中夏の暑さ

the spring rains have stopped and we are in the full sweaty fetid bloom of summer. the thing with this time of year is that tokyo's postmodern acrylicky skyline is at its gaudy worst. there's the reflective glare bouncing off the polished vitrines in thirteen storey shopping centers, marble facades from the roman-style "mansions," layered industrial finishes in steel and aluminium gleaming fiercely against bauhaus concrete. yesterday was just such an overly exposed day. like some bad 70s film about parched californian suburbs (the graduate?), except this time the unsympathetic surfaces make the light saturation a nightmare. with my friend i ducked into a small fish restaurant hung with round paper lanterns, a polished concrete floor and reed mat back seating area laid with blue and white cushions and settled down for horse mackerel tartare with ginger and spring onions, chilled shellfish gelee with mushrooms, eggplant pickles, rice and miso soup drawn from tuna innards.

then it was off to the "old" downtown area, ginza, which used to be the parisian boulevard of the 30s with approximately the same atmosphere and social caliber and connotation. nowadays it is about as charming as fifth avenue. meaning, the european connection got lost in the years, and it is american in spirit with far more wearying density. i went to see a cai guo qiang exhibition, a chinese artist who studied art in japan and then went on to a charmingly traditional patron-artist relationship with shiseido cosmetics. while greying women in hats and lace gloves sit upstairs in the art deco cafe taking pound cakes and earl grey tea on fine bone china, cai's work downstairs in the gallery basically consists of various flammable chemical powders set aflame on japanese rice paper (previously treated to make it resistant to the flames, presumably), with the resulting flame trails leaving their trace of destruction behind. it's powerful stuff, quite "environmental" in the heidggerian sense...

the afternoon heat was more environmental than ever, as fat tourists in shorts and sun visors trampled around the pavement, feeling squelchy and wrinkled by lurid sunlight and all those glaring reflections. escape to the french-japanese institute, a nicely patinaed fifties corbusian building with a "double revolution" tower by junzo sakakura, one of several devoted corby disciples who gave the city its characteristic mid-century modern-brutal face after the tabula rasa of WWII (there is a lovingly obsessive retrospective of corby with mockups of studios and small commissions at the mori art museum at the moment). the refugee film festival is showing at the nichifutsu gakuin, and i went to a cambodian film by rithy panh, a little heavy on the moralizing flashbacks but capturing perfectly that note of fatalistic third-world wretched capital city squalor and the hopeless capering about of its inhabitants amid documentary-verity but stunningly picturesque slums, towering makeshift piles of apartments, light industry, workshops and nightclubs pulsing with square dance beats and too-bright strobe lights.

the day pulled to a sultry close with the sun setting behind streaky clouds, the sky a dark lavender. back in kichijoji, stooping beneath the noren languidly flapping in a light breeze and sliding back the wooden shuttered doors, we settled into a two-person counter for dashimaki (omelet made with fish and kelp stock for extra wetness, folded over itself like a bolt of cloth), braised pork belly slices in soy with mustard and shaved leek, megochi (flathead) tempura, and housemade "handbeaten" soba noodles, greyish white flecked with buckwheat.