Non-fiction — Essays

It was early evening at the end of June 2019, and I was looking out of my second-floor apartment window at the courtyard-come-car park ringed by abandoned eighteenth-century school buildings, a dilapidated and abandoned hotel and our brutalist slab of concrete and glass. Bees were bobbing among the lavender and butterflies sipping the nectar of water-blue irises, what I thought earlier was a pile of dog shit under the rear of our car I now saw to be a hen blackbird, it must be injured and, as I looked, it rolled over.

Walking along Hisago Dori, a covered street in Tokyo's Asakusa neighborhood festooned with paper lanterns and ribbed with red pillars, a friend and I were looking in the shop windows at the piles of mochi (rice cake), the ranks of plastic sushi, at the kimonos and the yukatas. I had lived in Asakusa for about six months and had just about got the hang of street etiquette, the pedestrians, cyclists and rickshaws that moved around the areas that bordered Sensoji Temple.

My journey seemed perfect, well, at least one part of it a dolphin swimming in a kitchen sink. I wrote these words in a diary on January 3rd, 2003. I have no idea why. They may not even be my words. I would not write them now, reality television having abducted the concept of journey for its weight-loss and amateur talent shows, where we hear it spoken before the onset of maudlin piano or swelling strings.