February 24 

I awoke and checked e-mails.  A friend had written about what she was giving up for Lent and why.  After a week of at least two alcoholic beverages every night I spontaneously decided to give up alcohol until Easter. 

I took off for Tokyo after saying goodbye to Ola.  I didn’t envy him his flight from Tokyo to L.A. and then on to Chicago.  There are better ways of doing a round-the-world trip. 

Actually, I detoured through Shinonome to drop off the booth key I’d inadvertently taken with me on Friday.  The surprise on the employee’s face when he saw this gaijin in his seventh-floor office in an industrial zone was well worth the time spent. 

In Tokyo I bought things useful (socks), useless (Anpanman DVD), and overdue (electronic dictionary), leafed through Tomohiro Sekiguchi’s new book on his train trip through Switzerland (meaning the Alps), then set out on my actual mission: to find my friend’s friend Maria Kunii.  She had left Catharine with an address in Komae-shi, west of Shinjuku on the Odakyu line. 

Before I set out, I ate a snack from the combini while watching a young drummer perform in front of the new South entrance.  I read the sign in front of him, which said “Happy drumming!” and a lot of Japanese stuff, and asked him why he was drumming here.  He said because he’d felt like it.  The car behind him blocking the taxi lane was his, and he’d come all the way from Nagoya with his drum set to play for about a week in Tokyo.  Yesterday he’d been across the street, but there the police had shooed him away after five minutes. 

I took the train out to Komae, past the incongruous mosque at Yoyogi-Uehara (if the Japanese can allow a minaret, why do we in Switzerland have such problems?), and walked in the direction I remembered from map.yahoo.co.jp.  Of course I got blown off track, so I turned around and asked at the nearest combini (convenience store).  I remembered the number of the block (addresses in Japan work via numbering increasingly smaller partitions of land) and soon found a humongous apartment complex, probably the largest building in all Komae.  I looked at all the mailboxes and then the entire directory by the elevators, but no Kunii lived there any longer.  Asking the combini lady wouldn’t have helped, so I gave up and strolled back to the station, stopping on the way at the Moriuta record store and bought a few CDs from the “Wagon Sale” (a.k.a. we-can’t-get-rid-of-it-let’s-wait-till-Stephan-comes sale).  With the Dodekachordon CD, these new records, and the free downloads from Katy Wehr‘s and Marc Andre‘s sites, I have enough to keep me going for a while. 

Anyway, if for some reason you know Maria Kunii and where she lives, or if you are Maria Kunii, Catharine wants to get in touch with you, and you can get in touch with her through me. 

What I thought would be an early bedtime turned into a late night packing session.  I needed to get everything ready to make it on an early train and breakfast before that so I stayed up past midnight and when at ten my hunger became ravenous I bought a double cheeseburger menu in the McDonald’s (Makudonarudo) below.