The first time I saw The Great Wave off Kanagawa, Hokusai’s great wave, I was in Japan.

It was the winter of 1969.

I am no longer sure I remember everything exactly as it happened. Memory changes with age. After enough years, it becomes like an old house: some doors remain open, others stick, and entire rooms disappear without warning.

But I remember the cold.

It was a hard winter in Gifu Prefecture. I walked through icy streets with the careful steps of someone learning to respect the ground beneath his feet. The cold air filled my lungs. The houses and streets seemed to have withdrawn into themselves, gathered quietly inside the Japanese winter.

And yet something inside me was burning.

The Wave.

Not a real wave—the kind that rolls toward the shore and breaks at our feet.

This was a wave made of ink, paper, imagination, and time.

A wave that had traveled from another century and, for reasons I have never fully understood, decided to stay with me.

Maybe it was the force of it.

Maybe the movement.

Maybe those little boats, so fragile beneath something so immense.

Or maybe it was Mount Fuji in the distance, quiet and still, as if it knew that every storm eventually passes.

The wave seemed to be shouting.

The mountain said nothing.

Maybe life is a little like that.

We make a great deal of noise while moving through our days. We rush. We struggle. We worry. We celebrate. And somewhere in the distance, something remains silent, waiting for us to understand.

I have walked many streets since that winter.

I have passed through cities I might no longer recognize. I have known people who came into my life to stay and others who remained only long enough to become memories. I have watched friendships begin, love change its shape, and years quietly disappear.

Life has a curious habit of moving on while we are busy living it.

But the Wave stayed.

It followed me through the places I went, a fixed point among so many passing memories.

And when I think about that now, I think about Michiko.

My daughter was born in 1968. When I was in Japan during that winter of 1969, she was still very small. I could not have imagined that, many years later, that Japanese wave and the memory of my daughter would somehow meet inside me.

Michiko did not live with me.

I say that simply, because some things are simple to say even when they contain an entire lifetime.

We did not share the ordinary rhythm of daily life. I was not there for every morning, every discovery, every small detail of the life that continued unfolding while time moved forward.

But over the years, I learned that distance is not an exact measure of love.

Some people live beside us and somehow remain strangers.

Others may be far away and still occupy a place no one else could ever fill.

Michiko came into my life.

And she stayed.

In a different way.

With a different kind of presence.

But she stayed.

Perhaps that is why, today, I connect Michiko and the Wave in my memory.

The Wave came to me through art.

Michiko came to me through life.

One crossed centuries.

The other crossed my existence.

The Wave remained in my memory.

Michiko remained in my heart.

And both, in their own way, taught me that some things do not have to remain before our eyes in order to continue existing within us.

Today, when I look again at The Great Wave, I see much more than Japan.

I see the winter of 1969.

I see the frozen streets of Gifu and a younger man walking through the cold, having no idea which images would survive the years.

I see the places I have been.

The people I have known.

The losses.

The reunions.

And I see Michiko.

Life, after all, may really be made of waves.

Some arrive slowly.

Others take us by surprise.

Some knock us down.

Others pass without leaving a trace.

But there are some that arrive and, for reasons we may never understand, never really leave.

The Wave stayed with me.

And Michiko did too.

Not in the same way.

Not in the same place.

Not with the same closeness.

But in those deep regions where memory and love seem to speak the same language.

After all these years, I still walk, now and then, through the frozen streets of Gifu.

Only now I walk there in memory.

And beside me, the Wave is still there.

And somewhere inside it, Michiko remains.

Some things pass.

Others stay.

Palmari H. de Lucena
August 29, 2026