The Clock Garage
Comments: 2
So I see go to the meeting — about which I can’t say anything but there was a young woman,a tarento who perhaps in a not-too-distant time might have been an idoru (only this being the 21st century, a far more nuanced and sophisticated media-savviness is leveraged to try to catapult careers in various and brightly burning arcs, or maybe everybody’s just self-conscious — beauty short of stardom gets posed tough questions in a recession) — and I finish the meeting, leaving when I said I would, and I take the elevator the 8 floors to the ground. When the doors open, I’m on another floor, not the one we entered on, yet I’d pushed “1” (but hadn’t paid attention when we’d walked in earlier, naturally assuming that entering a building from the street puts you on the first floor).
Facing the elevator on this new floor was a big hand-lettered sign (thick black felt-tipped marker, big end scrubbed up and down the page several times per letter stroke to emulate a sort of Akzidenz Grotesk delivery) which said EXIT with an arrow pointing off to the left of the E. There was a doorway, not the one we’d entered by: it seemed to be at the back of the building.
I walked outside, took a wrong turn, and as I was realising that I was heading in the wrong direction (this feeling waddled into my head as I was still trying to figure out the mysterious floor arrangement), I looked up and found that I was standing in front of the clock garage.
There was an old Citroën in the garage, surrounded on all sides by clocks. There must have been 80 or a hundred clocks — but enough at any rate that the overall impression was simply of not being able to count them.
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Posted to General Rants • 2003.02.14 (Fri) • 23:21
Comments
Posted by resonance 2003.02.15, 01:54
Sometimes I think you live not in Japan as you report, but on an abandonded Terry Gilliam set.
Posted by Adam Rice 2003.02.15, 05:50
This is one of the things I love about Japan. You turn a corner onto some little alley, and there you find evidence of some kind of fanatic, fastidious devotion.
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