Today, I want to write about a friend of mine, Yoko. I met her at the butoh workshop I've mentioned several times in my posts. Our workshop and rehearsals were really intense, so at that time we saw each other almost every night. We were like a family, so to speak.

Yoko has a unique vibe. She expresses her emotions straightforwardly and says almost everything that comes to mind. She's kind of childish, however I always sense a depth in her thoughts. She's a cheerful, chatty person but sometimes goes silent in the middle of a conversation and briefly gets lost in her own thoughts. Her mind is always free, I think. She was working at a famous café and often cooked our meals at the temple where the workshop was held. She's a seeker in every field, especially in cooking. We all loved her cooking.

She's a music lover like me, but her taste in music is also unique. She doesn't know artists everybody knows, and knows and loves some artists no one knows. I discovered some artists who've become really important to me because of her. She's much younger than I am, but she's influenced me a lot.

Even after our butoh group broke up, we'd sometimes meet up. She couldn't take days off on weekends, but I was working as a freelancer, so we usually hung out during the week. However, when I started working for a company, it became difficult to see her. We're both busy and we live quite a ways apart.

I wanted to see her before I moved, so I asked her to meet me somewhere near her place, with the pretext that I wanted to return some CDs she had lent me. She lives in the center of Toyama city and knows a lot of good restaurants, so I asked her to pick. However, her choice was a basic, cheap family restaurant halfway between our homes.

It was my first time seeing her in a while. She wasn’t wearing any makeup and looked even more fresh and natural than I remembered. She told me she had quit the café and would be moving to a mountainous region to work on a collective farm. She had always been interested in agriculture, so that was no surprise to me, however, young people like her rarely choose that path. In Japan, it's becoming increasingly difficult to make a living from farming with every passing year. That's one of the most serious problems our country is facing.

Naturally, she can’t make a living from farming alone, so she said she's going to keep delivering her homemade sweets to cafés as a side job, and gave me some of her tiny sweets. When I asked her what music she was into lately, she answered, "the sounds of the mountains." She smiled and said she was listening to rivers, winds, and birds at the noisy family restaurant. Of course, I treated — it didn’t cost much anyway.

Her sweets were perfect. I tasted her spirit in them and I texted her as much. She said she was really happy I got her and was looking forward to the "Tokyo version" of me. I'll never forget her words. I'm really happy to be friends with her even if it's not easy for us to meet up.