Hōyo Strait, Shikoku → Kyushu

“‘I still mourn for him, forty years on. At first I wondered how long it would be before I forgot him. Three years, I reckoned; five years at the outside. I was young then, without experience. And here I am, talking about him as though it was just last week he died. The people who lost their sons and their husbands in the Falklands War will know what I mean. They’ll still be thinking of them, just like I am, forty years into the future…’,” Alan Booth wrote in the prelude to “Roads Out of Time”, quoting an innkeeper, a grandmother who had lost her husband in the Japan-China War.

I thought of my grandfather I had never known, who had died in 1979 on this day. My grandmother still mourned for him, forty years on, and she was 92 now, old even in the Japanese sense of the word, and in a few weeks I would see her, and tell her what I had seen.

I stood at the railing of the ferry until the last outcrop of Shikoku faded from view, and there was nothing but the grey skies above and the grey seas below.

The End