Skyscraper of Broad Daylight
If I’m to avoid succumbing to jet lag, I should get out of the hotel room and move around. Having gotten up at three a.m. and finished, more or less, with my work for the day, I decide to take the afternoon off. So far, I’ve spent my drowsy evenings in an uncommonly relaxed Tokyo (it being Golden Week) shopping for eyeglasses for my wife, in Shinjuku, and pajamas for my kids, in Ginza. Today, though, I have for myself. It’s a straight shot on the Tozai Line from Iidabashi to Nakano and gets there in 22 minutes, so why not?
In the Sun Mall, which connects Nakano Station to the Broadway, the same songs I heard over and over again the year I was living here (“On Your Mark” and the Ponyo theme song) are piped in over the heads of shoppers, many of them families with young children; a lot more are out and about than on non-holidays, which is a nice sight in this at times austere city. Covid hasn’t ravaged Nakano Broadway, one of the world’s great shopping malls, as much as I feared. The Sangokushi pop-up store that I came upon the last time I was here has since been replaced by an Shin Ultraman pop-store, but the stalwarts remain: Mandarake, of course; also TACO ché and Shop MECANO, the latter the specialty CD shop with laser curatorial focus on 80s electronic music. The proprietor, who always seems present, sold me their tenth anniversary compilation double CD. This was issued in 2015, but their blog says there’s been a recent resurgence of orders. Having listened to the entirety, I think I understand why. One new aspect to the mall, to me, is the number of stalls selling luxury timepieces, which feels a bit out of personality, but these are changing times, even in Japan.
On a different day, I avoid the subway and walk to Jimbocho. The air was heavy with humidity, not quite raining, but with droplets floating in mid-air. I was sad to see more of my old haunts shuttered permanently than in Nakano, including that manic comics store on Yasukuni-dori and Sweet Po-tsu, a venerable gyoza shop in the parallel arcade that had stood since 1936. Combing through the bookstores, I came upon Komiyama Shoten’s impressive wall dedicated to Mishima Yukio, decorated like a shrine with photographs and a set of his complete works, in alternating orange and black binding. I never quite got into Mishima, but the display made me think I might want to try again. A discovery was a newish (released 2015) edition of Kitasono Katue’s experimental prose fiction, Skyscraper of Broad Daylight (白昼のスカイスクレエパア). I hadn’t been aware Kitasono wrote fiction, if it can be called that, something I would want to pick up if I could ever get back into reading Japanese again.