The most noticeable differences between Japan and the US are of scale: Japan, as a rule, tends towards smaller and denser construction. What’s impressive is the lengths to which the Japanese take this tendancy. My first day there, I saw a one-car driveway with a small hydraulic lift installed so that it could fit two; I saw a little purple excavator not much larger than a typical American SUV. Roads themselves tend to be about as wide as one and a half American lanes, and they lack sidewalks; the expectation is that most traffic is pedestrian and that cars will just scoot carefully past one another when they do meet.

The real fun wasn’t in any individual artifact or oddity, though, however amusing. It lay in the simple fact that whenever I wanted, I could set out on my bicycle and find something new and cool. I explored a giant temple one day on nothing more than a whim, and found acres of carefully landscaped Buddhism. I rode out another day and found a flooded golf course: perfect challenge terrain for a mountain biker. I went out on an extended trip once and saw the World’s Fair, featuring huge and elaborate displays of corporate prowess. Another extended trip got me to the International Robot Exhibition. Other days brought nothing more than the simple satisfaction of seeing the sun rise over a canal in the outskirts of Tokyo, and realizing that the national emblem of a red circle on white background is a perfect illustration of the sight.

There was the first weekend I arrived in my apartment, when I went out to explore my surrounding area. I got tremendously lost, and wandered for a good four hours–but the things that I found! I saw ordinary road bridges, decorated with gull sculptures spaced so that bypassing cars would see them rotoscoped into flight. I saw factories and ironworks adjacent to apartments; I saw machinery which looked both well-worn and far too preposterous to be real. I saw farmers’ houses with ripe onions sitting on the stone fence and beans hanging by strings from the eaves. I saw rice paddies stretching to the horizon in one direction, and busy suburbia in the other.

There was an unimportant summer night when I went out for a walk, expecting nothing more than fresh air. What I found, instead, were two separate fireworks displays; two towns celebrating for no reason more than that fireworks are fun. To simply walk toward unexpected festival explosions on a whim for over an hour, through rice fields and hamlets, was a uniquely Japanese experience.

There aren’t many places in the world where one can wander easily on foot and see all of this. I was privileged to have been able to live in such a place; the satisfaction of exploration was one of the reasons I loved living in that country so much.

They said that Merlin lived his life backwards. It was true enough, in a sense: a dangerous experiment in clairvoyance while he was but an apprentice left him forever changed. For the rest of his life, he could sharply remember the future, but could offer only hazy predictions as to any moment prior to the current.

Every Christian sect, no matter their other differences, focuses on the life and death of Jesus Christ as a pivotal point in the relationship between Man and God; a turning away from the vengeful and capricious god of the Old Testament, in favor of more benign policies saying to “love thine neighbor as thyself.” What they don’t realize is that they’re looking at the whole thing backwards.

Just as there is no effect without a cause, there is no cause without an effect. The whole machinery of time runs equally well backwards as forwards. As it happens, Divinity perceives time to flow in the opposite direction that humans do.

Jesus Christ was not the culmination of the relationship of a chosen people with their god; he was a toe in the water that got bitten off by piranhas. God was just getting really interested in this world and its inhabitants, so he took a risk, and created an avatar to go down into the world and spread his message. For thirty-three years, God relinquished omniscience, so that his son could live truly as a human.

Imagine, then, his rage upon waking up to discover that the human species heard his message of love and tolerance, and responded by brutally murdering the product of so much effort. The grief of a parent who has lost their child knows no end; no matter what happens next, they will never reclaim that hope for their future. The grief of God, weeping for his Son, was no different. He had graced the world with the physical manifestation of divine love and tolerance, only to have those qualities killed.

This was a turning point for God. The truce with the Israelites was a mark of attention, but never one of favor. Their nation only thrived when it was engaged in bloody conquest; as soon as they settled down and built a great Temple, it was destroyed and its stones cast to the winds. Eventually, from God’s perspective, the nation grew weak, and unable to conquer any more. He amused himself then by driving them through the desert for 40 years, eventually to become slaves of the Egyptians.

For the rest of existence, God tormented humans in ways great and petty. He found a devoted follower, and ruined that man’s life. He was capricious, and violent, and destructive. Eventually, he had whittled the human race down to two people. In their innocence, in their stupidity, his heart softened, and for the first time in four thousand years, he saw that there could be good in these people.

After that, there was only one option left. After planning for a day, God spent days softening the world into entropy. First to go were Woman and Man, which he rubbed into the clay bank of a stream. After that, God destroyed the birds of the air, and the beasts of the land, and the fish of the sea. And there were no observers but God, but if there were, they would have seen on the next day the sun and moon and planets swirling out into cosmic gas, and all the stars winking out one at a time. The last heavenly body to go was the planet Earth, for God resided there as much as the humans did. Still, he rubbed out the grasses and the trees, and blended the oceans and the mountains, until there was only mud.

And finally, God himself left the universe, and there was Light no more.

Behind him, the earth dissolved entirely into entropy.