I’m awake after a fairly sleepless night.  Most of the alcohol in my body has evaporated and now the room is almost certainly a fire hazard.  I open the window, my yukata flaps open and a bird flies past.  We are beside a wide, rocky, icy looking river in a small valley.  Everything looks so grey that it could be somewhere in eastern Europe except there is a huge bush with giant green balls hanging off it and a K-Truck in the distance.  I had an urge to explore so I took off down the padded stairs and out of the fragrant foyer with my camera and a growing sense of impending doom.  I managed to find a large thatched temple, a fresh spring water that may grant good fortune (I drank it) and an awkward tree house structure.

A man followed me from the hotel.  He must have been sent by the hotel.  Some sort of ordely I imagine.  No, he was a painter actually.  He spoke decent English and he reminded me of someone..  Anyway, back at the hotel, a quick splash of water on the face, a quick machine-driven massage and a quick breakfast of fish and raw eggs.  I had time to take my blood pressure in a darkened room (it’s normal btw) and photographs of some stuff before they kicked us out onto the powertard bus.  The weather was beautiful, hot.

We arrived at our destination, a temple.  The family lived next door to the main temple in a long residential property with a little adjacent tearoom style building.  The shoji screens and doors had been removed to make space for our performance.  It was a lovely setting for some theatre.

We had a great meal with some sausage, and tomato and salad.  Very western and it was a nice change.  It was relaxing waiting for the customers to arrive, drinking coffee, walking around, sitting in the sun.

After our performance a musician was booked to play little concert.  He was playing the tsuchibue or ocarina.  He seemed quite anal about sounds and music and he offered to ‘master’ our tape recording (its the soundtrack we use to perform to when there is no live storyteller/shamisen player).  He copied it onto CD and boosted some frequencies to make it clearer.  Anyway, that was very friendly of him but it was pretty foolish to do this 32 minutes before blast-off.  So, anyway halfway through the performance the CD soundtrack went silent didn’t it..  Everyone froze for a minute thinking the same thing: ‘What should we do? Do we break protocol?’  The place was full and the audience began to fidget nervously.  Yamao san decided to pop up and explain the situation to everyone.  He made sure to tell everyone that the man over there made the faulty CD recording and that usually this never happens because we use our own tapes.  So we go back to the tape and the performance rewinds and begins again.  No-one noticed.  Ocarina man squirms, and I squirm too.

Later, we are all chilled out post-performance, drinking cool oolong and some little rice snacks listening to Bach, Handel and Michael Jackson played on a ocarina.  I had to ask myself whether the man was a genius.  He was obviously a gifted musician but why the ocarina?  Maybe it was a test of his fortitude/aptitude.  Maybe it was a gimmick.  I couldn’t cope with it; he was murdering Earth Song.  I took a walk in the sun and sat next to some graves and susuki.

After 6 hours of ocarina twiddling we all felt a little cranky and a beer on the bus was definitely well earned.  Powertard arrived at our new hotel, a huge convenient swanky high-rise slab in the middle of nowhere.  I did my usual reconnaissance trick and then it was off to dinner and things turned messy.  How messy?  Metaphorical messy: not a single wayward drop of bodily fluid spilled onto the floor all night (I lie, I’m positive something hit the floor – but I just didn’t see it).  Awa odori?

The door to the moon…

NEXT DAY

With heads filled of powdered concrete it was time for the Toyota Factory Museum.  It was like reading a glossy magazine with just three pages and loads of huge shiny pictures of rice cookers.  Sitting in a convertible Lexus I began to feel funny.  The doors were too thick.  The buttons under my fingertips adjusted my body.

A vulva car of the future driven by air and makeup.  Trumpet playing robots with real lungs.  Car-shaped curry.  Grilled squid.  Phantoms.

Where am I?