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Nobody runs in Japan. A nation of naturally fast walkers has no reason to pick up its pace--except for emergencies like a closing train door. During four years in Tokyo, I've found the only runners besides myself to be senior citizens chasing a better cholesterol count or teenagers trying to make the high-school team.

I was jogging at a pathetically slow pace, the better to weave between office workers without toppling them. The city is crowded, and there are unwritten rules about knocking people down. At the Roppongi Crossing intersection, I had to wait two minutes for the light to change so that I could cross over and go three blocks farther to the Kayama Kaikan, the landmark building that was headquarters for one of Japan's leading schools of flower arranging.

Being late was my fault. I had lingered over my morning coffee, watered all my plants, and found a half dozen other reasons to dither so that, in the end, I had to jog from the train station to the school. As my aunt Norie frequently points out, my job as a freelance antiques buyer gives me control over my time. Not making it to the Kaikan on time was my own passive-aggressive response to her demands.

Being half Japanese and half American, I sometimes struggle to fit in with my father's Yokohama relatives. I can understand most of the jokes in movies, drink tea correctly, and even prepare my own pickled daikon radishes. Still, I was clueless about ikebana, the uniquely Japanese art of flower arrangement. The last time I overstuffed an urn with plum branches, my aunt stared at it without speaking. Shortly after that, she informed me that I was enrolled as a part-time student atthe Kayama School.

I'd only been to the Kayama Kaikan twice, but that was enough for me to learn that in ikebana, less is more, and I'd rather spend less time arranging flowers in an overheated classroom and more time outdoors. That Tuesday morning in late March was bright, with temperatures in the sixties--almost time for the blooming of sakura, the cherry trees that are Japan's premier symbol. A weatherman on the morning news forecast that Tokyo's cherry trees would be in flower within five days, remaining at peak condition for no more than two weeks. Viewers were encouraged to plan their cherry blossom viewing parties accordingly.

"But watch closely, because clouds over the moon may mean storms over blossoms!" the reporter added with a corny smile. He was making a double entendre--referring to the likelihood of rain as well as offering up an old proverb that meant misfortune is lurking even at times of great happiness.

Prediction is a risky game. During the time that I've lived in Japan, I've marveled at the number of people who insist that the future is determined by patterns held in the past. I'm not good at predicting things; that sunny spring morning, I had no idea what I was running toward. The next fortnight's cherry blossoms would bring a storm of death and revelation that none of us--my clever aunt, the proverb-quoting newsman, and especially not I--would have expected.

***

The Kayama Kaikan was erected twenty years ago, as Japan soared toward the bubble years of vast economic expansion. The mirrored asymmetrical tower spoke of innovation, wealth, and power, the traits that had made the Kayama family successful in teaching ikebana from the start. Aunt Norie had told me that the land-owning family began the school in the 1860s, when the second son in the family abandoned training as a Buddhist monk but decided to teach others the flower-arranging skills that he had learned in a temple setting. The students of the first iemoto, or headmaster, were the socially ambitious wives of Japan's growing merchant class--similar to today's students, almost all the wives of salarymen. The Kayama School, and many other ikebana schools like it, prospered into the twentieth century, but following World War II there were few Japanese women with the money and leisure to continue flower-arranging studies. Not ready to shut down, the iemoto invited an American general's wife to see his work, and after she enrolled, many other officers' wives followed. The Kayama ikebana philosophy became more avant-garde and international, spurred on by the new student body and the current headmaster, who traveled the world. By the late 1960s--a full century after the school had opened its doors--the small cement building where my aunt had trained had grown into a low-rise, which was demolished in turn to give space to the shiny new tower.

Walking through the school's giant glass doors, I faced the school's signature artwork, an installation of jagged sandstone boulders. It would have been interesting to climb through the rock garden to examine the flower arrangements peeking from various crannies, but I didn't have the time. I stepped into the large elevator with mirrored walls and a polished granite floor and sailed up to the fourth-floor classroom.

Outside the classroom doors, tall containers sat filled with a lavish assortment of flowers and branches. At my previous class I'd learned that each student was allowed to choose a bunch of line materials--branches that would give a dominant shape to the arrangement--and another bunch of smaller, decorative flowers to use as an accent. Today I took the last bunch of cherry branches and some white asters and slipped into the classroom, where a dozen women were working at the two long tables. Aunt Norie was snipping loganberry branches with her best friend, Eriko Iwata, at a table close to the teacher's lectern. Norie and Eriko were like two peas in a pod: both slender housewives in their early fifties who looked about thirty-five.