letter #2
we're all making our own sense of things and this is mine
#2
By the time I have travelled from my seat in the plane to my bed in the hotel room I understand that in my first week in Tokyo I will have no conversation. No one I meet on my first day speaks English and I speak no Japanese. In this week that I am travelling solo, the only words I am likely to speak beyond, ‘Thank you,’ will be those I say to myself. I will hear, I will listen, but I will not speak or be spoken to with any sense of real connection.
In my hotel—found in the back streets of the flashy flashing Shinjuku—I sit in my room to gather my thoughts and centre my senses. There is nothing wrong, I feel comfortable and safe, but there is something else going on in here that I do not understand. I wander about the room (which isn’t hard, it is neither long nor wide) trying to work it out. The answer comes when I step into the bathroom. Through the vent above the bath, sounds come in. Trains rattling past, sirens, even voices. These sounds travel through some labyrinth I cannot see and arrive here, in my room, up on the 24th floor. I know that they are real, because if I stand at my window, I can hear the trains and the sirens, although not the voices. But sent through the vents they are ghostly sounds, the echoes of phantoms. The rhythms of conversations stripped of their words.
These shadowy sounds transport me to my childhood when I was lost in the worlds of novels that I believed were real. Children sent to uninterested uncles, separated from mothers, told to be quiet, opening doors they have been told must stay closed. I am transfixed, transported and until I go to sleep I go back and forth to the vent, holding my camera towards it, recording the sound. I am always looking up at it, as if towards the light.
I close the bathroom door, but the sounds seep through my sleep. They stir my thoughts and when I wake I experience the world in a way I never have before. These ghostly sounds help me to hear more sounds and to hear them all more clearly. It is as if, even when I leave the hotel room, the sounds from the vents leave me tuned to a new frequency. Not only are these new sounds amplified, there are no hooks of conversations to catch my mind and distract me. A world beyond words opens up.
Instead of taking photographs I begin to collect the sounds. As I walk through the city, I use my phone, holding it still and capturing snippets of sound. I start with fifteen seconds, a random number I’ve chosen because in the museums they tell me that’s the limit if video is allowed. And it seems about right, about the amount that I would hear a sound if I were just walking by. But if I were just walking by, these sounds would be in and out of my life soon to be forgotten.
The more I collect, the more I hear and the more I hear, the more I want to collect. I filter the noise and I search out sound and as I do the world grows richer and more dense. The recorded voice at this station is not the same as the recorded voice at the last. A suitcase wheeled on the footpath outside Tokyo station sounds different pulled over the road. The stairs in this museum creak. One escalator grinds, another squeaks. A man rolls his shoulder and I hear it shift in its joint, another cracks his knuckles one by one while we wait for the lift. (I don’t record these, though I wish I could).
It is not only the sounds I hear it is the shades of silence too. In this city of millions there is more chance for quiet than I would have believed. In this 7-11 the plastic bags don’t crinkle. On railway platforms no one speaks. In Yanaka Cemetery my footsteps make no noise. In shrines and gardens, leaves rustle, birds sing. I learn something more. If I spin my own silence around me like a cocoon, it will cushion from loneliness, protect me from isolation.
In a week where I speak barely one hundred words, I collect the sounds, I spin a cocoon, and I do not grow lonely.
I read a lot less than you might expect of someone who had no-one to talk to
But I started We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves on the plane and finished it off the night I arrived. I'm not sure why I missed this when everyone else was reading it. I found it to be a real page-turner, not only easy to read, but I was always wanting to know what came next. I don't want to spoil it for you if you haven't read it yet, but I thought it was excellent.