Lost in Translation

The strange grief of becoming someone new

To me, Japanese whisky might be the finest drink on earth.

I knew I was going to love it long before I ever tasted it.

Years earlier I’d watched Lost in Translation and become quietly obsessed with the scene where Bill Murray stares dead-eyed into the camera and delivers the line: “For relaxing times… make it Suntory time.”

That’s nostalgia in a glass.

The first time I actually tried it was at a whisky festival with my friend Warren.

We wandered over to the Nikka stand and ordered two glasses of Coffey Grain.

Warren took one sip, looked at me wide-eyed and just said:

“Oh my god.”

I couldn’t have phrased it better myself.

Then came my first bottle of Yamazaki.

I’m slightly embarrassed to admit how much I paid for it.

But this wasn’t Jack Daniel's.

This had notes of raspberries, strawberries, vanilla and cinnamon somehow existing all at once.

I had to watch myself because I knew if I got too enthusiastic I’d end up drinking half the bottle in one sitting.

It felt less like alcohol and more like memory you could drink.

For years, everyone close to me knew exactly what to buy me at Christmas.

Then something awful happened.

And Yamazaki quietly disappeared from my life forever.

Smell the coffee

It happened suddenly.

I caught Covid-19.

At first I thought nothing of it. I remember eating some soup one evening and assuming it was just bad soup.

Then one morning I made a coffee and realised it tasted like nothing but hot milk and sugar.

The bitterness was gone.

The depth.

The character.

I unscrewed the coffee jar and pressed my nose right against it.

Nothing.

I could smell the glue around the rim of the label, but the coffee itself had almost disappeared completely.

I tried a dark roast next.

It just tasted burnt.

That felt insulting.

By that point I’d recovered from the illness itself.

But something had changed.

The coffee hadn’t changed.

I had.

You can never go back…

And that was that.

Yamazaki never quite tasted the same again.

Sure, parts of it eventually came back.

But drinking it now feels a bit like talking to a man disguised as Bill Murray.

The shape is right.

The voice is almost there.

But somewhere underneath it you know something important is missing.

For a while I kept trying to chase the old experience.

Different bottles.

Different glasses.

Hoping one day everything would suddenly click back into place.

But it never really did.

I think growing older quietly involves a lot of moments like that.

Not dramatic loss.

Just the strange realisation that some experiences only exist properly once.

The first time you hear a song that changes your life.

The first time you discover a technology that completely rewires your brain.

The first time you fall in love with a city.

Or a person.

Or a version of yourself.

The thing itself might still exist.

But you don’t experience it the same way anymore.