And you came to Finland to build a station?""No I came here on vacation to visit a friend.""That's good," the driver said. "Vacations and friends are the two best things in life.

No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself. It’s like your shadow. It follows you everywhere. -Komura

all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody's reach. A place beyond the flow of time.

It was a different sense of isolation from what he normally felt in Japan. And not such a bad feeling, he decided. Being alone in two senses of the word was maybe like a double negation of isolation. In other words, it made perfect sense for him, a foreigner, to feel isolated here. The thought calmed him. He was in exactly the right place.