Letter from the .corridor.
It rained for three days in Tsukishima the week we re-read Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. Not the heavy rain of summer — the slow, persistent late-October rain that the city seems to make for itself.
I had come back to Tokyo for what I told myself was a working trip. In practice it was a reading trip. I had a stack of seven books, three of which were re-reads, and an apartment without a desk. The first morning I tried to write at the kitchen counter and could not. The second morning I gave up and went for a walk.
Watching In the Mood for Love again on the last evening, I noticed for the first time that nearly every scene of consequence happens in a corridor. Not a room, not a street — a corridor. The architecture of the in-between.
A city is, perhaps, only the sum of its corridors: the bits between the rooms where the real work of a life is done.
Coming home each evening through the basement passages of Tokyo Station — that strange, fluorescent, unending corridor that takes you from the Yamanote line to the Sōbu line — it occurred to me that this is what we are doing at Aravien, too. The pages we file are not the rooms. They are the corridors. The work that takes place inside the reader is the room.
This is also, incidentally, the answer to the most common question we get from new subscribers, which is: what is this for? It is for the corridor.
This week’s pathway: The architecture of longing — an eight-work route through Wong Kar-wai, Murakami, and Linklater, threaded together by the same withheld geometry of desire. New on the index, edited by Mira Asai.
Next dispatch: December 2. Tiana writes from Lagos on the second-album problem.
— M.