It’s December and rural Japan through a train window is a blurry painting in primary colors. Hazy blue mountains fence in perfect rows of dark green tea. Gold mikan oranges hang heavy from their branches — a thousand little suns born in the bleakest time of year.

I am in a metal box, hurtling way too fast and distracted through all this beauty. This landscape, still new to me, is an untamable vastness. The earth shakes often enough to remind you of your frailty. And a towering beast rises up above it all.

The first time I’d seen Fuji-san one summer evening, when the clouds cleared around him, I’d cried. Then summer had tumbled quickly into winter, and the autumn I was promised was lost; save a carpet of blazing leaves whose fire went out with the cold wind.

Yumi is there at the train station waiting for me. Of course. She had probably arrived exactly three minutes before my train pulled in. I step into her calm.

“Konnichiwa!”

“Hello!” she replies and hands me a box of subtly sweet sweets. She is sweet too; tries to make communication easy on me with her few words of English.

It strikes me now that she has never been even the littlest bit offensive during any of our meetings and I wonder if she knows how. We were all offensive, where I came from. Merit lay not in being nice but in keeping the point of your personality sharpened; and in cultivating immunity to the sharpness of others.

I like who I am with Yumi.

Here there are other foreigners; children of the developed West come to gape at the ways of the Asians; to assure themselves where civilization really lay. They are offensive by their very nature too but express surprise if one hints that they might be, like they have never seen themselves before.

For the Japanese though, an encounter with another is not a battle on behalf of the ego. This gives them a certain blankness that the worst among the gaijin paint their own corrupt selves upon, and then stand back in horror.

We walk together around the old castle grounds. “This is typical Japanese garden,” she says.

Around me is a kind of crafted beauty, magnificent as a feat of human achievement and seemingly only mildly related to nature. Crooked five hundred year old cherry trees are now bare. Jewel colored ducks swim in the little ponds. I smile secretly at the thought that those trusting creatures wouldn’t last long back home, before they were carried off and curried.

We sit on a bench, in the chill air that my blood is too thin for, and eat the chewy rice cakes she brought. I can feel her looking at me for a long time. “How is Japan for you?”

“So cold,” I say through a strained smile.

“Mmm.” She nods her head slowly. “And how is your husband?”

My heart is cracking in my chest. “I…don’t know anymore.” I want to say more; want to scream in fact. It streams silently out of me and bounces off the sides of the watchful mountains that surround us.

“Let’s walk more.”

She gets up and I follow her. We wade through brown, crackling leaves and make our way to a little wooden bridge to look at the koi in the water below. It seems like not very long ago when those leaves were green and part of something living.

I think of the unchanging beauty of the landscape back home, where every day was the same and the breeze never blew too strong.

She is pointing at something. It’s a rusty red maple leaf entangled in a bed of mossy pebbles, being bathed by flowing water. “We Japanese think this kind of thing is so beautiful. It’s…” She does not have the words and reaches for her pocket electronic dictionary, pink and encrusted with stick-on gems. She leans her head to one side and finally tries, “Temporary?”

“Yes. I understand. I think it’s beautiful too, though I’m not Japanese.”

We walk and walk under the big sky that is only this blue in winter. It’s out of place now, like all those sunny mikans.

“I think this cold weather is difficult for you? Spring will come soon. Then we can enjoy o hanami.”

“Drinking under cherry blossoms. What could be better?”

“Yes. The flowers don’t last long. So we enjoy them very much. It’s also…temporary, isn’t it?” She’s learned another English word.

I think about how everything that’s worth anything falls quickly to the ground — cherry blossoms, autumn leaves, the Technicolor poui flowers back home, love so dizzying it consumes itself. Here and then gone and perfect in their impermanence.

“Tell me more about spring,” I say. And we walk on.