The Eighth Farewell: Aoyama Cemetery, Tokyo

To be seated on the stone benches of the Aoyama Cemetery on my last night in the city, with streetlamps and stones for company, it feels fitting, because it is an echo of so many evenings spent here. This is a space unlike any other, in this city or in this country. Tokyo has some fine cemeteries, the one in Yanaka is wonderful, smaller and quainter, the Zoshigaya has its own charm, but the Aoyama is unique.

The most prominent part of Japan’s identity is the seamless marriage of the old and the new, each brushing shoulders with the other while giving each other space and deference. Neon-bright arcades share walls with ancient shrines while Kimono-clad ladies ride escalators into minimalist cathedrals of capitalism. Time moves in both directions here, and it is a sight to behold.

The Aoyama Cemetery is a perfect encapsulation of that. It stands in the centre of the city, an endless expanse of prime real estate filled with gravestones, surrounded by modern skyscrapers who watch over it like sentinels. And at no other time is it more beautiful than at night, with views of calligraphed gravestones framed against the stars and the dim, distant lights of floating offices.

And that is good enough to keep me here tonight.

***

I have no interest in the macabre and to me, cemeteries are anything but that. They are spaces of peace, of memory, of grief, of dense time, of love. I wonder, are there any other places that remind us more intensely of the human capacity to love? 

The love we have for the departed, it is perhaps as pure as it gets because it is done without expectation, without requital. Cemeteries are windows into how we love, filled with symbols of the living’s affection for the departed. Every sculpted stone, every engraved word, every fragrant flower is an act of love and being there, surrounded by all that unadulterated emotion, exalts me.

Every culture has its own traditions, its own ways of expressing these affections, and this curiosity makes me seek out cemeteries everywhere I go. Each is unique in its own way, yet so fundamentally human. There’s the Pere Lachaise in Paris (where I spent my last birthday), the Cimitero Accatolico in Rome (where Keats, my high priest of beauty, is buried), the Highgate in London, the Old Jewish Cemetery of Prague (the New one too, Kafka’s resting place)… These are some of my favourite places in the world, and the Aoyama Cemetery is part of that list now.