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.

91

Was there a waterfall featured in Heart of Darkness? Although there are falls on the Congo River I can’t remember if they feature in Joseph Conrad's book. Heading upriver along the Shakujii gawa in this part of Takinogawa (waterfall river), at this time of the day, is heading west into the sunset. Did the book's protagonist Marlow head west on his journey? If so, inside the “heart of darkness” – whatever that might be – is potentially a sunset? The telling of Marlow’s tale begins at sunset. I pass a Buddha on the north side at the beginning of my run. Marlow’s character is described in the last paragraph of Heart of Darkness by Conrad as having “…ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha.” If I start running on the south side of the river heading west at sunset then finish on the north side heading east near the Buddha then perhaps some clarity might emerge. Nevertheless, since the whole matter of traveling upriver in Heart of Darkness takes place in London on a stationary boat in the form of a recollection, then the real question I should be asking is if the river Thames has a waterfall.

89

Heading east along the Shakujii gawa at night the inverted pyramidal street lights repeatedly appear and disappear perfectly in the crooks of the trees forming glowing, sudden, upside down tree crotches. That implies that the heads are buried underground, or removed entirely.

88

Heading west on the north side of the Shakujii gawa I leave behind the sounds of the neighbor's koto lesson, then somewhere around Itabashi I hear a parallel koto lesson. With enough height the right vantage point would emerge and the individual lessons would compress into an unknowing duet; however, at this point I am no longer growing into the height that I would need to witness this, nor would I ever grow to the five hundred feet needed to see this occurrence, but am compressing into a smaller unit with greater density. As a result, the duo will remain forever separate. On the south of the Shakujii gawa walking towards Ōji Station it is not the third point of this koto triangle that I encounter, but hesitantly played classical guitar drifting out from a window and through the branches of a mikan orange tree. The mikan oranges are small, squat and look tender. The round plucking of the nylon strings compliments the mellow dark-orange color in a pleasant manner. As well, the delicacy of the notes and the way that they hang in the air seems abstractly similar to the increasingly tenuous hold that the mikan oranges have on their branches as they become riper, more luscious, and heavier. I sense a parallel in the tenuous nature of the situation so I abruptly leave towards the station in solidarity – detached and horizontally dropping.

79

Earlier this evening I was heading east along the Shakujii gawa towards a little girl riding in the basket on the front of her mother’s bike. Both of her hands were tightly pressed covering here eyes. Her mom was laughing as we passed. Again, I experience the Doppler effect.

75

A young man on a bike heads east along the Shakujii gawa past the post office with wheels the size of mikan oranges. It seems to take ten rotations of his pedals to move just one foot. It is comforting to know that there is unrestrained pedaling along the once roaring and turbulent "waterfall river." I yell "がんばってください!" (ganbatte kudasai – do your best) to encourage him. Tucked discreetly within his furious motions I glimpse the slightest nod of acknowledgement.

69

I decided to put my watch back on. Then while running through the park I looked at my watch, admiring the legibility of its magnified proportions and noticed that it was the same style as the giant clock atop a pole that I was running past at that moment. Now I know why MUJI named it the “Park Watch.” I place a high value on knowing the correct time here, although I am uncertain why, as I have no particular daily routine. Watch = precise time for no reason. No watch = imprecise operation of ambiguous schedule with the possibility of intermittent human contact to ask for the correct time. Watch on, off, off, or on – different choices, each with their own particular clutter.

67

Two tentative Takinogawa cats walking west while I walk east.

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.

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.

57

The embankments of the Shakujii gawa occasionally have ventilation shafts for the Tokyo Metro Namboku subway line, so as I run along the river I often hear the clacking of wheels and have the impression of trains moving in parallel with us. If the ventilation shafts are not for the Metro, then phantom trains definitely exist in Takinogawa.

54

There is a man with a chainsaw strapped to the back of his bike heading east.