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

I am writing this while a typhoon passes over Kyoto. The rain is not falling so much as being thrown — sideways, in sheets, with an insistence that makes the ordinary sounds of the city entirely disappear. Everything outside the window is moving: the trees, the puddles, the air itself. Kyoto, which is usually so composed, so deliberate, has been temporarily returned to something wilder and older than its careful streets suggest. I find it, unexpectedly, beautiful. I have been