Sons of Loki

I cycled along Route 14 on my way back from Kichijoji. I can’t remember what I was listening to, but it seemed apt. I passed glowing family restaurants in the dark, catching a vignette of a store manager standing, alone, keeping a midnight vigil over rows of empty tables. Brief traffic flashes past. The night air whips past, cool and refreshing. This is my city.

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery.

The word of the day is “crash blossom“. On Nippon Housou 1242 AM Radio, they are debating the relative merits of YouTube and Nico Nico Douga.

The day after – or was it the same day? – I’m on the 48th floor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. Actually, the 47th floor, where the toilets are. Away from the bright lights and monochrome carpets of the observation deck on the floor above, the oddly-lengthy corridor to the toilets is plain, a shade of industrial beige, unadorned. It seems impossible that this floor was once open to the elements, as big-muscled construction workers wearing blue bandanas hoisted great steel beams into place, laid cabling, built stairs up to a floor that had yet to exist. If you were one of those workers putting this floor up, twenty years ago, two-hundred and thirty metres above the ground, would you be able to imagine how it would look full of tourists and gift shops and with a grand piano? How’d they get that up there, anyway? The whole place seems impossible, a logical contradiction.

Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own.

The next day – or it might have been today – Rob and I, sweltering from the heat, take a seat on a bench outside MUFJ in Kichijoji. We are killing time until the contact lenses we have ordered from the local opticians are ready, at 2pm. The lenses are made in Japan – it should be cheaper to bulk-buy them here and bring them back with us. I bought a collection of Otsuichi’s stories, Zoo 1, and the first The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya novel. I feel like we’re two old men, sitting on benches all day long.

Some time before, I’m at ICU for their end-of-term party thing. It’s a bright, sunny day. Someone hands out water pistols. I take a few photos, lie back on the grass, bask in the sun. It’s certainly summer.

Back in Shinjuku, we browse all seven floors of a branch of Marui, one filled with little boutiques for the stranger side of Tokyo fashion – gothic, lolita, punk, gothic lolita, steampunk, and various combinations of them all. Two middle-aged men dressed up like china dolls in pink frilly dresses and blonde curls stomp around on platform shoes. Victorian angels float through the merchandise. On the first floor, I buy a silkscreen print, which later covers my window.

Geologist Charles Brophy had endured the savage splendor of this terrain for years, and yet nothing could prepare him for a fate as barbarous and unnatural as the one about to befall him.

Close to midnight, I get on the wrong train and end up on the Hashimoto spur. Luckily, I can still get home before the trains stop running. I am at a station called Keio Tamagawa with about three or four other people on the platform, all of us waiting for the last train.

A lot earlier, in the book shop of the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art, I flick through glossy, enticing books on architecture. I ache with desire to become an architect and design sweeping facades of glass and pine, design for better living, live in Fallingwater and listen to jazz all day.

The simple fact is that if you are ever mentioned on page 1 of a Dan Brown novel you will be mentioned with an anarthrous occupational nominal premodifier and you will have died a painful and horrible death by page 2.

The night before ICU’s party, I’m in Koreatown with Kaz and Rob and Kanako and friends, feeling nostalgic at the PCbangs and noraebangs, mixing the egg into the bibimbap and wrapping up chunks of barbecued pork in leaves of lettuce with lashes of chilli sauce. This time a year previously, I must have been heading out to Seoul for a month. It seems like forever ago.

“”Every day I write the book”. Elvis Costello,” says the DJ on Nippon 1242.

Today, I’m back on Route 14, cycling back wearing my nice new climbing boots which I bought for scaling Mount Fuji in two weeks’ time. Everything is so perfect, so peaceful, and yet there’s an underlying current of discomfort. It can’t be summed up in words, that’s why. I’m overwhelmed by it all. The sheer beauty of nature, the overbearing unending joy of living, when everything’s going right – no one can quite write that down. It’s painful.