Our buildings form jagged teeth.

Now, I`m not exactly sure whether you call what I am doing here, in a city of over 10 million people centrally, as `living` here. Every place that I have been able to spend time here in this vast megalopolis; from Nakano to Ueno, has been a treat. I have had the opportunity to actually `live` here. I use quoatations simply for the fact that at times it feels as if I am playing some kind of role here. Some kind of part. I am still a foreigner trying to fit into a puzzle where I really hope to be a tangible part of one day. For instance when I stay with a host who has offered to put me up for a few days I am given the gift of the home life that I have left behind me. I am able to simply read, go to the park, walk through the endless maze of streets and small pubs in the nieghbourhood. Yes, the neighbourhood. Tokyo has some of the most amazing little neighbourhoods in the world. Tiny and welcoming, they form a kind of protective netting so you don`t get lost while observing the people who support their neighbourhood. But the question that comes to me as I prepare to take off for a week travelling Kamakura and Yokohama, is have I been `living` in these neighbourhoods? Have I become a little part, a tiny witness to someone else`s reality? There are areas where I feel the most at home. Sendagaya is beautiful, and is where my friend Mariko lives. She lent me her apartment all to myself for two days a few weeks ago. Here I felt acute loneliness for the first time. A home that didn`t belong to me at all. A place that I wanted to settle in. To rest after travelling in the woods for six weeks. But I really could not. After all, before I left for Japan I was living at my parents for seven months saving cash and have been here for over two months, so that`s over nine months of being...well...of being homeless. I have left no apartment in my name back home like the last time I travelled over here. I have forgotten what`s like to actually feel at home in a little place that you can actually call your own. Something that I think many of us take for granted. Funny how I needed to spend time in Tokyo to feel that way, yet Tokyo; as I have said before time and again (and you guys I am sure are getting bored with) is the phrase`home away from home.` In this phrase I have understood the reason why I had bouts of homesickness first staying in Tokyo, because being here is like being at home. The streets are all for me. When I get a chance to walk at night is when I am able to appreciate where I am. At night is where the city really comes to life. Not just here but even Toronto. The night has a way of dancing with our false lighting, or ways of helping our eyes see ahead of us. But what it really does is make the city come out of its shell. Why people are always able to be themselves, at night. At times you forget you are here. I was at a tiny `anarchist` pub near Waseda University`s main campus, a place called Akane and had a chance to meet a German guy who was staying for a few nights with Bunsei, a kid who I stayed with from the Nakano/Koenji area. We spoke for hours as he cooked dinner for everyone in the bar, mainly about what it feels like to not feel where you are. A beautiful friend of mine and I once came up with a phrase, entirely by accident one time in the car, `Are we where we are right now?` The German and I asked ourselves the same question as some of the older guests regailed us with Norweigan and World War 2 pro-German songs of the dead. Weird little place. Anyway, the German laughed and I laughed at our ridiculous realities. But you have to wonder, when you are lost in a mammoth city like this one what your place really is? Am I able to feel as if I am living here when clearly I am a guest. But I do feel as if I am living here, a part of the puzzle. I guess that`s all that I can really ask for.