#12 a bike named Sardine
the adventures of furochan, July 2019
I picked up a road bike last week after several years of vacillating. Her name is Sardine, which began as a joke and stayed on like an adopted stray. She is currently covered in mud spatters and bike oil. I've been riding her for two days, and this is rewriting my mental map of Tokyo. A rainy month is not the best time to learn how to cycle on a road bike, but the second best time for anything is the present.
Walking unearths pockets of a city in slow motion. I have always been one for exploring on a small scale, the details of a place unfurling at the pace of a window sliding itself open, or snatches of muttered conversation between two old women in patterned dresses. I space out in front of doors and stare at hanging towels. The city at ground level overwhelms with the sheer barrage of life lived at close quarters.
On a bike, I haven't so much seen the details of Tokyo as felt its urban sprawl. 8 kilometers feels like it on a bike, when my triceps and shoulders tremble at the effort required to keep myself on the bike. I pedal while willing myself not to fall over as a breeze picks up and makes me sway on the path. Every downhill feels like a rollercoaster – I hate rollercoasters – and my hands can barely grip these rain-slick handlebars. My speed-sharpened senses are mostly directed by terror and fear at unexpected pedestrians or the sheer mass of cars and trucks barreling by. But adrenaline zips through my bloodstream and I find a strange exhilaration coursing its way around my body.
On my first day riding Sardine, A cycled me over to a friend's home, and then came again at midnight to return to mine together. It was raining steadily. I wear glasses but may as well not have been, quickly regretting my lack of windshield wiper-equipped goggles, or some silly-looking invention of that ilk. All I could really see was his rear light blinking red in the watery blur in front of me.
This is the route I always take to yours, he yelled over the rain. Shoe on the other foot. It occurred to me that while I'd always known he lives a 15-minute cycle from me, I'd never known what that really entailed, especially with rain. He's cycled over on many a dry night, but there have been times when he's arrived past midnight in the rain. He does this a few nights a week, even when he has to leave early next morning.
We took a long trek along Inokashira-dori, which when you're on it seems to ribbon out forever into the distance. Our route was mostly flat, but the road had its dips and rises, its uphill slopes and valleys. As the rain steadily drowned us I shivered and swore into the needle-fine spray. I entertained scenarios where I lost control of my brakes and skidded into a car. At times I thought I would just dissolve like the Wicked Witch of the West. But there he was, always just ahead of me, looking behind to see if I was still there.
That last lane change, he said, as I pulled in next to him at the red light, wobbling perilously on Sardine. I was shitting bricks for you then. That had been a sharp downhill towards the park, one where you had to swing three lanes rightwards after a large intersection to turn onto the street near home. It was a quarter past one and we were thoroughly soaked.
Since that night, I've been imagining him on these roads, weaving in and out of traffic for the last few months through all kinds of weather. Love takes many forms. But these days it looks like a red light blinking ahead, a worried face, someone who insists on cycling home with me in the rain. Someone enfolding me in a tight hug, like I might disappear, as I tell him about nearly colliding with an incoming bus. Someone turning up at my doorstep several times a week, rain-sodden, just so he can wake up next to me.
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FLORY'S VENTURES (STUFF I'M UP TO)
A YEAR OF NEWSLETTERS Consistency has never been my strong suit. Nor has persistence. But this month marks a whole year of monthly missives from Japan and beyond! Your reading them makes writing each one worth the time it takes.
LATELY I discovered this month that overwork does manifest physically – what a fright that was – so I’ve been forcing myself to take hours and days off. Time spent resting is not a waste; this I knew but now know anew. How important it is to slow down! I am writing little, but reminding myself that time spent recharging, absorbing and resting is also part of the writing process. I co-led a 10-day tour with a colleague. Last week I met a dear friend for the first time in real life. Currently, I read as much as the hours will allow. I am on a social media hiatus – unwittingly began – and it is a relief to step back from the performances.
EAT WITH ME July is here – it’s about the right time to plan for autumn! I do eating and walking tours in Tokyo, and for at the right times, in Kyoto – so here's where you send your Japan-bound friends. (Or you can forward this newsletter to them.)
JAPAN TRAVEL CONSULTING This is exactly like it sounds. Need to ask me burning questions about interesting places, rail travel, or what to include in your holiday? Ask for me (or one of the other excellent folks) at Japan Travel Consulting.
Until this morning, I hadn't seen the sun for two weeks.
This is not entirely accurate – there was one instance the sun made its presence known, around dusk three days ago.
That afternoon had felt very much like the one before, and the one before that, an interminable stretch of off-white cloudy days differentiated only by the varying intensities of rainfall. The sky was covered in a light, dirty lilac. The suburbs are drained of colour when the light itself seems listless, when the drizzle itself seems to mirror the energy dripping out of you. But a slight shift in colour caught my eye that evening, and I saw the house opposite his window lit up in shafts of orange-gold. Is that sun, we cried, hardly able to believe our eyes. It disappeared within the minute, and another night began.
Tsuyu seems to have overflowed into summer. It is July but it feels like late October, and I like the cool, damp atmosphere enveloping us in the streets of Tokyo, though not the persistent light rain that lasts for days at a time. I cannot recall a rainy season having lasted this long here. Last year the rains seemed to descend upon us and vanish in a breath, quickly dissipating into a scorching summer like I’d never known before. Summer is taking its time this year.
This fortnight has tested the limits of my love for rainy days. Even the blue and pink hydrangeas glowing like moons along sidewalks and train tracks lost their appeal after a few weeks, and I stopped wanting to draw the curtains each morning. Give me thunderstorms and typhoons, the high drama of wind and water, but spare me such relentless grey!
WHAT I'VE BEEN READING
Parasites Are Us (Nautilus)
The Tamarind is Always Sour (Granta)
Failing Better: A Conversation with Ocean Vuong (Los Angeles Review of Books)
The Making of a Millennial Woman (Another Gaze)
My Mother Pattu (Granta)
Agnes Martin Finds the Light That Gets Lost (Paris Review)
The Accidental City (Catapult)
Zen Cho – Sorcerer to the Crown and The True Queen