My first spring in Japan, quite stunning, has ended. The crickets have returned and they are getting louder by the day. It is now rainy season and my heart is in my throat. Living on top of a hill and having very little between you and the sea is so beautiful until it start raining elephants and hippos and warnings of landslides flood your phone constantly.  

Yesterday, I was awaken by an emergency alert at 5 AM, with a loud urgent message in Japanese. Although it has improved somewhat, my Japanese is not good enough to understand the alert. I could only panic more and listen to see if my immediate neighbor is moving around hurriedly in his apartment. When I failed to hear him, I went to look through the peephole: all of my neighbors’ cars were still in the parking lot. I went back to my futon, unzipped the mosquito net, got in and zipped it close. I manage to extract the written alert and paste it into google translate—THANK GOD for MODERN TECHNOLOGY. Basically it was saying my building was in a high risk area and I should evacuate because there is a possibility of a landslide. However, I located the hazard map that came with the alert and it said that I was not at high risk. I could breathe. 

I stayed there on my futon, on the floor, and thought about the fact that I have no relatives in Japan and all the relationships I have managed to acquire are work related. Then Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem, “Second Fig,” slipped into my thoughts and I couldn’t help but smile. It was so easy to write about the coolness of living in sandcastles from a brick building in an apartment in NYC where landslides and earthquakes never came to mind. But when your apartment sits on a perilous cliff and slopes right into the sea, the poem hits differently. But, I maintain my stand. Though on shakier legs. From this perilous cliff of mine, there is beauty that challenges one everyday. You see it, and look closely because it speaks of the union of life and death. It constantly asks you, “if today were your last day. . . “

P. S 

I watched a mukade play (do mukade play?) in my potted strawberry plant on the patio last evening and I thought, mukade are a little cute aren’t they? I remember encountering my first centipede a few weeks after moving in and how frightened I had been. I have killed several since then and now I can watch them sleeping on my patio and don’t get instantly zapped by fear or a lightening pull to kill them. Even though they are dangerous, they are life, aren’t they?  

P. P. S
I miss the native feel: the comfort of understanding language, culture, terrain, and blending in effortlessly.
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JAO