Wanderlust

This morning, I woke up, as I have been lately, in an absolutely disastrous mood, so I decided I should try to get on the nearest train and ride it somewhere arbitrary where I know a park happens to be and give it a good skulking about. Unfortunately, after doing this, I was still as angry and despondent as ever, so I resolved I’d walk until this was no longer the case.

Well, turns out this criterion would take me all the way home, from Kichijoji back to Harajuku, some four hours and 16 kilometers later. I’m no less bothered now, but I did get to spend some quality time with the deep Tokyo burbs, which actually surprised me with their beauty. I once thought Tokyo’s appearance a bit dull, sorely lacking as it is in the tree department, developed mainly with single-family homes and four-floor condo buildings made entirely of grey tile. But I realise now that its narrow streets and quiet neighbourhoods have really grown on me. Indeed it now feels cosy and familiar.

I realised something else as well. In 2019 I ended up watching this Norwegian film called Harajuku, about a young woman who, facing the collapse of her life in Oslo, develops an obsession with escaping to Tokyo to absorb herself into the Harajuku fashion scene. Without spoiling too much of the story, I think the movie is trying to tell us that you can’t run from yourself, and that the grass grows where you water it.

Some years later, having learned absolutely nothing from this movie, I uprooted everything to move to Singapore, under the implicit belief that the hyper-competent technocapitalist utopia would somehow solve all my problems. It was certainly a nice place to live, but I’m sorry to say I was the same person there as I always was. When things went pear-shaped over there, I once again relocated myself to, yes, that’s right, Harajuku, where I live now.

Retarded as I am in many ways, I am not incapable of learning a lesson, so when in Tokyo the same old problems continued to haunt me as they always have, and I felt once again the desire to hit reset on my life, I figured that doing this a third time was not going to have a vastly different result as it did the first two times. Of course, I did not and still don’t have even the faintest clue what I should do instead. But changing countries again is probably not the move.

I wish I could provide some kind of catharsis to this ramble, but that would require me to provide a conclusion to a story that’s still being written. I once wrote on here after cycling the 70km Shimanami Kaido that I had figured everything out; this was not true. All I had done was pump myself full of the nice chemicals and stuff you get from rigorous exercise, which for the sake of one’s health is certainly a noble pursuit. But being content, for the moment, to live with your latent issues is not the same thing as having solved them.

I don’t yet have a single additional answer to any of my long-standing questions, but at least I know I certainly won’t find them at the bottom of another intercontinental relocation bottle. I will wage this war in Tokyo. I don’t know when, or how, but at least I know where.