RainStorm

you.
    I uploaded the message at an Internet cafe. Then I made my way
    to Hong Kong International Airport. I caught a flight to Seoul, and
    from there to Narita International in Tokyo. And so, that very
    evening, I was mildly surprised at being back in Japan.
    From Narita, I took a Narita Express train to Tokyo station,
    where I emerged to find my former city hunched up against characteristically
    rainy and cold late autumn weather. I stood under the
    portico roof at the station's Marunouchi entrance and took in the
    scene. Waves of black umbrellas bobbed before me. Wet leaves were
    plastered to the pavement, ground in by the tires of oblivious cars
    and the soles of insensate pedestrians, by the weight of the entire,
    indifferent metropolis.
    I watched for a long time. Then I turned and disappeared back
    into the station, borne down by a feeling of invisibility that was
    nothing like the one I had assiduously cultivated while living here.
    I bought a cheap umbrella for an extortionate thousand yen and
    caught a Yamanote line train to Nishi-Nippori, where I checked
    into an undistinguished business hotel, one of dozens in this part of
    Shitamachi, the scarred yet stalwart low city of old Edo. With the
    lights off, I could have been anywhere. And yet I was keenly aware
    that I was in Japan, I was in Tokyo.
    I slept poorly, awaking to another gray and rainy day. I made my
    way to Sengoku, where I had lived for so many years before getting
    burned by Holtzer and having to leave for more anonymous climes.
    Outside Sengoku station, I discovered that the features of an area I had remembered with some fondness had been erased. In their place had grown a McDonald's on one corner, a Denny's on the other. There was a chain drugstore; a chain convenience store;
    and other chains, all intended, no doubt, to offer increased choice
    and variety. A more pleasant, more efficient shopping experience.
    The city's implacable engines of progress grinding on, I supposed,
    the homogenous expression of some increasingly senescent collective
    unconscious.
    I reminded myself that all I owned of Sengoku were memories.
    The neighborhood itself was someone else's to ruin.
    I opened my umbrella, crossed the street, and walked until I
    passed my old apartment. And here, away from the station's newly
    gaudy facade, I was surprised to find that all was almost exactly as I
    remembered: the gardens with their carefully tended plantings, the
    stone walls draped in patterns of gentle moss, the buildings of ancient
    wood and tile roofs, standing with dignity and determination
    beside their younger brick and metal cousins. Children's bicycles
    were still clustered around doorways; umbrellas dripped as they
    always had from stands before small stores. The periphery had
    changed, I saw, but the core remained resolutely the same.
    I laughed. What I had just seen at the station had been disappointing,
    but had also allowed me some compensatory sense of superiority.
    What I found afterward came as a relief, but carried with
    it a profound feeling of insignificance. Because I understood now
    that in Sengoku, life had just . . . gone on. The neighborhood was
    as untroubled by my loss as it had been unaware of my presence.
    When I had lived here, I realized, I had dared to think that perhaps
    I had belonged, that in some way my living here mattered. Now I
    could see that these thoughts had been, in their way, narcissistic.
    Certainly they had been mistaken.
    I thought of Midori, of what she had once told me of mono no
    aware, what she had called the "sadness of being human," and
    wished for a naked second that I could talk to her.
    I took a final look around, trying to recollect the life I once had
    here. There was a feeling that lingered, certainly, something insubstantial
    that expressed its longing for corporeity in the form of
    a series of long sighs, but nothing I could really grasp. The interior
    of the town was just the same, yes, and yet, imbued with the unfair
    weight of my memories, it was now all hauntingly changed. I
    didn't belong here anymore, and I felt like an apparition, something
    unnatural that was right to have left and foolish to have returned.
    I walked back to the station and called Kanezaki from a pay
    phone.
    "I was just going to upload something for you," he said.
    "Good. Where are you now?"
    "Tokyo."
    "Where in Tokyo?"
    There was a pause. He said, "Are you here?"
    "Yes. Where are you now?"
    "The embassy."
    "Good. Be outside Sengoku