While I studied at the University of London, a classmate once asked me how Japanese summers differ from British summers. I told her it just feels different. She asked for a more practical example, so I explained that the plants growing in Japan during the summer, such as bamboo, pine, and chrysanthemums, are quite different from those found in England.

My English classmate believed in a unified world, and I also believe that the boundaries between people are man-made and therefore unnecessary. However, we could never agree on the Japanese summer.

"Seasons change, and they affect people's hearts," I told her. "So, for example, between you and me—what's different?" she asked, her green eyes fixed intently on mine.

During the summer vacation before graduation, I visited Japan once again. My flight was delayed, and after a brief afternoon in Tokyo, I headed straight for my destination, the Izu Peninsula. Unable to bear the burning urban sun of Tokyo, I feared the feeling of being drenched in sweat with nowhere to go.

At 6:30 in the evening, I boarded a southbound train. After arriving in Ito, I grabbed a seaweed rice ball from a convenience store and then switched to a local express train along the coast of Izu, heading further south.

Compared to the cross-border European trips I had taken in the past, the Izu Peninsula, with its blue sea and southern vibes, felt small to me. It took just over an hour to travel from Ito, the starting point of the coastal line, to Shimoda, where the Pacific Ocean comes into view at the peninsula's southern tip. I planned to catch the 7:50 train, only to realise when it arrived that it was the special limited express, which my 'Izu One-Day Tour Ticket for Foreigners' didn't cover.

So, I had to wait. I wanted to wait in the air-conditioned waiting room, but the tourists and the noise of locals, along with the insatiable desire for solitude, drove me outside.

Leaning against a pillar in the station hall, I watched the blue-green sky outside for half an hour until the distant green mountains disappeared into the mist, then I finally boarded a local train bound for Shimoda.

***

When I was choosing my travel destination, I wanted a coast away from the city yet not too far from it, and upon seeing the word 'Izu' on the map of Japan, I was instantly drawn to the imagined mountains and ports depicted countless times in Japanese classic literature.

I often wandered with my luggage while traveling, like a child chasing a butterfly, following a trail or a shadow until I could lose track of myself. By the time I finally reached the reserved hot spring inn, it was nearing midnight.

The innkeeper, a dark-skinned, stout local man, was waiting for me at the reception desk. After a brief greeting, he led me to a room on the third floor.

Sliding open the paper door to the room, the sight of the grass-woven mats and simple wooden furniture came into view, and the desire to embark on a journey suddenly surged into my weary heart, which had been long confined to the window seat of the train.

"The hot spring has been cleaned. Tonight, please use the regular bath," the owner apologised profusely after settling me into my room.

I didn't mind at all. Unlike the many professionals from Tokyo who came here for a relaxing hot springs holiday, I wasn't there for that.

If I were travelling in Europe, I would choose cheap youth hostels and shared rooms with other travellers. Booking an old-fashioned hot spring inn was purely because I had had enough of the fleeting euphoria and sorrow of backpacking, akin to a nightclub experience.

Just as day and night on the journey, they come and go quickly. If physical movement is life, and stillness means death, then travelling alone for me is wandering between life and death. Sitting still on a train prepares for movement upon arrival; movement, in turn, prepares for another stillness.

As the night deepened, I opened the paper door leading to the balcony, sat quietly by the engawa, watched a lantern hanging on a wall not far away, and journaled these words as my heart fluttered between movement and stillness.

***

On the second day in Japan, I woke up early, using my foreigner's day pass to catch the first local train south, moving to my next destination, Kawazu.

Outside the rustic Kawazu station, the scorching sun sharply outlined the station's contours on the ground. I found the owner of the guesthouse squinting at the burning sun by the wall. I had planned to retreat to the guesthouse to escape the heat and rest for half a day, but the owner told me such sunny weather was rare and suggested I head directly to Mount Amagi.

So I entrusted my luggage to the owner to take back to the guesthouse and decided to climb the mountain on a whim. At the station, I caught a bus to the foot of Mount Amagi.

The mountain paths of Mount Amagi weren't steep, but winding. The sun was high when I climbed the mountain, but suddenly a few drops of rain wet me. After taking a few more steps, the rain stopped. The forest was dense, sheltering me.

A few more steps brought me to a clearing without tree cover. I looked towards the valley. The tops of two green maples met in the air, forming a small empty oval with other unknown tree species. In that nothingness, raindrops were clearly illuminated by the sunlight, as if a light snowfall had drifted quietly.

A car suddenly drove past the road below the valley. I watched in the direction it disappeared, standing there for a long time, completely forgetting the soreness in my calves from the climb.

After descending the mountain, it was around 4 pm. The guesthouse owner came to pick me up at the station. Despite my physical exhaustion, I chatted joyfully with Hasegawa on the way back to the guesthouse. Divorced and somewhat lost, he was raising an eight-year-old child alone, whose name I never learned.

When I walked into the living room, Hasegawa's child was sitting on the floor watching TV alone, completely indifferent to my arrival. I sat on the sofa and struck up a conversation, "What's your name?"

The child glanced at me, then turned back to the TV without answering. I could tell he wasn’t shy but accustomed to the curious gaze of travellers. I wondered how many times strangers with smiling faces had asked him this question. Even if they learned his name, they would leave soon after, so why bother asking?

This is a unique melancholy of an era where national boundaries are blurred. As someone far away from home, I am also an orphan of the times.

With such confusion in my heart, I couldn't enjoy a quiet summer night in the peaceful guesthouse. I asked the owner to drive me to the train station to see the fireworks festival he had mentioned, taking place on Kinosaki Beach that night.

Fireworks bloom on the seaside every summer. Many of my New Year's Eves were spent under fireworks in England, but summer fireworks only blossom in Japan.

***

It took only half an hour to get from Kawazu to Kinosaki. Stepping off the train into the crowd, I felt lost. The deepened darkness divided the crowd, with some heading higher and others towards the coast, leaving me unsure of where to go.

"Excuse me..."

"Yes?"

"May I ask, where the fireworks are?"

I grasped an elderly lady in the crowd and asked her in halting Japanese. She smiled and said a string of words I couldn't fully understand.

"Do you speak English?" Seeing that I was lost, she switched to fairly standard English.

"Ah, yes, I speak English."

"Are you here for the fireworks? We're too."

It was only then I noticed her family: a middle-aged woman and a young girl. When my eyes met with the middle-aged woman, she smiled gently at me.

"That's great," I replied.

"You are welcome to join us," the old lady said to me. I thanked her truly.

***

So, we walked together along the winding trail leading to the high ground. The night was pitch black, a subtropical summer darkness rarely seen in Europe. A darkness rarely seen in Europe, which neither borders the ocean nor sees the summer sun set so early. It felt like I might encounter a ghost from the past, yet the bustling crowd brought life to the winding road.

The old lady explained that everyone along the way was heading to the beach, but some settled for the fireworks at the beach near the station, while others took a longer route to a quieter beach, hence the split crowd.

"What is your name?" the gentle middle-aged woman, Soyeon, asked me with a smile.

From our light conversation, I learned that Soyeon was the old lady Fukada's daughter-in-law. Her husband worked abroad, and she had moved to Japan from Korea.

Fukada had studied in Europe when she was young, and we found a good connection since I had also been there. However, the summer night's trail wasn't long, and soon we reached the end of the slope.

We arrived at a place where we could see the sea—

"I like 'umi' (sea)," I said in imperfect Japanese to Fukada. She heard "unmei" (fate) instead of "umi" (sea), smiling but looking puzzled. Realizing this, I quickly gestured to explain that I liked neither "fate" nor "dreams" (yume).

Climbing down a small rocky outcrop, I turned back, reaching out my hand to help Fukada and her family down the rocks. Fukada and Soyeon took my hand without hesitation, but the girl refused my help.

She jumped down on her own, having her white canvas shoes sink into the sand. We walked to the crowded beach.

While we weaved through the crowd to find a place to sit, I seemed to have stepped on a dog's tail, earning a glare from its owner. Just a few minutes before the fireworks began, we finally found a spot on the crowded beach.

The three generations of women sat on a slightly elevated rock by the shore, and I sat on the sand below the rock, with the girl just so happening to sit right behind me.

As soon as the fireworks started, I couldn't help but burst into laughter. The music accompanying the fireworks turned out to be that theme song from the movie Titanic. The familiar voice of the American singer echoed from the other side of the ocean, spreading far with the sound of fleeting fireworks and breaking waves.

Tired of chasing dreams, I couldn't help but smile, yet I didn't feel weary inside. "So beautiful," I said, turning to Fukada and her family. Fukada and Soyeon smiled, but the girl remained indifferent.

***

After the fireworks ended, we began our walk back to the station together. On the way, I walked slightly ahead and struck up a light conversation with the girl. Under the white streetlights and the darkness of the night, we walked back from the trail to the populated area.

Fukada's family lived in Kinosaki, so they didn't need to take the train anywhere. At the station, at my request, we exchanged contact information and waved goodbye.

"My name is —, what is your name?" I asked the girl under the half-lit, half-dark streetlight outside the station.

The train back to Kawazu was filled with locals returning from work or school. Holding onto the train's handrail, I watched the coastline through the window, swaying back and forth, back and forth among the strangers.

***

After graduating from university, I naturally lost touch with my British friend. I didn't return to London for the graduation ceremony, nor did I get the chance to tell her I had spent a summer in Japan.

Perhaps it's because I wanted to leave some regret for myself. That summer in Izu was my last true solo trip. After that, I grew tired of being alone. The solitude of my twenties nearly drove me to the brink.

I was weary of living with determination, slowly dying alone, and too exhausted to enjoy solitude anymore.

Since then, whenever I travelled, I would go with a lover. Strangely, I never felt the desire to travel with friends or family—nor did I have the desire to travel with a beloved.

As a wanderer struggling desperately between cities in the 21st century, I seem to have forgotten how to love in an instant. Just like the ghost I thought might appear on that winding trail, it fleeted and vanished.

This summer, I briefly returned to my birth place and tried hard to record these journeys. But the more I wrote, the less real my life felt. The past dreams scattered across the world, like fireworks on Kinosaki Beach, beautiful yet unfulfilled.

I didn't find my sense of belonging wandering in London as an immigrant, nor did I change my view of my birth country.

I found myself in such a state of loss when I met her again.

That day, the usual chain café near the MRT station was offering a buy-one-get-one-free deal. I only discovered this upon arriving at the café. Since moving to the UK in adulthood, I have lost the enthusiasm to purchase things to be part of some event. To queue up for some material satisfaction seemed absurd to me—not that I couldn't understand, but I couldn't be a part of it.

Despite the air-conditioning, the café was still humid and crowded. I was lucky to find a seat by the window, as most people intended only to take their orders to go.

I approached the counter to order my coffee and, turning around, saw her sitting by the window, waiting for her coffee with her luggage by her side.

She looked at me, and I looked at her.

I couldn’t be certain it was her.

"49號──Number 49!"

The staff called out. She stood up from her seat by the window, grasped the handle of her suitcase, and took the two cups of coffee in a paper bag from the staff.

"Excuse me!"

I couldn’t just let her leave like that. I called out to her in Japanese.

She turned around—

That day, that extra cup of coffee she had wasn’t meant to be shared with anyone, and neither was mine.

“What are you doing here?”

"What about you? Shouldn't you be in England?"

"I came back a few months ago."

After the fireworks faded over Kinosaki Beach, we chatted online for several months. When I returned to Japan again, we spent an afternoon and evening together in Tokyo. Later, unable to make it work and only adding to the loneliness, we exchanged messages only around our birthdays.

Mrs. Fukada passed away last year. She died in an accident caused by a foreign immigrant. The lawsuit is still ongoing, she told me.

The news brought a silence between us. In search of words to fill the emptiness, I reluctantly asked her impression of Taiwanese people so far.

“Oh, about that—Taipei guys seem taller than Tokyo guys, but Taipei girls don’t seem to care if their boyfriends are handsome or not.”

She suddenly spoke with enthusiasm, as if we were back to our daily online chats.

“Haha… maybe it’s because taller guys feel more reliable. Here, everyone tends to seek stability, don’t they?”

I hesitated for a moment, then laughed.

"As long as he's handsome, at least as tall as me... even if he's a bit shorter, it's okay. He can be younger too, but having nice eyes is important."

She said quite seriously.

After that, it felt as if we had rediscovered something between us, and we could talk properly again.

I half-jokingly asked why she hadn't told me about coming to Taiwan, and she apologised. I said I didn't mind at all.

It wasn’t that I didn’t care; I just didn’t mind. I was happy that you came.

I explained plainly in my still somewhat broken Japanese. Her eyes fluttered like butterfly wings, blinking and drifting.

Her long-absent father returned to Japan for the funeral, and she quickly grew weary of his presence. Urine stains on the toilet seat and mounds of empty beer cans piling up in just a couple of days made her unable to understand her father anymore.

His business had encountered setbacks, and she felt he cared more about the inheritance than about her grandmother’s death. Thus, she decided to travel abroad to clear her mind.

She always felt indebted to her family, yet like a stranded fish, she had to thrash about desperately.

Her self-centred father, only interested in his own happiness, was like a selfish worm surfacing only when it rained. She hated how much she resembled him.

“...That day after school, I came home and found out my father had returned from elsewhere. It had been so long since I’d seen him, I’d almost forgotten his face. I didn’t recognise him at first, and was even a bit scared... He got angry then. Luckily, Grandma was there to shield me... I think it was back in elementary school.”

She told me this. I was about to blame her father, but then I remembered Mrs. Fukada’s death and my own circumstances, and I didn’t want to blame anyone anymore.

In life, there are things we can't force… Was Fukada's death the same? Just like how we once believed that jumping high enough would let us fly, and going far enough would let us meet.

"…There's nothing, the path is hard to walk, truly an endless expanse. But because there's nothing, so... you know what, I encountered a pack of painted dogs in the desert…"

After a moment of silence, when she asked why Taipei's summer is so hot, I told her that there are even hotter places in the world; when she asked what kind of places those were, I told her about my trip to the African desert.

My life has always resembled a flower in a saltwater lake, the premature wandering in my young age has rendered my heart indifferent and unmoved by anything, yet I lack any pillar of support.

In her essence, she might never be anyone's pillar, yet she stirred ripples in my heart that were fleeting to still.

“I don’t really care how severe the sentence is for the killer.”

Finally, when I gently broached the topic of Mrs. Fukada’s death again, she told me this.

“Even if the sentence is severe, it won’t bring Grandma back. I’d rather the judge never make a decision; that way... it feels better than nothing.”

“Better than nothing?”

"No matter the sentence—be it death, life imprisonment, or however many years—it only confirms Grandma's death. It's over, she can no longer be with Mom... and I've used her death... just to do what I want..."

She felt that the family agreed to let her travel because of Grandma’s death and the inheritance. Rather than travelling, it felt more like she was escaping.

"Don't blame yourself," I told her. "Because she was your grandma, I believe Fukada would support you too."

What seems like exploitation to an Eastern mind doesn’t weigh as heavily in a Western heart. Perhaps, in using each other, we can find some reasons to live. I offered this worldly wisdom to comfort her. She trusted me, like rain soaking an umbrella.

Between people, perhaps it is always thus, breathing the air each other has exhaled, like microorganisms breaking down each other’s bodies to gain sustenance to live on. We grow in a summer filled with the cicadas’ song and their deaths.

Having grown up in these summer rice fields, our deeply rooted hearts cannot truly stand alone, and thus we must feel, reluctantly. I didn't share this indistinct resignation with her in the café that day, hoping she would overcome it in the future not far away.

***

The time to part ways came again. She was heading south to continue her journey, and I was to see her off at the gate.

There was a long queue at the ticket machines in the train station. She walked briskly to join the line. Not needing to buy a ticket, I hesitated only briefly before joining at the end of the queue.

“I thought you weren’t going to keep me company in line,” she said, half-jokingly.

"Actually, I was just about to head to Pingtung today, so I need to buy a ticket too," I replied.

“Really?”

“No, but I've always wanted to go.”

"You can. I'm heading south too... not going together?" When it was time to part, she asked me.

On the summer train, I looked out the window, and so did she.

***

On the train, I borrowed a pen and napkin from her but soon returned them, and I remembered that summer in Kyoto when I got lost alone in the Tofukuji Temple. I heard "Mary Had a Little Lamb" played on a flute behind a wall. Mi Mi Mi Mi Re Re Mi Re Do—the disjointed flute notes stopped suddenly, followed by children's chatter. The woman I asked for directions told me it was her kindergarten.

Deep within the temple grounds, there was a hidden little bridge. I stood alone on that bridge, gazing until a sudden heavy rain swept across the pond's surface, yet I didn’t feel drenched… it turned out to be thousands of water striders jumping wildly due to the wind.

***

The cicadas' incessant chirping made the endless fields outside the fleeting window even more tranquil. I once loved venturing deep into the countryside because no one knew me there, and I could pretend to hold onto a bit of old simplicity and the hope of a farmer... but now I no longer wish to hide...

Before I struggled to uncover the dream at the end of that trail, her gaze, clear and distinct, appeared before me through the gaps in the trees and grass.

We are like some kind of wounded marine creatures, floating on the hot and cold sea surface. I lie on my back on the scorching surface, while she looks into the depths of the sea, swimming forward faster than me.

Reflected in her deep eyes was a gaze as transparent as a lake, making me long to drown in the tenderness of wiping away the tears of the girl before me. However, we no longer needed answers, and had already lost them.

Even if summer comes and goes again, even we...

I think we will live on, even if not together.

"Do you feel it?"

"Actually, no."

She gave a different answer than past lovers.

Perhaps it was because she didn't understand the concept of quenching thirst by thinking of plums, I thought.

"If you get close enough, you can hear it flowing."

She once told me. Perhaps women are a kind of seasonal creatures. I thought. So am I.

Turning my head, I would see that heart flowing with the changing seasons, from dusk to dawn, to night, and her and myself, leaping from the rocks by the summer shore.