Japan: Crazy cat ladies

While on holiday in Japan, I kept a detailed series of notes in honour of Nanowrimo.  All posts about Japan comprise excerpts from my journals. 

"... This morning, I wake up thinking that I must have had a terrible nightmare.  The misty sky is slowly lifting over the city to reveal a helipad and spiral staircase on the roof of the building next to us.  My mother is sitting by the window, taking it all in.  My throat feels dry, but I am more well-rested than I have been in a while.  I slide around under the sheets a little more, then tumble into the showers and out onto the streets.

The air is cool but not too crisp and the plaza where we walked last night is bright and soft with the sound of trickling water.  In the autumn, the leaves are a delicate yellow-green.  We eat at Cafe Doutor - coffee over a marble cake and Baumkuchen.  I love the Baumkuchen, I would eat it every day for the mild fragrance of its sweetness, the fluffy way its layers peel apart.  The coffee is simple and delicious.  We eat in silence, watching men in suits go past; a boy in plaid and jeans slowly pick his order off a laminated menu.

After breakfast, the first place we go is the Calico Cat Cafe.  

I've been secretly dying to go to a cat cafe, so secretly that I didn't even know it.  I read about one somewhere online a long time ago, but the memory stayed with me.  Today, I woke up announcing, suddenly, that it was on the itinerary.  My mother is nonplussed, but agrees.  After all, we didn't make any plans this holiday and the only rule was that nothing was off limits.  

We walk down the road to the nearest cat cafe.

The whole time, my mother is grumbling about the plan.  "Fur is going to get on my clothes, so you pet the cats okay?  I'll just sit in the corner."  We get there and recognise it from the drawn silhouettes of cats plastered on the 6th floor window.  Apparently, this is one of the more popular cat cafes in town - we jam into a tiny lift with two other Japanese people who are on the same mission.  A third lady, pressed up against the wall, rolls her eyes at us and mutters something about "Neko".

On the sixth floor, we are given a rapid fire introduction by a man at the counter.  Do not wear your shoes in.  Do put on slippers.  Do wash and sanitise your hands.  Do not use flash when taking the pictures.  Do not wake up sleeping cats or drag them into your lap.  And see that black and white one?  He points to a "Wanted" poster.  Of a cat.  Do not touch her.  She bites.

My slightly asthmatic mother is already freaking out.  She grabs a mask and slaps it on.  We get ourselves cat-ready and someone opens the door to the two-storey cattery, and that's when, hoping to make a break for it, a massive grey and black cat with beautiful markings all over its back bounds out of the room.

Several things happen at once.  The cat unconcernedly sits down and starts washing itself.  The staff clap and laugh - "Oh that mischievous one!  Always trying his luck!".  But the most amazing thing that happens is that my mum goes nuts.  "Oh!  He's beautiful!  Oh, look at him, Shu!  He's beautiful!  You're so beautiful, yes you are!"

And one of the most blissed out hours I've ever spent with her commences.

I love animals, yes, but I've never quite gotten the concept of a cat cafe.  Looking around now, though, I am starting to.  The two floors are filled with all kinds of awesome ledges and boxes and cubby holes and although I only see a few cats at first, I am starting to realise that there must be more than twenty.  And they're all exceptionally good-looking from the grey short-haired tom and a permanently surprised-looking Scottish fold to the fluffy, tri-coloured beauty draped over a hollow box and a sleek, almost Egyptian feline with bright eyes.

There are shelves of books and magazine and comics, and cat toys to use on the inhabitants.  Some people clearly come here all the time to relax.  One girl totally has it down.  She's brought her own blanket, books and iPod.  As she reads, a slim, tawny cat actually snoozes in her lap.  I feel myself starting to calm down.  Every corner is a new surprise cat - a rusty tortoiseshell or a grumpy-faced Crumbs lookalike, but everyone talks in hushed voices.  The cats are beautifully clean.

My mother is going to town.  "Oh, look at you!" she is crying at a leopard-stippled grey beast.  We find a spot near the sunny windows and start taking stock of all the cats around us.  They all have names.  The little Singapura cat curled up in a basket is called Asari and it likes its paw stroked.  On the floor, there's an enormous ginger Siberian cat, twice the size of my Jack Russell, Chip.  It is raggedly majestic.  My mother finds out it is called Hatoro and starts patting it and cooing at it.  It starts purring like a phone going off and my mum looks as if she's won the lottery.

Over the hour, she keeps ripping off her mask and making me take pictures of her with various cats saying, "Quick!  Quick, this one!  I am going to make it my Whatsapp profile!"  She tells each one, "You're beautiful," and then as if afraid the others will get jealous, continues, "You're all beautiful."

I spend the last twenty minutes gently ruffling the fur of a snoozing cat of an indeterminate brown colour.  Every time I rest my hand on his flank, he sighs and sleeps deeper.  Eventually, we leave and my mother muses, "This could work in Singapore, you know."

As we step out into the sunshine, she seems to shake herself and snorts at me, "The things you make me do!"

I smile to myself.  After all, she petted more cats than I did."

Japan: Supper

In lieu of doing the whole of Nanowrimo this month, I promised myself that I would journal aggressively about my trip, documenting as much as my synapses could transmit.  I have since decided that instead of writing whole new posts about the experience, I'll just post (fresh, possibly delirious, late-night) excerpts from my journal instead.

"11:09pm, Tokyo time for now.

In the lobby of the Keio Plaza Hotel, there is a massive bank of mini cubby holes.  Each one is outfitted with tiny red and green led lights and in their prim rows, they flash like the lights on a runway.  I'm trying to work out what they mean: are all the green ones on the right signs that people are in their rooms and suitably occupied?  Using the TV?  The lights?  The bathrooms?  Making love?  Are the red ones a cry for help or a sign of malfunction?

We arrive past dinnertime; go up to put our things down in our bedroom, an otherwise regular twin bed setup with a toilet that promises to steam-cleanse the anus.  I'm tempted to try it one day.

Already, I'm feeling excited because suddenly we're free.  We can do anything we like.  We could run the streets of Shinjuku till 3am and no one could tell me otherwise.  But it's also an excitement through an odd sense of calm because I've realised why I'm here.  I'm not here to see all the sights or famous or historical things.  I'm here to try anything that calls out to me on the spur of the moment and to live.  To feel all the things I don't normally feel at home and to find stories wherever I wish.  I'm not spurred by the thought of must-sees.  I just want to experience a slice of life.

And so this first night, we decide to experience our slice of life across the road.  We cross the pedestrian crossing - "Sirty seconds only", the concierge tells us earnestly - and find ourselves in an alcove of shops and restauraunts that contains a minimart selling bits of everything and an organic bakery.  One of the cafes promises a delicious breakfast but we want dinner and so weave our way through the streets and basement alleys until we find Hanamidori, a restaurant crowded cosily with wooden tables under low light, where everyone is bent over bowls of steaming chicken hotpot.

A waiter with coffee-brown skin brings us to our table.  "No English menu", he says anxiously, but we don't care, we just point to the stuff we want.  We choose chicken hotpot and, to my delight, they have grilled mentaiko - a salty, slightly smoky cod roe still in its original sac. 

Remember that scene in Departures where the old funeral director grills puffer fish roe over a brazier?  They roll it in salt and gingerly hold the globules between their fingers before slurping them, through pursed lips.  And then the old man says, "This is so good, I hate myself."

I have been dying to replicate that scene and much to my mother's amusement, after brushing my mentaiko lightly with some lemon juice, I do.  Every nugget is a briny, gently charred morsel on my tongue.

The chicken hotpot is a performance in its own right.  At our table, the waiter, Myanmarese, gently heats a pot of unsalted stock with chunks of cooked chicken in it.

When it starts to steam, he sprinkles salt and spring onions in a shot glass and pours a ladleful of soup over them.  He gives us each a small, pure white chunk of chicken on the bone, squatting in an umami yuzu sauce.  Then, as we dutifully sip at our shotglasses, he tenderly places vegetables in the soup, rolls and dunks chicken balls from minced meat with a wooden spoon.

The last thing he puts in, after chunks of chicken meat and liver, is a thick slab of jelly (collagen?) that starts to melt almost immediately.  As it cooks down, the soup thickens, becomes delightfully fragrant and nourishing.  Inside this, the chunks of chicken are so clean and white and firm that even the fat is palatable.

We eat in silence, vegetables and meat and shotglass after shotglass of soup until my lips are slightly tacky from the richness of it.

Yuppies chain smoke cigarettes in the restaurants here, blowing plumes elegantly at the light fixtures.  One girl keeps shouting for the waitress - Sumimasennnn! - and orders so many dishes, I wonder how she will pay for them.

We leave, slightly glazed and smelling of tobacco.  The light pollution makes the 10pm air so unnaturally bright that it looks like dusk is suspended over the city.

We hit the minimart and for the first time in a long time, even though I have travelled, I feel like a complete tourist.  The little cakes in their clear plastic packaging - fat Baumkuchen and rummy marble cake, the racks of coffee in heated cans, ready for immediate consumption, even the packages of hundred yen tidbits makes me sigh and gasp.

I buy a Japanese action nail clipper (don't laugh, I'm bringing a whole bunch home for friends) and a pack of lightly puffed rice coated in a layer of chocolate so thin that it melts to nothing but a delicious aftertaste in the mouth.  We stroll back to the hotel, examine the bakery downstairs and make plans to buy a cheap fashion magazine for the free tote that is being sold with it, and then, as I'm wondering what to do with my chocolate rice puffs, we return to the room to find our last pleasant surprise of the night: hot water and a lacquer box of roasted brown rice tea.

Done, and done."

Rising sun

I'm just back from a holiday in Japan with my mother and I have to say: it was one of the best holidays I've had in years.  I ate a lot, rested a lot and got a ton of photo practice which will find it's way onto here eventually. 

This is the first time I've travelled with the aim of practising photography and I've learned several lessons.  My mother said to me one night as we were strolling in the sunset at the bay of Yokohama, "You know, sometimes we forget that we are so privileged to be able to even travel." 

And so we are.  I would love to go back one day and see all the other beautiful parts of the country, but even if I never do, I will always hold this experience dear. 

Portrait practice

Toffeenut season

So you know how I may have mentioned earlier that I navigate the seasons through Starbucks?  Well, Christmas is here.

To be precise, it landed on the 31st of October, looking and smelling like magic.  

Libby texted us frantically the night before to tell us that we were soon going to have access to Toffeenut lattes and Peppermint mochas and instead of thanking her and getting one at our nearest conveniences, someone (Kim?  Dawn?) fervently demanded that we meet at the crack of dawn the next morning to break the year long fast together.

When I realised that I had to wake up at six, I began having second thoughts about the pilgrimmage but we were all so enthusiastic about the idea that I decided not to let the group down.  And I'm glad I did.

For one thing, Starbucks had done that magical overnight thing where everything was suddenly deep red and flecked with snow.

For another, well, friends!  Whom I seldom get to see!  On a spontaneous outing!

Kim does not normally look like a ferret but this photograph was so adorable that I had to include it.  Dawn, as always, looks like she belongs in a magazine with beautiful hipsters reclining in Scandinavian interiors.

Libby finally rocked up (she is looking all fresh and glowy and relaxed in her second trimester!) and we had a gander at the beautiful Christmas merchandise.  I can't believe it's been a year since Lynette got me the awesome fox coffee mug with tail-as-handle. 

And I don't know what it is about the overpriced Starbucks cups, but the smell of melting caramel and the gleam of red-and-white enamel just get me. 

We warmed up to the morning with a ton of laughter and just a smidgen of gossip and suddenly my day was looking right as rain.  I was so glad I'd gone for drinks; it was warm, sweet, inviting and comforting... and the coffee wasn't half bad either!

PS  The rest of the afternoon was equally festive.  Sindhu, Shirin, Eddie and I dressed up in Deepavali-appropriate clothing and walked around together in the office proclaiming ourselves the Tamil-Tiggers.

Xiang Wei ran into us outside as we were taking these pictures and very sweetly and sincerely blurted, "You guys look great!"  Aww.  Attaboy.

I am going to miss spending Diwali with my colleagues.  Shirin looks doubtful about strength of minority power here, but trust me, for much of the time, we felt more or less like this:

Namaste!

Holiday!

Clockwise:  Owl beanie crocheted by my mother's friend, Delfonics pencil case from Beck!, 17 - 50mm kit lens, journal, DIY denim cutoffs, Big with 35mm prime.

This is me today, about to embark on my first real holiday in just about a year!

I know that I'll eventually wrap my mind around being excited about awesome photography opportunities and exploring, but believe it or not, right now, my mind is most embarrassingly eager to embrace some sleep.