In a very abstract frame today, I tried continuing with my writing and realised I would rather be talking to you. Whoever you are … wherever you are … I have a lot of tabs (1, 2, 3 …) open I’ve been meaning to close once I wrote something about David Berman,

…as Nathalie Sarraute once said–writing really is an attempt to find out what we would write if we wrote. — Enrique Vila-Matas, Mac’s Problem, Trans. Margaret Jull Costa & Sophie Hughes, (New York, NY: New Directions, 2019), 4. It was a time when children seemed very old, and the

We will return to Seseragi. Ha, next to the babbling… The egg for breakfast is coddled in the geothermal spring. The dining room, Kamiyama, is on the fourth floor of the ryokhan, Ichinoyu Honkan, est. 1630. Yakuta are worn. The maître d’ steps aside for a clear shot. But none

We leave Akasaka, and Hotel Felice–and it has been–for the Romance Car–it, in fact, is–booked to take us to Hakone. Reaching Hakone-Yumoto, we have climbed off the flatlands of rice production, and ascended into the cloud and into the hills; the temperature has dropped outside; the

Out the back gate, past the ventilation chimneys, crossing, the beware of ghost sign, up over the hill, down residential oneway, police manning the inroads to embassyland, under the pedestrian bridge, left at the south-easterly corner of Yoyogi, in through exit 2, minutes before Chiyoda line sped away, under the

I had come the wrong way in the morning so I had no choice but to go the wrong way at night. I left Komaba Campus by the main gate, the one close to the local line, if I had been, as if I had been, intending to catch it—