Sons of Loki

On the road, he became anonymous, a nobody. Just another gaijin tourist; no more worthy of note than that the sky was blue or that birds sang. He didn’t so much blend in as simply not be present; he was discovered as a suitcase in a luggage rack, or seen as wallpaper plastered against walls, or spotted as a railing affixed to the pavement.

In Kyoto he saw the temples and the forests and the geisha. In a town called Yamaguchi, he brushed his teeth with the complimentary toothbrush, and ordered a cup noodle from the vending machine.
Down in the far south, from a city called Kagoshima, he took a train ride down the coast to the end of the world. The sea thrashed and boiled in a desperate frenzy as it poured over the rim. From the edge of the Earth, hanging out over eternity, a peninsula ran out into a thick grey fog; there he found himself as far from Tokyo as possible, surrounded by mountains and empty highways, vending machines and deserted high schools. There was a TV shop here, too: big-screened Sonys and Toshiba plasmas. A man was carrying wet cardboard boxes from a pile and tossing them over a railing off the edge of the world, where they tumbled down into infinity.
A little further down the coast there was a white-painted metal stairway leading down to an observation platform, proudly proclaiming itself as the most remote point on Earth, a kilometre out from the rim and into space. An elderly couple – the man in a grey coat and flat cap, the woman wearing a purple headscarf – were leading on the rail, staring out at God’s creation, enormous lilac nebulae and supernovae erupting across unimaginable distances.
“It’s cold,” the man said, in Japanese he could just about understand.
“It is, isn’t it?” his partner replied.

Trying to get back into this writing lark, now I have some time. It’s what I want to do, more than anything – it’s what drives me. I think I possibly explained before, but if I was a famous singer, I could lose my voice; if I was good at piano, I might not be able to afford one; were I a playwright, I still need actors and a stage. But being a writer, and specifically a novellist, it’s like you don’t need anything. You can write on a train or write on a mountain. You can write on a PC or scrawl it down on a napkin. Even if you’re completely paralysed you can still write.

The last days have been a little hectic. I was worried that I’d have nothing to do this holiday, but it’s been quite the opposite; karaoke on Wednesday, nomikai (drink-meet) on Thursday and then again last night. Everyone else sensibly went home before the stroke of midnight but Kaz and I, determined to make a proper Friday of it, ended up wandering around Kichijoji in the rain.

Kichijoji is a nice place, and it can be a pretty good spot for nightlife, but by midnight everyone sensible has gone on to Shinjuku and it was raining, so the town was kinda dead. Went to Hub for a few drinks, then an izakaya I’d been to before for a few more drinks, then got waylaid in a bizarre tiny shisha bar I’d noticed before, one which spills out on to the street under a plastic awning. The drinks were expensive, and the girls – well, I suspect they weren’t there for the atmosphere, if you get my drift – but it was kind of fun in a seedy underworld kind of way, the ten of us crammed into a tiny space on wooden stools, me alternately getting dripped on from the awning and having my ass grilled by the portable heater. Had it been more inside with the burly Sly Stallone-lookalike (right down to the porkpie hat!) between me and the exit, I might have been a little worried, but if they were running a dodgy clip joint it was an honorable dodgy clip joint where we were free to leave any time.

So we did. It was about 3am, and we had some time to kill before the first trains, so Kaz took me to this place he used to drink, and it was beautiful. It was an old-timey, Showa-era place, with vintage posters on the walls and that beautiful jazzy old Japanese music (I think ryūkōka?); you could imagine that it was the 1950s and you’d just got the new-fangled Chuo-line locomotive back from your labouring job in up-and-coming Shinjuku and decided to pop into your favourite haunt for a glass of nihonshu. It’s like a long-forgotten Tokyo, the Tokyo you see in old photographs. It was cheap, too, and I tried frog for the first time (exactly as Kaz said: like fish, only … like chicken).

So in the end, I spent a whole lot of money, but it was worth it because I learned stuff! I think I learned more Japanese just chatting to Kaz for a few hours than I do in a week of lessons. And such is the point of language learning, no?

Here’s the sunrise over Chofu airfield.

A little bird keeps visiting my balcony, which is nice. I leave out thawed frozen veg for him.

I decided to head back to Asakusabashi, for a stroll along the Sumida River. The trip out was weird; first time I’ve been out in daylight for a while, first time I’ve seen Tokyo in the morning for a long time.

I went to Asakusa, to Shitamachi (lit. ‘down-town’, meaning ‘old town’), way back in 2007 to find a department store that apparently specialised in fancy paper. While there I ended up down strange ancient alleys that seemed the antithesis of the Tokyo I knew, and wandering along the Sumida River, so desolate and empty compared to the Thames or the Seine or whatever municipal rivers you care to name.

It was a stroll that inspired a short story for my Writing Fiction class last year, and that little short story grew into a novel that’s 60k and counting. Head down the right passage off the Sumida embankment, you see, and you stumble across the secret artist commune that’s at the heart of my novel. Which sets most of my novel in old town, in Shitamachi. Which meant I wanted to head along and do a little research. (It’s not every day one’s in Tokyo, after all.)

After lunch at Maccy D’s, I walk.

I always feel some strange connection to rivers. I’d love to own a boat one day, go chugging along, watch the scenery go by…

The titantic bulk of the (Shuto?) Expressway.

I bother a few pigeons for cool shots.

Strange little buildings, as far from the towers of Shinjuku as can be imagined.

Could this be the secret entrance, I wonder? (Naught but a concrete wall and bags of rubbish could I peek behind it.)

The riverside walk stretches on for an awfully long way, but is desolate except for old people, the homeless, and a couple salarymen on a smoke break.

How many live here?

Fabulously wealthy Tokyo has a shanty town too. It's just that this shanty town is thousands of elaborate cardboard hovels stretched in every nook and cranny across the city.

I end up walking quite a ways along the river, all the way down to Tsukishima and its Hong Kong-esque apartment towers at the tip of Tokyo Bay. Here I stop for a sit-down at the top of a steep embankment and catch a quick nap in the less-than-blazing January sunshine.

Walking back inland towards Tokyo Station, I pop into a Starbucks populated mainly by businesspeople rather than the usual student crowd (and a woman in a kimono chatting to a Yank for reasons I couldn’t discern) and get a café latte while putting a few ideas down. Writing in cafes. It’s practically the entire point of being a writer.

It’s the 2010s! The teens! I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen!

Last night I went with Rob, Miles, Katy and her friend Nola to see in a Japanese new year at the local temple. (When I say local, I mean it took me a 50 minute bike ride to Musashi-Sakai because my local Seibu Tamagawa line wasn’t running past midnight and then ten minutes to Kichijoji on the Chuo-sen (which was actually running all night in stark contrast to the other 364 days of the year), but that’s local for Tokyo.)

After meeting Rob on the train entirely by coincidence (he happened to walk in exactly the same door on exactly the same carriage on exactly the same train as Miles and I at a completely different station, but I swear these kinds of coincidences happen in Tokyo every day) we reached the ‘Joji at 9ish and found a shrine. I chucked 11 yen in the bucket and woke the o-kami with a clap.

With some hours to kill until the actual new year, we met up with Kaz at the station and then went to a combini to buy food to eat in the lovely Inokashira park. Being a classy bastard, I bought a jar of sake (which Kaz took the piss out of for being “old man” booze).


I messed about with light drawing, and Katy, Rob and Miles did a impromptu Soul Run performance. The very last of 2009!

To the temple, where it is tradition to ring a big old bell 108 times for some reason (probably luck, I don’t know). There was fire and a sizeable queue to ring the bell, which we joined.

There was a cheer from part of the queue as 2010 dawned, which spread like a meme through the crowd over the course of a few seconds. 2010 was here. For us gaijin, the first new year we’d rung in in Japan.



We rang that bell and ate our free orange and decided to go for 2am soba, which is apparently a tradition for some reason (probably luck). As we walked through the Kichijoji shopping arcade, young J-ruffians passed us on bikes, yelling “Happy new year!” in English and grinning broadly. We yelled it back, lost in the happy ecstasy of youth.

Ah, 2010. Two thousand and ten. Twenty ten. I don’t bother making resolutions, but if I could continue this weight loss down to about 75 kg, I’d be happy. I also want to submit my short story for the Writers and Artists’ 2010 competition in a month or so. And, if I’m honest, I want to win, but that’s entirely up to them.

Past that, I guess passing Japanese would be great. And maybe if I get my act together, this time next year I might be looking at an agent for my novel. Or still stuck on 56K! Or down and out in Tokyo and London!

My novel has a title. It is called “The Remnants”, which sounds like some early-90s California art-punk-rock band (I think I’m confusing The Replacements and The Rembrandts). And, thanks to judicious use of WriteOrDie, I’m continuing on like the damn Duracell bunny to 33,827 words, just an hour or two away from passing last year’s 35,608. I was very pleased when I managed to Title Drop the title a few days after picking it:

Humanity finally had harmony, but at what price? In a sense, the Hostiles had already won, for they – the remnants of humanity – were living in a world that very closely matched the Hostiles’ ideal of a well-regulated, orderly, soulless society.

That passage sounded so good when I was writing it. In the light of reflection, less so. But this is Nanowrimo, and I will soldier on.

TV continues to fascinate me. I watch the late-night anime. Back when I was really into anime – it must have been 2000-2002, bookended by Tenchi Muyo! appearing on Cartoon Network in September 2000 and Saiko Exciting! coming to a premature end in 2002 – the sum total of anime available was dubbed, edited, and at least four or five years old (Tenchi Muyo was eight years old in Japan when it debuted in the UK!).
Now, of course, you can download fansubbed versions of the hottest new anime in about ten seconds off the net, but there’s still a spark of excitement in being able to watch brand new episodes of some anime debuting on Japanese TV, even if most of it’s crap and I don’t understand any of it. (An episode of Miracle Train has just concluded on TV Tokyo, which is about anthropomorphic personifications of Tokyo subway stations, or something.)