has a promise of it’s end. When our plane took off from Helsinki Vantaa, somehow the thought formed in my mind, “it’s not just sad that we die”.

I bought just two things with me from Finland, Haruki Murakami’s short story collection Birthday Stories,  and Banana Yoshimoto’s Lizard. Both of them are in English, not in Japanese. There’s something in these books what makes me feel comfortable. Perhaps I haven’t changed that much.