“Sharp edges have been blunted and whole sections have collapsed: periods and places collide, are juxtaposed or are inverted… Some insignificant detail belonging to the distant past may now stand out like a peak, while whole layers of my past have disappeared without trace.”
Claude Lévi-Strauss
25th of July, Tokyo to Satte
Off we went! Past Tokyo’s golden turd, through its endless suburbs (and endlessly appealing little shops and cafes), to the Edo River Cycling Road, which we followed almost all the way to the small town of Satte.
The main attraction that morning was not, as I would have hoped, some grand scenery or newly discovered snack. It was a set of public toilets. Two little white round buildings, dotted with round coloured glass, in a retro-future-gender-clichéd vibe, all pink inside for women and blue for men. I remember it perfectly — or so I thought. In reality there was a third structure, with green glass, unmissable in the middle of the other two, yet so completely wiped off my memory that, even in the face of photographic evidence, I can’t place it back in.
At the time, it was inconceivable to me that I might ever forget a single moment of the experience, so I didn’t bother keeping a diary. I should have known better, of course, given the brain’s capricious inclinations. Sometimes I amuse myself thinking of it and its attitude towards my memories as similar to Google’s in my phone’s Photos app.
Our dog has food allergies, and one of the ways I keep track of his digestive health is by taking pictures of his poop when it looks a bit off. You get where this is going, right? Every time I open the Photos app in search of some important piece of information I screenshot, or something cute to send someone, Google serves me, absolutely unrequested, “Featured memories”. Collections such as “3 years since…”, “2 years ago”, or “Spotlight on a day”. Sometimes there’s even a cheerful “New collage!”. Of dog poop. Forget the thousands of pictures of epic landscapes and beautiful moments in my albums. Left to its own devices (no pun intended), the app will often choose literal crap over beauty.
Not only that, but the sheer volume of experiences we were going through daily made the smudging of memories, sometimes to the point of erasure, inevitable. I’ve been trying to mitigate some of that by scavenging past the poop (real and metaphorical), through my photos and the chaos of my notes app, texts, emails and voice messages, some so long Manu took to calling them podcasts. Can’t say it hasn’t been lovely, surprising even, these encounters with my past self.
By lunchtime, we were obviously starving, and also needed to hide from the increasing heat. This was my sixth time in Japan and Hugo’s third, so we knew any old hole in the wall would do — I don’t think I’ve ever had a bad meal anywhere in the country. Still, we reached for our phones and opened Maps.me, a move that betrayed our beginner’s insecurity, a sense of everything being so very new, we didn’t think to rely on our own knowledge.
There was a single restaurant marked on the map in our vicinity, in a town close to the river, and it was, unsurprisingly, perfect: free iced tea and cold towel as soon as we sat down, as is customary, then cold noodles with raw egg and silken tofu for me and some meat and rice for Hugo.
The decor was exactly the sort of idiosyncrasy that endears Japan to me so much. In an otherwise regular looking restaurant, a plasticky Mickey and Minnie Mouse mat lined one of the sitting platforms, under cherry blossom cushions. A wall featured a noodle-slurping Hello Kitty and another a giant Rolex, wrist band and all. And the toilet — yes, there will be a lot of toilet show and tell around here, but what can I do? Japan has some pretty peculiar ones, and I happen to pee a lot. This one was flowers galore: printed photos of big bouquets taped to flowered wallpaper, plastic flowers in the sink, on the floor, on the walls. And let us not forget the fauna: a big cartoon-bunny sticker on the inside of the toilet lid and a stuffed dog perched on the paper holder.
When we left this air-conditioned oasis, the sun had breached the morning clouds, all white, aggressive, mid-day light. We knew we couldn’t cycle in that, and found a shady place to nap by the scorched grounds of a shrine.
Now, this heat.
The Japanese divide their year not only into 4 main seasons, but also into 24 “solar terms”, each further split into three micro-seasons, adding up to 72 different names for times of the year, with changes every 5 days or so. We’d landed in Tokyo during the solar term Shōsho, meaning lesser heat (if only!), and were there during the “First lotus blossoms” and “Hawks learn to fly” periods.
We set off on the bike during the “Paulownia trees produce seeds” days, the first micro-season of Taisho, or greater heat, followed by “Earth is damp, air is humid” and “Great rains sometimes fall”.
All very poetic, accurate even, the air was indeed humid and great rains did fall — the kinds called typhoons. But our reality was more akin to “Big heat melts asphalt” or “Bitter sun hurts all the things”.
While the paulownia trees produced their seeds, the NYT ran the following headlines: “Temperature Hits Record High in Japan as Nation Withers” and “In Japan, Deadly Heat Wave Tests Endurance of Even the Most Stoic”.
Back in the “lesser heat”, we’d flicked through channels showing ever more dire versions of weather reports: an all red heat map of the country with a high of 39.8°C; a beefed up, angry cartoon sun, the presenter’s face in disbelief next to it; a reporter holding a thermometer on the street reading 47.7°C.
An okonomiyaki restaurant we’d been brave enough to eat at had handwritten signs at the door, in both Japanese and English, warning customers: no air conditioner, very hot, 39°C, with the temperature frantically underlined in red.
People did try to warn us against going to Japan in the summer but I’d been like “Nooo, it’s fiiiiine, I’ve been there in July before, I love wet heat”. And it’s true, I do. But let’s just say that, after many years spent mostly indignant at the weather in London, as if it were a personal affront, engulfed in a “need-sun-and-heat” kinda moaning, now there were talks of moving to Iceland.
All this just to state the sweltering obvious: on a bike, there’s no escaping the elements. Whether a backdrop of delight or exasperation, the weather is never not a factor – especially if your inner climate reflects the outer as much as mine does. If you want to get anywhere, you just have to brave it, and this heat is what we were up against. Well, you can also cry and catch a ride, but I get ahead of myself.
Rejoining the Edo post nap, we eventually veered off it, onto tiny roads, some unpaved, some bumpy, some flanked by bright green rice paddies, all lovely under soft late afternoon light, runaway sun rays shining from behind clouds, god-like, and a first sight of mountains.
We’d booked a hotel for the night as a way of easing into the whole thing. Get two full days’ cycling in the bag before attempting to camp, which was our general intention going forward, though I admit I wasn’t terribly looking forward to it.
For now this room was a sight for sweaty eyes. Slippers perfectly lined up at the foot of a platform and a clean futon bed. Nothing fancy, this was a cheap business hotel, but it fit our financial and emotional bills perfectly. Even the bike was treated to a night indoors. When asked where we could park it, hotel staff showed us to their conference room and reassured us, in words and gestures, that it would be safe there.
What we did, instead of jotting down thoughts at the end of each day, was check the stats on our Garmin and, with that info, I kept a detailed spreadsheet of hard facts. On this, our very first day on the bike, it tells me we rode 58.48 km from Tokyo to Satte over 6:07 h, starting at 8:19 am, at an average speed of 9.6 km/hr and a maximum of 28.2 km/hr. We gained 47 m of elevation, lost 45 and slept at a hotel.
The notes field after that sits mostly empty, and when I do find something there, it feels like finding a little gift. Today’s gift, in a mix of Portuguese and English, ended with: Room on raised platform. Dinner at Cafe Gusto. Pussy on fire.
Unfortunately no, I wasn't horny. I had issues with my new saddle. Which I remember having, of course, just not that they started literally on day one. I’d changed saddles since our maiden trip in France, but the problems remained. My squished parts hurt, chafed and burned. The heat and sweat didn’t help. I knew I would eventually grow protective calluses on my sit bones, but the soft bits? Oh man.
Part of me wants to say we were too tired to chat over dinner, but I truly don’t know. In the absence of confirmation from other sources, here’s my mind’s “Featured memories” for that night: me freezing under the restaurant’s polar a/c and a vague sense of having to throw together a meal of side dishes for lack of vegetarian options. Audible joy in walking back out into the warm night air, and a mix of overwhelm and fun navigating a giant pharmacy through products such as armpit pads, in search of sunscreen and KitKats.
Finally, a sense of achievement and the absolute, unmistakable pleasure of feeling the whole weight of my body against the futon, horizontal at last.