kiddie-pool lockdown
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Today Tokyo is on a lock-down lite, as the governor dips our collective toe into the concept of a locked-down Tokyo but without all the pesky stuff about businesses closing. I had an appointment for a hair-cut with the fellow who cut my hair for my first five years here in the city, and I decided to keep it. Some stores were closed, but by and large it was still a busy day on the trains and on the streets. I've been nearly shut in all week, only emerging for food, so I reckon I'm doing okay to "flatten the curve". Surely I can't wait for another week (I work longer hours than the barber shop is open) nor should I wait for them to put a real lock-down in effect.
My old friend Takahashi-san and I caught up as he cut my hair. Sadly he told me the news of the passing of his dear mother, who'd worked alongside him in the shop and who had done things like the shampoos and operated the neck massage gizmo (of course there's such a gizmo in this country). It was liver cancer. Which he conveyed through speaking into his phone. 肝臓がん. She died last April. If I remember I'll bring him a bottle on the anniversary. Takahashi-san is still charging ¥3000 for a hair-cut; about $39. As always, I left a ¥500 tip.
Tonight as I write this I'm eating lentils and rice with a bit of one of the grocery store's last onions (all of the green onion was gone, along with almost all of the dried ramen (seriously, that shit is not good for your health, a young man died of malnutrition eating nothing but that crap)), some sweet chili sauce and some oyster sauce. I polished it off and am going back for more. Today was a day of three grocery stores; the one in Gotanda where I first learned to shop for groceries appears to have changed hands and undergone a substantial re-design but what I noticed most is that virtually all of the rice and all of the pasta was gone. I picked up a package of four "premium" toilet rolls, the first I've seen in this country and the second-to-last package in the store. The second - in Mizonokuchi, the "mouth of the gulley" - turned out to be a bit of a high-end outfit with short queues and a lot of really nice stuff; I wound up buying a small and expensive but totally worth-it roast beef prepared meal for "lunch" which I ate at three. They had the best drug store I can recall seeing in this country, with about thirty types of eye drops for instance. I'll definitely be going back.