Photo Club

The surreality of being back in Tokyo was compounded by a reunion with my old roommate Tets. Much of who I am is because of this guy, but I hadn’t had a real one-on-one conversation with him in about three years. We met up in Shibuya and had lunch at a tiny Greek restaurant. We talked about his new job writing local news for NHK. We talked about music, because a major part of our relationship has been based on music. During college, he introduced me to things like Underworld and Aphex Twin, which I never would have tried on my own. We’d listen to them during epic mah-jongg sessions with other Japanese students, as I got a crash course in Japanese culture and language. After lunch, we went to the photo club room at Sophia. It was strange to revisit a place that I used to spend so much time in, but hadn’t thought about for years. All of the photo club stuff was in a new room, but it unmistakably belonged to the same club. My [old photo from Nagano][1], probably the best photo I ever took, was still there on the bulletin board. Tets says that Ueki-san, seen on the far right of that photo, the guy who was so nice to me, is in the hospital with some serious disease and may die soon. [1]: /index.pl?699