Air Lines
This is a response to a prompt provided by Jake Starr. Although it is fiction, many parts of it come from conversations that me and Dan McClellan had in Tokyo.
Some thoughts on air, since you wanted to know.
And thank you for asking. Gave it all some kind of buoyancy.
We drifted down as if reluctant to land. Green hills finally appeared after too long. I thought we'd never touch down. Do you get anxious in the sky? I think you're supposed to. You can't help but wonder. It's funny that we call them terminals as if that's the end of something.
At first I felt like it was a commodity. Like leeks or plastic chopping boards. I saw a five-storey high bank of exhaust fans at the back of a building. They bellowed into the thick morning air. It was before six. I was looking for water and imagining a pipe running some of their cool air back to my flat in Sydney.
I thought I'd have a simple table to report back. Fit the whole thing into a punch card:
Monday.
14 Deg. Celsius
86% Humidity
Wind: N/NE 2-4 Km/h
Tuesday.
17 Deg. Celsius
etc.
We compared Tokyo to the internet. I said Tokyo is unlike my phone in that I actually find it hard to stay on the main line. I keep getting sloughed off like a raindrop. You said that it is however very like my phone in that money seems to coil up behind every clean window. I wanted to see Tokyo on its own merits. As it is today. I'll have to leave the Samurai for another time.
And anyway instead of punch cards, I shifted through live streams. There are no hard thresholds; one channel would fade into the next. Dashi pots wreathed in fatty steam. Liver and charcoal. Fresh jasmine in Honmachi. Clean aircon dignifying my hot scalp. The dessert smell of the arcade where you couldn't seem to outpace me over two races. We agreed that the game was unrealistic, lacking sim-rigour.
Songs are composed in the absence of these kind of things. Bic Camera has a theme that plays on loop.🎵 Biiiku biku biku Bic Camera! 🎶 They sell rice cookers, toy cars, PS5s, electric shavers, you name it. A cute jingle heralds the arrival of the Yamanote Line trains. When you finally remember your pin code and that you need to actually have money in the account, the ATM plays an "item found" sound-effect. Honestly straight out of Zelda, fr. That made me laugh.
We both noticed that they play birdsong in the train stations. We both googled why. The bird song is so people can find their way to the stairwells.
Oh and I have to tell you about the night we went to Sangen-Jaya to listen to music. I was on the way to meet you on a really busy train. A stream of air swung back and forth, covering everyone fairly. Despite the amount of people, we were all basically silent. And I'm talking boob to butt, cheek by jowl, butt to briefcase, your bag against my face: Packed. A sign on the window read,
"Please hold on to something, for the love of god. Sometimes we need to apply the brakes suddenly. You will be thrown flat to the ground if we do. You have been warned. Thank you :)"
So I dutifully held on. About half of us were thrown flat to the ground when the train stopped enthusiastically, just as the sticker had warned. After a great deal of excusing and apologising, we all brushed ourselves off and stood there, butt to butt and so on, in complete silence. Not one phone sound. Not a note in the air. Just the swinging back and forth of the air conditioner. The train finally pulled out of Shinjuku three minutes late.
When I walk through the botanical gardens, through carriageworks or through Ashfield station there is no *main thing* about me. My visual signifiers are smaller at home. They add up together and make a picture of me. Sometimes in Tokyo the main thing about me is that I'm not Japanese. How funny to be reduced. As if chef forgot to take me off the boil. Once or twice I gave people a fright rounding a corner on my way home.
We debated what makes a weeb and where you draw the line. I said moving here and learning the language doesn't count. You said it depends how you present yourself to the world. I disagreed and said you can be a weeb in secret. We finally agreed on the wording of, “who sees no shame in their clinging to a different culture,” but had to stay up til dawn working on “someone who is not Japanese.”
Then I noticed the ads. Who's modelling for Dior, Chanel, Lacoste, Burberry, Balenciaga, Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Prada, Reebok and Converse?
They don't really use local folks in the ads. So I realised that to some people, I had appeared Night At The Museum style, popping out of a faded exhibit. And I'm cool with that but I can see how it could get old after a couple of years.
We disagreed about dignity. It sounded so clear before I landed. I used to say, see how the government spends for her people! So that they may have cool unscented air on the summer trains underground. Now, talking to you I'm not sure if there is an artifice at hand. I said they treat people like adults here. But you said that's not completely true. We had been sung to all week like babies teething.
Ahh fuck. The scale. Just when I got tired of one city, another blows into view. They call them cities not suburbs. The network of prompt trains come to a stop around midnight. Did you see the moon gazing through a nest of phone and electricity connections last night? How many people meshed into Shinjuku station that day?
Some days it was too big. Can you think of an icon on the Tokyo skyline? Except for Tokyo tower. You want to but you can't. It's fractal like that. The variation and homogeneity go right down to the basement. Two hundred bars in eight blocks. Six-foot-wide apartments. Even there, people live for days without coming up for air. I read about hoarders and hermits who never do.
It's no wonder they had to think up a Godzilla to nip all this in the bud. A necessary fantasy to balance the psychic account.
I heard about how the old Shinto gods protected Japan from the Mongolian invasion. It was a mobilisation of forces that wouldn't be matched until the Normandy landing in WWII. Someone said 140,000 soldiers. This is where the word Kamikaze comes from. Kami “divine” and kaze “wind”. Their ships were broken up like autumn leaves.
The chrome is especially reflective. And it's everywhere. We didn't feel the need to talk about it. But we both noticed the unbreakable mirrors. Shatter never. I nearly walked into Narnia in Harajuku. Chrome has a tricky way of shrinking the image unevenly.
It's hard to see into the restaurants. It's unlike Paris, where that's the whole point. To see who's in there. Here they have frost on the glass or small windows, or no glass at all. It has the effect of being in a den. Safe with mother. The rain cleans the outside air while we sit and compete to see who can smoke the most Camels.
Japan has a paradoxically lower rate of lung cancer than the west. That's even adjusting for per-capita cigarette use. There is still old magic sparkling in the sky. First there was Shinto, then Buddhism came. Do the old charms still work in the age of nuclear power? Since Buddha has no specific comment on this, we have been left in the dark on this matter.
I saw one sign on a Yakitori door barring people who wore too much cologne. There's one spell I won't cast. It never seems to be working as people intend it to. You've got too much atmospherical influence and now you're ruining the mackerel's delicate scent. Which was my favourite dish by the way. Pickled the night before, one chef told me. Faint vinegar with the specific fishy whiff of silver-skin.
The days drifted in and out. I learned polite words. I started waking up later and later. This and everything else seemed like a breach of protocol in the metropolis.
Air is the spirit of change. Fleeting and universal. It would have been strange to keep coming back to the earth or water. Those are domestic forces. Air is the essence of travelling alone. No plans on a Monday in a foreign city. Fire too is hidden behind the counter here. Air is the one element on open display in Tokyo. The graceful dance never stops. Locked up in every cabinet, splitting city blocks like the Colorado River. Air is the mirror image of any city and in Tokyo there is a grandeur in the resemblance.
Then one night, sitting in the impeccable gutter fronting your gallery window, I learned what an earthquake feels like. I had to recalibrate my *steadiness* and *permanence* radars. I looked over at Maru and he hadn't even noticed the earth wiggling.
I asked what do you do when there's an earthquake.
He thought for a while and said, you stay calm.
It's so ordinary that he said even when they're really big, you only hear about one or two old men being killed by falling sake bottles. That's the hoarding thing coming back to bite you. I want to clean up when I get home. Like Sophie in Howl's castle. Deeply.
Then when it's all clean and empty, I'm going to unwrap the Tokkuri I bought. Terry said they're traditionally for serving sake but mine is for flowers. I'll snip the tape and the ceramic will cool my hand through layers of soft, white paper. When the rusty brown bottle appears in my darkened living room, I'll take one last breath of Japanese air.
Building sites are clean here. They use the same old broom that has swept probably a hundred foundations. It resembles a sage bundle. An ancient outline. The simple things used for cleaning all sleep overnight in a bucket in the corner, ready for tomorrow afternoon. Broom, cloth, sponge.
Now there's a profession that twins ideas. Clean and dirty. Air and Earth. Measure and reckon. Noble humble. You accuse me of being reductive and anyway that the elements thing is a bit on the nose, this being Asia and all. In my defence I printed out a picture called "iron lion protecting the temple," and wheat-pasted it to your door. That'll show him. We didn't really talk much after that.
Singapore 2023