grid

You were a funny kid when I met you, the woman tells the doorman.  Just a skinny kid standing on a corner in Fitzroy with a potato in your pocket.

 

The doorman tells me that he liked the way the potato rested, round and smooth in his palm, palm inside his hand, hand inside his jacket.  His letter is tucked into my waistband now, a little something to hang on to as I stand alone at bus stops, in other people’s bedrooms, on cold railway platforms, under fluorescent tubes in strange offices.  Waiting.

 

Not that I’m doing much of that right now.  Okasan keeps me busy and she must take care of me. We have talked about what might happen if I caught a train.

 

If I get lost I’ll say Where am I?  Where is this train?

 

Where am I? Interesting question. Do you lose yourself?  And your train too? You know where you are.  You are here.  What you must ask is Koko wa doko desu ka? Where is this place?

 

Where is this place? There is a cage at the side of the house, in front of Otosan’s little garden shed.  The dog sees me coming and he howls in a Japanese way.

 

Wan Wan Wan

 

He’s crying out the loneliness of an animal that is well loved, and fed and kept.  The cage stinks of moulted fur and crapped out biscuits.  Only one dog, in his cage.  Only one me, in this place. This afternoon, week three, day five, we are both allowed out. 

He stretches up onto his hind legs and places his paws on a horizontal bar.  I have to clip his lead on before I open the door, or he will escape.  I make sure the collar is tight around his throat. 

 

As huskies must, he runs. The road is just wide enough for one car (if it isn’t American) and the rice fields come right up to its verges.  The dog drags the lead out tight and urinates at the end of the vectors; left and right, left and right.  We charge over the Numazu Sen and turn south, past the noodle shop, the hairdresser, the garage.  I can’t read the characters on their signs, but I read the cracking, rusting concrete, the sticky dusty windows, the way the paint peels, the smell of cooking oil and exhaust fumes, the streaming sound of cars in afternoon flood.

 

A man driving a yellow forklift stops halfway across the pavement and we edge past his smooth metal prongs.  Two women gossip at a gate, stop for a moment as we pass, start up again.  I can hear my name behind me…gaijin. An obasan, bent double and humped, pushes her trolley up towards the supermarket.  The carrying bit is low and squarish, with a cushion on top, so she can sit down when she needs to.  It looks a bit like a pushchair.  A little girl walks beside her.  The dog lunges at her little white socks and slip on shoes and I struggle to hold him back.

 

Sumimassen, sumimassen, sumimassen. Apologising and apologising.  The girl cries, the old woman stands very still and I drag the dog away, his lead burning my palms.

 

At the edge of the rice field grid, between the highway and the bullet train line, the water in the river is a murky, pale blue. Puddled ceramic glaze.  Eyes filmed over with cataracts.  Lashed with rank grass.  Fringed with shredded garbage.  Concrete crosses lie, at intervals, along the river bed.  To our left, vegetable gardens tumble with green patches, tea bushes, squat trees, a hat on a pole, bound stakes.  The soil looks rich, under the bleached weeds. Pieces of fluttering black plastic are raised on sticks, funeral flags to scare off birds.  I’m not scared.  I look up at the sun as it fades and falls, past the horizon strung with wires, and I am happy in this place.

 

Walking a dog on the grid is a bit like messing with a game of  pac man.  There are big dogs and little dogs, hunters and food.  I have to look well ahead and plot 90 degree turns to dodge fights.  People wave at each other from a distance, then run in opposite directions.  It is best, says Junko, not to get too close to your neighbours.

 

We walk and walk and walk until there are only one or two walkers left, then we turn down a track, too early, and it peters away to a dirt path that carries us through a clump of high yellow weeds.  Rained on toilet paper and tissues are draped and moulded over the stalks.  The ground is matted and boggy under my feet. The dog stops to eat ants. By now, the evening light is hanging like gauze over the scenery. Yellow gold rice straw bundles, growth shooting green out of the mud, low piles of husks burnt to shifting dunes and air brushed into black and white and grey.

 

I should turn left, but I turn right. The dog gets edgier, scenting a trail of unfamiliar smells.  The steep fenced bank below the bullet train track reaches up on one side, and a large shed walls us in on the other side.  Danger. It would have been proper to walk the dog the way Otosan does it, in a neat, brisk, repeated square.  I’ve pulled the circuit into a rectangle.  Too far south, too far north.  Too late in the day. Headlights rise up behind us. Two blinding yellow eyes in a black face.  Mercedes Benz.