A Moment of Truth

What do you notice when you’re back from a place that not only speaks a wholly separate language from your own but has different set ideas for architecture, cuisine, ethics, everything. Well not much because you’re sort of overcome by the ambivalent wonder of -

Lucky me. I got to go see that.

Once back, and after recounting some things in anecdotal detail you have to get on with what’s normal. Jobs, commutes, online banking, everything. 

It’s only when you’re stood on a footstool gazing out of a clear windowpane with the microwave thrumming innocuous radiation at your head that you think about what it all meant. Those sights, those people, those food stuffs. The kindness of all those people so far away from us now that they’re a little speck in a different time zone – not just a different space zone. 

That mega 18 hour trip from the London Underground Piccadilly Line to my hometown of Kasukabe; (you always start at the beginning when you recount something don’t you? It’s funny because the beginning is the least significant part because nothing has happened yet. It must mean we like the feeling of something about to happen, not the actual happening. That’s probably why life can be disappointing.) 

You think afterwards, what could top that? Not another holiday, surely. Well quite. I don’t want to be living a life which is mostly me taking time out from it. Telling the whole world on my dating profile that my hobbies consist of ‘travelling, going out there with open arms to explore and experience what the world has to offer my bared soul’ and ‘food. Eating is discovery, much like travelling, I think that when you’re eating food from different countries you're widening your horizons and learning about foreign cultures too.’ Etc. I don’t want to just be taking holidays for the rest of time. 

So you set to thinking, was it the holiday aspect of it that you miss? If coming back has stopped you from writing then what’s that about? Is it simply catching up with friends, your workload and washing? Partly yes. But it also means something’s changed irretrievably. It sounds dramatic, perhaps it is, but a gear got stuck when I got back. I wasn’t sure what was wrong, if anything, I was at a stand still. 

But something has been brewing for several days. A concoction; a thought which I didn’t have quite enough empirical evidence to muster out of conjecture. An inkling it has been, an awakening it is. 

Part of being an adult is being helpless. 

Not helpless like a child who can’t open a jar. Helpless like an adult who has to carry weighty news that they’d rather drop in the bin but can’t because it’s called responsibility. Meeting people who have integrity and knowing you are imprudent. Trying to procure an ounce of sympathy from within when you see a fellow human suffering but you can’t seem to understand why or care. All those “Big Thoughts” as Sam Simmons (comedian) would say. 

Listless may be the word to describe that day. I had been feeling belittled by an app which managed to translate a Japanese word perfectly for me after I had struggled with it all day. I had this immense dislike for this app, which took away my struggle so easily, like someone who says they’ve solved all your problems but makes you feel inferior so they’ve given you another problem all together. And whilst sitting at the bottom of my carpeted staircase thumbing my phone and breathing deeply, I had this very clear realisation what being an adult meant. Responsibility, knowledge, wider resources, yes to all of that but really, it means making do with the bloody truth.

Even if that truth is emotionally draining, or the answer to the question is I don't know, or you secretly accept cruelty because it’s not your problem, or that money really matters a lot. I mean it’s all so draining and yet it’s all true. And we have to Eat. It. Up. but also live life like it isn’t true, otherwise what would you ever get out of bed for? 

Making do with the truth is like the tale of Father Christmas, where you know it’s not real but the joy of pretending it’s real for the sake of a child makes life worthwhile. Or if you’re about to go inside for a bollocking from an authority figure but you’re outside and the sun is shining and the air is balmy and everything smells sweet, that bit of life makes the rest of life however morose, seem pretty good. When you get to feel lucky for a moment before it peters away in to a life of mundane expectations, and if you got asked by the devil ‘would you like to do it all again?’ you probably wouldn’t bother. 

There’s nothing bad about being cynical. The best piece of news I’ve read since being back in the UK (and this is actually interesting rather than all these soapsuds I’ve left strewn across the web) is that being unhappy does not affect your mortality. As in, research had often detected a link between people being unhappy and people dying earlier than the rest of the population, which would lead society to think unhappy people die faster. But in fact we had just got the causes and effects mixed up. Unhappiness and death correlate but they aren’t linked, so people who are unhappy tend to be sick and so more likely to have a shorter life span. But those who are perfectly healthy and unhappy live just as long as the happy buggers. So that’s something isn’t it, after coming back from the halcyon that was Japan with the boyfriend and the family who are all alive and healthy. Even if I get really unhappy about life for some reason, death won’t come to me any quicker. And that piece of knowledge actually made me happy.

photo by Aidan Clifford

The Little Man In The Lights

The first time I learnt her surname was from the back of an identity card for the Film Biennial. That’s where they had met. Story checks out I thought as I hunkered down in to her wicker armchair shoes off legs swinging idly. I watched Annina move around the room silently like an insect with a headache whilst Layla got (un)dressed in to clean clothes. She had stayed the night on the flat floor on a semi-thin mattress and her knees were well-swollen in the morning; we had now completed the hunt for aspirin for Annina’s aching head. It was Sunday.

All our clothes stank from the night before of stale cigarette smoke. The bars in Berlin still allow people to light cigarettes indoors, and what’s nice is that most seem to be smoking and enjoying it rather than vaping in consternation. I felt more relaxed there than here, maybe because of the lack of language skills I possess around Germans (less pressure to be understood) or maybe because they do generally have a more relaxed attitude about city stuff. They ride a lot more bikes and everything is graffitied but runs on time. That’s cool efficiency for you: muck without stress. Amen.

Saturday we had been on a hunt for sauerkraut. Annina, my ever dear host and mythical shapeshifting cat moved to Berlin months ago and yet still we are on the hunt for sauerkraut. I can’t pronounce any of the stations or street names so have to make up an anglicised-equivalent to etch a trace of where we have wandered in memory. Once at Hamburger Hobanof [sic.] art gallery each of us wondered about the Manifesto exhibition with most sides agreeing afterward that it was post-ironic-pop-art-wank that involved Cate Blanchett thirteen times. I thought it was worthy because it was funny, Annina thought it was a bit much and if “new companion” Layla had been given the task to take it of leave she would have left it. Not a barge pole.

We traversed a street called Shoos de Yunga [sic.] where a traditional restaurant supposedly lay but it was closed because it was the weekend; and the story of its name goes something like a young man who sold or cobbled shoes did something with the shoes and that was it. The morning after when Annina had told me this shoe-based history she had felt sickly and I was still blurry from the beers the night before that we had drunk amply from the bottle in a bar that Layla called Bar (Untitled Two). 

I found the sauerkraut of my dreams! Jumping off and on U-bahn carriages - an urgent blinking red light like eyelids - snap to. This one word I’d learnt: ampere menschen (the little man in the lights).

One, two, three weeks on and the memory is so disparate. It has been squidged inelegantly between northern parts of England, fireplaces and chocolate eggs. Easter has come and gone and although it is a completely forgettable holiday for me each year, these last two I have been spoilt by a newfound family. I have to apologise to Annina for being so tardy in my writings and being so ineffectual in my rantings. Yesterday I celebrated 6 months of having stayed in one place, yipee! with my lodgemum whom everyone tells me to call my landlady but I think that’s not what she is because she’s more that that. The wise words from this woman were, ‘You should know it goes by in an instant.’ It rings in my ears as love laced with fear. This goes by in an instant. O no.

My favourite part is Prince Lower Berg [sic.] which is where Annina grew up and it feels somehow familiar, perhaps my subconscious pretends to be her in Berlin to steadfast itself. That’s where we found the sauerkraut and after the slap-up meal us three drank smooth beers in Bar (Untitled). The super-bar-man served us by sitting at our table and chatting whilst not really taking our orders but occasionally returning full-handed with delicious pitchers. There's old moustachioed men in the corner laughing and bellowing and sometimes sniffling; smoking cigarettes that looked like they had no filters and one big dog and a jaunty navy blue cap atop a brush of hair. Some women joined them and they sloshed about baring teeth to laugh and cry and the night had set in and I was still highly dubious of this thing called Spring. 

They serve a tofu sandwich. Shops are closed on Sundays. Emergency pharmacists speak through locked glass doors (port holes to peer through at little cuts and bruises). Bikes are ridden everywhere, cycle lanes on pavements.

Whilst scoffing gherkins and pre-cooked wieners larking about on the streets in the nighttime we heard a bicycle bell and then something - boof - turn around to see Layla on the floor she'd been crashed in to by a cyclist who looked like, it doesn’t matter what he looked like, he stood up apologising to tough sweet Layla who had cut her hand. The sausages were poking out from between his spokes. No severe damage done, at least. The next morning after the successful aspirin hunt and the unsuccessful bandaging of her hand the pair took me to a covered market filled with East Londoners serving me eggs benedict. I must have had 5 or 6 oysters, Annina examined, tasted and deliberated over some chocolate and we had coffees that sparked thoughts off about the future. 

Beyond The River Sanzu (radio doc)

My friend and radio producer Eloise Stevens made this radio doc. after interviewing me about Ogiichan's (Japanese grandfather's) funeral aptly titled Beyond The River Sanzu. The piece was aired on ABC Radio PocketDocs on 28 March 2016.

Beyond The River Sanzu - radio doc. prouced by Eloise Stevens

Bench of Bread

I’ve been lacking of late, not paying attention, not really observing or taking anything in. It may be an obstruction caused by love and happiness, those nuisance anti-muses. I am on the top deck of a double-decker bus and a girl with her left arm in a sling has just managed to stand up to get off, but the vehicle impromptuly stopped and with no free hand to steady herself she boob-planted the man sat beside her. Full breast. He seemed pleased but tried desperately to hide it and she seemed amused if slightly pissed off.

The moon has been out a lot lately, I notice: A sliver here, a round face there. There have been minor maintenance problems which must rack up to some amount. The front door Chubb key became a ‘deadlock’ because the tooth of an old key broke away inside it. Deadlock? I had never thought of it as an object but it must mean a key that no longer turns or fits. A redundant key. How many memories are redundant keys I wonder to myself as a I stare at a bench full of bread. They look like fresh loaves to me. Loaves remind me of something and it has to be biblical doesn’t it, or was it a poem I received about bread being poetry, or is it about poverty? And a funny thought every time one sits on a bench you’re fulfilling its purpose, benches like being sat on. If you have a bench in a part of town nobody uses then it’s a shit bench, but if it’s used a lot then it’s being a good bench. But what if some baker uses this bench to lay out his loaves at night so that passers by can look on bewildered until someone hungry comes along and it becomes normal because it seems necessary to them and then also for us. Like art. You don’t need it until someone who wants it sees it and consumes thus carving the way for the rest of us, sheep. Baa.

Bus terminates here. The amount of drivers that have to change over at Camberwell, really, South London is like falling off the map for some. Getting on and off buses getting slips of paper and touching cards on readers. Bleep bleep. I never feel like I turn a key in my life unless it’s the actual key in the lock that broke. I mean I don’t do anything hands on. I now see why the Makers’ Revolution that Portlandia and The Observer covered happened. Everything is touch sensitive when was the last time I worked anything hard? Not even hard, light? God and why do you think there’s bread on this bench? The only answer is someone put it there, is it a social movement and what makes me different from that woman with the shopping bag perusing it whilst waiting for the bus, checking on their condition. And now stuffing one, two, maybe four loaves into her bag. Bread for free. And why am I afraid and uncertain of what? ‘Stress comes from giving a fuck’ I told Chloe. A tax rise of 3% on rolling tobacco. Numbers of nightclub goers continue to fall preferring eating establishments that turn in to clubs later on i.e. The rise of the restaurant-clubs. Yuck. We touch everything and nothing happens and this ineffectuality about my being makes me rise and fall with hopeful longing and hopeless settling. And that bench of bread remains but now with three loaves, still not none. 

Old Days

The last few Sundays have been grey and monotone. Feeling under the weather or staying under the covers there had been no need for me to get up and face the music, however, on Sundays I usually call my Obaachan in Japan. This time two years ago  (three if you’re counting the Japanese way) my Ogiichan died. He was my grandfather and Obaachan doted on him even though she mildly complained and sometimes jibed at his inadequacies, I remember she used to often follow it up with ‘I am grateful for how hard your Ogiichan worked in his day’. They were an old couple like any other, they annoyed each other and couldn’t imagine life without one another. Then he passed away. One cold February morning, there was still snow piled up on the roadside; you could see your breath inside the house. The cold wooden corridors left condensation marks after your feet. I always forget about February and how harsh it can be and so darn draining, even here in England, and especially here in London. It is a time when sane creatures hibernate.

‘Moshi moshi?’ Comes from my speaker - it’s Obaachan’s inquisitive kind voice.

‘Moshi moshi.’ That’s me - saying that it’s me to her.

‘Today I went to a laughter-show at the local centre. Held for children, parents and old people of Hamakawado. The man had grown up here, a Hamakawado resident, and the woman had been at school here until Year 6. They were very funny and made me laugh a lot. Afterwards, we played wa’nagé.’

Old age and community are done differently in Japan. I think being old means you are just another category of human being who is treated in a certain way like children, and you have a definite position to fill in the community who see it as common sense for old people to be included. They aren’t old and separate. They are old and present. I like it. I ask is a laughter-show some sort of comedy/entertainment/stand-up/pantomime and she replies yes, and I wonder some more about the different sorts of people who were there today but first -

‘What is wa’nagé?’

‘You have ten long sticks in the ground and you try and get the wa’nagé in between them.’ It must be like cricket and wickets I think.

‘So wa’nagé are balls?’

‘No circles.’

‘Circles that are balls?’

‘No they are more like circles.’

I then remember that the Japanese for hay is possibly ‘wa' so I ask: ‘Are the balls made of hay?’

‘The wa’nagé have to go over the sticks.’ She sounds miffed that she can’t communicate to her granddaughter a very simple game she had played today, ‘the more sticks that you get the wa’nagé caught on the higher your score.’

‘The wa’nagé go over and around the sticks?’

‘Yes.’

‘Like doughnuts?’

‘Like doughnuts.’

‘What do you win?’ There was a pause. Perhaps she was coming to terms with the comparison between wa’nagé and doughnuts or it was the sense of relief she felt after I had finally understood the basic mechanics of the game.

‘You win… the game.’ She said frankly.

’No prizes then.’ I say more to convince myself that this was in fact fine.

‘You win the game. The person who scores the highest wins.’

And I realise that my whole concept of having fun in a community was sort of like a fairground where you win soft toys and tack that you don’t need and I felt a bit tacky myself for having asked.

‘During the show they give beer to the parents, sweets to the children and then there’s tea for the old people.’ Obaachan held back one of her laughs, ‘I took home quite a lot of rice crackers. It was fun.’

‘All for free?’ I am so pleased with this whole idea of a Sunday fun day with kids and beer and comedy.

‘Of course for free. We pay money in to our communal pockets every month so when they have enough money they hold these shows or similar things. Last time it was a talk about cherry blossom gardening but only for the old people.’

I am going back to Japan relatively soon after I had left it this Christmas. I notice each time the enthusiasm with which Obaachan greets me and takes up the activities such as shopping for groceries or cooking or gardening whilst I am there, but I worry that she will overdo it and make herself ill. One holiday I remember we went with the whole family to a bath-house in the mountains. All the meals were included and laid out beautifully in wooden lacquer boxes and filled to the brim with delicious things. Obaachan with her olden days philosophy, or it could have been her World War mentality (or both) hates the wastage of food so preceded to eat everyone’s leftovers from their boxes after the meal. After that she got ill and caught a fever because her stomach was so tired from having overworked at the bath-house. A hard-worker by nature a hard-worker by nurture, it doesn’t suit her to sit still and be patient, she wants to get up and clean things, cook things, fix things, and so old age I imagine doesn’t suit her at all.

‘I walked all the way to the Post Office the other day. I was pleased with myself when I got there because I had walked a long way and I still felt fine, so, then I walked to the super store. But once I had walked there I had got very tired. Very tired so I sat down on the bench just inside the entrance.’

‘I know the entrance. You should use one of the old walking sticks that Ogiichan left behind.’ Obaachan concurred that she should, only, she didn’t feel she needed them because she doesn’t get tired often enough to require a stick. Stubborn as well old. How refreshing.

‘I sat down taking my time and having a rest. And I noticed that on the other end of my bench was an elegant old woman. Her hair looked very neat. I said to her: ‘Once you reach eighty years old everything you do makes you feel tired’; and she smiled, nodded and replied: ’Yes it is the same for me too. I am glad to hear the same applies for you as well. I get tired so easily now.’ ’

And the pair struck up a conversation inspired by mutual dissent of ageing and Obaachan had found one of her own. She had begun telling me the story with a hint of what was still possible but I didn’t realise that it was the story of how she had made a new friend who was also in her eighties and now lived alone. It strikes a note of pity in me when I think of Obaachan alone. She likes to tell stories and laugh and joke, you can’t very well do that in the evenings by yourself. The old graceful lady had moved to the town recently, precisely because the Post Office and the super store were at a walking distance from each other; she had lived in a city before where everything was further away and not close to her home. Now she lived in a high-rise flat and her daughter would come to visit sometimes and she liked it here. The pair ended the conversation inviting each other to their abodes, in the hope that one day they would meet again. No numbers were exchanged. But no lies were offered up either. It was a pleasant serendipity that passed my Obaachan’s day and the other’s too.

‘By the time I had said good bye -’ Obaachan this time let out a fire cracker laugh, ‘it was already getting dark and I knew if I went home then I would have to turn on the switch on the rice cooker and wait forty minutes for it to finish. So instead I went downstairs to the food court and bought myself two onigiri (rice balls). And when I got home I ate the two for dinner.’

She never liked leaving Ogiichan alone in the house after dark. I remember her rushing the final bits of grocery shopping to get home before five o’clock so she could bring in the washing and turn on the rice cooker incase Ogiichan had forgotten. She would buy her groceries in the day in preparation for the night and the meal she would lay out at home for the pair of them. It gave her a routine and a reason to be home by a certain time, to make her cadential apologies to her gathering of friends at the super store or on the street corner to get home in time to do the cooking. Now she has to be her own stopwatch and when you stop living even just a little bit for that other person, when ostensibly you stop being needed by someone, you slip up - a little bit like - over a frozen crack in the pavement. I was afraid she would lose her footing being departed by her husband like that, like so many old women of Japan where longevity is unnaturally great, but I worry just like her, a lot.

The two old friends were sat on the massage chairs on the fifth floor of the super store. If you slot a ten yen piece in to the arm of a chair then the machine turns on and gives you a massage for three minutes. The legs and the back. The local super store is a warm safe hang-out for the old, and my Obaachan and her friends often spend their whole afternoons there buying some little thing and then sitting and chatting. In the winters it is cheaper to sit with friends in the warmth of the super store than to have your electric heater turned on at home alone. And more fun, I suspect.

‘I was talking with Tabata-san on the massage chairs on the fifth floor and we didn’t notice then but I do vaguely remember now a tall woman passed us by. There was nothing familiar about her. She might have given us a nod. I don’t remember.’

‘Do you use the massage chairs often?’ They always looked so clean too, which was more my surprise than their existence.

‘We weren’t getting massages we were just sitting in them because they are comfortable’.

Obaachan wanted to speed on with her story this time her tone said it. I was always impressed by her stories, they never had non-sequiturs like mine or my mother’s, which always go off on tangents. There is something of the trained storyteller about Obaachan which is something I had always been drawn to like a bright light but only recently landed on, it is the reason for my enthrall when she speaks about the past and plays out scenes from her life over and over again with dutiful clarity each time.

‘Tababta-san and I conversed’ about their relatives and possessions they owned but no longer needed or friends who were ill I presume, ‘then the woman came back and handed us some tea. Green tea. She said: ‘Here you are, please have it.’ So the both of us exclaimed: ‘We can’t take this - it’s not our place to take it!’ but she insisted and said: ‘Please have them.’ ’

‘Who was it?’ I wondered. ‘How old did she look?’

‘About Mariko’s age’, who is my aunt and so I suggested she could have been one of Mariko’s school friends who recognised Obaachan and thought to buy the old women some tea.

‘I’ve kept the empty bottle on the table. To not forget it happened. It was an odd thing to happen.’ And so we mulled it over and passed it off as random kindness. I think of her in Japan and make sure to call next week.

 

Still Winter / Contemplating Displacement / Thinking of Growing Up

After Christmas you forget how long winter lasts; but it is a long, laborious, languorous time. No more falling leaves just frost then wetness that is harsh and a misery to deal with. I keep getting minor chilblains in my toes because my shoes are too thin and the heating inside buildings is too high and outside we all know it is cold. Outside. It’s out there. Where we all want to avoid, for now, until the light lasts longer and we start to stretch not huddle, shout not cusp.

People I work with are ill. I got ill but then kept on getting better to a point of getting worse again. Old age must feel the worst in the cold. I don’t know how they do it when I, in my late-twenties, feel lethargy upon waking up. Get up. I have to coax myself up and then I fall back asleep again like a flimsy blade of grass. Four alarms I have to set for myself, on Fridays I set seven because the time I have to technically be up by is 6:30 but I could push it back to 6:50. Any time past 7 is a disaster. But then again, I don’t have an active life style.

I work on a computer interacting with a cursor that floats around the screen all day. It’s all virtual anyway. Facebook’s started greeting me with ‘Good Morning’ and I can’t tell it to go away. I tap some buttons and wait for things to load or happen or both and then it becomes darker and the shadows become masses and it’s night. I go home the same way I came. I actually don’t consider this drudgery, which might sound surprising to an alien, but it's true. I want to be doing this. I picked it and worked hard to get it. But the actions really don’t imply the feeling. I don’t have to scrape my knuckles on hard surfaces to get a wage, I don’t even have to move off my squashy bum bar the times I get up to make some instant coffee. There are cats in the office and I produce comedy. What’s the big fuss in all that? Nothing. Nada. Nout.

I don’t want life to disappear though and for me to fade away. But I do want to be worn out and characterful like a familiar leather case - a doctor’s bag, a kid’s favourite satchel. The essential pair of shoes. I want to be one of those all-purpose all-weather handy things that granny couldn’t live without. Best thing since sliced bread etc. etc. I want to be creased and smudged by love, and sometimes dropped but I’m washable and sturdy, I’ll survive. There’s been talk of displacement theory around me.

Paul told me on a hangover that I was feeling this way because ‘You're paying back for all the fun that you borrowed last night.’ Borrowed, I guess, from the alcohol (fairy). It could be true. It could be true I pondered because I tend to do the same in the limited space I inhabit. I started to use a new glass recently for the water by my bed. It is a special grey glass made by Iittala. By making this change I had to move the coaster that used to lie beneath the old glass because the old glass left marks, my Iittala does not. The coaster now takes up the same space as my necklace and the two together on one surface is too crowded and so the necklace had to go. I’ve folded it in tissue paper and I will take it all the way to Richmond on a train. That particular necklace has had its time on my bedside table, I have more in other places, and I’m sure it’ll resurface some other time. And it's not forgotten just displaced by the movement of other things. A reshuffle.

Friends are the same. Ones I used to see all the time have become ones I see occasionally. Ones whom I never had the chance to see are steadily creeping their way back to me. But most notably, the ones I didn’t even know existed I see quite often now. More often than not. I check my online bank account more than I watch YouTube videos. I boil the kettle more than I open a can of beer. I sit around thinking a lot more than I do running around. All a steady shift and displacement of things. Not noticeable enough to be genuinely perturbed by, but you have an inkling later, retrospectively: a rupture.

Ash Dome by David Nash

She fills her face with senses

I have a few heroes in my life and whilst in Japan I met one of them. Her name is Saeko and she doesn’t seem real. We crossed paths when I was 18 or 19, about to set off for university and whilst working as a kitchen porter at a Japanese restaurant in Soho. It was great. I washed dishes, I cut sushi rolls, I sliced raw meat and washed and drained the rice, multiple times. She was a waitress, so she was customer-facing and looked presentable and pretty all the time whilst I looked sweaty and smelled of onions and had my hair scrunched up in a bun under a grubby white cap. We had loads of laughs over the internal restaurant phone as she sent up orders in a funny voice pretending to be a monster or like a mouse and stuff. After work we’d go out and have fun sometimes too. She danced professionally in the arts clubs, there was one in Notting Hill with a strange sloping floor and eerie ultraviolet mood lighting, like a cave for neon night creatures. She had a room in Paddington in a shared flat with too many cables running across the ceilings, and in her own room she had a wardrobe that doubled-up as a mirror the size of a dance studio’s to practice her movements in. Against the opposite wall was her bed and although the whole room was coloured an off-yellow, possibly darkened by the cigarette smoke, there was one pale blue circle painted above her bed. Just off-centre. The blue little moon floated there since she had arrived. Her theory was that someone had painted the whole room yellow whilst leaving a clock permanently stuck to the wall. And so, when a new tenant arrived they had removed the clock and behind it was blue, the original colour of the room. I thought the circle could likely have been painted on top of the yellow for some unknown reason, but I preferred her theory in the end. Because I imagined her staring at the pale blue moon for days - between dancing and the restaurant - and coming to the fixed conclusion that a small wall clock had hung there first and found peace in it. I really didn’t mind, it was a nice feature.

The day was so bright it hurt and I waited outside Harajuku station for Saeko to arrive, she had come all the way from Shizuoka to see me. When she was there standing in front of me it was like no time had passed since - forever - and the moods were all the same, like they always have been, goofy and full of surprises. Lots of corners to turn and things to stare at. We laughed and joked and reflected and found a gluten-free cafe (neither of us have an intolerance it was simply the first thing we found down a busy narrow street filled with too much) and sat down. 

‘How is your singing going?’ She was now part of a few bands in Shizuoka ever since she won her local karaoke contest in her village in the mountains. 

‘I have bookings as a sessions singer for some older people’s ballroom dancing’ she looked wide-eyed and around with a smile forming across her lips, ‘but they are really old’. 

*

I always forget that the Japanese sky looks so different and not only that it feels different. Like flat, like a mass of something rolled-out with a sheen, and it’s clear but a vapour and it goes on for much longer than you would expect it to. Perspectives don’t exist in the distance everything looks flat and right there. Here’s a funny thing that I forgot I wrote when straight off the plane: 

The sky and the sea

Fool me

It’s bigger than any giant

You’ll see

And you know in Japanese the word for ‘sky’ is the same as for ‘air’ and ‘empty’ and ‘open’. It’s that sort of sky that I’m talking about that isn’t just a thing but the lack of a thing. It spreads out to nothingness. We walked and talked and got accosted by a vlogger who made us do a pose and say happy new year to her ipad and arrived at Meiji Jingu - the shrine in the middle of Tokyo - slap bang next to Harajuku filled with fake nails and vloggers. But here it’s another world: serene. At the start of the new year people do Hatsumode, which is the first few visits to a shrine to pay your respects and maybe eat some market food and pull a few fortunes. I love Meiji Jingu because of the trees, there are so many trees there that it feels cool in the summer and warm in the winter and the woodland shot up from seedlings in only 200 years, which I think is impressive in tree terms. I got out two 500 yen coins and bought us a ticket in to the private gardens inside the shrine’s grounds, where we met an old man and a woman who had staked out a kingfisher with their telescope and let us have a look through too. He was cobalt blue with a sash of ginger red round his chest. He flew not too soon after we’d seen him, so I guess we had been lucky. Later on we turned a corner in the woods and there was a flurry of tiny wings, perching and then flapping, perching and then swooping. A small pair of children, brother and sister, had their hands raised and out flat above their heads and the little birds were flocking to their palms to eat some crumbs, then to disappear. They were so excited, we were so excited. A groundskeeper-cum-priest who was passing through said it had become the highway of the birds and told us, ‘If you young ladies place you hands out flat they will surely perch because they think you have food for them’. Saeko went first and soon one hopped on and stopped, had a look and flew off. I did the same and a tiny thing perched on my hand, gently clasping my ring finger as if a twig with her dark delicate feet, she searched and failed to peck and left. It was a joy and the rest of the day continued as it had been set out for us. We laughed and joked and reflected.