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

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.

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.

66

Last night on the south side of the Shakujii Gawa I saw two dogs with illuminated collars, one collar was red and one collar was green like the left and right running lights on a ship in the darkness. Their erratic movements gave the impression of an alternately shrinking and expanding vessel, or of a drunk riverboat captain traveling towards me, then abruptly turning around and traveling away from me.

41

After an exceptionally violent mid-air catastrophe the paper airplane completes its sudden plunge towards the earth on the top of a dark green bush, the cockpit buried in the foliage. The bodies of the pilot and flight crew are indistinguishable from one another, just unimaginable human configurations and red mist hanging in the air. Nearby a dog’s ears – the same shape as the former nose cone – are attentively listening for the sounds of any passengers that survived the rapid decompression and subsequent impact. There is nothing. Only stillness, save the dog's own panting and its concerns for the victim’s families whirling around in its dog brain. The gurgling of the Shakujii gawa slowly fades back in as soundtrack for the torsos still safely strapped to seats. Beheadings are always such tragedies. Woof.

35

Everywhere I go I make it a point to look at where I am from above on Google Earth so that I can see my surroundings. One never knows if there is a nearby neighbor with a kidney shaped pool that can be secretly drained when they are away on vacation, and furtively used for the purpose of skateboarding. The Google technology that allows one to zoom in and out reminds me of two films that incorporate zooming into their structure – A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe made in 1968 by Charles and Ray Eames and Cosmic Zoom made in the same year by Eva Szasz.

From the vantage point of 2-32-10 Takinogawa, Kita-ku, The National Film Board of Canada presenting eight minutes of film in Cosmic Zoom of a boy rowing, a mosquito, his dog, and a blood cell, along with the Eames' eight minutes focusing on a picnic all seems like some far away experiment. Still, genuine connections and linkages exist. They are on a river and I am near a river. I have no dog, but I was born in 1968. I like picnics and I also like rough sketching without the requirement of crafting a final, honed something. However, neither film hints at the possibility of a kidney shaped pool.

26

Heading home late at night I stop at a street corner to wait for the light to change and a white dog suddenly appears in my peripheral vision behind a plate glass window. At first I thought that the dog was standing in a bank (the sign on the marquee said Softbank), so I asked the dog about the economic situation in Japan. The dog responded that it did not train in economics – woof – but in communications – woof – hence its current position as representative for a cellular phone company – woof. I asked the dog if communications was an interesting field to work in and the dog stated that it simply wasn't interested in talking to me, or anyone, because linguistically expressing one's deepest beliefs was such treacherous terrain – woof – woof. I stood there, mouth agape, momentarily stunned by the brusqueness of the response. It was without doubt a reluctant spokesperson / spokesanimal. I was channeling the friendly dog Hachiko from a classic Japanese story about loyalty, but it turns out that it wasn't the real Hachiko and that I was only talking to an inflatable corporate mascot that didn't want to get its plastic paws dirty. I was projecting, which was a chancy endeavor at best. Once you think about it, the plastic dog’s attitude towards communication actually makes a tremendous amount of sense, particularly in regards to conversations between species, or between animate and inanimate matter. The light changed from red to green and I was off.