On October 14, 2024, I watched Perfect Days from Wim Wenders. It made me want to write about Japan. That’s when I started this text, which I’m only now, months later, finishing. I still haven’t managed, since my return, to open this box, nor properly define this project. This desire. The truth is, there’s so much to say that the very idea of putting impressions, sensations and memories down on paper seems to me too vast, too complicated, inevitably lacking in something. Inevitably biased.

There’s a kind of fascination that has carried me since I first set foot in this country. Seeing the five letters of Tokyo written on the edge of a large book lying in my bookcase is like a balm, a secret, as if I now possessed a special knowledge, as if a piece of this city belonged to me and knowing it, experiencing it, gave me infinite pleasure, a wave of warmth, gratitude, happiness, even, perhaps. Tokyo. There’s a grace in reading this word, pronouncing it, associating images with it. Night, day, light, wind, horizon, air, neon lights, noise, crowds, calm, emptiness.

I then wanted to write about Tokyo, and I didn’t know how to start there either. I couldn’t know what I wanted to say about it. I’d like Japan to be always within me, present in each of my texts, in each of my pictures, I’d like it to be the recurring and perpetually renewed setting of my stories. Maybe that’s why I’m afraid to tell it. I’m afraid of loosing my backdrop, of saying too much and having nothing left to say to enhance a piece of life, to enliven my stories. Afraid of not doing it justice.

I was drained when the plane landed. I feared I had no energy left to give or receive. An empty reservoir, or maybe a reservoir overfilled, nourished by so many images, so many emotions, after almost seven months of travel, living abroad, meeting new people, and six consecutive weeks of road tripping, first on New-Zealand’s South Island then in Australia. A thousand times I thought I’d loose my capacity for marvel. Of not being able to plenty enjoy things. Would I become this ungrateful person who’d ruin herself the chance she gave herself to experience something beautiful and fabulous?

Then I stepped onto the airport’s burgundy carpet, decorated with light spots picturing cherry blossom petals. It was at this moment than I began to realize where I was. Japan was written on the screens. There were sakuras on the floor. The day was turning blue outside.

I was in Japan. 

The train took me to Asakusa, passing over the empty streets of Tokyo. As far as the eye could see, it stretched out. A wave of brown and grey, mineral and pale in the blue hour of the morning. The sky was a matte satin sheet, oscillating between parma and ethereal blue, a softness shaping the buildings in its image. I glimpsed the white signs on the ground, a few bicycles braving the biting cold of dawn, lengths of electric wire, flying over the world’s largest city, my eyes glued to the outside, when they weren’t glued to the screen displaying the next stops. I feared I’d made a mistake. I’d let three trains go by at the airport, afraid they’d take me to the wrong place.

It was sunny when I set foot in Asakusa. I crossed a bridge, a river, and every particle of life fascinated me. From then on, every particle of life, of fabric, of concrete, would fascinate me.

Talking about Tokyo can’t be done all at once. Nor can it be done completely. It’s a place – as perhaps all places are – that is first and foremost experienced. You have to feel the energy circulating and hear the curious silence that inhabits the streets, where you’d expect to be drowned out by an uninterrupted stream of cars, movements, shouts, roars. Of course there’s fury and hustle and bustle. But they’re concentrated, and you can easily avoid them, easily escape from them and go back to the river, go back to the sky and to a kind of horizon, the emptiness, on all sides, of residential alleys in which you walk on the pavement, on a sidewalk that doesn’t exist. 

Of Tokyo, one must say the geometry and textures, that are a marvel for the grasping eye. It’s not easy to capture this in pictures, because everything happens in the subtlety of the serendipity: being there at the right moment, in the right light and in the right angle, to perceive the fine bond between architecture and space, which gives facades a velvety or sparkling or profound or moving aspects. It happens all the time. It’s not a privilege for the lucky ones, but you have to pay attention.
You don’t come here to stick with what you know anyway. When you arrive in Japan, you must accept to undress. Put down your beliefs and habits, accept that your conception of beauty and harmony will evolve, and prepare to be unsettled, overwhelmed, fascinated. I still wonder how there can be so many similarities between their cities and ours, so much familiarity in certain aspects of life, and so many differences at the same time. 

The hostel I’d booked for the first week was in Asakusa, on the other side of Sumida river, where you can find the iconic Tokyo Skytree (which I didn’t visit, by the way). I thought one week in Tokyo was the minimum to immerse properly. I hadn’t spent two days in the city I knew already I’d have to come back. Asakusa turned out to be a good base camp. Well served by transport, far from the bustling vibes of Shibuya and Shinjuku, more authentic and welcoming than Ginza. As I arrived early in the morning, I could spend the first day strolling around, gradually familiarizing myself with the neighborhood, and with the Japanese ambiance.

The major landmark of Asakusa is the Sensō-ji temple, the city’s oldest Buddhist temple. It was barely 10am and hundreds of people were already crowding on its immense esplanade. I remember of a cold sun, a very clear sky and the sound of boxes filled with sticks that visitors were shaking to draw their fortune. This ritual is called omikuji. If the prediction is good, you keep the paper. If it’s bad, you tie it to a tree branch to ward off the bad luck. Not having a 100-yen coin yet, I couldn’t do it. But I promised myself I wouldn’t leave Japan without having drawn, somewhere, the prediction of my fortune. 

Despite the majestic beauty of this temple, its huge gate and its alley lined with lanterns and stalls, what I preferred in Asakusa was the streets. A maze of clean and clear cobblestones, taking us through various eras and atmospheres. Here, a beautiful modern delicatessen full of intriguing dishes, there, a very small traditional restaurant; here, a kimono shop, there, the giant Uniqlo of the district. From behind a fence, you can hear children shouting and metallic rails heavily clattering : this is the sound of the little Hanayashiki fairground, known to be the oldest amusement park of the entire country. 

The wind blows in violent gusts, frantically waving the pennants, lanterns and noren that adorn the storefronts. But business doesn’t stop, terraces fill up and colors invade the alleyways, as the city awakens to life. One sweeps one’s doorstep with an old straw broom, one eats soup and meat out of a giant pot on folding picnic tables set up in the street, as if one was in a garden for Sunday lunch. Bicycles hang motionless on the sun’s rays. Facades are made of wood.

In Asakusa, normal life and the imaginary world we are building around Tokyo collide. And if you forget for a second the horde of tourists concentrated around the temple, normal life prevails. And that, I think, is what I loved the most. 

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