Convergence

The crosses on my calendar slowly converge on the date that says “Contract ends” and I begin to count the number of weekends until go day. I start to think exactly how much I can fit into a standard issue air-mail box. Which clothes are expendable. What I need to cross off my list. My time in Japan is rapidly coming to an end and the faster it comes, the more I realise I haven’t done. Each weekend becomes a juggling act between the desire to pack as much into my time here with the necessity of down time.

I find I have less and less time to write detailed travelogues. Less time to make observations and detail the curious and bizarre things I seem to run into almost daily. The man quietly stacking a restacking piles of manga outside the neighborhood fast food chain. The train conductor with a string of anime characters dangling from his whistle. The teenager in paint-splattered work coveralls and bleached orange hair reading Tolkien in English while his girlfriend checks her makeup opposite. These are all interesting stories and I want to tell them all. Detail the things that made me laugh. The things I will remember long after I leave here. But time is short and motivation to write is limited.

Instead, here are some photos which I hope will tell at least some of the stories of the night we drank absinthe and lit sugar on fire. Of when we climbed a mountain covered in 30,000 cherry trees and found a moss covered temple at the top. When we crammed a van full of people and drove up the coast, to check out a friend’s new bar. When we rode between the sakura as the last light from sun hit the castle walls and made patterns on the stone. When, on a whim, we broke from the bar playing the Flaming Lips and headed underground to Troop, where the vocalist from the Mad Capsule Markets span Japanese punk alongside balearic techno. When we buried ourselves in sand, alongside a beach where steam rose from the water, and grandmas giggled as the attendants piled shovelfuls of black volcanic dirt onto them.

Posted in Mwah on Wednesday April 19, 2006.