After returning from New York, I found myself strangely sensitive to cold, fatigue, and silence.
What unsettled me most, however, was not the jet lag—but the quiet uniformity I felt upon coming home.
While I was in New York, I was surprised by the cold day after day.
Still, when I compared it with weather reports from Japan, it seemed no colder than Aomori or Sapporo.
If I thought of it as similar to northern Japan, it felt manageable.
Then came this morning in Kamakura: zero degrees Celsius.
That was cold.
In New York, perhaps by coincidence, the lowest temperature was three degrees.
Yet somehow, Kamakura felt far colder.
Yesterday, I stayed awake for most of the flight, making an effort to endure the long hours.
As a result, my body ached all over.
Exhausted, I passed through customs and then faced a simple question: how should we get back to Kamakura?
When I return to Haneda from a business trip, my wife usually picks me up by car.
This time, however, she had been traveling with me.
On the way out, we had reserved a flat-rate taxi, and she even brought my luggage along.
On the return trip, though, the arrival time was uncertain, so we did not make such arrangements.
Taking a taxi from Haneda to Kamakura would be expensive, and buses toward Yokohama have been significantly reduced.
In the end, we decided to take the Keikyu Line and then transfer to JR.
We arrived around 5 p.m., right in the middle of the evening rush hour.
Still, many people on the train were carrying large suitcases, and somehow we managed to blend into the crowd.
Even so, the silence of Japanese trains is unsettling.
The noise and chaos of the New York subway were stressful in their own way, but the quiet, wordless atmosphere I felt after returning to Japan was eerie.
No one stared openly at our luggage, yet we seemed to be recognized as a category—people with large suitcases—from which a faint sense of discomfort radiated.
Everyone had black hair.
Body types were nearly identical.
I wonder how visitors from abroad perceive this uniformity.
I had never felt this way when returning from overseas before.
Yet this time, coming back from New York, the sensation was unmistakable.
Was that city truly different from all the others in the world?
