It was one of those afternoons in Sapporo when the light seems slightly off-kilter, as though the sun had chosen to lean against a different corner of the sky. I hadn’t planned on getting a haircut. In fact, I hadn’t planned much of anything that day. But when you travel long enough, you realize that some of the most necessary things happen only by accident.
I had walked past two barbershops already. Both were full. Their chairs occupied by men staring blankly into mirrors while clumps of dark hair fell like soft punctuation marks around their shoes. I was about to give up when I noticed a narrow shop tucked between a bakery and a place that sold second-hand jazz records. The glass door carried a hand-painted sign: Nori’s.
I slid the door open and stepped into the scent of sandalwood and something metallic, sharp, like fresh rain against stone. A man looked up from polishing a pair of scissors. He was lean, wearing a black apron, his hair tied back in a way that was both casual and deliberate.
“Do you have time for a cut?” I asked, half expecting him to shake his head like the others.
He smiled, easy and warm. “You’re in luck. Everyone else seems to be busy today, but I’ve got time. Take a seat.”
His name was Nori. I asked him once, between the quiet snips of his scissors, what it meant. He laughed softly and said, “It’s short for Noriyuki. But you can think of it like seaweed. Something simple, always there in Japanese life, holding things together.”
There was something grounding about that explanation. Seaweed is never the main dish, but it binds, balances, gives depth without asking for attention. In a way, that was Nori himself.
As he wrapped the cape around me, we began to talk. His English was flawless, not the cautious rhythm of someone who studied from textbooks, but alive, quick, with the easy slouch of someone who had lived inside the language.
“I was born in Chicago,” he said, running a comb through my hair with an almost meditative precision. “Then moved to Philadelphia when I was still young. Spent most of my childhood there. But my grandmother lived here, in Hokkaido. After college, I came back to see her. And I never left.”
I asked him why. He paused, razor glinting in his hand.
“Because when you’re young, you think the world is measured in how far you can go. But sometimes the most meaningful thing is going back. My grandmother was getting older. She cooked miso soup every morning. She had this way of humming old songs while hanging laundry. I realized that if I didn’t return, I’d miss all of it. And missing it would be permanent.”
He met his wife here, he said, not long after. She was from a nearby town. They had a daughter now, still small enough to think the world was no larger than the park outside their home.
“I wanted to start a business,” Nori continued. “Something honest. Something with craft. I learned that in Japan, only Japanese citizens can hold a barber’s license. Maybe it’s protectionist, maybe it’s tradition, but it meant that I had a kind of luck. I studied, practiced, and here I am.”
His razor moved along the curve of my neck with a calm confidence that made me think of a calligrapher’s brushstroke. He explained his philosophy as he worked.
“A barbershop isn’t just about hair. People come in with their heads heavy. They sit down, and suddenly they have permission to let go of things they’d been holding in. I’ve heard confessions, heartbreak, joy, fear — all while cutting hair. My tools are sharp, but the space I want to create here is soft. A place where people feel lighter when they leave. Not just because their hair is shorter.”
I thought about that as he worked. The hum of the clippers, the low music from a radio on the shelf, the faint creak of the old wooden floor beneath the chair. Everything conspired to create an atmosphere where time moved differently.
At one point, he asked me: “What’s the emotion you feel most often?”
The question hung there, suspended like the strands of hair drifting down around me.
For a long time, I would have answered with something less flattering: restlessness, maybe. A constant pull to be somewhere else, to do something different, to escape the feeling of standing still. But lately, I’ve realized the emotion I return to, the one that threads itself through my days more than anything else, is joy. Not the loud kind, not fireworks or applause. The quiet joy of a warm bowl of ramen after cycling under the August sun. The joy of a 50-cent burek eaten on the streets of Ljubljana at four in the morning. The joy of listening, really listening, to a stranger’s story while the scissors whisper close to your ear.
Joy, I’ve learned, is not about scale. It doesn’t ask for grandness. It asks for presence.
fresh cut in the light
strangers share unguarded words —
joy hums like a blade
When Nori finished, he brushed the last stray hairs from my shoulders and turned the chair toward the mirror. The cut was sharp, deliberate, balanced — but more than that, I noticed I felt lighter. Not just on my head, but in the way I carried myself.
Maybe that’s what joy really is: not something you chase, but something you allow. A state you return to, again and again, like the simple taste of seaweed in miso soup, or the steady hand of a barber who knows that his craft is more than a craft.
Outside, the Sapporo air was still strange with light. I carried the feeling with me as I walked, sharper than the razor, softer than the cape that had rested on my shoulders.
And I thought — joy, the emotion I feel most often, isn’t just mine. It’s something shared, like a story told over a haircut, or a smile across the barber’s chair.
life 