Now Entering the Site of Reversible Destiny

Oh yes. Oh yes. This is it - the long-awaited recap of my adventures at the Site of Reversible Destiny. A horrifying art-installation-turned-twisted-fun-park that, in the words of my friend Jenn, "should not exist. Not in Japan. Not anywhere." Fortunately for us, though, it does, and I will share its glory with you.

NOTE: IF YOU EVER PLAN ON VISITING IT YOURSELF, STOP READING. THE PARK SHOULD BE EXPERIENCED WITHOUT PREAMBLE IF AT ALL POSSIBLE.









Alright, if you're still with us, then I assume you probably won't ever be coming to Japan, or you just don't care. Suit yourself! I will now begin the tour.

Two Saturdays ago, after a bout of band practice, Jenn mentioned that she wanted to go to the town of Yoro, because there was a park there that she wanted to check out. A park? Alright, nothing special, I thought - until I heard the name. The park of Reversible Destiny. Oh, yes please. I wanna go too!

I still thought it'd just be like a nature park, with trees and maybe a pond or a waterfall or something, but the name was intriguing enough that I had to check it out. Fortunately, Jake was meeting his friend Masaru, so he was there for this conversation, in the middle of the food court at the local mall. Masaru had been there before, said it was really cool and we should all go. He could drive. We'd leave tomorrow morning. It was settled.

So next morning rolls around. I'm a little afraid Jake and Masaru will be too hungover to make it, but they defy expectations and roll up (thirty minutes late). I ran into my coworker Michael out in front of the apartment, while waiting, and he decided he'd join us. Masaru's girlfriend Robin did, too. So full car - not enough seatbelts - as we make the 45 minute trek to the park.

At this point, I knew it wasn't any ordinary park. Jenn described it as a land of "optical illusions" - kind of like a house of mirrors. Still, I thought surely it would be an innocent, kid-oriented kind of place.

I was wrong.

We stopped at a conbini (convenient store) for some food, and made some other..."preparations"...in the parking lot upon arrival. Behind us, mountains loomed large. Nearby was an old amusement park - but that was not to be our destination. We got out and began crossing a large field with a lone, leafless tree. It's January. The grass is jaundiced, pale and hard beneath our feet.



We buy tickets at the gate, and enter the park. The Site of Reversible Destiny. So far, it looks pretty sparse and not at all trippy - just kind of old. We enter a faded pink house with an oversized, sloping roof.



This is the Reversible Destiny House, as you can see in this sign.



The house consists primarily of entrances. Terrain predominates over plan. Two distinctly different re-worked labyrinths are used one above the other in constradistinction to one another...There will be parts of the kitchen or the living room that will reappear in the bedroom and in the bathroom. It may take a few hours to go from the living room to the kitchen. It may take several days to find everywhere in the house that the dining room is in...There will be a superabundance of references, a surfeit of landing sites...
The house will relieve one of having to have a personality...







Strange happenings are afoot. I go outside - I've fallen too far behind my comrades. I'm already beginning to lose my way. I've somehow managed to climb atop this craggy mountain.



This is where we must go to get the water from the well. I can see the house now...there it is.



Some of it is outside. Some of it is inside. The ground is above. The ground is below. And the walls...keep shifting...







It is time to get out of this twisted house. Solo, I stumble my way through the park. I think my friends went this way?

No. I've somehow ended up in America.



It's like New York...but something's...different...



Oh God where the hell am I



I've come across a big chunk of metal. It's like a piece of spacecraft fell from the sky and lodged itself into the earth. It is misshapen and jagged and there are people bending down, looking for something in the crater as I approach. There is something inside the giant shard. You have to bend down to see it...



It's...a ladder?!



I crawl under to investigate. The ladder is a bust though - it leads to nowhere. But inside the sculpture is another labyrinth of walls, perhaps identical to the previous house, perhaps not. It's impossible to tell, because the floor is uneven and it's dark. It's like there's been an earthquake in the middle of the night, but time has stopped going forwards or backwards. I feel my way around. There's another stove. Another mattress. Another toilet. I crawl back under the walls and return to the land of sunshine, but time seems to have remained frozen in place.





I am looking out this great basin of vegetation. It is a strange sight to behold. I slowly descend down the incredibly steep slopes - I would later fall flat on my face trying to get back up these hills. This is a dangerous place. There are families with children around, but the children are not laughing and having a good time like you would expect to at a traditional fun park. They are clinging to their parents and screaming kowai! (scary!). At various points, I have heard even parents muttering to each other about how difficult it is to get around: Abunai... Abunai...

The basin hosts another few permutations of the labyrinthine house, including one without walls, as you can see here:





And a lot of paths through nearly inpenetrable wilderness:





They boast names like the "Exactitude Ridge" and the "Geographical Ghost" and the "Trajectory Membrane Gate," and they all hold certain charms. At some point I meet up with my friends, who have travelled their own journeys backwards and forwards through time, navigating the perils of this twisted place. We find ourselves in a bizarro version of Europe, with German and French street names plastered below our feet.



It seems we've fully explored every nook and cranny. My mind wanders back to the sign in the Reversible Destiny House - was it an hour ago, or two; two weeks ago, or another lifetime that I'd seen it? - but the phrase The house will relieve one of having to have a personality jumps into my temporal lobe. It is shocking how accurate it's proven to be. I've completey lost track of time, of what I'm doing, of who I am. In my simple effort to constantly acclimate and reacclimate to my surroundings, I've gone into a sort of instinctual survival mode. More than any other time - including my New Year's ordeal on the mountain - I am struck by just what life might be like for a wild animal, or a primitive human, just trying to get by in a strange world. It is fascinating. I try to remember the civilized world outside the park's boundaries, but it's fuzzy and difficult to place...

Right before we are leaving to go, Jenn and I discover that we've not been to the Cleaving Hall. It is difficult to find any place, even with the map, and so we set off back into the fertile basin to experience one last thrill.

The Hall is easy to miss - it's just a slit in the flesh of the mountainside.



Inside it is pitch black. I can go left or right. I turn to the left, and immediately careen forwards down a hill. I run into a wall and wait, the only light emanating from that tiny crack which leads to the outside world. Jenn's silhouette appears in the sliver. She, too, turns left, takes a step, and falls flat on her ass down the hill.

She's fine though. We cannot stop laughing.

I hold my hands out in front of me as we continue to explore the pitch dark tunnels, which snake upward and downward like the handiwork of a deranged mole. In the center of my vision, there is a spiral of imperceptible color, pulling me in me inward. It is like I'm falling in forward motion, into a bottomless pit of eternity stretched out before me. A black of hole of possibility swallows me into the complex.

It's another maze. At some point, we come to a room. An outline of Japan is cut into the ceiling, shining down on us from above.



It is as though we've been transported into space, and can look back at the country we used to inhabit, beckoning to us to return. I am giddy and excited and filled with the exhiliration of a 10-year old child after his first ride on a jet coaster.

Eventually, we go back out into the world. First, the world of Reversible Destiny, and then the real world, that shining beacon of insanity that is Japan. But the experience remains, residue imbedded into my circuitry.

I'm still not sure what Reversible Destiny means, but I'm a whole lot closer to finding out.

Happy New Year!

Hello again everyone, hisashiburi! Or, as we Americans would put it, long time no see. Also, akemashite omedetou gozaimasu! (that one's Happy New Year) I've had a busy last few weeks, so I've been meaning to relay some of the details of my continuing adventure to you, loyal readers (or you know, to myself, so I don't forget them someday in the probably-not-too-distant future).


I

So, here we are in 2011. A year which should be good for me, if my New Year's fortune is any indication - daikichi, or "big luck," the best one you can get. Woo hoo! And really, so far so good. I'm still alive and everything!

That may seem sarcastic, but oh, I assure you, it's not. Because I decided to go climb Mount Gozaisho, one of the highest mountains in Mie prefecture, with my friend Jenn on New Year's Eve, and well...let's just say thoughts of death crossed my mind more than once. That's right, I'm not afraid to admit it! My coworker Andy was challenging me a few days before, when I told him I wanted to climb Fuji with him, but had no climbing experience. I told him I could do it, no sweat - just gotta keep walking, right?

Normally, that'd be true...but not when you're in the middle of a snowstorm, with neither snow nor hiking gear, and you lose the path and end up hoisting yourself up, flimsy tree trunk by tree trunk, and edging around icy ledges with boulders and pointy branches sticking up beneath you on a practically vertical incline. But don't just take my word for it - look for yourself.







They certainly look beautiful (courtesy of Jenn), but at the time, I really thought I'd end up one of those dudes on the news getting helicoptered out for being a dumbass off on a mountain somewhere in a blizzard. We had bad omens right from the start: my camera died before we started the ascent, so I was looking for batteries, which I thought were "tenshi," but apparently it's "denchi" - tenshi means "angel." Looking for angels all right...about halfway through our climb, a guy in a big yellow coat with bells started limbering slowly behind us, out of nowhere, and for a little while I thought he might be an angel, come to look after us. But no, he just gave me an incredulous stare when he saw I was wearing sneakers, and moved on.

In our defense, it wasn't supposed to start snowing til noon, so we left at like 5:30 in the morning, started climbing around 7:30/8, but within an hour of climbing the snow was already coming down...eventually it got so bad that we lost the path, and then it got really frightening. I was worried about falling, and Jenn was worried about avalanches - the wind would blow and it'd be all white, we couldn't let go of the trees for fear we'd get blown down the mountain. Still, I didn't want to give up because I'd told Andy I could climb it, but eventually, between our numb extremities and the obvious danger of our predicament, we decided to head back.

On the way back down, we noticed a big arrow pointing to the path, which turned out to be a whole lot easier, but by then we were pretty drained and just wanted to get down and get warm. But the snow finally eased up a little as we made our way back down, and we found a beautiful waterfall - behold!



Even that waterfall could only pick me up so much, though. We'd been on the mountain for about four hours, trudging through the snow, completely soaked and so cold that I didn't even realize I was cold until I took my gloves and shoes and socks off in the car and put them up to the heater. We sat there for about twenty minutes, and slowly my hands and feet felt like flesh again, and not like frozen nobs. Then we went to an onsen.


II

An onsen, for those who don't know, is like a public bath/spa/hot spring. They are very popular in Japan, and widespread, though this was my first experience at one. I held off for a long time because a) being naked with a bunch of other guys in a hot tub is creepy, and b) when I do things for the first time, I like to go with someone who can speak Japanese, in case I run into a situation where I need to understand/communicate and can't. In this instance, however, the thought of going with a friend seemed even more uncomfortable (though not for the Japanese, who often go with friends, family, schoolmates, teachers - you name it, they've seen 'em naked).

But I always figured I should go at some point, and as we were both painfully frozen from our climb, this was as good a time as any. I'll spare you the details of the experience, but...let's just say it was awkward. The hot tub itself was almost insufferably hot - once you adjusted the water was alright, but the air was suffocatingly muggy. Maybe by myself, or with just a couple others it would have been relaxing, but it was so busy, being New Year's, that it was impossible not to think about where I was and how weird it was. Thank you, Puritanical American upbringing for instilling in me a sense of bodily shame.

That said, there was an open-air tub outside, which was still kind of awkward but wonderfully refreshing. Between the hot water, and the cool air...when the wind blew, my closed eyes lit up in neon yellow and electric blue. It felt like flying inside a big, warm thermal. I'd definitely do it again.

After the onsen, Jenn and I split up - she went to Kobe (though she wouldn't make it, due to snow), and I stayed in nearby Yokkaichi, where there was a show that night featuring Japan's greatest power pop act, The Breathless. The Breathless sound a lot like Gentleman Jesse & His Men, if you know who they are...and you should! I'd seen them a couple times at King Biscuit in Gifu, and each time had had a blast - danced so hard they gave me a free CD, so I bought them drinks, and so then they gave me a T-shirt... in short, we created a feedback loop of goodwill and good times.

So when I got there, Yamu, the lead singer, was real happy to see me - bought me a beer, and even gave me a shout out on stage before they started playing. For my part, I got into their show as usual, and pretty soon there were a few of us dancing, feeding into the band's energy...It was great, and towards the end of the show Yamu jumped the stage rail and started jamming out in the audience. He brought down the mic too, so we all could sing along - and I could actually do it, because their lyrics are in English!

The Breathless were fun, and I ended up sticking around for Yamu's other band, a 50s/60s style cover band who were also fun but not nearly as good as his main act. I also saw a band called The Ragamuffins, who played a jittery, new-wavey kind of pop, and they were good, I talked to them a bit afterwards. In short, the show was a success, which was good because the first band was so atrociously, high-school-emo-bad that I had some real doubts for awhile. I could only stay for a handful of the acts, though--the show went til midnight, but I had to catch last train or risk being stuck in the city all night by myself. If it were America, maybe I'd have gone for it, but in Japan, there's no guarantee people are going to be out at the bars partying til sunrise, even on New Year's Eve. In my limited experience, I'd say they don't really go for that kind of thing.

III


My train rolled into Gifu around 11:30, which gave me just enough time to get out and go say hi to some friends ringing in the new year over at Bierhall. When I got there, the place was wall-to-wall people, but I saw my friends Dak and Hiro and a few others I knew. I quickly fought my way to the counter, ordered a drink, and looked at the time - I had about ten minutes.

So I strike up a conversation with Hiro, and we're talking when all of a sudden some older Japanese dude, maybe in his 40s or 50s, taps me on the shoulder.

"This is an empty chair, please sit down!" he invites, with a big smile on his face. Well, that's a nice gesture, I thought to myself, but I was talking with my friend and didn't really need to sit down. I politely declined.

A couple minutes later, I get another tap. "Oh please, sit down!" He pushes the chair in my direction. This time, I decided to try it, but found myself eye-level with everyone else's ass, since so many people were standing. I couldn't even see Hiro, let alone continue talking with him. So I stand back up, and immediately the old guy comes and taps me again.

"Oh no, please, you should sit down!"

Finally, Hiro came up and whispered that the guy wasn't just being polite, like I'd imagined, but that I was blocking his view and that he really just wanted me to get out of the way. Basically, he was being a typical, indirect Japanese person. This pissed me off to no end - if he wanted me to move, he could have just asked me to, rather than pester me to sit down in this stupid chair, like he was saving it just for me because he was such a good friend. Forgive my insensitivity to cultural differences, but I just found it incredibly disingenuous and obnoxious.

So I'm talking with Hiro, after the umpteenth interruption, when the dude comes over and taps me again. "Oh please, here, use this chair!" I couldn't take it anymore.

"NO!" I shouted into his face and stormed off across the room.

So I was in a pretty bad mood when we began our arbitrary countdown. Counting down isn't something they do in Japan, so a bunch of just took a consensual cell phone time and, when it got close enough, began shouting down from twenty. When we hit zero, I clanked a few glasses, but my friends were all on the other side of the room with that jackass old man. I finished my drink and hightailed it right afterward, so I could catch the 12:25 last train.

I went outside. Snow was falling as I walked to the station. Suddenly, I realized, even then, that I couldn't get too upset, because at least I wasn't on that goddamn mountain.


IV

My New Year's Resolution is to not think about things more than 24 hours in advance, and not to worry about them when I do. Thanks to Gozaisho, I've been able, thus far, to achieve this. So here's to 2011: the Year of the Rabbit, the year of Big Luck, and the year of anxiety-free living. Happy New Year!