The Socrates Express

10. How to Appreciate the Small Things like Sei Shōnagon

11:47 a.m. On board Japan Rail East Train No. 318. En route from Tokyo to Kyoto. Speed: 185 miles per hour.

Speed, I’ve learned, is the enemy of attention. Swiftness fragments our awareness, splinters it into a million tiny pieces, none large enough to grasp.

What about beauty? Does it, too, decrease as we accelerate? Or does speed possess its own blurred beauty? A hummingbird’s wings, flapping eighty times per second. A flash of lightning, arcing across the sky. The quiet whoosh of a Japanese shinkansen, or bullet train, rocketing from city to city.

When I boarded the one I’m on now, at Tokyo’s shiny Shinagawa station, I didn’t know whether to gasp or laugh. With a flat platypus nose attached to a toned swimmer’s body, the train looks ridiculous. And beautiful. The shinkansen is the Robin Williams of trains: an absurdity blatantly flouting the laws of physics but doing so at such mind-boggling speed that all is forgiven.

Just as Robin Williams didn’t compete with other comedians, the shinkansen doesn’t compete with other trains. It competes with the airlines. Japan Rail has done its best to mimic the feel of an airline cabin. I could be on board an Airbus, with the notable absence of seat belts and canned announcements about what to do in the unlikely event of a water landing.

As we departed Shinagawa station, precisely on time, the echoes of air travel grew louder: the high-pitched whoosh, the G forces gently pressing me against my seat—smoothly, without even a hint of Amtrak shake-and-rattle.

If all goes according to plan, and in Japan it almost always does, we will cover the 227 miles from Tokyo to Kyoto in a brisk two hours and eight minutes. We are flying. We are not flying. Only when I glance out the window—not at the horizon but at a nearby house or railroad crossing—do I experience an inkling of our exceptional velocity. Speed is relative. Without reference points, it is meaningless.

A conductor walks by and scoops up a chopstick shard that somebody (okay, me) had dropped. In my mind, it was too small to qualify as litter. Clearly he felt otherwise. My stray speck of wood had upset the aesthetic harmony of the train. In Japan, something is either just right or it is not right at all.

I retrieve my little black notebook, not the gem I lost in England (it is irreplaceable), but a more pedestrian model. I unfurl the elastic band that contains my thoughts. I turn to a fresh page, blank with possibility, and start a list. I like lists. List making is, I believe, a profoundly philosophical activity. Don’t take my word for it. Ask Plato. He made lists. He listed the attributes of a philosopher-king, and of the good life. His student Aristotle outdid him. Aristotle was philosophy’s great list maker. Keen to superimpose order upon messy reality, he created layers of categories and subcategories.

Some two thousand years later, Susan Sontag offered this eloquent and characteristically cerebral defense of her chronic list making: “I perceive value, I confer value, I create value, I even create—or guarantee—existence. Hence, my compulsion to make ‘lists.’ ” Umberto Eco put it more succinctly: “The list is the origin of culture.”

My list making is considerably less grand. My lists do not guarantee existence or establish cultures. My lists do not, as far as I know, perceive value, but they do help me corral my thoughts. They help me make sense of the world, of myself, and what is more philosophical than that?

The key to good list making is getting the category right. It must be large enough to encompass a variety of entries yet small enough to wrap your mind around. “The Greatest Music Ever” is too broad while “The Greatest Polkas Composed by Polish-Americans of 1930s Chicago” is too narrow.

I glance at the list I’ve just created in my notebook. “Foreign Countries Where I Have Lived.” It is not a long list, only three entries, but it has, more than any other list, shaped how I think, and who I am.

Each country on the list taught me something important, even if inadvertently. India taught me how to find stillness in chaos. Israel taught me the importance of savlanut, patience. Valuable lessons all, but nothing compared to Japan. Japan taught me, a person of the book, a head-heavy aficionado of words and the people who use words, how to shut the fuck up for five minutes and experience a different way of being. Japan opened my eyes to a philosophy of things. Beautiful small things.

The Pillow Book. What a strange title, I thought, when I first learned of its existence, nearly two decades ago. I was living in Tokyo, working as a correspondent for NPR. It tickled my interest. What is this peculiar book named after a nocturnal accessory and penned a millennium ago by a little-known courtier from Kyoto? And how does it attract readers ten centuries later?

My investigations started and ended there. I was busy filing reports about the Japanese economy or the country’s aging population or jetting off to cover some simmering conflict in Indonesia or Pakistan. I didn’t have the time—or, to be honest, the inclination—to read a thousand-year-old book about nothing in particular. The book, though, the idea of the book, stayed with me, relegated to the exurbia of my brain, waiting patiently for space to open up downtown.

I snuggle with The Pillow Book while, appropriately, resting my head on a pillow. I am in a hotel room in Tokyo’s Shibuya neighborhood, though in Japan, “room” is a matter of opinion.

Both in style and scale, the alleged room reminds me of a ship’s cabin. A masterpiece of spatial efficiency, it supposedly sleeps three, but there’s a catch. These three bodies must remain at rest. Any motion requires the sort of advance coordination typically demanded of presidential visits and premarital sex. It is less room than nook.

Nooks don’t get their fair due. Not with adults at least. Children appreciate a good nook. They instinctively seek them out, and if none is available create one. I recall, as a melancholic five-year-old, transforming our Baltimore living room into a labyrinth of nooks by stringing together dozens of blankets and sheets, then anchoring them to anything within reach: chairs, couches, the dog. I was too young to articulate my motives, but I now realize what it was I craved: the sublime combination of coziness and wonder, confinement and expansiveness, security and adventure, that only a nook provides.

I still like nooks. I suffer (if that is the right word) from claustrophobia’s opposite. I am drawn to confined spaces, thrive in them. Maybe this is why I am so fond of Japan. No one confines like the Japanese. People of the Nook. They shoehorn themselves into subway cars and bars and alleged hotel rooms. Remarkably, they do all this without killing one another.

I turn to the first page. The Pillow Book reads like a private diary, and for good reason: it’s a private diary. “I merely wrote for my personal amusement things that I myself have thought and felt,” writes the author, Sei Shōnagon. She never expected her words to be read by others, which explains why others find them such a joy to read. The Pillow Book is written with the naked honesty typically reserved for the anonymous and the dying.

As I turn the pages, adjusting my pillow, I am drawn into Shōnagon’s world, seduced by her boldness, her love of details—and how she finds beauty in the most unexpected places.

The title, like so much of The Pillow Book, is a mystery. Why a pillow? Perhaps Shōnagon kept the manuscript by her bedside, like a pillow. Perhaps she found comfort in the words it contained the way we find comfort in our favorite pillow. No one knows.

The Pillow Book is not a book, at least not in the conventional sense. It contains no narrative thread, no recurring characters, no overarching theme. The Pillow Book is a jambalaya of observations large and (mostly) small, “a crazy quilt of vignettes and opinions and anecdotes,” notes Meredith McKinney, who translated Makura no Sōshi, The Pillow Book into English.

The book that is not a book is arranged in 297 numbered entries, ranging in length from a single sentence to several pages. Some entries relay anecdotes from the Imperial Palace in Kyoto, while others are simply opinionated lists. The lists are my favorite. In Shōnagon, I have found a kindred spirit, a list-making ally.

Shōnagon refuses to stay in a single lane. She swerves from “Refined and elegant things” to “Worthless things” then back to “Things that are truly splendid.” It’s tempting to conclude she is lost. She is not. She is engaging in zuihitsu, or “following the brush.” It’s a Japanese literary technique that is not a technique, which strikes me as the perfect way to write a book that is not a book. A writer practicing zuihitsu isn’t afraid to follow a hunch, scratch an intellectual itch, then circle back, or not. The writer doesn’t impose structure but, rather, allows one to emerge.

All of us, I think, could use a bit more zuihitsu, and not only when it comes to writing. Set clear goals and channel all your energies into reaching them, the self-help books advise. This approach assumes we’ve identified our destination before beginning our journey. Life doesn’t work that way. Sometimes you don’t know where you’re going until you start moving. So move. Start where you are. Make a single brushstroke and see where it leads.

Shōnagon doesn’t describe the world. She describes her world. No observation is neutral. She knows what she likes and what she doesn’t. She subscribes to perspectivism, the philosophical theory advanced by Nietzsche centuries later. There is not one truth but many. Choose one, says Shōnagon. Make it your own.

You might object that it is a surplus, not a dearth, of opinions that bedevils us. Thanks to social media, anyone can opine about anything anytime. These opinions, though, are heavily mediated—by friends and “experts” and, most insidiously, algorithms. The result: we see the world through a cloudy lens; our convictions are paper thin. Do you like that new sushi joint or do you only think you do because people give it five stars? Is the Taj Mahal really beautiful or have all of those swooning Instagram posts merely convinced you it is? Sei Shōnagon strived to ensure her lens was clean and clear, her opinions wholly her own.

For every one thing Shōnagon likes there are three she finds unpleasant or disturbing or repulsive or, her ultimate smackdown, infuriating. Among these, she says: “A guest who arrives when you have something urgent to do. A very ordinary person who beams insanely as she prattles on and on. A dog that discovers a clandestine lover as he comes creeping in, and barks. Fleas. Someone who butts in when you’re talking and smugly provides the ending herself. (Indeed anyone who butts in, be they child or adult, is most infuriating.) Flies. A mosquito that announces itself with that thin little wail just as you’ve settled sleepily into bed. Rain all day on New Year’s Eve.”

Shōnagon is opinionated, but flexibly so. Consider the blossoms of a pear tree. The Japanese considered them ugly, and deployed them in insults, such as “he had a face like a pear blossom.” Yet the Chinese adored them, she notes, so “there must be something to it after all.” Sure enough, upon further reflection, she concludes they do possess a certain beauty. If you take a “careful and sympathetic look at it, you may notice that just at the tips of the petals there is the barest hint of a rather lovely luster.”

Like Gandhi, Shōnagon was fussy. Consider this observation: “I cannot bear people who wear a white shirt that is slightly yellowed.” Normally this sort of fastidiousness irritates me no end, but I grow to appreciate Shōnagon. She’s not so much picky as she is sensitive.

Like Epicurus, Shōnagon invents a taxonomy of pleasure. She distinguishes the merely pleasurable from the truly okashii, or delightful. Delight, unlike pleasure, contains an element of surprise, an unexpected frisson. And delight, unlike pleasure, leaves no bitter aftertaste. You never saw the delight coming so you don’t miss it when it’s gone.

For Shōnagon, the smallest detail can tip the balance. She approves of a three-layer fan, but not a five-layer one (“too thick, and the base looks ugly”). It is delightful when there’s a feeling of snow in the air but “it ruins the mood of the occasion if the skies are instead heavy with the threat of rain.” Hers is the philosophy of just-so-ism. Something is either just right or it is not right at all. Miss by an inch and you might as well have missed by a mile. An ox should have a tiny splash of white on its forehead, while cats should be completely black, “except for its belly, which should be very white.” Musical performances are delightful but only at night, “when you can’t see people’s faces.”

Something need not be perfect for Shōnagon to declare it delightful, but it must be appropriate. It must fit the mood, or the season. It must align with its essence. Thus “summer is best when it is extremely hot, winter when it is excruciatingly cold.”

Shōnagon engages all her senses but especially the olfactory. She delights in the “sudden unfamiliar smell of the ox’s leather crupper” and “taking a midday nap snuggled up under a lightly padded kimono that gives off a faint whiff of perspiration.” She adored “scenting frames,” wooden contraptions designed to infuse an article of clothing with the smell of a certain incense, and she enjoyed a good “scent-off,” fierce competitions to see who could mix the most aromatic incense.

Most philosophers dismiss smell. Tomes have been written about the aesthetics of vision and the philosophy of music, yet hardly a word on scent. (Kant denied the sense any aesthetic status at all.) Yet smell is the most deeply rooted of senses. An infant as young as six weeks shows a strong preference for his mother’s scent over that of another woman. Smell triggers memory in ways the other senses do not. Sadly, smell is now the bastard sense. To say something “smells” is to imply it smells badly. If something is suspect, we say it “smells fishy.”

As Thoreau taught me, we only see what we’re prepared to see. Most of us are ill-prepared to see the small. Not Shōnagon. She knew our lives are nothing more, or less, than the sum of a million tiny joys. “Shaved ice with a sweet syrup, served in a shiny new metal bowl. A crystal rosary. Wisteria flowers. Snow on plum blossoms. An adorable little child eating strawberries. A tiny lotus leaf that’s been picked from a pond.”

Like many Japanese, then and now, Shōnagon was fond of sakura, cherry blossoms. The trees are famously fleeting. They bloom for two or three days, and then are gone. Other flowers—plum blossoms, for instance—last considerably longer. Why go to such great lengths to cultivate something so fragile?

The Buddhist concept of mujo, or impermanence, holds clues. Life is ephemeral. Everything we know and love will one day cease to exist, ourselves included. Most cultures fear this fact. A few tolerate it. The Japanese celebrate it.

“The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty,” wrote Yoshida Kenkō, a fourteenth-century Buddhist monk. He suggests we pay more attention to branches about to blossom or a garden strewn with faded flowers rather than blossoms in full bloom. The cherry blossom is lovely not despite its short life span but because of it. “Beauty lies in its own vanishing,” says Japan scholar Donald Richie.

Appreciating life’s small, fleeting pleasures demands a loose grip. Hold them too tightly and they break. What has been said of Thoreau applies equally to Shōnagon. “He is paying attention to things, but he is not grasping them, manipulating them, trying to figure them out.”

This skill does not come naturally to me. My grip is too tight. I am always trying to figure things out, unearthing hidden meanings that may or may not exist. As for impermanence, it terrifies me.

Shōnagon loves many objects but none more than paper. Writing like a wine connoisseur in Burgundy, she recalls the time she laid her hands “on some Michinoku paper.” Paper and wood were thought to possess a divine kami, or spirit. Craftsmen made the most cherished objects from wood: gold-lacquered boxes containing sutra scrolls, sandalwood boxes inlaid with mother-of-pearl, painted screens, mirrors, writing brushes, inkstands, musical instruments, go sets. Even today in Japan, everyday materials such as paper, wood, and straw receive as much attention and celebration—and sometimes more—as luxurious materials, such as gold or precious stones.

I feel Shōnagon’s paper love. Whenever I’m in Tokyo, I make a point to visit Itoya in the Ginza district. Itoya is a stationery store, but that’s like saying Yo-Yo Ma is a cellist: technically correct but woefully inadequate. Spread across two buildings and eighteen floors, it is a vertical ode to the analog: Italian-leather planners, sublime notebooks, exquisite pens. Everyone, shoppers and staff alike, shares this love of the tactile. No one rushes you. Fondling is encouraged. I could spend hours—days!—in Itoya, and I’m sure Shōnagon could, too.

Something need not be in pristine condition for her to find it delightful. Many of the objects she celebrates are old, worn—even dirty. She prefers not carefully tended ponds but “the sort that have been left neglected to the rampant water weed, where patches of reflected moonlight gleam whitely on the water here and there between the swathes of green.”

The Japanese call this fondness for the imperfect wabi Wabi is a frayed kimono or a cherry blossom lying forlorn on the ground or a “complete” collection of Shakespeare missing a play or two. If you’ve ever bought torn jeans or a distressed-leather bag, you have bowed to wabi.

For someone so quick to expose others, to shine a bright light on their charms and flaws, Sei Shōnagon reveals little of herself on the page. We know only the basics. She was born about AD 966 and was appointed to the court of Empress Teishi. She did whatever Empress Teishi wanted or needed or might conceivably want or need in the future. In exchange, Shōnagon was given room and board in the Imperial Palace in Kyoto and access to a world of beauty. Not a bad arrangement.

Shōnagon’s world was highly circumscribed, geographically bounded by the walls of the Imperial Palace and the adjoining gardens, socially demarcated by the invisible but no less formidable wall that separated the aristocracy from everyone else. You’d think such a confined world would dull the senses of its inhabitants, yet it had the opposite effect: it heightened people’s perceptions. Shōnagon lived in a nook. A beautiful nook.

I am in a taxi, heading to the Imperial Palace. I decide to walk the last few blocks. I’d like to say I walk mindfully, like Rousseau, but that would be a lie. I walk mindlessly, my head and feet not on speaking terms.

I step inside the walls of the palace and the adjoining gardens, as appealing today as they were in the tenth century. It’s an enormous compound; rows of cherry blossoms and orange trees lead to a collection of cedar buildings that blend naturally into their surroundings.

As I walk, the summer sun hot on my neck, sweat soaking my shirt, I imagine Sei Shōnagon’s world. She came of age during the Heian period. Heian means “peace.” Warring factions sheathed their swords and reached for the calligrapher’s brush. Historian Ivan Morris calls the period, which lasted from AD 794 to 1185, “the cult of beauty.”

I love that. If I ever join a cult (always a possibility, given my utopian leanings and well-documented naïveté), this is the one for me. No other civilization, with the possible exception of Renaissance Italy, held beauty in such high regard and went to such lengths to cultivate it as Heian Japan. They wrote poetry. They played music. They created exquisite gardens. They mixed incenses with a fierce single-mindedness today reserved for Kona coffee and fantasy football.

The Heian Japanese internalized the artistic impulse, rendering it invisible the way rafters and beams and other supporting structures of a well-designed building are rendered invisible. Life was art and art was life, so closely linked as to be inseparable. The Japanese of the time prized the aesthetic experience more than abstract speculation. More important than what you knew was how you saw, how you listened, and, yes, how you smelled.

Heian Japan valued all the arts but none more so than poetry. Poetry punctuated every milestone of life: birth, courtship, and even death. A respectable Heian gentleman left this world with a parting poem. The good poet could win a lover’s heart, or earn a promotion. A bad poet was mercilessly mocked.

It wasn’t enough to write a beautiful poem. You had to package it beautifully, too. Imagine you’re living in Kyoto of AD 970 and you want to send a message to someone. What do you do?

First, you must choose the paper. Not any paper will do. It must be the “proper thickness, size, design and color to suit the emotional mood that one wished to suggest, as well as the season of the year and even the weather of the particular day.” Then you produce several drafts, experimenting with different compositions and brushes. Once satisfied with the words and the calligraphy, you fold the paper in one of several accepted styles, then attach an appropriate branch or spray of blossom. Finally, you summon “a smart, good-looking messenger,” dispatch him to the proper address, and wait for a reply. Your poem might be met with approval or derision or, worst of all, silence. Ghosting is not a twenty-first-century invention.

When I learn of these elaborate poetry rituals, I can’t help but compare them with our email rituals, such as they are. Sure, I choose the font, and perhaps an emoji or two, but no one has ever questioned the scent of my emails or the aroma of my text messages. Email is convenient, but convenience is never free. It always carries a hidden cost, a “convenience tax,” one exacted in intimacy lost and beauty forfeited. Consciously or not, we gladly pay this tax. The people of Heian Japan did not.

They would find our soulless, scent-free missives not only aesthetically wanting but ethically suspect. Immoral. In Japan beauty was—and to an extent still is—considered a moral virtue. A morally upstanding person is an aesthetically attuned one. Beauty is an essential ingredient not only for the good life but the good person, too. Making the world a bit more beautiful is a generous, selfless act. It is ethical behavior, no different from the courage of a brave soldier or the compassion of a wise judge or, as Simone Weil believed, the loving heart of an attentive person.

Sei Shōnagon was clearly a witty, insightful writer, but was she a philosopher? Consult any compendium of history’s great philosophers and you will not find her name. That’s understandable. She developed no philosophical system, no theories about the universe and our place in it. She expressed little interest in ideas per se. It was people and things, beautiful things, that enthralled her.

Yet if the task of the philosopher is, as one scholar says, “to demonstrate that things can be otherwise,” Shōnagon is clearly a philosopher. She shows us the world, her world, and says, in so many words: Look at this. Isn’t it marvelous? So tiny yet so beautiful. If the task of philosophy is, as Nietzsche said, “to enhance our taste for life,” then Shōnagon is a philosopher. After reading her for a few hours, colors appear more vivid, food tastes better.

Implicit in Shōnagon’s philosophy is this: Who we are is largely shaped by what we choose to surround ourselves with. And it is a choice. Philosophy reveals the hidden choices we make. Realizing something is a choice is the first step toward making better choices. As the German writer Hermann Hesse said: “The man who for the first time picks a small flower so that he can have it near him while he works has taken a step toward joy in life.”

I am sitting at a desk in Vermont, writing. I come here every summer. Always the same house, surrounded by the same objects. There’s my laptop, with the soft, almost ethereal glow of its backlit keys, and the satisfying click they make as I type. There’s my cup of coffee. I savor the pleasant weightiness of the mug, and the way it warms my hands on this, an unseasonably chilly summer day. I sense the gentle swoosh of liquid as I raise cup to mouth, touching its lip to mine and tasting the coffee, warm and pleasantly bitter.

Then there is the desk itself, solid and serious. Embedded in the wood is the intention of the designer, his or her guiding hand suggesting the desk be used for a certain purpose and in a certain way. There is the history of the desk, its biography, for objects have stories to tell, too. There is the lingering presence of the craftsman who made it, the people who owned it before, the movers who lugged it here, the nice woman who cleans it on Sundays. It’s only a desk, yes, but it contains multitudes.

I read The Pillow Book and, across the centuries, Shōnagon and I lock eyes. Hers is a steely stare. She is sizing me up. She sees the bald head, the endemic keratoses, the mismatched clothes. I can imagine the lists I’d appear in. Things That You Wish Weren’t. Things that are oh-my-God-I-can’t-even. Sure, she also sees a mind that enjoys wrestling with big ideas but, still, she’s not impressed, for here is a man who lacks the aesthetic impulse.

She’s right. I am not a detail person. Grooming is for lesser mortals. I, a Man of Ideas, have no time for such trifles. I take perverse pride in my slovenliness, believing that intellectual depth is inversely proportional to neatness. My mind favors the big, like a camera stuck in wide angle. It overlooks details and seeks out the grand and the universal.

My size-ism extends to nearly every corner of my life. I excel at opening food containers (big) but forget to close them (small). I remember to feed the dog (big) but not the cat (small). I write books (big) but have awful handwriting (small). I never gave my size-ism much thought—who has time for such trivialities?—until now. My inattention to details, I realize, comes at a cost. It’s hobbled me, constrained me. Once, it nearly killed me.

While still a teenager, I took flying lessons. I was doing well. Up to a point.

“You get the big things right but not the small ones,” my flight instructor told me after one lesson. I wasn’t sure whether this was a compliment or an insult. It all depends, I suppose, on how much you value the small. He did. I didn’t.

One day, after our scheduled lesson ended, I taxied the plane back to the ramp and shut down the engine. I was unbuckling my shoulder harness when he said, nonchalantly, “I’m getting out here. Why don’t you take it up yourself?”

“Say what?”

“You’re ready.”

“I am?”

“Yes, you are.”

My first solo flight. I was sixteen years old and had not yet driven a car by myself. I gulped audibly.

“You can do this, Eric,” said a voice that sounded remarkably familiar, for it was my own.

“Yes, I can do this,” I replied to myself.

“I have no doubt,” said my instructor, “but let me get out first.”

“Oh yeah, of course.”

He exited the plane, leaving the right seat eerily empty. I radioed ground control and requested permission to taxi for takeoff.

“Roger. Taxi to Runway 14,” came the crisp reply.

I steered the plane until just short of the runway, then ran through my preflight checklist.

Flaps? Set.

Gas? Full.

Altimeter? Set.

Everything looked good. I radioed the control tower. Cleared for takeoff, I eased the throttle forward. Airspeed climbing nicely. Engine power on track. Wait—what’s that rattling noise?

Something was wrong. I had seconds to decide whether to continue down the runway or abort the takeoff. As I gained speed, the rattling grew louder. I glanced up and saw the door handle was in the open position.

Damn. I had forgotten to—what’s the technical term?—close the door. With one hand on the control yoke, I reached up with the other and latched the door shut. Seconds later, I was airborne. The rest of the flight went the way all flights should go: uneventfully. I nailed the landing.

As I taxied back to the ramp, the air traffic controller broke the usual clinical remove and transmitted a quick “Congratulations, Eric.”

“Thank you,” I said, all the while thinking, If you only knew. If you only knew.

Back home that evening, I replayed the incident in my mind. It was a small oversight, a mere door handle, but one that was potentially disastrous. My instructor was right. I was not good at the small things. Small things can kill you. They can also save you.

No one knew this better than Sei Shōnagon. One day, Empress Teishi, watching the joy Shōnagon derived from a finely woven tatami mat, remarked, “The simplest trifles console you, don’t they?” Shōnagon doesn’t record her reply, but I can imagine what she was thinking. Yes, they do, Your Majesty, only they are not so trifling as you think.

Sadness feels like a great weight, but maybe that is an illusion. Maybe it is lighter than we think. Maybe no heroic maneuvers are necessary. Maybe life’s so-called trifles—the great beauty of small things—can save us. Maybe salvation is closer than it appears. All we need to do is reach out—and close the door.

Does any of Japan’s “cult of beauty” remain today? Take one look at the bleak high-rises and concrete-lined rivers and you’d conclude no, it doesn’t. And, from that vantage point, you’d be right. Big Japan is ugly.

Go small, though, and everything looks different. I feel like a ten-year-old peering through a microscope for the first time, marveling at this hidden world that was there all along. I see micro-beauty everywhere: the soft glow of the vending machines; the onigiri, small triangles of rice and fish, wrapped so the seaweed remains crisp and crunchy until it’s time to bite into it; a glass of sake served in a perfect wooden box.

Back on the shinkansen, bulleting toward Tokyo, I retrieve my bento box from the shopping bag the clerk at the station had packed it in. The bag is made of paper, and it is beautiful. Solid handles. An attractive design on front. I remove the box carefully, grateful for the clerk’s kindness.

After lunch, I reach for my notebook and write, in all caps: “JAPANESE BULLET TRAIN: LISTS.” A good start. Too broad, though. I need to get specific. I need to go small. Delightful things about a Japanese bullet train. Better.

1. The way the conductor glides down the aisle then pivots and, facing the passengers, bows. 2. The way a passenger, a young woman in high heels, teeters ever so slightly while walking down the aisle but steadies herself with the grace of a ballerina. 3. The feel of the Styrofoam coffee cup, one of those solid, thick ones that radiate a pleasant, not painful, warmth. 4. The way the cup says, in English, “Aroma Express Café” and the way the “o” in “Aroma” is shaped like a coffee bean. 5. The way, as you approach Tokyo, the view grows increasingly urban but gradually, so that the city doesn’t appear so much as materialize. 6. The spotless toilets. 7. The unexpected glimpse of the sea. 8. The whooshing sound made by a train passing in the opposite direction, moving so fast there is no time to worry about a head-on collision. 9. The way the rain droplets bead across my window, forming rivulets and tributaries, moving with alacrity and seeming agency.

Dispiriting Things about Riding a Japanese Bullet Train. 1. That momentary thrill of spotting Mount Fuji only to be followed by the sharp stab of disappointment when you realize that, no, it is not Mount Fuji but just another mountain, nothing special. 2. Reveling in the sight of an empty seat next to you only to have it occupied at the last minute by a man who looks like an off-duty sumo wrestler. 3. The dated aqua-blue seats. 4. The fact that everyone on board is quiet, not a peep, even though you are not in the Quiet Car.

I’ve written my lists on quality paper—not Michinoku but, still, good stuff. Acid-free, it will last a long time. A few centuries, maybe longer. Not forever, though. Eventually, my lists will disintegrate, and join the other casualties of impermanence. This fact saddens but does not devastate me. It is the sadness of the moving van, of high school graduation, of the retirement party. It is the sadness of a late autumn day, when a wind gust stirs a pile of fallen leaves, and they dance.

We arrive in Tokyo on time. Good. I am meeting my friend Junko at a bar and don’t want to be late. It is not just any bar. It is an otaku bar. An otaku is a geek, only in Japan, a nation of geeks, the word carries less opprobrium than it does elsewhere. Otaku is, in certain circles, a badge of honor.

The bar is a train otaku bar. A bar for train geeks. In the middle of the room, a model train runs with shinkansen punctuality. Such an arrangement could easily slide into gimmickry, but not here. The train—and the miniature town it passes through—seem natural, and thoroughly okashii, delightful. No detail was too small, too insignificant, for the person who designed this little railroad town. Not the tiny signboards fronting the tiny store or the tiny cars in the tiny parking lot or the tiny shrubbery lining the tiny road. The bar itself is small, too: six or seven chairs arranged in a circle with the train in the middle. A nook.

Junko orders a beer, and I order a Suntory. My whiskey arrives in a sturdy, serious glass that oozes quiet elegance. The bartender, a smiley man, had chiseled a single ice cube, as if it were David and he Michelangelo.

As he works, I ask him about—what else?—trains. He explains how as a child he could see trains rolling past his bedroom window, a reassuring presence during the bumpy years of his youth. Most children outgrow trains. Not him. As an unhappy salaryman, he spent his free time taking train rides to nowhere. “Riding a train makes me feel calm and happy,” he explains. “On a train, I can think more clearly about life.”

I nod and sip my whiskey, delighting in the solidity of the serious glass and the oaky taste and the slightly sweet aroma, all the while gazing at the tiny, beautiful world that lay before me.