116

Top image: Film still of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz from Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now. Bottom image: On the river Thames.

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.

47

I am looking at a relatively mutilated, 3” x 5” photograph of my childhood room. I brought this small catalyst with me from New York across the ocean to Japan. My current state of remove on a different continent and across the span of years affords me the opportunity to methodically, almost surgically go back into the heart of adolescent darkness and contemplate what exactly makes a high school room tick. I note the two old, battered skateboard decks mounted on the wall in the top left corner of the photograph. They are trophies. Recently, I noticed that there are two skateboarders regularly in front of Ōji Station in a parking lot on the east side. The numerous generations of skateboard decks developed since I skateboarded have evolved so much that now it is virtually impossible to distinguish between the front and back of a skateboard. That one skating closer to the Toden Arakawa line could potentially face forward and move backwards, face backwards and move backwards, face forward and move forwards, and the most interesting possibility to me: face backwards and move forwards. The last possibility reminds me of photographing, of expressing gratitude for mounting distance.

5

If the singer and songwriter Jacques Brel wrote the theme for Carol Reed's 1949 film The Third Man it would be the hatsumelo (train departure warning song) for Ebisu Station on the Yamanote line, but I have the feeling that I have said this somewhere before and that this thought will pervade everything I write from here on, like the anti-hero Harry Lime's presence before he actually appears on screen in The Third Man, or like Joseph Conrad's mysterious Kurtz lurking upriver in the Belgian Congo. Jacques Brel was a Belgian, Orson Welles played Harry Lime, and Orson Welles was going to make Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness as his first film before he made Citizen Kane in 1941, but I am uncertain of how this will all play out in regards to the looping Yamanote train.