I’d expected a gray and humid rainy season here in Tokyo, but the sky is deep blue and the sun as shiny as can be. !!Lucky!!

In a sense, it’s as if I’d never left. Some vocabulary has evaporated, but I find myself happily chattering away in Japanese — a great relief to be able to trust my organic hard disk.

Things are a little newer here, more modern — Starbucks everywhere, including my favorite ‘hood, Shimo-Kitazawa (sort of the East Village or Berkeley of Tokyo) — but there is still the delightful surprise of the old (shrines, little bent old people) nestled among the new.

Gary has been diligent, taking amazing pictures on our new digital camera his mom kindly gave us, and writing every little bit of weird English he sees in a tiny notebook he’s dubbed “Language Heaven.” He notices and fixates on things that I totally take for granted — it seems he has to stop and look at every vending machine, which is to me both annoying and endearing.

He loves it here, and I’m so glad. It’s an enchanting place. I took him one day to my old neighborhood, a little fairyland of twisty streets and shops selling sushi and little cakes and shopping bikes, blessed with both a Buddhist temple (famous for its shrine to lucky cat statues — pictures to follow eventually) and a Shinto shrine where I used to steal dolls from the “sacred burnable garbage” area. Blooms everywhere: huge bushes of St.John’s Wort, hydrangea — the splendid irises in the iris garden in Yoyogi park… the “tropical” aspect of Tokyo’s “semi-tropical” climate is gloriously evident.

G. can’t wait to get out of the house (we’re staying with my old friend and colleague Kathy). He just said to me, “Girlfriend’s writing a novel. You can’t wait to write a novel until you retire?” [He still calls me “girlfriend” despite our new status — although he did also say today, “you are my wife now and you have to do what I say” (!!)] It’s still very early, though the light is bright. We’re jetlagged. I’ve never been so jetlagged. It’s much harder coming here from NY than from SF. I’ve gone, after four days, from waking up at 2 am and not being able to sleep at all to waking up at 5:30 after sleeping like a boulder, unable to go out with friends to party at night because too catatonically sleepy. Sigh. Tonight we will be sure to view the neon kanji everywhere.

This is such a much more delicate place to live than New York. I’ve been revelling in the convenience stores, where we have been buying stuff for our breakfasts — little mini packs of eggs and ham and pastries as well as hijiki salad with lotus root and devil’s tongue or, this morning, nanohana no karashi-ae (broccoli rabe in mustard sauce??). Barley tea in cartons. Gary and I pigging out at Fujiya bakery on anmitsu desserts — mine had “soft cream” (like frostyfreeze ice cream) little squares of agar-agar, a plum, a piece of apricot, and sweet bean paste, drizzled over with kuro-ame syrup! How could I have forgotten how charming it is?

The tatami smell, even more fragrant in the heat, brings it all right back like a Proustian injection right to the bloodstream. It makes me feel many things at once, suddenly reexperiencing recalled parties and assignations, intense loneliness and piquant joy… ohhhh… Japan…