View From the Train and Some Other Places

I’m writing this from the comfort of a train and the discomfort of a tiny phone screen. The view looks like this for now:

A moment has passed and now the view looks like this:

There’s the glare from the window, of course. Sometimes these things can’t be helped.

Last weekend I was in Kyoto for book club. We were reading Huxley’s Brave New World and I was the only person drinking. Sober book clubs are a curiously productive thing. Earlier that day I found myself inadvertently attending some kind of High School Brass Band competition staged outside the city office; when we emerged from the cafe after book club the streets were awash with bold, red faced teens marching to the tune of famous western brass band hits- like “Zippety Doo Daah”. I’m not sure how to spell that.

The current view from the train is not worth sharing. At the brass band fair one team dressed in penguin suits. They played Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ with true gusto. I was too enraptured to get a good photograph. My view looked something like this:

A week earlier I attended a festival. I think it’s called さぎちよ but I totally just made up how to spell what I think it’s called. Essentially the plot of the whole affair was straightforward: people spent months building giant floats out of wheat and food. People carried those floats into the village. The floats were paraded around. On the second day of parading the game changed: when one band of (mostly) men carrying a float met another band if (mostly) men men carrying a float they had to charge floats. The goal: tip the other team’s float over. Unlike my book club, sobriety was not really a thing at Sagicho.

The floats were heavy. The men were drunk. Accidents happened. The story goes that there was this rocking important political figure living in Azuchi back in the day and he wasn’t supposed to frequent the festivals of peasants, but he really wanted to get amongst it and see the floats – so one year he disguised himself as a peasant woman and snuck down to the village to attend the festival in secret. For this reason many of the float-carrying drunk men also dress in drag for Sagicho. The accuracy of my story is totally up for grabs – but it was the explanation I was given for all the bee-hive wigs and cherry lipstick.

In the end it got really cold and dark and they carried the floats into the area out front of an ancient – mostly wooden – shrine.

Then they lit all the floats on fire and people danced drunkenly around them and sprayed sake on one another. I can’t think of better, more practical or warmer way to end a long day. It smelt of a rich sweet smoke and looked like this:

Suddenly, despite the fire hazard and smoke inhalation, Japan felt magical again.

Walking home now, here’s the view of the spring daffodils I pass everyday on my way to the train station:

Staying In

Hysterical (adj.)

1610s, from Latin hystericus “of the womb,” from Greek hysterikos “of the womb, suffering in the womb,” from hystera “womb”  Originally defined as a neurotic condition peculiar to women and thought to be caused by a dysfunction of the uterus. Meaning “very funny” (by 1939) is from the notion of uncontrollable fits of laughter. Related: Hysterically.

Moving out of places in fits and panics has somehow become our style. In London we moved out of a flat we’d lived in for only a few months. The girl we were sub-leasing the place from suddenly decided to move permanently back to Belgium. She showed up with her car, packed it with her sewing machine and art supplies, and drove off to catch a ferry back to the continent. The flat was still fully furnished. Her crisp, freshly issued County Court Judgements were still stuck to the fridge: Failure to pay council rates. Failure to appear in court on charges of failure to pay rates…that sort of thing. We were moving back to New Zealand; everything had to go. So we hosted this curious little party where we put out all of the things we were getting rid of and invited people to take them away when they left. I gave away a small travel-sized chess set to a person I didn’t much care for. She’s probably never used it.

The night before leaving we put all the old pots and pans and weird statues and curtains into boxes, and we used a clothing rack with wheels to help wheel it all about 500 metres down the road, to the St. Vincent de Paul’s. There, in the dark, we put the boxes and the clothes rack beside the front doors and ran. There’s a big sign outside that shop that says PLEASE DON’T DUMP ITEMS. We dumped. We are public dumpers. But I figure they must have made a few quid off us. None of it was junk; the kettle we left was quite fancy, really. Deep down though, the guilt will never leave me. I can’t look a charity shop in the eye.

On the morning that we were due to leave London, we carried a bunch of couches and dining-room chairs out to the street and put out a sign saying FREE TO A GOOD HOME. I kept going outside and looking at them all lined up there against the wall, waiting to be claimed. It was Hackney, just a few months before the looting and the riots, but nobody wanted our charity. We had a back-pack each, and a train to catch. I should have crossed off the bit about A GOOD HOME and just had FREE. We swept up the apartment one last time, and threw the broom and the cleaning equipment into the steaming dumpster  behind the building. My stomach was heavy with the guilt of abandoning furniture to the street. I felt I had somehow failed a true test of character by becoming a dumper. But magically, when we hobbled outside with our backpacks to meet the waiting taxi, the couches and chairs were gone. I think a rubbish truck came to collect them. London’s good like that. Thank goodness for rate-payers. That was right before we went up to Stratford, got the Shakespeare themed Bard-game board game, and played it alone in a hotel room while cooking falafal on the radiator. Those were responsible times.

Now we’re in Japan and packing down yet another flat. P is heading back to New Zealand next week to get her womb scraped.* We thought our lives would be too simple with just the logistics of being apart for a month, and surgery, and international travel, so we decided to throw moving into the mix. On her return, P will be moving in to an old Japanese house in Kyoto city. She’ll be ten minutes walk from the subway line. And closer to me. Along with transforming the old house, she’ll be transforming this very blog into a pinterest-worthy documentation of her step-by-step renovations. But before we get to all this excitement, we have some moving out to do. We’re emptying the apartment in Sonobe so that P won’t have to pay rent for the month she’s away.

I’ve spent the last couple of days happily dismantling kit-set Ikea furniture and listening to the audiobook version of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. Yesterday a man from the local second hand shop came by and took away some tables he’s going to try to sell. I said “this one, this one, that one, that — all together” in bad Japanese.  He said “That one. That one. Not these. Not those” and basically didn’t take any of the stuff we were hoping to get rid of. He has a bad back, so I carried the tables down to his car for him while he said “Sugoi, sugoi,” and marvelled at my apparently surprising strength. If I had a chess set, I bet he’d have taken that.

I can see dump trucks driving back and forth from P’s window. I look longingly at them. We haven’t got the logistics down yet about how to get the old mattress and couch up there to the dump. It’s not like London. I don’t know how to write the Japanese equivalent of FREE TO A GOOD HOME on a sign. Also, I don’t think that’s really a “done thing” here. I have terrifying visions of us strapping the mattress to a clothing rack and attempting to wheel it up to to the dump in the dead of night. When you’re under pressure you make desperate choices. Wouldn’t a highly effective person buy an axe from the local hardware store and attempt to chop a couch into moveable pieces? I think this falls under Habit One: Be Proactive, not Reactive.

This weekend we’re renting a car and driving P’s things to her new house in the city. I think we’ll be Ok. I keep telling P that if she can drive a rental car on a Chicago highway, she’ll be OK driving in Japan….She said, our lives are but torn bits of party hat blown by breezes of the sea. I said, when with I lousy swordfish.

*Not in any way an adequate description of the medical procedure.