#17 On The Street Where I Live (July Series #1)
July 2020. Observations from an apartment in Tokyo.
Dear friends, I have not left Tokyo since late April. In a normal year I would already have been in and out of the city––at the very least not in this apartment––for weeks at a time, researching places for content or taking clients around parts of Japan. As in most places around the globe the travel industry is in tatters, and with it the fortunes of many working in and adjacent to it, myself included. I have barely had work since mid-April (though a lot of life has happened since) and things are incredibly anxiety-inducing most days, but it’s difficult to complain much: I have a roof over my head, the ability to cook and feed myself, and some leeway to consider what might come next.
For now, July will be an experimental month of newsletters: a series of 8 pieces for you, in lieu of the few months I have missed the monthly streak. It turns out that you have to go away and do some living in order to write again. These will be sent twice a week on Wednesdays and Sundays before returning to normal(ish) scheduling.
Spend enough time on one street and you become attuned to its rhythms––the different shades of sunlight as the seasons wear on, the time of day delivery vans rumble up and park just outside your building, the lusty wail of an infant a few floors up in the evenings. You notice when the breeze picks up and dies again. You look forward to the time of year when one tree on a hill visible between two apartment buildings bursts into white blossom, and evenings when the buildings carve silhouettes into pink skies. You live for nights when the half-moon shines an eerie orange between roofs, that period in early summer when a particular and beloved tree is awash with feathery white blossoms glowing in moonlight.
I have lived in this apartment since 2017, but as with many of us this year, I have never spent as much time here as in the last two months. I live in a quiet part of my neighbourhood, on the ground floor of a slightly worn, three-storey building, an apartment sandwiched by two units on each side. One is occupied by cardboard boxes stacked floor to ceiling containing props and costumes for a broadcasting company, and the other, a woman I have never met. She is not my first neighbour: before her was a couple in their early thirties, both people who look completely different in contact lenses than in spectacles. I used to know their names even if I did not always recognise them on sight, but they moved without warning and I’ve now forgotten. So one day I was neighbourless, and then a few weeks later, I wasn’t.
(In fact, I still don’t know anyone who lives in this building or this street. My building has just 9 units and we, the occupants, walk among each other as strangers. We nod to each other on the staircase or the driveway, our hours are our own, we keep our own counsel.)
But I knew when she moved in because of the sign on her mailbox. I have had a handwritten sign on mine for a long time: チラシ投函お断り––No Junk Mail––bordered in washi tape. It doesn’t work; I still receive all kinds of paper rubbish, including, memorably, an ad for a private detective agency specialising in cheating spouses. One day the exact same handwritten sign appeared on the mailbox next to mine, also bordered in washi tape. It’s the only acknowledgement that we exist to each other. I suspect she receives plenty of junk mail, too.
I have no idea who she is or what she does. Like me, she seems to keep late hours. I’ve stepped outside long past midnight and looked sideways to find her lights on, behind her curtains. Most often, the faint smell of cigarette smoke wafting over in the wee hours tells me she’s home. Wooden slats separate our balconies, but on a cool spring night I ventured out to vanquish the slugs crawling up my balcony walls and caught a glimpse of her through the gaps of those slats. It was a Hopper painting for Tokyo: a woman in her early forties, perhaps, her hair mussed and wet, a towel around her neck, lit up from the side by her apartment lights. She was taking deep drags on her cigarette, squatting in front of her laptop perched on top of the condensing unit, watching anime.
The image of her has stayed with me since. You could say it was “a mood,” the cast of a fever dream hanging about her. It feels like the last few months. The days slip by in a haze of cooking, dish-washing, cooking, cycling, dish-washing, walking, emails, dish-washing, Twitter, emails, phone calls, emails, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter. I have busied myself with various projects that go somewhere and then nowhere for a while, sputtering and clanking, the stop-start motion of every day and its half-hearted reset. Occasionally I look back months hence and see things that were once true and now aren’t: I do not like sitting in silence as much as I used to, now that I find myself within these four walls most of the time. These days I listen to music almost constantly. Solitude, warping into loneliness, made ever louder by the clacking of my keyboard. I have one friend who visits regularly––a rarity in the current age of social distancing––and count myself lucky; what will I do when they leave Japan this year?
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The street on which I live is quiet except when it isn’t. By and large, I can mark the hours by the roar of delivery trucks pulling up in front of my apartment unit––a high-enough wall separates my balcony and the street––and the sound of car doors opening and slamming shut. They usually arrive in the morning around 9 o’clock, sometimes in the mid-afternoon, and often again after the 5 o’clock chime. Sometimes there are planes flying low, sometimes the angry buzz of helicopters. Sometimes there are sirens in the distance. There was a week in May ambulances came to my street, twice; who was it, what happened, was it the virus? I don’t know, and no one can tell me.
My street is at its loudest on a particular evening in the first week of September, when a sizeable neighbourhood procession sways past, several dozen men heaving the omikoshi housing a local deity, everyone chanting and laughing. There will be none of that this year. Earlier in spring, when schools were shut, you could hear the laughter of local kids playing in the street. That has also stopped. But the birds continue to sing and chirrup, and on nights where I am still awake when the sky starts to brighten, I can hear their shrill tweets heralding daybreak from the trees nearby.
For most of May and some of June, if you happened to be on the street where I live around 6 o’clock in the evening, you would hear someone playing the piano. They would begin with Chopin (I no longer remember which waltz) and my ears would perk up when they started to play Astor Piazolla’s Libertango (whose arrangement, I could not say). There’s a certain romance to walking around here at twilight, the frantic strains of a piano echoing down the street. They’d usually repeat the main refrain several times, playing several bars over and over again until they nailed it for the day. This might last for half an hour or so, and then, presumably, they went to eat dinner.
Libertango gave the days a certain rhythm, a pleasant regularity that made the earlier days of being home bearable. I would turn off whatever music I was playing, step out to the balcony to look at the sky, and let the notes wash over me. I notice they stopped playing it recently––in fact, they do not seem to be playing the piano at all––and I cannot help but feel a little pang of grief that the music stopped.
As I write this I have it playing on my speakers, a nod to those late spring days when music demarcated the hour between afternoon and evening, when someone faithfully pounded away at their piano keys––not for the neighbourhood, but a public service nonetheless––when I had still not yet fully settled into the notion that I might be living on this street for far, far longer than I had anticipated.
THINGS I’VE BEEN UP TO
Cycling. Still pedaling, still alive. Sardine is still faithfully ferrying me around, as dinged up as she is in the wake of two (!) bike accidents.
Compiling a JP-EN tech glossary. This thing actually runs to 100+ pages. There is a companion Japanese resume template. What will I do with it? At some point, release it into the world as a thing. All things in good time…
Cooking. So much cooking. I love cooking and I am also heartily sick of cooking and washing dishes. But eating out regularly does not inspire much confidence, even as things begin to go back to some semblance of ‘normal.’
LONG READS, GOOD THINGS
Fuck the Bread. The Bread is Over. (The Paris Review)
The Entire Vittles Newsletter (Substack)
‘It’s bullshit’: Inside the weird, get-rich-quick world of dropshipping (Wired)
My Appetites (Vulture)
BOOKS + TV
A Darker Shade of Magic (V.E. Schwab): I was only in the mood for escapist reads for weeks on end and this was perfect. She also knows how to draw you in from the first page: “Kell wore a very peculiar coat. It had neither one side, which would be conventional, nor two, which would be unexpected, but several, which was, of course, impossible. The first thing he did whenever he stepped out of one London and into another was take off the coat and turn it inside out once or twice (or even three times) until he found the side he needed.” Why wouldn’t you read this after an opening like that?
The Ten Thousand Doors of January (Alix E. Harrow): Possibly one of my favourite reads of the year. It’s about doors, which I love; but also about love, justice, family, traveling between worlds, and all that delivered in some truly gorgeous writing. E.g. “You don’t know a thing about me; you can’t see me sitting at this yellow-wood desk, the salt-sweet breeze riffling these pages like a reader looking for her bookmark. You can’t see the scars that twist and knot across my skin.” This is just page one. Read!
The Good Place (Netflix): Funny and smart take on philosophy and the afterlife and also made me ugly-cry at the last episode. One of those shows which ended exactly when it needed to end. Can’t recommend enough.