There she goes, again.

I dated this girl or someone just like her. That was nearly five years ago now. It was a brief thing, for all of a month, at best. Last week, in the moments before I took this picture, I was transported – I recognised immediately the fragile shape between the shoulders and those loose skinny arms, with one, always the left, often hooked through the straps of a hand-stitched leather bag.

But now, piecing together quite ordinary scenes, it could have been an even shorter time, such is the manner in which suddenly, all the lunches, afternoons and evenings assemble and blend, only to give way to the next. Of course, among them there are highlights, too. Some moments that, despite the accumulation of other intimacies, return intact.

Like on that one occasion, in the seconds before I collected her for a restaurant date, the marvel I felt, full of a self-satisfied thrill that the girl I was meeting – she waiting and absently gazing outwards – looked as good as she did. There and then I was stopped and from a secret distance, the passing carousel of faces giving me a brief anonymity, I stood, taking in all that I could before she finally found me. Discovering her unlikely spy, the elegant repose broke when she started in my direction but that image of her, the dark eyes wide open, the bag, that time held primly, in another simple dress, was of someone of I had never expected to know. (And that I could kiss her and did, remains, perhaps, more than what it should.) The ache of incredulity is one I can still feel.

_________________________________________________________________________TTT

I was crossing the roads between Tokyo Station and the Shin Marunouchi Building opposite when I saw this girl. The tall glass sliding doors of the Citibank foyer entrance opened and out she came. She paused to look at a streetplan. I walked up and stood close to her, pretending to look at the map, too. She had that great smell of salon hair. After a while she turned and walked away. It was then I took this picture.

LX3, f/2.8, 1/80, ISO100

The Final Approach – Nippori, Tokyo

...stay on target, stay on target

It’s late evening, I’m on the narrow end of a central reservation, just before an underpass and just beneath a monorail. It’s exciting; taking the pictures, cars and trucks zooming by, leaving behind tail lights like tracer fire in the live view; they’re close, too, I can feel a rumble buzz running through my shoes and that spent diesel air, a hot breath all around me and I’m thinking, c’mon, there’s gotta be a good one out of this lot and I shoot again. The moment had that feeling, y’know, the juice.

Then the cops come along, pulling up, blocking the fast lane, lights aflashin and asking me to move. Shit. ‘What you doin here?’ ‘Taking pictures.’ ‘Why?’ ‘It’s my hobby.’ ‘What you takin pictures of?’ looking where the lens was pointing and seeing only road and where the pasty gaijin would most likely plant his IED, hotbed of counter insurgent TEFL activity that is north-eastern Tokyo. ‘Hmm…roads and stuff.’ He looked confused, then automatically switched to suspicious, his default setting. He unclipped his seat belt and that was the sign to up sticks and take the haul I had created thus far. (I imagined him demanding the memory card.) My compliance assuaged him and he muttered something about it being dangerous taking pictures here.

And he was right, I suppose, despite being a young surly prick. Still it was fun and I’ll do it again when the next venue reveals itself. They usually do in a way that is very pleasing and nearly always unexpected. Two weeks ago I got lost while looking for a bowl of Miso Ramen – it was close to midnight then, too – and hungry, I wandered where I hadn’t in a long time and suddenly there was all this tall deep metalwork wherever I turned. Dark hulking structures, effulgent glows of streetlighting on wide heavy flanks that stretched as far as you could see, it was beautiful. There and then I took loads of preparatory pictures with the LX3 (a pleasure in itself) and vowed to come back, as they say in the gangland flicks, all tooled up.

And I did: Canon 400D, Tamron wide lens (again), 8secs, f/4.5, ISO100,+1 EV