When I come home late at night / I get my favourite dish, fish
Striking up a conversation with strangers is still scary. I can do it these days, especially when I’m back in Japan, but it is a hard-won skill, one that I’m still honing. For me it is less innate disposition than practice. I know some truly magnetic people for whom talking to strangers comes as naturally as breathing; the phrase "right off the bat" was coined just for them. After a few minutes of banter they’ll have someone rattling off their life stories, where I’m still frantically racing around in my head wondering how to begin asking questions.
This is why I frequently return to places more than I explore new spots. Not having the gift of gab, or an ability to instantly and efficiently draw out stories from people I’ve just met, forces me to take the slower path of "exposure" - for them, and for myself. Both parties have time to open up to each other. A place reveals more of itself on every visit. It’s slow, but leads to immensely rewarding nuance and depth over time.
Craig Mod’s words on re-walking a path, from his 18th Roden Explorers newsletter, come to mind: ...Which speaks to something important: Rewalking is not unlike rereading or rewriting. We may only get the permission to see a path in a certain way by walking that particular path again and again. This was my 6th or 7th time on the Kumano Kodo (4th on the Kohechi route; 1st time walking north to south) and I only now, finally, felt like I began to see the road.
Recently I decided that I would visit a particular fish market as often as I could. There are around 48 stalls there. It is not a large place. But the people who work there are immensely friendly and interesting, and when it is not busy, you end up sitting with them on styrofoam crates, listening to them gossip about a late-night dispute at Tsukiji Market, the impending Olympics, Koike’s prospects in the next election. It is an hour away from my apartment by train, with two transfers, so visiting involves deliberate planning.
A market like this has many stories to tell. For now, just one scene from the last visit.
The first stall I visited at the market belongs to the Matsumotos. I asked the lady there how long she'd been working here. Since I married into this family, she said.About twenty years. Her mother-in-law ran the cash register, perched on a stool inside a small booth (chōba).
I wedged myself between two pillars behind their workspace, and watched the eldest son shuck blood clams. They're appropriately named. He tapped each clam with a screwdriver-like tool, kok-kok-kok, before wedging it inside and prising it open. Dark red liquid dripped and pooled all over the wooden countertop. He tossed each clam into a small metal bowl, and the ridged black shells into a plastic crate beside. Their fleshy orange bodies glistened in their bloodbath. Just once he inspected the shucked clam before tossing it on the counter; his customer, a sushi chef, wanted them pristine to serve whole.
Want to have a go? He asked. I declined, laughing. In that moment I also thought that someone else more daring might have said yes. He smiled and shrugged, turned back to the table. The clams were bagged and sold. He began preparing the next fish. It felt good to be there, to watch how he wielded knives and wires, how he separated shell and flesh, to marvel, too, at the way he turned ocean catch into the food we eat.
FLORY'S VENTURES (STUFF I'M UP TO)
EAT WITH ME Sometimes when I'm not writing copy, consulting, or figuring life out, I take people out for food on a private basis. It's pretty simple: we figure out what you want to eat, and then we go eat it together. Here's how it works.
(And you can forward this newsletter to anyone interested!)
LETTER-WRITING Much of February was given over to shallow work - emails, confirmations, planing, scheduling. Little in the way of deep work I was especially proud of. But I wrote several letters and postcards this month, and thoroughly enjoyed it: something deeply personal about writing for just one recipient.
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.
Send to a loved one? I have a favour to ask of you: if you enjoyed this missive and think someone else would love to read my writing, please forward it on to a friend with a note, and they'll receive the next one!
In the age of social media and instant gratification, an honest recommendation means a lot when seeking readers. Thank you <3
Clouds are in the sky / awaiting a command / from an aching heart
I write to you from San Francisco. It is presently rain-sodden, its skies swathed in a duvet of light grey.
In the several years I’ve been visiting this city it has nearly always been the very picture of local postcards, i.e. absurdly sunny and blue-skied. This is my first time witnessing a long spell of their famous fog and rain. No tropical thunderstorms have we here, nothing to shake the trees or make the walls shudder, just a steady, relentless, needle-fine precipitation that has abated only occasionally since I arrived last week.
From the window I can see a slice of California: a leafy bush hanging heavy with golden angel’s trumpets, a tall cordyline with leaves bordered dusky pink, a tree festooned with magnolias like blood-flecked crumpled tissue from a distance. The neighbours on either side have lemon trees in their backyards, but the bright yellow globes hang there unused. Out on the city streets, rosemary grows everywhere, both in cultivated clusters and by the roadside in straggly, thorny clumps, alongside feathery fennel, dandelions, geraniums in the cracks. These are just the very few I can identify. The iNaturalist app has been a tiny godsend of sorts in this regard.
I fall in love with local vegetation more with each visit to SF, each walk in this city.
The other day K took me for a post-breakfast walk through Golden Gate Park and the Panhandle and pointed out the giant eucalyptus trees. Though amusingly enough he shuddered at touching anything close to the ground, convinced that everything is covered in dog pee. (It may well be.)
I walked through the park again this morning, this time through a trail dotted with elegant Tasmanian tree ferns, past Stow Lake with its Medusa-branched trees on the banks, oaks, cypresses, pines, and redwoods towering above. Most are absolutely furred with moss and lichen. Even a felled pine is beautiful up close, its body hacked to pieces, exposing a core of sienna, auburn, ochre. Are the clumps of light green tendrils on its lichen-encrusted branches Usnea, or Spanish moss? How frustrating to look at a profusion of foliage and not know what it is!
If you were walking around the triple intersection near Masonic and Euclid on Monday afternoon, you might have spotted someone crouched near an ordinary-looking fence for an odd length of time, peering at nondescript weeds.
Growing in the horizontal gap between fence and wall was a diminutive plant tableau as delightful as any terrarium shaped by human hands, perhaps even lovelier for its lack of considered preciousness. A triangular, broom-like tuft of shaggy moss edged with teeny, star-like pale green and pale pink geraniums. Delicate tendrils protruding here and there, tipped with tiny white flowers. Clumps of fuzzy leaves, budding maroon stems. What looked maybe like star moss or something of that ilk, interspersed with clumps of crusty white lichen - at least, white without, but pale tea green within. And the wall below, its surface all but obscured by swathes of lichen as though it was sprayed on - yellow, white, charcoal, bright orange.
Missing the bus and walking to one’s destination has its charms. Who could fail to love a city that lets its mosses, liverworts, and lichens be? The rain has been kind to them this winter. A short walk for an entire world found near the ground in the space of a half hour. Hardly long, all too short. But for today, it's enough.
WHAT I'VE BEEN READING
Home as a Verb: Writers in Choosing to Live Overseas (The Millions)
Is Line Editing A Lost Art? (LitHub)
Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction (Paris Review)
If you choose to travel — or are a digital nomad — you have this privilege. (The Cup and the Road)
Death to Minimalism (Current Affairs)
Whose facade is it, anyway? Homeownership in the age of the Instagram “travel influencer” (Curbed)
The Ethical Dilemma Facing Silicon Valley’s Next Generation (The Ringer)
A FEW THINGS I'VE WRITTEN