Letter 304: Tokyo Drift

In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.

There are moments in which we create memories, and moments in which we savour them. For a while, it was midnight in an Izakaya in Tokyo, where sleepless souls attempt to nurse their insomnia with warm sake and stashes of manga.

Even if such a today soon ceases to be today, no one can deny that it is in fact a today. For if a today ceased to be today, history could not not exist as history.

Memory only serves us so limitedly. History is every Today documented. Like how a steaming bowl of rice is every fragrant grain huddled together, History is every word pressed together to form a composition.

Things in the past are like a plate that's shattered to pieces. You can never put it back together like it was, right?

Bento. Timeless in its creation. Exquisite in its presentation. Aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Yet, once the chopsticks start attacking the morsels, beauty is defaced. Shredded like a bed of daikon. Perchance it becomes a state of flawed beauty?

Izakaya Bento

The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.

Sensation remains a thing of the past. One can never recall the exact combination of flavours that elicited a pleasurable tingling down the spine upon initial contact with the tastebuds. It is the gratifying sensory experience that remains in memory. Till next time, the same wave of quiver still runs down the spine whenever that memory is dug up.

Jap-styled braised pork as part of Izakaya Bento

Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.

A sight to behold, materialised from the magical mastery of the chef, leaving one begging for more.

Unaju Bento

That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far the maintenance of life is concerned. They are all just fuel.

That a plate of the freshest sashimi may, in the end, too, be part of the degustation process that helps keep memory alive. After all, food fuels the body, pleasure fuels memory, and memory fuels life.

Can you imagine what it's like to be left with a solitary thought when its embodiment has been pulled out from underneath you, roots and all?

Can you imagine what it's like to be left with fragments of yearning when memories are unearthed at the most unlikely places?

Izakaya Nijumaru-- a little secret whispered amongst the Japanese expats in the Lion City, hidden from the radars of the gaijin. Even menus don't have English descriptions.

Excerpts (and inspiration) from Haruki Murakami's After Dark, A Wild Sheep Chase, Kafka on the Shore, and Dance, Dance, Dance.

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