The first time I ever went to any kind of anti-war demonstration -- or any demonstration of any kind, really -- was today, March 21st, 2003. I would say that I ended up there half by chance, and half by choice.

I would have never known about the Tokyo "Peace Parade" if The Romanian Woman living in my guest house full of coffin-sized rooms didn't have such passion for the lesser-known effects of over-the-counter drugs. Whenever I use the shared computer to contact important people about important things, she paces around in slippers, mixes minced beef in a frying pan, and/or turns off the television if anyone happens to be watching it.

She turned it off right in front of this German guy two nights ago. He was watching a show in which four "cool" guys poked around in a lingerie shop, saying "funny" things. The Romanian Woman turned off the television. The German guy turned it back on when The Romanian Woman went into the bathroom. The Romanian Woman got out of the bathroom, and turned the television off again. The German guy went to bed.

The Romanian Woman ducked into the coffin-sized room where the boisterous Japanese landlord keeps the internet.

"Tim, are you finished? I must work."

"Yeah, I'm done," I said.

I turned on the television. I watched the show about men's interest in women's lingerie until it was over. When it was over, the big, round, profane American astrology professor who is now forced to sleep in the next-door room because of his snoring arrived home, calling the icy rainstorm a "son of a bitch," and a few other things.

"How are you doing?" he asked me, when his anger had calmed.

"Not bad," I said. I was wearing polka-dotted pajama bottoms I swiped off an angry financial analyst and a brown Army sweater my dad gave me forever ago. I was eating 100-yen popcorn and drinking Kirin Afternoon Tea Milk Tea:

"Just like a rose, this tea will bring color and beauty into your life."

The big American was grilling fat slices of bread in bacon grease. He had a pack of meltable cheese slices in one hand. He was making grilled bacon-and-cheese sandwiches, and talking to someone who might have been me. The news was talking about how many different types of vehicles the US Military has at its able-to-be-dispatched-to-Iraq disposal, and in Japanese, no less; the American making bacon sandwiches became more interesting the second he mentioned Colonel Sanders.

"So I met these two girls today for a private English lesson, you know, and they were giggling when they met me. One of them is twenty-four, the other's twenty-six. They kept saying 'Kentucky,' 'Kentucky,' 'Kentucky,' and I was like, I'm from Texas, you know?"

"Oh," I said.

"So I finally got what they were getting at. Here they were saying I looked like Colonel Sanders -- Kentucky Fried Chicken, you know? They call it 'Kentucky' here."

"They do," I said. That's about when I snapped to attention: this guy had just mentioned Colonel Sanders.

I spent the greater part of 2001 living with two young Asian-North-American college graduates who swore by the thrills of earning paychecks teaching conversational English by day, and conspired to steal the local statue of Colonel Sanders by night. That I might be living in such close proximity to a guy who looks like Colonel Sanders, now more than a year later: it got me interested.

I recalled for an instant the time I once asked my roommates why they were stealing a statue of Colonel Sanders.

The fat one said: "Revolution, man."

The skinny one said: "We don't have shit else to do."

The fat one was American. The skinny one was Canadian. I take it the skinny one was more sensible.

Compared to the American astrology professor, these roommates were young Einsteins.

I looked the old guy over. He had told me before that he was forty-six. He definitely has the thick white hair, black glasses, and mustache going on. While I figure this American I live too close to might have a few more kilograms in the midsection than your run-of-the-mill plastic statue of Colonel Sanders, I'm going to go ahead and refer to him as "The Colonel" for the duration of the time I spend writing about him.

I'll write about him a little bit right now:

*

The Colonel sat next to me at the only other place at our table the size of a pizza box. He munched on his extra-crispy bacon sandwich, and at one point carried on a shouting cell-phone conversation with his wife in Hong Kong in which he used no more words than "I can't hear you" and "You'll have to speak up" and "Sweetie." Two steel-haired Japanese news anchors stood behind a news desk in half-daring poses, shouting headlines about the day's news that also happened to be news that mentioned Iraq.

The view inside the perfect replica of Julius Caesar's television set snapped from an M-1 Abrams battle tank prowling through a desert and to the face of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. He was speaking English, and subtitled in Japanese.

Then they showed some Russian guy, speaking Russian, subtitled in Japanese. I take it this guy was the president of Russia -- the news people kept calling him "daitouryou," which I remember from college Japanese classes as meaning "president."

Then they showed George W. Bush. They called him "Daitouryou," too.

Then they showed this guy in China. I have no idea who he was. He sure was speaking angrily, though. His words were subtitled in plain white Japanese.

Then up popped Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. When he spoke in his trademark short sentences, the subtitles that popped up were colorful, and with some words bigger than others. Every ten seconds, the video footage paused, and we got a fade to black, with some big, prominent, red letters.

"What's he saying?" the Colonel piped up, the third time this subtitle effect pounded the screen.

"He doesn't support the war. Japan doesn't support the war," I said. "I'm not really sure of the specifics."

The Romanian Woman spun out of the internet's company, stood up, and turned the television volume down to a whisper.

I kept my hand in my bag of popcorn and my eyes on the subtitles at the bottom of Julius Caesar's television set. Anything to keep my eyes off the collecting grease on the Colonel's plate.

Eventually, my hands were covered in crumb dust, the Colonel was washing his dish, and the day's news about Junichiro Koizumi's stance on the war had turned into the day's news about Junichiro Koizumi's stance on something else. He was addressing the Japanese . . . Diet? Is it the Diet? I think it's the Diet.

The Diet's assembly-place is all wooden. It looks like where the PTA should meet in a low-budget television show about a trendy high school's PTA. From the camera angle on the news, I swear you can see a window with really generic yellow light outside. Maybe it's just my mind playing tricks on me, though I'm pretty sure I spotted an air-conditioning unit in one of the windows.

Koizumi's address to the Diet went unsubtitled. Standing at a podium two feet in front of Koizumi's podium was a chubby guy in glasses and a suit jacket that only needed one button. The chubby guy wasn't saying anything.

Koizumi's shouting Japanese went right into the microphone and whispered out Julius Caesar's speaker into my right ear and out the left one.

Injecting drama into what I realized was a political debate were shots of the chubby guy's sweaty forehead and pans to a section of seated Diet members, three of whom were laughing so hard they were slapping their knees.

"Looks like a real riot," the Colonel said. His voice made the landlord's bottles of Scotch atop the refrigerator clink together.

"Japanese politics," I said, adding a subject to the Colonel's sentence fragment.

The Romanian Woman got up. With arched black eyebrows, she closed the door to the internet room.

This really put the uncomfortability cap on the Colonel's and my conversation: the television in my living-place sits atop a bunked bed that forms the low ceiling of the internet room. When the Romanian Woman closed the door, she hid the television.

I threw away my empty popcorn bag. The sudden spike of carbohydrate had put into me the urge to play guitar. I grabbed my old folk guitar from against the wall, sat down, and stared at my fingers on a chord I couldn't name.

The Colonel jerked his head at the door.

"What do you suppose is her problem?" he asked me, like I was supposed to know.

"Same thing that's always her problem," I said.

"You alright in there, sweetie?" the Colonel shouted at the door.

When the Romanian Woman didn't scream at us, the Colonel looked at me.

"Nothing interesting on television, anyway," he said.

"Just all about Iraq," I said.

The Colonel boiled water and Chinese teabags in a frying pan.

"Looks like we're going to war with them on March 28th," the Colonel said gravely.

"I thought Bush gave Saddam forty-eight hours?" I asked. I looked at my digital watch. It was still March 19th, 2003.

"The stars say it's going to be the 28th." The Colonel gave a nod. "You want some tea?"

"Nah, I'm alright."

The Colonel sat down hunched and drank his tea straight.

"This is Irish style," he said.

"Mm," I said.

"That means you boil the teabags in the water."

"Ah."

"My ex-wife used to make it this way."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. She was a real crazy bitch, man. She was IRA."

"Ah."

"My son's in the Navy. Out on an aircraft carrier on the Indian Ocean."

I knew all this already.

"So, uh, why is Bush attacking Saddam?" I asked.

The Colonel sipped his Irish-style Chinese tea. "Well, we'll attack if he doesn't leave Iraq in forty-eight hours."

"Well, I mean, what's the reason they're fighting him to begin with?"

The Colonel clarified.

"Saddam's been gassing people. All the Kurds. Kuwait. For years and years now."

"Well . . ." I reached for what I really wanted to ask. I didn't know what I really wanted to ask. I found a decent substitute. "Why so urgent? I mean, why now? Does it have . . . does it have something to do with September 11th?"

My face turned pink. It might have been because of the kerosene heater.

"I think Saddam is giving that . . . that Bin Laden aid or something," The Colonel offered.

"Ahh," I said. It made a little sense. The Colonel's uncertainty on the matter made me confident that he wouldn't scream at me for being politically ignorant. I decided to open up a little to him. I held my cold guitar in my arms.

"You know," I went on, "my friends in America are always screaming at me when I say I don't care about politics. Like, my one friend, he once asked me, 'Why do you like George W. Bush?' And I didn't know what to say. So I said, 'I don't like him. I never said I did.' And my friend said, 'You never said you didn't like him.'

"Another 'friend' of mine once asked me, 'How can you not hate George W. Bush? You're a college graduate!'"

"Huh," the Colonel said. "A few years ago, it was hate on Clinton because of Monica. Kids'll do anything to be cool."

I shrugged. "Maybe. I was living with my Chinese best friend and my Korean girlfriend when Bush ran against Gore. I had an untouched absentee ballot on the dining room table. My girlfriend and my friend kept telling me to vote for Gore. They got downright violent. I had at first refused to use the ballot at all, and toward the end, I was like, 'I'm going to vote for Bush,' just to mess with them."

"Ha," the Colonel said. "So did you vote for Bush?"

I shook my head. "The ballot disappeared. I think my girlfriend stole it and voted for Gore."

The Colonel stepped out of timeline for a second, and said, "Kids don't understand war."

"Bush won, anyway," I said.

The Colonel snorted up some tea. "Last time I voted, it was for Reagan."

"I never voted."

"It's not like you make a difference."

"Exactly," I said. This guy and I were starting to see eye-to-eye.

"I haven't been back to the States in nine years," the Colonel said. "It was my dad's funeral. Then four years in China, and five years in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and now here."

"Hmm," I said.

"I don't plan on going back. I couldn't adjust."

I came to want to ask this guy some question that might lead to an understanding of why he didn't want to return to his country of birth. I didn't get the chance to, because he dove head-first into the kiddy pool of his character depth with one sentence:


"Besides, the girls here are so much damned prettier."

Before I could agree for the sake of not looking like an asshole, the internet coffin door swung open. The Romanian Woman stood in the doorway in her clicking sandals and sweatpants and sweatshirt.

"Hey there, sweetcakes," the Colonel said. He put down his teacup, and it suddenly looked grotesquely small.

"Tim, Tim, there is one thing wrong."

In a second, I was in the office. The Romanian Woman had just finished installing a Live Action Weather Radar Plus Computer Virus that kept track of the temperature in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Behind the installation panel was an internet explorer window full of information about "How to get high off over-the-counter drugs!" The Romanian Woman's notebook was opened atop the keyboard and covered in cursive Cyrillic scrawl.

"The mouse," she said.

I moved the mouse. From within the tower case echoed the sound of metal golf balls bouncing off plywood.

"Wh-what?"

The display went blank, and up came the Blue Screen of Death.

**

Two hours later, the expert diagnoses of one Japanese landlord, one Japanese landlord's Japanese brother, two German college students, and one Nigerian businessman all pointed to "Reinstall Windows." The Japanese landlord lamented over tequila that he didn't have the disk on hand. It was on the desktop at the Yokohama location of his fine housing establishment.

The Colonel was lecturing the Romanian Woman about her lucky stars. Apparently, Friday the 28th is going to be a good -- and rainy -- day for the Romanian Woman to make money.

The Nigerian was seeing if he couldn't do something about the computer. He couldn't.

When the Japanese surrealist painter who lived next door moved out, she left behind a big bag of miso soup packets. The Romanian Woman is always trying to raise awareness of the soup. She can't stand to see them sitting on top of the refrigerator. She herself hates Japanese food -- and the Japanese people, and Japanese television.

She was staring at the television -- a documentary about pharmacist's school -- and commenting:

"In Romania, which is one communist country, we do not have television such as this. This is worse than one communist country!"

She stood up, and grabbed her pack of cigarettes from the top of the refrigerator. There was that bag of soup again. She crumpled it up in her hand.

"If anyone eats this soup!" she yelled.

"I'll have a bowl, if you're making it," the Nigerian man said.

The Romanian Woman threw the bag of soup on the ground.

"I am not one wife!" the Romanian Woman yelled.

"It's just a joke," the Nigerian man said.

"I do not care about your one joke!"

The Romanian Woman was outside and smoking in a second.

"She doesn't like jokes," the Nigerian man said to the computer screen.

The Colonel shook his head.

"Not gonna work, champ?"

The Nigerian shook his head. "Nah."

"Looks like I'm going to have to go to the cafe in Shibuya tomorrow. I got an interview down there."

"Another one?"

"Yeah, they want me to teach business English lessons."

"Good for you."

I was still staring at my guitar. It was past two in the morning. I pondered going to Shibuya, to the comfortable Manboo manga and internet cafe where I sit at this very moment with a glass of frozen melon soda and a hot cup of cocoa. I've been typing for a half an hour. That first hour is two hundred yen. From now on, it's three hundred an hour. I'll have to type more quickly.

"I took the new line down there today."

"The new line?" the Nigerian asked.

"Yeah, the new line. The Han-zo-mon Line," the Colonel said.

"The Hanzomon Line?" I asked.

"Yeah, you switch at O-shi-a-ge," he said.

"Oshiage?" I asked.

"Yeah. It's only 230 yen."

"Hmm."

"They just opened the line today."

"Yeah?"

The landlord nodded, and sneezed, and we all looked at him. Somehow, the tissue lodged in his nostrils didn't budge. He held the bottle of tequila in his lap as his brother played with a deck of cards and a documentary about pharmacist's school became a rerun of a television drama and I decided to head to bed.

***

I woke at a little after two in the afternoon. On the dinner table was an envelope with no return address. For the third day in a row, someone sent me money. A plea I'd made on my personal website had actually turned out to be quite lucrative. Inside the envelope was an anonymous contribution of fifty American dollars. I slid on some jeans and a sweater, put on my shoes, and headed out to the post office to change the money into yen.

All in all, it took about an hour to get my money changed. I was number 219, and they were now serving number 179. I watched a news feed about Iraq and the USA play on about seventy times. Each time, I picked up a new kanji that had something to do with something in politics. By the time my dollars had become yen and that yen was in my hand, I'd forgotten all those kanji. Did I really need to know them, anyway?

I stood out on the corner in front of the post office and looked left-to-right at what one might call a busy street. I wondered how far of a walk it was to Oshiage Station, and I didn't wonder long before I found myself walking in the wrong direction.

I boarded a train from Tateishi up past Oshiage. I took in a few essays by Shigesato Itoi during the ride. As the sun turned everything orange, I rode back up from Ueno to Oshiage. I got off onto the dilapidated concrete of the Oshiage Keisei Line platform, and when I descended into the station proper, I met a world of Lego-yellow and sci-fi white.

The Eidan Subway Hanzomon Line platforms at Oshiage, I found, are equipped with smart escalators that move up when a train arrives and down at all other times. The bathrooms, brand-new though they may be, still are full of toilets that amount to little more than porcelain holes in the ground. I gritted my teeth when I arrived in the bathroom with something to share; at the end of the experience, I was weighing smart escalators against third-world toilets, and thinking: one out of two is . . . half.

I was able to sit comfortably, legs spread out in front of me, until halfway to Shibuya. By the time the train stopped in Omotesando, I was hugging my backpack with knees pressed together. The cloud of compressed passengers sighed out onto Shibuya Station's tired old Hanzomon Line platform and broke up into distinct, stumbling molecules. I was using the back of my hand to smooth out my sweater, and cracking my neck. Sitting down on the train can sometimes be as hectic as standing, and sometimes worse.

I looked for the sign pointing out the exit to Hachiko Square. I found it, and exited into the middle of what looks and feels at some times like the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world. Men in shady attire and of indiscernible European nationality sell counterfeit jewelry and handbags off the tops of velvet blankets as kids with nothing else to do beat drums and offer gawking gaijin in suits that scream "English Teacher" glimpses of interpretive dance that is better off nowhere else. Sometimes a lonely-looking guy or three is playing guitar in front of the clock, where a dozen dozen people have arranged, by cell phone, to meet at this exact second. A person, either male or female, hidden entirely in a cartoon-character suit, hands out packs of tissues to everything approaching the wall of payphones near the curb. Thousands of people exiting all the train lines that serve Shibuya Station line up on that curb and stare off at the videogame-y skyline as they wait for the light to change. Television screens embedded in the glass of the tallest buildings advertise new music releases, or Adidas, or Suntory beverages. On the other side of the square, hip kids with Starbucks cups in their right hands and Tower Records bags in their lefts stand and wait to cross the street, and eventually head home. I joined those headed into Tokyo's pop capital, with some mildly appropriate Japanese pop-rock ballads popping against my eardrums via my Sony Eggo headphones. When one song ended on a synth crash and before another could begin, that's when I heard the screaming.

I tore off my headphones; American as I am, I snap to attention when there's danger. Here I could exaggerate, and say I clutch my right hand to my chest, like a seasoned detective reaching for his gun. I don't. And I didn't the other night -- because the screaming, screaming of a girl though it was, revealed itself as none too urgent.

She was screaming from the top of a Mitsubishi van parked sideways in the square. She was screaming into a megaphone, and wearing a big puffy sweater and a twenty-foot yellow scarf and a long skirt that looked made out of felt in a home-economics class at Cartoon High School. The purposely ridiculous, big, brown stitching was visible from my forty feet away. When the light changed, I didn't cross the street. I reached for my digital camera to snap a picture of the girl.

It wasn't until I lined up a shot that the girl standing behind the screaming girl rotated her pedestrian-clothed body at such an angle as to allow me to see the sign she was holding:

"DON'T ATTACK IRAQ."

I had two pictures snapped and a short video made by the time I started to listen to the poor girl.

She was insisting in a cartoon voice that she and four hundred other students were going to march to the United States embassy at one in the afternoon on March 21, 2003. They had, like, petitions and stuff. They wanted to let the world know what they thought, and they thought war was bad.

She turned around, to address the people on the other side of the square. That's when I saw the cartoon black cat embroidered on the right side of her skirt. I snapped a picture of it, too, and the light changed, and I crossed the street.

****

I spent two hours in the internet cafe. When I came out, I almost bumped into four yakuza guys with lip-rings. They were, not surprisingly, talking like tough guys and wearing black suits with white wedding ties. They didn't notice me, and I didn't complain.

I headed back to Hachiko Square. With no Tower Records bag of my own, I felt a little lonely. I headed into the big Tsutaya video store, and looked at videogames.

When I came out, some guy old enough to be my uncle was hocking an armful of pink flyers. Each one was adorned with a heart and the words "PEACE PARADE 2003." I know this, because I stood close enough to him to look at the flyers, not because he gave me one. He didn't even look at me. Not so far away, two girls dressed like mixes between protestors in a movie made in the nineties about the sixties and characters in Final Fantasy X-2 were handing out more of the same flyers to a confused young professional man. When he took the flyer, bowed, and was off, I stepped up.

The girl on the right had dreadlocks. The girl on the left didn't. She was, however, wearing an orange sweater made of hemp.

The girl with dreadlocks half-handed me a flyer.

"Are you American?"

I shrugged. "I guess."

"You can speak Japanese."

"A little bit."

"What do you think of the war?" the other girl wanted to know.

I shrugged again, the second time in their acquaintance.

"Not much."

"I'm Miki," the girl with dreadlocks said.

"I'm Yuki," the girl without dreadlocks said.

I remembered the last time I ran into a pair of girls named Miki and Yuki. They were guitarist and tambourinist, respectively, for aggressive-anarchist-folk-punk duo "Clover," who performed every Saturday night at Omiya Station in Saitama. Might there be some chemical reaction that occurs when girls named Miki meet girls named Yuki? Something that makes them break down from civilized girls into hemp-wearing peace-parading folkies? I need to meet a third pair to cement my theory.

I almost asked them if their names were really Mikiko and Yukiko. I figured it was probable that they'd dropped their "ko"s, maybe even together.

I didn't ask them.

"I'm Tim," I said.

"So, are you coming to the parade?" Miki asked.

I reached out for a flyer.

"Maybe."

"It's tomorrow at one," Yuki informed me, reading from the flyer:

"Tomorrow at one o'clock," it said. Yes, it actually said "Tomorrow." No date was listed. I happen to collect that sort of thing. I wanted that flyer, bad. My want for that flyer was like a sudden disease.

Miki and Yuki turned away from me, then, to harass a salaryman. I stepped back, and hung out behind a stall across the way. At that stall, a Turkish man was serving Turkish kebabs following deft cuts of a hanging, spinning, sweaty piece of meat the size and smell of a small dog and the color of a child. Speakers somewhere blared out some of Ayumi Hamasaki's popular trademark nose-singing as the Final Fantasy Hippies handed out flyers no one except me wanted to everyone except me. Sick of waiting in such tone-deaf scenery and hungry for ramen, I headed to the Hanzomon Line and took the first train headed home.

*****

The Romanian Woman was seated in the kitchen and squinting at the television when I returned. She didn't say anything to me until I finished eating my Korean kimchee ramen and a bag of 100-yen 7-Eleven popcorn while dodging the landlord and his whisky-inclined, computer-puzzled workmates.

The thing the Romanian Woman said to me was "You had one phone call."

"Who was it from?"

"A girl."

"A girl," the landlord said, with a chuckle.

I was already standing in front of the phone with a ten-yen coin in hand. I had the receiver in my left hand when the landlord's brother asked me, "How many girls you got in Tokyo?"

As is my chief hobby, I entertained the guy with an off-the-top-of-my-head quarter-lie: I counted to five with my right hand, then closed my fist, and counted to three.

"Eight?" I said, inciting Japanese laughter and hoots.

"Americans always win," the landlord said, with a wink.

"Not always," I said, and inserted the ten-yen coin. "I'm just lucky."

This roused up some more laughter. I had four digits dialed when the landlord's brother said to his friend, "We're going to have to go back to LA this summer, and get revenge."

I quieted the coming storm of laughter with a raised finger to my lips.

Kazuko picked up her cell phone on the eleventh ring.

"Hello?"

"Hey, it's me," I said, in English.

"Oh. How are you?"

"Did you call here earlier?" I asked.

"No," she said. "Hey, let me call you back from the house phone."

"Okay. I only used ten yen, anyway."

With a series of angry beeps, NTT informed me that my coin was not enough to keep talking.

I hung up. The heavy pink phone rang in three seconds.

"Hello?"

"Yeah."

"So, uh, how are you?" I asked her.

"Fine. Why did you call?"

"To ask if you'd called earlier."

"I didn't," she said.

"Well," I said. "Never mind."

"How are you?" she asked me.

"I'm alright, I guess," I said.

"What did you do today?" Kazuko asked me.

"I, uh, went to Shibuya?" I said, like I wasn't really sure.

"Oh, that's good. Got out of the house, huh?"

"Yeah. I got to use the new Hanzomon Line."

"Oh, the one that goes up to Oshiage?"

"Yeah. You ridden on it yet?"

Kazuko is an avid leisure rider of public transit. Now that she's been fired from her twenty-second job in a row, I figure she'll be keeping up on her new transportation routes. The other day, she showed me the slowest and longest bus from deep Setagaya to Shibuya. It took almost an hour and a half. We sat in the back with a bag of strawberry-chocolate snacks and a McDonald's Hot Apple Pie, looking out at franchise diners. The scenery in Setagaya is semi-unique: the buildings are, for the most part, under ten stories, which keeps the roofs of diners within view from bus windows. The diners even have parking lots. We were looking inside each diner, and remarking on the way the orange lighting, set against the background of a navy-blue Tokyo night sky, made each particular diner the perfect place to film a scene in a movie about diners.

"Nah," Kazuko had to say. "I've been staying home and reading the book."

"Oh. You do anymore translation?"

As far as I know, Kazuko stopped after chapter seven to do some "deeper reading."

"I started reading it again from the beginning today. I'm taking more notes."

"Oh."

"You're not angry, are you?"

"Nah."

"You sure?"

"No. Do I sound angry?" I asked. I really wanted to know.

"No. That doesn't mean you're not angry, though."

"Nah, I'm not. Just tired."

"I bet. Shibuya, huh?" Kazuko asked.

"Yeah. There were these kids protesting the war in Iraq."

"Fools."

"I felt kind of sorry for them."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. They were handing out flyers for some 'Peace Parade,' and it looked like no one was taking them seriously."

"Too bad, huh?"

"I guess. I kind of want to go to the thing. Just to see what it's like. How many people turn up. I might write something about it."

"Go for it."

"Hey, why don't you come with me?"

Kazuko laughed out her nose. "No."

"Aw, why not?"

"I'm busy," she said.

"With what?"

"The book. And I've got to clean the house. And I was thinking about working out."

"Hmm," I said.

"What? Are you angry?"

I laughed, kind of. "No. I was just thinking I don't want to go to this thing alone. I'll feel kind of stupid."

"Stupid? So you'd feel stupid alone, and not stupid if you weren't alone?"

"That's kind of it, yeah."

"So being with me makes you feel not stupid?"

"Well, just as long as someone else is there, I won't feel stupid."

"Because you're smarter than everyone, huh?"

I exhaled into the mouthpiece. It made a bristly sound.

"That's not what I'm saying."

"Ooh, you're getting angry," Kazuko said.

"No I'm not," I said. "I'm just saying that if I had someone with me, then all the dumb kids who take this sort of thing seriously, well . . . maybe they wouldn't pick on me."

"You're afraid of them picking on you?"

"For lack of a better word, yeah. Kids who believe in things always pick on me."

"Why's that?"

"I don't know. Maybe because I don't believe in anything worth believing in. Or maybe because I'm too rational. Like, I talked to these two girls tonight -- real anti-war types. I wanted to ask them, 'Didn't your prime minister already say Japan wasn't going to get involved? Isn't that as good an indicator of Japan's anti-war stance as any?' And then I figured they probably wouldn't even hear me."

"Kids are like that," Kazuko said. "I had a boyfriend when I was fourteen. We didn't even kiss or hold hands or anything. It's kind of like the same thing. No matter who the person is, you're proud, because you have a boyfriend."

"Or like you take your casserole out of the oven, and you get a long look at it, and you think, 'That's not what I meant to make, '" I said.

"And then you eat it anyway," Kazuko said.

I coughed. "Exactly. Anyway."

"Anyway. Kids used to pick on you?"

"Pretty much."

"You ever get angry at them?"

I sighed. "What's this about me getting angry?"

"Nothing, nothing. I've just been reading your book, and your articles on Tokyopia. The one -- what was it -- 'state of tokyo real estate.' You say something about how you got angry and punched the air-conditioner?"

I scoffed. "I forgot all about that."

Kazuko went on with her critique. "It didn't seem right. It seemed like you were lying. You know. I'm just saying."

I was standing with my back to a German guy's coffin door, scratching the side of my head with my too-long index fingernail. I need to get some new nail clippers.

"I wasn't really LYING."

"So what, then?"

"I don't know."

"Do you often get angry when you're by yourself? You say you don't swear -- though how the hell do I know if you just don't swear when you're around other people?"

"I don't get angry," I said, very, assuredly calmly. "Not even when people throw apples at me."

"Apples?"

"Yeah," I went on. "When I was in high school -- I was sixteen. I was really short, and really fat, and I always ate lunch alone. I packed a big lunch every day -- and I mean a big lunch. A giant roast-beef-and-cheese sandwich, a Big Grab bag of Fritos corn chips. A cup of pudding, a Fruit Roll-Up. A giant carton of chocolate milk, and an apple."

"An apple?"

"Yeah. One day I was at lunch, sitting at a table all by myself, like always. I was reading up on my calculus homework. The book was really new, so it wouldn't stay open. I had my giant carton of chocolate milk sitting on one side of the book.

"I was about halfway into my roast beef sandwich when something SMACKED me in the back of the head. My face SLAMMED into the book and bounced back up. My carton of chocolate milk fell over, and spilled. In the middle of the table was an apple. It was still spinning.

"A few tables away, all the 'cool' juniors sat together. They were screaming and laughing in my direction. I turned around, and saw this one kid -- he was on the baseball team -- was pointing at me, and laughing. He must have had tears in his eyes, he was laughing so hard. I looked back at the apple. There was a big bite taken out of it. Then I realized -- it was MY apple. The kid must have stolen MY apple during lab time in physics class, taken a bite out of it, and thrown it at me.

"He stole my apple, he bit my apple, he threw my apple, and then he laughed at me. And I didn't get angry then. I figured -- he didn't like the taste of it, so he put it to use by entertaining his friends, in a way that returned it to me.

"I wonder now, though -- maybe he didn't not like the taste of the apple at all? Maybe it was his plan, when he stole the apple from my lunch bag, to bite it, and then return it to me inedible in the most painful way possible?"

Kazuko didn't make a sound for ten seconds. My Hell Ears picked up the noise of her index finger uncovering the mouthpiece of her cordless phone. Short on breath, Kazuko said, "My god." Then she laughed uninterrupted for half a minute. I detected the beginnings of a cold in her snort. She should really see about eating some tangerines.

I chanted, "He stole my apple, he bit my apple, he threw my apple, he hit me with my apple, he laughed."

******

It wasn't long before Kazuko had to go to bed.

"Good night," she told me.

"Good night." I told her.

When the landlord and his drinking buddies were gone, I sat in a kitchen chair with my back to the meter-tall refrigerator, sipping Kirin Afternoon Tea Milk Tea at a pace that matched the auspicious peace and quiet that had come over the guest house I so deem "The Morgue." All the coffin doors were shut, and all people of all nationalities had turned in for Thursday night so that they might get up on Friday morning for an early start on all things Roppongi. The television was on, and muted. In voices I couldn't hear, two Japanese men were discussing the War in Iraq.

Just as I wondered where the Colonel had gotten off to, The Romanian Woman came back inside smelling like cold rain and cigarettes. She sat at the kitchen table and glanced between the muted television and the dead computer.

"You know," she said in her usual tone of maybe-angry voice.

The tea bottle almost slipped out of my hands.

"Y-yeah?"

She was flicking her index finger at the coffin over my shoulder.

"That one boy. That boy."

I looked over my shoulder, then back at the Romanian Woman.

"Yeah?"

"With the apple?"

I remembered my phone conversation with Kazuko.

"Yeah? What about him?"

"He is behavior very close to that of your president."

"Oh. Ah."

I thought of the dumb bastard who'd brained me with the apple. He wasn't a bad guy. Just really dumb. His dad was a lawyer. I'd seen the guy a few times at my college, in a fraternity sweatshirt and a dumb-bastard grin. He's probably in law school right now, eating his dad's money. Some day, he might end up sheriff of some county in Indiana, and after that -- who knows what small country he might declare war on?

Or maybe he's here in Tokyo, living in a shoebox, teaching English, and making enough money to pay for long-distance cell-phone calls to his one and only prom queen?

I stood, and told the Romanian Woman I was going to bed.

********

One day in January of 2002, my former protegee Masako and I were watching chaotic snow-rain falling outside the window of Fujimino, Saitama's Cafe Monster. That was the very day I ordered a double-espresso and the waitress -- Fukuda-kun -- asked me if I wasn't not Mormon.

The Beatles were playing on the stereo. It was "Nowhere Man."

When the song was finished, Masako made me play it on my computer. She wanted to hear it again. At her insistence, I aided her in translating the song into Japanese. I kept saying we could probably find a Japanese translation of the lyrics somewhere. Masako told me to quit complaining, because the song was so simple, anyway.

Then she wanted me to help her learn to sing it in English.

"'He's a real Nowhere Man, sitting in his Nowhere Land, making all his nowhere plans for nobody.'"

Et cetera.

Masako came to a revelation of sorts at the conclusion of our translation session:

"You know, it must, like, totally kick ASS to live in a time when stuff is, like, happening."

"It must," I agreed.

"Nothing happens these days."

"What about September 11th?"

Masako dismissed September 11th with a wave of her hand.

"That's America, man. I mean, nothing happens here, in Tokyo. Nothing ever happens."

"There was a student movement back in the sixties," I said.

"That was the sixties," Masako said.

"What was it all about, anyway?" I asked her. "All I know is that students were . . . angry about something."

"Hell if I know what it was."

Masako listened to the left side of "Nowhere Man" with my left headphone. I listened to the right.

"Hey, you got any Bob Dylan?"

"Bob Dylan?"

"Yeah. I was reading Haruki Murakami's Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and the narrator keeps talking about Bob Dylan. I keep realizing I never heard Bob Dylan before."

"I'm sure you've heard SOME Bob Dylan," I said with a scoff.

"Nope, none. So, you got any?"

"I got a couple CDs ripped on here, yeah. You want some?"

"Make me a mix."

"I'll do it tonight."

"Do it now."

"I don't have a CD."

"Get one."

We asked the Cafe Monster Guy for a blank CD. It set us back 150 yen.

I made Masako a mix CD of Bob Dylan. My computer popped it out in sixteen minutes.

Masako listened to the CD twice, and gave it back two days later.

"I did hear this before," she said, when I told her she could keep the CD.

She didn't explain any further.

In April of 2002, my computer's hard drive failed. One of the only CDs I had lying around at the time my new hard drive arrived was the Bob Dylan mix Masako had returned to me. I ripped it, and didn't listen to any of the tracks until just this morning, the morning of Friday, March 21, 2003.

********

Why I was in the mood to listen to Bob Dylan . . . I don't know. I was looking over a manuscript and drinking Aquarius Sports Drink at nine in the morning when I threw the songs into my MP3 playlist. All of the songs were without titles, and I honestly don't know my Bob Dylan very well. Track one was the song about "The Answer" "Blowing in the Wind," track two was the song about "The Hurricane," and track three was "A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall." I listened to those three songs, and felt like my day was on track to something important. I took off the headphones. I put in my last blank CD, and started to burn the mix. Track one was in the progress of being copied when I stepped out to take a shower.

Halfway through the shower, I checked myself: is it not cool to show up at a place like this unwashed?

I paid a little less attention to my hygiene than usual this morning. Though I guess the fifty-yen shampoo ensured I wouldn't end up too clean, anyway.

When I got back to my coffin-room with dry hair and a disposition that could put on shoes and socks and jeans and leave on an adventure, I saw that the CD had ejected.

I looked at my Windows Media Player. The CD had encountered an error in the burning process during the middle of track three.

I imagined a dialog window: "ERROR: BUFFER UNDERRUN: TOO MANY SONGS THAT USE WEATHER AS AN IMAGE OF CIVIL UNREST."

Time was getting on to ten o'clock. I threw on a sweater and scrounged around my CD collection for something folky. I couldn't find the new Beck album. Then I remembered -- my copy is back in America, in my friend Big Joe's car. And lord knows a guy named Big Joe isn't gentle with something involving so many acoustic guitars.

I found a copy of Japanese pop duo Puffy's "Fever*Fever" that I had lying around for some reason. As I recalled, it had a mostly acoustic track on it. Sung by Puffy's Kansai half -- Yumi Yoshimura -- the song never really made sense to me.

I listened to it over and over again on the Hanzomon Line down to Shibuya. There's a part of the song where Yumi sings "JimboCHO!" with a harsh downward intonation. It must have been the tenth time the song repeated. When she said "JimboCHO!" the train stopped, and I looked up. It was Jimbocho Station.

"Cho" means city. At the moment, as the doors hissed shut, I didn't care to think of what "Jin-bo" means; it's amusingly Romanized as "Jimbo," so that makes "Jimbocho" mean "Jimbo City."

That's just too much of a riot. I was laughing out my nose when I saw a subway employee in a green suit waved his white-gloved hand, and the doors hissed back open.

Another subway employee was stepping backwards out of an elevator. He was pulling a handicapped man in a wheelchair. As the conductor held the train doors open a little longer, two subway employees with white gloves hauled the man in a wheelchair up and into the train car.

I had my headphones around my neck when they finally loaded the young handicapped man into the train. The handicapped man wore a denim jacket and blue jeans, and nodded profusely to the subway employees.

"Thank you, thank you, thank you for your help," he kept saying.

I looked at his shins. His legs were contained with so many straps and buckles, and his white tennis shoes faced so perfectly forward, that I guessed he never stood up, and never left the wheelchair without help.

The subway employees bowed several times as they backed out of the train.

"Thank you for using the Hanzomon Line," they were saying.

My mouth was open. I closed it after the train started moving.

Two men in green suits were waiting right by the train doors at the Omotesando Station platform. The guy in the wheelchair rolled up to the doors, and the subway guys helped him out.

"Thank you, thank you, thank you for your help."

"Thank you for using the Hanzomon Line."

I thought again about the guy who hit me in the head with the apple. I had once entertained the thought that he might be on track to become the President of the United States, or that he might be just any dumb businessman. When I watched the two subway employees carry that handicapped man out of my sight at Omotesando Station, I realized that the boy who hit me in the head with an apple can, really, become just about anything. I have no say in it.

*********

The sky above Hachiko Square at two in the afternoon was so blue you'd swear it was a color that didn't occur in nature. I didn't see a single cloud. Students got together, and marched to the embassy. I didn't follow them. I wasn't filled with revolutionary spirit. This was Hachiko Square, not Tiananmen.

A few white people like me and a few white people not like me hung back, and looked disinterested. Some people took pictures. I didn't take pictures.

Hachiko Square just isn't as impressive during the day.

On mornings when I stumble out of manga cafes following night-long punk-rocking sessions, Hachiko Square is owned by dog-sized ravens with heads as big as American footballs. The ravens perch on benches kids with folk guitars will claim in twelve hours' time. They stand on light poles and scream down at each other. All the jumbo televisions of the square are turned off, and the world is as quiet as a thousand-some giant birds screaming in alternation. Before the trains even start to run, no cars dare streak by, no truck equipped with billboards dares to advertise Panasonic batteries as better than Maxell batteries. The ravens don't need batteries.

The ravens' song is loud and quiet at the same time. It's loud because you can hear them, and they can hear each other. It's quiet because it's not as loud as the sound of a thousand Japanese college kids who think they have something to add to the world with their bullhorns, who are here precisely because their being here is adding something to the world that the world wouldn't be at peace without.

The ravens, and the dead-electricity of Shibuya's Hachiko Square at six in the morning on a Sunday: the notion that it turns nightly into what might be the busiest intersection on earth strikes me as the opposite of one of those movies about the world a century after nuclear war. Surely as there is calm before the storm, there is calm afterwards. What is a post-apocalypse, even a post-apocalyptic Shibuya morning, if not a breath of peace of the intransitive variety?

I'm not saying the Final-Folk-Fantasy-trendy kids who invaded Shibuya's Hachiko Square at one in the clear afternoon on Friday, March 21, 2003 were wrong about one thing or another thing. I'm not going to criticize them for being too loud, or caring too much. Because, really, what is life, if you don't care about something?

I'm just going to say that I found their peace too transitive. After seeing two subway employees help a wheelchair-bound man onto a train at Jimbocho and two more subway employees help that same man off that same train at Omotesando, the boredom of young people, myself included, starts to look a little silly.

And so does killing.

And so does the Colonel. At some times, I can't believe he's not been back to his homeland of America for nine years. At some times, I realize he probably won't ever return home. And at some more confusing times still, I do both at the same time.

Just last night, when I got home and before I called Kazuko, before I remembered the kid who hit me in the back of the head with the apple, the Colonel sat down next to me at the table and told me about his day.

In the middle of the afternoon, he and this buddy of his he knows from Taiwan went to Roppongi for some drinking. He's been in this country for two weeks. It was about time he got some drinking done.

In the middle of the afternoon, they "totally went into this whorehouse."

"This girl, she took me into the room. She was only twenty-three. So she says, 'Take off clothes.' And she says, 'Take shower.' It was really nice treatment. Still no Thailand, though."

I could only reply with "Mm-hmm."

"Forty-five minutes. Ten thousand yen got me forty-five minutes."

All I could say, really, was "Ten thousand yen, huh?"

"Yeah," the Colonel said. "Ten thousand yen."

The Colonel was silent as I looked at my grip on my guitar. For a moment, I lived inside myself: young, American, on an adventure overseas, like a guy in a movie -- and with a guitar, and even wearing a sweatshirt that said "ROCK AND ROLL HERO" on it, listening to some old man tell his tale.

"Ten thousand yen," the Colonel repeated.

"Ten thousand yen," I said, about to strum a chord.

I didn't strum the chord. The Colonel cut me off with a question.

"How much is that in dollars?"

"H-Hong Kong Dollars?" I asked.

The Colonel shook his head. "No. American."

- Tim Rogers
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