Of Rain and Geckos

It’s a rainy evening here in Okinawa. And, as if by some conspiracy, it’s a Saturday. I hate rainy weekends because that’s exactly when I have the most free time to go out and explore. When it rains here, it pours cats and dogs (and geckos!), but luckily these intense showers tend to be brief, rarely sticking around for more than half a day. The clouds move fast over these islands.

I’m currently staying in a spacious traditional-but-remodeled house in Nakijin, a small rural village on the Motobu Peninsula. I’ve been here six days already, and I’ve got another four ahead of me. It seems this rain should let up sometime in the morning, so tomorrow I plan to head out to the eastern coast to a place called Teniya, specifically to shoot some videos and take photos. The coastal cliffs there look spectacular from what I’ve seen on Google Maps.

Ever since I arrived at this house, a little beige colored guy has climbed up the entrance door every evening. I can clearly see his little sticky feet clutching tightly to the rough glass door. The kitchen light seems to lure him up there—maybe he’s secretly hoping I’ll let him inside for dinner. I’m talking about a gecko, of course—or yamori, as they’re called here. If you stay somewhere rural in Okinawa, encountering geckos at night is inevitable; they absolutely love hanging around windows and doors wherever there’s a light.

It might feel slightly unsettling at first, but you quickly get used to it. People in Okinawa certainly have—they even treat geckos like household pets, appreciating how they keep insects away and supposedly protect homes. The little guy who visits my door every evening—I named him El Capitan. Why? I’m not sure. It just felt right, and he doesn’t seem to mind having such a fancy name. Funny enough, tonight, for the first time, he brought along the whole gang. Now there are three geckos on the door, only moving for a brief moment every once in a while, and there is one more perched on the kitchen window. It’s kind of hard to tell now which one is El Capitan, but I am suspecting it’s the one who usually stays near the door frame. Anyway, thankfully, they’re all outside. I’m not too keen on finding one unexpectedly in my bed later.

With geckos, frogs, owls, and whatever else is lurking out there in the dark, making strange sounds from around the house and nearby forest, it really feels like stepping back in time or spending a night at a zoo, except that now I am the one who’s inside the cage. I imagine Tokyo probably sounded something like this way back in the Edo period.