![]() ![]() It was difficult getting out of the car, and it was extremely hard getting up the steps and into the house. When we got to our street I felt overwhelmed. The species of azalea that was flowering in one of the temples, a deep, dark venemous pink, looked so salacious and drenched with colour against the verdant backdrop as we drove past it looked like paradise. The road up to Kita-Kamakura, the quieter, lusher, less tourist-infested area at the top of a mountain valley where we actually live, was joyously familiar to me but also so lush, green, dazzling – so wet and verdant and beautiful I felt almost alienated by it. When you have only had visual banality, and pastel pinks and creams, and sense-nulling hospital realities for so long, to see classical Japanese temples and traditional buildings, the boulevard of cherry trees in the rain the umbrellas, the black, shining lacquer, the wood, the sheer refinement of it, I felt, almost, as if I were seeing it all for the first time. Meandering along the coastline to Zushi, and then to Kamakura, former ancient capital and Zen centre of Japan, I was unexpectedly dazzled anew by its beauty, even though I have lived here for twenty years. I had been scared to leave it unwilling, even, but now as we sped away from it and it came into a different, new focus, it was like a kaleidoscopic vision, a reversed telescope of myopic constriction in which I realized the full extent of my long, addled confinement, and the ceilings seemed miraculously tiny like a doll’s house my room just a dot in the world in which I was stuck, but deluding myself that I was free and happy, when really I was just dealing with the day to day and suppressing all anxieties as much as I humanly could while in the very necessary, and lengthy process of healing. I felt as though I could hardly even breathe just remembering it, wheareas ten minutes previously it was all that I knew. We drove along the coast of Hayama: past the Imperial summer palace, where the guards stand year round to protect the emperor and his family outside the gates, as the rain slapped the windscreen and the sea opened up into vast vistas and the hospital suddenly seemed to me like the most claustrophobic place on earth. I am not one for car sickness, but I felt a bit dizzy, lost – while at the same time unencumbered and newly liberated. I said goodbye to the nurses, my surgeon said goodbye to my physio: the lift doors closed, and we went downstairs to the entrance, me and my walking stick, as I leaned on D heavily and we figured out how to pack me, and my newfangled legs, into the front of Mr Mitomi’s car.Īs we drove off, I felt queasy, seeing the institution I had been in so long get smaller and move away into the distance the straggle of electicity lines and all the shops and buildings and cars and people emerging and disappearing as we entered the city of Yokosuka and real life the sheer velocity and level of movement after being stationary or self-powered for so long disorientating. And just wearing casual, realworld civilian clothes – jeans instead of those big, shapeless, pyjamas, felt like a big psychological step up: the staff see you differently. It was raining quite heavily, and I felt quite afraid as I had only ever walked outside once before that moment and was terrified of slipping over and having to start all over again. This time last week exactly, I was sitting on my bed, all my things packed up, waiting for my neighbour and ‘Japanese dad’, Mr Mitomi, to come and pick D and I up in his car and take us back to Kitakamakura after two months in my swaddled, beige cocoon. It was very strange coming out of hospital.
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