It starts as a name, a place, a squiggle on a map. Japan. A country as far away from familiar as familiar can be. I try to imagine the country, what its streets look like, how its air smells. I touch the country on a map, fingering the page of a weathered atlas, spine broken, yellowed pages flying apart. As big as a thumbprint, as small as a canoe. Japan. I like the sound of it.

When my best friend called to say there was a job in Japan, when she asked, did I want to go, I knew I would. I would say yes, I would sign a contract to take me to Japan for the year. The job? To teach at three different junior highs. The town? A medium-sized city in the mountains, someplace called Matsumoto. I had just turned thirty, a watershed year. I would start over that year. I knew I would. I wanted to, I needed to. I didn’t know the difference then between want and need. All I knew is that I had to get away and when I stared at my name on the Japanese contract, the squiggles of katakana, my name typed in English sturdily beneath, I liked how it looked. As if it—as if I—were translated, transformed, emerging now as someone new.

And within a month, I had arrived. Sleeping on tatami mats. Eating rice. Washing blue-and-white bowls. Hanging laundry out on the balcony to dry. I loved the smell of sun-dried shirts and cotton sweaters that carried a hint of wind and earth. A new wind. A new earth.