by Carlos Bukowski

Yamazaki Distillery. Osaka, Japan.

The first thing they tell you is to be quiet. Not library quiet, but cathedral quiet. Like you’re about to witness something holy instead of just seeing how they turn grain into the kind of liquid that makes Japanese businessmen weep with gratitude.

This was 1994. I’d been living in Shenzhen for over a year, running a small import business that was doing well enough to afford me trips like this one. Teaching English was behind me; now I was dealing with factories and shipping containers and the kind of money that let you take weekends in Japan to drink whisky that cost more than most people’s monthly salary.

The tour group was exactly what you’d expect: American tourists who pronounced “whisky” like it had an ‘e’ in it, British expats who acted like the Japanese had stolen their birthright, a few Japanese whisky nerds, and one woman who caught my attention the moment I heard her laugh.

Michelle. Vietnamese-French, living in Saigon, with mushroom-shaped hair and an angelic face that belonged on a Renaissance painting. She couldn’t have weighed more than 90 pounds, but there was something substantial about her presence, something that made the rest of the tour group fade into background noise.

Our guide was a small man named Tanaka who spoke English with the kind of precision that made you aware of every lazy syllable you’d ever uttered. He wore a crisp white coat and the expression of someone who had dedicated his life to something greater than himself.

“Yamazaki,” he said, “was founded in 1923 by Shinjiro Torii. He chose this location because of the water.”

I was standing next to Michelle during this introduction, and when Tanaka started explaining the distillation process in rapid Japanese, I whispered a translation in Mandarin without thinking about it.

She turned to me with this look of complete surprise. “Why you speak Chinese?!” she said, loud enough that several people turned around.

“I live in Shenzhen,” I said, switching to English. “Business.”

“But you’re…” she gestured vaguely at my obviously non-Asian face.

“American. But I’ve been in China long enough to dream in Mandarin.”

That broke the ice. During the tour, we ended up walking together, and somewhere around the fermentation room, I offered her one of my headphones. I’d been listening to The National’s new album, something moody and perfect for the contemplative atmosphere of the distillery.

“About Today” was playing when she put the earbud in. She closed her eyes and listened for a moment, then looked at me with this expression I’d never seen before. Like she’d just realized something important about me, or maybe about herself.

“This song,” she said quietly. “It’s…”

“Sad and beautiful at the same time?”

“Like whisky,” she said, and I knew I was in trouble.

The tasting room was where things got serious. Not just the whisky – though that Yamazaki 12 was a revelation, fruit and spice and patience distilled into liquid form – but the way Michelle approached it. She didn’t just taste; she listened to what the whisky was telling her.

“In Vietnam,” she said, holding her glass up to the light, “we have a saying about things that are beautiful and sad. They’re more real than things that are just one or the other.”

By the time the tour ended, we’d made plans to have dinner. By the time dinner ended, we’d made plans to see each other again before our flights the next day. By midnight, we were sharing a hotel room and talking like we’d known each other for years instead of hours.

I’d thought I knew what connection felt like. Mona had been magic, Melissa had been fire, but this was something else entirely. This was recognition. Like I’d been walking around with half a conversation in my head my whole life, and suddenly here was someone who knew the other half.

We made love with the kind of intensity that comes from knowing time is limited. Not desperate intensity – gentle intensity. The kind that says this matters, this moment matters, you matter. When it was over, we lay there talking about everything and nothing until exhaustion finally took over.

I woke up a few hours later to the sound of her voice. She was singing softly, something about closeness and distance and the space between wanting and having. Her voice was barely above a whisper, but it cut through me like the Yamazaki had – clean and precise and impossibly moving.

“What song is that?” I asked.

She turned to me, startled. “Just something… from earlier. From your music.”

The National. She’d been carrying that song with her since the distillery, the same way I’d been carrying the taste of that whisky. Some things stick to you whether you want them to or not.

We had breakfast together at the hotel, and then it was time for airports. Her flight to Saigon, mine back to Hong Kong and then the train to Shenzhen. We exchanged information, made promises about staying in touch, said all the things people say when they don’t want to admit something is ending.

But walking away from her at Kansai Airport, I felt something I hadn’t felt since Mona left. That specific hollowness that comes from knowing you’ve just experienced something rare and might never experience it again.

The Yamazaki I’d bought sat unopened in my apartment in Shenzhen for two weeks. When I finally opened it, I poured a proper glass and put on that National album and tried to recapture whatever had happened in that hotel room. But the whisky just tasted like whisky, expensive and well-made but no longer magical.

Michelle and I wrote letters for a while. This was before email was reliable across borders, before you could stay connected without effort. The letters got shorter, less frequent, until they stopped altogether. Different countries, different lives, different timezones that made everything feel impossible.

But I kept that bottle of Yamazaki until it was gone, and every time I drank it, I remembered the way she’d listened to whisky like it was music, the way she’d sung in the early morning darkness, the way some connections are so perfect they can only last a few hours before reality destroys them.

These days, when I see Japanese whisky on the shelf, I remember both things: the reverence in Tanaka’s voice as he talked about craft and patience, and the way Michelle had understood that beautiful things and sad things are often the same thing.

Some experiences teach you about quality. Others teach you about loss. The best ones teach you that the two aren’t as different as you think.

Carlos Bukowski writes about whisky, connection, and the weight of perfect moments from his apartment in Hollywood. He still listens to The National sometimes, but he’s learned that some songs are better left as memories.