Dispatches - Somewhere in Japan

Dispatch № 86: Falling Into Patterns

If I am still contentedly cooking her breakfast forty years from now, I’ll consider that a great personal success in a life well lived.

Dispatch № 85: Absent

A thick black line drawn through her name, as she would not be attending.

Dispatch № 84: Conditioning

Almost nobody gives them permission, let alone a push, to question authority or to push against the structures to which they find themselves subject but from which they rarely benefit.

Dispatch № 83: Bulging

The bag of plastic recycling comically large and overstuffed to bursting, like a farcical suitcase.

Dispatch № 82: Hidden Away

Plants are good at that, at keeping secrets subterranean and contained.

Dispatch № 81: Capsule Elegy

Few buildings ever manage to command such remarkable presence, and many that do lose their edge as the rest of architecture catches up around them.

In the winter months, kerosene trucks drive slowly through neighborhoods in the evening, making their presence known with a repeating announcement played over a loudspeaker, accompanied by the tune of an old children’s song.