Something’s going on, but I haven’t gotten to the bottom of it yet.
Strangely, in the last week or two, the trains have suddenly become quiet in Tokyo. Day by day, people seem to be disappearing. One by one, they’re falling off the Earth. That’s the only way I can explain the fact that the trains were bursting at the seams two weeks ago, and this week, they’re running at half-capacity.
I’m reminded of this horror movie nobody in the world has ever seen. A man walks through an empty train. He passes from car to car, car to car, and he can’t reach the end of the train. He begins running and running. But the train is endless. And as he continues, little bits of debris begin to appear on the train floor and on the train seats — nothing pleasant — strips of bloody clothing, chunks of flesh, organs unravelling, tendons, tubes, lips, kleenex, all kinds of things unspeakable. After all, they say we have tubes in our body, miles long, if we unravelled them. The anatomical disarray continues to build on each car that the man runs into. The floors of the train are wet with blood. Suddenly, the man looks to the right. And sees his reflection in the glass, and recoils in terror. Its his own body that has been gutted. The train is a circle. In fact, it’s not even moving.
So, anyway, sorry for wrecking the ending, but it’s not likely you’ll ever get the chance to see it.
Last night around 11:00, I was taking a break from recording, and watching Saving Private Ryan on video, and I felt an earthquake for the fourth time in about six weeks. Previously, in my life, I’ve never felt the earthquake. But it’s only natural. Why shouldn’t the earth quake? It’s under a lot of pressure, you know.
Two nights ago, my phone woke me up at 4 in the morning. And it was the one — everybody has that one person in the world they hope is on the other end of the phone at 4 in the morning, when the phone rings, and it never is that person. So, it was something like a shock. It must have been shock, because I’d just about completely forgotten that it was I who called her first, earlier in the evening. This girl I’ve bestowed with mythic qualities in the absence of five months since seeing her last, and then in the beginning only seeing her 4 dates, for which drinking was the primary activity..
Some strange dreams recently. For example — somewhere in Japan, there’s a kind of amusement park, which has scale models of the world’s famous buildings — the Eiffel Tower, Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Colosseum, Empire State Building, and so on, but I don’t know exactly, cause I’ve never been there. Anyway, in my dream, I was staring out at the Tokyo landscape, and all these famous buildings were mixed into the landscape in full scale. And rollercoasters were threading through the city. My vantage point was from across the bay, somewhere on the reclaimed land that surrounds the edge of Tokyo Bay.
In my other dream, I was flying over a chain of tropical islands. There were these fields of lush, leafy greens, wet with a recent rain. And everywhere, side by side, were these massive jet black, slate pyramids, bigger than the ones you’d find in Mexico. And as I flew over, endless pyramids passed by, and then I hit the beach, and still endless rows of black pyramids rose out of the ocean, until they descended below sea level, while the surf broke over their peaks.
I was standing on an escalator tonight, looking at someone’s T-shirt in front of me, a pineapple pattern. And I couldn’t help but observe how the pineapple seems almost like an animal amongst fruits. It’s true in the case of tropical fruit — the distinction between animal and fruit is meaningless. Think of the fleshy qualities of a mango. Anyway, a pineapple seems to have scales on its side. People have argued that the concept of exotic is nothing more than a case of otherness. If Southern islands are exotic to an Englishmen, then it’s argued that England is exotic to a Southern islander. But I don’t buy that. Exotic is exotic, and England (or Canada) is definitely not exotic. And the reason is that there fruit is fruit. An apple is green and round and boring. And sometimes, it’s red.

Last week, I checked out the indoor ski slope, SAWSS in Chiba, for the first time — I’m talking about genuine indoor snow, not the plastic slopes I’ve heard about in England. You get this strange little mirror that you flash to pass through various gates, and they scan this mirror, when you get your rentals, when you get a drink — it’s a cashless society. Everything is organized into flows. And so many people have to rent the skiwear, so just about everyone’s wearing the same clothes, using the same snowboard. It’s 85 degrees outside, and then you walk into the biggest air conditioner you’ve ever seen in your life. There’s surely enough air being conditioned in here to keep a small African town cool. The run itself is just a joke. It’s over in 30 seconds, and then you stand in line for 10 minutes. Everywhere, Japanese pop music is playing. Little things I miss, like the odd stray log, the little bushes that line the edges of a ski slope. It’s all so fucking controlled. The ceiling is a weird shade of silvery blue, a kind of artificial night sky.
Today, I went to this water park by mistake. I thought it was an outdoor swimming pool. But it was just a bunch of kids and middle aged people soaking in all these wading pools. There was this kind of swimming pool river, flowing blue chlorine water, and all these people going around with the flow. There was these 10 minute breaks, where everyone got out of the water, so they could let the surface settle.
I was wishing for a diving board. I lied around suntanning, watching a helicopter hovering over some nearby apartments.
I fell asleep, and experienced such a peaceful awakening. I look over my shoulder and I could see these flowers, and the sun streaming through, and in that moment of disorientation, I thought I was sleeping in bed underneath a flowery sheet, and the sun was streaming in through the window. There was this music playing. And I rolled over, and everyone was gone.

All year, this cigarette advertisement follows me around Tokyo. For Lark cigarettes, predictably a Phillip Morris product, it displays groups of surfers, tanned and muscular, hanging around the beach, having a butt, with the sun setting in the distance. The end of a perfect day. It’s simple, but I’m admittedly susceptible, cause that’s it, you know.
This morning, I woke up at 6, cause I took a nap early yesterday evening, and never managed to get out of bed. I rollerbladed (by the way, someone wrote me recently shocked and disappointed when he found out I bought rollerblades — and believe me, I’m not the rollerblade type, but what else can you do when you’re surrounded by concrete and dirty water, with not a basketball court in sight?) around the industrial wasteland that surrounds the banks of the Edogawa River, near where I live in Chiba, not so far from Tokyo Bay. I got back at 8:00 AM, took a shower, went into Tokyo for a Japanese lesson, after which, I hit this massive outdoor pool in view of the Shinjuku skyscrapers and the beautiful old trees around the edges of the Meiji gardens. One example of Tokyo insanity — it cost me 1500 Yen (or about $22) to go into this outdoor pool. I did some lengths, and lay around the side sunning myself, checking out girls, but mostly catching sightlines filled in guys in speedos. And then, I figured time was getting ripe for a matinee, so I thought I’d check out the Beach. Luck was with me, cause I got to the theatre 10 minutes late, and no one was standing near the door, so I was able to walk right in, without paying.
Anyway, like many, I could connect with Richard, the character in Alex Garland’s The Beach strongly. I read the original book, shortly before I found out DiCaprio was cast in the role. But ever since finding out, the memories of the book have been relayed to me in the voiceover of DiCaprio (I can recognize his voice anywhere — I recently walked into a house, and heard the famous words of French poet Rimbaud, “Eternity, it’s the sun in the middle of the sea,” and knew it was DiCaprio reading it, and sure enough it was the end scene of the movie Rimbaud, which I’ve not seen), and so DiCaprio’s voiceovers seemed to ring a deja-vu in me. And the scenery, too, of the movie — I’ve never been to Thailand, but scene after scene, the movie played itself exactly into my imaginings of the book.
But I guess that’s no accident, cause apparently the original beach, the location of the movie’s filming, didn’t exactly fit the image of the directors, either. So very controversially, they introduced new vegetation onto the island, and kind of remixed the island, so to speak. And that is unbelievable, one of the grossest examples of Hollywood’s excesses I’ve ever heard of. I’ve always marvelled that $100 million might be spent on a movie, filmed in countries with people starving all around, and then $100s of millions more are spent by the people that consume the movie and the surrounding products. It’s fucking stunning, isn’t it?
But anyway, I’m not trying to be moral. It’s just a movie, isn’t it? It’s just a beach, isn’t it? And you know, a lot of companies a lot smaller than MacDonalds have destroyed a lot more than a beach in their process.
Others have said — never mind what they did to the Beach, but what about what they did to Alex Garland’s novel? I’ve often thought about classic stories, and wondered what would happen, if something different happened halfway through the book. And that’s basically, what happens inside the Beach, the movie.
I think you could derive the truism from DiCaprio’s voiceover at the end of the Beach, the movie — that it is after all the process that matters most. And therefore, no matter how much I like this movie, I’m not sure that my enjoyment seems enough in this case.