It is difficult to connect Tokyo—Tokyo around the Yamanote, Tokyo of the central wards, Tokyo of fresh construction and manicured parks, Tokyo as we see it on our television screens—with the numbers that people use to gauge the health of a nation. Pull...
Plans made while eating Cookie Crisp on the balcony, looking out on the elevated highway. Contemplating my buckets of yuzu, approaching their second winter. Listening to the white noise of traffic. The chimes of garbage trucks. To go to Jinbocho. Or to...
Are they going to stay there, set down, left in utter neglect, abandoned? Maybe. For they have been there all year. I believe I took this same picture a year before, too. The empty lot between the supermarket and a barbershop. On taking that picture a ...
The tourists are returning to Asakusa. Well. I always say this. I say this mournfully. Three summers of peace and quiet. Three summers without hearing about “tourism pollution.” Three summers of warm reception, without the chilliness and silence that c...
Adachi Masao is filming a picture about Yamagami Tetsuya. Jean-Luc Godard is dead. His more fearsome Japanese apostle has never given up his brand of nihilistic leftism. His years in the desert have only sharpened him.
This morning, a man set himself...
25
Shonan. On a weekday in late August, the beach is mostly locals. Now, the trains from the city only come fully loaded on Sundays. A few kids in wetsuits. Middle-aged surfers with tans that will never fade. A drunk that gave up his post with a v...
In the window of a bookstore in Kanda, a 1982 first edition of Araki’s Midori. The store is not open. I know that if it was, and I worked up the nerve to go in and ask the price, whatever the figure, that I would be forced to pay it. (How much would it...
Even in the summer, Onoterusaki seems to be in perpetual gloom. The trees block the sunshine that the apartment towers do not. Except for a few days in late August, the shrine’s dirt yard is never completely dry. Several safe paths are laid out in flat...
8
I had already moved out of Kanagawa by the time news broke that a twenty-six year old man had stabbed nineteen people to death. But I knew the area, generally if not specifically. Maybe that is why I paid closer attention. I suspect most people ...
The reflexive greeting in the elevator is a comment on the weather. “It is raining today.” “It’s very cold.” “The typhoon will hit soon.” “It might snow today.” There are subtleties that I don’t appreciate, so I believe it’s best to echo the forecast: ...
I moved my TV out to the balcony. It serves as a windbreak, stopping the blast of the air conditioner’s compressor from knocking over the slender beanstalks that I have already propped up with plastic straws.
It stopped working. When it did, I only fl...
Not having anything better to do, I walked north to Minowa.
The rainy season has finished. Now, there will be a month of grey, humid days.
I bought a paper sleeve of kakiage with pickled red ginger and ate it in the park that abuts the shopping ar...
The news marveled for one day at the details from a Gender Equality Bureau Cabinet Office white paper: sixty-five percent of men in their twenties are single, forty percent have never been on a date, and the number of marriages has slipped to a record ...
When Josef von Sternberg got the offer to make a film in Japan, he was already on his way out.
He couldn’t make the kind of movies that he wanted to make. The sumptuous pictures he made with Marlene Dietrich seemed like artifacts of another time. The...
The Imperial Palace is below, and so is the national road system's kilometer-zero terminus marker. Everything emanated out from here.
All the energy, manpower, and expertise for imperialist expansion turned inward at the end of the war and was directe...
A street performer had set up under the railway overpass at Yurakucho. He was juggling long, dull knives. When he got down, he gave a heartfelt speech about the life of a busker. Two police officers watched as he solicited donations.
I could see that...
I insist on writing about enka. I know that nobody is interested. This is a challenge to the reader to get through the next thousand words and try to get something out of the performances I'm talking about. But it's also a reality that few people under t...
This entry is brief. I am still testing the limits. I am not sure what to do with the medium, first of all. The freedom is scary. In order to restrict myself thematically, I have confined myself to writing about a city—Tokyo—that I am not in love with. I...
This essay about Misora Hibari begins in Beijing in 1966.
It begins with Zhang Chengzhi, who was the original Red Guard of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He came up with the name. “Red Guard” was what he signed on a May of 1966 poster cri...
I am leaving Osaka tomorrow.
I had no particular reason to stay past the weekend. I figured I could get some work done, if nothing else, shut up inside a hotel room. I moved to a nicer place. There is nobody around. Unless there is a wedding rehears...