Getting Lost in Fukui
“A walk is always in the form of a question.”
— Jacques Derrida, Right of Inspection
“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images… In the end, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.”
— Jorge Luis Borges, The Maker
I came to Fukui with a plan: to witness the precision of Takefu knife village, to walk among the bones of Fukui’s famous dinosaurs. But what I found was something far stranger, and in the end, far truer.
A missed bus. A walk in the heat. A dinosaur seen not in a museum, but inside a train station.
And yet, strangely, I was not disappointed.
🌀 The Clarity of the Unplanned
There’s a word in Japanese: 道草を食う (michikusa wo kuu): to “eat grass by the road.” It means to be sidetracked, to dawdle. But there’s gentleness in the phrase, a recognition that wandering is not always waste.
The philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote that reverie resists calculation. I hadn’t lost the day; I had simply left the system that measures it.
🌾 A Path Without Arrival
I passed green fields mirrored in still water. Saw a farmhouse low against the hills. Ate a salty riceball of heshiko: fermented mackerel, more memory than fish. And still, I walked.
I wasn’t where I meant to be. But I wasn’t outside the journey either.
🚶 Flânerie, or the Ethics of Delay
Derrida once wrote that “a walk is always in the form of a question.” And that was the shape of this day: open-ended, unsolvable, gently demanding.
I wasn’t a pilgrim this time, or a tourist. I was something stranger: a flâneur—not a seeker of sights, but a dweller in the in-between. The missed connection, the closed museum, the long shoulder of road between towns, these did not subtract from meaning. They were meaning.
🥢 The Grace of Salt and Mistake
There was one moment that remains clearest: standing by a shuttered shop, chewing on that sharp heshiko. It was briny, fermented, almost resistant. But it tasted of something I hadn’t expected: something earned. It was the one “local experience” I hadn’t planned. And somehow, it was the one that stayed.
🧭 The Labyrinth We Walk
Borges once imagined a man who tried to map the world, only to discover in the end that the lines he drew had traced the shape of his own face.
I hadn’t drawn a map today. But I had walked one.
Each step through the rice fields, each wrong turn and awkward silence and sweaty pause, had quietly marked out something far more enduring than an itinerary.
💭 A Thought for the Way Back
The museum was closed.
The bus had gone.
And still, something opened.
Not every day has to be fulfilled. Some days only have to be followed.
And if we do, the line may yet take shape. The labyrinth may still reveal us.
And the walk—though without destination—may end in recognition.
