had ached from reading the titles of thousands of books sideways off the spines. She’d drifted through every section of the shop, luxuriating in the profusion of printed English. From Maps and Travel, to Science, to Sociology, to Philosophy, to Fiction, and back around again to the big rack full of magazines and newspapers from the U.S., Britain, Australia. Sunday she’d gone alone to mass at St. Ignatius Church on the campus of Sophia University, then walked down Shinjuku-dori to the Mr. Donut, where she’d spent hours at a table by the window, hunched over the copy of
The Handmaid’s Tale
she’d bought at Kinokuniya the day before.
It was now just after four thirty on Sunday afternoon. She had an English lesson at five with Yuka, the woman who lived across the hall. But at the end of such an empty weekend, facing a full day of teaching at the college the next day, she was not looking forward to the lesson. She stood on the roof of the building and looked out in the direction of Ikebukuro, out to where she knew the countryside was the closest. Tokyo was a tax on the imagination, a real place that had to be dreamt of to be believed. Everything about it was difficult to hold in the mind. It was difficult to look at the Chinese symbols for the names of the neighbourhoods and imagine that the crowded urban sprawl of Nakano had once been a central well. Who would draw water from that source today and drink it? The name of the area next to her own, Haramachi, meant
field town
. How could there once have been a field there, where there was not a square metre of earth to be found? But as difficult as it was to imagine Tokyo before it was Tokyo, it was equally difficult to imagine it as it now existed. She wondered if part of the reason she came to the rooftop so frequently was to confirm that there was actually such a place.
As she looked out over the city, she tried to go back in her mind and find her thirteen-year-old self, the person she’d been ten years before. She closed her eyes, mentally trying to shed the last ten years of experience, then opened her eyes, hoping to get an idea of what she would have thought of this place if she’d seen it back in 1978. Take that girl she’d been. That girl from Nova Scotia, from Pictou County, from Albion Mines, that girl who’d never seen Halifax, let alone any place bigger or more cosmopolitan, drop that girl here on this rooftop in Tokyo, show her this view, this jam-packed landscape: How would she react? What would she think? What words would she use to express what she was thinking? Most important, how would she be different afterward? This was a mental exercise Meta often put herself through. Why couldn’t I have known this before? she would think. My life may have turned out differently.
Above her, thick clouds rolled past beneath the overcast, oblivious to the city that strained and strove beneath them. Across the narrow street at the back of the building, the tiny family-run print shop hummed and buzzed and clicked. The sound carried up to the rooftop and blended with the
smack … smack
of two preteen boys playing catch with baseball and gloves on the street in front of the shop.
She couldn’t handle the English lesson with Yuka today. She would go downstairs now and cancel. She wanted to retreat intoher apartment, lock the door. Maybe rent a video and pretend she couldn’t see the subtitles, make believe she was in a theatre in Canada. She walked the two flights, descended in the elevator, and noticed, after months of looking at the same marks with incomprehension, that she could now understand the single word of graffiti scratched into the grey paint on the back of the door.
Kuso
, it said.
Shit
.
The hallway outside Yuka’s and her own apartment was dark and silent and smelled of the mouldy red carpet on the floor and the miso soup that at various times in the day would be cooking in every apartment in the building. After pressing the buzzer several times,
The Handmaid’s Tale
she’d bought at Kinokuniya the day before.
It was now just after four thirty on Sunday afternoon. She had an English lesson at five with Yuka, the woman who lived across the hall. But at the end of such an empty weekend, facing a full day of teaching at the college the next day, she was not looking forward to the lesson. She stood on the roof of the building and looked out in the direction of Ikebukuro, out to where she knew the countryside was the closest. Tokyo was a tax on the imagination, a real place that had to be dreamt of to be believed. Everything about it was difficult to hold in the mind. It was difficult to look at the Chinese symbols for the names of the neighbourhoods and imagine that the crowded urban sprawl of Nakano had once been a central well. Who would draw water from that source today and drink it? The name of the area next to her own, Haramachi, meant
field town
. How could there once have been a field there, where there was not a square metre of earth to be found? But as difficult as it was to imagine Tokyo before it was Tokyo, it was equally difficult to imagine it as it now existed. She wondered if part of the reason she came to the rooftop so frequently was to confirm that there was actually such a place.
As she looked out over the city, she tried to go back in her mind and find her thirteen-year-old self, the person she’d been ten years before. She closed her eyes, mentally trying to shed the last ten years of experience, then opened her eyes, hoping to get an idea of what she would have thought of this place if she’d seen it back in 1978. Take that girl she’d been. That girl from Nova Scotia, from Pictou County, from Albion Mines, that girl who’d never seen Halifax, let alone any place bigger or more cosmopolitan, drop that girl here on this rooftop in Tokyo, show her this view, this jam-packed landscape: How would she react? What would she think? What words would she use to express what she was thinking? Most important, how would she be different afterward? This was a mental exercise Meta often put herself through. Why couldn’t I have known this before? she would think. My life may have turned out differently.
Above her, thick clouds rolled past beneath the overcast, oblivious to the city that strained and strove beneath them. Across the narrow street at the back of the building, the tiny family-run print shop hummed and buzzed and clicked. The sound carried up to the rooftop and blended with the
smack … smack
of two preteen boys playing catch with baseball and gloves on the street in front of the shop.
She couldn’t handle the English lesson with Yuka today. She would go downstairs now and cancel. She wanted to retreat intoher apartment, lock the door. Maybe rent a video and pretend she couldn’t see the subtitles, make believe she was in a theatre in Canada. She walked the two flights, descended in the elevator, and noticed, after months of looking at the same marks with incomprehension, that she could now understand the single word of graffiti scratched into the grey paint on the back of the door.
Kuso
, it said.
Shit
.
The hallway outside Yuka’s and her own apartment was dark and silent and smelled of the mouldy red carpet on the floor and the miso soup that at various times in the day would be cooking in every apartment in the building. After pressing the buzzer several times,
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