Ginzaline

March 11, 2020

Feeding Nine

Across the river in Higashi Mukojima, formerly the red-light district of Tamanoi, where the crooked laneways wind around triangular and odd-shaped residential and light-industrial blocks to deposit you where you never expect, maybe back where you started, there is near the Tobu railway underpass at Taisho-dori a butcher who sells among other things horsemeat and,…

December 6, 2019

The Life Recycle

Old machines and old clothes pause here for a second chance, everything has value to somebody, even small, everything its aura, as if you’re stepping into people’s houses, seeing all their stuff, seeing these outdated products, like meeting a distant classmate, gee how time flies, warm flush of recognition then maybe a little embarrassment. Relics.…

September 27, 2019

Daydream Believers

K tells me as we cross the Azuma Bridge over the Sumida River on a summer morning in August last year, how she followed her boyfriend from Saigon, and he dropped her shortly afterward. She laughs. Below the scarlet bridge, sightseeing ferries ply the blue-brown waters to and from Tokyo Bay. She was shattered at…

September 26, 2019

black honjo

Walk here at night, rose from the ashes, in the backstreets you hear yourself breathe. The black velvet laps at buildings watching and listening, pools soft edged under mercury light. Walk hear. How can it be, better not ask, this feeling of hope and freedom, a timber yard, liquor store, small factories fronting people’s houses,…

September 24, 2019

Port in a Storm

Up by the Arakawa one humid afternoon about a week after the terrible typhoon of September 9, I looked in on Mr Tanaka at his small compound of blue tarpaulin huts. We sat on boxes under a tarp among the summer weeds, at a low table of construction-site plywood scattered with utensils, a jar of…

September 23, 2019

Thank You for a Long Time

Probably the master wouldn’t have told me even if I’d gone there more recently, closer to July 16 when it all ended. I don’t know where he is, or even if he is alive. Seventy-two-year-old Mr Shiraishi. Stubborn stoic, reticent. Hard of hearing, so he hollered. Welcome! Seven hundred yen! Thank you! His elder sister…

May 7, 2019

Finishing Up with Rice

I bought a riceball stuffed with kombu seaweed and ate it beside the window at Iseya, the shop with the striped awning next door to the leaning metal workshop in Kyojima, near Hikifune station. The young woman pulled her mum into the picture. They do inari sushi, pockets of rice in deep-fried tofu, and a…

May 2, 2019

Travelling Riverside Blues

Mr T is a bit tired of life in the blue-sheet shacks. He and two mates have been here for three years. Reckon I’ll give it a few more, he says. I didn’t ask where he would go. He comes from Tohoku. He says, To tell the truth, I don’t know what I’m doing from…

May 1, 2019

Gone Things: Lost in Heisei

A few items that went irretrievably missing in the final sputter of the Heisei era, as Tokyo businesses and government lost their minds to a frightening wave of demolition, speculation and hotel erection, grasping for as many tourists as they could… Some captions link to previous Ginzaline stories Yusuke Kabuki lost his painstakingly crafted cafe,…

April 26, 2019

Men in Books

Shigeru and Kazuhiro Yamaji are father and son who run separate used-book stores in an old commercial building owned by the family in noisy Shibuya, amid the rampant juvenile shoppers and smoke and steam billowing from yakitori bars and ramen stands. Crowds scurry around the scramble crossing. Touts for hostess bars loiter on the stained…