As happens, or seems to, in times of loss, when you find yourself emotively strengthened from having excised all grief, and when you claim through auspice of enthusiasm to certain circles of people that you’re going to drive to the highest mountain in the hemisphere, because you need to “(get) the fuck out of dodge, here, again in this static city, vast messianic meltingpot to the immobile and rigid, laughing with comets on my tongue, stardust in the eye, not referring to the referdex, but thumbing through Bukowski and Tennessee Williams when I required clarity or company”, you either come across as crazy or appealing, and it’s rolling with the swell to see which way the weathervane rocks. So I drove to Mt. Superbus, soaring east through Queensland, because I had the gas money and the appetite, and somewhere between accelerating around a hilltop bend as my windscreen was blanketed in an impermeable white suffusion of low-flying cloud, and stalking off up the mountainside rainforest to a company of that compacted swampy and most ardent odour of wet bracken which is forever beloved, I met some girl! – who,  for me, without waxing hyper-embellished and unfalteringly prosaic as I’ve no doubt managed to in the recent past as pertains to the dictum of love, – means more than golden soil and glittering citadel. She proved then, as she proves now and irremediably always, that she is a lady to light the lantern of every shipwrecked sailor’s lighthouse, that she is treasured and throbbing with the joy to embrace a rush of experience, and though I’ve crowed voluble volleys of sentiments about each one of my past relationships, because I do, and because this proves the conduit to  best conduct the business of love through the channel of a crazy burning one like myself, I will place the sentence here, simply, in deference to all the kinetic wanderlust I’m able – let it cool from the foundry of zeal and perception from whence I’ve just forged it. It’s this: This girl is the woman I want to mix and intermingle the rest of my life with. And when you’re young and perilous, a paladin knight with as many fucking fancies as a rockstar has moments nursing his electric guitar, I’m sure we must all think this, countless times, with countless visions of the rhyme, and yet it doesn’t prevent me from telling you, keen reader, that she breaks the day, she breaks it into pewterpoint pieces which she slips into her pinafore pockets, and is it so wrong for a hangdog oaf with this beardy face to follow the swing of her silhouette, if sunshine pours from the seams and secrets of her dress?

            Of course not. Most certainly not. The mountain speaks to me with its deep, rumbling earthen voice like a conversation between volcanoes, and it tells me all that I need to continue championing. Superb us.

            As happens, or seems to, in times of loss, you promise to your glowing adored lady with the autumn sky in her eyes, that you’ll take her to see Japan, and it all seems so serenely easy, a gaffe, a lofty allusion to something likely and without lassitude or liability. So let’s release those satellites and luftballoons of scarlet intent into the sky in her eyes, take her by that ageless hand, and clatter toward that departures gate. Oh what a furnace for story, oh what contents for a narrative of heroism and promise!

            I told her I loved her, and nine months after returning to Brisbane from Japan, we travelled to my befavoured Eastern capital. There was no sound entering my ears upon disembarking into Narita, but that thunderous quiet prior to the wave descending to pound you.

*

I was standing, considering breaking rations for the day and lighting up again, in my workaday best, in the courtyard at the base of the Soshigayokura train-platform. To my left:  the pachinko slot palace frenzying the tangle of backstreets, as a casino boat is wont to take a brazier to the dark ripples on the flats of a deep-south undertow. To my right: the most pious and prettiest bronze-mould statue of Ultraman, phenomenological superhero, undercover Zoroaster, and extraterrestrial beta-capsule borne luchador from the galaxial expanse of deepest space, – where it must be apparent and justified to cut lunch with a chthonic crusader, equipped the countenance of a silverfish and the sort of bodyhugging “neutralising” crimson jumpsuit that gambles to recall the best of Velvet Goldmine and Strictly Ballroom. All the same, beneath Ultraman I plunder hands into pockets, rock on the sockets of my feet, and think about the lady. I think about hair furled across the traces of my exhaling chest, I think about perfume at the ridge of her neck as she presses her forehead beneath my chin, I think about newly-laundered bedding that smells of sensual turmoil and the cinnamon of midnight. I think about holding her hand, twining my fingers into hers, and speeding through dead air as the wheels of the plane ascend up into its underside, looking at her eyes beyond brilliant and seminal and warm, with countries turning tiny and transitory out the porthole window beside her cheek. I think about the last time I was here, across seas and standing regaling in the cloth of a Japanese morning; when I was just as sordid and wholesome and demented and brimming with wisdom as I am now, but flooding the wee-hour streets with the plasma blasts of carefree footfalls, by myself, buoyed by aspirations to devour the whole photovoltaic town, unthinking and dream-teeming, a high society glamourpuss, a highwayman, a high-school’s most likely to save the world at the hands of a novel. I think about those nine months behind me, like the intergalactic hero errant above me, where I’ve grown into my boots, and grown into my beard. I think that I’m pretty glad to be where I am, with the job, and the darling, and the smoking suit. I check my watch, take out my book of James Joyce, and palm a fist of change into the near vending machine. A bottle of white peach nectar, complete with screw-top and peculiar manga character like a pink jellyfish with arms and the lips of a baleen whale, parks into the contour of my palm. I take a seasoned gasping draught, and read something short and sharp about gallivanting Irish gallants fucking and swanning ’round the cloven countryside. The sun beats fiercely with tempestuous fists into the centre of my back. I sit folded at the lip of the road. It hits half an hour before I’m needed at work, and I rise up to meet the clientele like Hasselhoff’s shoulders meet the slap of the tsunami, and you’ve never before beheld the face of such an angelic card, no matter how ever many times you recite biblical text or go searching the cathouses and shantytowns blazing with peals of bruised laughter at the edge of the worst wharf. I’m a blossom and a boy, a motherfucker of sublime intervention.

            When I walk, the people astride their bicycles whistle around my striding shadow. They look, and recognise. They tell me that I’ve never imagined the capacity of their love, they tell me that there are sonnets as hot and blanched with the spice of day-warm adoration composed with lotus petals, in their hallways, just for me. They tell me that I’ll make good here, that I’ll be tended to and coddled. Someone runs over my foot, I drop my drink, and Ultraman gets torn down by coalition vigilantes, where the head is paraded through the streets impaled on a stake. Work tells me I’m early.
 

*

            Exacting a tactful penury-proselytising career change, mid-traffic of my history of twentysomething employment, I exit the realm of Australian environmental conservation politics and societal fundraising, to pursue a parched desire in broadening my academic parameters by teaching a language I’m incurably smitten by within a cultural centre my mind can’t shake. Both the lady and I are employed by an English-Language conversation think-tank, then, the sort of educational corporation whose best or most accurate equivalent within contemporary Australian commerce is McDonald’s, – if not rivalling the preponderance of fish ‘n’ chip shops dotting our forgiving brown homeland, by the immodest excess of school branches populating the expanse of Tokyo. By now, then, it’s unlikely you’re ill-informed as to what corporation this narrative is actually denoting, and if you’re unsure, it could be debated as preferable. This story won’t explore the alchemical madness or the politics. Just the event. Upon being bequeathed our accommodation in the prefecturate of Kanagawa-ken, in the ward of Zama-shi, a meandering mile down the length of the Odakyu line heading due west from Shinjuku, at the indelibly quieting suburban byzantium of Soubudai,  we reason that we done good. By the time we’ve been delegated our separate offices, we’ve endured the exhaustive and defiling thirty-hour training program over the initial three days and we’ve been afforded the subsequent day to trip fantastical and eminently fatigued through the splendent grounds of Ueno Park, we conclude that it’s righteous providence to be at the tipping-point we’ve together come to provoke. When we’re two-and-half weeks into our arduous and salacious work schedules, and we’ve stipulated aloud, late into the early morning, that in that time we’ve come to realise we haven’t seen anything of the Tokyo wonders I’m self-cultured in, beyond our late-afternoon amble through Ueno two weekends prior, my lady and I dissolve into the fabric of the tatami-mat futon with faces informed by shared feelings of unexpressed defeat. Around this time her branch’s boss quits, citing the inadequacy of the in-house pay system by repeatedly caterwauling his not having been paid for three weeks. My own boss, a man as oily as a fist of crude and as tall as was dense, but with the heart of a golden retriever, bumbled the consequent day to inform me that as I’d been displaying superior performance aptitude in my position, I should – here it is – consider resigning.

            Told me that the company was on the vertiginous decline toward big-business bankruptcy.

            Told me that he, himself, hadn’t been paid for fourteen days.

            Told me, through no oblique escutcheon of verbal implication, that I wouldn’t have found this out until having arrived in Japan, to begin with, but nevertheless the company had been court-martialled earlier within the year for corrupt practice.

            Told me that he was sore and sorry to have to return to Canada. He quite enjoyed the accommodation the international tenancy board would soon seize back from the corporation due to having failed to supply necessary rent allowance, which is something that comes from not being paid for a fortnight. He then exchanged an offer to frequent a gay bar after shift. I demurely declined.

            At the conclusion of the third week, when the alleged billionaire president of the company issued the branch-specific Japanese staff a correspondence informing them that he had located the most efficacious economical way through which to extract money from the corporation coffers so as to pay all withstanding staff by “observing the ascent of the sun through the golden rain”, I bailed.

            There’s some adherent disinclination toward being ensnared further in the tendrils of a notoriously blacklisted company where the individual responsible for providing expenditure for something short of one-hundred and twenty hours of work, is depending upon divining your pay cheque through the ministration of a bushel of tea-leaves.

            The day my sweetflower and I processed and embraced our deliverance by submitting twin resignation forms, the corporation was still hiring and flying people from overseas (not having supplied the expense to purchase tickets, just the imaginary and ungovernable incentive to do so.) Someone within the office stole the last ￥1,000 yen note secured in my wallet that day, and in deference to any resolving resentment, I really couldn’t blame them. When I tremblingly collapsed into the Metro that evening, knowing far well that the next day we’d have to organise return airfares, evacuation of premises, new and affordable accommodation to enact as an interstitial venue to anticipate our haggard departure from Japan, capable baggage storage, and a miraculous finance reshuffle, I sat broke and butchered in the dark as the carriage ballooned through the catacombs of the railway. Three girls were staring at me, or behind me.
              Beyond me, past the window supporting my dethroned head – a flourish of snakes and ladders of iridescent night-light fireworks screaming above the Keizai foothills. Today was Respect-for-the-Aged Day, of course. I felt the crow’s feet at the apexes of my eyes pad round and pock the rest of my face.

            Yasuhiro insisted that we act like right lushes and indulge those sides within us which proved sensitive to the furniture of decadence. Not in those words, or a transliterated Japanese equivalent, so much, but in impelling us to dine with our stomachs of stone with him in his cold-water Shin-Ōkubo flat, and through consuming everything he reasoned was moderately Eastern in culture. This meant that the food brandished at us didn’t necessarily have to equate to being expressly Japanese, simply heretofore unavailable to Australians. If it was unidentifiable in its packaging, Yasuhiro would place it in the hand-held shopping basket. If something inspired an epiphanic moment within him whilst carving through the aisles of the ￥99 yen mart, throatily declaring that he’d forgotten such a foodstuff existed, it therefore constituted being placed into basket. If I observed there were quite a lot of sweets within the store, Yasuhiro would ask me which I wanted. When I chose one out of cordiality and thanks, he asked me why I hadn’t chosen another as well, and quickly redoubled our basket’s inventory of wares. If my lady, most amused and exquisite, mentioned that she thought she probably wouldn’t enjoy something, and indicated toward it, Yasuhiro would defend its honour, and place it in the basket to rationalise his oratory. If I said I’d enjoyed the food we had, Yasuhiro would offer me seconds. If I said I was bloated by the wealth and diversity of the spread supplied, Yasuhiro inquired as to why I did not like it enough to warrant asking for seconds. If we were all too high and flooded with levity from eating too much, or drinking too much, or smoking too much, or talking, or laughing, or debating and berating one another, it only meant we formulated some gestalt triumvirate of generosity, where nothing proved unenthusing. It was a time of rich feeling and festivity. It was our last week, we were all heartbroke in some way, and I sat with nicotine heady about us, and quart of awamori curled into the crook of my forearm, with eyes embracing both these people, and the things they each said, and the ambience so melancholy, fragile and adored. I guess I must’ve come to some conclusion then, that Japan was lost to me all over, once more, even whilst I was immersed in its ensuing hospitality.

            Yasuhiro languorously arched over the Teflon-coat wok sat upon the shingle-sized glass table we’d all been hunkered round, bracing against the dimming light, when he retrieved a Betamax cassette from the sprawl of his hickory bookcase, and shook it like a pan of sifted gold residue in the feebling light. We watched and entertained a continuing footage reel captured when he was twenty years younger, as nimble as a candelabrum, and with the hair of a cram school heartthrob. He was competing in a “reality” television program, an esoteric Japanese game-show conserved against the elements of the days from the radical and irrational ‘80’s, something called Endurance. We feasted on shared cigarettes and a communal extravagance of steaming hiroshimayaki, and watched Young Yasuhiro run up and down some tundra beach-side shoreline in boots crafted from steel and waylaid by a haul of buckets overflowing with collected sea-water. We watched him hold his breath underwater in temperatures exalting in the sub-zero figures for minutes and minutes and minutes. We watched him staggeringly balance with an Oktoberfest equipoise on the husk of a log suspended metres in the air, with bags large enough to hold poundcakes swollen and draped over his shoulders. We watched him harry blindfolded through a cedar forest with cameraman collecting his every heart-holy agony. We watched him try to best lateral-thinking questions inscribed into placards that no-one lacking in an irrelevant volume of dimestore thought puzzles could possibly hope to wrestle. We watched him sink to his haunches with his head clamped between his knees and saw his lungs churn through the fabric of his tracksuit like the pistoning legs of a racehorse. We watched him in irredeemable circumstances of depravity, and behind us, indulging the televisual spectacle, the present Yasuhiro roared in self-deprecatory laughter.

            Our hero was presented first-prize from amongst seven-thousand contestants nation-wide. He later told us that though having claimed to have kept the tape-recording, he lampoonishly lost the trophy privileged him, and used his prize money to pay off an inconsolable insurance debt from later running his car into another.  Yasuhiro later escorted us to the train station, and glowed with an unwavering waving hand at the bottom of the escalator which we ascended to commute back to our hostel.

*

            She looked total, alive, stunning and luminous, and there’s not a given moment where I’m not yet half-gone for her when she stands still, with hands flat and cupped at her side, with her hair scooped and snarled in the fists of a specific autumnal knockout wind. She waited, her figure carving pendulum conundrums from the cloth of the backdrop, and she turned to grace me with a swinging smile.

            ‘I don’t think we’re going to find them,’ she said, nodding at the calm clarity of Shinobazu Pond. Boats shaped to resemble ducks pink, lemon-yellow and florid pedalled across the unbroken layer of water dividing us from the busying, gusting cityscape shooting its jagged spires into the early-evening skyline. The bulrushes fluttered, inhaling and closing as though the gills of some sinuous conger fish writhing in the density of the foulest muck. Birds chimed like bells made from water and glass. Somewhere across the pond calm floated the voice of a dog and its owner. Cats, as ginger as bared Irish chests, played and splayed amongst the enclosing brambles. We traced a path around the circumference of the body of water. There were clouds entrapped in its meniscus like the genius gimmickry of some funhouse mirror contrivance, and occasionally a turtle would ascend from the vacuous heavenly interior to protrude its angelic head. ‘There’s not going to be any mandarin ducks, my baby, but you can have a few turtles to console you.’

            We described an illustrative arc around the exterior of a Tokugawan shogunate-era pagoda, as the occasional heron interrupted the reverent evening-minted solemnity with a disruption of wuthering wings, or an antagonistic slash of the surface of the water with a pointedly delegated thrust of its bill. The building still, in its unobtrusively Eastern flourishes and architectural crenellations of torque-shaped extraterrestrial contours, was continuing to humble a formidable and frequenting brace of post-work temple-goers. Something small and about the size of a dragonfly chirruped from its canopied cornices, and jewel-mouthed carp surfaced to thrash about amongst the flattened stalks of disturbed reed-beds. Laughter oscillated with heft and velocity across the murkier depths, like a stone thrown to reach us from the hand of someone waylaid within the land of kappas. I caught her at the lip of her hip, and kissed her behind the ear. ‘I came here last time,’ I told her. ‘I was just wandering through the streets, not actually knowing where my footfalls were taking me, and it opened up to this. There were so many mandarin ducks it was rapturous. They were waltzing across the water, holding high the plumage and the promiscuity. It was winter, and yet nonetheless there were high-school kids still tramping around the rushes, and jamboreeing round the park’s exterior, the monkeybars, some sketch artist entranced with watercolours and canvas tethered to the river by the filtered hue of sunlight invading the afternoon.  I don’t know. I just couldn’t imagine that some place like this could exist. People were in Australia, my family was doing Christmas with its woeful and deathly tree, and all the collective Marshall hysteria. But I was here, with no-one else I knew, and there wasn’t anything I cared more about than being sat here, being bathed in this light, being privileged this moment. No-one else I knew or have known have been valued this opportunity, been able to come away and mourn for a moment in some Tokyoyite park; the thought throbbed and brightened over time. It was the wonderful part of the world I’d trusted existed, but never before beheld.’ It was probably an oblique or damagingly existential and rosy-budded romanticist thing to verbalise, but it’s what I felt, and through the attenuating events experienced and collected throughout my cursory and claw-wielding life, I suppose I’d never comprehended the vitality or eloquence of the earth I’d known and cultivated, without first having it exemplified to me in a book, accompanied by some inaccurate artist’s impression.

            She pressed down the fabric of her dress into the backs of her knees, and made to sit cross-legged on the lawn encircling the pond. She removed our communal deck of cigarettes. Her hair was silver in the sunless illumination, her complexion as soft as a ruby’s afterglow. Our eyes followed the passage of some large and obscene drakes as they gallivanted across the river calm. I took some photos of her against the darkening sky with the camera, unparted from me, fashioned to my neck. We scrolled through our accumulating succession of pictures, deleting the ones where I appeared to have witnessed a rainfall of seahorse, or stood in a mile of teeming, ungovernable manure: any of those expressions which mean nothing, but represent the ephemeral moment between the fleeting vision of your appearing quite handsome and the ensuing yawn that consequently ruptures the photogenic supremacy.

            Now: Something you come to endorse when you’re forever promoting and conveying the enrichened capacity of environmentalism throughout two years, is a nontangential affection that whatever worldly damage appears to corrupt the purities of nature, the planet will always demonstrate a way through which to disentangle itself from permanent oblivion. It will neither never come to channel to you a necessity for nor compulsion to keep you endemic to its surface. It will never require your individual, singular feeble and futile presence to enable it, in whatever renewed manifestation it wishes to affect, to prevail, or to continue in its cyclical schema. For what I’ve developed, without expressive politic or prejudice, is a recent notion that our life here constitutes a provocation, but not an obligation, put to the world to demonstrate its superior skill-set to survive. There seems an apparent limitation within our contract of cordiality between earth and our living upon it, that ensures our capacity to make a claim for indispensability. See, nothing about us is fundamental to the continued progress or prowess of the world. And there will come a day, I’m sure, as doom-brilliant and unreckoned as the descent of the gilded and aghast seraphim, wherein where I’m sitting, beside her, and what we’re looking at, before us, will be occupied by some other heretofore unencapsulated phylum of heightened evolutionary suitability, a creature like a snowflake with feet, perhaps, equipped with its notable and refined dominance in activating the appearance of all the fish within this pond; and the finned, fanning things will erupt from the surface to sail and leap for it, and no-one or nothing will fondly recall the Australians who once rested here in pleasing asceticism.

            ‘What are you thinking about?’

            ‘Weird little hexagonal creature, like a snowflake with feet.’

            ‘Do you think we made the right decision, Kirk?’

            ‘Going home is the only decision available to us. We don’t have enough finance or funds privileged us to continue living here, even if we found another job respectively for both of us; the process could take weeks, our initial pay beyond that will be delegated to us a month from commencement, and we can’t locate new company-disassociated accommodation, instigate a new sub-lease agreement, and supply the expenditure for all the necessary utilities, whilst working and living on what’s affordably ours for a stone month. More than that, our Visas indicate that if we’re to work, we’re to teach, and don’t think that with a corporation’s tempestuous collapse there won’t be thousands upon thousands of foreigners who can extol more workplace experience and non-Western independence simultaneously, wrestling for our placements. We haven’t really cultivated a discernible comprehension of the language, it takes somewhere shy of two months to obtain an internet service within the home, and there’s something in me that wants to enjoy the remaining time withstanding, whilst preparing for an improved future anew in Australia, as opposed to squandering the enjoyment and possibility present by harrying around looking for hasty employment.’

            ‘Let’s travel somewhere, then. We’ve enough accumulated money to travel once out of Tokyo within the forthcoming week, and we shouldn’t omit extending ourselves and having fun simply because in eight days we’re going to be disembarking Japan. I want to be provided the ability to recall Tokyo with some tangible sentimentalism, instead of harbouring some reminiscence of the five weeks we went poor, starved and acidic in this city.’

            ‘We’ll buy tickets to someplace tomorrow, then.’

            ‘It gives you more of chance to find Haruki Murakami, as well.’

            I pushed her forcibly into the pond, and fell into the brackish water after her. We both waded in the shallows below a portcullis of burning autumn zelkova trees, and a shoal of entwined fish circumnavigated our cold and yielding bodies like a teem of ripples. An otter passed us by, fulcrum-tail flush with the water’s surface, pirouetting upon its back, abdomen distended to the sky, my camera between its paws.

***

            Our final week was spent somewhat equitably in the cedar-forested winds of Hakone, and from there disparately in Minowa, Minami-Senju, Kita-Senju, Iriya, Ueno, Ikebukuro, Sunshine, Omotesandō, Harajuku, Akihibara, Yoyogi, Shibuya, and Asakusa, in addition to a dozen or so places that demanded attention and the immeasurable transcience of memory-longevity. We freely brandished most of our pooled resources in rocketing out within an Odakyu Romancecar, with Hakone Freepass clenched in kingly and hunted glamour between our fists, to the observation platform of Mt. Fuji. We wended through the Musée de Saint-Exupéry de Hakone, the provincial French villa secluded and occluded within the Hakone mountain-country comprehensively dedicated to The Little Prince, complete with an ornate Parisian fountain which sprayed out a thick ululating flume of soap bubbles; a cinematheque hosting a daily-recurring film of sound-art positing that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry went decidedly AWOL and could be foresworn to have hijacked a plane belonging to the Aeroposta Argentina Company, before crashing in a tumult and tumble of imminent death on either the dehydrated savannahs of Sahara or possibly into a levitating silhouette of the Little Prince, himself; and a gift-store which seemed to have every Little Prince accessorised essential not yet commercially conceived, including but not exclusively limited to deodorant, massage oil, dental floss, lavatory paper, and the ever-seminal l’eau de toilette which would “allow you to smell just like the Little Prince”, whilst not dismissing the plush soft-toy of an elephant-bloated snake to keep that unwholesome childish nightmare at bay. At day’s end, we eventually swooned upon the floor of our rented hostel-room in a farce of fatigue, not wishing to awaken for a trillion years or even the empirical dictatorial domination of the dolphin.

            We woke on our final day before plane-facilitated departure, stinking of travel, broiling onsen mineral and a grandiloquent boon of fallen cedar fruit. Yasuhiro met us at Nishi-Nippori to accompany us through the neighbourhood bazaar of Sugamo, to ogle a befavoured brass statue of Japanese film star Toru-san, brazen tiger-bright; to then bear witness to a marriage between a geisha and a suit-sweetened salaryman as old as newly-cured milk; and to inexorably catch a gondola or shuriken-katto shuttei (“dart-cut” boat) on the Arakawa River as it meandered toward Chiba. Jet-skis and motorboats tore scythes of spray around our raft as the ferryman propelled his bamboo bargepole through the mangrove, arms aching with sunlight. Ears of corn bristled in the distance.

            ‘After, we go to Shimokitazawa for shisha bar and coffee.’ Yasuhiro had proven an eminent host thus far, interpreting kanji and plying me with amazake, and we all exchanged cunning and bladed jokes and slurs about Yasuhiro having drowned his ex-girlfriend whilst on a romantic journey to Chiba via skiff, about my obvious deprivation of a penis, and about the other incurably demented passengers huddled on the raft, of which it was proven many spoke English, and displayed superior talent in wielding an inventive invective. Cormorants cannonaded the water from the opposite bank, and my darling made rhapsodised conversation with Yas about what she was likely to do when we departed Japan. It was all so sincere, and it was all so lamentable. When we hit the jetty of the preceding bank, and moored into the mudflats, we scurried from out of the raft’s stomach and stood unsure, newborn and blinking at the contour of the river.

            ‘Tonight we will eat nabe, which is a traditional Japanese wintertime party food. Please try. It won’t be cooked in blood.’

            We roared at the folly and weirdness of Western culture, then, of vegetarianism and of personal politics. We stood with full-blown daylight cradling us like a cheerleader in the forgiving arms of a strawberry-blonde quarterback. We talked about urgent and unimportant things, matters which were of import as we would be leaving, breaking the honest and vulnerable heart of a great friend, matters which were impossible to be properly surmised in our inadequate Western tongue, on this, the ultimate of last days. We talked as though we could convince the fickle god of circumstance to supply us a compromise, we clucked and clambered and rambled with rogue abandon, mouths forever moving, as though we could converse for the remainder of our lives. We went for broke, thrust our hands into our pockets and threw huge sweeping collections of ha’penny witticisms into the air, trying to obscure the glare of the sun with the blind visor of shared communion. We gambled our love, and tried to break the day.

            We stood in the street in front of his apartment, with furious tears, like Siamese fighting fish beneath a footprint of rainfall, entrapped behind our eyes. We stood, like a trio of idiot-kings, having exhausted the novelty of brightly-lit word. He looked so tragic, so hurt, so forsaken, and yet he smiled and swallowed hard. We were all doing the same. I think that sorrow is such a starry, savage fight. Above the Shin-Ōkubo backstreet, the moon laughed in cavalier spite at the purposeless impulse of people.

            We walked through the night, she and I, with grief harboured between us like some shared and weeping wound. Everything was so bright, so voltage-enhanced, so alchemical and disastrously gorgeous. Cars and people surpassed and eclipsed us, and my feet grew so heavy that I might wonder how could anyone understand the misery of going home, when everything abundant with ebullience is writhing and flying around you. She and I didn’t hold hands. It was like drowning, so slowly, as though I was four again, dwindling in life and descending to the pool’s deep illuminated bottom. Everything was racing through this night.

            Yasuhiro was standing at the entrance-gate to the train-station escalator. He launched himself at us, and we embraced, and I think we all cried. I can see him clatter into his basement garage, burst astride his motorcycle, kicking engine into monstrous and zealous gear, and storming down the dark midnight Tokyo street in a panting pursuit. I can see the wind howl at the collar of his jacket, I can see his face lowered to brace and kiss the angry might of the piercing, fierce cold. I can see his hands curled and whitening around the handlebars, his eyes glistening brown and mourning. I can see his teenage body bedecked in numbered tracksuit crumpled over the seashore, his lungs screaming for oxygen, his arms spreadeagled around him, as they approach to award him the trophy, the cameras encircling him to record his blissed-out reaction. I can see his face diminish as the escalator escorts us into the black metal of night. I can see him slaloming through the aisles of the supermarket with shopping-basket clenched in palm. I can see him laugh, with face naked to the constellations above, as we all hightail it through an alleyway populated by yakuza in tan suits, and silver shoes. I can see him in his apartment, exiled, hands in hair, trying to control the tears. I can see him in the alleyway, with hands sheathed in pants pockets.

            ‘When will you come back?’

            ‘We’ll try to come back in a few years. We need to save money again, and get new jobs, but we’ll be back.’

            ‘We must write something together. A porno monster film. You promised long ago.’

We roared at the folly and weirdnesses of Western culture, then, and my lady and I traced our collective way to the railway station, treading water in the undertow of this rapids-riven electric palace. My Tokyo self somehow smuggled into my luggage, and sometime during the flight I weathered an urge to kowtow to the steward when he replaced our hot towel.