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stickers on the Tokyo Metropolitan Subway doors depicting a highly distressed cat with its tail stuck in the door have been replaced by stickers of a masked raccoon and its pup pointing at the closing door.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.

108

On Sunday, November 29, 2009 at 12:40 JST, a discarded VHS tape case tires of communicating with a playful cellular phone's video camera, painfully aware that the phone is ignorant of the fact that it is fast approaching the sad days of obsolescence. Nearby, the dead fish indicates that it understands all of this perfectly by not winking the glazed over eye that is no longer in its socket.

97

After visually consuming delicacy after delicacy in the paper museum in Asakuyama Park I emerged into the middle of a group of kids roughly playing. One faked an eye injury, wailing in agony, then attacked when the others came over to see if he was OK. The late afternoon light illuminated the imaginary eyeball perfectly as it rolled on the ground, its stringy nerve and tissue collecting dirt and twigs. The wounded boy grabbed a piece of paper drifting by, crumpled it into a ball and stuffed it into the gruesome socket to stanch the gushing of imaginary blood.

61

Last night I saw – and remembered that I previously saw – a square electric meter with five lights glowing in the dark on the south side of the river. Two yellow lights formed the eyes on the upper row and three lights made up the mouth on the lower. This meter has a red right tooth and two teeth that look to have fairly advanced tooth decay. Depending on the fluctuations in the building's energy consumption this meter could change and be sticking out its tongue, or have lost its eye leaving only a bloody socket. Alternately, it could have a completely bloody mouth after gorging on human flesh.