#20 Tokyo on Two Wheels (July Series #4)
July 2020. On cycling in the Big Ume.
Dear friends, welcome to part 4 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 think, you should share this indiscriminately with lots of people.
I remember when I used to dislike cycling, so my current life would have baffled a younger me. I would have found it curious, given that I am tremendously clumsy, and by all accounts a serious liability simply standing around on two feet. But despite two bike accidents and numerous close shaves since I began cycling in earnest, I’ve grown to love life on two wheels. I like going places without riding trains. I like seeing the city without being behind glass windows, the sea wind on a coastal road, long rides to a forest and back.
Life on foot is granular and moves at a leisurely pace. I walk to think: drifting around a small area in slow but constant motion, puzzling out problems in writing that otherwise elude me . On foot, I might be gifted with whole sentences and paragraphs. Walking allows me to linger on details at ground level, oblivious to other moving parts around me. Other humans, for instance. Cars, lorries, cyclists. A walk is for encounters with tiny animals, like a swallowtail butterfly drunk on hummingbird sage, or bug-eyed puppies in prams. I walk for the texture of moss in the pavement cracks, the ground in front of a house strewn with the corpses of white bell-like flowers, hydrangeas crisp and nearing the end of their lifespan.
But cycling feels more active, and consequently more reactive. Cycling demands attention and presence to one’s environment in a way that walking does not. I have come to think that navigating Tokyo on two wheels is a little like being in a video game. There are times when you weave in and out of blissfully unaware pedestrians as though you’re dodging NPCs. Anyone who has cycled along the main shopping street between Hachiman and Uehara on a Sunday afternoon will know what I mean––people who decide to cross the road without looking, or drift out of their trajectory while looking at their phones. I do not multitask well, and remain in awe of those who listen to podcasts or field calls while cycling along this stretch. I privately fear for their lives, though in truth I’m more likely to crash into a dog-walker than they are.
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Pedestrians are just the beginning of many cycling hazards, including but not limited to: tiny children, the same tiny children but on bicycles, toy poodles (this city has too many), birds, bollards, flying bits of rubbish, sudden cars, car doors opening, too-high curbs, potholes, giant lorries hurtling past you with an inch to spare, taxis in front of you pulling over at an intersection without warning, other cyclists hurtling around the corner.
(Am I the only person in the city who uses their bike bell? It is the rare other-cyclist I hear ringing their bell when on a narrow street with other pedestrians. More often, most cyclists will simply drift very slowly behind the people taking up the whole sidewalk or street in front of them, as though the mental waves of hostility they’re emitting will be enough to jolt these walkers into awareness. I don’t know if there’s some unwritten rule of bike etiquette here against using one’s bell, but I am unapologetically obnoxious about it, and throw in a loud sumimasen for good measure from around 10 metres behind.)
Hazards notwithstanding, life on two wheels has expanded my view of the city. I would not return to a life without my trusty road bike. I remember what life before her was like: train rides and multiple line changes across the city, dodging other people in the crowds at busy stations, tens of thousands of yen dropped on train fares. I still like trains: these places to observe people and their outfits, whether strange or dapper; these spaces for thinking, writing, or reading. (I read rather less than I used to before a bike.) I still like long train journeys, the romance of riding with friends and furnishing our fellow passengers with back stories.
But there is no question that cycling has saved me (and many others) this quarantine. On rainy days I have rode the train a few times, and it always feels fraught. Everyone is masked and there are always empty seats. I cannot imagine relying on trains in Tokyo right now, even as I miss the fact that I am not travelling for work.
With Sardine, I can still travel in and around Tokyo, which helps quell the constant feeling of confinement within the city. I can coast along small, green paths with friends on a Sunday afternoon, or ride to Tsukiji in under an hour. Distances that require trains and buses now only ask that I am willing to pedal. The city opens up on two wheels, and I can see more and less at the same time. Life on two wheels gives me fleeting glimpses of all the other lives I’m passing by. It reminds me how surprisingly small this city can be, and yet just how much more there is left to know of it.
LONG READS, GOOD THINGS
Baking Bread in Lyon (The New Yorker)
Insane after coronavirus? (London Review of Books)
Why I don’t have a child: society isn’t built for motherhood (The Guardian)
Ask a Sane Person: Jia Tolentino on Practicing the Discipline of Hope (Interview Magazine)
The Pandemic Experts Are Not Okay (The Atlantic)
BOOKS + MUSIC
On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes (Alexandra Horowitz): A book I’m revisiting on account of the way it invites you to pay attention and see the world with different eyes––something I find myself needing when unable to travel.
Please Muscle: I promise this is literally the best thing you will watch all week.
There Is No War in Ba Sing Se: The Avatar musical should, in fact, exist, and she should write all the music for it.