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I’m sitting in the airport, waiting to board the plane that will take me home. All the words and stories I wanted to write seem to have disappeared. Well, they’re still there really, they’re just swirling around each other so they don’t make sense anymore. The stories have taken on meaning from each other, and the words have bled into each other, until there is no meaning and the words are jammed together in a congealed mess.

Airports are sad places. Or they are very happy places. (See how everything exists together?) They are also pretty soulless places, because most people’s hearts are far away. They are thinking of the people and places they are leaving, or they are anticipating the people and places they will soon see. Airports are places of transit, of course; places where dreams and hopes and regrets and welcomes and leave-takings collide.

For me, airports have also become symbols: concrete markers which signify bright new starts, and the chance to leave behind mistakes and disappointments, the chance to promise yourself that this time things will be different, this is the chance to build a better you. Poor airports. They have to deal with a lot of expectation. I expect they don’t much care, though. Even if your baggage is lost in transit, the airport smoothly and efficiently delivers your old self, so that by the time you step through immigration, you’ve already been reunited with who you once were, whether you realise it or not.

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So this is Britain. He settled back in the back seat of the company car that had been sent to pick him up. His small suitcase was in the boot, his briefcase was on the seat next to him. The rest of his baggage, and his family, would follow after him in a couple of months. Those months would be busy as he looked for a house to rent, and met with the people he would be working with over the next years. The company had given him a colossal assignment: to help build a factory from the ground up, a factory that would become a major production centre supplying northern Europe.

He relished the challenge.

He had lived with his family in Japan for six years. They had lived in his father’s house, the house his grandfather had built, in the same small farming village where he had grown up. It had not been easy to return. The house had seemed smaller than he remembered, despite the extensions his father had added; having two young children running around made it seem even more cramped. The village had seemed smaller, too. But more than that, Japan had seemed smaller, and more closed, and its people more close-minded than he remembered. He could barely stand working in the office, where even the simplest tasks took whole days to be completed in accordance with stifling regulations that governed every action. He had become used to direct and straightforward solutions, not labyrinthine procedure and endless form-filling.

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That’s as far as I got, writing about my father moving to Britain nearly thirty years ago. He was a restless person when he was young, but he also always seemed to know where he was going. Often, that was because he was told where to go. He said to me that the choice – whether or not to join the company – which had been offered to him when he was not yet eighteen, still studying in technical college, was the biggest choice of his life; but that afterwards, he didn’t have many more choices to make. He just had to live that choice, and absolutely own it, and his life would be filled: training, overseas assignments, promotions, and more training.

I think he’s quite unfair on himself. Not many people could have lived and succeeded in as many different countries as he did, I think. But he now sometimes seems a little bitter, and more than a little regretful. Even though he did his best, things have not turned out the way that he expected.

At other times, he is calm and resigned, and able to see the good things that he experienced, and is able to enjoy the life he has with tranquillity and poise. One of his favourite phrases to describe himself is ‘Nothing to add, nothing to subtract.’

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A brief (and incomplete) itinerary of various airports frequented by my father:

Narita to JFK                Leaves for an overseas assignment in America. He is 22. Lives in New Jersey. Marries a New Zealander, and has two children. During this time, his parents come from Japan to make a visit.

JFK to Narita                Receives urgent telegram from brother-in-law: his father has only three weeks to live. Returns to Japan with wife and children. Company agrees to reassign him, so that he can take over family responsibilities. Ten year stay in America is over.

Narita to Heathrow     Offered a chance for another assignment, this time in Britain. He and his wife are both discontent with life in Japan, for different reasons, and the opportunity is taken.

Heathrow to Narita     After six years in Britain, returns to Japan. Partly because the British assignment has been all-consuming and exhausting; partly because his mother in Japan is suffering from poor health. Wife and children remain in Britain.

Kansai to Memphis      Returns to America at the request of company. Suffers from poor health and exhaustion while there.

Memphis to Kansai      Is assigned office work in Osaka – a sort of semi-retirement. Hates the work; after three years, resigns and retires.

Kansai to Manchester  Rejoins wife in Britain for his retirement. Six years later, suffers a stroke; a year and a half later, a brain haemorrhage.

Manchester to Kansai  Returns to Japan. His daughter follows him two years later.

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What am I doing? I’m condensing a life, and reducing it to landmarks and events which outline the structure, but has almost nothing to do with its essence. Still, even though it might be arrogant and futile and inadequate, I can’t help but think that it’s important to try to write something; so I’ll keep trying, I suppose. It might become clearer when I’m back home, and am over the airport blues.

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