I collapsed on a bed, exhausted after 23 hours of travel. When I awoke, at 12:30 a.m., I looked around. I had three beds to myself. Cable TV. A heated toilet. Luxuries far beyond what my wife and I enjoy in our two-room apartment 75 minutes away. Most of all, an unexpected kind of freedom: Nobody could reach me; there was nowhere else I could be. I could spend all day in my pajamas, if I so wished, binge-watching the N.F.L. playoffs for 138 straight hours. As I positioned myself perfectly on the windowsill, I saw a giant Ferris wheel lit up in rainbow colors, radiant in the dark.
More on the Coronavirus Pandemic
We all know that a holiday means liberation from your habits as much as from your home; even in a place not far from where you live, you have the chance to be someone different from the self you know too well. And to see the world you thought you knew afresh. No tickets to buy, no itineraries to fret over. No visas, no injections, no fancy clothes, no people to impress. I’d been living near Osaka for 34 years, but now, for the first time ever, I was getting to see a small part of it from within.
So why not make the most of even an enforced staycation? As Hannah Arendt noted, we cannot be free unless we recall we’re subject to necessity. When the sun came up the next morning, I noticed I was looking out on a restaurant called Joyfull, and a great expanse of blue water and blue sky. An ocean view!
Outside my room, a burly security officer patrolled the corridor. A chair barred my exit. On the chair, however, three times a day appeared a bag of carefully packed goodies. Sweet tangerines and tubs of yogurt, small boxes of pasta and green-tea mochi. I learned to stockpile my salads for when I awoke, at 12:30 a.m., to save my bottles of un-English tea for post-Covid-test celebrations. In some ways, I was getting to fly across the Pacific again and again, but in a first-class suite, and without turbulence or cabin-attendant announcements.
In the days that followed, I marveled at the globe-trotting energy (and annotated every chapter) of an 896-page biography of Tom Stoppard that I would never have completed otherwise. I finally saw that four-hour documentary about the Grateful Dead. Accountable to no one, I could watch every match at the Australian Open, even though my wife might otherwise have been lobbying, hard, for “The Crown.” When a friend sent me his 448-page memoir, he was probably surprised to receive a detailed, 21-paragraph response to every word of it the following morning.
