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.

120

If flying from Cairo to Beirut yields shimmering red and green hexagonal light refractions in photographs, and if flying from Cairo to Tokyo yields arcing red, green, and blue color flares on in-flight television, then what kind of light and what kind of shape would a flight from Beirut to Tokyo generate? Would it be red and blue, or blue and green? Would the colors present as undulating waves, crisp, rotating pentagrams, or would they take the more radical form of the Japanese Red Army being extradited from Lebanon?

112

The euphoria of encountering a clear beginning on a crisp day is soon to be interrupted by a crossroads, a conspicuous absence of people, vast openness, and the sound of a prop plane overhead. I am not inside of Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 film North by Northwest, but a check on Google Earth shows that my current position in Japan is not so different looking west from Garces Highway near Corcoran Rd. in Wasco, California.

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.

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.

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.

74

I have run past the same person in a wheelchair, smoking, with two broken legs in front of Teikyō University Hospital at least ten times already. I am starting to know someone here in Takinogawa, yet I am not sure how my running presents to a smoker sitting in a wheelchair with two broken legs. Should I cross to the south side of the Shakujii Gawa from the north when I near the hospital?

67

Two tentative Takinogawa cats walking west while I walk east.

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.

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.

64

Two nights ago I passed by the tree that bit my hand, stopped, returned to it, and was tempted to snap its neck, but I didn’t and thought it best to hurry home for fear of encountering hordes of bloodthirsty Japanese zombies in the night. But perhaps if I did meet zombies I might feel a sense of kinship with them, as we are both “destined to wander the earth in search of brains.” Listening to an unabridged audio reading of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is affecting me, but not nearly as much as listening to The Toyota Way, read by the same man who read Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. After that the two texts merged and I was imagining Foucault’s Pendulum's nefarious "diabolicals" roving about everywhere, safely and economically in Japanese compact vehicles.

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.

62

Heading west along the Shakujii gawa into the setting sun, suddenly the smell of flour, water, salt, oil and boric acid, or otherwise known as Play Doh.

52.5

Across from the three-story Buddha on the north side of the Shakujii gawa there is a scaffolding system installed on the side of a house to support an old and still growing two-story cactus. Zooming in on the current, but outdated image from Google Maps “street view” shows only construction materials where the Buddha now sits, but it seems that the cactus has always been there in 1-3-16 Kita Ward. The cactus' house is cater-corner to the Buddha, so the cactus has the opportunity to contemplate Buddha contemplating the electric cables and telephone pole wires directly in front of his face. The apartment building nearby has the opportunity to contemplate the back of Buddha's head, while the electric cables have clear sight lines of both Buddha and the cactus and can consequently contemplate a wide range of topics.

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.