image: J. Squier
“For two weeks the day began with this morning walk, our shared routine.”
It is early November, our first morning in Tokyo. We are freshly arrived from a midwestern college town in the United States. My traveling companion is a friend and colleague, Nan. We’ve been invited to the Ekoda campus of Nihon University to give a presentation on electronic art and a workshop on web publishing. The picture was taken about a block from the entrance to the campus.
It’s a pretty nondescript picture, I know. But it sits on my desk, propped against the wall, with a small collection of half a dozen pictures all taken within a two-block area near the university. All of them feature street scenes of traffic, signs and small shops, always with Nan a few feet ahead in the distance. This is the Tokyo that I remember.
I visited and photographed the Ginza [1] and the Imperial Palace and lots of other areas in Tokyo that you might think would be more memorable. But those memories have become more vague with time. Whenever I look at this stack of ordinary pictures, though, I can still feel the slight chill in the November air. I hear the traffic—that taxi passing by—and remember the sounds of delivery trucks being unloaded.
Somehow this small stash of mundane images has become a collective portrait of sorts. Something in these pictures is that thing I brought home with me.
And it seems fitting that Nan figures prominently in the pictures as well. For two weeks, the day began with this morning walk, our shared routine. I suppose that the pictures also serve as a marker for when I began to realize that I’d found a friend for life. You can’t travel halfway around the world without getting to know your companion pretty well. [2] It was during our time in Tokyo that Nan and I eased into a deep mutual comfort with each other. A door opened in our friendship sometime during those days in early November. And I wonder if this was what I was trying to capture as we stood on the curb together, just waiting to cross the street as a green and white taxi glided by. 
referenced works
- It seems that there was a shift in the English syntax used to describe this place, some time before your humble editors arrived. The Ginza, a district much like New York's Fifth Avenue, simply became Ginza, We don't know why there was a the, or why it disappeared, but it tickles our eardrums everytime we hear it. ↩
- Actually you can, we've done it, and let us tell you, it ain't pleasant. ↩
location information
- Name: block from the Nihon University entrance in Ekoda
- Address: Nerima-ku Asahigaoka 2-42-1
- Time of story: early morning
- Latitude: 35.737787
- Longitude: 139.673867
- Map: Google Maps
033 “Dewy eyes closed, her porcelain arms and legs splayed attractively”
032 “The ika had made too many turns.”
031 “A tongue was moving around my big toe, like a warm slug crawling. ”
030 “Ichor will gush out of this carefully constructed image”
029 “I wince, more than her.”
028 “Their schoolbags were puddled around their socks, forgotten”
027 “Amongst the bottles and the obscure records and the crimson velvet walls”
026 “Nostalgia isn’t an easy indulgence for amateurs”
025 “... but anyway please take one of these little cheese cakes ...”
024 “The inhabitants of the blue, makeshift tents in the bushes.”
023 “Yeah … I’m sorry too. Merry Christmas.”
022 “I was dead broke. It was winter.”
021 “The district's energy had faded to rest on my last night there.”
020 “The slightly bald salaryman didn't correspond to any memory I could conjure up.”
019 “She laughed at my effort and responded in English, ‘Long time, no seduction.’ ”
018 “In my dreamy state, oblivious to signs and announcements I often boarded the wrong train.”
017 “I was fifteen years old and it was one of those nights.”
016 “That ear of corn just wanted to go home”
015 “With his painstakingly coiffured mane blowing in the wind”
014 “Her voice, even across languages, betraying her worry.”
013 “I saw them drawing bamboo sticks from a silver rectangular box.”
012 “A simulacrum of someone else's home, equal parts comfort and loss.”
011 “Jumbled Escheresque insanity where geography in any traditional sense ceases to exist.”
010 “I could hardly make out anything apart from his glowing eyes...”
009 “Shibuya was like a stroke.”
008 “I cried for a while and wiped the dead bracken off my karate pants.”
007 “Both my tie and my disposition hang limp as I calculate the remaining distance to the station.”
006 “I once read about a Chinese maiden whose feet were unbound by a cruel man …”
005 “The Bad Girl strutted off and I was left with a ham egg pie.”
004 “I arrived expecting an irritated Japanese person to step out of the crowd and identify himself as Hideki.”
003 “The woman at the ticket window seemed surprised to see another human being. I was the only visitor.”
002 “Flanked on either side by adult manga shops and the like, the smell of yakitori in the air.”
001 “For two weeks the day began with this morning walk, our shared routine.”
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We’re looking for short narratives describing pivotal moments of elation, confusion, absurdity, love or grief — or anything in between — inseparably tied to a specific place in Tokyo or New York.
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