Posted on Friday, 09/27/24.

There is a small used bookstore just off the street toward 三茶. The usual route to my apartment from the station crosses over this stree; at its top is a crook around which sits the famous 「鈴なり横丁」 neon sign. I’d crossed by the bookstore at least once, years ago, but hadn’t gone in; some of these stores appear, from the outside, to stock only featureless paperbacks on history or self-help, which don’t appeal to my love of objects, of ephemera. Ephemera is a great, low-effort diversion from the act of combing the stacks; it is a drink of water.

I was snagged by the boxes of film pamphlets out front; my enjoyment of these is superficial, alloyed with the novelty that anything physical could have every been attached to a movie.

The interior was fluorescent and cramped, impacted with books, some stacked in front of the shelves proper in unstable piles, on top of books themselves set in a perpendicular direction, necessitating exploratory surgery. The aisle caps each had small sections or shelves or bins to store postcards, magazines, maps, and occasionally cups, pins, or other small tchotchkes. The philosophy section specifically was well-stocked, humorously intermixed with the mathematics books (both pop and serious) such that under the green Loeb copies of Plato’s Republic (I-V and VI-X) would be a thick standard text on elliptic curves, and then some slim pamphlet on Deleuze. My hope is still to find a Japanese copy of the Tractatus, but there was only one Wittgenstein-related book (secondary lit). A nice copy of Benjamin primary essays. An old book on mathematical logic with a gilt spine and foxed edges.

I came away with two vanity purchases: the film pamphlet for Crash, which was colorful and excessive and serendipitous, and a small colorful tiny booklet of mini maps of the Tokyo area Including the 23区, surrounding townships, particularly noteworthy city centers, and the main 新宿駅 and 渋谷駅. It is impossible to find a date anywhere in the booklet, though its general style could place it anywhere back to the ’90s, without closer inspection., produced apparently together with the Japanese Navy or Coast Guard, though intended for civilian/leisurely use. It fits easily in even a modest pocket, and the pages are industrially numbered in their top-outside corners. A clean index at the front, and gently color-coded sections visible on the fore edge even when closed.

I’ve reproduced two pages of the booklet below, with colors modified and effects added. My apartment sits near what I realize now is the nexus of five 区: 世田谷区 (where I actually reside), 渋谷区, 中野区, 目黒区, and 杉並区. The map of 渋谷区, given its small size, is at the most generous scale among these, such that the smaller side-streets, including my own, are laid out in full. The plot of land on which my aparment building sits interrupts the road, and the jog can be seen on any reasonable map.

A map centered on 渋谷区, though a small corner of 世田谷区, and the street on which I live (within 北沢一丁目), peeks out; my apartment is marked on the left-hand edge with a yellow encircled star. My local station, 東北沢駅, is just above in green.

The second half of 渋谷区, from the opposite page as the map above, showing the station proper, near the larger orange symbol. An inability to make the image totally flat has necessitated cropping, leading to missing interstitial area.

The first map shows how I might walk to フグレン, the late night cafe from before, which I can see now is in 富ヶ谷一丁目 (specifically 16番), and the long road that traces down through 神山町 Containing SPBS and the small fragrant roastery 豆虎 (bean tiger). to 田川町 and then the main station proper, along which I’ve walked too many times.

I think that maps and cartography must be among those interests that some people, especially the academically-adjacent or suburban-raised, can cling to and inhabit so strongly that they get pale and stringy. Something in this also relates to the subject of ‘geography’ which even when I was a child seemed outmoded and taught only halfheartedly, paying lip to some idyl of a well-rounded aristocratic child. The names of rivers, of their final splayed deltas, of mountain ranges and passes and inland seas. The Sahara or the Mojave or the Gobi. Tierra del Fuego.

Another sign of this is the infiltration of the term ‘cartography’ into the theses of masters’ students in two-year design programs: the obviousness of a map’s representational function, the choices necessarily made during its drafting, appealing immensely to those who’ve decided that Simulacra and Simulation is the last book to have ever been written. And why shouldn’t they? In this case one finds that the backwards application of cartographical terms to anything that has ever been is not only fun, but unfalsifiably correct and necessary and furthermore cool. Collages, physical media, GIS, glossaries and indices. Such people geek out over protractors and mechanical integrators. Such people think very dilligently about projections and oblate spheroids.

I am extrapolating, of course, from a small subset of graduate students at Harvard GSD I follow on Instragram for one reason or another. Also the online footprint of someone I dated briefly in 2019, who has since mostly ridden freight trains across the country, participated in far-flung protests, and produces mobile noise-music installations from their hatchback whose accompanying text again draws heavily on cartographical terms. I also think of the euphemism for murder or s**cide in IJ: ‘demapping’, and those people I’ve known who’ve used this phrase unironically in real life and to whom I no longer speak. I think about how most people I have met and been briefly involved with have been on the cusp of major changes or upheaveal—how one left their comp-lit program to pursue pschiatry, the other their comp-lit program to pursue standup comedy Odi et amo. God save me from comp-lit students; god provide me with comp-lit students., another their lab job to pursue med-school deep in upstate New York, another their archival work for language immersion in Taiwan, and the aforementioned arts student who’s now a trainsurfing anarchist. I think about how %100 of the people I’ve been involved with have cut off their hair within a year of meeting me, not to be interpreted causally, but out of some mutual understanding of inclinations and pressures. I think about how everyone I’ve ever known is slowly moving to New York, and what happens next.