A Letter from Japan
From the Book of Disorderly Days

Ichihara

It takes me back to the slippery, water-resistant English town of Buxton, January 2024, and the glassy pond upon which pedal-boats and swans went about their separate yet oddly syncopated manoeuvres. One particularly decrepit, half-sinking pedal-boat on Buxton Pond bore a wishful, handwritten imperative: ‘Half Price Half Hourly Rental’, an offer for which, sensibly, there were no takers. My wife Jen and I are presently on the foreshore of the well-manicured Ichihara Lake, east of Tokyo City. A poem by Tokyo-based New Zealander Brent Kininmont – whom we met a few days ago – sets this scene for us, or revisits it: ‘Across the pond the wind has swept / the swan boats into a jam…’

With their polished white hulls and rounded rooftops, from which protrude swannish necks and long-beaked heads, the two-person pedal-boats of Ichihara appear lake-worthy and well-appointed for both maritime and faux-avian roles. (The actual swans of the prefecture appear to have been relegated to adjacent waterways and lesser tributaries.) The flotilla of swan-boats Brent encounters in his recently published collection, The Companion to Volcanology, is far less mobile than those laid out before us. In one poem, the usually bustling pondlife is frozen in a Tokyo-style gridlock:

Neck and neck, couples
and small families going nowhere.
Swimming out is not an option –
the signs are clear on this.
One soaked woman cradling a child
has reached her limit. See!
It’s only up to her knees.

Brent lives mostly in Tokyo but also rents a small apartment in the west of ...