Home

Coming home is often as big a shock as going away.

It's 6.30 in the morning and I'm up and bushy tailed: my time, it's 2.30 in the afternoon and even my lazy bones don't sleep that late. It was the silence that woke me up, though. The sound of absolutely nothing: as deafening as any noise.

The first time I came back to England from Japan, the shock was the expected shock. Lots of white faces and light hair when I was used to Asian; direct eye contact from strangers; understanding conversations around me; rudeness from shop staff; knowing what was in the food I was buying; understanding road signs; adverts on television that didn't feature cute cartoon characters; nobody bowing at me (although I still frequently bowed at them). I gorged myself on Cadburys and fish n chips and Walkers crisps and found being able to communicate with everybody surreal: as if I was suddenly visible again, after so long as a ghost.

That was last time. This time, the shock is different.

The white faces, the eye contact, the food, the language: I've slipped straight back into it as if I never left. The things that have shocked me run deeper than that, and have left me reeling in a different way.

The light is different. The light I'm used to in Japan is golden and intense. It's warm and vivid: the colours of the sky, of the trees, of the sea, are strong and dark. Here, the light is silvery and gentle: clearer, more delicate. Everything is still bright, but it's in a fragile, slightly metallic way; the flowers are smaller, the smells are sharper and less powerful. The sky is pale and brittle; my skin looks a different colour underneath it.

And, just as the light is different, so too is the air. In Nichinan it's dense and solid: you pass through it consciously, as if swimming, and it is hot and sticks to you. The humidity means that breath doesn't feel like breathing: everything is warm and wet, inside and out. It's close, and rich, and there's no escape from it. At night, you can - and do - sleep on a beach with no blanket, and the air wraps around you; during the day, you run into shops for a few seconds of air conditioning. In England - even in August, because the seasons are the same - the air is cool and clear and calm: empty and snappy. Breathing feels like breathing: as if you're taking in something that wasn't there before. And when you pass through the air, you do it without thinking.

The silence, though: that's what woke me up. On the outskirts of London, I can hear nothing at all: a few pigeons cooing now and then, a couple of early birds, the distant, faint, roar of the motorway, and nothing else. In Nichinan, the morning is filled with the piercing screams of insects, of tiny birds on the tree outside, of my neighbours, yelling in Japanese. The air is as full of noise as it is with colour and heat, and I've grown used to sleeping through it. Here, the coolness, and the calmness, and the silence, have woken me up.

This morning, as I sat in the garden of the house that I grew up in, and I looked at the flowers and the sky and the colours, and I listened to nothing at all, I thought: I'm home. And while I have to leave - am not done with the world quite yet, am not done with the noise and the hotness and the sticky colours, am still hungry for more (even if not necessarily Japan) - these are the colours and the sounds that are part of me. The clearness of the sky, and the silveriness of the light. Just as beautiful, in their own ways, as anything golden and dark that Japan has to offer.

And, as I sat in the garden this morning and felt my toes get cold and a peace inside me that I haven't felt for a long time, I realised that England is still my home. It's still the place I run to when I'm hurting badly inside - as I am now - and it's still the place that makes it better, and calms it and soothes it in ways that I don't expect: in the light, in the noise, in the colours, in the sky. In the people I love who live here, and the land itself: a delicate, subtle, thoughtful land. A land that I came from, and that I return to whenever I need energy, and calmness, and peace, and the courage to go away again. A land that I draw strength from.

England is a part of me. And no matter where I am in the world, or how far I travel, it will always be the bit of me I come back to.

And that is what makes it my home.