assorted thoughts from the past few days

6/27/2004 kaminari - the distant sound of thunder. today’s outlook: kumori, tokidoki ame.
Okayama is still here, but almost everyone I knew has gone. I passed by my old apartment (Nakasho Haitsu 103) but the light was off. My mind’s eye still sees it as it was, only now with a thin layer of dust over it all. But time marches on, and leaves nothing in its wake. Enough cliches. I know now that this is probably the last time that I’ll be able to do the backpacker circuit. It’s tiring, and I’m too old for this nonsense. It’s time to show your cards and commit to one thing or other, career or something else. The next time I come here, I’ll be a visiting scholar, and things will be different. Obvious though it is, I don’t have a lot of tourism to do in Japan. I’ve seen a lot of it already. What’s left is pure business.
Had dinner at “taiyo no jidai” a monja restaurant. Monja is a strange thing. You cook it yourself at a griddle, and it’s a mass of vegetables and meat, with some sort of sauce. It never really hardens into a pancake (like okonomiyaki) but stays kind of liquid. Like I said, rather mysterious food. The owner, Ohashi Yasutami came over and had a beer with us (Yoshimoto-sensi, Youko, and I). It seems he knows a jazz saxophonist in NYC (harlem, in fact) named Masa. A woman in her forties. When I go back, I’ll ask around. Okayama is like this I guess. The only thing that brings me back are the people I know, and every year it seems they get fewer and fewer.
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6/30/2004 7:15PM Kyoto, at K’s Hostel. I’m like an old-timer now. The first time I came to this town was 1996, eight years ago. I no longer feel like a tourist, which feels like a loss of innocence, both good and bad.
lunch with an Irish couple at Sukiya – serves PORK bowl now, not beef bowl after the outbreak of BSE in the states shut them down in february. The same fate for Yoshinoya?
jogging along the gurgling Kamo River in the midday sun. turtles ducking of the way as I approach. long necked cranes followed me with their eyes. an odd sight: an abandoned wheelchair by the river’s edge.
Some aesthetic observations about Japan, the ambiguous, and myself:
1. Entering the bath after Satoko’s sister; the water spilling over the edge and running down the drain is the difference in the size of our bodies. (edit: there was a lot of water down the drain, she's not a very big girl.)
2. I love the rice patties of early summer because they reflect the sky and mountains, between a green grid of precisely laid sprouts.
Later that night, an evening of ‘Japanese’ experiences: participated (fortuitously) in the Minazuki shinto ritual at Ichihime jinja. Saw a group of maiko (geisha) strolling along Shijo dori carrying shopping bags. One yawned as they waited for the pedestrian signal to change. A rare display of humanity from so ghostly a figure.
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7/1/2004 Minazuki (“the month without water”) is over and now it’s Fumizuki. In poetry, it has autumn resonances, but it’s still extremely muggy here.