And you’ll climb a mountain and stand all alone at the top

The third post from Human Again, my series of dispatches from a walk in northern Japan, is now online.

Tl;dr: It is about the volcano Rishiri.

Alas, I write this not from a remote hamlet in western Hokkaido but from a dear friend’s dining table in Shinjuku. My walk for this year is over. An injury to my right foot I had picked up somewhere on the Okhotsk coast worsened gradually to the point where I could barely walk a few hundred meters for coffee, let alone 35–40 kilometers every day. At some point I was left with no choice but to pause this journey. I shall be back and continue my circumambulation of Japan, from the same place and on the same calendar day.

I will now return home to Estonia and, after a bit of rest and physical therapy, resume work on A Something Like Peace, the thatching book — one of the beneficiaries of this turn of events.

And I’d like to hear from you. Did you enjoy reading Human Again? Is there anything else you would like to see or hear or read about on my future walks? Have you been to any of the places I wrote about and did you experience anything similar — or different? Let me know!

For now, I’d like to thank you very much for following along, and I hope you enjoyed these three longer dispatches from across northern Hokkaido. See you in about a month.