24 hours
Sun all through the night. I get restless, sleepless, near-dream-heavy. I move out onto the busy morning streets. Day commuters and night carousers intermingle in these early hours where glossy night suits and shiny day suits brush past each other like ships. Time is lifted. The markers between daylight and darkness blur into soft points of inner light that feel warm.
48 hours
Humidity takes hold. I balloon and squeeze through the elegant crowds marching along their elegant sidewalks. This is an island, I remember. Images release themselves from somewhere in my unconscious, of animes I watched as a child; whispering octopi, wandering water spirits, singing sea urchins, divine children who swim to the bottom of the ocean emerging eventually onto land to share their secrets with earthly children. I will succumb to this water.
72 hours
I have taken off my shoes and been seated on a pillowed floor in a sequestered room. Erotic art from an era I have not visited hangs longingly on the walls. I have a scroll in Japanese script in my hand. While unrolling it, the characters seem to move off the paper and rise above me like wandering iClouds. The chef sends platters of rare fish, wildflowers, wilder mushrooms, and marbled beef. They arrive on handmade ceramics painted with erotic symbols.
96 hours
This is an island, I realize, ruled by Pluto. Mushrooms. Mushroom clouds. iClouds. Underworlds. The networks of intelligence hover around me electrically as I move forward, the morning sun now piercing the softer dawn overlays. Young men carry feminine handbags. Young women carry briefcases. Pluto has always been about leather and change.
120 hours
Another stretch of endless light. Please wrap your hype beast jacket around my shoulders, I think, this is an island in continual transformation. Standing at a shop window, I linger over the reflections of girls licking cartoon coloured ice creams behind me, and a man in a tie standing erect but unsure. I think of generation gaps as if they are holes to fall into. I think of sake. The ceremonious fermented rice invention of here, a wine alive with bacteria from long ago. It tastes wise, like it has adapted from the past and prepared for what it knows lays ahead. In my sleepless humour, this thought too seems to float from the window and hang like a trembling vision on the still air. Who ever said Japan was precise? I grip my leather goods and hold them close to my body.
144 hours
Outside the sun; inside the soft fog euphoria. I had a feeling all along. These beautifully dressed people carrying beautiful imaginations behind their crowds of politeness, are leader waves of plexus. Moving together into the gaps of falling between eras, they are caught as one in an invisible gauze, poised on the face of infinity. Water is logos, I recall. Profound, prophetic, plural, and powerful, especially in the way it quietly feeds an island and presses its fathomless agendas into an island people, who press these agendas, in turn, into the world. This place, I think, is the opening of the portal to the future. It starts in Tokyo, but we will all clamber into it in our turns, hands after feet, with glowing eyes.
