Christmas, Ghosts, and Loneliness in Tokyo
It’s Christmas Day here, and finding myself alone with time to do
a little wandering, I drifted into a quiet place where I
remembered spending some moments before. And I thought how fitting it seems to find myself in this place, on Christmas Day, in Tokyo.
The place exists only immaterially, so you wouldn’t need to come
to Tokyo to see it, and won’t find it here even if you did come.
But because it is situated in the same virtual world where you’re
reading this page, you can — without leaving the corporeal place
where you are now — visit it yourself.
It’s located here:
What you’ll find there is a series of 50 photos in “book” form –
“A photographic poem on the city and its ghosts”.
The creator of “Ghosts of Tokyo”, Olivier Thereaux, describes it this way:
This book started as a project to document the “other” face of
Tokyo, by walking around the Yamanote, the ultra-busy circular
train line often thought of as the heart (or more appropriately,
the crown) of the city, and taking pictures of the areas between
the stations, when the common images were too often close to the
stations.
Those photos capture well the mood of a few of the kinds of places
you might find if you stray off the trail a bit in Tokyo — some
lonely places where your thoughts may start to turn inward a
little.
“Ghosts of Tokyo” is such an apt title for that book, and coming
across it again today made me think of another book about ghosts,
Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”.
I am sure that as long as the “A Christmas Carol” endures, in many
minds Christmas will always in some part be associated with
ghosts. I think that for a lot of people it’s a compelling
connection because it’s a reminder of what might be thought of as
a sort of dimly lit “alley way” of Christmas — one that that is
situated in stark contrast to the twinkling-with-happiness
vision-of-dancing-sugarplums main thoroughfare of Christmas.
And for me, there is only one shade which rules that dark side of
Christmas: Dickens’ “Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come”, whose
entrance into the story Dickens describes like this:
The Phantom slowly, gravely, silently approached. When it came,
Scrooge bent down upon his knee; for in the very air through which
this Spirit moved it seemed to scatter gloom and mystery.It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head,
its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one
outstretched hand. But for this it would have been difficult to
detach its figure from the night, and separate it from the
darkness by which it was surrounded.He felt that it was tall and stately when it came beside him, and
that its mysterious presence filled him with a solemn dread. He
knew no more, for the Spirit neither spoke nor moved.
And in my opinion, the climax of that story comes not when Scrooge
happily finds himself back in the real world and finally makes
right for all the bad things he has done. The climax instead
occurs when the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come takes Scrooge, in
darkness, to a dilapidated churchyard “overrun by grass and weeds”
and among the headstones there, shows Scrooge his own grave.
In that moment, as he looks at his grave, Scrooge realizes that
his life of greed and selfishness has been a waste and that it
will end with him dying alone, unloved, and forgotten.
I think that moment — that dark, shattering part of the story,
rather than the bright and happy ending — is the part that
resonates most strongly in many readers’ minds.
Anyway, I guess there are bright and dark sides to many stories,
and I suppose it is worthwhile for all of us to remember today
that there are bright and dark sides to every season, and bright
and dark sides to life in every city in this world. And I imagine
that the bigger the city, the more abundant are its dark and quiet
and lonely parts, and the more numerous the people who find
themselves there.
Today, just as in most other places, there are many people here in
Tokyo who are spending Christmas alone. Many who are away from
loved ones — who moved here from other parts of Japan or
from other parts of the world.
And as one of them, I have to admit that this year I feel the
quiet and lonely side of life in this city more strongly on this
day, on Christmas Day, than I have on any other day of the year.
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