If you want to get famous in Kawasaki, ride a bike—or kill somebody.

I AM born in this city's dry cleaner's shop, longing for John Lennon, for brothers who love Man City. Working Class Hero. Violent form. Perfect being. Poems and songs to praise myself. Carve it in. Kawasaki Southside.

No matter how wrecked I get, I crawl forward. I puke. I keep rolling. Covered in vomit. Even on the days when I decide to feel like total shit, I still crank up my Rock 'n' Roll.

A city I know too well. Frontale flags. Twist, snap, pray, crush everything I see. A life of love and hate. I wanted to die at twenty-seven.

I am a rat. The only way I can revolt against myself is to stare—hard enough to make it hurt.

In my mind my dreams are real. Every day flies by at the speed of light.

Repeated physical labor. Working the warehouse. Waiting at red lights on the way there and back. Washing the face of a nobody. Cigarettes & Alcohol. Repeating days and repeating views. Parks and benches. Bus stops. All things pass. The boredom of riding my bike to the same place every day. Passing through. I remember neither the seasons nor yesterday, but I remember looking up at this city's sky. Life was best until I was six 🤨. A peppermint machine in a music bar. A terrible band, still terrible, shouting, "This is our last song."

Half the World Away. Goo goo g' joob.

I crossed the night, returned to the night, raced through the night. Following wherever the mind drifted. A so fuckin' special world. I am me, and I stay me. I cannot become anyone else, so I stay me. Then erase it—rewrite it—the joyless life of working like a stone statue, the pale days ruled by what people say you should do. Factories. Twenty-four-hour discount stores. Toothbrushes packed tight on shelves, waiting three years to be used, while just behind them, products only slightly old get thrown away. Days that never change, feelings that never change, looping and looping.

No matter how hard I tried, ordinary happiness stayed far from me. I became a demon of struggle, lit a fierce emotion, and thought I had shaken off every kind of emptiness. Thought I had. I look back at old photographs.

What I see there is a youth so blue it hurts, hurts, hurts, hurts, hurts. I should have reached back and held that hand—the hand that was held out to me. I should have exhausted every way to find some Everything's gonna be all right. Infinite.

Through lonely nights bound by deep despair, through lightless mornings possessed by hard resignation, the one thing I never stopped was writing. This is my mission, my fate, my calling. It was true ten years ago, true the day before yesterday, yesterday, today. So it will be true tomorrow, the day after, and at the hour of my death.

I keep pedaling straight ahead. At the end of the river (the end of the world), there is always the sea, and I know—running—that beyond it I can go nowhere. I see. The steel tower of the waste plant rises high. At night its tip glows red. For an instant, loneliness looks out. I go on living empty, unfilled, and still I never grow tired of life.

"But I don't know. At a time like this, what would Shota Shimura do?"

Love. The story goes on, stretching into the dark like tire tracks. An adventure beginning at the dot-end. And here I am, alone, waiting for daybreak. ……

Only pachinko parlors still let you park your bike for free.

21st century. Rusted machines. Heart racing. Chasing the tail lights of the Keikyu Line, shoegaze echoes—departing TOKYO, bound for SEKAI.

Yesterday, before dark, I disappeared into the crowd. 1 = n. They say it's better as long as Kanagawa Prefectural Police aren't around. Neck pain. Cramps in my lower belly.

The bike I ride is urban mobility. Mobile technology. Amen.

And the devil keeps chasing me—LONDON, ISTANBUL, TOKYO.

Hit me at the edge of death. I've got no talent anyway. Despair. Lack. I switch hands, switch forms, trying to fill the void. No hobby but work. Crushed down. Forced to swallow bitterness. Still, a feeling too fierce to give up. I was born with a violent love. Anthem For Myself.

Always right, or left. Forced to choose. Because life is finite, to gain one thing is to lose all else; to lose one thing is to gain all else. Fate is abstraction. Inertia. Critical Cycling — 🚲 a dance of reality. I want to become someone who can wreck a whole life for one instant of pleasure.

I blend into the dark. I can't stay like this forever.

What the hell am I doing here?

The river never stops. The same water never returns. Time keeps flowing one way, unchanged. A single drop here will one day cross the open sea, reach the far side of the earth, turn into cloud, drift the sky, then sometimes freeze and wait for hundreds of millions of years. Like pedaling, I move one by one, clearing one thing at a time. Loop. And loop.

Boyhood. I stood blankly before the bridge over the Tama River, staring at a distant world. Memory. Like looking from Johto toward Kanto—so close, yet impossibly far. Memory. The moon reflected on the Tama River.

I live, and I am born again. Quo Vadis. Cur dormiunt nezumi?

No matter how far I go, I can't outrun myself. Eternity. Even if I keep down this road—hurt, hated, pushed away, standing alone in the rain—there is hope in thinking: somewhere ahead is someone lonelier, more broken than me. Desire. Let's love life. The end is not some empty wasteland. A Day In The Life. I still believe rock can change the world.

"You'll be okay," you said. You were the one who gently peeled away the corroded fragments from the whole view of this world, gathered the light, and showed it to me.

"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."

I live, and I am born again. Booze. Music. Nostalgic, but already too old for words—"like a movie."

Be proud of your life, and live in that blur where reality and story bleed together. I had a dream like that. Going to a strange town for no reason. Flipping through a book that catches your eye in a bookstore. And night flight. This universe is vast and joyful, and it breaks my heart that we only get one life, and that one day we die.

"Love your fate." ("Love your fate.")
"The place you drifted to" ("The place you drifted to")
"is the place you wished for." ("is the place you wished for.")

A new world. Keep playing. I wonder if you're still doing well. Hello, hello. On the night when the hard rain that ends winter finally stops, I slip away south, unseen.

"How can anyone sleep on a night this good?" I say. A voice echoes through the curtain of night. The greatest hope. The world shines beautifully. Live each day.

"The future you keep praying for will one day become fate, and lead you forward."