(Leaf 15) – Looking Back
When I first used to visit
Japan, I would sometimes stay at a small and conveniently cheap hotel close to
Shinobazu Pond in Tokyo’s Ueno. It was a nice, clean and wholesome place which had
clearly seen better days, but nevertheless was aging amicably. It felt like
some kind of urban fossil, somewhat incongruously leftover from the 1960s, with rotary dial telephones, Thermos flasks of hot green tea, and crocheted cotton place
mats on the bedstands of its tiny but homely rooms. It was a quaintly eccentric
place, like something out of a Kawabata novel perhaps. On one occasion when I
was staying there in 2004, I was surprised by an unexpected occurrence when I awoke one morning and
went to use the tightly-compact, little bathroom. It remains
one of my most abiding and amusingly odd memories of that now long-gone hotel.
In the strange old hotel,
suddenly hot water
flows from the cold tap.
