It takes a very special pair of eyes to locate (from far far overseas) a tranquil spot amidst the maddness of a ‘Global City’ such as Tokyo. I’m very glad she did, as I was then able to go scouting for the location.

As it turns out the library of the Park Hyatt Tokyo is rather like a walk-in wardrobe: a glamorous moment in the confines of a relatively small space. Nonetheless, it was a pity, after much anticipation, to find the library was not ‘a room of its own’, but instead a decorative corridor on route to the lifts. Left to your own devices you’d probably be easily fooled by the photograph on the hotel’s website; as ever one must ‘learn to ignore what the photographer saw’. Needless to say I took the very same photograph – a ritual of the sightseer I guess (though this visit was always going to want to be a loving memento, the picture side of a ‘Wish You Were Here’ postcard).

As I arrived - dressed in just T-shirt and trousers – I was asked if I wanted my luggage taken. A little startled that my single bag could be construed as luggage, I must have let on to my lack of credentials. ‘Are you a guest here, Sir?’ – she asked. I had to be honest, but I pulled from my magic bag a printout of an email from the hotel saying how I was most welcome to visit. It was enough to get me in. The hotel’s main entrance and lobby is accessible from the street as you’d expect, but there is nothing more of the hotel until 41 floors up in the lift. Like Charlie in the Great Glass Elevator, I arrived into the hotel with a huge grin and with full recognition that this was not where I would normally be found.

I managed to wander about without causing any further suspicion and soon came upon the library which I had come looking for, but had not quite been expecting. I paced about the bookcases, looking in at the various and curious volumes contained. I caught sight of myself in the parallel mirrors, which gave an infinite set of reflections and I made an expensive call: an invitation to dinner (tbc), 41 floors up in the sky.       

…finally I left for the now hum-drum streets of Shinjuku after many attempted goodbyes (like those false fades common to the pop songs of the 1980s, when the music just starts up again, sounding evermore fresh and necessary). The light was fading as I entered this more quotidian, yet alternative ‘library’; full, as it is, of a vast array of materials and media.  

 …and just as I had experienced the library at the Hyatt in the mode of hyperspace, it was perhaps fitting that upon one of the many ‘library’ shelves of the department stores I was finally able to locate more appropriate (virtual) luggage. Yet, like the books in the cabinets of the Hyatt, these too were behind glass, awaiting an affluent onlooker.

…but all is not lost. The trip has surely afforded me the occasion of a vacilador, which – as previously noted – Steinbeck describes as one who is ‘going somewhere but doesn’t greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction’. The beauty of such trips would seem to be you come away with far more than you might expect. So, like Steinbeck, who goes in search of potatoes, ‘it turned out I saw almost more potatoes than I needed to see’ – for I got to my library and then its experience stayed with me over long-distance, as well as when I then fell back into the streets outside. As one result of my virtual visit, I have some new thoughts for the ‘Project’ supposedly unfolding here. Like quaint library index cards, I think the sections of the book (to come) should be divided by simple, single words. A sort of idiosyncratic filing system. One word can be ‘Library’ – to be filled out with various associations, manipulations and of course liaisons that occur in such ’neutral’ surrounds. Another, I suspect, can be ‘Fabric’ – just because it is simultaneously both such a tactile and textual word and because it seems various items under this label are already underway. ’Luggage’ (not baggage) might need to be another one…