Posted on Thursday, 09/08/22.

I have gotten in the bad habit of traveling to new locations on the days I am supposed to be working from home. It is not as bad as it sounds; I am doing work in these places. I am sitting in a very scenic Starbucks in Kamakura (鎌倉) right now, which used to be a museum, I think, and has a pool outside in which people can wade. I order a small iced coffee and, later, a sweet potato danish (the last one). A lot of teenagers have come here to study, as well as retirees who sit in the comfortable reclining chairs and nurse a single coffee for as long as they stay. The teenagers all have very neat stationery sets and appear to be transferring data from notebook to notebook. When they have transferred enough they move to their phones, from which little charms frequently dangle. I am probably overstaying, but also I have come a relatively long way, and want to feel as if I have gotten some real work out of the way before I walk to the coast and see some of the things that many tourists come here to see. Somewhere around here is a large Buddha statue. I am not sure if I will go see it, because it is so famous.

The rest of this is being written the following morning, long after returning from 鎌倉. I stayed in the Starbucks for a while more, and felt quite productive; I think maybe the distance traveled compelled me to see the time spent there are more precious. After leaving the Starbucks I walked along a main road parallel to the ocean, but relatively far inland, passing through a small tunnel through a mountain. I spent some forty minutes in a used bookstore くんぽう堂: small but well-stocked, mostly art books (film, photography, theory of aesthetics, translated french lit, children’s book, and a smattering of ephemera including a sizable philatelic haul., buying a couple postcards and a copy of 日本の幽霊 by 池田・彌三郎, which looked fun, and which I may try to translate small sections of later. The title translates to ‘Ghosts of Japan,’ and seems to be a folkloric study of ghosts/ghouls/demons and their utility in tracing the Japanese psyche. After the bookstore I walked further on, dipping into stores that seemed interesting. I walked further still into the hills, picking one of the countless shrines in the area basically at random 鎌倉佐助稲荷神社, and bought a small 守り from the man working there. The distinguishing feature of the shrine was the presence of thousands of small ceramic foxes among most crevices and grottos of the hillside it was cut into. The forest was mostly quiet, very humid, and a pleasant muted green under the heavy cloudcover. At the top of the step was a small alcove with a spring cut into a small cave.

Most of the high parts of the beach were overrun with construction; men without shirts, bronzed, hammering together wood to form complex scaffolding and instructure for what I guessed would eventually be beachfront restaurants or shopping stalls or changing rooms. I was unsure about why they were building now, with the summer almost over, or if perhaps they were not disassembling the buildings already there. I watched this for a while. I watched two old men climb a very tall pole and poke around in some wired cluster at its top. I walked toward the edge of the main bay and sat on the boardwalk for a while until it started to drizzle. Far away light bent strangely around sheets of rain like columns from the clouds to the horizon. A few other small groups were sitting as well, though distanced. Low waves lapped. The surfers sat becalmed. Dozens of windboarders rode the weak breeze back and forth far off in the flat. A very low grey sky. Steel nets on the far off mountains above the tunnels punched through them, to safeguard against rockfall.

After this I returned to another cafe to do some more work before eventually returning home across three different JR lines. In truth though the commute was quite painless, and the city itself beautiful. I took many photos. I packed in with others on the train as the sun went down, winding backward to the much smaller 厚木 station (versus my usual 本厚木 stop), and walked back over the bridge home.