Coming Back to Kyoto

There is a particular kind of joy that only return makes possible.

Not the joy of arriving somewhere new — that particular aliveness of the unknown, which I love and which this life gives me in abundance. But the other kind. The quieter, warmer, more surprising kind: the joy of arriving somewhere you already love and discovering that it loves you back. That it has been here, unchanged in the ways that matter, waiting.

Kyoto does this to me every time.

I keep saying it out loud, to Irene, to Tommy, to my children, to anyone who will listen: I love Kyoto. I love it here. I say it the way you say things that surprise you by being so completely true — with a kind of wonder at yourself, at the fact that a city can do this, can make bubbles of joy rise in you simply by existing and by letting you walk through it again.

It is not nostalgia exactly. It is something more alive than that. More present. Like recognition — the particular thrill of seeing something beloved and knowing immediately, in your body before your mind catches up: yes. This. Here.

The Smell of the Mysore Room

Every time I enter the Mysore room here in Kyoto, a smell hits me before anything else does.

I cannot name it precisely — wood and incense and the particular warmth of a room that has held many bodies in disciplined movement over many years. But my memory knows it immediately and completely, the way smell always bypasses the thinking mind and goes straight to somewhere older and deeper. It pulls me back to two years ago, when I spent two months here practicing every day. The early mornings. The particular quality of attention that Ashtanga Mysore practice requires — no instructor leading you through, just your own body, your own breath, your own relationship with the sequence, day after day, building something slowly that cannot be rushed.

I stood in the doorway for a moment the first time I returned this visit and just let the smell arrive. Let it bring everything with it — the mornings, the people, the version of myself I was then, which is different from the version

I am now, which is different again from the version I am still becoming.

The practice has been complicated this trip. My knee — still healing, still requiring more patience than I naturally possess — has meant modifications, adjustments, the particular frustration of a body that will not do what you ask of it. The monkey mind arrives loudly on those mornings. Impatience sits beside stillness. Busyness and quiet occupy the same breath.

But the smell of that room reminds me why I keep coming back. Not to perform the practice perfectly. To practice it honestly, which is a different thing entirely.

Tsunomi — The Restaurant That Remembers You

Near where we are staying there is an okonomiyaki restaurant called Tsunomi, and going there feels less like eating out and more like being received.

The host — ever-smiling, warm with a warmth that has nothing performed about it — runs the restaurant alongside his mother, whose presence in the kitchen you feel in every dish even when you cannot see her. The food is extraordinary in the way that food made by people who love making it always is — not because of technique alone but because of care, because of the intention that goes into something you are going to give to another person.

We have been there enough times now that they know us. And on this visit, they gave us a gift — something the host’s wife had made — a gesture so simple and so genuine that I found myself, as I often do in Japan, moved by the particular kindness of being seen by people who had no obligation to see you.

This is what I mean when I say Kyoto loves me back. It is not the city abstractly. It is these specific people in these specific places who have chosen, for reasons I find myself grateful for every time, to make us feel like we belong here even though we are always passing through.

About Us — The Coffee Shop That Knows Our Order

There is a coffee shop — About Us — where by now they know what we drink before we ask for it.

I do not take this lightly. I know what it means to a nomad to have a place that knows your order — it is a small act with an outsized meaning, a tiny anchor in a life that is always moving. Walking through the door and having someone reach for the right cup before you have spoken is, in its quiet way, one of the loveliest feelings this life offers.

We go there most mornings. It has become part of the rhythm of Kyoto, which has become part of the rhythm of us.

Kazue and the Sashiko Studio

We bicycled to Fushimi Inari to visit Kazue at her Sashiko Lab — newly opened in a studio space that already feels entirely like her, which is to say: considered, beautiful, completely itself.

I have been dreaming of returning to Kazue’s studio since we were last in Kyoto two years ago. Sashiko is a traditional Japanese form of decorative reinforcement stitching — running stitches in white thread on indigo fabric, creating geometric patterns that are both functional and deeply beautiful. The first time I tried it, I felt two things simultaneously: a settling, a sense of rightness, of hands doing something slow and deliberate and ancient — and also frustration, because sashiko requires a precision and patience that I am still developing. I wanted to be better at it immediately. I wanted to stop time and stay inside the learning forever.

Both feelings were present again this visit.

We stopped for coffee at Vermillion first — the café at the entrance to the Fushimi Inari torii gates — and I sat with it for a moment, preparing myself for the studio the way you prepare for something that matters. And then we rode to Kazue, and the needles came out, and time did what it does in the best creative spaces: it became elastic, unhurried, full.

Irene rode infront of me on her unicycle the whole way. I noticed people on the street smiling as she passed. A few gave her a thumbs up. She rode on, perfectly balanced, entirely herself, and I thought: this is also what joy looks like. Unhurried. A little impractical. Making strangers smile without trying to.

Shigeharu — The Last of His Line

This morning we went looking for a knife.

Shigeharu is a knife maker whose lineage stretches back eight hundred years. His shop is not easy to find — nobody knows exactly when he opens, and the waiting list for his work has been, at times, five years long. He closed for a period and people waited, because some things are worth waiting for, because there are makers in this world whose work cannot be replicated or approximated and whose absence is felt as a genuine loss.

We found him open.

We stood in the shop and I watched him — slowly, deliberately, with the unhurried movements of a man who has been doing something for so long that speed has become entirely beside the point — hand-engraving a knife for a customer who had just purchased it. The tool moved across the metal with an attention so complete it seemed like a form of conversation between the maker and the object. Eight hundred years of lineage in a single moving hand.

I thought of Robert Yellin and the names he placed into the cups. I thought of the cabinet full of portals. I thought of all the invisible threads that run between makers and their objects and the hands that eventually receive them.

We left with a knife. I carried it home carefully, the way you carry something that has history in it — gently, aware of the weight of what you are holding.

The River, the Ramen, the Cancelled Trek

Bicycling ten kilometres with Anton to the Kamo River on a sunny day — the city opening up around us, the river wide and glittering, both of us quiet in the way you can be quiet with someone you love when the day is good enough to speak for itself.

Visiting Kobushi Ramen and sitting with the particular sweetness of reminiscing — we stayed around the corner two years ago and ate the soupless tantanmen so often it became a kind of ritual. The broth had just the right slick of heat. The noodles were exactly right. Memory and present tense collapsed into the same bowl, which is what the best food always does.

And the cancellation of our Kumano Kodo trek — three days of walking a pilgrimage trail I have been wanting to do since I first heard of it. My knee said no, clearly and firmly, and for once I listened before forcing the issue further. This is its own kind of practice: the pulling back. The choosing rest over ambition. The reminding myself that the trail will be there, that the body is the only one I have, that healing requires something I am always last to give myself — patience.

Acupuncture. Early mornings in an empty gym. The smell of the Mysore room again, every day, pulling me gently backward and forward simultaneously through time.

Time here feels liquid.

That is the only way I can describe it.

Transparent and moving, speeding up without warning, letting me see through it to two years ago and to this present moment at the same time. The Kyoto of then and the Kyoto of now exist simultaneously in me, layered over each other like transparencies — the same streets, the same smells, the same feeling of being exactly where I am supposed to be, at two different points in a life that keeps surprising me.

I love this city loudly and with my whole heart.

I love it for the smell of the Mysore room and the gift from the restaurant owner’s wife and the coffee that arrives without asking and the knife made by the last of an eight-hundred-year line and the unicycle and the ramen and the sashiko stitches and the Kamo River glittering on a sunny afternoon.

I love it because it keeps showing me that return is not repetition.

Return is arrival, again.

Always slightly different.

Always, somehow, more.