It's Monday afternoon here now.  About this time tomorrow, I'll be on the Narita Express train headed back to the airport and, eventually, Chicago.  I spent much of this morning in a fruitless search for the green tea my wife asked me to buy.  I find it comical that ocha-no-hapa (tea leaves) are nowhere to be found in Ochanomizu (the name of the neighborhood where I'm staying, which literally means "water for tea"). 

   On Saturday, I had several nice get-togethers with former students from UCLA and ICU, including one in a back-alley izakaya in Roppongi that I know I'll never be able to find again.  Yesterday, I saw a couple of films in the Kamei Fumio retrospective at the National Film Center, did some Christmas shopping at Takashimaya and Maruzen, and then headed off to an izakaya near Tokyo Station with a couple of my former UCLA graduate students. 

   I'm still mulling over how to spend my last evening here.  In fact, I'm ready to head home.  It's been a good trip, I suppose, and I was able to get a fair amount of work done as well as see many old friends.  But the euphoria that Tokyo normally produces in me never quite arrived. 

   Usually when I step off the plane at Narita, I feel like I'm sitting on top of the world.  I was looking forward to that rush this time, after a year when I've often felt like the world was sitting on top of me.  But I've discovered that, two months after my mother's death, even Tokyo is sad.  The change of scenery didn't elicit the desired change of heart, and now I'm feeling a bit like Dorothy in Oz, tapping my ruby slippers together and chanting, there's no place like home, there's no place like....

   Besides, I expect to be back here in Tokyo in something like twelve weeks.