Well it’s another day in the land of the rising sun, though I’ve yet to see the sun rise, since my sleep patterns are all out of whack. I live above the main expressway that tracks west out of Tokyo through Shibuya, though when I say above what I really mean is above and a little off to the side. Living on the 12th floor of a 14 storey apartment building the views, especially at night are pretty spectacular.
However look past the hemoglobin lights of cars racing into the city and the anaemic lights of cars rushing into the cultural cancer of suburbia, and for me at least, another picture emerges. It is a picture composed of bare concrete roofs and the blocky outlines of architectural organs that sit like dialysis machines open to the sky, like a sacrificial offering left open for the rising sun to gaze down in Aztec like approval for the entire span of a swelteringly hot Japanese summer day.
The sun has gone down now and what was torrid before is now merely sultry. Whilst sultry is normally a word associated with the languid gentility of New Orleans or Georgia and is generally not associated with the hustle and bustle of Tokyo, it suits well enough for me, mostly because the wife has come home and she changes her clothes in the living room. At such times I remember lines from British comedies such as when the wife says do I look ok and the husband says of course you do you’re naked aren’t you?
In any case I digress. I was talking about what I see from my window and what I see from the 12th floor is rather different from what you would see at ground level. Adopting an attitude of a ‘dead poet society’ student I stand on my balcony and look at things from a different perspective and try to take the time to think about what I am looking at. However what I see is not likely to drive me poetry, reciting Yeats or Donne. It is much more likely that I will be driven to psychiatry or to look up the definition of the word madness.
Is it insane to glory in mediocrity, to savor the delights of a slow death by poisoning, to rush to the beat of someone else’s drum in a way quite against one’s own interest. I would say that yes it most assuredly is so. However lemming like in my passivity I do as others do and dream of a time when I can order the world around me in a way that makes more sense. There are many reasons why the view from my window bothers me and I will get to each of them in time.
