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My father has not taken a vacation since 1996, and that one was an accident. A cancelled flight in Mauritius turned a business trip into three days at a beach resort, which he spent making international calls from the lobby and complaining about the humidity. He came back with no photographs and a restructured distribution deal for East Africa. My mother still calls it “the honeymoon I never got.”
So when I suggested we spend five days at a traditional ryokan in Kinosaki Onsen — a small hot-spring town on Japan’s western coast where the primary activities are bathing, walking slowly, and doing spectacularly nothing — my father looked at me like I’d proposed we join an ashram.
“Five days,” he said. “Doing what?”
“Resting, Papa.”
“From what? I’m retired. I rest all day.” This from a man who had, that morning, reorganised the kitchen pantry by expiry date and fired off eleven WhatsApp messages to his former colleagues about GST compliance.
I should explain the trip. My father turned seventy-five this year. My sister and I had pooled together for what we were privately calling Operation Sit Down. The idea was Japan because my father respects Japan — the discipline, the infrastructure, the punctuality of the Shinkansen. “A country that runs on time,” he’d said once, approvingly, as though the entire nation were a well-managed factory floor. We thought this admiration might buy us enough goodwill to get him into a yukata.
We were half right.
Nishimuraya Honkan
Nishimuraya Honkan has been receiving guests in Kinosaki for over 150 years. It is not a hotel. It is a world with its own physics — one where shoes disappear at the entrance, where meals arrive in fourteen small courses, and where the passage of time is marked not by clocks but by the particular quality of light through shoji screens. Our room overlooked a garden so precisely composed it made you feel like a crude and disorderly person just for existing.
My father’s first response was logistical. “Where is the cupboard?” There was no cupboard. “Where do I hang my suits?” He had brought two suits to a hot-spring town. “And the bed is on the floor, beta. On the floor.” The futon, laid out by a woman who moved through the room like a poem, did not impress him.
Dinner was kaiseki — a vegetarian arrangement I’d confirmed three weeks in advance with an email chain so long and so polite it could be published as a novella about cross-cultural courtesy. Each course arrived in its own ceramic universe: a cube of sesame tofu trembling on a leaf, a broth so clear it looked like an apology for existing, pickled vegetables arranged with the seriousness of a peace treaty.
My father picked up his chopsticks, examined a translucent slice of yuba, and said, “Beta, this is the skin of the milk.”
“It’s a delicacy, Papa.”
“At home we throw it away.”
He ate everything.
Walking at Kinosaki Onsen, Image by Rei Imagine, Shutterstock
The thing about Kinosaki is that the town has seven public onsens, and you’re meant to walk between them in your yukata and wooden geta sandals, towel over your shoulder, like a character in someone else’s quieter life. On the second evening, I watched my father — seventy-five years old, former chairman of a mid-sized manufacturing concern in Ludhiana, a man who once made the Deputy Commissioner wait — shuffle down a lantern-lit street in a blue cotton robe and wooden sandals, nodding solemnly at a Japanese grandmother who nodded back.
Two cultures that understand formality recognised something in each other. No words were exchanged. None were needed.
By day three, something began to shift. He stopped asking about the Wi-Fi password. He stopped checking the time. His WhatsApp group — Ludhiana Lions 1975 Batch — received its first-ever message that was not a forwarded article about turmeric or geopolitics. He sent a photograph of the garden. No caption. One of his friends replied: “Paaji, sab theek?”
On the fourth morning, I came down to find him sitting in the garden alone. Not reading. Not on his phone. Just sitting. A cup of matcha in both hands — my father, who has taken his tea with three sugars and Parle-G for fifty years, holding a bowl of bitter green tea and not complaining. The steam rose and disappeared into the cool Kinosaki air.
I almost said something. I didn’t.
There is a Japanese word, ma, for the silence between things — the pause that holds meaning. I had read about it in a book and thought I understood it. Watching my father in that garden, I realised I hadn’t understood it at all. Ma is not emptiness. It is what rushes in when a man who has never stopped moving finally allows himself to be still.
Kichino-yu, Japanese style onsen at Nishimuraya Honkan
On our last morning, the okami — the woman who runs Nishimuraya Honkan the way a matriarch runs a family, with invisible authority and absolute grace — came to see us off. She bowed. My father bowed back, deeper than necessary, the way he bows at gurudwaras.
In the taxi to the station, I asked him what he thought.
He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “The futon was still uncomfortable.”
I laughed. He almost smiled.
At the Shinkansen platform, while I was buying an ekiben lunch box, I turned around and saw him standing at the edge of the platform, looking out at the mountains. He was holding his phone, but he wasn’t looking at it. The screen was dark.
He was just looking at the mountains. Letting them be mountains.
We didn’t talk about it. We never will. ◼
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© This article was first published online in May 2026 – World Travel Magazine.
