I suppose it sounds slightly frivolous to spend half an hour staring at swords, but it seemed like the right thing to do after eating raw fish for breakfast. The National Museum in Ueno Park had an exhibit of katana and tachi (I hadn’t even heard of the latter), all displayed unmounted so all you were looking at were the blades themselves. There was also a separate display of mountings which was fascinating in itself, but it was the blades that most interested me.
Camille Paglia says that “the sword blade… is given an interior by Japanese connoisseurs, who project poetic landscapes into its hundred folded layers.” For about half the time I was in the exhibit, I saw the swords as beautiful examples of metal-work, and also as, hey, cool—swords! But then something clicked, and all at once I started to see those interior landscapes. Suddenly, the temper lines along the blades weren’t random squiggles, but this one was a mountain range, and that one was an ocean. In some corner of my mind I sensed sound and motion. It was an odd sensation: I was still perceiving the objects in front of me, but I was perceiving something else as well, or at least a suggestion of it, the kind of something else that makes you look at all ordinary objects just a little differently because of the tiniest suspicion that there might be something else there.
Then I snapped out of it, and went and bought a Tokyo rail map to hang on my wall in Seattle, and it was time to meet Ryan at Tokyo Station.