Pre-Fab

I take the train around the outskirts of Tokyo; there are boundaries, a place where the city starts & ends but you'd never know it & you'd never find them if you looked. The city is endless; buildings rising & falling with the sun. An undulating topography in concrete chaos; metastasizing out into the sea 'reclaiming' land that it never really owned, never quite reaching the mountains that seem far, far away.
  The streets are a flea-market of architectural design; grey, modular buildings, real Moonbase Alpha stuff, Insectile glass hives, cheerless apartment blocks, flourishes of continental villas, slate-roofed houses invoking a sense of history in a country where buildings over 10 years old are deemed ancient, buildings so obscured in smog & shadow that no other definition or design could be determined. Form may follow function but Sullivan is lost in translation, or I am.

The sun on my face I lean my forehead against the cool, greasy glass. I feel the thrum of the train & the city beneath it. It's sunny, the light strobing through the breaks between the blocks.  At the stations & along some of the streets there are yellow pathways that look like the tops of Lego blocks; they're there for the blind. Maybe the whole city's really made of Lego?
The train rises up above this sub-suburb & I look out across the city. Four Tet's "you could ruin my day" is the soundtrack for this scene. Then there's Fuji, beautiful & imposing. Winter skies are crystal clear here. The city doesn't quite get there & never quite will. I hope.
Then it's gone behind the towers & aerials & hoardings & windows & stations. Yet somehow it all seems (& always has) like a scale model; a finely crafted construction of balsa wood & forced perspective, the kind that Godzilla would tear through in his rubber suited glory; a pre-fabricated pretense of a city. Fuji is the painted backdrop & if I could reach beyond the glass I could cross the city in seconds or pluck those buildings from the distance, no more than an arms length away.

A song for the city, a city song