GoKawiilThe day was cloudy, and not in a way you would remember. The kind of cloudy that does not threaten rain, does not promise sun, does not change while you are looking at it. A gray that is simply the weather. Fukuoka on a Tuesday. You take the train. You take it a long way. Almost to the end of the line.
You get off at a station you will not remember the name of, in a neighborhood that looks like most neighborhoods — a bathroom in a low concrete block, a playground with metal equipment painted in primary colors that have softened under a decade of weather, and beyond it a small open square where elderly people in tracksuits are throwing a ball to one another with a kind of attention that looks a great deal like prayer.
And standing in the middle of it, as though he had always been there, is a bronze statue of a swordsman with three swords.
Zoro.
A girl is taking a selfie with him. She cannot be older than twenty. She has the phone at arm's length and is tilting it to get the angle right, and you wait a polite distance away, and when she lowers the phone you step forward and offer — in the broken Japanese of someone who learned the word for photo and the word for together and gave up shortly after — to take it for her.
She says yes. You take it. She says something back, and the something is an offer: she will take one of you. And here the memory thins. You do not remember if you accepted. You do not remember whether the photograph exists. A decade from now, you will not know whether there is a picture somewhere in a stranger's camera roll of a foreigner standing next to a bronze swordsman at a playground at the end of a train line on a day that was only cloudy. The uncertainty itself is part of what makes the memory feel true. You were there. The other details — the ones that would matter in a different kind of story — refused to stay.
You stood for a minute. You looked at the statue. You watched the elderly people throw their ball. Then you walked back to the station and you kept going.
The Rest of the Afternoon
The order was not deliberate. A map on a phone, a path drawn between statues, the route chosen by whatever combination of trains and buses would cover the ground without doubling back. You walked when it was possible to walk. You took transit when it was not.
Chopper was by the zoo. A reindeer-doctor the size of a child, cast in bronze, set near a low wall at the edge of the animal enclosures. People went in and out of the zoo past him without slowing, the way people pass a mailbox.
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