I left home because I thought it would still be there when I came back.

And now, a decade later, I am standing before a burning Aragonese landscape.

More than a landscape, it is a memory. It is the sacred, cold drop that numbs my face on an October morning. It is like a badly rooted habit. A photograph of my grandfather, whom I never knew, standing on the battlements of a castle in his black beret and black jumper. It is a mountain house where the only inhabitants are the ashes disappearing into the wind outside on the hillside. My family has always had the custom of giving the ashes back to the wind when someone dies.

It is my past.

And the fire standing before it. What remains of myself is inside that fire.

And it is burning again.

When I was little, I had a sheep in the Sahara.

Many times, my parents asked me if I wanted to go and see her one day, since I did not live there, and I would tell them yes. That I would like to, someday. But I never asked myself why I had a sheep in the Sahara, or why it mattered to me to own something I had never seen.

A sheep is a soft, woolly animal. Something you can almost fluff beneath the weight of your hands. And yet, to me, a sheep was simply something invisible, something that existed somewhere in the Sahara, thousands of kilometres from my home in Europe.

I had a sheep, but I never really stopped to wonder what I wanted with a sheep I had never seen. Why do we want things? Why do we desire something simply because we know that it belongs to us? Perhaps for some future flock, or sometimes because that something settles deep inside us and becomes an anchor tying us to our past.

Everything we desire. Everything we do not know.

How would I know how to look after that sheep? The heat of the Sahara must be unbearable. And what would I do when I couldn’t speak Arabic? I had never lived away from home. A seven-year-old boy with his sheep in the Sahara?

“I’m sorry, Daniel. I’ve sold her.”

“Why?”

“Well, she was already very old.”

“But... you told me she was my sheep.”

“Yes, but don’t worry. When you come, you’ll have another one.”

“Will you send me pictures of her when you go back?”

“Of course.”

Lehabib smiled. And I still didn’t understand why I would always have a new sheep in the Sahara. I didn’t understand why he would sell her either. To be honest, I didn’t even know where El Aaiún was, Lehabib’s home. I didn’t understand why he came to visit us once a year from Germany. Nor did I understand what connected Lehabib to my family.

El Aaiún is a city in Western Sahara.

And Western Sahara is... well, it isn’t.

It is something like the sheep.

The history of the desert is older than the sky, and throughout the centuries men, civilisations, power and rain appear and disappear. The forces of humanity and the weaknesses of nature. All of it contained within a grain of sand.

I think my uncle must have thought something similar when, in the early 1970s, he was sent to Western Sahara as a teacher. He had been born in the former Protectorate, and now he had been sent to the fifty-third province of the Spanish state.

Western Sahara was, at the time, a province, and as such Spanish authorities and their citizens inhabited places that children like Lehabib believed to be far removed from the words being spoken far from the desert, in the baroque and gloomy offices of Madrid, Paris, Tangier, Washington and Algiers.

On 6 November 1975, a great cloud of dust swept across the Sahara. I suppose that, at that moment, the sounds of the Green March had not yet reached the school my uncle and Lehabib shared, teacher and pupil respectively. The great cloud of the Green March was a testimony, a swan song for one colonial power and a great leap of faith into the future for another colonial power. For Lehabib, as for many other Sahrawis, that November day would be one of the first last days of his youth. Weeks later, he would no longer return to school, nor would my uncle. The Spanish authorities abandoned the Sahara. My uncle saw the desert for the last time from a ship bound for the Canary Islands while Moroccan and Mauritanian authorities divided and occupied the territory, arresting many Sahrawis, including Lehabib.

The connections between a schoolboy and the Polisario Front or the Sahrawi Liberation Movement did not need to be proven, because the destruction of a place’s childhood is also the destruction of its future. The imprisonment and subsequent expulsion of its citizens would turn the idea of creating a Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic into nothing more than another mirage in the desert. Beyond the negotiating tables and the expulsions, one thing was clear: Lehabib was in prison, like many other Sahrawis. My uncle was expelled to Europe. Both of them left the Sahara.

Europe, despite its proximity, has traditionally isolated itself spiritually from Africa, only reaching its hands through the window when necessary, or opening the peephole to see what was happening without responding. The Old Continent fell silent when the mother continent became an inconvenient and noisy neighbour that would not allow it to rest in its European garden. In 2022, Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, compared the European Union to a “garden” and the rest of the world to a “jungle”. The African jungle and the European garden looked at one another. The jungle threatened to destroy the beautiful botanical parks and the perfect, black and frozen waters Rimbaud once wrote about; meanwhile, the garden closed itself off more and more, and its lush gates were also made from African materials.

I have often wondered what happened during those decades when Lehabib was held in a Moroccan prison. What went through his head? How did he experience it? Did the turmoil of occupation and war also exist inside the prison? Because displacement existed both inside and outside its walls.

Years later, I learned that, after being released, now a grown man, he began travelling to Germany. There, he would buy second-hand cars and drive them across Europe to El Aaiún, where he would sell them. There, in the Saharan city, he married and had children.

El Aaiún is the de jure capital of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.

Tifariti is the provisional capital of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.Rabouni is its capital in exile.

As for me, I did not discover any of this until I was well into my adolescence, roughly the same age at which he had been imprisoned. We never spoke about any of it when he came to visit us. We talked about the journey, the French roads, the snow at the border, his family, how much I had grown and, of course, the sheep.

Meanwhile, far away from Europe, in Tindouf, Algeria, his fellow Sahrawis remained — and remain — isolated by a great wall of landmines built by the Moroccan state decades ago. The Sahrawi people are divided by that long wall cutting across the desert.

I think it is easy to build walls in the desert, but not around its people. Perhaps that is why the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic has endured on the margins of History for so long, waiting for its day to come.

“Well, I’m afraid I have to get going. It’s getting late.”

“Come back and visit us soon.”

“Of course. I’ll call you when I’m back around here.”

“Next time, you could bring the sheep so I can see her.”

“I’m sorry, Daniel. I think it would be better if you came to see her.”

“You see, the sheep was born in the Sahara, and she wouldn’t be happy if she wasn’t there with her family.”

“Of course. Poor sheep.”

“Well, you’ll come one day. I’ll send you pictures of the new sheep. She’s very bouncy!”

“Thank you.”

“Well, everyone, see you soon!”

“Have a good journey!”

I think I understand better now what he meant. So often, we carry the worlds in which we grew up and learn how to live deep inside us, so deeply that they become as important as a heart or a body. And so often, the most intimate part of our world is everything we are and everything we carry with us without ever saying it, almost like the desert.

In Denmark, the cold is serious. As serious as your face numbed by the Baltic wind and the frozen puddles behind the wooden stalls of a deserted Bakken.

I still don’t understand how you agreed to come here in December. It’s my birthday, and I couldn’t make it home in time. Instead, you’ve let me bring you to Dyrehaven, my favourite place in Denmark. In winter, the amusement park falls silent, leaving the forest to the deer once again.

And it’s cold.

Very cold.

The path is torn open by the snow, and the only sound that breaks the silence is your voice.

“Dani... it’s so cold.”

“Please, we have just arrived.”

“I know... but it’s so cold.”

The steady crack of branches breaking overhead marked the path as the tall red wooden gates of Dyrehaven slowly disappeared behind us. The evening was sinking into the sea. It was late, and there wasn’t another visitor in the park.

The moment we stepped through the open gates of Bakken, the quiet sounds of the forest came to an abrupt halt. Only the clatter of our winter boots against the frozen pavement had anything left to say.

In late autumn, Bakken is a lonely place.

The rides lie dormant beneath enormous green plastic covers, soaked by the rain that had fallen before dawn, and where electricity should reclaim its kingdom, stillness and absence prevail.

Two strangers are reflected in the empty shop windows of the amusement park.

“I think we’re the only visitors.”

“Don’t move.”

“But it’s normal... it’s so cold.”

Click.

“Got you.”

“Let me see... We look good, don’t you think? Although with that hat you can barely see your face. You look beautiful today.”

“Well, since we’re here, I might as well take some pictures.”

“I bet you’ve never had an amusement park all to yourself.”

“Well... I’m here with you.”

Her reflection lifted the camera towards the glass, capturing us both. Her brown eyes glistened in the cold, and her red hair glowed against the empty park.

The space between the buildings of the amusement park and our bodies grew smaller and smaller, almost desperately so. Thin, cold snowflakes scratched against the glass. It was late.

The sunken paths of autumn faded between the trees as we walked on together, slowly, as if caught in a circular current. A single sound broke the silence.

Crack!

“Dani, what was that?”

Suddenly, a deer burst through the forest, weaving between the bare, blue-tinged trees. It reached the edge of the path and stopped, completely still, watching the two human figures standing beneath the smoking roof of the world.

Click!

“Deer are beautiful.”

“I think they belong to the Queen.”

“I’ve heard that if they get too used to humans, the keepers have the right to shoot them.”

“That’s horrible.”

“That, and many other things.”

“Something is rotten in Denmark, huh?”

The deer, like so many other creatures, did not know that it lived in a northern kingdom, or that its life, like so many others, was often beyond its own control. Yet its cold gaze remained fixed upon us, meeting ours.

A moment later, the deer lowered its head and began to run, disappearing deeper into the forest until it was gone.

I remained there, staring at the absence it had left behind on the autumn path.

“Shall we go? It’s getting late. It’s so cold.”

“I thought we could walk as far as Raadvad, and from there we could go to Skodsborg station and catch the train.”

“You’re crazy, Dani.”

“Perhaps. But it’s a beautiful place.”

“All right. We’re nearly there, aren’t we?”

“Yes. We’ll be there in no time.”

Raadvad is a narrow, little village, one of the few places in Denmark that never reminded me of Denmark. It reminded me, in some strange way, of the villages back home.

It is a small settlement opening onto a clearing in the forest, with a pond where swans glide with glassy, perfect eyes. Raadvad is a village where knives were once made, and the old factory still seems to spill into the village and around the little pond.

“You know, there’s a hotel here. I wish I could live here. Don’t you? It’s so peaceful.”

“No. You’d hate it. I know you. You always want to be somewhere else. You always want to leave.”

“I know. But right now, I’d like to stay here. Here with you. Just like this.”

“I don’t know how you’re not freezing.”

“Let’s get something hot.”

The door rattled in the wind as we sat down for a hot chocolate in a café in Raadvad.

“I’ve never been this cold.”

“We both come from cold places,” I said, wrapping my hands around hers as she held the cup of hot chocolate.

“Yes, but it’s really cold today.”

Snowflakes struck the windows of the café, and our faces, as we left Raadvad behind and made our way towards Skodsborg.

The path passed quickly, almost weightlessly, carrying us towards Skodsborg station. The train appeared through the darkness, dazzling us with its headlights, and we climbed aboard.

“You’re freezing.”

“So are you.”

“How long until we get home?”

“A while. Do you want to sleep?”

“Yes.”

“Me too.”

“Shall we set an alarm?”

“Okay.”

“It was worth it, wasn’t it? We saw a deer.”

“Yes. That was really nice. And I took lots of pictures.”

“Hey, what if we come back in the summer?”

“Okay.”

“Come here. You can sleep on my shoulder.”

“You’re so cold, Dani.”

“Goodnight.”

“Dobranoc.”

When I woke up, the train was already empty.

Far away, snow covered the mountains of the Pyrenees. Sharp, solitary peaks began to emerge in the distance. I was returning to France, and I would have to stop once again at Canfranc station.

The mountains seemed to tear the minutes from the clock.

We never came back to Bakken.

The train slowed to a halt. I picked up my backpack and coat. Darkness pressed against the contours of the Aragonese mountains as I crossed the station concourse.

My shoulders were cold.

Very cold.

We never came back.

Two years later, another winter found me crossing the bridge towards the new church on my way back to France.

Snow held the horizon like a pillar of granite.

For a moment, I heard her voice once more.

A snowflake struck my face.

“Dani... it’s so cold.”

“Pretty lucky.”

“My lucky day?” I asked.

“Your lucky day” he repeated.

“What do you mean, lucky?”

My colleague looked up from the bar till.

“Look.”

An emerald-green praying mantis was slowly climbing the mug from which I had been drinking my instant coffee before the morning shift began. Its warm, unblinking eyes met mine beneath the pale winter sun of the Cape.

He stepped closer.

“Didn’t you know? For the San, these creatures are sacred. Apparently, if you come across one, it’s because it has chosen you. It will bring you good fortune... or perhaps not. It’s complicated. More like an omen.”

“Mmm... if you say so.”

“It’s not me saying it,” he replied. “It’s the people who were here before you arrived. Before we arrived. Perhaps even before time itself.”

“Right... I understand,” I said, gently lifting the mantis onto an empty matchbox.

“Then... where are the San now?”

He looked at me for a moment.

“Far away,” he replied. “In the desert.”

I looked at the small creature resting on the matchbox and wondered about the people whose stories were still carried by the landscape, even after they had been pushed away from it.

South Africa, a country of extraordinary complexity, carries one of the most visible contradictions of the modern world. The geography of separation did not disappear with the end of apartheid; in many ways, it changed form.

This is where the country’s estates come into view: gated residential developments of identical streets and near-identical houses, many of them designed with everything needed to live without ever leaving their boundaries. Parks, schools, gyms, small shops and even restaurants sit behind walls, surveillance cameras and electric fences, while life continues beyond the gates of Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town.

The barriers are no longer decreed by the state, but shaped by the property market. They appear on roadside billboards with reassuring promises: Looking for a safe place to raise your family? Plots for sale. A peaceful retirement. The promise is always the same: security.

It is difficult not to wonder how the displacement of communities initiated by the Natives Land Act of 1913 has, decades later, contributed to new forms of separation. Many of these developments are culturally and linguistically dominated by English and Afrikaans, creating spaces where contact with the country’s diversity is often limited by the walls surrounding them.

I began to notice that the geography of Cape Town was divided not only by streets and neighbourhoods, but by invisible distances.

Many of the people who worked in and around the city did not live nearby. At the end of their shifts, they waited for taxis that would take them back towards places like Khayelitsha, many kilometres away from the coastal suburbs where they spent their days working.

One evening, I mentioned that they could come inside the bar while they waited. They could have a drink, sit down for a while. We could even make some money.

The answer was no.

It was a small moment, almost insignificant. Yet it stayed with me. There were places where some people belonged, and places where they remained outside.

Yet what stayed with me most was not the separation itself, but the contradiction behind it.

I had fallen in love with South Africa: the winter light over the Cape, the endless landscapes, the humour of the people I worked with, and the conversations that continued long after the bar had closed.

Many evenings, after the last customers had left, my South African colleagues and I spoke about the country we shared. We wondered how a place of such extraordinary beauty could carry so much pain.

How could a country with such warmth, creativity and resilience continue to leave so many of its own people behind?

The question was never about the land. The land was magnificent.

The question was always about the people who belonged to it.

I came to understand that loving a country means loving more than its landscapes. It means caring about the people who wake up every morning within it, who carry its history, its contradictions and its hopes.

Perhaps that is why the contradictions hurt so much.

The more I cared about South Africa, the more difficult it became to understand how a place of such extraordinary beauty could remain divided by invisible borders.

One night in Cape Town, before switching off the light, I saw a small emerald figure twisting through the cold Atlantic air. The mantis drifted away through the bars of my window and disappeared into the night.

The mantis knew nothing of gates.

Never before had I returned home so soon. Perhaps because I had always tried to leave only shallow footprints, the kind that do not crush butterflies.

Summer was fading through the fractured corners of the river. The water carried away every sound until the voices and the echoes of the animals were erased. The wind struck the trees with the wrong shade of green; it should not have been summer. The reflection of the riverbanks stretched horizontally towards a sky that felt clean and certain.

Then I saw myself.

There, among the ochre colours of the trees, was my own reflection. Trapped between the stone and the sky, a dead and mutilated body. The river flowed on while I remained there, broken among its rapids, my skin scraped by the jagged rocks and my eyes bruised by the passing minutes. I was the quiet outline of a body that had already come to an end.

For not everything that dies leaves an empty space behind.

I was every damp footprint upon the convulsing branches of uninhabited days. I was all the silence drifting through the blue currents of summer.

The wind lifted its arms.

Never before had I returned home so soon.

To return, even when there is nothing left to return to. It is almost as impossible as describing my own body reflected in the river. Almost as impossible as the ivy that wraps itself around the exhausted walls of the village.

That is how I found myself, a decade later, standing before the final breaths of a life that had ended long before I was born. During a summer holiday back home in northern Spain.

This story has a name which, simply because it is so rarely spoken, almost seems not to exist:

Zenarbe - an abandoned village in the Aragonese Pyrenees.

To return, as I have returned for the summer; to return in order to see what others once left behind, just as one day I too will leave things behind that I shall never see again.

Something hidden inside a rain-worn stone.

The first time my heart was broken.

There, almost at dusk, wrapped in a storm of red and leaden leaves, hidden within the walls of the church - the letter I left behind.

Like many villages in the Aragonese Highlands, Zenarbe fell victim to the government’s programme of forced depopulation linked to the construction of a reservoir. Officially, the village ceased to exist on 21 November 1966.

Most of its inhabitants left for the industrial cities of Spain and France. The village itself remained behind, waiting only for its new inhabitants: snow, ivy, and the slow work of decay.

Years later, during the 1980s, much of Zenarbe was deliberately demolished with explosives. Officially, the buildings were considered dangerous and were destroyed to prevent accidents. For many former residents, however, the demolitions carried a deeper meaning. In Aragon, the house is more than a building; it is the centre of family memory and belonging. Once the houses disappeared, so too did the possibility of returning to them.

Slowly, almost methodically, Zenarbe was reduced to its roots. Today, only fragments remain: the narrow cobbled street, the cemetery beneath the cypress trees, and the church tower, still standing, watching time quietly slip away.

Weathered like an old oak, the church still watches over the valley, its tower rising above the fields while the years themselves seem to disappear into the distance.

So do I.

The letter was written a long time ago.

When I reach the village, I search for it among the stones. I twist and sink my hands into the rock, as if trying to rescue the words I abandoned there years ago.

The afternoon approaches, impregnating the contours of the mountains with its demented howl, and the letter.

The letter is not there. Only I am.

Perhaps it was beyond the door scratched by winter; perhaps the rain has already destroyed the sad, pale, and scarce fabric of my words, and most probably, nobody will ever read the letter.

The orange sun of the afternoon strikes the valley, the dead reflection of the river, the cemetery of Zenarbe, my swaying body, and the wild memory - everything I once was, everything I will be.

Every memory of myself throws itself against the years, and it is because I have grown, not horizontally, but along a thin and narrow line, yellowish and sickly at times, of fire and memory always, almost like the act of falling.

Afterwards, on the road, I will ask myself: why do we always fall?

Zenarbe is something that rises, softly levitating above the roots to reach the sad and leaden sky, in any of the seasons, and my life persists.

When I return, the rain falls once more.

On a slow autumn afternoon on the shores of the Roskilde Fjord, I was trying to escape my life for a few brief hours, even though I knew I would have to return to it before long. I immersed myself in the pale, cool colours of the Danish autumn sunset, leaving behind - if only for an afternoon - the university, my flat, my partner, and my life.

I often walked to Sankt Hans when the distant sound of buses had faded away. It was quieter then. I wandered along its paths beneath a canopy of crackling leaves in shades of red, yellow, and brown.

St. Hans is one of the largest psychiatric hospitals on the Danish island of Sjælland. Like any psychiatric hospital, the clean, pragmatic lines of its buildings unsettled me. Behind the windows, nothing could be seen - only the fading reflection of the last boats crossing the fjord towards the harbour, the steady hum of the ferry, and, in the distance, the bells of Roskilde Cathedral.

By 2023, after returning to Europe, I had walked those paths countless times.

The hospital stood among open fields and bare trees, their roots reaching towards the water’s edge, while birds skimmed low over the fjord.

There it was.

Between the sunset and the water.

Between the silence and the wind.

For a fleeting moment, with the cold Danish autumn pressing against my face, the whole kingdom of Denmark felt as though it belonged to me.

Suddenly, footsteps broke the silence of the fjord.

As I turned my gaze, I saw small figures moving through the last wisps of mist rising from the lingering rain and the orange-ochre glow of the sunset. Light footsteps crackled among the roots and branches of the forest. In the blink of an eye, they had vanished. Only faint echoes lingered in the distance, somewhere within the safety of the hospital wards.

The sound stirred a strange curiosity in me. At eight o’clock on an autumn evening in Denmark, I found myself walking towards Sankt Hans Hospital.

The door to the little chapel creaked open; someone must have forgotten to close it that afternoon. I used to spend long afternoons reading in its tower, surrounded by cobwebs and ancient machinery, fixing my gaze - my whole body, almost - on the metal shafts that supported the great bell that had never rung.

The clock, worn down by time, stared back with a bitter grimace as I looked through the windows, where a light rain had begun to fall in scattered patches. I leaned against the glass and listened once more to the footsteps moving along the hospital’s cobbled paths.

Determined to find whoever was out there, I went downstairs and crossed the chapel. There, on the neat, damp wooden benches, lay a single book: a collection of poems in Danish. I opened it at random and found a poem entitled Krystalslottet. I paused to read while the sounds scraped softly against the windows.

The poem spoke of a fragile castle standing alone on the shores of a lake.

Outside, the voices grew louder.

A sharp, almost electric sound.

I descended the final steps and stepped into the church square.

There they were.

Behind the trees, motionless, murmuring.

Small figures.

Children.

Children clutching walkie-talkies and plastic rifles, running and leaping across the damp carpet of leaves that covered the stone courtyard of Sankt Hans Hospital. They shouted to each other in a language I could not decipher, throwing themselves behind walls and tree trunks, turning the hospital into a maze of trenches and the fjord into an invisible front line. They disappeared into the woods whenever the rain grew heavier, only to emerge again a few moments later.

I watched the scene in silence.

It was late.

I had to go home.

Then two women appeared through the rain and the mist. They walked calmly towards the children, sheltering them beneath enormous umbrellas before gently leading them towards a yellow stone building, its wooden window frames covered with green moss. A single light glowed behind the windows.

The door closed softly.

As I turned the corner towards the bus stop, it was time to go home. As the bus wound its way around the bay, the crystal castle remained in the distance. Nestled among ancient, weathered leaves, St. Hans Hospital resembled the castle from the poem, fragile, isolated, almost unreal.

The gardens and triangular houses, with their perfect lines, marked the way back to my flat in Trekroner. By the time I arrived, night had settled over the concrete outlines of the university, and a single light glowed in the distance, probably the Argos power station. I found myself thinking of the yellow light at St. Hans Hospital.

That night, sleep came quickly. In my dreams, the crystal castle glowed in the distance against the darkness.

The following morning, over coffee, I told one of my classmates about the previous evening - the hospital, the rain, the children.

“Ah,” he said, almost casually. “Of course. They’re Ukrainians.”

“Ukrainians?”

“I thought most of them had gone to Poland or Germany.”

“Many did,” he replied. “But some came here, to Denmark. They’re staying at Sankt Hans.”

“Since when?”

“You weren’t here then. I think they arrived after Russia invaded Ukraine.”

“They’ve been living in the psychiatric hospital all this time?”

He nodded.

“I saw them playing war,” I said.

He was silent for a moment.

“I suppose that’s the only thing they’ve known in recent years.”

My alarm rang. It was time to go back to class.

Outside, rain drifted almost horizontally across the campus, carried by the wind. I thought of the children of St. Hans and wondered whether those same clouds, skimming the damp grass before lifting again towards the edge of the island might one day carry them home.

It was late.

Losing five or ten minutes on the way to class was inevitable. The crowded, maze-like corridors of Rikkyo University swallowed students by the hundreds, and every morning I felt like an ant disappearing into the Ishikari supercolony.

And I was late.

I drained the last sip of my vending machine coffee as a spring storm rolled across Tokyo. Class was about to begin, and for a moment my only concern was making it there on time. Then, just as I slipped my phone into my pocket, it rang. I didn’t know it then, but that call would become the first step towards a story I had never intended to find.

I glanced at the screen.

A new email.

A few lines I did not care to read at all.

Normally, I dismissed them as casually as someone tears a page from a calendar. We leave days behind without thinking twice, making room for whatever comes next. I did the same with that message, tucked my phone away, and joined the river of students flowing across the university grounds. Ikebukuro had turned red and grey beneath the spring rain, and somewhere between the station and campus I realised I couldn’t even remember the classroom number.

“Daniel.”

I turned.

“I’ve been trying to reach you,” my professor said.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t notice your call,” I replied, knowing perfectly well that I had.

She smiled. “It seems to be your lucky day.”

“They’ve accepted.”

“Really?”

I tried to sound composed, though my thoughts had already outrun the conversation.

“So... when?”

“Tomorrow.”

She handed me a small slip of paper with an address written neatly in Japanese and English.

“Go here. They’ll meet you outside the school. Don’t worry—you’ll recognise them.”

Then, almost as an afterthought, she added, “And since you were late, that goes on your attendance record. Now go and find a seat.”

I don’t remember much of the lecture that followed. My Korean professor spoke about aesthetics. That week we watched Chungking Express. We talked about the end of the British Empire, the rise of twenty-first-century China, old and new forms of colonialism, and the restless energy of East Asian cities. As Faye Wong’s cover of Dreams drifted through the darkened classroom, I found myself somewhere else entirely. I was no longer in Hong Kong.

They had agreed.

The images flickered across the screen, but my thoughts had already left the cinema. I imagined tomorrow before it had arrived: a school entrance in another corner of Tokyo, unfamiliar faces, perhaps a few words of Korean if necessary, and the strange realization that I was about to step into a community I had known only through books, newspaper articles, and scattered conversations.

Tomorrow, for the first time, I would meet students from Korea University. Before that moment, Chongryon had existed only as an idea. Officially, it is the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, founded in 1955 and historically associated with North Korea. That much was easy to learn from books. What interested me was everything those books couldn’t explain. To many Japanese, Chongryon is a familiar but distant presence—visible enough to be recognized, yet rarely understood. Outside Japan, it barely exists in the public imagination. But for the students I was about to meet, it wasn’t a political headline or a historical curiosity. It was simply the world they had grown up in.

That was the world I wanted to understand. Finding them had taken more than a month. I spoke with my professor, who introduced me to a South Korean film lecturer. The lecturer put me in touch with a former student from Korea University, who in turn passed my request to the community. Weeks went by with no reply. Every lead seemed to end where the next one should have begun.

Then, unexpectedly, they called. It took less than a week to arrange the meeting.

On the appointed day, I found myself standing outside the gates of Korea University. By then, my shirt was soaked through. Getting there had meant changing trains several times, crossing the western suburbs of Tokyo, and walking the final stretch beneath a quiet avenue of maple trees that led to the university’s heavy iron gates. I had arrived too early.

Impatience got the better of me. I lit a cigarette. Then another. By the fourth, I was checking my phone every few seconds.

Suddenly, the heavy wooden doors opened. Five students emerged.

They wore matching uniforms of deep Prussian blue and bright white, walking side by side with the effortless coordination that only years of shared routine can produce. I crushed my cigarette beneath my shoe as hurriedly as a teenager caught smoking by his parents. Then I looked up.

“Welcome,” they said together.

“Please, come in.”

Without another word, they led me through the doorway and into a small reception room. It was plain and almost austere. Two faded green armchairs stood opposite a simple wooden table. The room carried no particular scent, only the stillness of a place used more for conversation than decoration.

The students took their seats. I settled into the armchair opposite them. For reasons I still struggle to explain, the room felt much larger than it was.

“Would you like something to drink?” one of them asked. “It’s warm today.”

“Whatever you have is perfect. Thank you.”

Only then did I allow my eyes to wander. On the wall above them hung framed portraits of the Kim family. A few moments later, they returned with a bottle of Coca-Cola. For an instant I considered asking what they thought of serving one of the world’s most recognizable American products beneath those portraits. The question crossed my mind almost as quickly as I dismissed it. It was too clever, too obvious, and far more about my assumptions than theirs.

Instead, I accepted the glass.

“It’s very refreshing,” I said.

The truth was that I had never liked Coca-Cola. But in that moment, it became something familiar—an anchor in a room filled with people I did not yet understand. A Coca-Cola is a Coca-Cola, no matter where you are in the world. People are never quite so simple. I opened my notebook. The interview began.

The room fell quiet.

For a moment, none of us spoke. They watched me with the same curiosity that had brought me there. I had come to ask questions about their lives; perhaps they were wondering why a foreign student from Europe had travelled across Tokyo to ask them in the first place.

I began with the simplest question I could think of.

“What do you want to do after university?”

One of the young men answered first.

“I know it’s difficult to work in North Korea,” he said. “But I’m studying business administration and commerce. I’d like to help bring China and North Korea closer together. There are opportunities along the border. I think that’s where the future is.”

“How?” I asked.

He smiled.

“I don’t know yet. But someone has to try.”

A young woman spoke next.

“It isn’t so important what people think we are,” she said. “What’s important is what we’re able to become.”

Another nodded.

“There have been problems with some political groups in Japan,” she admitted. “But my family is here. My friends are here. Why would I leave just so someone could say, ‘Oh, you’re from Japan’?”

The conversation drifted naturally between politics and ordinary life.

When I asked what the future held for their community, one student answered seriously.

“We want to make our families and our teachers proud.”

He paused.

“As for the next few years...”

The others smiled.

“...first I’d like to pass next week’s exam.”

The room burst into laughter.

I asked one final question.

“If you could say one thing to Japanese students, what would it be?”

There was a brief silence.

One student answered quietly.

“Our grandparents came here a long time ago. We’re part of this island too.”

Another spoke.

“I’ve never even been to Korea. Being Japanese is the only life I’ve ever known.”

Then a third looked around the room before saying, simply,

“We’re the same.”

When the interview ended, a snow-white veil of spring pollen hung in the air as I said goodbye to the students at the gates of Korea University. As I walked away, they stood waving from a distance, their arms raised against the afternoon sky. From afar, their figures slowly dissolved into the sunlight as I turned the corner towards Takanodai Station.

Later, on the train back to Ikebukuro, I found myself thinking about them—their immaculate uniforms, their quiet composure, their young, calm eyes, and the words they had entrusted to me. How was I ever going to explain all of this? Would my Japanese classmates understand? Would they simply shrug and move on? Did it even matter who they were? Who would they become? Who are we, after all?

As the train carried me back through Tokyo, I thought again of those figures beneath the heavy spring sun. Outside, the electric lights climbed the walls of Shibuya as evening slowly settled over the city. I made my way home with a notebook full of words and the eyes of those Chongryon students—filled with hope, uncertainty, and the future itself—etched into my own.