Popping up

The last few days in Tokyo we stayed in a small apartment not far from Nippori Station.

It was on the second floor: the small balcony, occupied almost entirely by the air conditioner motors, overlooked a piece of the causeway. I was glad to live there for a few days: we had passed nearby the first few days after arriving in Japan. I had been struck by the Shinto shrine on the side of the road: three tombstones depicting monkeys. You can see, that someone thinks about it, at this shrine: you can tell by the flowers. A gecko lives in this shrine: I saw it, not caring about the traffic that made the earth vibrate.

This part of Tokyo looks like something else. The train stations are dim, looking like the oldest ones. Close to the tracks is a long series of love hotels: they have signs put up high, on the roof. At night they glow and shine with flashing lights and neon lights, but in the daytime they show the drippings of rust, the missing paint, mottled with gray and brown just where neon, a few hours before, promised sparkles. In the crooked alleys of this area are small restaurants, piled up against each other, in disarray: to be dropped here by a hypothetical space elevator, few would hazard a guess that they are in a metropolis.

Cars and trucks rumble up the interchange's chute, which passes just above the first-floor balconies and then goes up again. Not too far ahead, the causeway becomes a bridge over the twenty or so tracks that cut through this corner of Tokyo: before the trains stop at Nippori Station, the on-board loudspeaker says you can "change here for the Joban line, the Tohoku line, the Ueno line, the Takasaki line, the Utsunomiya line, the Yamanote line, and for the fast trains of the Hakita, Tohoku, Yamagata, and Hokuriko lines. The length of this list, at first, is almost comical. Then, quickly, it becomes reassuring.

When I entered the apartment, I hoped that in the evening, like other parts of the city, this part of Tokyo would fade away, and with it the causeway, at a certain time, with the simplicity of things that go unnoticed. They happen.

It was only two days later, looking out, that I saw that yellow cube pop out.