Posted on Monday, 06/22/26.

北沢

My plane nosed through thunderheads to touch down at Narita International, which is not, as the pilot welcomed us, in Tokyo, but in Chiba. This is analogous to Newark (EWR). Chiba is cut into many polygonal fields, each dark and dotted with the green shoots of young rice. We all see the fields suddenly and alarmingly beneath the low cloud-base, something like five-hundred feet, and I try to imagine whether flying IFR feels religious. If the pilots allow the attitude indicator to fill their minds and hearts. I can’t remember if the descent was really that bumpy, but people clap when the reversers engage.

I must, I think, beat my own record for the fastest time through customs; I weave down staircases and am permitted into the secret and shortest third line neither for citizens nor tourists. I catch a spot on the 4:10 bus, which works through the fields, over the 江戸川 and 隅田川, then past 千代田 and finally to 新宿. They’ve put down new black rubber industrial flooring in the catacombs of 新宿 station, and its enveloping petroleum sweetness makes me feel quite safe among the Monday evening rush.

It didn’t rain yesterday, nor will it today, but it has for the past couple of weeks, and the forecast is more drizzle. This is the so called rainy season. I can tell that it’s been here, the rain——that the water’s been gulped down by the earth and now leaks back out during the sunny mornings, making everything easier to smell. In California the jasmine bushes released their plumes at night. I have never looked this up but I think that the diffusion of olfactory droplets must depend strongly on humidity. The clean streets, the detergent they use to scrub carpets here, means that whatever people are wearing drifts through the atmosphere easier. I wonder if I know what a tonka bean smells like. I watch Youtube videos of some girl named Mima who describes expensive Tokyo scents.

East Bay

Everyone is crashing out publicly on the streets of Berkeley. Skirting down Derby a twenty-something with sun-bleached waist-length hair says into her phone that ChatGPT said she should go directly to the hospital. On a bright green couch in the institute for the theory of computation a woman saves a voice note on her phone about freezing her eggs. I give her a kit-kat and never determine if she is of sound mind; something about the dark under-eye circles. Women and men of indeterminable age writhe about on street corners; some of them drag dirty duvets up and over four-lane medians. An Italian man in very tight pants paces for the better part of an hour on the phone in the patio area of Caffé Strada, relating some past amorous spat to someone else, where only the quoted lover speaks in English. The quotations break his cadence. I think about the Rohmer film I watched a few weeks ago alone in my apartment while having to constantly make a visor of my hand to block the intense California sun, which appears suddenly around corners and bubbles through cracks in blinds.

The ‘Of Montreal’ song that I listen to most begins, very sweetly:

How will I ever know you enough to love you /
If you’re hiding who you are?

Then now, and usually, more so recently, the slightly ammoniac feeling, varnished by repeated interactions of a certain type, that the people I would describe myself as closest to don’t seem to like me, or by the most charitable interpretation almost entirely lack the tools to express this publicly or legibly. My own sort of anorectic thing about providing clean affection. Something bolstered by the recent casual, almost sweet textual interactions with M, against which I realize I am totally miscalibrated regarding love and being defenseless. I ask myself, incredulously, dumbly, while supine, does everyone I’ve ever loved hate me? And if so how did I manage to either cause or ignore this? And so on.

While it is mainly known to be a Southern California phenomenon, I think that some of the mornings here I have experienced june gloom, which manifests as gray but luminous cloud cover through the mornings. It rains weakly on Monday, or Sunday; no time passes here in a meteorological sense, which I worry has had some effect on me through my childhood in the East Bay. A bright, slick, yellow slug of unusual size strays into the fire trail that I hike for the second time. I blast off a picture to Sophie. My black Hoka’s are then covered in dirt, accreted over both hikes, and some fine silt that dusts the eroded trails——the soil so different from the volcanic remnants of the Japanese archipelago——which leaves my ankles powdery. A while afterwards I distribute the picture of the slug widely——as though it is a private expression of my body and recent mood. The Japanese word for slug is ナメクジ（🐌）, which sounds, to me, like the word 舐める (to lick).

Then noticing the strange similarity between my (then) current airbnb and my brother’s high school bedroom; both built against dormers. A small desk inserted in an alcove dictated by the exterior geometry of the house. Hearing the owner’s small dog scratching at the door in the mornings, which they tell me is six months but looks indeterminably old. Rooting through Whole Foods snacks with slickly designed packaging. Scrounging around Trader Joe’s for unsweetened fruit leathers, one of which I consume at the apex of the fire trails, before taking a drink of room temperature water, at that moment coolly enclosed in a grove or copse. There are many others who fret about the trails, some with dogs. I take some film photos of the dogs.

In the ice cream shop I realize, surrounded by fit millenials who all had the same idea for the warm Tuesday evening, that I’d prefer, embarrassingly, to be among people who care for things the way I do, and whose reasons for living where they do are almost unquestioned. No one argues about whether they ought to live in Berkeley, at least while they are young, or single. My thoughts about this, colored by imminent, seemingly consequential life choices, are a little puerile. The sun’s angle is low and bounces through the plate-glass of the storefront. My legs feel cleanly taut from the hike. The ice cream shop serves careful flavors like lychee-rose and lemongrass.

Old fragments

Today as the most beautiful weather that’s come through in recent memory; walk by ラジオ体操; knowledge that in about thirty minutes the Artemis capsule reenters, which had been the self-explanation for calm this morning. 6:30 meeting with a kind-faced dean, etc.

Featureless weather again. The way that the New Yorker spells ‘premièred.’

Two separate run-ins with couple having a spat: once at a lookout over 鎌倉 and again in a convenience store a mile or so away. The desire to have breakdowns or rows in beautiful, public places. I consider confronting them about it all.

Reading about Roger Horn’s granddaughter. Functional analysis.

Seeing someone under a tarp being loaded into an ambulance on the morning of April 25th.

Odoriko; the faded photos of Kawabata visiting 下田. The theme of inviolable virginity. Accreted cruft at low tide, but no smell, as some seasides have. Ground glass; bottles of it sorted. Old men guarding old wooden statues, once buried in a vacuum seal of clay, dust still at their bases. Trying to divine, by only my memory that they do have meaning, the apotropaic intent of the mudra. I think in 2005, had I been post-adolescent, I would have been a good Bay Area buddhist. The long-armed woman from the Nara period, who is the most affecting of the statues.

Again, the feelings of abandonment. How to pull out of the local nadir? Barometry, nutrition, delusional thinking.

Being spoken to by an MPDG during lunch, who announced both her arrival and departure to me personally. The simple shame of a white man (myself) ordering and eating butter chicken and naan. The special, unusually slick and oleaginous sweat produced during times of fear. Overwhelming sunlight on rough-hewn wood.

In the cafe across from a two-top with an aging couple (academic?), seemingly American (the man) and Japanese (the woman). And out the picture windows some peach-coloured double decker house with white trim. The cafe is cavernous and beautiful; my opinion of it is influenced by the sheer amount of cream cheese they provide on the bagels. Across the room a man with visible mineral sunscreen on his face reads a paper with the aid of a magnifying device.

I’m conditioned, I know, to mimic the people I’ve loved sometimes, in habits or obsessions, here now where many of them do not talk to me un-prompted, all of which produces strange pangs of dislocation and worry, like that some part of me is ill, that some part of me is doing a little solo commedia dell’arte, though this must also be soothing, surely, because of course the illness is evidence of the past love and conditioning, and could have only set with duration. Like a sort of leprous callus, thickly healed.