Posted on Wednesday, 11/05/25.
The sunlight through my kitchen window in the morning has hardened. I think it has something to do with the atmosphere. An absence of particulates, or less water vapor, or some tantrum in the rarefied currents that blow air over from China. The wind was gusting so powerfully yesterday that my building flexed. I saw the stiff twisted-pair power cables outside dip. This sort of wind knocks my balcony pepper plant over, though it is so root-bound that no soil spills out. It looked unchanged after I righted it. I apologized, and inspected its leaves. It’s too cold for it now, outside. A few weeks ago it put out a second flush of flowers, and because I did not use the tiny brush that came with my Timemore hand-cranked coffee grinder to pollinate the blossoms individually this time, only one swelled into a fruit. This second-generation pepper, even while green, is larger than those of the first. I know because two small red peppers remain on the plant, because I wasn’t sure when they’d be ripe enough, and then because I waited too long and they’d probably gone woody, I told myself. I plan to pick them someday, to save their seeds, though I hear peppers are perennials if wintered properly. With all the wind, with the cold mornings, I’ve brought the plant inside, setting it on my kitchen counter so that it can bathe in the hard morning light.
I sent off a postcard to New York on November 1; this was in the stead of writing a blog post, which I’ve felt unable to do recently. Or else when I try they turn into lexical garbage. Stress appears to subdivide my world. It gets frangible and voronoi. I observe and sequester sundry cramped sensuous occasions. One afternoon, walking down 神山通り in 富ヶ谷 I see an old Japanese woman, back curved, pulling a rolling pink suitcase, closely inspecting a note written in black ink on her palm. I take a photo of an overgrown house in 代田 among modern, gleaming single-family concrete cubes surrounded by tall walls. A decaying ladder stands upright in the overgrown house’s yard, supported only by adjacent shaggy trees. The son of the landlord of my apartment power-washes our stairs while I am home, sluicing the dirt deposited by a recent hard rain down from one floor to the next and out onto the street. I hop over puddles. He owns a black sedan with a nondescript shape, but its cherry-red break calipers, its red interior, how he washes it by hands at times with chamois, tells me it is an enthusiast’s ‘whip.’
10:04
Sophie says she’s seen my double in the city. It’s an odd hour for a message from her. We lob texts weakly back and forth these days. When they arrive, from across the room, I see my phone screen bloom. I think about her more than I text. I recently saved an Instagram video about a man who prepares petri dishes containing a thin mud or `slip’ for his dart frogs to bathe in. Perhaps they need vitamins. I learn, like in Nausicaä, that when raised in captivity the frogs are not poisonous. I discover the Golden Dart Frog (Phyllobates terribilis) is the largest and most poisonous. The word ‘aposematism’ appears. I don’t send the video to her because I am about to fall asleep, and because in the middle of so much quiet it might come across that I am trivializing the privilege of being allowed to lob data her way. I remember a horrible video I once saw of a frog in a jungle, each leg tied with a string as though to a saltire cross. The frog was prodded, which elicited a dark glistening oil from glands on its back: a sign of stress. The oil, when rubbed into wounds on human skin, effected a dissociative high. I wish sometimes, I think, that humans had more obvious secretory pouches, like the musk glands of deer. We might conceal them with leather blinders lashed by cords, or else excise them in puberty.
Seeing my double makes her take the wrong train. Then she sends me a photo of a famous author’s house whose address she scraped from the Web. I get a buzzing feeling, because even though I have done nothing, my apparent and dislocated image makes change far away.
Sophie also sees her sister’s double; she provides photographic evidence from the train of a pale woman in a red technical jacket: small zippered pouch on the sleeve. I’ve only met her sister once, so I cannot feel the resemblence the way that Sophie feels it. I see one respond to the other on Twitter. I then scroll through Sophie’s sister’s Twitter account without much reason, amused by the photos of worms and arthropods and freshly dead birds, because they rhyme with someone with whom I feel familiar.
At 22:34, as I write this, the second earthquake of the day ripples through my apartment. Beyond the surprise it’s nice to feel the building move, then rush to this website and see the live graphic of the quake’s S and P waves radiating out from a point on the archipelago. The first earthquake, at 12:04, while I sat at my low desk, was centered in 栃木県. This one is 千葉県. When I look up a map of the world’s volcanoes, the country of Japan is comically riddled with them. There’s no escaping the temblors.
I’ve been editing this document all out of order; some sentences have been written weeks after their neighbors. Some slick new words have been spliced into leather-hard old material. I listen to the Of Montreal album ‘Cherry Peel,’ which reminds me mainly and intensely of a relationship I had at the end of college, and again briefly in graduate school. I feel very bashful about this relationship; my phone shows me pictures of them, sometimes. I edit the previous sentences weeks later, now in a cafe, now listening to a short playlist that is mostly the Mishima soundtrack, Glenn Gould, Tchaikovsky 6, and some depressive indie pop.
Softness
One Sunday a few weeks back, at an open-air thrift market in 世田谷公園 I bought a green Hello Kitty plush from a woman whose wares were laid on a quilted blanket. I inspected it for a while, in its original plastic pouch, which prompted her to tell me it wasn’t old. I understood this to mean that it wasn’t from the 1970s or 1980s, whose plushies can be astronomically pricy. I inspected the tag and saw it is from 2002, part of some environmental initiative by Sanrio, hence the green color, and the felt leaves at Hello Kitty’s ears. I remember that canonically Hello Kitty is not a cat but a little girl, and moreover that she is exactly five apples tall. This apple fact is repeated on the back of some (of course, apple-flavored) gummies that I buy a few weeks later. Hello Kitty sits on top of some of the used books I have found recently in the bins outside my local fix: a Solzhenitsyn novel, ‘Detransition, Baby,’ MYORAR, the travels of Marco Polo.
Night moves
Something about a fallow body. Harrowing. Clean and consistent sweat.
Seeing the tall man and the short young woman dressed entirely in white, in the club, pressing handmade stuffed animals into each-other, as a kind of sublimation. They refused to speak to us.
Kyle Herndon’s top-rated response to post on LW about feeling only disgust while reading fiction.
Unalloyed fear. Golems. Takahata didn’t die for this (in response to ジブリ AI). Flashes of anger. Sweat when I try to speak a different language. Foxed books as low-background steel. Scrutinizing a jacket to see if its stitching is anachronistic, if its buttons have been replaced, if they could have been made of this plastic at that time. Herringbone. Condensation on the interior of the boxing gym windows indicating the temperature, and the collective fumes of the men inside. My pale green Hello Kitty plush is subject to a 抱く. It sits next to my pale green iPad and pale mossy bandana. I wrap my head in the bandana. Hair oil; Kotaro, my stylist, unwilling, this time, to press too hard on the knots in my back. I worry I’ve made him fearful. I wear the bandana to write; it makes me feel ‘frum.’ I remember a conversation (a conversation within a conversation, among low voices, me and her in my first Cambridge apartment’s kitchen, while the rest of the male apartment went on loudly around us at the dining room table) where she tells me her first doctoral advisor suggested that she try a different topic (i.e., with someone else advising, i.e., get the hell out). This subtext clear to us, in our quiet Matryoshka conversation, but interrupted by a loud man’s question, the abrasiveness seemingly reminding her that she should have been embarrassed, which led her to brush him off without saying what she’d been saying, meaning that also I, questioned about what had been said, said nothing was said. There really was no shame. I did this at many parties. Mainly with K. Again thinking now about the old woman with fine, pale hair, bent over and dragging a suitcase with one arm, the other hand up to her face, where she makes out some text inked onto her palm. The palm is subject to much wear and moisture, and is thus one of the worst places to write a message that will last. Was it her doing? They recommend against tattoos on the palm, as they peel and fade fast. I buy a full box of imported ‘sleepy time’ tea, which contains, I find, only standard botanicals: chamomile, spearmint, rose buds, raspberry leaf. A memory of the dip beside the tracks between 池之上 and 駒場東大前: I send this photo to two people. I buy a black herringbone twill french work jacket, of which I can only find a single example online in an Instagram post from 2021, which uses a kanji I haven’t seen: 纏う（まとう）, here meaning ‘to wear, to be clothed in, to be clad in.’ I know the word in the modified form まつわる (to be wrapped in, coiled in), though the kanji’s use is rare. The sound of retching from the apartment upstairs, almost every morning; I worry for him. I’ve heard him throwing up, and sometimes pass him on the stairs. A severe cough from the adjoining office at work, then fading down the hall. My sister once told me that even in comparatively recent medical practice the uterus was sometimes thought to ‘wander.’ In English our term comes from planētēs: a wandering thing. The Japanese say 惑星: the 星 is 惑, as in 戸惑い。I look up the Japanese article for ‘planet’, and they devote a small section to the etymology. In 1792 Motoki Yoshinaga translated a text of Copernicus provided by the Dutch. Before the import of modern astronomical nomenclature, the article indicates, the sun and moon were considered 惑星 as well. An older term, before the Edo period, was 遊星, which was used sometimes together with 惑星. They explain that in the Meiji era unification of scientific terminology, 東大 used 惑星, while 京大 used 遊星 (typical Kyoto blowhards). While the former won out, certain mechanical terms (like planetary gears: 遊星歯車機構) still use 遊星. Both of these are basically unique to Japan, while the rest of the CJK affiliates tend to use the less poetic 行星. The Japanese name for Chungking Express is 恋する惑星. I watch Fallen Angels (天使の涙) on a VHS tape I bought for $2, on silent, while trying to do other work. I walk behind a man this morning who is holding a lit cigarette, and get almost a full mouthful in the sharp autumn air, which has closed up the cascades of ivy on a nearby building, browning and cupping the leaves, all of it to be scraped off shortly.