I am only a would-be Japanese, and more of a global being, so I don’t have any grandparents nearby or a local shrine to which I can claim full allegiance. Thus, last New Year’s found me visiting the global village’s elders in Jerusalem, where ancient passions sob and flare through the thin stone passageways, reminding us that constant turmoil is not the same as change. The beauty of the Old City there is that its spiritual fervor hasn’t diminished in 2,000 years or more; everyone has an acutely keen sense of what he or she believes in. The sorrow of the Old City is that its personal enmities do not seem to have abated much either; everyone knows just whom he or she doesn’t trust.

A new year is a time to reflect on change and to see what endures beyond the flash and grab of the moment. At the turn of the millennium, therefore, I emptied my savings account to take my mother to Easter Island, where the 21st century looked to be mostly a matter of tall stone statues and ancestral taboos. Four years earlier, I spent New Year’s Eve in Port-au-Prince, seeing the modern globe in miniature: All night long, the Creole elite danced the evening away in soigne French restaurants, stunning in that season’s Dior and backless dresses. When the light came up on the new year, nearly everyone else had to awaken to a country with few schools or roads or hospitals or hopes.

Wherever I am, whether Egypt or Ethiopia, I observe my own makeshift rites on New Year’s Day, as if superstition might be the first step toward sacrament. I wake up early and compile lists of the cultural highlights of the year just past. Then I begin writing out a swelling catalogue of all the moments that moved and astonished me, annual proof that even the emptiest-seeming year is rich.

... contd.