The yen is low, and everybody is coming to Tokyo. If that sounds familiar, it’s not because I’m being coy or hedging my bets; it is the only information to be found in most English-language coverage of Japan’s capital in the aftermath of the pandemic. I can’t stop reading these accounts. After nine years in the country, you’d think I would have learned enough Japanese to liberate myself from the Anglo-American internet, but I’m afraid I’m stuck with flimsy stories about the tourist uptick for the time being.
Fifteen years ago, New York Post critic Steve Cuozzo bemoaned the “infantilization of dining” as white tablecloths — elegant, urbane — disappeared from the city’s upscale dining rooms. It was a creep of casualization as diners were increasingly excited to eat Millennium Falco pizzas off of reclaimed lumber or to slurp ramen from a barstool. “For so long, the aesthetic of a Brooklyn restaurant was raw brick and Edison bulbs,” says Tim Meyers. “At least in Williamsburg, we’re thankfully moving past that.” When Meyers was planning his restaurant, Field Guide, which opened on Kent Avenue in November, he decided early in the design process that he’d include white tablecloths. “It’s a signal of, Okay, let’s unplug — we’re gonna have a nice meal,” he says. “There’s a tactile element to the white tablecloths that I don’t think a lot of people appreciate; it’s nicer to set your forearms on a warm tablecloth than a cold, hard table.”
Kali White’s The Monsters We Make (2020) plays with the primal fear of the threat strangers pose, following the lives of three people impacted by local kidnappings. The novel’s main undercurrents—the public versus the private, the community versus the individual, the concepts of victimhood versus survivorship —all circle the growing dread of an unsafe world. White constructs an atmospheric mystery that burns slowly until it is too late.
Once, when I was 18 and living in San Francisco, I spent a Sunday afternoon at the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Muir Beach. I did not arrive in time to sit zazen, or for any lecture or discussion, although if you had asked, I would have said I was interested in such things. Instead, I came for tea and lunch, followed by a tour, all of which now gleams in my imagination as the emblem of a life unlived. As for how that works, let’s put it like this: I was, if not quite spiritual, compelled by the idea of spiritual practice, its rigor and its clarity, the focusing of consciousness required by contemplation. What I was not was disciplined enough.
I kept thinking about that experience as I read Pico Iyer’s Aflame: Learning from Silence, which traces the 30-plus years the author has spent visiting the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur. Founded in 1958, the hermitage dates the heritage of its monastic order to the 11th century; at one point, Iyer describes a gathering, at a retreat center on the Central Coast, “to celebrate the one thousandth birthday of the Camaldolese congregation.”
Indeed, as this fascinating book attests, the more you find out about our cognitive and emotional relationship with music, the more mysterious it seems – and sounds.