Dear friends, welcome to part 2 of the July letters. If you’re new here, this newsletter is usually sent on a monthly basis. This month, you’ll receive them twice a week, on Wednesdays and Sundays. Read the archives here; if my writing brightens up your day or makes you laugh, you should share this indiscriminately with lots of people.
Saturday is Crow Day.
Let me explain: the burnable rubbish goes out for collection twice a week on my street, so the crows descend upon the neighbourhood on Saturday mornings. It’s like the crow mafia decides to set up shop, scavenging and scaring the shit out of everyone walking past.
I don’t know why they don’t bother on Wednesdays. Is it because it’s hump day? Is it because weekend bags have better food scraps? Do crows understand the concept of Saturdays? In 2020, anything seems possible. I find myself referring to star signs without irony. I could swallow the idea of a weekly corvid convention on my street, organised by the local crow committee in the park nearby.
The crows of Tokyo seem to have become more brazen this year, emboldened, perhaps, by the early months of the pandemic. The city has had a ‘crow problem’ for years, but I’ve never seen them so closely and in such numbers. We disappeared from the streets for weeks, and witnessed all the reminders that we are not alone here––remember #natureishealing?––and as we spilled back out from our tiny box-homes into some semblance of normalcy, the crows seem to have decided, collectively, that they will continue to walk among us.
I like crows. In 2013, when I was first in Tokyo as a student, one swooped down to grab the flower off my hairband. I can still remember how its claws felt against my scalp, and maybe I should be more wary, but I like them. I like watching these jungle crows, corvus macrorhynchos, these chicken-sized birds with their big goofy beaks and heads covered in fine blue-black fuzz. I like how they caw like they’re shouting FUCK all the time. They hop like they’re almost skipping, leading with one claw in a kind of da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM rhythm. They root around in rubbish, surf on cars, steal credit cards. Mostly, I love how crows just don’t give a fuck.
The crows take to my street on Saturday mornings. More than a dozen, perhaps, fewer than 20; I never count. I like to think of them as the Corvid 19, with some kind of yakuza swagger in their caws––Alright boys, it’s Saturday, let’s go, 行くぞ ––as they convene mid-morning, and descend on my street shortly after.
On Saturday mornings, the crows hang out on my street like the men you see in Kabukicho. They perch on the telephone wires crisscrossing the sky, sit on top of roofs and balcony railings and fences in ones and threes, and glare at passersby as though they own the place. Mostly, they scavenge. They tear at the sacks of rubbish and empty their contents out onto the street. Styrofoam trays, crushed plastic packaging, half-eaten food spills out onto the tarmac. Some neighbourhoods cover the rubbish with blue and yellow nets to stop them, but I suspect it doesn’t work. I know it doesn’t; I’ve watched them push the nets aside, drag a bag or two out.
Did you know it’s Crowmageddon outside? announced my friend from the doorway when he dropped by yesterday.
Every Saturday, I said.
We left my apartment in search of lunch. The crows glared at us as we walked past, and we quickened our pace. I like crows but I would not like to cross them; there is something a little eerie about them as a collective. Then again, are the crows that come each week always the same ones? If I watch them long enough they start to stand out as individual birds: this one a little leaner and nimbler, that one more apt to shoot me a fierce whaddya lookin’ at stare, another one long-necked and malcontent.
Earlier in the morning a man wearing a drab olive shirt was walking down my street. I watched him circle the area around my building a few times, walk up to the crows, click his tongue at them. They ignored him, or hopped away at his approach.
I have no idea what he was trying to do, but then I remember that I do exactly the same thing with most birds. I find them fascinating. It’s that impulse to reach out, one animal to another, and––what? The crows and I will remain utterly inscrutable to each other. Human concerns mean nothing to them. In a year when we are making it all up as we plod along, I have hit pause on the idea of careers, plans, life stages. It is strangely comforting to know that the crows don’t care about that sort of thing. I suspect just like 2020, that the meaning of what they do will always elude my grasp.
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LONG READS, GOOD THINGS
Ruby Tandoh on the Art of Quitting (WePresent)
Our Ghost-Kitchen Future (The New Yorker)
Crows are watching your language, literally (Corvid Research)
In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both. (New York Times)
Reni Eddo-Lodge: ‘The debate on racism is a game to some and I don’t want to play’ (The Guardian)
BOOKS + MUSIC
The Cat and the City (Nick Bradley): I remember reading a story by him somewhere on the internet while searching for information on creative writing programs and promptly bought the Kindle version when his book came out recently. Super charming. Will likely read many times over.
Unnatural Creatures: Stories Selected by Neil Gaiman (Various): Now and again I encounter a short story collection that transports me back to reading Diana Wynne Jones and Joan Aiken for the first time. Highlights: The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees (E. Lily Yu), The Griffin and the Minor Canon (Frank R. Stockton), and Sunbird (Neil Gaiman).
Hercules Muses Medley: I don’t want to know how many times I’ve played this on YouTube in the past month.