An island between the sky and the water.
An island with neither men nor boats.
An island between the sky and the water
For me, this island is called Hachijo-jima. More than 300 kilometers of Tokyo, this piece of rock is located at the bottom of the archipelago of the Izus. The island is beautiful, it is wild, it is at the end of the end of the world.
It was Toru who took me there with his group of friends. We took the ferry from Tokyo. We spent the night under the stars and we imagined our lives. We were 22 or 23, but the horizon seemed to us permanently blocked, entrenched as we were in Japanese society.
“Suffer mortal, suffer and life will teach you.”
That is what was written on the stele that greeted us at the foot of Mt. Hachijo.
Suffer? Suffer? I was dreaming of becoming a hedonistic person. No, I was not going to raise chickens and goats on the island just contemplating life but rather, I was going to indulge myself and enjoy life exactly like I was doing on this holiday.
I was going to skip rocks on the sea, I was going to swim in the clear water among fishes of all colors, I was going to burst out in laughter telling French jokes to my Japanese friends.
The sentence written on the stele soured my mood and the rest of my holidays, it stayed heavy on my heart as a stale onigiri.
When I left the island of Hachijo-jima, I understood that I was done in the Land of the Samurai and that it was high time to move on.