Miyazaki's Clouds

Now that I have moved out of Tokyo and into a very rural area, Japan offers a bath of reality. It is reassuring to see that some images that I had relegated to comic books and animated films are, in fact, the world as it is.

Crows, for example, in Japan, I noticed that they have different beaks-the upper arch has a more pronounced shape. Like what I've seen in animated movies from here.

Last night, I went out at sunset time and above the house there was a fluttering of dragonflies such as I had never seen except in cartoons. This morning a white butterfly passed over a rice field, zigzagging: how strange, I thought, all these images from movies, how strange the illustrations becoming real, day after day. On the rice field, what's more, the wind was blowing and green waves were forming all over it.

Yesterday, there was a gentleman on top of these dunes, who at one point opened an umbrella to get out of the sun and then started to descend from the steeper side of the dune to join his son who had carried on ahead. And on the way down, he was swaying left and right, in a comical way, but which was no longer comical, because he was just a Japanese gentleman descending a Japanese dune. It seemed that at any moment he might find himself rolling down, but even that was no longer true: reality took over and he came to the bottom, and he got his feet wet in the sea.