Posted on Wednesday, 08/07/24.

The weather will be perpetually 90+ for the foreseeable future, which means I furtively skirt from air conditioned location to location, feeling sweat well up and evaporate alternately, depositing minerals. While I still wake up early, the time difference clinging to me (with some encouragement), I have to plan my moves more carefully as cafes and stores awaken in waves from 8am to 9am to 10am (and god forbid 11am or later). The sun rises at 4:30 and yet the rest of the city lags. There are 30+ million people here and at 5am the streets of a central sub-city are entirely empty and yet fully lit.

My temporary housing sits on top of a small, pointed hill. The building is L-shaped, two stories tall, and surrounded by a purposefully unkempt flat garden choked with ivy. Outside my window is a persimmon tree, though the fruits are still small and green. A few of them fall into the green tangle. Some of the other trees are ginkgo. The cicadas awaken with the sun like me; I have heard that different broods with different calls crest and wane over the course of the summer, which I allow myself to believe.

Every bureaucratic interaction goes nearly as expected, with the addition of a small snag or hiccup that needs to be sweet-talked or silently ignored by mutual consent. My lodging doesn’t permit residential registration, and so they print it on the back of my residence card without truly registering me. The bank account requires an appointment or an application, and my phone does not permit the app, and so I book an application in which I claim that my residence (unverifiably unregistered) is more permanent than it is. The woman who helps me register my bank account is partially paralyzed on one side, her right arm secured with a sling. When a form is misfilled or otherwise needs to be changed, the erroneous part is either crossed out or whited out, refilled, and scanned again. When the document cannot be rescanned, my signature needs to be placed over the cancelled section, as a replacement for a seal I don’t yet have.

When I bought an iPad in Cambridge, two days before leaving, the employee who helped me was in a wheelchair. I am serviced by a great diversity of people. I was given a giftcard with my purchase to use on another purchase, but we both forgot to apply it, and so he had to refund to my card and start a new transaction—I am reminded, though perhaps I knew before, that there are secret receipt printers under the blonde-wood desks that dominate most apple stores. The man wheels to and from the secret printing, handing me a notice of purchase, of cancellation, and of purchase again. The bag is blindingly white and carefully creased, and I take a photo of my three slim boxes of iPad and iPad accessories on my carpet as, I imagine, Steve Jobs would have wanted.

This morning on the train a girl was curling her hair with an iron, looking into her reflection in the door’s window. I hadn’t known irons could be battery powered. I perform a cross commute today, the opposite direction than what I will do when I am eventually living here, and not in 弥生. The train, full when I start at 根津, empties some at 新御茶ノ水, and then at 大手町, and by 明治神宮前 is almost entirely empty, during the middle of rush hour. I wonder about the other direction; perhaps passing through the center of the city on the commute means that few (who mostly commute from the outside in) take the entire route.

On Sunday morning I toured the apartment I intend to live in; the real estate agent mans a tiny sub-branch of a common real-estate agency by 池ノ上, and I wait briefly for him to finish a call, and to notify the landlord that we will be walking over (I am referred to as 東大の方). He suggests I redo the 審査 domestically, because it is cheaper (I am called later that day while walking, and stumble through their formal questions about my employment status and bank account details, though it goes through), and we walk for five minutes discussing the weather and my previous experience here. He seems increasingly at ease; the collar of his shirt fits well, and his face, round but not shapeless, inspires phrenological confidence. The apartment is as expected—as it was in the Google street view—with large, north-facing windows, an older but not tired atmosphere, and a pleasantly large kitchen counter. I take photos, and peer into closets for mold, though I feel aware that there is little that would make me back away from the apartment outside calamitous condition or fraud. He thanks the residents of the first floor, a middle-aged man and, I assume, his mother, who appear to be the landlords of the building, and who imply something humorous about the strife of a mid-career man living with his mother (who is shorter and proper, with a halo of white hair, neatly kept).

Now I am in a コメダ珈琲, part of the 10:00-11:00 block of today, before I can stop by a few home-goods store to plan out furniture and appliance purchases. I edit a few documents; one of them with the intent only to pare down its length precipitously. I prepare copies of my visa and passport for yet another form required by the fellowship program to confirm that I have arrived, and when, and to what end. I send my first postcard, written and stamped yesterday, though carried around until now. The postcard is to you, if that is still your address. I find an increasing urge to be settled, and to start filling an apartment with comforting accouterments, though I acknowledge that being able to function while my surrounding are in flux is an important skill to be stretched and hardened.

After the apartment tour I transit to a nearby station and the 世田谷文学館 which is hosting an extensive 伊藤潤二 exhibition. Many of the drawings and paintings are original—most of them, even—and their scale, let alone that they represent nowhere close to how much this man has drawn, begins to unnerve me. I lean in and can see where additional correction fluid has been applied, or where pen has gone over and corrected initial, placeholder marks in pencil. Most of the drawings are covered in thin scratches and hashes, making them appear almost to move. Everyone takes photos of the drawings on their phone, including me, though it is not clear why. Drawings from his childhood are included also, and they are almost exactly the same, if only less exact, or elaborate, as if he had been born seeing these images. The merchandise section on the ground floor is swarming, and I dutifully gather desired goods and get in line.