“I’m doing the best I can,” Beth texts me.

It’s 5:23 in the morning my time.

I’m in Kyoto.

Beth’s in an intensive care unit in Winston Salem, North Carolina.

It’s her third admittance since she began her cancer journey in early 2025.

I know she hates being in the hospital, but I smile at her text just the same.

It’s what our mother always said.

Whenever we called on Mother at her senior living apartment, where she was placed after she broke her hip, she’d smile and say. “Well, I’m doing the best I can.”

It became her mantra.

And now, over the distance that separates me from my sister, our mother still connects us.

Our mother and Japan.

We were both born here, five years apart. Beth in an army hospital, me on the kitchen table in the family house. Both of us have “Fukuoka” on our birth certificates. Signed by the same doctor, Ephraim F. Braverman, CAPT, MC.

I’ll be heading to Fukuoka in a few weeks.

For the meantime, though, I’m in Kyoto thinking of my sister.

I’m staying in a cozy apartment alongside the Eizan Railway. The trains rattle my window as they rush past, and I can catch snippets of conversations people have as they wait along the platform. I realize I am not far from the Seika University guest house in Shugakuin where Beth and I stayed in 2006, the summer Beth came with me to Japan.

That summer, we met at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, Beth flying from Raleigh and I from St. Louis. Meeting mid-journey allowed us to share the long trans-Pacific flight together. It also allowed me to guide Beth from the airport in Osaka to our guest house in Kyoto.

Beth’s Kakejiku

My friend, Rebecca Jennison, a Professor of Humanities at Seika, helped arrange the lodgings. She met us there when the MK taxi from the airport dropped us off. It was dusk and the tree frogs had begun to sing.

We were the only people in the facility, which turned out to be a lovely old villa within feet of the beautiful Manshuin Temple.

At the time, I had never been so far to the north before in Kyoto, and I felt a little intimidated, uncertain where to find the bus stop or a grocery store.

We were jet-lagged, but giddy with the excitement of our adventures.

Alone in the sprawling villa, surrounded by cedars, sasa bamboo, and tangles of hydrangea, we felt like fairytale princesses peering out at the growing darkness. Once the cicadas stopped singing, the silence swept over us as surely as sleep.

The following morning, we set out early and headed to the antique market at Kitano Tenmangu. Beth enjoyed poking through the stalls. I remember she bought a kimono pattern stencil and a small scroll with delicate calligraphy. Beth was attracted to the beautiful light blue color of the paper on the scroll surrounding the dark thin calligraphy. When the seller told her the writing was of a poem, she was sold.

Years later Beth posted a photograph of the scroll on Facebook, asking for help reading it. (I wasn’t able to!) and Gian-Piero Persiani told her it was actually two poems from the Man’yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, 759).

He shared McCullough’s translation of one of the poems:

Ah now it is spring,
the season when sprouts appear
on coarse-leaved bracken
alongside the waterfall
cascading over the rocks.

He noted “the word iwabashiru (racing over the rocks) against the blue background looks like water rushing down.”

Beth in Uno Kimono Archway

Following our outing to Kitano, we returned to the Shugakuin area and had a quiet dinner in our abandoned villa.

We feasted on the nibbles and treats we picked up on our way home.

Beth’s tastebuds were still attuned to a little girl’s Japanese palate, her memory sparking with each familiar taste. We ate inarizushi, o-mochi, and o-senbei—all the things a five-year-old had coveted.

Before we crashed for the night, we had fun costuming ourselves and taking photos. I dressed Beth in the beautiful cherry-petal-patterned kimono that Uno Chiyo’s secretary, Fujie-san had given me the previous year. I had brought the kimono with me to wear when meeting my dance teacher Nishikawa Senrei Sensei. Later that summer, after Beth left Japan, I planned to take part in the Traditional Theatre Training Workshop, practicing again with Senrei Sensei on Nihon buyō.

Since we had the villa to ourselves, we posed in different rooms. In one photograph Beth is seated, gazing at an antique blue and white plate I bought at Tenjin-sama.

Beth at the desolate guesthouse in Shugakuin

Our week in Kyoto flew by. Beth accompanied me to Tokyo, where I attended an Asian studies conference. We met up with our older sister, Judy, there and then traveled to Fukuoka.

It was a return for all of us. Back to a city that had meant so much but for the most part had lived on in dreams and memories. It was vaguely familiar yet strangely unfamiliar. The street names were the same, but buildings were all different.

And, this trip I am on now that has taken me away from the United States and away from my sister, will send me back to Fukuoka, our birthplace. I feel both closer to Beth, thinking of our earlier trip to Japan, and faraway.

I would prefer to be in Winston Salem right now at Beth’s bedside.

And I wonder what serendipity brought me back to an area of Kyoto where she and I shared such lovely adventures.

To be honest, I cannot now remember where the desolate villa was, and I’ve long since lost the address.

It feels like a dream in a way.

And because of that, because it is not completely real, I’m allowed to return to it with Beth in the after image of photographs.

We are not together, but in truth, we are not that far apart, either.

Japanese poets trusted in the pathway of dreams. Though loved ones might be separated by day, at night, through dreams, they were joined.

I feel this too.

Being here, being in a place that resonates with memories, I feel perhaps I am not so far away.

I find comfort in this pathway of dreams poem by Fujiwara Shunzei (1114-1204):

Upon the path of dreams
I saw a house I used to know so well;
In reality, it is
Near to Utsu Mountain,
A hut all twined with ivy…

“Thanks for chiming in from Kyoto!” Beth writes in reply to an email I sent earlier telling her where I was. “I wish I could hear the tree frogs sing!”

Just like that we are back in the desolate villa beneath Manshuin, imaginary princesses playing dress up.

And I know Beth is “doing the best she can.”