the remaining rice fields

It is Saturday evening and I am sitting on the floor just behind a mosquito net in front of an open veranda door. My wife and son are sleeping and I have just finished the dishes, having cleaned the bathroom after a long bath. It is dark ouside, although I can discern a faint glow from the moon behind the clouds, shining through the pine trees on the hill outside the window. Summer is here, the air is sweet, impossible to stop enjoying – so fresh, so untainted by the city.

I really feel like I live in the countryside, although the densely populated city is only a five minute walk from here, on the other side of the bypass. But those few minutes makes all the difference in the world – I am both astonished and at the same time not at all surprised that I do not miss Tokyo. Sitting in the middle of nature writing in front of an open window – how I have been longing for this. Inside I hear the music-box goodnight-playlist playing for our baby, but outside nature is singing.

When my wife was a child living on the other side of the bypass, that whole area was countryside – rice field after rice field with only a few houses every now and then. Now most fields are gone and small single family homes have taken their place. Where we live however, the rice fields are well and growing, and through my open window I hear the rice field frogs singing. I saw a frog in our not yet green little garden the other day, perfectly blending in with the soil except for a line on the back, sitting there waiting for nightfall. The croak of rice fields frogs is amazing – listening to them now I can only think that they are singing in happiness.

Times like this it is so easy to appreciate nature, as well as to wonder about the order of things; the frogs are all singing together in harmony, only to suddenly stop all at once, leavening the faint sound of cars far away to be heard. Who decides when to stop singing? How do they all know when to stop – they are sitting far away from each other, in separate rice fields. And as I wonder if it might be our little garden frog who is the mastermind behind it all, I feel that this is one beautiful way to spend a Saturday night – thinking about the order of command among rice fields frogs, receiving natures breath in front of an open window in Japan, Kyushu, Fukuoka.