Hakodate · Wednesday — Anchor day: the cemetery and the port

Day 6 · Hakodate

Wednesday — Anchor day: the cemetery and the port

Wednesday, August 26, 2026 Foreigners' Cemetery (Motomachi) / Benten-cho waterfront

in the Protestant section of the foreign cemetery on a hillside above the strait, rows of upright pale stone markers half-sunk into rain-heavy turf, each stone darkened at its base where grass holds water, low grey cloud pressing the ridge flat — stopped mid-row, head tilted toward a stone she has just finished reading, weight not yet shifted to leave

The grass held the rain at the base of every stone. Not mud — just resistance, that particular wetness that soaks through at the ankle and leaves the surface pretending otherwise. I wore the linen trousers knowing this might happen and came anyway, because there was no version of this morning that suggested different shoes.

The cemetery is divided without being segregated. Protestant section, Orthodox section, Chinese section — each with its own stone grammar, the way different languages use different lengths of sentence to say the same thing. The Russian markers ran to the ornate. The Chinese stones were lower, wider, a different relationship to the ground. The Protestant ones stood like they expected to be read. I read them. Missionaries. A merchant from Odessa. A ship's surgeon. Several men who died in their thirties and were buried facing a strait they'd crossed to get here.

in the Chinese section of the same hillside cemetery, low wide granite stones flush near the ground, each with a different spatial relationship to the earth than the Protestant rows behind, damp grass between them, a stone boundary wall at the far edge before the hill drops — crouching to read a low stone, one knee not quite on the grass, paused at the instant before she would have stood again

I tried to reconstruct the decision. To die in a place this far from wherever you'd started. Not the dying — that part makes itself. The decision to come, which contains the dying in it somewhere.

I didn't resolve it. I walked the rows twice and left.

A lacquer bowl of ikura don — glossy orange salmon roe mounded over white rice, a thin strip of nori at the edge, small soy dish alongside on the counter

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The port smelled of diesel and the specific cold of deep water brought up through nets. I found a bollard away from the warehouse end and sat on it — the jacket tied at the waist because the harbour had opinions about open fabric — and watched two tugs work a container ship through the berth. The tugs were absurdly small for the job they were doing. They did it anyway, nudging the steel flank at angles that looked argumentative. The ship moved the way heavy things move: inevitably, slowly, as if it had already decided.

A red tug nudging the steel flank of a container ship at the berth — the tug absurdly small against the hull, the ship's name in faded Cyrillic or kanji at the waterline

The whole operation took forty minutes. I stayed for all of it.

on the Benten-cho waterfront, seated on a steel bollard at the edge of a stone pier where the paving meets the harbour wall drop, the dark green water below, a container ship filling the middle distance, two small orange tugs against its grey flank — the jacket tied at the waist, watching the tug manoeuvre, in the long stillness of the operation — the ship not yet still, the tug angle held

The sky stayed flat grey and even. No drama in the light today. Just the water, going its particular dark green, and the ship, finally still.

What she wore

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I wore the linen trousers knowing the grass would still be wet — the kind of morning where you dress not to compete with anything.

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I tied the jacket at the waist coming down the hill — not because it was cold, but because the harbour wind had opinions.

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Changed for the evening into something that wouldn't fight with the last light — the skirt felt right sitting on the dock as the tugs finished their work.