“Bright yet vague. She is perhaps twenty-two. She is shabby. She crosses the road and looks at the daffodils and the red tulips in the florist’s window. She hesitates, and makes off in the direction of Temple Bar. She walks fast, and yet anything distracts her. Now she seems to see, and now to notice nothing.”
-Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf
As she walked through the narrow streets of Osaka, seeing the workers at her side unloading the cargo, stacking one boxes against another, to be carried off to places she will never know off. Kobe, perhaps? Rainy gloomy western Kobe. Murakami’s Kobe.
It takes me ten minutes to the station. What delight do I find myself in?
I talk to the lockerman on the station and he tells me, in signs, that my bag is too small and I should proceed to the locker room on his left. I heard hyaku hyaku. I have mastered the numbers. I speak to the old men in the bicycle shop, renting a pink bicycle to go around Arashiyama. I speak of directions. One passes through the plot of grass in the middle of the hundred of ancient houses. I tell the British couple the direction to the bamboo path. I walk up to some neglected temple only to be shun away for not wanting to pay five hundred yen to see the view of Kyoto from afar. I struck the bell five times and then resume downhill, speeding down my bike, delighted by the sound of the scenic train choo choo-ing, took pictures of enthusiastic schoolboys and schoolgirls on a boat. The rail crossing. I stop at the bridge when my map of the place was blown off by the wind. The lady in the kimono in front of the entrance of some fancy restaurant smiled at me. I cycled through stones statues and arrive at another temple. I didn’t go inside. One gets tired of temples eventually. I tried to find some udon but the old lady said she only sells soba. So I cycled to a nearby bamboo shop and she offered me green tea. Oishii, I said.
perkaraperkara 