Kintsugi

I didn’t go to Japan to find myself. That’s too neat a narrative. If I’m honest, I left because staying felt like decay. It wasn’t that I hated my life—it was worse. I’d grown indifferent to it. Every morning felt like crawling back into a suit of someone else’s skin. I wasn’t running from trauma or heartbreak, not exactly. I was just eroding. Quietly. Invisible to others, and maybe, finally, to myself.

I needed to be nowhere. I needed to be no one. I needed to stop pretending to know who I was. So I chose a place whose language I didn’t speak and whose customs I didn’t understand. A place where getting lost wouldn’t be an accident, but the very point. I booked a one-way ticket and told no one when I’d be back. I told myself it wasn’t an escape—it was an erasure.

Tokyo greeted me with silence. Not literal silence—God knows it buzzes, hums, and pulses with life—but an internal hush. Even in Shibuya’s chaos, there’s a discipline, a rhythm, a choreography to the noise. I stood at the crossing surrounded by hundreds of strangers and felt the first sliver of peace I’d known in years. It was the anonymity. I was no one here. No expectations. No apologies owed. Just a man with a suitcase and a history too heavy to carry any further.

I wandered. Not with purpose, but with presence. My days became slow. Intentional. I walked alleyways like they were sentences in a novel I had never read. The signs meant nothing to me, but the colors—neon blues, washed-out reds—felt like punctuation marks against the grey sky. Japan was both utterly alien and achingly familiar. It mirrored something in me I hadn’t dared to name.

For weeks, I drifted. I let the days stretch, resisting the urge to define them. I sat in parks and train stations and let the world move without me. I began to notice things I would’ve missed back home—the angle of shadows on shrines, the murmured thanks at temple gates, the way shopkeepers bowed even when you didn’t buy anything. There was an intimacy to everything, even the mundane.

It was a month before I ate anything worth remembering. I’d been surviving on vending machine coffee and convenience store rice balls until one night, wandering near Ueno, I stumbled upon a ramen shop tucked beneath a rusted sign and a faded red curtain. The kind of place that doesn’t want to be found but waits for someone who needs it.

There were only five stools. A chalkboard menu I couldn’t read. The air inside was thick with steam and reverence. Behind the counter stood an old man, his back slightly bowed, his movements spare and measured. He didn’t look up as I entered, didn’t speak as I sat. His hands worked like water—constant, fluid, intentional. Lifting the noodles with long chopsticks, lowering them into a broth that had clearly been simmering longer than I’d been alive. When he placed the bowl in front of me, he nodded once. I muttered “arigatou” with clumsy gratitude. And then I tasted it.

The broth was deep, like memory. Rich but clear, honest. The noodles had chew, bite, breath. The toppings were humble—egg, scallion, a slice of pork—but each carried a precision that demanded reverence. I didn’t slurp like the others—I was still clumsy with etiquette—but I closed my eyes and let it in. It wasn’t just food. It was a life’s work in a bowl. It was devotion made edible.

I returned to that shop three more times during my first month. I learned, through a translator app and brief conversation with a regular, that the man had been making ramen in that exact space for over forty years. Every day. No fanfare. No Instagram. No Michelin stars. Just a man who had chosen to perfect one thing in a world obsessed with many. And that, somehow, broke me.

I laid awake in my tiny capsule hotel that night thinking about him. I, too, had spent years doing something over and over. But where he had shaped a craft, I had shaped excuses. I had stayed in jobs I hated, maintained relationships I couldn’t nurture, lied about things I didn’t want to fix. I had repeated myself not to improve—but to disappear.

Kyoto changed the tempo. The city breathed slower. Streets curled like brush strokes through history. I wandered into temples and gardens and sat beside ponds with no goal other than stillness. I watched the wind write poetry through the bamboo. I listened to my thoughts for the first time in years—and they frightened me. They were loud. Ungoverned. Petty and sad and full of longing. But they were mine. And that was something.

One afternoon, I took a wrong turn en route to a shrine and ended up in a small pottery studio. It was sunlit, quiet, warm. The kind of space that feels like someone’s soul. A woman in her fifties stood at the wheel, shaping clay with hands that moved like old lullabies. I must’ve stood there too long, watching her. “You want to try?” she asked in English, softly. I shook my head. “Then sit,” she said. “Watch.”

So I did. I watched her build a bowl, then shatter it on the floor. Deliberately. I almost gasped. But she just smiled, swept up the pieces, and began again. This time, she mixed lacquer with powdered gold. Slowly, she pressed it into the cracks. “This is kintsugi,” she said. “It means ‘golden joinery.’ When something breaks, we don’t throw it away. We mend it. We don’t hide the cracks. We highlight them. That’s how the piece becomes more valuable.” I nodded, but something inside me cracked.

I returned to that studio many times. Not to make anything—I had no skill—but to watch. To learn. To be quiet in the presence of someone who understood that beauty wasn’t in perfection, but in survival. And slowly, I began to understand myself. Not forgive, not heal, not yet—but understand.

I stayed in Japan longer than planned. Months slipped by like beads through fingers. I worked at a guesthouse cleaning rooms. I folded linens. I learned how to say "good morning" and "thank you" properly. I carried myself with less apology. I listened more. I read books I never would’ve touched before. I stopped checking the time. I wasn’t reinventing myself. I was excavating. Digging through the wreckage for anything worth saving. And, to my surprise, I found some.

When I finally returned home, nothing looked different—but everything had changed. I called my mother. I wrote letters to the people I had hurt—not to reclaim them, but to release them. I left the job that had once made me feel important and took one that made me feel honest. I kept the kintsugi bowl the woman had gifted me on my desk. I never used it. I just looked at it sometimes, the way one looks at a scar that finally stopped hurting.

I began to write again. Slowly. Not to escape, but to tell the truth. Not the polished kind—the kind with cracks, with gold, with grief. I wrote to remember that I had survived myself.

And then, years later, I woke one morning in my own bed. The sunlight had just begun to slip through the blinds in that quiet, golden way. The city outside moved without me. And for no particular reason, I thought of her—the pottery woman.

I remembered the bowl she shattered and the way she smiled as she mended it. I remembered the way her fingers pressed the gold in—not to fix, but to honor. Kintsugi, she had called it. And I thought—maybe I was kintsugi.

Maybe it was because I broke that I too became beautiful. And in that moment, I wept. Not in remembrance for the things I lost in myself, but in recognition of all the things that were still possible.