The Beautiful Sadness Of The Yamazaki Distillery
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
Patron Silver Surfer Gods
Patrón Silver. Just saying the name makes my sinuses clear up – that tequila was always the perfect cure for a runny nose which I, ahem, had a lot of during that time. But it also makes something else happen, nothing to do with congestion and everything to do with memory. This was 2003. I was living with Mona in a condo overlooking the ocean, and we had this ritual. Every Friday, we’d drive down to the store and buy a bottle of Patrón. Sometimes two, if we were feeling particularly alive. We had money then. Not rich money, but enough money to not have to work or do anything we didn’t want to do, for a little while. Enough to just be in love and enjoy life. Mona had come into some money, and I’d sold a screenplay that would never get made but paid like it might. “This won’t last forever,” she’d say, holding up the bottle, “let’s drink it like it will.” The bottle would catch the light from our ocean-facing windows, that silver liquid looking like liquid moonlight, like bottled starlight, like something you might find if you cracked open the night sky and let it pour into a glass. And when we drank it – always neat, always slowly, always with the kind of ceremony that made our beachfront condo feel like a palace – strange things would happen. Not drunk things. Magic things. I swear to God, that condo would get bigger when we drank Patrón. The walls would stretch, the ceiling would lift, and suddenly we had room to dance. Mona would put on some music and we’d move around that space like we had a ballroom, like the laws of physics bent themselves around the silver fire in our bellies. And the colors. Jesus, the colors that would bloom from that bottle. We’d be sitting on our king-sized bed – we’d finally bought real furniture, figured we might as well live like adults while we could afford to – and the tequila would hit our bloodstreams and suddenly the white walls were painted with auroras. Greens and blues and purples that had no business existing in a beachfront condo. “Do you see that?” Mona would whisper, pointing at the patterns of light dancing across our ceiling. “I see everything,” I’d whisper back, and I meant it. The Patrón showed us things. Made us see things. Not hallucinations – something realer than that. Like it stripped away the filters that normally keep you from seeing the magic that’s always there, hiding in plain sight. We’d make love on that mattress surrounded by impossible colors, tasting silver lightning on each other’s lips, and afterwards the room would hum with something that wasn’t quite music but wasn’t quite silence either. Like the universe was purring. Like we’d found the frequency that everything vibrates to when nobody’s listening. Mona was an artist too- the kind that believes art can change the world – and when she danced after we’d shared a bottle of Patrón, her feet wouldn’t quite touch the ground. I’m not speaking metaphorically here. I watched her floating three inches above our scratched hardwood floor, moving to rhythms that existed somewhere between the music and the heartbeat of the ocean outside our window. “You’re flying,” I’d tell her. “We’re all flying,” she’d say. “We just don’t know it.” We’d sit on our balcony with shots of that silver magic, watching the ocean stretch out below us like liquid mercury, like a living thing breathing light. And sometimes – I swear this is true – we could see the dreams rising from other windows along the beach. Actual dreams, colored like smoke and shaped like the things people wished for in the dark. “When we make it,” Mona would say, and the words would shimmer in the air between us like heat waves, “we’ll have a house where we can see both the ocean and the mountains.” “When we make it,” I’d say, watching my words take flight like silver birds, “we’ll drink Patrón every night.” “When we make it,” we’d say together, and the phrase would hang in the air above the water like a promise the universe was actually listening to. We thought we were playing at being adults, but looking back, I think we were actually playing at being gods. The Patrón gave us that kind of confidence, that kind of power. Like we could reshape reality just by wanting it badly enough, just by drinking deep enough from the bottle that held liquid starlight. The magic was real. I know how that sounds, but it was. The room really did get bigger. Mona really did dance on air. The colors really did paint themselves across our walls. The dreams really did rise from the windows of the sleeping beachfront like prayers made visible. But magic, like everything else good in this world, doesn’t last. The tsunami was building even then, of course. We just couldn’t see it through the aurora that surrounded us every Friday night. The money was running out faster than we’d calculated. My screenplay money was gone, and the next one wasn’t selling. Mona’s money had seemed infinite when we started, but infinity has a way of becoming finite when you’re not paying attention to the math. The fights started small, but they grew in the spaces between the magic. Whether we should start looking for real jobs. Whether this whole period had been a beautiful mistake. Whether we should let go of the condo and move somewhere cheaper. The Patrón started tasting less like possibility and more like denial. Less like alchemy and more like expensive procrastination. The magic began to fade. The walls stopped expanding. Mona’s feet started touching the ground when she danced. The colors dulled to their normal, depressing shades. The dreams stopped rising from the windows of other condos, or maybe we just stopped being able to see them. She left on