Nippon Gawky

I'm in Japan. My hotel room overlooks the Tokyo bay and in the distance, a bridge rises mightily like a finger arcing forcefully across the bay connecting the two sides. I draw the curtain, change and go out. My guides are waiting downstairs...

By the time I return, it's past midnight. I've spent the day on the back seat of the bus, kneeling on the back seat, staring kid-candy-shop like at all the bikes parked on pavement everywhere I look. The room service chaps have managed to leave the window ajar, and I can feel a cold thirteen degree draft blowing through the room. Then, riding on the thin breeze comes the familiar, haunting howl of an inline four being caned. Like a pack of wolves, all letting out their pent up sorrows, many more howls join in. My ears follow the sound till it fades and waits till the howls return, going the other way... Two hours later, I find myself sitting on the window ledge. Feeling very, very cold. I'm clad in a yutaka (a japanese around the house robe of sorts) and I've been perched with my legs dangling out into the night, thirteen floors up. I have the same welling of emotion I had the first time head Andre Previn and the Royal Philharmonic playing Mars, The Bringer of War, Gustav Holsts' shattering, powerful composition, from The Planets. I shiver, as much from the cold, as from the motorcycles.

Crap! it's two thirty. I've to pack and be out of the hotel by five thirty am...