Osaka

Upon purchasing the bus ticket from Hiroshima to Osaka regret and defeat instantly shot to my core. Should I have tried t risk the storm and hitch hiked? My regrets were intensified after the first 30 minutes of the bus ride. I hadn't talked to that many people while trekking around Hiroshima. I was on a mission to see some sights and veered from the bars where people tend to open up, usually too much. It became clear that I wasn't going to meet anyone on the bus either. I was in a single seat in an inconvenient location as most people were taking their chance to rest their eyes on the 4 hour trip.

I missed the thrill of people reaching beyond their comfort zone to interact with a stranger. While hitch hiking it seemed natural and welcome to get to know the person you were traveling with; people on the bus were much more drawn into themselves, distant, far from the present moment.

I did take the time to read a book given to me by my friend Jonathan just before he left Japan for Missouri. After Dark by Haruki Murakami tackles Murakamis usual themes: love, alienation, consciousness/subconsciousness, dualities, history, and chance. Murakami gets back to the basics with this novel, keeping the characters to a minimum and writing a simple plot spiked with surrealist elements. Murakami has a talent at crafting beautiful symbolism and analogy and leaving it up to the reader to make piece together a personal meaning about the novel's mystery.

In the first chapter, Murakami gives his readers a great image, summing up large cities in Japan:

The city looks like a single gigantic creature -- or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old...the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city's moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding...wild electronic sounds; a group of college students spilling out from a bar; teenage girls with brilliant bleached hair, healthy legs thrusting out from microminiskirts; dark-suited men racing across diagonal crossings for the last trains to the suburbs...Two young police men patrol the street with tense expressions, but nobody seems to notice them. The district plays by its own rules...

This is how I remember Tokyo. Will it an accurate account or foreshadow of Osaka?