I came for the rain. I stayed because the rain in Kanazawa is the most thoughtful weather I have lived in. It rearranges your week without asking permission, and after six months you find that you have begun to write differently because of it.
The decision to choose a small Japanese city for the third year of a long, deliberate decade is not, on paper, optimal. The tax position is unfavourable. The visa pathway is more administrative than the alternatives. The internet, in three of the four buildings I considered, is poor.
And yet. The cost of living a serious creative life — quiet, generous, walkable, and surrounded by people who are good at their work — is lower here than in any of the other cities I considered, including some of the cheapest. Kanazawa is what happens when a place has decided that quality is the variable that matters and is uninterested in optimising any of the others.
I will leave in a year, possibly. I will be different when I do.