Nodded off in a taxi crammed with screens that blared demented commercials for ambiguous products. The effect was like watching a film from a century ago: everyone was smiling too fast and the frame rate was wrong.
Twnty minutes later, minimalism reaches its vanishing point: unable to find the door to our hotel, we’re about to give up when two concrete slabs slide open to reveal a young man who takes our luggage and our shoes.
Socks that give the sinister effect of cloven feet.
An exhausted but persistent corner of my brain keeps reciting these lines from the Surrealist Manifesto: “Let yourself be carried along, events will not tolerate your interference. You are nameless. The ease of everything is priceless.”
The rare and tiny trashcans in Tokyo make me feel like a gluttonous and negligent beast, constantly shedding bottles, wrappers, and receipts.
I woke up sweaty from a dream in which I could hear everything except my own voice.
The Tokyo streets are busy yet hushed, and I cannot put my finger on the sounds that are missing. Shouting? Laughter? Police sirens and angry horns?
But living fourteen hours in the future is fantastic. Wake up and squint at the news back home. Alright, so that’s what America did today. Now they’ve gone to sleep and I can enjoy not thinking about the president for a while.
Nobody in Tokyo seems to wears sunglasses except for me and C. even though it’s unusually bright.
I say sumimasen constantly and enthusiastically.
Fifty degrees might be the line between a light sweater and a heavy sweater.
In Chiyoda City, there's an endless street of used bookshops where so many people, mostly middle-aged men, quietly peruse decades-old publications about astrology and jazz and George Lucas and aerobics.
And god, dig all these middle-aged Japanese men with fine-tuned haircuts and selvage denim and understated sneakers.
I had an elaborate fantasy of picking up smoking again and pretending I’m in Tokyo Vice, but there’s no smoking on the streets of Tokyo. It’s a ¥2000 fine, about fourteen dollars. I want to live in the future with the aesthetics of 1971.
But holy christ, it feels so good and lucky to be seven thousand miles away from America—like running away from an awful odor or the sweet relief that comes when a car alarm suddenly falls silent.
Learned to find freedom through the ritualized dressing and undressing and scrubbing and soaking in the onsen.
I’m disoriented enough that at one point while orbiting Tokyo Dome City, I found myself earnestly saying, “The sun sets in the west here.”
Time for bed.
