sometimes it snows in March
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Early this morning I ran over to the dry cleaner's and picked up my suit. It was raining a fair bit, of course, and I was jumpy but I got the suit back without it getting wet/ruined. On the way I spotted two or three dry cleaner's that were closer.
Then I took the Nambu line all the way down to Kawasaki, the seat of the ward by the same name (in which I'm living). There I spent a ridiculous amount of time shopping for two bottles of Pinot Noir. Wine is absurdly expensive here and the mall in which I was wandering turned out to have been constructed of three buildings with only a vague sense of which stores are on which floor and little rhyme or reason as to how the buildings are conjoined.
Anyway, I then made my way to Shonan on the sea. It's close to Fuji-san (which I couldn't see at all in the rain) and my friend's place was right off the beach. However, it was quite chilly and very windy and in fact it snowed at two points which shocked everyone (except the guy fresh off the plane from Canada). It was a life insurance industry gang at the get-together, except for two people who live in the building and are frenemies of my guests. Those two are in the process of moving to Canada: specifically, to Montreal. I wound up spending all my time with them and their decidedly undecided approach to this imminent relocation.
At 20:30 one of the other guests (another old friend) announced that the only remaining express train into Tokyo for the night was about to leave and that he and I would have to dash. So we did!