What matters

One's language matters
Not one's biography
In writing the lyric
Time doesn't progress
One needs to explore
Terrains marked and unmarked
Eventually to remember
What at one's beginning mattered

A foggy night in Tokyo

It's so foggy outside and it's beautiful. Lights are dim, your vision is blurred, not from animal tears but from some atmospheric magic.

My son says this is like London, although he's never been there.
I say this is like Milano, and I've never been there.
My wife says this is like Seattle and true enough. We've lived in Seattle fog.

Fog or snow, the world is made beautiful by the presence of water.

And the critic Kojin Kondo says "photography is born from water."

The book I and Kondo co-edited, How to Talk to Photography, is now in store everywhere.

Nowhere Everywhere

Strange things can happen. Just before my trip to Kauai in February, I was desperately fighting against time to finish up my book. One of the last portions of the book I wrote was a section called NOWHERE EVERYWHERE and in my mind the section tells the soul of the book. I wrote it in haste, gave it to my editor, and hopped on the airplane to jump half the pond to my beloved island.

Then I bought a copy of the novel Symptomatic by breathtakingly good-looking Danzy Senna, whom I had already written about several years ago on her essay "Mulatto Nation." Then on the page 48/49 (I can't reproduce the book's crazy pagination----you should see it for yourself) is written as the protagonist's newly found friend Greta's words: "I always tell people I'm from Nowhere. Everywhere."

The sad book proves Greta to be muy loca in the tragic end. It's a book about at least two people from nowhere, nowhere everywhere.

After I got back to Japan I learned there is a song by the Japanese idol singer Ayumi Hamasaki titled "Everywhere nowhere." Probably the implication is not so close as it may seem. But the combination of these two words have been resounding in my mind. In fact I might change this blog's name to: NOWHERE EVERYWHERE.

Snow falls on Tokyo

At this moment Tokyo is under a layer of snow. Not exactly white, but gray, sombre, dark, yet illuminated in a strange light. Not exactly familiar, but a remembrance from some other years, other winters. Beautifully gray, in a way.

In Tokyo the heaviest snowfall of the season usually comes in March. It may be the nature's way to say Happy Spring!