Wedding Never Delivered, So I’m Going to Tokyo

I make these decisions in a rush and only start panicking once they begin to feel real. Months ago I decided I was moving to Tokyo for a year. Easy call. Felt right. I went around announcing it. And then, not half an hour ago, I cancelled my lease—my landlord typed up a note on his ancient PC, I signed it, done—and now the whole thing is sitting in my chest in a way the original decision never was.

February 28th is when Wedding lets me go. I’ve lived in this northern Berlin neighborhood for five years, quietly waiting for it to become the next Mitte, the next Prenzlauer Berg—for the rents to creep up and the coffee shops to multiply and the area to finally develop a personality beyond cheap and slightly grim. The artists moved in. The rents stayed low. Nothing happened. If the trends won’t come to me, I’ll go to the trends.

The logistics are what they always are: sell what you can at flea markets and buyback sites, give away what won’t sell, throw away the rest, stash the genuinely important things somewhere safe. It’s all gone suspiciously smoothly so far. Normally I have to clear twice as many obstacles as a reasonable person to reach the same destination, so the absence of friction is making me nervous in its own way.

First, though, I fly home for Christmas. A week of roast meat and cookies and relatives who want to know whether it’s all sushi, whether I’ll accidentally end up with a woman in a schoolgirl outfit, whether the earthquakes will get me before the radiation does. I’ve heard all of it already. I’ll nod and eat another cookie and think about February.

This is the first entry in what I’m calling the Tokyo Diary—notes on the move, the preparations, the low-grade dread, and eventually the thing itself. Not because I’m the first person to have ever relocated, but because the process of getting there is worth documenting. Two months from now I’ll be writing from somewhere considerably further east.