On occasion we stumble across old photographs. What's the reason we take photographs and that they're so dear to us? To capture a moment in time, in our lives, because we know that such memories fade and that we can always take recourse to jogging them from the deep interior recesses of our mind's memory banks if and when we take the trouble to look at the photographs we've stored in aging albums.
And several photographs popped up just recently, slightly shocking my memory, leading me to wonder why it is that I am one of those people who allowed valued contact to dissipate. Where is Miharu now, what is she doing, what became of her? She was my friend, a sometimes-companion whom my husband had met years before I did because of his link with her family's business. He spoke of her to me, and then I met her.
We had joined a few recreational 'clubs' in Tokyo, one of which took us to various places we might otherwise not have seen, like a weekend at a Shinto monastery in the mountains, where during the day we could amble through their incomparable gardens, or down a cart trail to the town below, and in the evening sleep on futons in a small room assigned to us, waking at 5:00 a.m. to take part in prayers when I discovered how difficult it is to balance yourself in a semi-crouch for a prolonged period, then go along to the communal bath and later have a breakfast of miso soup topped with raw egg and dried fish.
The other club was that of Friends of the Earth where we met other foreigners in Japan among the mostly Japanese hikers, and we would awake very early on a weekend morning to take a succession of trains and buses to exit Tokyo and be conveyed to small villages in the mountains where we accessed trailheads and spent hours climbing through the forested hillsides on the lookout for the monkeys signs warned were present, but never seen.
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