Posted on Sunday, 04/05/26.

Last night a brief and violent storm passed through Tokyo, lashing my single-paned windows. The streets this morning felt scrubbed clean, dark dirt sluiced through gullies to settle in low places. I can smell it. The frequent rain these past two weeks has rudely awoken the plants; I take spaced photos of a wall covered in ivy and send them to someone I know saying ‘look at how fast it grows.’ Just before unfolding, the reddish undersides of the infant ivy leaves have the appearance of a gnarled Buddha’s hand.

When my friend died nine years ago I hadn’t been to Tokyo yet, though then I had already known that I’d be spending the summer here. I care and think about the calendar date of the death, but I more strongly associate its advent with Easter, which it was that year, on that day.

It’s Easter again, which in Tokyo is almost invisible. I recall, I think, last year, walking by the only obvious church in my neighborhood and hearing the attendees singing from inside. Loud, emotional singing. Noting then the uniquely violated equilibrium between what I imagine is the elation of the Easter message and the Japanese tendency toward leaving one’s neighbors unbothered. The church, just at the top of a steep rise out of the depression of central 下北沢, is done over in a minimal whitish stucco (laced in beautiful dark depositions of dirt from years of sediment-full rain) and has a tall, thin, brutally simple spire topped with a chromed cross. This spire is the last bit to catch the sunset, and looms above me when I take my usual route home up from the bend in 茶沢通り.

My family occasionally dragged us to churches at Christmas, but the spring was too busy for anything beyond hiding plastic eggs (kept in a plastic bin for re-use year to year) in our California yard. I recall rooting in the tall ferns at the base of the massive pines on our corner lot for the injection-molded shells filled variously with jelly-beans and budget chocolate. I prized a few of the iridescently coated or particularly large eggs. They popped open when lateral pressure was applied to them. And either because of our yard had sprinklers or because dew condensed onto the grass during the cool Mediterranean nights, my bare feet were always damp after the forage. It was all delightfully pagan; I don’t recall even a hint that my parents leveraged the sugar and rummaging into lessons about Jesus. When people I know tell me about the showy excess of their church’s Easter plays I feel, even though I am disconnected from the heart of whatever such excess points towards, that it would have been nice to have at least been given the option to reject such things as ‘cheapening the miracle.’

Living in Cambridge I attended two, I think, of my roommates’ Pesachs, and some time in high-school or college I must have attended one Passover with E’s family, if only because I recall someone going to the door to check for Elijah. In Cambridge there was a dingy drawer above our fridge that contained the jumble of Jewish accoutrements: various candles, dishes with dimples to organize the Pesach requirements, aging parallelepipeds of matzah. I was told multiple times by S, who took it all the most seriously, that our substitute for the bitter herb was not the right one, and where our particular reading had been abridged to keep the whole thing to a reasonable couple of hours. I had the sense that he would have preferred to be surrounded, as he might have been in youth, by a much larger group of people who were themselves quite seriously indebted to the whole thing, instead of our curious ecumenical crew of a German Christian, an Algerian Muslim, a Sephardic Jew, two reform (?) Ashkenazis, whatever it was that he was trying to become, and myself. I was also allowed to smell the etrog on Sukkot.

I’ve spent another weekend too close to home; some mixture of mild illness, malaise from communicative issues with people I like, the usual cruel aspects of April, and some limbing of fear over having to decide sometime not so distant whether I will continue to live here. Spring is difficult to make decisions during because it is brief and climatically turbulent. The weather today will never occur again; it is made up only of confounded gradients towards other, more oppressive and protracted weather patterns. The cherry trees have shed their sickly petals to put out a gross abundance of thick, glowingly green leaves that will only later thin and darken. The adolescence of trees is perennial and appears painful, whenever I see it. I worry that I have become ‘sallow.’ I wear my thin brown District Vision shoes, my black linen Kapital shirt, thrashed Uniqlo corduroy pants, and lug my Chrome bag to another wooden cafe table to bang out a few thousand glyphs, which for unclear reasons on this warm, over-cast day operate as a devotional or eulogistic thing.