131

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 to stay attentive to various objects as I ran past them. Yet, my observations had no particular focus and constantly meandered 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, a spotless, yellow, eight-prong Lego brick was 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 sighting 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 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 emerged in rapid succession from a bush. They were 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 the pavement. The dog in triplicate instantly made me conscious that tonight, along the Shakujii-gawa, there were no cats. 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 raised, ceased the meticulous cleaning of its ass, swiveled, and slowly tracked my passing; all the while, its left leg was sticking up in the air at a precise ninety-degree angle to the ground upon which it was sitting.

126.5

64

Two nights ago I passed by the tree that bit my hand, stopped, returned to it, and was tempted to snap its neck, but I didn’t and thought it best to hurry home for fear of encountering hordes of bloodthirsty Japanese zombies in the night. But perhaps if I did meet zombies I might feel a sense of kinship with them, as we are both “destined to wander the earth in search of brains.” Listening to an unabridged audio reading of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is affecting me, but not nearly as much as listening to The Toyota Way, read by the same man who read Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. After that the two texts merged and I was imagining Foucault’s Pendulum's nefarious "diabolicals" roving about everywhere, safely and economically in Japanese compact vehicles.

58

While running along a particularly dark area of the Shakujii gawa tonight I reached up to grab a tree branch, unaware that there was a large thorn precisely where I was grasping. There was a momentary resilience of skin followed by rapid puncture and slice. I was sweating heavily from the run, so continually wiping my face and not realizing that I was smearing blood all over my cheeks and forehead. In retrospect, the perplexed and nervous expressions on the faces waiting at the Takinogawa traffic signal now make sense.