Night behind closed doors—
strange rivers of questions flow
where language falters
It was late, nearly midnight, when I first found the Irish bar in Morioka. It was the kind of place you could pass a dozen times without noticing, tucked half a floor below the street, its small window fogged and humming with quiet music. Above the door, a wooden sign read “Patrick’s,” but there was no shamrock, no green neon, just a battered blue bicycle chained to a post outside.
Maybe it was the rain, or maybe it was a kind of unnamable loneliness that follows you sometimes when you travel solo, but I pushed open the heavy door and stepped in. The place was warm, the walls crowded with faded rugby jerseys and a map of Ireland that had long since curled at the edges. At the counter, a row of empty stools. Behind them, a bartender who looked bored enough to be in two places at once.
There was one other customer—a man in his late thirties, nursing a pint of Guinness, his jacket folded neatly over the barstool next to him. He was Japanese, hair just starting to thin at the crown, face with that healthy, outdoor glow you only see in people who spend their mornings by the sea. He nodded as I sat down a few stools away.
The bartender slid me a menu, but I pointed at the tap. “Guinness, please.” The first sip was dark and smooth, a little too cold, but real enough to remind me of the last time I’d drunk Guinness, years ago, in some other city that now felt like a dream.
For a while, we sat in silence. The only sounds were the muted clink of glasses and a faint hum from the speakers—Van Morrison, maybe, or a band trying to sound like him. I pulled out my book, but only half-heartedly. My thoughts kept drifting to the day—a long train ride from Hakodate, a slow walk across the bridge in the rain, the feeling that everything was new and slightly slippery, as if the city were waiting to see what I’d do next.
It was the other man who spoke first. His English was careful, almost formal, but with a warmth that made up for its hesitations.
“Are you… traveling?”
I nodded. “Passing through. I’ve always wanted to see Morioka in the rain.”
He smiled, as if that was the most reasonable thing in the world. “I came here from Hachinohe. I am… volleyball coach. My team played match today.”
“Did you win?”
He shrugged, then laughed. “No. But it was good match. Good to travel.” He took a long sip of his pint, then studied the foam. “I come to this bar when I am in Morioka. To practice English. Usually, I meet foreigners. Tonight, only you.”
I grinned. “Tonight, only us.”
We talked, as strangers do, at first about the safe things: where we’d been, how the city felt at night, whether the Guinness here tasted different from Tokyo. I learned he was a teacher by trade—middle school, mostly science—and that he’d built his own house on a bluff above the sea, so every morning he could wake and watch the sun rise. “Not many people like to live so close to ocean,” he said, voice softening. “Typhoons, salt in the air. But I like the sound. Reminds me to start again each day.”
We drifted from one subject to the next—Japanese whisky, Irish music, the best ramen in Aomori. The bar filled, emptied, filled again. Sometimes we switched to Japanese, then back to English when he wanted to practice. There was no hurry, no pressure. Just two people sharing a small, warm space on a night when the world outside seemed endless and wet.
At some point, after a third Guinness, he leaned in and said, “Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“What is it… you are most curious about?” His eyes were serious, and for a moment, I thought he might be asking for himself, not just for me.
I paused, feeling the weight of the question settle on my tongue. I could have said anything: the mind, the body, why people fall in love, why they drift apart. Instead, I looked around the room—the battered jerseys, the handwritten notes pinned behind the bar, the map with its faded lines—and said, “I’m curious about why things change. Why we keep finding new questions, even when we think we’ve answered the old ones. Why there never seems to be a final answer.”
He considered this, nodding slowly, as if tasting the words. “When I was young, I wanted to know everything. But now, I think… it is better to be curious than to be finished.” He smiled, the lines at the corners of his eyes deepening. “My students ask questions every day. Sometimes I don’t know answer. But I tell them, that is not a problem. The problem is when we stop asking.”
I thought about that, about how so much of my life felt like standing at the edge of something infinite. “Do you ever feel like… no matter how much you learn, there’s always more?”
He nodded, grinning. “Always more. That is why I like sunrise. Every day, the same sun, but never the same sky.”
We sat in comfortable silence for a while, each of us turning the idea over like a smooth stone.
After a while, he pulled a small notebook from his jacket pocket. The pages were crammed with English phrases, half-remembered volleyball scores, sketches of houses, and, tucked into the back, a poem about the sea written in careful, looping characters.
He handed it to me. “I write to remember what I am still learning. I make mistakes, but that is good. Mistakes show me where to look next.”
I leafed through the pages, careful not to smudge the ink. “I think mistakes are how we move forward. Every time we get something wrong, we’re one step closer to something right.”
He tapped his glass to mine. “To mistakes, then. And to questions.”
“To questions,” I echoed.
We finished our pints. Outside, the rain had stopped, and the city was washed clean, gleaming in the quiet light of the midnight streetlamps.
Before I left, he said, “If you ever come to Hachinohe, you must visit my house. You can see sunrise. We will ask more questions.”
I promised I would. I haven’t been yet. But sometimes, in the early morning, when the sky over Bern is just beginning to brighten, I think of that small Irish bar in Morioka, of strangers turning into friends, of mistakes and questions and the beginning of infinity.
life 
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