No portal to another world could be any less auspicious.
Narita is still a small town. It accepted its international luggage designation (NRT) reluctantly,
launching one of the last proletarian revolts agains the central administration in Tokyo to halt
the plans for another land grab that would hardly benefit the locals. Didn’t succeed.
Most visitors to Japan are raced through the terminal to the express train into Tokyo and return
in a rush to make their flight. Few ever visit the quiet country town that receives them.
Here are the first colors I see in Japan: lush greens in the forests and grassy fields, the spent gold
of after-harvest gathered at the borders of small neat plots, and the cleared earth, rich in bronze
and rust. Narita suggests anticipation and loss, sweet and tart.
As the sunlight began to fade in my empty traincar, I watched the farmlands slip into curious islands
of suburban growth and finally slide all the way into the dense, colorfully-illuminated, fast-moving
metropolis by nightfall. In under an hour, a relaxed day’s-end on the farm in Narita becomes
a hundred thousand people with plans for the evening striding through Shinjuku Station.
The excitement of arrival was reclaimed on the return trips to Narita, leaving Tokyo for home.
The first goodbye was the most difficult for me. I was ready to disembark before the airport, never
to return to the land of my birth. Perhaps this is why the train is an express.
My visits to Tokyo were so wonderful that I feared the train was something like a bedside alarm:
there to rob me of my dreams as I returned to the world of the wakeful, leaving me with only
an indistinct longing, soon forgotten.