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While heading west on the south side of the Shakujii gawa tonight I was vaguely annoyed by the realization that nothing in particular caught my attention. I often turned my head like Seijun Suzuki’s slow tracking shot around a rice cooker from his 1967 film Branded to Kill in order to stay attentive to various objects as I ran past them, yet my observations had no particular focus and meandered constantly from the indecisive angle of tree branches to the indeterminate feelings associated with the time between 16:00 JST and 17:00 JST. Nevertheless, while returning east on the north side I was practically stopped in my tracks by a quick sequence of appearances. First, I saw a spotless, yellow eight-prong Lego brick resting on its side in a patch of dark soil. It seemed as if the ground had been evenly raked, then the brick placed on top with such care that it left no impression and floated slightly above the ground. This was followed immediately by a young boy bounding towards me in a green down vest, his left bloody nostril plugged with tissue paper. Evidently his nose had been packed for some time, as the tissue had drawn blood out from deep inside his skull almost all the way to the remaining white tip. The last triangular iceberg of tissue would no doubt soon succumb to the flow in his mobile paper chromatography experiment. Three paces later three identical dogs appeared in rapid succession from a bush. Impossibly small dogs in matching and impossibly small dog sweaters, their nails nervously tapping out an erratic Morse code like a bushel of crabs dumped on to pavement. The dog in triplicate instantly made me conscious of the fact that tonight along the Shakujii gawa there were no cats and simultaneous with thinking "no cats” from the end of the thought “tonight along the Shakujii gawa there are no cats,” a cat promptly appeared on my left. The cat's head momentarily lifted, ceased the fastidious cleaning of its ass, swiveled and slowly tracked my passing, all the while its left leg sticking up in the air at a precise ninety-degree angle to the ground upon which it was sitting.