What a Typhoon Is Good For

Three weeks of silence on this journal while I was busy eating ice cream on Tokyo beaches, getting drunk on overpriced beer in tiny bars, and pointing a camera at every brilliantly dressed person who crossed my path. Then the rainy season arrived and after it came the first of several typhoons sweeping across Honshu, and suddenly I had nothing to do but sit inside and stare at a redesign I’d been avoiding for months.

Every time I’ve attempted a full overhaul of this site it has backfired—I know this, I have learned this lesson more than once. The black minimalist diary that I thought was genuinely elegant drove everyone away. The pseudo-print layout I was proud of: same story. The reader’s tolerance for my design ambitions is a known and finite quantity. So this time I made the thing better instead of different: a proper homepage that occupies real visual space, no more irritating background image, and English coming back after a long absence.

There is something strange about rebuilding a personal journal from the other side of the planet during a weather event. The site is the smallest possible artifact of a life being lived elsewhere—tinkering with it while a typhoon rattles the windows feels like finding an old notebook in a drawer and correcting the grammar. It doesn’t change anything that matters. But it felt good anyway. Now I’m going to eat tendon, drink matcha, and get my hands into further trouble.