Losing things(物を失う/Mono o ushinau)

When I was in Standard One, Sister Celine, our ginger-eyebrowed St Joseph’s nun, once said to me, “Farrell Cleary, if your head wasn’t attached to your shoulders, you’d forget it.” That was fair comment. I’d never had the Zen gift of being in the moment, and my absentmindedness has meant that I’ve lost more than my share of things during my life. That was until I encountered Japanese culture.

Almost as soon as I met Y, she amazed me by her ability to find missing contact lenses and to remember the location of anything that she had seen around the house. Once, while we were living in Auckland before moving to Japan in 1986, I lost a contact lens while she was away in the South Island working as a tour guide. When she arrived back, she walked along the passage of the flat towards our bedroom to dump her things. It was an old, subdivided house and the passage was dark. Even in those conditions. she caught the glint of the missing lens on the floor. Her sharp eyes have saved us several thousand dollars in replacement lenses over the years.

When we arrived in Japan, I found myself surrounded by Ys, people who seemed determined to stop me losing things. I arrived home from work one day, had a cup of tea, and the phone rang. It was someone ringing from a coffee bar in town. He said that he had picked up my wallet in the street and had taken it to a coffee bar he knew before opening it so that there would be no suspicion that he had interfered with its contents. He told me that he was leaving it in the coffee bar for me to pick up and refused even to leave his name. Dropping my wallet on one of the small private railway lines going inland from Kumamoto city resulted in a similar phone call.

Once I even managed to leave behind my briefcase beside the river when we went to a children’s bonfire festival just after New Year. It was hours before I realised I’d left it behind. I cycled back to the riverbed where the festival had long since finished. There was no-one there. My bag was still there, beside the road, all alone and eloquently standing up where someone had left it so it would be easy to see. I opened it to see that everything was intact, including a clearly visible 10,000 yen note. Don’t ask me what I was doing carrying 10,000 yen notes around in my schoolbag!

Even Japanese society has, on occasion, given way before the relentless onslaught of my absentmindedness. I arrived at University one day to find that my bag was missing from the carrier attached to the rear wheel. I retraced my route from home several times and paid special attention to the unofficial railway crossing where I had dismounted and carried the bike across the rails. Nothing. I duly reported it to the police but never saw it again.

In those early years I used to cycle everywhere with brio, and took delight in racing, and occasionally beating, cars through the narrow streets of the city.
One day I was cycling into town and could feel someone peddling just behind me. I could see out of the corner of my eye that the cyclist was wearing the navy serge of a high school student. He seemed to be trying to race me and I struggled to keep up the pace for another 100 metres, until the next traffic lights. It wasn’t the first time I’d indulged in that kind of adolescent competitiveness, although at 40, I was finding it harder.

The boy pulled up beside me. ”Sumimasen. Otoshimono deshita.[Excuse me. You dropped this.]" He was panting as he thrust a 1000 yen note into my hand, and cycled off in the direction we had come, before I could do more than mutter a quick thanks. That was before the economic bubble burst in 1991, but I think it still could happen today in Kumamoto.