Posted on Saturday, 08/17/24.

Yesterday a typhoon grazed the edge of the city. The radar trace on my phone looked quite alarming–a well-defined circular eye some forty miles across, and a body, marked in the needless reds and yellows of Doppler, rivaling the size of the country itself. Tokyo, and the Kanto plain, as it would turn out, were just lapped by the extremes of the spiral arms–called rainbands–though to understand this through the radar felt improper and lame. The rain would come in sheets, drawing the line-of-sight up to the edge of the yard abutting my apartment, and then almost completely stop; this would repeat on regular intervals. These were the rainbands being drawn over us as the typhoon moved and rotated, curving suddenly back out into the pacific by the early afternoon. I considered, when I went out later, if sitting and carefully measuring the wind speed, the intervals between heavy rains, would allow me to somehow plot and determine the true shape of the weather pattern (given up too easily by the Doppler). There must have been someone who determined this first–whether themselves, or by collusion with many enthusiasts, each with their own anemometer, found that the correlated wind directions and speeds, the strange calm at the center, and associated pressure drops, pointed towards a great cyclonic movement on the scale of hundreds of miles.

My outing, by the mid-afternoon, was settled to be a re-use shop somewhat deep out, between 目黒区 and 品川区, a few minutes walk from the comparitively sleepy station of 武蔵小山 On the 相鉄線, apparently newly connected through direct transfer from the 三田線 only last year. The train felt older, and more proper than the usual rolling stock of the 千代田線 and 小田急線 I’ve been riding recently., made all the more comatose by the typhoon, which encouraged shops to close early. Finding the resale shop was straight-forward, just off the main bus depot, past a line of restaurants specializing in some sort of grilled squid, a few of them occupied by older people–I am reminding that the average age rises precipitously away from major city centers or college-sub towns. Encouragingly the shop was packed with carefully but thoroughly used objects: fridges and dishwashers, tables and chairs, microwaves and rice-cookers, and various more or less flimsy flat-packable shelves both for sale and being used to store smaller trinkets and appliances. At my request one of the shop owners explained that a lot of the appliances had recently been claimed (as indicated by their 販売済 stickers) but that new old-stock was expected within the week. I had hoped for a full set of appliances, to take advantage of their bundling deals and free shipping, and left a little defeated, though happy to have braved the storm and come out Friday rather than today, when I could visit their closer, but perhaps smaller branch closer in, and near where my contract was to be signed at 5pm.

The prospect of directly returning on a forty minute train ride was depressing enough that I looked up nearby ‘OFF’ stores Including Hobby OFF, Mode OFF, Hard OFF, Liquor OFF, Book Off, and the displeasingly incongruent OFF House, devoted to used hobby goods, clothing, hardware, alcohol, books, and furniture respectively. of which there were a few, again down an artery terminating at the main station depot. This road turned out to be a covered, and substantial 商店街, again muted and gloomy given the wind and cloud cover, strangely partially air conditioned by the adjacent storefronts. The Book OFF was closed early for the Typhoon, though the rest were open. In another used clothing store apart from the OFFs, I bought a maroon Carhart t-shirt and a 1980s Levi type-three jacket, both remarkably good deals given the shop’s distance from the city center, and a special 20-50%-off sale they were holding through the weekend. A lot of the used-goods stores were surprisingly well-stocked, and picking through them quietly, feeling the atmospheric low of the storm pressing on the windows somehow, made for a calming afternoon. The Hard OFF also had appliances, though only for self-pick-up and transport.

Interstitial note: the OFF cadre of stores has a certain cachet among tourists in Japan, with countless online videos of skinny men wojacking at special-edition Game Boys in vitrines for ￥40,000, though their enjoyment is hard to fault. The stores are a pleasant mix of well-kept and chaotic, each with a self-advertising jingle that periodically cuts into the piped muzak, and no shortage of tote-able items to stir conversations back in the middle-west. It is also true that the shops even modestly removed from the five central Tokyo hubs are infinitely better, if only because the items coveted by tourists are homogeneous enough, and disjoint enough from practical needs, that they litter the satellite stores. There are even videos of groups of skinny men who rent cars and drive to distant OFF locations in Izu and beyond in search of even rarer Game Boys.

Today will involve visiting the other branch of the recycling shop, this on near 永福町, though I resign myself to the possibility of arriving in a bare apartment, curtainless and scraped clean. I almost look forward to it. I may dine upon a large handkerchief spread out on the floor, or project a Rohmer film on a wall, perched atop a pile of jackets.

For now, though, I am again in a Starbucks, waiting for the day to grow just a little later. I have maintained waking up around 6am, though some days earlier, allowing the mornings to stretch deeply, and transforming 9pm and later into terrifying, excessive night, improper to indulge in. The proximity of having my own space has made my want for it keener; my desire to do silly morning tasks and acquire objects I don’t strictly need increases in tandem. I would like to make pour-over and type on my laptop looking out a window at that painfully gentle cream-colored light the sun makes and spills over everything in the hour after dawn. I would like to drink so much coffee my head goes quiet and I read painfully personal blogs online for hours, until I can’t stop from drinking half a water bottle in one go. I would like to buy a two-person love-seat done up in pale fabric with linen content and read a book I shoved in my backpack and brought here despite all convenience pointing to the contrary, because I increasingly and desperately invest in unnecessary acts. I may even want to mark up academic papers densely and do out their calculations again in personal notes until their internal structure, like what happens when I can barely manage to write fiction, slackens and uncurls in my head, and becomes a beautiful malleable thing nevertheless made of steel.