The Map with No Name
名前のない地図から旅は始まる
Haru had never left Japan before that grey morning at Narita Airport.
His grandfather Kenji had died three weeks earlier, and the house still felt empty.
At the , Haru had found an old sea-bag hidden at the back of a closet.
Inside the bag was a hand-drawn map with no place names on it.
The map showed only small drawings: a tall tower, a train, waves, a village, and a lighthouse.
In one corner, his grandfather had written, "The long way is the only way."
Haru had never really understood his quiet grandfather, who rarely spoke about his past.
Now the old man was gone, and only these faded drawings remained.
"Have you ever felt that a dead person is still speaking to you?" Haru asked himself.
He had taken a leave of absence from university after the .
He decided that he was going to follow the map all the way to its end.
He did not even know the name of the first place he was looking for.
There was only a drawing of a tall tower somewhere far to the west.
His mother had begged him to stay, but Haru had already made up his mind.
"I will find the view that Grandfather loved," he promised her quietly.
He had never traveled abroad alone, and his hands were shaking at the gate.
"I have never been so nervous in my whole life," he whispered to himself.
The airport was full of strangers who knew exactly where they were going.
Haru, holding the nameless map, was the only one without a real .
A final line on the map read, "where the land ends and the sea begins."
He wondered what kind of place could sit at the very of the world.
"It is going to be a long , but I will not turn back," he thought.
He boarded the plane and pressed his forehead against the small, cold window.
Below him, Tokyo slowly became a pattern of tiny grey squares.
The plane lifted off toward a country whose name he could not yet say.
Haru opened the map again and touched the drawing of the tower with one finger.
Somewhere out there, beyond the clouds, his real had finally begun.