Month: March 2003

On festival days the public address system played traditional music with fife and drums, or gagaku. Some kind of music was often piped in to the shopping street as well.

Humidity. Formality. Dreaminess.

I am very sure that the carp in the pool at Gotokuji shrine miss me, one of their most fervent admirers. It was said that one of the carp resembled a human being.

One of the many interesting things about life in Tokyo: the neighborhood public address system. It would remind the citizens of public holidays and tax days, and would periodically run tests to ensure its seemingly inviolable efficiency. The echo across the neighborhood, competing with the voices of crows.

Oh! PANG of nostalgia.

I don’t want to forget how it was to be there.

That little neighborhood was very like fairyland. A tiny verdant footpath followed parallel to the curving shopping street. Of course it was gardened with great care to be lovely during all seasons. In the late summer, huge, surreal puffy hydrangeas. In the autumn, changing maples. Also in the summer — abutilons, columbines. Spring — crocuses. Starting very early in spring, the camellias would come out all waxy and ruffled.

In my old neighborhood in Japan, Gotokuji, when I wanted fresh tofu all I had to do was go out of my little apartment building, and then down a shady little lane to the curving shopping street. Right at the corner was a miniature tofu factory where a diminutive and very inquisitive old lady would first ask me if I wanted firm or soft, then she’d fetch for me the freshest, loveliest tofu you can imagine. I used to eat it plain.

I was reminded viscerally the other night of how much I cannot bear piety. A student of mine was giving a presentation on gay parenting, in which she quoted the American Pediatric Association as saying that children raised by same-sex parents were more likely to act on their homoerotic impulses (so?) and also that “homosexuals were more violent” (say what?). Then she quoted the bible saying that homosexual union was against nature. Another student said to her, you don’t really believe everything the bible says, do you? With an indescribably smug smile, the presenting student replied,”yes. I believe.”

How to describe the rage and annoyance I had to suppress at that moment?

I don’t want to. I want to sit here and post and publish post and publish post and publish these trivial nuggets. Nemo curls up on a magenta pillow. Tiny buds on the larch tree outside. Tiny.

Impulses to run away somewhere, stop everything, change my name again.