In Japan, autumn begins with a mirage, a slow, sultry slide from summer’s crescendo into something more liminal. The sun broods, and the heat hangs thick, like an oven just turned off. Cicadas scream their final sermon, a fever-pitch hymn that drowns thought, vibrates bone. The deep green of the hills closes in.
On such a day, we escape. We drive north, toward the sea beyond Nagasaki, toward water wide and wild enough to hold us. A coast that asks nothing but surrender. The hot wind lashes through the car. I think of my grandmother, riding Florida’s boulevards with both the AC blasting and the windows down. A woman who knew better. And did it anyway.
We arrive like pilgrims, bearing the offerings of a midsummer rite: folding chairs, wide-brimmed hats, thick novels, sunscreen, a chef’s knife in its sheath, and a watermelon swollen with promise. We walk the edge of the beach, past mothers veiled in cloth guarding their laughing children, past fishermen casting quiet hopes into the deep. We climb over rocks, lava soft and sea-bitten, to a secret cove that feels entirely our own.
There, I lower the melon into a tidal pool, a cradle of cool, bound by rope to stone. Waves lap it gently, as if blessing it. We swim. We float. We dissolve. The sea is shallow, clear, holy. I lie back and let silence take me. Cicadas fade. The sun heats my face. The water cradles my spine. I drift, untethered, between fire and flow.
Later, we slice the melon atop a barnacled rock. Its flesh is scandalously red. We dip it in the sea before biting, salt meeting sweet, sun meeting skin. Juice slips down my arms, my chin, my chest. And for a moment, nothing exists but the sticky, sweet now.
But pleasure, like summer, never lingers politely. I rinse in the waves. A silken thread wraps my wrist. A molten sting. A jellyfish’s kiss. A crimson bracelet blooms on my skin. I retreat to the shade. Beside me, smoke rises, the lazy swirl of a mosquito coil, that retro spiral of pyrethrum ash. A scent so deeply encoded in the Japanese summer it might as well be memory itself.
I hold a book, but I don’t read. I stare at the sea. Landscape has always been my meditation, its motion a kind of scripture. Trains through England, buses through Guatemala, the Shinkansen slicing past Kyoto’s temples, every window a sermon. Every passing field a prayer. The world slipping by like thought while I sit still.
Even now, as the sun scorches the shore, autumn is whispering. In Japan, time braids longing and loss with precision. Anticipation threads itself through memory. A soul-woven loom that knows only beauty born of impermanence. This moment is vanishing too.
We drive home in that golden hour when the mountains glow, and the rice fields catch the final breath of light. Panicles bow, a quiet promise of grain bins replenished. As we arrive, dusk is thick. I breathe in. Is that autumn? Just a brush of it, cool on the nape, like a lover already turning away.
The higurashi cicadas sing again. Their song, once bright with longing, now sounds lonesome. A farewell. A benediction. Because even this day, salt-stung, sun-slicked, joy-drenched, is slipping away. And isn’t that the deepest chord of all? That beauty is always more beautiful because it fades.
