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.

127

At one hour and two minutes into The Third Man and at one hundred and twenty-seven entries into Takinogawamonogatari, Harry Lime makes his entrance accompanied by a cat. The actor is cued. The cat pads down the cobblestone street to its mark on the doorstep of an apartment building, then briefly glances at someone off-camera, possibly the director. A single glance is all it takes to show the feline's high level of reverence for the movie-making process and simultaneously undermine the believability of the scene itself. One can almost hear director Carol Reed whispering to the cat in barely contained rage not to look at him, to look at Orson Welles, "Look at Orson!" The cat then plays a bit with Welles's shoelace (most certainly slathered in sardine oil as an enticement), followed by a thorough cleaning of its paw and then a gargantuan yawn that concludes the scene.

119

There is the question of plastic bottles filled with water and placed in public to consider. Last night I saw five liter bottles crammed onto a single step, a dozen surrounding a telephone pole, and single, small bottle blocking a large entranceway to a home. I have seen narrow alleyways scrupulously lined with plastic bottles on both sides, or a solitary, token bottle deliberately positioned. They are supposed to ward off cats, although I have never heard a credible explanation as to how this actually functions. I am usually told something along the line that that this system works because “Cats are scared of water,” or that “Cats see their distorted reflection in the bottles and are frightened away.” Last night it was suggested to me that I might consider that the water bottle phenomenon is not actually to dissuade the creatures from loitering, but to function like a flag and strategically let neighbors know the position that the owner of the premises takes towards feline loitering.

115

The yellow warning stickers on the Tokyo Metropolitan Subway doors depicting a highly distressed cat with its tail stuck in the door have been replaced by stickers of a masked raccoon and its pup pointing at the closing door. Upon first inspection the stylized violence seems to have been replaced with a more sober cautionary lesson; however, upon closer scrutiny one notices that there is a large, severed human hand in-between the closing doors that they are pointing towards. They must be enjoying the spectacle of human dismemberment because I detect the slightest hint of a smile in their masked faces. The explosive red graphic sited at the severed wrist is truly gruesome. Quadrupedalism trumps bipedalism. At first I missed the traumatized cat whose eyes practically popped out of its sockets enough to reveal the sinewy nerve, but now I have been won over by the ingeniously encoded horror. Unfortunately, I don't have a tail, so I will have to put my forearm in the door to see if what they are warning me against really is as extreme as I am told.

114

I want to befriend imperceptibility and begin my slow transformation over the years into an expert Japanese Sunday photographer with a long telephoto lens, bulging multi-pocketed technical vest, and familial support team standing at the ready nearby. Deep commitment to a hobby along a river seems healthy and right. But the expert photographers are now quite scarce along the north side of the Shakujii gawa. There is no more photographing of lazy cats absorbing heat, as they have retreated from the cold into the warmth of their mysterious cat communities in underground pyramids somewhere. Besides, the light is completely wrong now for photographing cats at 17:00 JST with any kind of lens. Although the photographers have departed, the colder weather has brought out the migratory expert fishermen to the south side. I used to see them further west upriver, vests also bulging with gear of a different sort, but now they sit on miniature folding chairs close to where I start my run. Fishing rods have been placed in shining holders pushed into the ground and lines have been stretched a short distance into a small pond on the river floodplain. I can't see any activity in the water and there doesn't seem to be anything living in the pond’s undersea world, but the slow movements of the fishermen indicate that they are doing something when they gently tug at invisible filaments. I never thought about it, but the expert fishermen might potentially be the expert photographers in disguise.

113

The entire Akihabara Station platform smells of butter. Is there a “Beard Papa’s” cream puff store nearby venting baking aromas into the station at a high velocity? Suddenly I am pulled from my olfactory reverie – or is it horror – when I see a man accidentally drop his wallet. I call out to him to inform him of the situation and he is both startled and thankful. I could have a delicate sandwich with the crust cut off to celebrate the encounter and successful maintenance of his financial situation, but I go for a louder culinary statement, order curry rice and inexplicably receive a plate of fatty meat. Recently in the town of Onomichi I found another wallet and brought it into a nearby store. The owner was also startled and thankful (who knows if it was even his wallet). I could have had a delicious bowl of piping hot Onomichi noodles to celebrate the encounter, but yet again I went for a bolder statement and in a nearby alley I had an impromptu staring contest with a medium sized, yellowish brown cat. Why does the mascot for “Beard Papa” look like the author Ernest Hemmingway, or the Gorton's Fisherman from packages of frozen fish when he is from Osaka? Is there a relationship between weathered old men, beards, the sea, fishing, luscious cream puffs, and the inadvertent jettisoning of personal wealth?

107

Three days ago there was a glowing, fat mikan orange tucked in a candlelit niche in a cave at Hasedera temple in Kamakura. Last week in Onomichi there were orange peels scattered elegantly down the embankment leading from the path in front of Jodoji Temple – where Setsuko Hara and Chishū Ryū stood after the funeral in Yasujirō Ozu's Tokyo Story – down to the train tracks. Last March in Nihonzutsumi in Taitō-ku there were orange peels that had been carefully Scotch taped back together into a husk with the form of an orange. Two days ago running west along the Shakuji gawa I heard classical piano again, another koto lesson, and as usual I saw a cat, but I did not see a single orange, or even notice anything that was orange colored. I did notice that the narrator reading of Heart of Darkness in my headphones delivered the lines “The horror, the horror” in a breathy voice just as I ran past the nurse’s dormitory across from Teikyō University Hospital (another zombie hospital perhaps?). Last night in Moriya I was given a plump orange for desert at an izakaya. I am curious if growing up in a room painted orange has predisposed me to seeing orange wherever it is available to see and desiring it where it does not exist.

106

The Excelsior Café on Inokashira Dōri across from CoCo Ichiban Curry House in Udagawachō is positioned so that anybody outside rounding the corner will accidentally activate the sensor of the automatic sliding door. When sitting at the front counter next to the door one is treated to the right edge of the glass door continually moving back and forth in front of you. The change in perception that this creates is delicate, only the vertical line of the glass’ edge erratically moving horizontally across your field of vision, but it is enough to disrupt the normal flow of mental meanderings so common when one sips espresso and stares aimlessly out a window into a place crowded with people. The moving glass edge reads as a scratch on a projected modern Japanese version of James Agee and Helen Levitt's 1945 film In the Street, with its concentration on frenetic activity and impromptu human dramas. It could also be an enormous twitching whisker from a cat sitting atop the café. As well, it reminds me of the shimmering light in Ain Soukhna in Egypt last August, which reminds me of the shimmering light in Onomichi last week. This succession of remembrances is all the consequence of the edge of something that is principally invisible.

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.

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.

67

Two tentative Takinogawa cats walking west while I walk east.

65

Three cats appeared tonight, all on the north side of the Shakujii gawa. The second cat was forty-seven paces from the first cat, the third cat was somewhere around one album's worth of music away from the second cat.

63

Yesterday, running into the close of the day on the south side of the Shakujii gawa, the 17:00 JST song played (Yuyake Koyake) mixing with the sounds of crows and crickets. I passed the Disneyesque playground, empty except for a single cat perched on the top of Cinderella’s castle.

50

An old man with a flashlight and a sharp looking stick is slowly looking for something stuck in a shrub along the Shakujii gawa. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, poke, poke, poke. As always, there is a cat watching. The situation seems innocuous enough at first; still, I get a momentary image in my head of numerous heads on sticks lining the path – both human and feline – with flashlights taped below their chins to create a childish horror effect. A moment later it is once again just a man with a stick looking for something while a cat stands by as witness.

48

Endless emails regarding my Tokyu Hands “Hands Club Point Card” keep coming to me, in Japanese. I can’t read them, but I know that they are good because the Tokyu Hands "Creative Life Store" has upwards of nine floors with products ranging from practical household items such as twenty varieties of nail clippers, to the more mysterious giant daikon radish costume. Variety and interconnectedness is the order of the day and there is even a cat petting salon on the top floor.

39

Man gesturing to a cat, a woman leaning over talking to a cat, a bushel of leeks heaped on the back of a bike – zap-zap goes the purple bug lamp.

32

Earlier while heading west I saw a man wearing a backpack and technical vest photographing a willing cat on the north side of the Shakujii gawa with an expensive digital single-lens reflex camera. Shortly afterward on the south side of the river I saw a different man (I think) in knee length shorts holding a small plastic grocery bag in his left hand while leaning precariously over a bush to photograph an awkwardly located flower stem with the mobile phone in his right hand. Now I hear the sharp sounds careening off the river embankments of someone clipping their fingernails indicating that unfortunately, personal grooming is publicly taking place somewhere off in the distance beyond the river bend. Perhaps later in the day I will come across a small pile of waning crescent moons further west.

8

Sometimes cats in Takinogawa will use a plant as an umbrella. Sometimes cats in Takinogawa will use a plant as a stylish accessory for their evening out on the town. Typhoons, torrential downpours, misty drizzles, or even weather forecasts indicating the slightest possibility of humidity should not be considered a factor in your assessment of the situation. Feline usage of foliage is a complicated matter and goes far beyond weather predictions. Inclement weather systems can be merely coincidental with the cat's headwear decision.

4

Sitting on the balcony in the night I hear crows, coughing, and a cat.

3

While running this morning along the Shakujii gawa (river) I saw two crows in a park carefully scrutinizing a large wooden sign with a cat painted on it and a real cat standing just a foot away intently watching the crows. I wonder what the reason for the slight curl of the cat's lips indicating the presence of a knowing feline smile?