Shorty

August 10, 9:10 am, Tokyo

Japan may be called the land of the rising sun, but the sun certainly sets early around here, and I am not a night person. Nevertheless, as the days begin to grow shorter, and dusk comes at 6:45, I have had no choice but to come home more often under the cover of darkness. A couple of days ago, as I was walking from the station to the bike parking building, I heard the tell tale screeches and moans of a slowly starting train. I was going parallel to the tracks, separated only by a mesh fence up to my upper arm and three lines of barbed wire that reached just above my head. The train was to my left, not a hundred feet away, and it towered over the surrounding night. It was lit on the inside, but there were no passengers, giving the impression that the train was groaning of its own accord, under its own weight, not tethered to a power line but given to its own snake-like disposition.
As I biked back home, I looked around at my neighborhood. The night, strange enough, hadn’t changed the place; it was the same sort of medium pace one would expect from an urban sprawl neighborhood during the day, except that the neon, what little there was out here, had turned on, bathing familiar blocks in waves of green and orange. People were still going to the large supermarket in the same volume, as could be seen from the filled bike racks. The only reactions people had made to the night were the pedal powered lights on their bikes; powered up, they would blind oncoming bikers, which I suppose was better than not knowing anyone was coming at all.
Life strides ahead in Tokyo, no doubt, no matter what hour of the day.