DAY 1

Friday I think.
Terrified to go out, but know I must get out of this tiny flat or I will go crazy. For the first time in my life I don’t want to unpack. I have stuff strewn everywhere and don’t know where to start. I also feel like if I start then I am really committed, I can’t just run on home. It all seems like a really crazy dream. And here I am for 3 months, in tears wondering why I put myself through this.
The challenge.
Well of course I got my period on the flight over, and have a headache today. Am scared of getting lost and scared of not finding my way back.
Last night finding this place was ridiculous, I was hauling my stuff around these tiny ass streets at midnight and fucking lost. Of course as soon as I asked someone who spoke no English, an older lady who looked tired, she gestured, all the time speaking incomprehensible words and I saw her actually cross herself, but she found it. I was so grateful bowing and scraping.
Here I am.
On my own.
Went through the cupboards and ate from what was in there, made myself some good noodles with seaweed and soya sauce with sesame on top, just like a real Japanese person. Felt hungry still and found a backpack with a tin of sardines, some tuna (called ‘chicken of the sea’), and a can of corn, so I gobbled those down as well. Later on when I read the previous studio artist’s notes I realised I had just consumed the emergency rations for an earthquake scare.
I did go out and I found a deserted Tokyo Fuji University campus with a manicured garden and a big pond full of koi/carp. When I sat down on a rock they came swimming up to me and there were so many of them, all colours, and huge. The pond was not so large but it was impeccably clean and clear, so beautiful. It was funny; I heard a strange zapping sound and noticed one of those big bug zappers installed in the garden. The things growing here are so different to the ones at home in Oz. Sure I recognise a few things but things like grass grow in a soft and fuzzy way. And it seems there is a certain wildness and untamedness that is perpetuated mostly.
I walked around the block a few times and took some bad photos, it was all new to me, and I kept on getting in people’s way, with my ambling fat ass. Finally found a 7/11 and took half an hour deciding on what to get, some yummy foods and a soup with bits of I don’t know what, but tasty, and she gave me some English mustard to eat with it.
The gates outside places are interesting, there are so many varieties that slide back into the wall, and there are grooves in the ground to suit. Also potted plants line the laneways and are so parochial and charming. I finally found a manicured tree propped up in someone’s garden, and I felt a sense of the past pass through me. Sometimes I see a really older person, hunched over or outside their house and I think back on what happened here only sixty years ago. It horrifies me to think that people remember that war.
This island has culture bursting from it in such a fashion. I have only seen about 3 other white people.
It's totally unreal...brain exploding. Just made sesame noodles with seaweed and stuff I have no idea what, but yummy.
I am at
Apartment 617 Totsuka Heights
3-16-11 Takadanobaba, Shinjuku-ku
Tokyo 169-0075
JAPAN!!!
Tel 03 3364 4494
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