135

Walking the back route down narrow streets to Ōji Station, I pass the house with the orange tree where I once heard somebody playing guitar. I stop and listen for the sounds of any strumming or the sounds of someone thinking about strumming, but there is nothing except silence and the smell of January cold. Then, a vending machine next to me suddenly glows and whirs to life, providing me with a ghostly consolation prize in the possibility of hot beverages. A quick nod of acknowledgment to the machine for its attempt to communicate across the gulf that separates inanimate and animate matter, and I am off towards the park with the miniature fence with a touch keypad lock.

Waiting for me at the entrance to the park, just past the tangle of telephone wires, is a small convention of people with compact dogs wearing winter clothing. One of the dogs—appearing like four uneasy sticks attached to a small sweater—looks about 18% gray and beautifully matches the sky. If I picked up the dog and hurled it into the air, it would abruptly vanish, only to remind us of its presence by the snapping sound of its landing. Across the park heading east, I consider leaping over the fence as I near it, but I speculate about what I will feel once I am on the other side. I might not want to return to where I jumped from or be unable to. It seems that it would be reasonably easy to hop over, but this might be an illusion, some diabolical method of falsely inflating intruder confidence, then snaring them mid-vault. The fact of its impossible smallness only serves to heighten the unknown threat of how it operates. What this fence lacks in height, it more than makes up through fiendishly confusing psychology. I pause for a moment and consider that the rate at which my body ages and shrinks is not so fast to keep me from a potential crossing on my way home from the café. I acknowledge the holding pattern, and I am off.

First, I run over to see that the golfers are busy golfing—and they are—but I am disappointed that the skateboarders are not skateboarding. Wouldn't it be nice if I could hear the bark of their skateboard trucks across concrete curbs and pedestrian handrails in the parking lot? Nevertheless, it is empty, and even if they had only recently departed, it is now impossible to see even the faintest trace of their breath in the air. I hear the sharp claps of clubs hitting balls and the dull thuds of balls hitting nets, but no wheels intermittently crackling and gliding across the tarmac. I circle the parking lot in a holding pattern of my exhalation until an unexpected squawk from a crow atop a garbage can, followed by a quick ding-ding from the nearby Toden Arakawa Line, punctuates the late afternoon and signals that it is time for a warm coffee.

Once inside the nearby café, I am struck, as usual, by the complete lack of separation between the smoking and non-smoking sections. The curls of smoke drift above the masked customers and the waning plants in the center of the circular smoking table, forming sheets of gray cloud cover. I slowly lift my 18% gray card into the haze above our heads, and it promptly vanishes. However, when I lower my arm again, it materializes, and I make a snapping sound accompanied by a whine that catches the attention of the schoolgirl 72% napping at the table next to mine

102

The cats in Takinogawa always stop what they are doing and watch me as I run past them. On the densely packed 00:32 JST Yamanote train from Shinjuku heading north towards Tabata, two girls only inches away have hair so sculpted that it looks as if they have poodles attached to the tops of their heads. The poodles are looking at me and I half expect to hear a snarl, or perhaps get licked. Two kids to my right in-between the train cars are singing loudly, encouraging each other to increasingly higher levels of raucousness and physically pushing each other in a playful way. They momentarily stop, turn, look at me, tentatively smile, then continue on with a heightened ardor. Somebody gently sobbing amongst the sleeping passengers, or throwing up would round out the scenario nicely with the full range of emotions. Once while sitting on a late night Yamanote train from Shinjuku I saw the terrified woman in front of me suddenly cover her drunk boyfriend’s mouth with her hand, forcing him to swallow the vomit that he was trying to evacuate from his system. The last train from Shinjuku often feels like a space suddenly shifting back and forth between comedy and horror, and it would seem equally as plausible if the train was rolling down the tracks upside down. The last Yamanote train from Shinjuku is one of my favorite places to spend time.

88

Heading west on the north side of the Shakujii gawa I leave behind the sounds of the neighbor's koto lesson, then somewhere around Itabashi I hear a parallel koto lesson. With enough height the right vantage point would emerge and the individual lessons would compress into an unknowing duet; however, at this point I am no longer growing into the height that I would need to witness this, nor would I ever grow to the five hundred feet needed to see this occurrence, but am compressing into a smaller unit with greater density. As a result, the duo will remain forever separate. On the south of the Shakujii gawa walking towards Ōji Station it is not the third point of this koto triangle that I encounter, but hesitantly played classical guitar drifting out from a window and through the branches of a mikan orange tree. The mikan oranges are small, squat and look tender. The round plucking of the nylon strings compliments the mellow dark-orange color in a pleasant manner. As well, the delicacy of the notes and the way that they hang in the air seems abstractly similar to the increasingly tenuous hold that the mikan oranges have on their branches as they become riper, more luscious, and heavier. I sense a parallel in the tenuous nature of the situation so I abruptly leave towards the station in solidarity – detached and horizontally dropping.

80

Trains departing from Ōji station initially make a slight complaining sound, the same sound you hear when you wake a cat that has been sleeping.

78

For five years I have wanted to purchase the 3,000 Yen melon ($33.73 USD), but have not. On the way to Ōji Station across from Asakuyama Park an old man on a bike with white hair, a pink shirt, and a green sweater rode towards me. Signs are increasing in frequency. If he dyes his hair from white to black I will go to the market immediately. But there is a slight complication in that I have found a store in Shinjuku that sells 25,000 Yen melons ($281.07 USD), the new gold standard regardless of the bike rider's hair color. What signal will notify me when it is time to go shopping for expensive fruit in Shinjuku?

70

From this spot facing west in the parking lot near the giant bowling pin in front of Ōji Station I can see the Toden Arakawa trolley, the Keihin-Tōhoku commuter train, the Shinkansen bullet train, a freight railway, city buses, cars, motorcycles, scooters, bicycles, and people walking. I can’t see the Namboku subway line, but I sense its vibrations under my feet. Also, the two skateboarders are to my left creating an intermittent racket. Ōji is Richard Scarry's Busy, Busy Town, but without a personable worm as of yet. Soon a charming guide will materialize.

47

I am looking at a relatively mutilated, 3” x 5” photograph of my childhood room. I brought this small catalyst with me from New York across the ocean to Japan. My current state of remove on a different continent and across the span of years affords me the opportunity to methodically, almost surgically go back into the heart of adolescent darkness and contemplate what exactly makes a high school room tick. I note the two old, battered skateboard decks mounted on the wall in the top left corner of the photograph. They are trophies. Recently, I noticed that there are two skateboarders regularly in front of Ōji Station in a parking lot on the east side. The numerous generations of skateboard decks developed since I skateboarded have evolved so much that now it is virtually impossible to distinguish between the front and back of a skateboard. That one skating closer to the Toden Arakawa line could potentially face forward and move backwards, face backwards and move backwards, face forward and move forwards, and the most interesting possibility to me: face backwards and move forwards. The last possibility reminds me of photographing, of expressing gratitude for mounting distance.

16

A northern station of the Toden Arakawa line – one of the last of the chin-chin (ding-ding) streetcars – is Ōji-eki-mae Station right next to where I am presently staying. In 2005 I lived in Higashi-Nippori next to the Minowabashi Station, the southern terminus of the line. A trolley that goes “ding-ding” connects my worlds of past and present not entirely dissimilar to the American television children's show host Mr. Rogers’ trolley; however, the Toden Arakawa line doesn't connect the world of Mr. Roger's living room through a mysterious tunnel with an imaginary land notable for its puppets and actual puppet monarchy, but connects two physical locations that are coincidental with my past and present. Also, the Toden Arakawa doesn't operate with the accompaniment of Mr. Rogers’ trolley's somewhat maniacal theme song. When I was a child the cycling "chugging along" relentlessness of Mr. Roger's trolley's song's rhythm always triggered a vague awareness of the inevitable forward movement of time. The Toden Arakawa doesn't have this precise effect on me, rather when I am on the Toden Arakawa I always think about Mr. Roger's trolley, how much I liked the soothing nature of the program, what a long time ago that was, and so in an elliptical manner it has the same effect, but minus the musical accompaniment. Aside from that and the evident absence of puppets on the Toden Arakawa the two trolleys seem to be more or less the same.

10

In a local Ōji Station café they were silently projecting Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke’s 1997 film Funny Games. It is an odd experience to be drinking an icy cold Sapporo beer, eating a tastefully spicy curry, and watching a father get methodically beaten with a golf club in front of his own child. Still, the curry was delicious and the late afternoon light streaming in the windows washed out the film projection in such a way that made it look not so much a projection, as an undulating and particularly violent portion of the wall. I ordered an espresso after my beer and settled in to study the murderous nature of some architecture.

6

Ōji Station east to west underpass: the Doppler effect of a hiccup from a woman passing on a bike – if such a thing is even possible.