Railroad Ties

"Are we almost there?" A child asks her grandmother on the train south.What is it to arrive? Artists have been asking for centuries. Travelers have been discussing for eons. Poets have been wondering for as long as they have been wandering. The question that vexes is, where is there? If we knew, would we better understand what it means to leave, to return, to almost be there? What is it to possess, or to be possessed by, a place--to build a home of sorts, to define somewhere worth arriving or worth wistfully watching disappear through the blurry glass of a train window? In this volume, Namijo ventures through a psyche at times obsessed with the concept of departures, at times grieved by the apparent impossibility of returning, at times stunned by the epiphany of landing somewhere and realizing that arrival can be a familiar face reflected in a lantern's glass, a nostalgic glimpse of summer evening when the bugs come out, a gradual process of waking up in a tea shop and knowing its autumn is indescribably the same as every autumn before and every autumn after. Travel the coast with her and share her journey, exploring the ties that bind us to one another and the tracks they conjure as we each blindly pursue the elusive arrival.