There was a television.
It was embedded in a wall somewhere inside Narita Airport, a square box with a thick frame and curved glass, playing a sumo match to a terminal that appeared to have emptied itself of almost everyone.
Two enormous wrestlers pressed against one another inside the little glowing screen while the corridor around them remained still. The match continued because television continued, indifferent to the hour and indifferent to whether anybody was watching. I remember standing there at nine years old, tired beyond the point at which tiredness feels ordinary, looking at that small concentration of movement in the middle of so much grey space. I cannot remember who won. I cannot remember whether I watched for thirty seconds or ten minutes. What remains is the contradiction: those bodies colliding with immense force inside the wall while the airport outside the screen seemed to have stopped completely.
It was around two in the morning. Narita was still open, although most of it had withdrawn behind glass and metal. The overhead lights continued along the ceiling in long, pale rows, reflected in the polished floor beneath them. The walkway seemed impossibly wide to me, designed for thousands of people but occupied by almost nobody. A few distant figures may have moved through it, although I cannot trust myself on that point. Perhaps there was a cleaner. Perhaps there were other families folded into rows of seats, sleeping beside their luggage. The strongest version of the memory contains very few people. It is dominated by the proportions of the place: the low perspective of a child, the long corridor, the closed counters, the dark storefronts and the great breadth of floor between one object and the next.
We were travelling from Australia to Italy, with Japan acting as the connector. Even now, that route possesses the strange shape of a dream. Australia behind us, Italy ahead, Japan holding us temporarily between the two. Narita was neither the home we had left nor the place to which we were going. We were passing through it in the middle of the night, existing there only because one flight had ended and another had not yet begun. For a few hours, my family’s life had no fixed country. We were contained by departure boards, luggage, fluorescent light and the promise that eventually somebody would announce the next stage of the journey.
I understood very little of this at the time. Adults describe an international move through decisions, documents, dates, costs, departures and arrivals. A child receives it as disconnected physical information. I knew that it was late. I knew that the shops were closed. I knew that there were robot toys behind one of the windows. I knew that sumo wrestling was playing on a television. I knew that we had come from Australia and were going to Italy, but the true size of that movement was beyond me. I could understand a corridor because I could see its end, or at least believe that I could. I could understand a packet of biscuits because I could hold it. The rearrangement of an entire life could only reach me through such things.
One of the closed shops has remained in my mind for nearly three decades. It was dim behind the glass, with figures and model kits visible inside: Gunpla, Transformers and other Japanese robots whose names I either never knew or have since forgotten. They stood in rows after trading hours, their bodies caught in permanent poses beneath whatever weak display lighting had been left on. The shop was inaccessible, which probably strengthened the memory. Had it been open, perhaps we would have entered, looked around and left, and the experience would have dissolved into the thousands of ordinary retail encounters that followed. Instead, the glass held everything apart. The robots were visible but unreachable, lit within a small chamber of their own while the airport around them slept.
I remember being drawn to Japanese mechanical designs long before I possessed any meaningful vocabulary for them. Giant robots carried an unusual mixture of scale, precision and personality. They were machines, yet they stood like people. Their faces were masks, their bodies were architecture, and each one appeared to belong to a history I had arrived too late to understand. Behind the glass at Narita, they seemed to belong perfectly to the hour. The terminal itself felt mechanical: repeating panels, fixed lights, numbered sections, sealed doors, moving belts and embedded screens. The figures in the shop were smaller versions of the building around them, complex forms waiting in silence for somebody to activate them.
There were also koala-shaped biscuits filled with chocolate cream. I remember the crisp shells and the soft chocolate inside them, and the pictures of individual koalas printed across their surfaces. They were small enough to inspect one by one before eating. At that age, novelty could hold my attention through exhaustion. Each biscuit was slightly different, carrying another koala engaged in some tiny activity that disappeared as soon as I bit into it. Somewhere between Australia and Italy, in an airport in Japan, I was eating cartoon koalas. I did not register any symbolism in that arrangement. Australia had simply reappeared in miniature on a Japanese snack, rendered as something sweet and portable while the actual country receded behind us.
The memory occupies 1997, but childhood chronology is rarely as orderly as the dates suggest. I was born in 1988. There had been a shorter visit to Italy in 1995, followed by a return to Australia. Then came the larger move in 1997, after which we remained in Italy until 2000. I know this sequence intellectually. I can write the years in order and draw a clean line between them. Inside my mind, however, the journeys have not remained properly separated. Airports overlap. Flights lose their direction. A room from the earlier visit can appear beside an event from the later move. Roads, relatives, suitcases and arrivals gather into one extended period of movement whose internal borders have softened.
There are memories I can locate immediately, and others that resist every effort to place them. I sometimes recognise a scene without knowing whether I was visiting somewhere or beginning to live there. A temporary room and a long-term home can occupy the same emotional distance. The brief 1995 journey and the 1997 relocation have spent years pressing against one another, exchanging details. I hesitate before declaring that a particular image belongs absolutely to one trip. Narita is different. The year, the hour and the route seem unusually stable. Australia to Italy. Japan between them. Two in the morning. Closed shops. Sumo on the box television. Chocolate-filled koala biscuits. The long grey concourse.
Perhaps the stillness protected those details. Much of childhood vanishes because too much is happening around it. Narita offered very little action, and so the few available objects gained unusual definition. The television became the television. The shop became the shop. The biscuits became the biscuits. Nothing competed with them. There was no crowd to break the corridor into smaller spaces, no busy retail noise, no daylight coming through the glass to orient me. There was only the immense interior of the airport and the handful of things that remained awake within it.
I suspect that exhaustion also altered the scale of the place. At two in the morning, after a long flight, the mind no longer measures distance accurately. The polished floor seemed to continue indefinitely. The ceiling repeated itself far into the terminal. Closed storefronts became dark compartments filled with inaccessible worlds. The television glow appeared brighter because everything around it had been reduced. I was old enough to observe the airport closely but too young to understand why the images felt so distinct. I was looking at an ordinary international terminal during its quietest hours, yet the experience settled into the part of memory usually reserved for dreams.
What strikes me now is that the connector has endured more clearly than many of the destinations. Narita was a pause, a few hours inside a journey that covered years of family life, yet it became one of the fixed points by which I attempt to orient that period. The homes on either side have rooms missing from them. Whole months of childhood have faded almost completely. The transfer airport remains illuminated. It still contains the closed toy shop. The sumo match is still underway. The corridor is still waiting for the crowds that will return in the morning.
There was so much moving. Places arrived before previous places had properly settled. One country became another, then became the first country again, then changed once more. At the time, I adapted because children adapt before they understand what they are adapting to. I carried whatever could travel: toys, drawings, impressions, familiar foods, private fixations and the basic assumption that adults knew where we were going. Later, when I tried to look back, I found that the movement had scattered the record. The broad events remained, but their edges had worn away. I knew where we had lived, yet I could not always reconstruct the exact path between one life and the next.
This blog has gradually become a place where I can attempt that reconstruction. I am not trying to produce a flawless archive or force certainty onto every surviving fragment. Memory does not become more honest simply because it is arranged confidently. I would rather preserve uncertainty where uncertainty exists and concentrate on what has genuinely remained. A person can build a truthful account from incomplete pieces, provided the gaps are allowed to remain visible. Writing gives each fragment a position. The closed storefront can stand beside the television. The biscuits can sit beside the journey. The child can remain nine years old without being made to understand what only the adult can now perceive.
As I write this, I can see him from behind more readily than I can see his face. He is small within the terminal, wearing loose dark jeans and a pale striped shirt, his brown hair catching a little of the overhead light. He has stopped somewhere along the wide concourse. Perhaps he is watching the wrestlers on the screen. Perhaps he is looking through the hobby-shop glass. Perhaps he is simply waiting for his family to begin moving again. He does not know that he will remember this place for the rest of his life. He does not know that the journeys surrounding it will one day become difficult to separate, or that he will eventually sit down and try to recover them through sentences.
The match continues inside the television. The stores remain closed. Australia is behind him, Italy is ahead of him, and Japan holds him for a few suspended hours between the two. The airport is nearly empty, but it contains enough: a corridor, a screen, a shop window, a packet of biscuits and a child too tired to understand why he is noticing everything so closely. Nearly thirty years later, I return to collect those images. I place them beside one another and let them form what account they can. The scattered pieces do not become complete, but they finally have somewhere to rest.
