I will tell you only small things, and from them you will assemble some larger truth, in time, when you have collected enough of them. I know that you can do this.

Holed up in a temporary apartment on my first and second days, peeking at Japan from my balcony, attempting to apply Enigma-machine style decoding techniques to Japanese television, I had to eat eventually, and I gave in around 10am on the second day. I was hoping for some breakfast, but I soon found myself to be fucking hopeless in Japanese convenience stores, and I wound up with a pseudo-orange drink and some semi-barbecued potato chips. That was fine. It could have come off a lot worse, as it did a few days later, when I inadvertently bought a ham sandwich that I swear was deliberately disguised to look like an egg sandwich. (Seriously. There was a ring of egg salad around the outside of the bread, and a sneaky strip of ham on the inside.) There was a plastic bundle wrapped around the neck of the orange drink. Inside was a small plastic statue of a monkey sitting on a plate of spaghetti and lobster tail, opening a clam and looking quite disappointed to find an omelette inside. The inscription on the base of the statue read WORLD MASTERPIECE THEATER II.

I have no internet access at home. I am writing this from an internet cafe on the sixth floor of a shaky warehouse (where the elevator only goes up to the fifth floor), a building surrounded by hip-hop clothing stores and the ubiquitous tiny noodle shops, each with its own handful of silent Japanese men in suits, where even one so cheeky as I does not get the impression he should entertain thoughts of entrance. My actual place of residence is many miles away in Juso, the red light district of Osaka, which is right around the corner from Friendly Street and Very Friendly Street. A building simply entitled "Diary of a Nurse" is nearby. In three days of residence, my roommate Adam is the only other white man I've seen.

Today, while trying to find this place, I saw a woman with a shirt that read THIS BIG NEW WAVE HAS ME VERY EXCITED ABOUT THE FUTURE.