Tokyo Zero | Page 4

glanced them. In the end, few of them
spoke. They steamed away memories of Indochina or Paris as we waited for the train to
get going. If it didn't get moving soon they would begin to feel ashamed of the fishing
hats they had chosen to keep on, and I might well be arrested and lightly tortured.
The doors closed.
We entered a tunnel and when we came out there were unworked rice-fields all around,
quietly taking care of themselves. The air was very cool on the train and a gentle breeze
ruffled the comic book ads (for Young Jump) that hung like war pennants from the
ceiling.
The sky was obviously rich in water because light came to us through a billion
microscopic gates that marked it. Also, each of my pores carried a tiny drop of dew.
We passed through a few small cities, like Narita City with its amazing concrete temple.
Its ancient design inevitably transports one to a distant future where concrete is revered
for its organic qualities, human spirit, emotional resonance. Quite a future: and one we
were working on.
There is also a windmill by the tracks and no doubt quite a story behind it. The story
probably begins with a small child in the wreckage of post WWII Japan endlessly staring
at a picture book at a picture of a building he doesn't even try to understand. He just
wants it to exist. He wants to see the wood flaring through the sun like bird wings and, in
the rainy season, blast the wind and rain back in their faces and play on. The playful
building would live after him, he must have known, and embody one spirit of all the
contradictory ones that would inhabit his too-little specialized human machine during 70
years of love and hate.
I had these thoughts whenever I saw buildings standing alone, too much like lost people.
Man kept on making these lost children, monstrous in size never suspecting that one day
they might learn to speak to each other. Even today too few people care about that.
Playing baseball in the sun there is always a spy-satellite that knows the score of the
game, at some level. Burying a friend, some spreadsheet counts the souls. You cannot
feel the information conversation in the air yet, unless you want to. It is now a luxury:
both the ignorance and the knowledge. Maybe not for long.
Suddenly we hit Tokyo. Technically speaking it wasn't Tokyo, in the same way that the

neck and the throat are not the same thing: if you didn't know, the point of transition
might not occur to you.
I was impressed. The rich concentration of things that people had made (and people that
people had made) was intensified by speed. A block of identically designed cubes came
to life like a zoetrope machine when the train's speed hit it: the tiny dirt and detail and
mutation of life supplied the difference needed for animation. People had broken the
design without even meaning to and the eye in the right place saw the human dance.
The city presented to the train line was typified by futons hanging on balconies to get
some fresh air. I knew this was largely ritual, so didn't even contemplate how filthy these
people would have to be for this to be effective. In between the buildings you would peek
at a bright street or building, often encrusted with thousands of tiny dancing light bulbs. It
was daytime, so the lights were having little effect on people: they were just going where
they were going... both lights and people. Larger lights, neon, signs, were largely dormant.
They were the road signs of a truly human network : sex, food,god, English
conversation... turn right - fifth floor.
I turned from the window and I felt underwater or deep in sand. When I managed to
complete the turn, I saw varying degrees of a hundred close but sheltered faces. We were
all traveling together.
***
After nearly an hour the voice of the announcer said "Kanamachhhhhhhh......"
My mind had been listening to train wheels clatter the same word out repeatedly. so I was
ready. I wriggled out of the train and on to a nearly empty platform. The station was
slightly elevated and fenced off, but very close to the roads and houses and people. There
was an enormous painted movie poster which showed either Kevin Costner or Harrison
Ford leaping through an enormous fireball. This ambiguity was something that I felt
Hollywood should look into. The movie appeared to be called "Rub Bomb"
Then I saw my first Let's Kiosk: a small cheerful box full of telephone-book-thick manga
and impossibly glossy 'female' magazines and snacks and drinks. I walked toward it,
aware