Style

As I drove, it occurred to me that thought sprung from this flat and open landscape would take on its reverse character. By necessity it would become dense and self-reflective. Because there were no mirrors, one’s reality would always come into question. 

There was something else whose existence I had long suspected, but which no one ever spoke of, which was the physical border between East and West. This would seem to be a significant landmark in this country, which is wider than it is tall. It possesses that mythic waterway, but it seems to be in the wrong place, off-center to the east; rather, I found the division with my own eyes and felt it on my skin, where the arid West ended, leaving behind dessicated cornfields, and the verdant East began. Almost immediately after I crossed it, a thunderstorm appeared on the horizon.

At another gateway—to which frontier this time?—I walked down the old downtown street. The arching landmark glowed like a ribbon of light in the night sky, while the crowds were sparse, if bubbly, and the people, contrary to what one might be led to believe, at ease. 

There were cities of soot-darkened high-rises and rivers crossed by iron bridges. I did not know what I had been expecting, but it was not this quilt of neighborhoods hemmed into its hills, like San Francisco. I had anticipated something else before I began this trip and was now definitely lost. I had also not anticipated the horizontal lines of the Midwest in the heart of a vertical city like Tokyo. But that had been the case, too, I was to discover a few short weeks later, as I left a frenetic Ikebukuro Station for a world of memories. As with so many things in Japan, and in the Midwest, place could be defined not solely by location, but a sense of style.