新しいものに挑戦する雰囲気

Through the winding course of Zenpukuji river the grass grows fast and loose, the mud paths are merely suggested at by the contours of previous treadings, benches sit by themselves where they can be alone, the jungle gyms and polycarbonate animals have been washed out by spring rains. This is Suginami park style: the waterway is the thing, a functional drain more than a scenic riverbank. The plants and bushes are an afterthought, sprucing for a concrete and aluminium-railed canal. You pass azalea bushes, magnolias with petals sagging with raindrops, and late-season soumei yoshino cherry trees with bald pistils after their petals have been dashed to the ground. Hobby vegetable plots, fluttering laundry on poles, derelict bicycles propped against the shutters. A children's nursery and toy workshop called Rabbit House nestles next to wooden clapboard houses with disused gardens only carelessly tended.



Asagaya's public housing estate lies just off this canalside green, its common spaces overgrown with bushes and trees in no discernable pattern. Tended to only occasionally since the sixties, maybe. Grass in balding patches, a litter of potted shrubs in clay saucers that collect moss and rainwater. Rainstained and greying concrete with the block numbers traced out in small brown square tiles. And what a lot of light on tile there must be - 木漏れ日, the leaking of light through the trees - in this little pastoral-socialist hideaway.

タイムスリップできる喫茶店

It was like a walk-in diorama, a stage set from a Dickens novel with mouldering furniture and a forlorn man behind the counter polishing glasses. The bell tinkled lightly, door opening with a creak, a light drizzle, and the wind making the windows shudder. I'd read about it in one of the "mania" Tokyo neighborhood tokushuu's on Suginami ward. One of the few classical music kissaten that refuse to buckle, assiduously polishing its china and porcelain hangings, tending to the chintz decorations and maroon vinyl banquettes. Some of them have become just the sort of distraught hole that caters to pensioners who squander their time watching the crud harden on darkened windows, but Violon is aging with a kind of doomed graciousness. It is nice to know that there are some people who devote their resources to upholding this sort of thing. What does it enshrine exactly? A kind of marooned passion with nowhere to dock, a specific hang-up, obsolete, faintly ridiculous, and because of that fact all the more desperately preserved. I hadn't felt so much of a loaded sense of trespass for a long while. Museums seldom have that power anymore; whereas caves of dusty antiques do. Just as lavishness and polish is oppressive, well-tended age is awesome.

There was one other person in the audience, facing the altar. A collection of flower-bell gramophone horns, vacuum tubes and an orchestral pit of other dated sound equipment. The altar was lined with lace, some pastoral-themed porcelain (country lass, farmer's son with straw hat, capering round an orchard, etc), and a very large and excessive lamp. Grandfather clocks, hanging oil lamps, large chests.