Our Best Day at Work Ever 3April Tokyo

The relentless need to travel and discover things in order to spend our retirement productively does have a downside: not every day can possibly be the best day at work ever.  After today perhaps we should accept that we have reached some sort of pinnacle and console ourselves to the fact that some measure of disappointment must eventually follow.

It may have been the residual brain scarring from the visit to the hopelessly overcrowded Fish Markets that made us more receptive to cheery things, but when we arrived outside the National Art Center and saw Yayoi Kasuma staring at us from the posters, her hair a fiery red, on a landscape that seemed to have been personally planted by herself, we began to get the teeniest inkling that today may just turn out to be a little bit special.

There is no way to adequately describe the explosion of colour that engulfed us when we entered the exhibition, nor the overwhelming joy that left all standing giddy with stupid grins etched across their countenance.   None of us could leave, we scurried from one painting to another like stupid school children, overwhelmed by it all.  Perhaps it was the best exhibition we’ve ever seen. Perhaps it was the best we will ever see.  Who knows?

Whatever the case we departed full of ebullience, noticing that every little thing along the way had perhaps just a tinge more colour than it had before. There were the almost equally stunning buildings and exhibitions and sights of course, the brown poodles with dresses and the boutiques that serviced them, their, hairdressers, those Super Mario carts being driven through the city streets, but none of that could truly begin to compare.  Not even the tacos we had for dinner in the German beer hall with Australian friends while lederhosen clad singers serenaded us with Cherry Blossom songs in Japanese to old German folk tunes.    Not even that.