how are memoirs faring in japan? i've no clue. unfortunately for ms. sakai, no one else on that train seemed likely to buy her book either, if only because most of them probably didn't see the ad. most of them were reading -- including a younger man with a newspaper that had an ad on the back for toupees, an ad that seemed aimed at younger men like the one reading the newspaper and that was big enough to be readable from where i was sitting on the bank of seats across the aisle. the older man next to me was reading a publication from some bank or insurance company on net worth and the estate tax. i would have been reading myself had i not been so dazed from my flight and distracted by tired anticipation. i'd hardly opened my borrowed copy of antal szerb's the traveler on the plane. unfortunately, despite having wanted it finished by the time i arrived at that night's destination (and in addition to my inability to concentrate), my copy of the book was in such disrepair as to be unmanageable in addition to my bags.
even if i wasn't reading, most of the rest of the train car still was. the ride from narita to nippori, where the keisei line meets two of tokyo's larger japan railway lines, takes about an hour and a half. from nippori to ikebukuro on the yamanote line is another fifteen or so minutes, and from there i didn't immediately have the humility to force myself and my luggage onto another train for another hour, so i stuffed my things instead into a coinlocker and let myself wander the area around ikebukuro station in vain hopes that by 8 p.m. the late rush hour traffic out of the city would thin enough to allow me a comfortable space on the train to higashimatsuyama in saitama where my japanese adoptive family lives.
there's a large stand of coinlockers at the "metropolitan" exit of the station (the exit's named for the shopping center above it), which is conveniently located at the above ground entrance to the tobu tojo line that runs from ikebukuro to higashimatsuyama. but, my god, if the entire city of tokyo isn't just a giant shopping center. recession or not, and regardless of japan's continuing deflation woes, the stores keep coming, and their wares are on constant display in the crowds that pass in and around them. tokyo denizens are shamingly well put together. i'll have to see about apparel shopping, which is to say that i'll have to wait and see which direction the yen blows after the g20 meeting in seoul. anyway, it's no time for frivolity. all the stations in tokyo have been on orange alert because of the apec meeting in yokohama.
so i sat for a while at the park near the west exit of the station, the park that, like most parks in tokyo, is just a lot of cement. a lot, that is, that hasn't been built up. there's a fountain on timers across from a set of railing seats for smokers and some kind of performance hall across from that. it's not by any means a tokyo must see, but it's representative enough (and vaguely nostalgic), so i took a picture before moving on. the longer i sat, the harder it was going to be to brave the home stretch of my arrival.
there's a pedestrian underpass that takes foot and bicycle traffic between the west and east sides of the station. i took it under and east to where it opens near the first floor of one of the area's larger discount electronics stores. i don't know how the employees stand it. that song can't be much longer than 30 seconds, and it plays on constant repeat. you'll know how to sing it after a dozen cycles, so you'd bettr know what you want. it's the same thing at most of the city's big chain stores, excepting the ones that sell books, and the bookstore to which i was headed isn't so awfully like a chain. it's definitely huge: the junkudou in ikebukuro (the company's original store) is at least nine floors plus a basement. but its interior is scarcely designed or gimmicked (the store on shijou doori in kyoto is no different, though slightly smaller). the japanese will stand and read at a seven eleven. it's hardly necessary for a bookstore to affect an ambience.
one sweep of the magazine section to the left rear of the cash registers on the first floor was enough. absolutely no sense in increasing my load on night one. there's a huge market for seasonal and limited time items in japan, but in my experience that doesn't affect the publishing or bookselling industries -- and saying so now makes me worried for when that floodgate finally opens.
i couldn't read on the train from ikebukuro to matsuyama either. despite having waited an hour around ikebukuro and then going to the platform and standing in the second set of lineups for the next next express, the train was still crowded. i got a seat, though at the expense of having to sit my bags in front of me in such a way as to make the seat next to me unusable. i've played that game on that same line more times than i'd like to remember, and, sadly, i don't remember specifically any of the books that i read during the two months i commuted between saitama and the city in college. the rules are similar in the opposite direction. during the peak commuting hour of the morning, higashimatsuyama station is the last station on the line where you can expect to find a place to sit on the train up to town. standing for an hour in the swarm is anything but unusual for riding morning or evening trains around tokyo, but it's not the most energizing way to start a day.
even if i hadn't been worried about losing the first fifty pages of my book over the laps and feet of the other riders, i still would have kept it in my bag. and i hated that train. the rebuffs and having to make the last one. 12:50? even if i took taxis, 55 kilometers is impossibly expensive. and so one decides to pay rent in the city. that night, though, i was happy to be riding that train to matsuyama, or if not necessarily happy, smilingly indifferent. there was be food waiting for me, and i just didn't care. looking good in pants means keeping up appearances, and having attended school in japan couldn't have been any better training. but really, anymore, i'm just tired of taking care of her. (when the LED news ticker on the super express ran that story about the man poisoning his mother, all i could do was wonder how mrs. bates had died in "psycho.")
more important than the strangers: "would they be able to talk to each other again, after all these years? after such divergent paths?" i've gradually made my way about half way through the traveler, and i wasn't surprised that a passage in a book so named would strike an assonant chord on certain heartstrings. mihály and ervin, the dissipated philanderer and the jew turned catholic priest, are able to talk to each other, and ervin sends his friend on another travel, a trip to rome. i might not need to finish reading the rest of the book. or, more correctly, i'm afraid of being sent on a different errand after already have been given the only advice i want to follow: "above all, do nothing. surrender yourself to coincidence. give yourself over to it, don't make plans..."
i'm sitting on a heated toilet seat next to which is a shelf of books. one of them,『ヘタな人生論より徒然草』("who needs some shoddy theory of living when you've got 'essays in idleness'"), strikes me by its title's coincidence with an idea that i once expressed at this blog. (the japanese, by the way, really did invent blogging.) the back cover describes something about finding fluidity between falling behind and being sucked into the pace of contemporary digital society. really, what better solution to that dilemma than a collection of seven hundred year old musings on the interplay of beauty and action?
what a strange, demented feeling it gives me when i realize i have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.
maybe that's why it's in the bathroom, but i guarantee that the japanese get some serious reading done there, too.
it was just a coincidence -- and, admittedly, those are easy to find when you need them. correlation and causality do, after all, have that strange and deceitful relationship. but we all know that those are the most fun to read. fun makes the writing easier, too. in other words, ms. sakai's book is an easy win on either side. it can't, also, be coincidence that the fortune i got at kiyomizu-dera temple told me that very same thing. for a hundred yen, it couldn't have been off mark. so i'll surrender. doing nothing is exactly the something i need to be doing, especially insofar as that means looking good in pants. and if there's nothing else to do than read and write, well, then that makes the decision all the easier.
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