About the Really Good Slope

To get from home to the Tanimachi Line, I always have to go over a slope that is not exactly gentle.

Climbing it on a summer workday feels utterly hopeless. The sun scorches my skin, and cicadas scream from both sides of the road, so loudly that it feels as if the whole street has broken down.

There is a saying in Japanese: “Life has three kinds of saka: an uphill slope, a downhill slope, and masaka—the unexpected.”

It sounds incredibly corny, like something a senior colleague would say at a company dinner. But every time I walk up that slope, I still think of it.

Walking it every day is genuinely dispiriting, but the slope itself is unambiguous. Go up from here and I reach the Tanimachi Line. Go down and I return home. There are not many things in life that are so clear, so perhaps having one fixed slope is not so bad.

The trees on the slope become almost absurdly green in summer. Crows perch on the branches and simply stand there. Tiny woodlice crawl along the wall, headed somewhere I cannot know. None of them is encouraging me or trying to offer any meaning. They just happen to be there. Yet precisely because they are there, I feel a little calmer.

So in the end, I decided to call it the “Really Good Slope.”