Saturday, August 6, 2016
The Crane hr574
The hotel I checked in on my trip to Kyoto gave me a discount coupon for
the buffet breakfast and I had it next morning at the restaurant. The
buffet had Japanese expensive dishes in addition to the familiar Western
breakfast dishes, which made up the most luxurious buffet breakfast I’d
ever had. As there were many foreign guests around, it produced an
international atmosphere. One of the walls of the restaurant was the
glass window from the ceiling to the floor. Beyond it was a small
Japanese garden that had a pond with many red-and-white-colored koi
fish. When I was eating delicious breakfast and thinking I hadn’t known
that Kyoto had a fabulous place like this, something out of the window
caught my eyes. A tall, sleek, beautiful crane came flying from
somewhere and landed in the garden. Its height was about half of mine
and its color was mainly white mixed with silver and black. It stood
just five feet away from me separated by the window, watching the koi
fish in the pond with its cool eyes. I was close enough to see each of
its feathers clearly. I had never been this near to a crane before. It
didn’t try to fly away but stood still majestically. There’s a myth in
Japan that a crane lives one thousand years. Since it is regarded as the
embodiment of celebration, kimonos for a wedding or the New Year have
crane patterns. The crane standing in the garden also looked as if it
had lived for a long time and the restaurant was somehow filled with a
sense of awe in the air. Because this trip was the first one after my
family sold and left its land that had been inherited from my ancestors
over for one thousand years from generation to generation, I felt the
spirit of the land finally got freedom, took the shape of the crane and
flew away. And it came here to say goodbye to me. I was convinced that
parting with the land was the right thing to do. It set each of my
family free after all. The crane kept staring at the koi fish a long
while and suddenly crouched as if it decided to pounce. I was thrilled
to see if it would eat expensive colored koi fish that often cost
thousands of dollars, but it returned to its previous calm position and
stood straight. It repeated those moves several times and then flew away
without attacking the koi fish. Goodbye, gorgeous crane. Goodbye, my
ancestors’ land and its spirit. I was going to visit my parents on that
day. Visiting them usually ends horribly and I had been quite worried
about it this time too. But seeing the crane was auspicious and made me
feel that the visit would go well. After the mystic breakfast, I was
headed for a strange town where the condominium that my parents had
moved in located…