Over four months ago, in the darkness of a late-night flight, we arrived in Seoul for the first time. I remember the rain. It was pouring when we landed and it kept pouring the next day, as if the city wanted to introduce itself through its weather first — insistent, dramatic, entirely unbothered by what anyone else thought of it. We came in late, exhausted, dragging our mountain of luggage through streets that were unfamiliar in the particular way that only night-time street

It has been four hours since my husband walked out the door with our three children, called a cab, and sent them off to a shopping centre in Sapporo. Alone. Just the three of them. I am sitting in the quiet apartment they left behind, and I am thinking about freedom — what it actually looks like, how it is built, how long it takes, and how quietly astonishing it is when you finally see it walking out the door in the bodies of your own children. When we decided to homeschool —

It is a lazy Saturday in Sapporo. Dusty rain simmering outside the window. One of those days where boredom and restlessness arrive together and there is nothing useful to do with either of them except sit with it and see what surfaces. I will be honest: I don’t like Sapporo. It was probably the one significant planning mistake we made this year — a city that sounded appealing in the abstract, recommended by enough people over enough years that it accumulated a kind of borrowe

At 7:45 every morning, the crickets begin. I know this now the way you come to know the rhythms of a place you have lived inside long enough — not because you checked the time but because your body learned it, the way bodies learn things that happen consistently and with conviction. They start softly and build quickly, layering sound upon sound until the air outside is thick with it — a living, pulsing wall of noise that my children have begun to complain about with increasin

A few days ago I lay on the turquoise blue bed of my acupuncturist Masashi-san at Dome Therapy Niseko, long needles placed with quiet precision in various parts of my body, listening to the rain insisting against the windows and the gentle melody of the Totoro theme drifting through the room. I thought about writing. I thought about the future just ahead of us, still unformed, still full of the particular combination of possibility and anxiety that the future always carries w

Last night I danced Bachata in Kyoto. I want to let that sentence sit for a moment, because it is the kind of sentence that should not exist and yet does — the kind that could only belong to this life, this year, this particular constellation of decisions that led me, somehow, to a small café called Rumbita in one of Japan’s most ancient cities, moving to Latin music with a Frenchman who did speak English but the facts is that he actually didn’t need to. Moving in the rhythm

There are days that arrive quietly and become, without announcing themselves, something you will carry for a long time. Today was one of those. Ginkakuji area on a tender early afternoon. My dear friend Irene and I found ourselves at a small restaurant in this neighbourhood of Kyoto that holds its beauty without advertising it — old wooden facades, narrow streets that feel like they belong to a different century, the particular hush of a place that has not tried very hard to