Eleven hour days and the frenetic scurrying of project work are my breakers, slamming against the rocks, and wearing me down. Tomorrow I jump on a plane and end up in Osaka. It’s been a while coming, but it’ll be good to be back, and I’m looking forward to slipping the leash and disappearing into the back country, choosing the path less travelled until I’ve taken the connections that put me alone at the front of the single-carriage train that judders along the coast, heading to somewhere I’ve never been before.

As always, updates from the road.

Posted in Mwah on Thursday October 2, 2008. Shoutouts.

The cell phone clatters onto the bitumen and slides gracefully into an ankle deep puddle, disturbing the reflection of a gaudy neon cherub gaily flashing his flickering red arse to the smoggy predawn sky. I should swear, or curse, but instead slump against the heap of sky-blue garbage bags and hold my head in my hands. I stare at the little silver box as the reflections reform above it, and the cherub resumes his neon peepshow.

Judging by the dawn light creeping into the mirrored canyons it’s going on five, which means I’ve only got about half an hour before my line begins service and I can start the slow creep westward, and home. I’ve still got the crumpled piece of paper in my back pocket that lists the times and connections I need to take, scrawled corrections noted in the margins. Home seems twenty thousand kilometres distant, rather than a few hours on an early morning train and, in a sense, I guess it is.

Screamed obscenities issue from the alley opposite, which is on enough of an angle that I can’t see who they’re directed at, or who’s directing them. I realise that all the signs above me are labelled in hangeul, the bobble-headed alien script of the Korean and I feel even more disconnected than usual. My mobile burbles once from the puddle, an android with its head held in a bucket, before it gives out. I doubt it will ever ring again. I don’t see who is ringing, but I know. Know that I have my back to the wall here, and now.

I realise I need to get my shit together before I get arrested, and push myself from the garbage bags, scoop up the phone, shake the excess water from the casing and eject the battery. I slip it into my bag as another of the problems I’ll have to deal with later. First, I need to stop this bleeding.

At the bottom of my bag is a sky blue head-scarf, covered in the intricate kanji of the names of fish. 鮭. 鯒. 鮪. I wrap the thin cloth around my hand and watch in fascination as the red-black stain first obscures yellowtail, then skipjack.

There is a proverb that a co-worker once taught me: neko ni katsuobushi. The cat takes the fish. He had to explain this to me as he wrote the characters in loose, broken strokes on the blackboard of the empty classroom. Don’t put yourself in a dangerous situation and expect to walk out unscathed. Don’t let your guard down because that cat, he’s going to take your fish. That’s his nature. He’s wired like that.

This morning I have taken my eye off the fish, and I will go hungry.

But then I recall another saying, one that a friend took to heart and recounted to me as we sat in a refurbished flower-shop eating tacos. 七転び八起き. Get knocked down seven times, stand up eight.

I stand and fish the paper from my pocket, adjust the makeshift bandage, and head for the station.

Posted in Mwah on Monday September 22, 2008. Shoutouts.

The whole complex has an air of heady, bubble-era optimism long since turned sour. This is a fairground set coming apart at the seams, or that first broken window in the abandoned warehouse. The website I looked at, before we pulled the bikes from the weeds and set off, mentions the whole thing sprung up in the eighties from reclaimed land around the bay. There’s a selection of sketchy rumours about the then mayor having connections to the central government and cashing in on the national frenzy for bubble-economy construction. The next town over, home to a dilapidated concrete-clad fishing port, a single ramen shop, and a stall that sells okra, boasts a bullet-train stop, so there’s a lot to be said for the politics of influence.

“What possible reason would you have for building this? It’s just. I mean, from a business perspective it’s insane. It’s in the middle of nowhere, on the outskirts of some town that no-one outside this region has even heard of, and there’s practically no way of getting here by public transport. It doesn’t make any kind of sense.” I mutter as I boggle at the concrete plinths supporting a chipped fibreglass sun for several minutes until she tells me to shut up and leads me by the hand over a series of stepping stones to the middle of a shallow artificial lake. We are all alone.

“Do you know the word rakkan?” she asks as she traces the characters onto the palm of her hand. The first one means pleasure, or enjoyment, and the second I can’t really make out. I think it has to do with a view of something. “It’s about good feeling, ne. It’s about when you don’t give up. Like, ‘he has very rakkan personality so he thinks only about the best things…” she screws up her face and spins on her stepping stone to face the sun. “This place. When they built everyone had sonna rakkan. They, everyone, had positive feeling for the future and so many place like this was built.” I realise she is talking about optimism.

As we skip from block to block across the lake, I ask her if she knows that Japan pours more concrete each year than America. “Yes, but don’t believe the truth. Come on. Sunburn and kangaroos.” And with that we head for the Ferris wheel.

There’s no one on duty at the ticket booth and the other rides, a rickety looking merry-go round and something akin to a bouncy castle, are deserted. Yet the wheel turns a lackadaisical revolution above.

Finally, we find the attendant, a man who looks to be about seventy, with a faded green uniform and wiry salt and pepper hair. He’s perched on the concrete prefab knucklebones that make up the seawall, and takes slow shallow drags on a cigarette that looks as old as his calloused and wrinkled hands.

“The wheel open?” she asks.

“It’s turning, isn’t it?” he grunts and extinguishes his cigarette on the lid of the portable ashtray that hangs around his neck, then flicks the butt into the ocean.

“未来のことをどうしてそんなに楽観できるんですか”

Previously: Kangaroo Court

Posted in Mwah on Tuesday September 2, 2008. Shoutouts.

The rain thumps against the angled glass and then runs in rivulets toward the original façade, where it trickles between the red brick and darkens the off-white tuckpointing until it is the colour of bile. I angle across the road and take a quick two-step onto the pedestrian island in a vain attempt to dodge the ute splashing toward me. I clutch my bag to my chest and shelter my eyes with an insubstantial magazine I’ve grabbed from the mall. The rain is worsening and the slate coloured sky promises more, heavier, and soon.

I head for the bus stop and, amidst the bedraggled suits and exchange students, you’re standing there, bouquet in hand. I realise you’ve spotted me as soon as I step off the island and head for the tiny rectangle of dry space under the angular bus shelter.

“Just keep walking,” you say as I approach, “keep walking” and I do, pulling up my collar and stepping back into the rain.

I look up the line of identical shelters and weigh up my options, there’s another just over the hill I can catch a bus from. “Hey.” It means I need to walk a little further at the other end, but hopefully the rain will have let up by then. “Dan.” I’m lost in my thoughts when I hear you behind me, and I stop and turn around. The flowers make for a poor umbrella and stray drips wander down your forehead and play havoc with your mascara. “Hey. Hey, look. Sorry. Look, I’ve got twenty minutes. Get a drink?”

It all seems perfectly ridiculous, you looking like you’ve just escaped from a wedding and me, work clothed and soaking, hands stained from the running ink of the x-press I’m now holding beside my ear.

We descend the stairs and take a seat at the back. The lights make ragged oblongs of white on the worn purple velour, a bainmarie steams slowly on a table against the wall and the ancient man behind the counter keeps a rheumy eye on the television as he mops the counter with a dirty cloth. The warbles of Coltrane’s sax issuing from tinny speakers are a perfect accompaniment to this pop-art-painting view of little city depression.

It reminds me of the tiny coffee shop we stopped to have breakfast in, that day we spent roaming the back streets of Osaka for an exhibition of Australian art, hidden in an ivy covered warehouse near the port that stunk of fish and kerosene and sweat.

The night before we shared a tiny tatami room in a run-down business hotel in Tennoji and every wall had a cupboard built into it. Our room backed onto the tracks, and there was no bathroom, only a stained and chipped communal bath in the basement. You pushed the futons together and we had slow, quiet sex to the vibrations of the late-night cars stuffed with commuters headed for Bentenchō. I lay on my back, fingers locked in yours, and studied the roof; the train illuminating cracks in sequence, like car headlights from an old movie in jerky fast forward. When you came you lashed out with your foot, caught the TV, and the room filled with smell of the powdered green tea now floating in the air around us.

Funny that the trains were still rumbling westward long after they’d locked the front doors and wrapped a chain around the machine dispensing hot water in the lobby. Funny too, that the next building down was the gargantuan edifice of spa-world, a sprawling six storey spa complex that would go broke three weeks later: its vision of a pristine chrome-plated future too out of place amidst the crumbling suburbia around it. We’d planned to go, before we knew of the curfew, and arguing with the octogenarian in brusque dialect changed nothing.

Judging by his scowl, this guy mopping the counter could be a long lost cousin. I think Coltrane is playing “After the Rain” and this makes me smile, as I can plainly hear it drumming against the sandwich board outside.

We order roast veggies, but no meat, and sit picking at peas in the dim. I marvel at the oddness of us sitting at this table, together, and eating roast pumpkin. I realise I have absolutely no desire for small talk. “How is it then,” I ask, “are the goods as good?”

You put down your fork and flick an errant pea away from the bouquet on the table. “You know, it’s different. I think, for us, for me, it was the bad that kept me.”

Posted in Mwah on Sunday August 17, 2008. Shoutouts.

Underworld remixes and stale coffee on a Monday morning after a sleepless night spent replaying fragments of conversation in jittery nonsensical loops. It’s blue, clear and freezing outside and I can see a criss-cross lattice of frost running from my bicycle tyre to the outside drain. I’m glad I don’t have to ride anywhere today.

Facebook is wonderful for keeping in touch, but sometimes it’s too much information: a slice of ever-changing social interactions that seem so very far away these days. It’s been less than six months out east and already I’m beginning to scratch at the horizons and draw huge, looping arcs on the globe and plan connections in my head.

Last week, I read a blog post about catching a cargo freighter from Alaska to Osaka. Reconstituted eggs, burnt toast and sausage every morning at six with the non-English speaking crew and nothing but blue to the horizon, a tiny cabin, and a pile of books. Doesn’t that sound fantastic?

Posted in Mwah on Monday August 4, 2008. Shoutouts.

Watching the Swans at Manuka oval, after which we went and had the world’s greatest Kebabs and pints of Little Creatures. I ran home around the lake and across the water all the government buildings were lit up blue, like concrete ghosts reaching for the stars.

Later, when we talked, it was about Mongols, their horses, and how mice look on the inside. I’ll gladly confess I got a little lost at this stage, and that the feeling was a good one. I don’t think thin-slicing should have anything to do with what sweatshirt you’re wearing, or whether you have a moustache, but it’s been a while since I read Blink, and I think I’ll be arguing around corners. This has never stopped me in the past, and it certainly won’t stop me now.

Today, I woke feeling invincible. Like I could punch holes through walls and scream mastery to the hills. Run so fast my feet kick up great clouds of dust, as I hammer through the young trees that snap backward at my approach. It appears I’ve dodged the epidemic that’s ravaging the office and though the vitamins I’ve been stuffing down my throat like candy are unlikely to have helped, a placebo is a powerful thing.

I slip off my front wheel and push a plastic lever into the gap between the rim and tyre. I always forget how to do this, and relearn it every time I change the tube. It doesn’t help that my hands are shaking in the cold, and I stop every few minutes to stick them in my pockets and hop in a circle. Even with cold hands, the metal back of the iPod is colder, and the Notwist inform me that “we’ll remember good lies / when we carry them home with us to our bedside table / and our coffee sets.”

I learnt a new word this week, Proprioception. It relates to the body’s unconscious perception of movement and spatial orientation. It can be learned, or lost, and I’m grateful for it as I lean into the corner and set into an easy rhythm, legs pumping as I head up the hill.

Posted in Locomotion on Saturday June 28, 2008. Shoutouts.

I’m at the Heart of Gold, a Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy themed hostel in the centre of Berlin. There is Vogon poetry on the walls and the wireless password is, charmingly, “Don’t Panic!”

I’ve dragged myself out of bed early today, fighting a pounding headache to slouch against the wall of the shower and pass out for a while. I gingerly make my way downstairs, grab a seat at the bar, and supplement my hangover with strong black coffee. I watch people walk to work through the huge double-glazed windows. Fuck, I feel terrible. Two equally bedraggled Eastern Europeans sit one table down from me, looking for all the world like escapees from the Lone Gunmen, but both tapping away on tiny iridescent-shelled Sony laptops. I would imagine that each is worth more than the entire contents of my pack, and probably my ticket over here on top of that.

The latest travel accessory amidst the backpacker set appears to be these ultra-portable laptops, to take advantage of the free wireless internet available at most of the bigger hostels. I can’t imagine lugging a laptop around for months and the thought of two thousand dollars of rigid, non-waterproof fragility in my pack doesn’t set my heart on fire. Then again, I tend to pack lighter than most.

The purple haired girl minding reception has given up watching the bar and has ducked outside for a fag, steam mingling with smoke as she exhales. It’s got to be below zero out there, judging by the scarves and jackets of the office set as they tromp past my window in charcoal-hued lines. No one glances up as they scurry along and I sit and watch, savouring my coffee. I think the panadol is kicking in, or whatever it was, in familiar red and green packaging covered in dense German compound-words. The blonde woman on the box sure seemed happy, and it appears to be doing the trick.

In the bar they’ve got the central cranked up and I’m comfortable in a tee-shirt, an old one from the threadless heydays, with a monkey pitching a Molotov at the viewer. Our lady of the bar blows on her hands, then flicks her cigarette against the wall and shoulders the door open and grins at me as she wanders back behind the bar. “Cold?” I ask, as I reach for one of the perfect, identical bread rolls heaped in a messy pyramid on the counter. “It’s not bad. For January. Usually much colder. You know, snow.” I grunt sagely, as she grabs herself a coffee, and focus on my roll. I’ve stuffed it with cheese and it’s perfect.

“The shirt, what does it mean? Is it supposed to be funny?” I don’t think it’s supposed to be funny, just irreverent, one of those stupid visual puns that makes you do a double take. I take it with me whenever I go overseas, a stupid custom I’ve picked up over the years and one I’m not sure Glebe realised she was buying into when she stole it from my apartment and took it to Korea. She sent me a photo of herself, with it pulled up over her monkey ears, ninja style, as she flashed peace signs in a generic hostel dorm room. I hadn’t even noticed it was missing, and spent the day at work wondering who’d taken the photo. I pause for rather too long, “No, not funny, just strange. Like, a joke because it’s unexpected.” She nods, and heads back to reception to help someone struggling with a bundle of dirty sheets.

You can grasp very little of the character of a city in a few short days.

Posted in Travel on Friday June 20, 2008. Shoutouts.

The leaves blow in ripples across my feet as I stride northward, spring in my step, and I need sea legs to navigate this sea of shifting golden waves. A crunch as soles grind veins underfoot and a hop, skip and a jump, legs flailing in giddy, ungainly glee.

Every island of yellow is a place to seek a moment of sanctuary before my next step. This tiny palmate quay is mine for this moment, mine to chart and explore. I think I have plotted a course when another gust kicks the white-cold breakers up and over my sneakers, the backs are white and in sharp relief as they flip end on end.

A bus rolls past, headed for the academy, and its tyres rumble over the uneven corrugations in this poorly maintained back-street. This is my ocean, and it whispers to me.

Posted in Mwah on Saturday May 17, 2008. Shoutouts.

We’re lying on the futon that’s angled carefully between the several teetering piles of cardboard boxes that line the walls of the tiny second-floor room. She’s in transit: half-way between packing and unpacking and no strong motivation to go all the way in either direction. Downstairs there’s one spoon and one fork in the cutlery drawer and a motley collection of disposable chopsticks to go with them, the moist refresher towels wrapped around them long since dried into brittle husks. The fridge empty, bar two unfinished tubs of miso and a six-pack of cheap beer.

She’s on her side, thumbing through a small pile of books and she moves one onto what I’ve gathered is the “to dispose of” pile. I flick her in the ear as I lean over to grab the book, and she swears at me in incomprehensible dialect, then stomps downstairs to make coffee. She must have supplies I missed on my initial survey of the kitchen – or she’s very creative with miso.

The book I have grabbed is one of those overly cheerful, not-quite tourist brochures, explaining regional treasures with the kind of breathless enthusiasm usually reserved for aging volunteer tour guides or, in this case, a bored local-government employee with a flair for hyperbole. The cover features a photo of a grim looking stone warrior wielding an axe. In the background, just visible between a line of bevelled pink text and a cartoon warrior hefting some kind of halberd, is the silhouette of a Ferris wheel.

Following the Japanese text is a short translations of the key points in English, Chinese and Korean: the charmingly naive Japanese attempt at “if we build it they will come” multiculturalism. Judging by the English, the consensus in the office was that though no one spoke the language fluently, it was worth having a crack at a translation and, besides, if it was stuck in the back pages of the book, who was going to notice?

“Ako ruins of the castle, which was built in 1661 by Naganao Asano, the lord of Ako, more than 300 years old, has been classified as the monuments and cultural assets of rich tradition.”

There’s a single line about the Ferris wheel which I now learn forms part of a huge seaside park somewhere south of the town. It’s got artificial lakes, a small zoo and something called “Wonderful Land.” I’m sold.

She return with two mugs of coffee strong enough to make me weep. When I ask her about the wheel admits that she’s never ridden on it, although she’s lived in the town for nearly five years. “It’s not something locals do,” she says. “But they must,” I insist. “Look, there’s a website and everything.”

“It doesn’t feel right, being a tourist in your own town. Not that it’s my town. Shall we go some time?”

“Now?”

Posted in Mwah on Tuesday April 22, 2008. Shoutouts.

The jagged, red letters painted on the path read “Today is just for you,” and the absurdity of this makes me laugh. I do this just as I’m passing a man, his arm outstretched, hand resting lightly on his daughter’s back; her face is a mask of intense concentration as she wobbles slowly forward on a bicycle that can only be a few days old. He looks up sharply and I realise how bitter the sound I have made is.

I force a smile. Look away.

The bicycle has strips of metallic foil ribbon dangling from its pink handlebars and they catch the afternoon sun, reflecting lake and sky, blue on brown. Today is just for me.

I’ve spent the morning reading the same two documents over and over, hoping for some sudden flash of clarity that has thus far eluded me. I swim in the words, struggling to make connections that should be apparent. But they are not and I force myself to take a break. Upstairs there is ironing to be done, a repetitive chore that usually relaxes as I turn up the music and focus on process and consistency. Today, I have no patience. I stomp downstairs to the coffee grinder purchased the day before. It spins up, crunches, whines and spews half-ground beans onto the bench. I take it to pieces and clean it out, replace the beans and press the button. Nothing. Enough, I need to breathe. I need to get out.

Twenty minutes later and I’m pushing along the foreshore, over those red letters and toward the angular collection of hexagons that make up the National Carillon. To be considered a carillon, the instrument must contain at least 23 bells. I can’t remember where I read that: a vague recollection of some terrible historical drama on late night TV. I stand at the base between the three shafts connecting the main chamber far above me and read the small brass plaque. The National Carillon has 55 bells, the largest of which is six tonnes in weight.

I’m alone on this island of music, but over the bridge everywhere I look there are people being people. I watch a group of men about my age engaged in an intense game of touch rugby. They are running hard and there’s more contact than I would expect of a social game. Without warning, half of one team jog to one side, gesture at the hills, and then drop to the ground. They lie in the grass, palms supine, and pray.

The idea of loneliness, a lack of connection, is at times worse than any physical isolation. It is just as real.

A rookery of cormorants, like a fleet of tiny black submarines, duck their heads forward together as they angle toward the bridge. I think we are all guilty of being caught up in ideas.

Posted in Mwah on Sunday April 13, 2008. Shoutouts.