Editor’s Note

Life, gathered in small portions.
Across the vast, bewildering landscapes and moodboards that make up Japan, you don’t gulp. You sip. Slowly. Purposefully. Here, the world’s established continuums of time, space, elements, and perception cease to exist. Because Japan, more than any other land, is its own paradigm.
Celebrated chronicler of the arts & culture, Soumya Mukerji, allows her senses to guide her in this story saturated most persuasively with atmosphere, and concurrently, the quiet dramas of synesthesia. Her eyes reach for spring’s first gasp, as cherry blossoms erupt in a private dialect. Her ears sense night with its portrait of enigmatic geishas. Her skin imbibes the dream sequences played out by the eccentricity that is bottled music. In every experience, she tastes the tender harmony of Wa—the ancient philosophy of purity and lightness that guides life on the island—as easily as she tastes fruit ripening in their expectation of spring.
So much of Japan is manic and explosive, and yet, within all the cacophony and the country’s perpetual deep dive into the future, always that sense of harmony.
‘Way of the Wa’ also represents the beginning of a new tributary under The Bombay Literary Magazine’s Visual Narratives—Passengers. This series will chronicle the ephemerality of movement and the ephemerality of the moment—be it travellers navigating the foreignness of an unfamiliar city, the rupture in a relationship, an evening sparkling with jazz and frisson, a street dog making its way through the city, or whatever else.
For now, this is an invitation to feast your eyes on small, everyday sketches of Japan. Or, given this essay’s playfulness with the senses, your ears. Gaze. Listen. And yes, sip.

—Siddharth Dasgupta
The Bombay Literary Magazine