134.5

I am thinking more and more about my Maxell UR 90 Tinted Oval Window Cassette Shell / POSITION•NORMAL / JAPAN•JAPON cassette tape from the mid-80s. The cassette remains an impenetrable mystery, even after reverse importing it to Japan three times and bringing it to the diminutive Shinjuku Psychic twice. I quietly placed it in a locker in Ueno Station and walked away with the locker's yellow key. It will steep there like tea, becoming darker and more powerful. It will sit in the darkness until my three hundred Yen runs out, and the station’s locker attendant takes the locker's contents to the lost and found. What will the individual think when opening the locker door and seeing the unmarked cassette waiting for them? At the appropriate moment, when I receive the correct sign, I will try to track it down and see where it traveled to and what stories it has acquired along the way.

124

As I look through some images from several years ago I realize that the one-week weather forecast from December 12, 2007, 06:58 JST did not mention the earthquakes that would intermittently punctuate yesterday, December 17, 2009. However, looking back it seems clear that the distorted reception of the program was predicting it all the same. As well, the last fuzzy frame of the broadcast bears the slightest resemblance to Africa, foreshadowing the connection between Egypt and Japan on the back of black sesame cracker snack packaging. I am curious what would be revealed if I saw the reflection of my erased cassette tape in a news brief on the television after the weather report. Would mysteries be revealed that could not be coaxed out of the cassette by the diminutive Shinjuku psychic?

103

The reflection on the kitchen countertop of the erased Maxell UR 90 Tinted Oval Window Cassette Shell / POSITION•NORMAL / JAPAN•JAPON cassette. What would the reflection of an erased cassette tape sound like if it could be played?

101

Soon I will return to the diminutive psychic at the corner of Kuyakusho Dōri and Yasukuni Dōri and see what she says now about my Maxell UR 90 Tinted Oval Window Cassette Shell / POSITION•NORMAL / JAPAN•JAPON cassette from the mid-80s that has been reverse imported to Japan from the United States for the second time. Until then it will wait patiently on the kitchen counter refracting light through the rectangular plastic case, through the layers of plastic cassette shell, then eventually stopping at the normal bias magnetic tape. The tape was erased in 2005, so actually, in truth, I am uncertain of magnetic tape's ability to block light once it has been obliterated through demagnetization.

95

Maxell UR 90 Tinted Oval Window Cassette Shell / POSITION•NORMAL / JAPAN•JAPO cassette from the mid-80s reverse imported to Japan from the United States. The cassette once held recordings made of a conversation with an American psychic, but was erased in 2005.