THE MYTH OF THIS MORNING

Tuesday morning came wrapped in a fog like the one in which Japan got started way back before history, and who knew what was going to happen this time. It was far thicker than the standard fogs you see on all the folding screens, that obscures less important details of famous events; it was a MythoFog of the kind that was there when Amaterasu Omikami and her troublemaking brother got to stirring up the ocean, resulting in Japan, among other things.

The morning's similar potential was not lost on me when I set out from the house on my Mythic Motorcycle and began to roll downmountain into eternity or the morning train, whichever pertained, wending my way through what might lead to a whole other country and culture or who knows what in this day and age, nobody really bothers to intuit that stuff anymore, all the mythothings that can get started on a godly whim...

We have conventional non-mythic fogs up here all the time, living closer to and sometimes inside the clouds as we do, but when we head on down to the flatlands we soon enter clear air, morning fogs hereabouts generally being temporary affairs that evaporate soon after sunrise. This fog, though, had a lot more going on, it seemed to get more mythic as I plunged down the road into the fog of meaning, which wasn't damp like the usual fog, even though it was cold like the hand of history on your neck, with more frisson than those fogs they attempt in the horror movies or that Dickens and Bronte wrote of to such great effect, so in my head there was a Victorian quality blended with some Japanese godplay in a complexity that is hard to describe...

In brief, the portent was major. As I slowly rolled down through the deep gray and blessedly monkeyless silence (they know what's going on), curving left and right, back and forth, all the way down, something in me kept expecting some kind of mythic event. It would have been a lot harder if I didn't know the road, but even so I had to go slowly in case a Japanese deity appeared... Can you imagine the scandal of a collision with a foreigner on a motorcycle, that would be one for the holy books...

Finally I got to the station where I was not surprised to find that it too was in the fog - in fact right at the bottom of the fog - and it too was silent-- no train sounds, no announcements of delays or cancellations-- Was I really here, this was my hand before my face was it not, no sound of other people walking and talking, no godsilks rustling, there seemed to be no one around, sometimes I'd hear what could be a footstep, but who really knows in the early phase of a myth, so I locked up my bike as usual, got out my ticket, felt my way through the mist blanket to the ticketwicket, wicketed my ticket and there was no one on the other side, all was silent, wrapped in the muted strivings of the gods...

I climbed the stairs to the platform, which disappeared before me; I walked on as usual, in faith that there was a platform there, I too became invisible like the mountains in front, the whole range of mountains right there in front was invisible, and the Lake in back, the big Lake just there on the other side of the invisible platform was invisible too... We were all invisible now, a state it is well to take seriously...

In the myth of the moment I went and occupied my conventional waiting spot there at the heart of The Fog of infinite hearts, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, and there I waited in what once was time for what once was a train, but there was no train... Still no train... Then some other hopeful commuters appeared like miracles out of the fog, spiriting past me to their trainwaiting spots; we waited in our collective invisibility.

After about half an hour an announcement came vaporing out of the soup that the express train - which doesn't stop at our humble rural station - was about to come through, the one that, 10 minutes before my usual train, comes roarblasting past at 80 miles an hour only inches from the platform, quite a stimulus on a normal morning...

But I couldn't hear anything, standing there right beside the track, maybe the muffled bleat of one of the goats that lives on the property down there beside the Lake or a goddess was doing something, then came a rumbling like a giant slow pushcart grinding along a hard road and the morning express came pushing into our part of The Fog, rolling through at about grandma bicycle speed, interior all lit up in the foggy dim, the folks in the cars like passengers in an airliner going through clouds, staring out the windows with big eyes at seeing ghostly commuter figures there in the air on what must please god be a platform, waiting for a train... or maybe they were rapturing their way to heaven... Imminent myths can do that to a collective mind in transport...

Our own train finally came pushcarting out of the generative fog - it was crowded by now - stopped before us, opened its doors, took us into its light, closed its doors and rolled on slowly through vapors that diminished like the past as we grew older nearing the big city and buildings became visible; turned out that a well-developed civilization is still out there...

Need I point out that what was about to happen, mythwise, is still about to happen, fog or no fog, so be ready...

WHERE IS MY MIND?

I love it when, like last night after a long day in the office, on the train home I'm sitting among all the staid salarymen of mostly older years who live outside the city, and after listening to an elderhoodly interesting podcast on history or science I suddenly have a craving for some mindscouring tunerush so I dive into for example the Pixies' Surfer Rosa, one of my dozens of top 10 albums ever, with Bone Machine for starters, get down, and Where Is My Mind not long after, whoa, I crank it UP, let's wail, and all at once the nearer heads turn to see what that odd new tiny pounding and screaming noise is, and wonder why those little drumsounds and microriffs are squealing out of my silverhaired head as factoids of puzzlement begin crawling all over their faces: what is this casually dressed, ponytailed elder with two gold earrings listening to?

Other earphoners my age are mellowing out to classical music perhaps, or maybe golden oldies from the Heian era, some koto tunes, catchy J-pop items of the 1930s or kabuki music, who knows, I can't hear it, but you can bet your last guitar pick they ain't listening to anything like the Pixies, who rule this particular train.

"Where is my mind, where is my mind, wheeeeere is my mind...
Waaaaay out on the water, see it swimming..."

Total.

***

In which connection, a GenX take on this reality:
Why Our Parents Were Cooler Than We Are Now
When They Were Our Age

TRUE DESTINATIONS

Some folks still think of life in the old-fashioned way, as a river flowing to a majestic sea, or as a long open highway leading to a wondrous destination, and either metaphor can still capture in a sort of word-amber what is becoming an increasingly packaged process. I can't help it; even though I don't commute much anymore, I still tend to get systematic.

I realize now that back in my commuter days, after commuting for only a short while I subconsciously began to view life, modern life, modern urban life, ok, my modern urban life, as more like a loop line. There was something manically repetitive about it, something worryingly cookiecutteresque, and every day I felt more and more like a cookie but it wasn't my recipe.

There was an unfamiliar aroma to my future, an artificial flavor I couldn't help sensing when I crowded onto the line and began my daily loop, soon falling asleep from the carbon dioxide level and waking up to look out the window only for the name of the station to see if this was where I was supposed to go, it was only a name I was supposed to go to, could have been any name on the line, depended on where the corporation was.

For a while it was one name, then I changed offices and it was a different name, there was something accumulatively deweydecimal about it, a catalog of places into which I was filing my numbered days, all linked by a macrocosmic infrastructure that took me where I had to be and then took me home again, whichever way I went.

It can take a lifetime to leave the loop line, if you ever get to want to. Lives lived in a standard place (however eclectic) at a standard pace (however frenetic) acquire a virtual quality, the buildup of habit and pattern and repetition forming layer upon layer of time after time slipping by, chronically laminating over the actual life until it resembles a sculpture standing on a platform waiting for a streetcar.

Time isn't as big as we think. Fortunately I didn't set out on this career thing until rather late in life, so I only commuted for a comparatively brief while until I departed for the countryside and the joys of actual solitude, part of which joy is talking aloud to yourself, finding out what kind of a conversationalist you really are, confronting the vast secrets to which you carry the keys. It can only happen off the loop line, where you wake into a morning like when you were born, and go out into the fresh new world with true destinations in your eyes.

(Mostly as published in Kyoto Journal #49)

WEARING MUSICIANS

I'd refrained for years from using portable music while commuting to Osaka and back, not because nobody my age on my train has an iPod or wears earbuds in public, but because I couldn't bear the thought of experiencing rush hour from the glory level of Coltrane, or of being pinned against train windows with Nine-Inch Nails; it would be unbearable to crush through the business district with Satie; heartbreaking to arrive at my office with Concrete Blonde.

The germ of those misgivings was my fear that the sudden contrast between the ecstatic heights in my head and the actual pits of the day would too painfully expose the irrhythmic nature of the quotidian; that with such measures of grandness going through my mind I would find naked reality even harder to appreciate than before I began wearing musicians.

But as soon as I got back from the US with my new music-filled iPod and plugged in - or plugged out, rather - I found that I needn't have worried. Plowing through fellow Osaka rush hour contestants with the help of The Pixies, or shouldering through wickets with the Chet Baker quartet gives the mundane that surrealistic quality it's always needed, transforming a humdrum commute into a suitably bizarre art form.

And having all those stellar personas right there in my head to rhythm me through it all, shrinking hours of commuting competition into minutes of playtime, drowning train announcements in Muddy Waters, blanketing shrieking infants with the Mothers of Invention - idealizing the quotidian - is basically what art is all about anyway, isn't it?

And in this state of technoschizophrenia, hearing a music that no one else hears, tapping my feet to rhythms unsensed by those around me, lip-syncing with voices from other dimensions, walking to the beat of a different drummer as it were, I view the commuting scenario as a very zany movie by a top director with a sense of humor much like my own, to which this is the masterfully shuffled soundtrack; and I can walk out of the theater anytime, is the unreal mood.

And amidst the tyranny of transit, suddenly there are choices: Red Hot Chili Peppers, or train through tunnel? Thirty-three garbled public announcements or the Talking Heads? The guy next to me coughing for an hour or Radiohead? To say there is no contest is to say that the sun shines in the daytime.

Although the choice is clear, and distinguishes this virtual fugue state from true schizophrenia, it is uplifting to be a madman manque: to watch the commuter hordes massively lemminging down the station stairs to I Wish I Was a Catfish is to see by a strange and welcome light.

I hit 'pause,' turn instinctively to a fellow commuter to share this vision and am met with the lemming look, when I realize that base reality is in fact largely uninhabited at this time of day; so I flip back out and follow the lemming crowd, but not nearly as really as I used to; actually, I'm on my way to one of the many potential heavens I've just begun to realize there are: a company meeting at which my boss will sing Heroin exactly like Lou Reed.

THE GAME

The kid in the grade school uniform gets on the train in the mornings as part of the crowd and maneuvers expertly to be the first to stand beside the only guy in the car who will be getting off at the next stop, making the seat available. This is commuting 101, but somehow every day the kid beats all the experienced grownups.

At first I thought: that kid is on the ball for his age, he's figured out the Game already, he bests all the professional commuters who get on at the same station and who, despite the fact that they take the train every day, don't seem to be paying attention, never seem to become aware that this guy in the seat next to me always gets off at the next stop after they get on, so they could quickly have a seat all the way to BigCity.

The kid runs sometimes to beat others to the spot, or just gets to the station early so he can be at the head of the boarding line, but even then he runs to stand beside the seat to be certain to get it first as soon as it's vacated, and if for some reason he isn't first he slowly maneuvers until he is; he's small, and none of the big people notice him wedging his way in there. He's only eight or nine, but he's already an ace at the game, the big folks standing all the way while he gets the seat next to me and plays a video game, reads a comic book until it's time for him to get off and go to school.

At first I had to admire him for his skill at the game at his age, how that skill would stand him in good stead as he commuted through life, but the more I thought about it the darker it got. This is no way for a kid to live, these are not the things a kid should strive for and weave the fabric of his being from, no way for a kid to learn or to grow up, already getting good at the Game among all these dour faces.

But maybe it's me, maybe it's just because I never liked the Game. When I was a kid, I disliked just about every aspect of the Game, from uniforms and schedules, rules and rote manners, upward to suits and ties and getting ahead, rungs up the ladder to higher income before I outgo; making connections, getting in the right places, knowing the right people, making the right career moves and so on, keeping my true opinions to myself so that the "prizes" would be mine, but for some reason they never appealed to me, those prizes, any more than the whole endeavor did; so, beyond getting into and out of college for the sake of the knowledge - not the career path - I never played the Game, never got wrapped up in it at any stage. So I suppose that colors my thoughts.

This kid is trapped though. He is deep in the Game already, so deep in it and so good at it that as he grows into the Big Who of himself he'll be one of the best around, may never have an inkling that there is a profound and genuinely meaningful alternative, let alone find the ability to break away into a world where he can fully exist - he'll learn nothing of that from school or dogma, peers or society... He may well spend his life on such demeaning tasks as being first in one line or another, on weighing the worth of his life in mean scales...

In time, he will perhaps acquire a professional command of mediocrity, like so many of today's politicians. He may look back over his life and passively wonder what it is that's missing from that perfectly straight line he has traced with his being-- unless somehow he finds the power to take his own direction, follow his own lead, though that gets less likely every day he notches up a small, dark victory. Perhaps video games will be his doorway...

Later I came across this article in the Chicago Times that had this subtitle: "Defying the group is a noble, necessary American tradition." In it was this line: "Once upon a time, each American's objective was to become an individual."

COMMUTER MEDALISTS

Even though commuting involves the highest degrees of skill, grace, finesse, endurance and discipline, it is not officially recognized as an Olympic event, for reasons I'll get into in a moment.

No doubt the Olympic Committee, in its top-secret meetings, has considered commuting as perhaps a decathlon-like event, given the multiplicity of skills involved, but they've continued to leave it out of the Olympics not only because of the transient and mobile nature of commuting, but primarily because the Japanese commuter squad would take the gold every time, so what would be the point? Olympic events must at least be competitive.

Having been a twig on the torrent of commuter Olympics here in Japan for some 30 years now, I thought I'd just share with you some of the amazing highlights from over the decades, limited only to my own experience, of course. You other commuters can start your own Commuter Olympic blogs.

This morning, for example, I saw the best Speedslip I have ever seen, the epitome of graceful headlong haste under pressure, while we were stopped briefly at a busy station along the line. From my expertly obtained window seat near the middle of the car, I could see a blurry young man broken-field-running his way through a tightly organized crowd up above, along the walkway leading to the crowded stairs down to the crowded platform we were stopped at: he was attempting to reach this train before the doors closed.

He was a good 30 or 40 yards away as the crow flies, with thousands of world-class defense players and a jammed stairway in between, with but a few seconds left before the doors would close, the train would leave the station without him and the next train would make him late for work (a small death in Japan), so he went for it full-out, running the field with briefcase through a rush hour crowd of defenders with their own briefcases, some of them even had those deadly pull suitcases on wheels that trail invisibly behind the apparently unencumbered player; he was moving fast, against the stream, the buzzer sounded, he was dodging, he was whirling, briefcase swinging, his body was turning, a couple of awesome feints, a record-breaking leap and then he was bounding down the upward disgruntled passenger-filled stairs, the doors were already closing would he make it, a fullbody bound across the platform, a mid-air turn sideways, he Speedslips between the foot-apart-and-closing doors that swish shut behind him - without messing his tie or moving a hair on his head - and takes his rightful place in the carjam. He's good for the gold , if you ask me; I haven't seen that much commuting skill, all in one person, in quite a while.

A couple of other Commuter Olympic highlights:

Most people fit into a 250 passenger car: Sept 14, 1973, Tokyo Station. The white-gloved pushers were working overtime, it was evening rush hour, I was on that train, a lovely young woman and I were pressed chest to chest, she looking over my right shoulder, I looking over hers, she smelled real good. Though the results were unofficial, being mine, I estimated that that 250 passenger capacity car held about 75,000 passengers for the requisite five or more stops; a standing record, I believe.

Other Olympic qualifiers and personal aspects in this unsung nationwide competition:

Complete makeup application dash

Eldest gold medalist

Righteous Inyerfacing

Becoming a Train Legend

THE RATTLER

I have previously chronicled the two main genuses of the Japanese train-commuting species, Weasels and Turtles, and have touched upon some of the families thereof that I've encountered in my years on trains here in this nation of delicate politeness and consideration everywhere other than on trains.

I've mentioned the Snuffler, the Bricklayer, the Cosmetic, the Scarfer and the Thumper, among others, but today I will address a new family of commuter I've encountered before but until my commute this morning had somehow overlooked as a true taxonomic family that can sit or stand on its own: the Rattler.

This morning I first had a Thumper sitting next to me (Thumpers are almost always men), the kind who treats the newspaper like an enemy, folds it in half lengthwise, then crosswise, then down to the size of the article he wishes to read, at each fold thumping the paper like a catcher's mitt, then having read the article he unfolds and rethumps his way to the next article, all the loooong way through the paper. The worst part is when he hits the sports section and all the pent-up wannabe kicks in.

I can't read or doze off when one of this family is sitting next to or looming over me, for obvious reasons. To any smart aleck who would say well why don't you just tune it out, I would respond by saying why should I have to? If such people attended zen meditation at a temple they'd be tossed out on their ears. Peace and quiet are public property, after all.

When the Thumper had mangled the silence for several stops he got off and was replaced by the Rattler. The conventional rattler is an upper middle-aged or older woman, who boards the train carrying at least three plastic shopping bags (less than three is a lower order: the Rustler), plops them all on her lap (after sitting next to me; seats next to foreigners are usually the last to fill) and at once begins to rearrange all the contents of all the bags into some cryptic order. The sound is that of a large polyvinyl waterfall of random flow volume. It is difficult to remain inattentive to a plastic Niagara beside you.

This morning though, it was not a woman, it was a man, the first male Rattler in my experience. Not quite elderly yet, but already manifesting the all-alone-in-the-universe quality that is the special province of those who have aged long enough. Anyway, he had at least four bags (beyond three, they tend to blend together), one of which was filled with bottled drinks and one with convenience-store onigiri. The other bags held other stuff, Rattler accessories perhaps.

As soon as he sat next to me he began rearranging the contents of the bags, as per the taxonomic rules, taking out each cellophane-wrapped onigiri, squeezing, turning and rattling it to see what kind it was - as soon as he dug out his glasses from one of the other stuff bags - then finally chose which onigiri he wanted to eat first, put all the others back with an extended rattling flourish, then tried to figure out how to open the onigiri (each one opened the same complex way, but to him they were all different).

He opened each one in turn, after peering again at the others, as before, then wrestled for 5 minutes or so with the one he had selected, emanating a sound that put me in mind of a cat scrambling around in a dumpster full of potato chip bags. He then ate each onigiri with publicly shared oral satisfaction, now and then stopping to clear his teeth by sucking or blowing air through them, bursts of sibilance that went interestingly with the rattling overtone.

Though he was a small man, about my age but probably half my size, he ate onigiri all the way from Kyoto to Osaka, four of them (I can never eat more than two), all in the same manner, then crunched down all the wrappers in a trash bag he whipped out from a bagful of bags among the other bags. A Rattler of the first order.

I look forward morosely to discovering new orders on our commuting family tree.

SOME THINGS I SAW THIS MORNING

Saw a high school girl on the train platform, alone there among all the suited older males, practicing her cheerleader moves without restraint or the slightest embarrassment. More major changes ahead for Japanese culture.

Saw a veteran commuter guy on the train who carefully positioned a folded handkerchief under his chin before allowing his head to totally loll forward and great quantities of large Zs to pour forth. A real pro.

Saw a ten-year old schoolgirl on the train staring wide-eyed at the foreign man with the long white hair. Having never seen such a thing before, she had trouble believing her eyes. She stared intently and unabashedly, therefore, until her convictions were once again in order and all in her world became normal again, including me.

At the terminus, saw the "Free Hugs!" girl again, alone this time, no takers visible, her sign now dogeared, her benevolence undimmed, a walking beam of sunshine.

THE FUTURE OF THE COMMUTING SPECIES

I've always thought of the morning route I take through the train station in the Big City with the rest of the rush hour crowd as a kind of subcivilized gauntlet through which one must shoulder one's way, angling for the narrow opening to the street so as to get ahead in the mob, all the while keeping an eye out for tangential time-crazed rushers swinging heavy, sharp-angled briefcases, dawdlers pulling invisibly behind them those deadly lowdown suitcases on wheels, or any of the other myriad threats to life and limb when everything's wild - and then on rainy days, fate tosses in those suddenly slippery floors - overall, what you might call defensive commuting.

That was until recently, when the station masters finally opened the newly renovated section, which offers two wide and bright new corridors with safety floors right next to the old, dimly lit and slippery corridor, whose narrow opening is endlessly fed by rapids of rush from trains, streets and subways.

No longer would rush-hour commuters experience the venturi effect as wide humanstreams were abruptly funneled into an opening for three abreast! Now there was new space, brightness, safer floors and faster egress staring the mob right in the face-- yet they continued to take the same old dingynarrowcrowded route as always!

When I took the new and spacious corridors for the first time last week, only two other people were in there with me; ahead of us the mob streamed on as before, right past the new openings-- elbowing, edging, racing, fighting for place, when if they took the new routes right in front of them they could have strolled as they liked: casually or quickly, run at top speed, even pirhouetted their way through with arms akimbo and briefcases whirling, if they felt like it, without colliding with another person. It's been a couple of weeks now, and still there's only a couple of people and me using the new corridors; the crowd continues to funnel into the dark narrow opening with the slippery floors!

Which is ok by me in my luxurious private walkway, but I can't help thinking that this does not bode well for the future of humanity.

RUPERT FINALLY GETS IT

The nickle finally dropped for Rupert Murdoch regarding the demise of the printed newspaper, which as I've said I will not lament, especially when everyone gets their daily news fix from sleek little handhelds, as opposed to, for example, the woman beside me on the train this morning who as I was nodding off in cozy modern commuter comfort actually made a quite passable tambourine out of her daily gazette, beating it to the tune of When the Saints Come Marching In I think it was, trumpets, tuba and bass drum not required.

As to the tambourine technique, you have to have been in Japan and seen the way train commuters read their newspapers, using the street version of fast Fourier transformation (reducing the number of computations needed for N points from 2N² to 2N lg N, where lg is the base-2 logarithm). This method was developed way back when commuters were advised to leave their sweaters at the office so as to make more room on the trains.

Under such literally social pressure, the commuters fold their open newspaper further in half lengthwise, then crosswise and so on till it is down to the size of the article they wish to read - overhead, if need be - complexly unfolding and refolding several meter-square surfaces a few hundred times or so in a complex newsy-noisy origami that wasn’t particularly bothersome back in the days when everyone was standing and rocking together on the way to work anyhow, but now that the trains are bigger and there’s more room and spacious seats in which to doze off, the pros still fold their papers the old way, as the woman next to me did this morning - such a petite woman, could jump in the ring with any pro folder...

GETTING HOME

You've been working in Osaka for a couple of weeks now, commuting from Kyoto and back each day, a distance of some 60 kilometers, and you've learned a few basics of the fine art of Japanese commuting. You've experienced firsthand the relentless and dedicated pursuit of the objective, the fearless defiance of odds against. Already it is clear that the innocent foreigner, in his rigid territoriality, his righteous sense of individual liberty, is no match for this mass progress. You perceive that few Western governments have ever understood this.

At first the movements of the individuals in the station mass had seemed to be random in nature; this misjudgment stemmed from both your ignorance regarding the higher laws of Japanese commuting and your indignation at the repeated violation of your personal territory. Your indignation waned, however, as you surrendered to the support of the crowd that twirled you along like a twig, when you began to grasp said higher laws and the truly impersonal nature of mob satori.

So today you've left the office only seconds after 5:30, to give yourself a reasonable chance of success in this event. Yesterday you almost had a seat, but it was the wrong train. This time, to make sure, you double-check the schedule before purchasing your ticket, wasting precious seconds while the pass-carrying professionals shimmy and elbow fluidly around you, seeking superior pole positions in the platform lines upstairs, all in obedience to Japan's highest law of commuting: if you see empty space, occupy it.

The competitive tension returns now in a rush of adrenalin as you spot an old lady shuffling ruthlessly toward the wicket you're heading for: no contest. First blocking your latter leg sharply with her cane at shin level, she mounts your advanced instep and shoulders you back a notch, shopping bag then ballasting her neatly through the wicket, leaving you stunned with her expertise.

She waddles off toward the escalator. No way: you lope for the stairs with a youthful stride, taking the steps two at a time, leading the old lady by about 4 lengths at the top, where three lines are feasible: which is shortest, which looks most professional? As you pause to decide, the old lady moves out like a tank from the top of the stairs. Not a chance: go for it. Dashing forward, dodging the lost and the hesitant, you round the guide rail, lope confidently toward the end of the shortest line just as the old lady slips her brick-filled shopping bag into the space and scuttles deftly under the rail to take her place in front of you, a benign smile playing about her wrinkled lips.

Immune to your microwaves of indignation, she stands solidly in pole position 12; no window seat for you; but still, a chance for a seat. It is the way, you reflect, of elderly women in this country to grab their rights at last, if needs be from naive and sentimental foreigners. Moreover, it is all impersonal; you yourself are not the object of these buffetings, these defeats; it is merely your physical manifestation that must suffer them. No need therefore to steam with indignation like this, a costly drain of energy not to be borne every day. Thus one learns--still, that twinge of the instep, that sting of the shin, the abruptness and heft of that shopping bag--preoccupied, you are pushed with sharp discretion from behind: the train has come in.

Now the game is afoot! The rules that govern polite behavior in this nation of casehardened courtesy are now temporarily suspended en masse as the higher laws of commuting merge with anarchy. What count now are position, power, agility, speed, relentlessness, elbows, knees, hips, feet shoulders, boarding tools (umbrellas, canes, bags, rolled newspapers etc.) and impersonalness.

Age or infirmity mean little in this arena, and the old lady knows it. She's off and shoving like a bouncer the moment the train doors open, cane and bag plying the legs of laggards, fending off those who would gain--but the other line, into the back of the car, is moving faster! Two rank amateurs at the front of your line have cost precious seconds being polite; now someone carrying a cello case is blocking the aisle (mental note: keep an eye out for large musical instruments in future lines) and four housewives are debating where to sit, as if this were a social occasion!

The housewives are tossed to the nether regions as the cello comes unstuck with a violent jerk, nearly felling the old lady. The thought pleases you. She pauses to recover: a flaw in her style, to be taken advantage of with daring speed. No contest after all. You feint impersonally by her in a graceful double-gainer half-twist one-legged commuter leap--a single aisle seat just there--the last: get out of the way, for--an arm shoots by, resembling something made long ago of a hard, dark wood, plumps a bag of bricks down on the very seat and is followed at dazzling speed by the old lady, who has trumped you at the finish...

You stand all the way back to Kyoto, among the amateur commuters blasted by wind from the windows, fighting for balance on the 50-minute ride, the old lady beside you sleeping blissfully, bag of bricks in her lap. But you are not indignant. There is no ire, no umbrage. You go over it all again, analyzing your moves, reviewing the moves of the pros, finding out where you went wrong: not relentless enough--an elbow just then would've--could've been faster with the shoulder; have to learn that trick with the knee--cane countermove--shopping bag defense--practice at home tonight--all impersonal--thus you ramble your way back to Japan's ancient capital.

Though still just a novice, you have learned much today, and will do even better tomorrow. Sooner or later you'll get a seat; in time, you might even be up to a crack at the old lady. She wakes up now, end of the line; you stand back to watch her get off, study her technique as she forges hydraulically forward, toppling men twice her size. Relentless. Awesome.

And now for the bus.

[Earlier version published in Kyoto Journal No. 4]