廃墟の魅力

there are relentless weeds in my yard some of which i've clipped the tops off of and placed in a small glass tealight holder as a wabi ornament. waking up early yesterday, biking bleary-eyed to the kyuu-kyuu for some extra bowls, milk, and carrots, we served brunch for three at ten-thirty. green chilli thepla, carrot sambar, dry potato curry, cucumber raita and chai, followed by carrot halva with shaved pistachios and vanilla ice cream. we sat on the floor on cushions in varying shades of faded blue, enjoying the drowsy lazing about of late summer.

later, the clouds muddling over into a thick woolliness, we walked up the meguro river to a studiedly dishevelled showa-era house with mustard walls, cracking wooden ceiling fixtures that exposed half an attic, midcentury office furniture and an intimate audience with the nestling cicadas thronging the neighboring trees. a view of the verandah stained with rain puddles and fraying white paint on the woodwork. cherry tree foliage overhanging a cobblestoned canal addling along at "my-pace". opatoca is a classic LOHAS cafe, modelled after equal parts of bali, okinawa, and southern france. the bakery downstairs huddles behind a weedy terrace threaded through with ivy and fig trees, offering red bean and edamame buns; the adjacent "bistro" is a converted hiraya that now channels scandinavian living rooms and london formica caffs. the upstairs portion where we were was too postmodern to trace a properly discernable lineage of interior design. it was overwhelmingly environmental, windows thrown open to the ebbing of the stream, the amble and shuffle of nakameguro hipsters, carelessly abandoned bicycles propped against rust-flecked railings. we sit, indulge 8-month old iroha who tries to eat my leather rabbit-shaped keyring, sip the iced tea laced with cloves, flip through araki nobuyoshi's showa-era tokyo photos and "sotokoto", a LOHAS-themed life catalog that tells you about bread collectives and environmental projects for fleeters.

it starts to sprinkle, and we head for an ivy-covered brown building a few bridges past the treehouse. we sip light-roast green tea and eat kinako-dusted hon-warabi with carved wooden sweet-forks. the soundtrack is joao gilberto's "white" album, which like all the other textures in the tearoom has been modulated to a certain shade of mellow. the view through the wide strip windows is streaked with rubber-sheathed electrical cables, a visual slight to the cherry leaves dancing in front of public housing units fronting the side of the canal. this is tokyo's trick, a serious urban planning lacuna that they've turned into an unexpected joy; puncutuating the mundane with the "wabi." the charm of this is evident but its source isn't, at least not immediately; until you realize that it's this thrown-together materialsness that makes a point of leftovers and rubbish, trashiness and beauty. ruins (and more generally, ruinedness) are doubly pathetic in tokyo, a city that lost so much first-order patina but made up for it with an understanding of how best to redeem that loss, and turn it into a kind of pastoral. so much of new york is merely grungy and unpleasant, whereas tokyo is aesthetically self-assured of its own controlled decay.