Confessions of a Grade School Role Model

I got back from a week in New York City yesterday.  In case you were interested, here is what I saw and did:

On the way from the airport to the East Village where I was staying, my subway broke down.  It was already midnight, I'd been in transit since 3:30 Texas time, and I was leaning heavily and exhaustedly against my suitcase on the seat.  Apparently someone was injured on the tracks, but amidst multiple sirens and "an ongoing police investigation," we were finally allowed to go.

The Puerto Rican Day parade.  I'll never again forget what the flag of Puerto Rico looks like, as it is burned now into my brain -- I saw it waving, accessorizing, being worn as a cape, eaten as a snow cone, and driven up Fifth Avenue as a stage for girls in flag bikinis and flag ball gowns.  I decided to leave when a scuffle broke out, involving a man who had hit his girlfriend, and 15 or 30 of their friends.

The World Trade Center site. Last time I was in New York, I drank sake at a restaurant at the top of one of the towers.  Three weeks after it was destroyed, I moved to Japan for four years, and watched most of the proceedings via spottily-subtitled foreign news.  I wanted to go see it to try to get my head around it, to grasp it and let it sink in that it is gone.  I had no idea how I might react.  For the first ten minutes, I just felt nauseous.  For the 20 minutes following that, I wanted to cry. Seeing the way people just walk around it, this enormous bare scar in the ground,  on their way to work, on their way to lunch, acceptingly and determined, made me feel better.

Tthe Statue of Liberty.  She is big and green.  At the ticket booth, a woman lost it when the booth attendant told her she couldn't have the military discount.  "But my husband is in the military, I'm his spouse," calmly at first.  Then, "Even if he's in Afghanistan?!" and increasingly shrill, "but he's in AfghanisTAN!! AFGHANISTAAAAN!! WHO MAKES THESE RULES?!?!?!?!!!!!"  I thought security was going to have to drag her off, but she finally stomped away.  When our ferry passed the Statue of Liberty, the copper and iron iconic embodiment of our nation's supposed values, a couple of anorexic model wannabe-types said only, "God, she's so fat!  Like, look at her arm!" 

Ellis Island.  The museum at Ellis was amazing.  I'm not sure most Americans realize what so many of our ancestors went through to get here, or what their lives were like.  Studying Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine photographs is a good start, a visit to Ellis Island makes it much more personal.   I think everyone even considering the anti-immigration nonsense currently being discussed should have to go there.  If they actually sign anything, they should have to sign it there, in the Great Hall, where their own ancestors checked in just within fairly recent memory. They should have to look their own carpetbagging relatives in the eyes before they tell anyone else they can't come in. Sure, things are different, but they're also the same.

Central Park.  I've been there three or four times, each time for three or hours, and each time I find a new part I'd never seen before, each time the new part was the size of a park.  Central Park is like 600 parks strung together in a sequence.  Tthis part was my favorite yet, called "The Ravine."  I sat for an hour on a rock next to a waterfall watching birds take baths and get all up in each other's bird-faces.  Birds are a lot more territorial than I'd realized.  But they're so cute when they're mad.

On the way to the Guggenheim, the train broke down again, and we had to evacuate.  A friend told me of all the time he's been in new york, of all the people he knows, he's never heard of anyone actually having to do that.  Apparently our station flooded, on a perfect, cloudless day, and we had to walk through all the cars to the front of the train and onto the platform.  I got to migrate from the car with the crazy guy on PCP, who kept yelling and swinging on the pole and gesticulating like he was covered with cat-sized flies.  The doors of our car wouldn't open at first, and the lights went out a couple times, but luckily PCP-Guy wasn't Random-Stabbing Guy they had caught on some uptown line the day before.  What was incredible to me was the way people didn't freak out.  On both broken-train occasions, people took it all in stride, they were patient and understanding, and no one took it as a personal strike of inconvenience against their busy schedules, the way i've seen people in smaller cities like my hometown do under similar circumstances.  People calmly waited through delays and vague explanatory announcements, and when we finally had to evacuate, no one left a car without holding the doors open for the person behind them.  Anyone who had trouble bridging the gap between cars found help doing so without even asking.  And all of this, this huge shift in pace between impersonal city-rush and neighborly helping-hand, happened smoothly, instantly, and without perceptible effort.  I was impressed.

The Guggenheim.  The outside was swathed in netting and scaffolding, which was pretty disappointing, as it's one of the coolest-looking buildings in the world.  Tthe exhibit inside though was incredible.  The main show was Zaha Hadid, an Iraqi female architect who designs the most insane and incredible structures i've ever seen, most of which people are too timid to actually build.  She also designed a really cool car.

Lots of interesting people in New York.  My favorite was the woman on St. Mark's, a tall, done-up, sassy, strutting black woman, pushing a baby stroller, who when I passed her,  said to me, "I. Am a diva."  The award in the men's category goes to the Barry White impersonator near Rrockefeller Center who had his own table, rotating light ball, and backup music.

Ethiopian food at Awash.  Mmmmm.  And Japanese yakitori, just like I miss so much from Japan -- okonomiyaki, yaki onigiri, tonkatsu ramen why do Japanese restaurants in my town only serve flash-frozen sushi and miso soup?  There is so much more to Japanese cuisine!

PS1, the most awesome art museum ever.  Tthe building itself is amazing, a labyrinthine, stripped-down, old brick schoolhouse where you can wander for hours up and down stairways and halls, never sure you've seen all the rooms.  There was an exhibit of John Lurie drawings there, I wrote down a lot of the titles because they were so brilliant:
-Bird has absolutely no face
-Your life is meaningless. Why don't you masturbate?
-Horse with mullet
-Self-portrait as a weed
-Obscure presidents and Sally Fields on the water
-Monks' last day of earthly pleasures (shows monks in line at a hot dog stand)
-I will not sodomize the teacher on Fridays (shows a naughty duck writing sentences on a blackboard)
-The sultan loved his BVD's
-The crow will scratch your bottom now
-I am a bear.  You are an asshole.  God is God.
-The image above:  friendly fascist bird.  The image below:  Bassho is goofy.
-I was a coyote, then I died, then I came back as a coyote.
-Jesus was in my garden once
-Audrey Hepburn as the Lone Ranger
-Man's hands have turned into forks.  Don't trust him.
-Bunny -- I'll kill you
-Marge moved to the country and she was not happy about it, and she was particularly pissed that Harry painted the door orange
-My clown's on fire
-My assistant Jeremy is gay, now I paint like a fag
-Women liked the wizard because of his hat (shows a wizard with an enormous erection)
-Three dentists think of the same squirrel

From PS1, I walked to Socrates Sculpture Park, a free and fantastic art park near the water at the end of Broadway in Queens.  To get there, I walked through the infamous Ravenswood projects.  I didn't pick up the hint when they guy at the museum answered my every question regarding the park's whereabouts and walking distance from PS1 with, "... but you could also take a cab."

I saw the Bell-Rays.  Most amazing show I've ever seen in my life.  And Ive seen a lot of shows. 

Two drinks at Joe's Pub = $21. If I ever pay that much for a drink again, it had damn well better come with at least two straws and be served in a smoking volcano the size of my head.

At a gorgeous velvet-wallpapered speakeasy, supposedly owned by Susan Sarandon, i drank a teacup of Jamison's whiskey on ice. 

I ate a bagel every single morning.  I don't know that I'll ever be able to eat a Texas bagel again. 

On Fridays from 4-8 pm, Target picks up the tab for everyone who wants to go the MOMA.  Which is great, since it's usually $20, as long as you're willing to deal with all the jackasses crowding in to take their pictures standing next to Starry Night.  The place is incredible, six stories of amazing art, photography, sculpture, design, and a bunch of that crap people jokingly donate to the art-world, but which the art-world doesn't understand isn't meant to be serious.  Slab of marble on a bed of rice?  Painted length of thick rope coming out of a concrete block?  C'mon, you thought they were serious?  Don't you people get a joke when you see one?

Art galleries' open night in Chelsea.  The art was okay, but the free wine was better.

A few spontaneous games of H-O-R-S-E on a basketball court with a view of the Empire State Building.  I haven't played since 5th grade when we had no girls' team and I had to play with the boys, and I'm better at basketball than I'd thought.  And I'm much better at basketball in a skirt  and three-inch heeled boots than I would have thought.

I am so moving to New York.

It's 4:00 in the morning Sunday, and I got back to Japan Friday night, exhausted. I don't sleep well on airplanes, and this flight was particularly insomniac. My plane was full of excited inadequately supervised Japanese junior high school students, and I seemed to be sitting next to the most popular one. He always had another boy on his lap and another dangling over the back of my seat, and he flirted loudly with the shrill girl behind him, causing her to laugh like a squeaky door. It took a lot for me to restrain my inner schoolteacher, and refrain from pounding my fist on my seatback table and yelling, "Urusai!" The cabin crew apparently couldn't take it either, and they hid somewhere else for most of the flight.

The woman on my other side could sleep comfortably but only with her elbow nestled in my stomach, and about every half hour she was apparently overcome with hope that there might be something out the window other than clouds at 40,000 feet, and she would snap up her window shade, filling the dark plane with blinding white light, my face in particular. I didn't get even one second of sleep.

Through some wacky use of arrows pointing in the wrong directions toward my connecting flight in Tokyo, I had to run back and forth through the fourth largest airport in the world with two overstuffed carry-ons, waving my boarding pass and two forms of photo ID in one hand, and my belt and bracelet in the other, as I didn't have time to put back on everything I had to take off at the security check to just barely make final boarding call for my last flight, which was then delayed half an hour for takeoff anyway. Too bad I live on an island, because I'll probably have to do it all again.

I'd say it's weird to be back in Japan, but I really don't know yet, as I've barely been outside. I went immediately to the grocery store for enough things to not have to leave my apartment all weekend before I have to go to work on Monday morning. Hey, that's tomorrow.

The next time you see me, I'll be in/have been to America.

From Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino:

"And you?" the Great Khan asked Polo,... "What is the use, then, of all your traveling?"

Marco Polo imagined answering... that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home, and a little square of Venice where he gamboled as a child...

When I was young, I moved a lot. Perhaps from sheer momentum, I still do. Two different second grades, two different apartments in third grade, 6th grade in two different cities, high school in two different states. My mom once showed me the section of her address book she kept for me in college; I took up two or three pages, a long sequence of 6-month or one-year leases scattered about my university town. Last year, I got my passport stamped in six different countries.

As a child, I spent most summers with my grandparents in various cities always several hours from home; my grandparents moved frequently too, generally staying well outside city limits. I loved their houses in the country, so different from my apartments in the city. I loved the trees, and the way the air smelled, and the stars I could never see when I was back home. Still, I was young, and I got homesick.

My grandfather and I used to sit at night on the patio furniture in the backyard, and look up at the stars and have long talks. One summer, Halley's Comet was coming, and we both became very interested in stars, scouring the libraries for star maps, and peering through his binoculars at the moon. On one of these nights, under an enormous clear sky, I felt particularly sad and small.

"What's wrong?" my grandfather asked me, after I had stared out silently for a little too long.
"I miss mommy. She is so far away," I told him.
He was silent for a moment, staring up at the sky sympathetically, thinking.

Finally he pointed up at the brightest group of stars, "See that constellation? That's called the 'Big Dipper.' It's the same one your mom can see from her apartment too. So see, you are not so far from home after all."

I stared up at the strange big cup and wondered if my mom could be seeing it at just that same moment, and somehow I felt better, the world didn't feel so big. I looked for it the next night too, sure that whatever was up there, it could see my mom at that moment even if I couldn't. If it could see her, and it could also see me, then we must be very close. I didn't get homesick again.

A few years later, we went to Hawaii, my first trip across an ocean. It was beautiful, dazzlingly so, but I felt restless. The first night there was cloudy and starless, I couldn't find my Big Dipper, and I couldn't find my place under it either. The next night was clear, and I could finally settle in. When you live in too many houses, a constellation makes a fine compass pointing home.

The Big Dipper is still the first thing I look for in a new place. Once I find it, everything else eventually sort of orients itself. Being wholly ignorant of what the relationships might be between constellations and hemispheres, I was relieved to find the Big Dipper also hanging over Japan. No matter how a dayful of strange language might swirl between my ears, and the enigmatic kanji might melt and morph before my eyes, on a clear night, I can always find in that space between the buildings, high above the trees, something that tells me I am not so far from home.

Kyoto flea market

Toji temple near Kyoto Station holds a monthly flea market. I bought the white kimono, the red ones were more expensive. Click on the photo for more detail.

Lying sick in my hotel bed in north Vietnam, I sorely regretted not seeing the world of the trek I was supposed to be on. Steep rice-field terraced mountains, remote villages only recently reached by the outside world, where people wore traditional tribal costumes because that was their clothes, and both transportation and dinner often means water buffalo. Sa Pa had gotten a paved road connecting it to the rest of the country only five years earlier. But the world I glimpsed on television, the world of Communist programming, was nearly as fascinating. I felt like I had tapped into transmissions from another planet.

Modern written Vietnamese uses Roman letters, this system was adopted in the 17th century, but in ways unfamiliar to Western ears. On the Vietnamese Wheel of Fortune , a contestant would make an unearthly sound, and an "N" would appear. "I'd like an 'ooOun'gh', please," *applause*. I was transfixed for a while by the letter sounds.

Another channel played a Communist military musical variety show that looked something as if Ho Chi Minh had once been guest costumer for The Lawrence Welk Show. On one, there were two separate groups of three men in light green and four women in dark green military uniforms on a studio stage, the women with red bows on their braids. The two groups took turns performing light ballet in front of a line of alternating man-woman-man-woman formally dressed smiling Lawrence Welk-esque singers, the women in beautiful traditional ao dai.

There was a channel seemingly devoted to mini-documentaries glorifying the blue-collar worker: glowing handsome young sweatshop seamstresses, cogsmen, and assembly-line stampers, smiling with the humble satisfaction of another honest day's work. Vietnamese banknotes feature similar scenes.

And inevitably, there were American shows, Roswell and mediocre Hollywood blockbusters, dubbed into Vietnamese. Vietnam, though, apparently has only one English voiceover actor, a woman, who does every single voice, and the effect was disquieting.

Imagine, for instance, a scene between a petite blonde femme fatale and her beefy muscleman lover. The couple sits watching the autumn leaves fall from their porch, their precocious Hollywood dog curled at their feet. The mailman is making his rounds.

"I love you, baby," says the woman, in the feminine voice of voiceover actor A. "I love you too, baby," responds her masculine companion, also with actor A's voice. "Woof!" says the precocious dog. "Good afternoon to ya," says the mailman, in the voice of actor A.

See? Disquieting. After a while, I had to turn off the sound.

My friend returned from his trek a few days later and regaled me with stories of picturesque landscapes, colorful tribespeople, home-cooked water buffalo, and a floorless hand-railed outhouse built directly over a running stream. The next day he rode in a Soviet military jeep to a faraway market where he watched a girl try to break up a pair of arguing water buffalo by throwing rocks, and a woman getting a cavity filled with a foot pump-powered drill, out in the open next to a pig-butchering stand. I stayed in bed and tried to imagine these things, and attempted to guess what vowel might need buying on the Wheel, with no success. One of these days I'll have to return to Vietnam.

Unfortunately, near-misses and horror make for the strongest travel memories. Like the time I thought I might die in Vietnam. Long, disgusting story short, in Hanoi last year, I caught something which turned out not to be just food poisoning and didn't just go away by next morning. Using the combined powers of optimism, ignorance, and an overwhelming need to escape the noise and stench of downtown, I hobbled aboard an overnight train bound north for Sa Pa, near the Chinese border.

The longer version. I didn't like Hanoi, and I felt guilty about it, and boarding that train let me leave my dislike and my guilt behind. I respect Hanoi, no doubt. The city has been continuously occupied for over 1000 recorded years. In the center is a beautiful lake with many legends, scattered throughout is a lovely and curious mixture of French and traditional Vietnamese architecture, and its streets pulse with life the strength of which I'd never seen before. It also holds the mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh, another story altogether, perhaps for later. I regard travel as a privelege and good fortune, and I appreciated the opportunity of going to Hanoi. All the same, I hated being there.

The Lonely Planet Guide on Vietnam: "Basically there's only one road rule: Small yields to big, or else. Traffic cops are often there to be paid off. Vehicles drive on the right-hand side of the road (usually). Spectacular accidents are frequent."

My old journal on Hanoi: "It makes me want to stand on a corner and yell, 'Oh, for f***'s sake!' I want to swing over the top of it from vine to vine. The traffic is the lost 8th wonder of the world... It's a nightmare of honking, yelling, smoke, and aggressive salespeople of everything. Even the tourists are rude. But maybe I'll like it better tomorrow."

Shortly after dinner in a cheap downtown cafe, I started to feel a bit strange. By the time I reached the block of my hotel, I was staggering down the sidewalk doubled-over in pain. I spent the rest of that night sick in the bathroom, and missed a planned daytrip to the Perfume Pagoda the next morning. I needed to recover quickly -- we had booked a trek in Sa Pa for later in the week, so I rented a $2 bed in a dorm to spend a couple days in while my friend explored Hanoi. The next evening, I boarded the train for Sa Pa, expecting to feel better at any moment.

Lao Cai was the train's final stop, and where everyone and our enormous backpacks deboarded before getting into vans or buses bound for Sa Pa. I crawled down exhausted and sleepless from my bunk and stepped into the crowded aisle towards the door. I had spent most of that night in the Trainspotting-filthy bathroom of the sleeper car. A few steps into the aisle, in the smothering line of backpackers, four of my senses suddenly went blank all at once. There was nothing else I could do in that crowd, so I felt my way along the narrow walls and out the door, and luckily my senses returned just in time to guide me down the stairs to the platform. I took a few cautious steps out and looked for my friend,... and suddenly there he was, standing above me, with maybe a dozen other people, on the train tracks. I had fainted and fallen off the platform, face-down onto the rocks beneath the train.

It was too perplexing a question at that moment why I should be fainting off of platforms, so instead the small crowd turned attention to my knee, which was rather bloody. My friend and the two actors who had shared our compartment gathered me up and carried my backpack to the minivan that was to carry us two hours further north. I limped to the station bathroom and paid 500 dong to an attendant, and splashed cold water from a bucket and ladle over my face and bloody knee -- there was no running tap. I settled grimacing into a hard-seated, cushionless minivan ride, one damp rolled-up pants leg sticking out from under the backpack where I nestled for warmth. I was miserable, and scared, and nauseous, and definitely not getting any better.

At the hotel, our guide phoned the tour company and arranged to transfer my trek money into room and board. I was disappointed, but protest was absurd. Our trek involved several days hiking over steep terrain. My knee was swollen and purple and could barely help me up the shallow stairs. I accepted the hotel room and dragged myself hand-over-hand up the railing to my room, one leg trailing stiffly behind. I had not been able to eat or drink anything in days.

My friend was worried and torn, and I told him to go on the trek. I didn't want him to miss this, it was one of the things we had most looked forward to in all of our 6-week trip, and frankly it's awkward to have someone around when you're constantly vomiting anyway. He left his supply of powdered rehydrating solution in case I should ever regain the power to drink liquid, and at the last moment, his Walkman, and I crawled into the bed nearest the bathroom, where I stayed for the next three or so days.

With all the trekkers gone, the hotel was silent. Silent as a tomb, one does not care to think when one is quite that sick, and yet still does. Three times a day, hotel staff would quietly slip a meal ticket for the adjacent restaurant under my door, but I was only just improving my odds with plain water, and didn't risk it. After a couple days, they started to worry, and brought me a tray. When I caught myself mentally writing a will, I decided to call my travel insurance company.

It took me several tries to demystify the phone at my bedside, but I finally placed the toll free call to America. I briefly explained my situation to the agent, and realized there was much more about my situation I simply could not explain, not to her.

"It's OK," she assured me in a Midwestern accent, "Now just go the hospital, and have your doctor email us, and we'll take it from there."

"Uh, I'm in Sa Pa. North Vietnam, near the Chinese border. There are no hospitals here, I already asked the hotel staff."

"OK, well a doctor's clinic is fine too --"

"No doctors. No email."

"No --? Well, whatever. Tell the doctor, fax is fine too, now --"

"No email, no faxes, no hospitals, no doctors. People just go to the pharmacist here and tell him what they want. I'm not sure you understand -- look, it's very primitive."

"Ha ha, primitive. Yes, I understand, look I'm in Wisconsin. Now just --"

I kind of lost it here. "No, no. Primitive! Village in northern Vietnam primitive, Chinese border primitive, not Wisconsin primitive. I'm not talking 56K dial-up primitive. I'm talking-- you don't-- look, I can see live water buffalo right now. I'm downtown."

I finally gave up on the insurance agent, feebly clawed open a packet of powdered rehydrating solution, and prepared myself to die in my hotel room on that water buffalo-filled north Vietnamese lane if it came to that. I telepathed a loving message to my mother, grasped for the remote, and found Vietnamese television to be fascinating.

Shirakawa-go

Shirakawa-go in northern Gifu Prefecture is a UNESCO World Heritage site. It is a sort of living museum of traditional Japanese culture, and the small village of 600 people contains 113 traditional "Gassho style" buildings, a type of snow-resistant architecture unique to the area. "Gassho" roughly means "praying hands" and refers to the shape of the steep thatched roofs. The buildings are hundreds of years old, but extremely well-preserved, and most still currently house families and businesses catering to tourists.

Tojinbo by Takeji Asano, 1900-1999

(Image from artelino.)

Legend says that in the 900's, a Buddhist monk named Kakunen pushed another monk named Tojinbo off a steep cliff near Fukui. Some say the murder was inspired by a rivalry for the love of a beautiful woman named Aya. Others say Tojinbo was a very unpopular monk who often shirked his duties and angered his peers. Some suggest the two had been drinking. In any case, Tojinbo died, and being understandably upset over his own untimely demise, he haunted the cliff each April and caused violent storms and waves.

Some years later, another monk took pity on vengeful Tojinbo, and called for a memorial service in his honor. Tojinbo was somewhat soothed, and the storms stopped.

Or was he?

Today the area named for Tojinbo is as famous for its picture-postcard views and unique geography as it is for its plague of suicides. Geologists note it for a specific type of columnar jointing which is found in only two other places in the world. Most other people note it grimly as the site of almost one suicide per week on average. A small island lying directly across from the morbid cliff is said to be haunted by the bodies that frequently wash up on its shore. The island Oshima is so well-known as a haunted place, it was even featured on one of those "True Stories of UFOs and Ghosts" type TV programs a couple years back.

After hearing last year Oshima was haunted, I of course wanted immediately to go. I asked a few Japanese friends with cars, and one finally agreed to take me, at midnight even; he was a big, cool, slightly cynical, punk-rock sort of man in his early 30s, and he wasn't afraid. We met at a bar at 11 pm, and made the walk across downtown to his car, chatting and joking amicably on the way. But as we neared his car, he started to walk more slowly, and by 11:30, he had backed out completely. He called his own bluff. He was scared.

Last weekend I returned to Fukui, in my own car, to visit friends. And again I determined to see Oshima. I took two friends with me for the sorely-needed trip out of town, and I stopped by my ghost-scared Japanese friend's shop to invite him for a second chance. He turned me down. Not only were there ghosts, he assured me, but his band's bassist had just broken her leg at Oshima a month previous. Because of ghosts, he said. Whatever.

Our schedule wouldn't let us make the trip at midnight, so dusk had to do. We made bad jokes about the ghosts that my friend said would follow us back home, but as we actually neared the island, we all became palpably quieter. By day, the tiny island is the home of a rather unremarkable but ghostless shrine, and we parked the car amongst family station wagons leaving for home. Still, there was definitely something desolate about the place, and even creepy.

Unfortunately, the island proved anti-climactic. A long red bridge connects the tiny island to the mainland. At the end of the bridge is the shrine, and off to the left a path. The path circumscribes the island, about 2 km around, dotted with signs detailing the area's geographical wonders for visiting school groups. There was a small grove of unabashedly creepy trees, a couple of creepy-sounding bird calls, but that was about it. Maybe we should have gone at midnight after all. We drove on a couple minutes to Tojinbo.

Tojinbo is gorgeous, stunning, picturesque. Its geography is strange -- 20- and 30- meter columns of vertical rock pieced together into cliffs. In low tide, pools of vivid green water are created immediately adjacent others of vivid blue. In high tide, violent foamy waves seethe amongst near-black rocks. Tojinbo is at all times dramatic.

The first time I visited Tojinbo, a friend told me about a free telephone booth near the top. Because the area was such a popular suicide spot, a free phone booth was actually provided to give those in a moment of desperation a chance to call a friend or family member and talk. I didn't actually see the phone booth that first time, but I was stunned by its existence anyway. But this time, perhaps because of the letdown of Oshima, I suppose we had half-wanted to see at least a flying candle or hear some disembodied wailing in Japanese, we decided to seek out the booth.

The main area of Tojinbo is well-photographed, and we wandered all over the recognizable part of it without seeing any phone booths. The cliffs seemed awfully touristy and public for a suicide spot, but then again, Tokyo train tracks don't exactly offer privacy to their frequent jumpers either. We finally gave up and looked instead for a restroom on the way back to the car, as it was getting dark. On a pitch-dark side path near a smaller, hidden cliff, there with grotesquely-glowing lighting in the near distance, was the phone booth.

It wasn't where we expected it to be, but after a moment it made sense. This was the part of the cliff not photographed, less dramatic, more private, and... directly across from Oshima. We recognized the booth though immediately. It was not free in the sense of no coin-slot, instead it seemed to be supported by donations. On the tiny shelf where the phone book usually sits, was a small hill of change, mostly bronze 10-yen coins oxidized green with age, or salt-air. Several brand new coins gleamed unsettlingly on top. The phone books sat stacked on the floor. A lonely path led briefly along the cliff, and of course we had to look.

We stared out at the view that must have been the last sight of so many other people. It felt strange to be staring at this as a group of three, when it was so clearly a view meant for one. A lone Japanese pine twisted out over the sea, defying the sober finality of the drop below it.

I don't know what we were expecting, but somehow it wasn't this, and it was. There was no high fence here to obstruct anyone from jumping, instead a single low chain ran for several meters only and then stopped. My friend translated a simple black-on-white sign further up the path near the edge as, "Make that call," and another directly across from the booth as, "Don't hurry to die; no one can replace you." The ghost-hunting suddenly didn't feel like lighthearted fun. There was nothing to be said that didn't feel trite, so we said nothing at all for a long time. It made me feel only sad, and helpless, and then glad to be alive, and more than that, glad to be glad.