I live near one of the largest parks in Tokyo. It is one of the true green oases in this metropolis – lush and expansive in the warmer months, with pockets of energy and tranquility in equal measure. It is also a popular gathering spot, and as a consequence, it is possible to run away from and into people here, sometimes in rapid succession or all at once. It is exactly what you would expect of a public park in a city.
Though it is no more than a ten minute walk away, I can count the number of times that I have visited this park on my hands since I moved here two years ago. I haven’t figured out why. Perhaps it is reclusive tendencies. It still takes a conscious effort to leave the apartment on most days, and there are times when I feel that everything is further away than it really is. But in reality, the effort it takes to go anywhere these days is often smaller than what I imagine, and each time I leave the threshold of my door, there is a sense of joy at re-encountering the world. I also spent my formative years largely indoors and at arm’s length from nature, and so perhaps on some level, I think of green spaces as places to be visited deliberately, with an appropriate sense of ceremony.
But more likely, not going to the park has something to do with being local to somewhere. Living anywhere, the places you rarely visit are precisely those in closest proximity to you. They are always there. You can go any time. Then the notion rears its head again one day, and you find yourself having travelled across the world and back, still never having set foot in the cafe en route to your office.
For some people – myself included, at times – it is bewildering point of pride to have lived somewhere and still not have been to X or done Y. This is especially true of tourist-oriented attractions like the London Eye. For such people, it is as though the length of time spent avoiding something is an achievement in itself, when in reality it appears closer to pig-headedness, or more neutrally, a casual lack of interest. You could see this as superiority of a sort: as a local, you can simply go any time, and therefore, you make it a point not to. This, even though existing somewhere does not make you an expert on the place.
I decided to spend Sunday afternoon in the park. Despite my attachment to indoor spaces, I have come to appreciate an open, green space as the logical antidote to cabin fever. I took the following items with me: a notebook, pen, Kindle, oranges (which remain uneaten), bottle of tea, wallet, planner, phone, charging cables, external battery. Looking at this list, it seems that I invest the same amount of energy packing for the park as I do going anywhere else. It feels absurd to put this much thought into going somewhere only ten minutes from home. I cannot decide if this is pragmatic or fussy. If it is neither, what is it?
That afternoon had all the warmth of late summer and none of the suffocating humidity of the preceding weeks. Dragonflies skittered around us by the dozen, moving targets glinting blue, red, and silver in the sunlight, at times resembling carelessly-dropped gemstones. Above, the sky shone clear and blue, as though repudiating several months of near-constant cloud cover over Tokyo.
The grass rustled thick around my ankles as I clomped across the lawn searching for an empty bench. I narrowly avoided a Frisbee flung in my direction. Eventually, I found one near a pond with a fountain. I was sitting opposite a group of youths, perhaps college students, who had set up their bright blue tarpaulin sheets underneath the expansive branches of a cherry tree. My bench seemed a little stiff and uncomfortable by comparison, but it was, I reasoned, better than ants crawling all over me on the ground.
Of course, now that I was in the park and surrounded by greenery, I wondered again why I didn’t do this more often. Part of me wonders if I am wary of becoming too habituated to its pleasures, as though enjoyment will cause me to forget what its inverse feels like.
I watched several crows swoop through the trees. Behind me, a teenage boy’s laugh erupts, harsh and guttural, like the crows. Though most people in the park were with other people, some were alone. I watched the women alone walk, jog, read, sunbathe. One woman in the distance slept, sprawled casually over a bench. I admired this impunity – the trust in society, the promise of safety it implied. Tokyo is palpably different to many other cities in this important respect: I rarely feel fear in public spaces as a woman, the way I have in many places outside of Japan. This is not to diminish the real and unaddressed problem of stalkers here, but the primary risk of being in a park like this is being approached by strangers or running into people you don’t want to meet.
If you’ve forgotten how you ended up here: in theory, you signed up here for a monthly missive of introspective writing by Flory Leow – immersive stories asking questions big and small, celebrating the small and large joys of life. Every dispatch includes a selection of reading recommendations, too.
The bench I occupied was wide enough for three adults; this particular one had an arm in the middle. Design can shape and direct behaviour: this could have been added to prevent people from sleeping here. Alternatively, you could say the arm allows two strangers to share this bench without being obliged to acknowledge the other person’s presence, or feeling indebted to the other party’s willingness to share a piece of furniture.
Unfortunately, it does not act as a barrier to the determined and garrulous stranger, particularly if they are male. Sitting on the bench, I remembered an incident from six years ago, when I was an exchange student in Tokyo. It had begun innocuously enough. An old, friendly man sharing such a bench with me struck up a conversation asking where I was from, what I was doing in this country, what I was studying. I enjoy talking to older Japanese people, so I answered his questions and asked him some, as the average social script dictates. After a while, I got up to leave. His voice took on a note of desperation as I made my excuses. He insisted on exchanging numbers, even making sure my phone rang when he dialed mine, so that there could be no mistake.
Looking back, I could have walked away at any point, but I did not. Perhaps I did not want to break character, make a scene. I think it was also narrative curiosity: what would happen if I let this continue? Having never written fiction, I sometimes let other people take the wheel just to see what will happen. I am apt to let strangers talk at me just to see what they will reveal. It’s a perverse habit that is difficult to break.
What did I think would happen? He called the next morning. I watched my phone ring several times, vibrating on my desk. It stopped after a while. A text message arrived. I’m sorry, it read. But my wife doesn’t talk to me anymore, and I wanted someone to talk to. You were the first person to talk to me in a long time. I never responded and he never called again.
Still, he shouldn’t have done that, said a male friend I told this anecdote to. He should have known better.
My glasses were lying beside me on the bench, so I did not notice him until he waved a tentative hand in front of me. A man with a camera, asking if he could take a photograph of me. It’s kind of a good atmosphere, he said almost inaudibly, gesturing at me and my notebook. He showed me a small stack of prints of other people he had photographed. I have often found it intimidating to ask for permission to photograph other people, but clearly, there is little mystery to the process. You ask; they say yes or no. That’s all there is to it.
It seemed easier to say yes to him without my glasses on. My eyesight is very poor, and it felt as though there was less clarity as to what I had agreed to, only a vague notion that I would appear on his camera in the immediate future. I wonder if this is in fact a better way to make some decisions: without asking too many questions or insisting on full knowledge of all the details involved. Like Plath’s fig tree, interrogating every path available often becomes an exercise in futility. I see this sometimes with people who want to know exactly what will happen on their travels. For these people, chance is uncertainty and is therefore a nuisance – they do not need surprises. They read the terms and conditions, they want to know exactly what is being sold to them. They want to know the exact outcome and will brook no compromise. I wonder if this is what stops me from trying more things – as when asking too many questions draws one to a standstill instead of informing new ways forward. I try to remind myself that it is possible to reconcile yourself to unexpected outcomes, even delight in them. That some life decisions are better made without questioning them too closely, that moving forward may be contingent on the very opposite of interrogation. At some point, it is easier to put on your shoes and walk to the park.
When I put my glasses on several minutes later, the skies had turned white. It was soft and fuzzy, a bleached skein of wool blotting out the blue. I realized that he had disappeared, had taken the photograph and departed without even mentioning it. Having made the effort to stay still I felt a little aggrieved. It seemed like he had left his part of the social contract unfulfilled. But as with so many things, the feeling reared its head and retreated just as quickly, settling back into reality, becoming something else barely worth dwelling on.
SUPPORT THIS NEWSLETTER
I began this with the intention of writing to friends in far-flung places, as a way of finding readers while ensconced in Japan. A year on, it continues to be one of the most rewarding things I do every month.
These dispatches are a labour of love – once-a-month missives will always remain free, and you are welcome to remain on the free list. But these newsletters do take considerable resources to produce every month.
If you do choose to make a paid subscription, you’ll be helping this newsletter remain sustainable, and also play a direct part in helping me and my writing grow. The aim has always been to find readers to connect with, a personal, intimate readership like friends in a living room, without having to rely on large media publications. I’d love to skip the middleman and find readers like you instead.
If you’ve been reading for a while and you like what I do every month, I would love it if you considered contributing USD$5 a month (the minimum Substack allows) or a discounted USD$50 annually.
Whether or not you choose to do this, though, please know that I’m glad and grateful that you’ve chosen to read my newsletters. You can support the newsletter in other ways, too:
・Send emails and issues you liked to friends and family, and ask them to sign up at furochan.substack.com. I love new readers and subscribers! It’s kind of like meeting kindred spirits, which is a very Anne-of-Green-Gables sort of thing to say, but it’s true.
・If you love what you read but can’t subscribe at this time, you can always buy me a cup of digital coffee here, in any currency you like. Coffee keeps the writing juices flowing: paypal.me/floryleow
・Write a recommendation for this newsletter, and I’ll add them to this page. Kind of like testimonials for Friendster but way better. (Who remembers that, anyway?)
Many thanks for reading – onwards and upwards…
FLORY’S VENTURES (STUFF I’VE BEEN UP TO)
UPDATED FOOD GUIDE New subscribers may notice that I’ve updated my food guide. Simply put, it’s a petite PDF collecting articles written by me, illustrated by my sister. My latest version was updated August 2019, and you can download it by signing up.
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.
FREE SPACE: WORK QUERIES If you have articles, essays, brand or profile descriptions, website copy, travelogues, or even – gasp – a book you want written, please do reach out. On a bio: it turns out I’m pretty good at weaving seemingly-disparate achievements and things you’ve done into a coherent narrative. Respond to a newsletter to let me know.
WHAT I'VE BEEN READING
・The Brief Idyll of Late Nineties Wong Kar Wai (Paris Review)
・A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies (Apex Magazine)
・Lessons From a ‘Local Food’ Scam Artist (Narratively)
・This Land Is the Only Land There Is (The Atlantic)
・Not Gonna Get Us (Paris Review)
・What Driving Can Teach Us About Living (New York Times)
・The years-long road to the Field Study Handbook (On Margins)
・Preeta Samarasan – Evening Is the Whole Day
・Yoko Ogawa – The Memory Police
WRITTEN STUFF: SOMETHING NEW, SOMETHING OLD
・Eating vegetarian in Osaka – a full day of food
・I *still* don’t have mobile data. Will this change, I wonder?