Monthly Archives: July 2017

 

 

Had a lovely day yesterday. We finally got to Yokohama’s Izezakicho, the place I had wanted to go to more than any other ther, and had a wonderful time walking in the heat, eating ice cream, perusing the junk shops, and finished off with a delicious Greek meal, where we sat outside on the pavement watching the curious people walk by drinking retsina.

 

There is no doubt that the vintage perfume is drying up though. It used to be a wonderland,  but several shops that used to be bonanzas have stopped selling scent, and even those that do had lean pickings. Still, I found a beautiful Mitsuoko vintage extrait, a small bottle of Acqua Vitae by Maison FK, and another Guerlain, one I had never smelled before, a full, inexpensive bottle of the long discontinued Orange Magnifica. I already have, and like, Mandarine Basilic, which is fresher, greener, but as a committed fan of oranges of all varieties ( I consider their scent the happiest smell in the universe ) and a diehard fan of Guerlain – something about them just makes me irrational -I had to get this other orange as well. And it is nice : like unpeeling a Jaffa while a joss stick burns away in the background, a woody, ambery, almondy  basenote that is just a tad too insistent for me to wear with ease but which melds beautifully with the spicy incense I use in the toilet. It feels a bit wasteful ( this is not a bad perfume- I can’t stand bad fragrance in my vicinity, even in that particular context : do you also ever do this? ) but I can’t say either that I entirely dislike the sheer plenitude of it all : the ‘decadence.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time keeps slipping. I can’t believe I have been home now for two months. The days and hours have become amorphous and melt into each other; a week or ten days pass like a dream; it’s now July.

It’s strange having all this time off, taken only to get better and to recover from what in retrospect was much more major surgery than even I had realized or anticipated- the hospital I am going to now for extra physiotherapy ( because my leg muscles have atrophied; so much conflicting advice and perhaps I have been quite the lazy convalescent, I don’t know), doesn’t even offer double osteotomies – the new physio seemed quite shocked that I had gone through it. Wow, really, both?

It’s not always easy to measure your progress when it is yourself, your own body, and any changes are gradual and incremental. It has often felt like two steps forward and then one or two steps back, but despite certain setbacks, I am less tentative, more robust, coming out of pathetic patient mode and more ready to enter back into the outside world.

 

But not quite yet.

 

One thing I have really enjoyed, having limited access (I have to get taxis anywhere), is exploring my own neighbourhood. It’s almost as if I am seeing it all for the first time. I have lived here for twenty years and we have always gone for walks on Sundays and tried different streets, so of course I do know most of it quite well, but as this is the only place I can go to practice walking, now, I have gone much deeper into its detail within these hot, sunny, humid weeks: I have meandered, on my sticks, along these private, quiet residential streets punctured by the sound of cicadas and other flying insects, huge black butterflies, and the full-thirsted warbling of birdsong.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While down the hill, the valley road I can no longer walk up or down, towards Kita-Kamakura station there are the grand, solemn zen temples of Engakuji, Kenchoji, and many others- the famous hydrangea temple, Meigetsuin thronging with tourists, the tea shops, the history, up here is the quiet, more suburban area, formed in the late sixties and seventies, known as Imaizumidai. My home for all these years, it as at once completely familiar, and yet mysterious. Who lives here? What do they do? At night there is no noise.

 

Where we live is quite affluent, but curiously overgrown, unkempt, even deserted ( Japan has a big problem with abandoned houses due to the hassles of inheritance tax, or something) and there are some of them here; boarded up, but occasionally cared for, and yet not out of keeping with the general slow, natural flow of this area, where gardens are often left to grow wild ( our own house is getting covered with creepers and we love it) and many of the houses are starting to look a little frayed around the edges.

 

I have never liked neatness, though, especially in gardens. Growing up, we always had foxgloves and bluebells; delphiniums, sweet peas… it was a place I could dream in, read books, play with friends. Further down the road there would be the great big houses with their hideous, hideous competitive manifestations of rows and rows of illfitting, fluorescent yellow and bright orange marigolds, pansies, fuchsias, patterns of regimented plants as if chosen by the blind, but maniacally arranged in tight fitting clumps, as anally retentive, fierce, and obedient as Nazis, with no soul nor grace orany sense, really, even of nature; I personally like flowers free and overreaching, lilting, strangling,  as in Rome’s Villa Doria Pamphilii, where the grass grows long and is filled with wild flowers, daisies you can pick, the perfect backdrop to the beautiful, fading wedding cake palazzo of the villa itself,
(and the government is too lazy to do anything about it.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Walking around and along these streets, I notice something similar. The local council is obviously not prioritizing the culling of weeds nor the purity of our pavements. Liana-Iike vines often gang down, the gardens have an indolence. It is a reserved place : people keep themselves to themselves, disperse silently in their own private directions when disembarking from the bus, but there is also something magical that happens when the monks come up from the temples and chant to purify the  neighbourhood, something binding, and then more so during the O-Bon festival held every August, when the spirits of the dead are said to come back to their homes to visit their relatives, and the people wear light cotton summer kimono and dance to old folk songs, let off fireworks, and people get drunk and quite animated and eat and drink in the streets, little children dart about, and teenagers crawl out from under their rocks and sprawl lazily, and you actually, for a day or two, get a glimpse of what has been hidden, the rest of the year, from view.

 

As you approach the mountain, the green smell is intense: steamy, teeming with undergrowth, mosquitoes, wild lilies; the air thick, the shadows looming, inviting, like portals to a subterranean world. Sometimes I go into a drowse state in these conditions, as if I were not quite here: somewhere dense and close, between reality, and a dream. This is how I would be as a child: where I dwelled.

 

I have always loved summer, I feel full, present, unmelancholic, alive :there is a deathless infinity to it: a respite from analysis; all of nature teeming with life and the virulence of chlorophyll, the rapacious need of the cicadas to procreate and die as they whirr from tree to tree and then to a standstill: their sarcophagi lining along the pavements when their tiny engines have somehow stopped; the swallows swooping joyfully down onto their telephone wires: I am a person who can laze for hours by the reeds of a river and watch the water go by, just lying on the grass and watching the clouds drift above me in the sky, and while my friends in Tokyo complain incessantly each year about the heat, up here it is a couple of degrees cooler, and I just bathe in it.

 

 

Japanese children don’t get a summer holiday. For them, this is the most tiresome and tiring time of the entire year: interminable homework, assignments, club activities, cram school seminars; they are mere husks when they go back to school in September. In England, we did nothing, or we did what we wanted( time passed slowly, and I loved it. Two weeks or so by the beach somewhere, Bournemouth or Newquay, and the rest of the time just free; away from schedules and school bells and uniforms and timetables and just the garden, the woods, the late summer light…..

 

Now, unable to really go anywhere beyond my own back yard I feel that I am experiencing similar sensations. In life, as working adults, we rarely get the chance to just do nothing, unwind; break free, stand back, breathe; and while my time is often painful, doing my exercises, riding the exercise bike or going for a ‘stroll’;  my joints seize up or my legs start to swell, I feel some of my childhood’s long summer reverie coming back. As though you were suspended in the liquid of time itself, interior.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source: Eau de Camille by Annick Goutal (1983)

 

 

 

 

Tokyo is relatively crime free. You never worry, feel threatened. In a way it’s an urban paradise – a megalopolis with all the
stimulation and virtually none of the usual, expected dangers.

Still, when it comes to certain areas, venues, clubs, theft of bags and wallets is not unheard of. It’s happened several times to our friends recently – a night out on the town ruined by the extraordinary hassle of cancelling credit cards, reporting in minute detail to the grim looking officers at thepolice station, the inconvenience of having to borrow money from your friends…and last night it finally happened to Duncan ( it once happened to me also , a long time ago, when a ‘knife wielding maniac’ stole into the school when I was teaching some morning classes by myself and made off with my bag containing my passport, my wallet, and a brand new bottle of L’Occitane’s Verveine, a perfume I always associate now with minor criminality).

Mind you, Duncan WAS dressed how you see him above, not exactly the most practical outfit for a night out and taking care of his belongings – an all night weirdo shebang with a big group of friends at a strange but legendary event called Department H ( which I once wrote about on here in my piece titled Tokyo Through The Looking Glass if you care to find out more about it).

He came back this morning at 9.30am, and said ‘ I’ve done something stupid’, and here I am now : my first outing anywhere interesting since my confinement to accompany him, and I am loving the warm, fecund smell of the city and its thrumming, neon glow. It’s quite hard walking on my two sticks, I will confess, but it feels like a breakthrough. He is wearing the stately lemon of Penhaligons’ Blenheim Bouquet: I am in a strange but not entirely unsuccessful combination of the original Marc Jacobs Eau De Parfum – all wet gardenias on asphalt- and the vintage parfum of Cacharel Loulou for a woozy, tropical realness. The night is young. We are going to go for Chinese. Even if curtailed by my current, physical limitations, it feels wonderful to be part of the world on this hot, glittering, summer evening.