October 2026

I. Commute

This morning the Tube swallowed me whole —
District line, westbound,
a Tuesday ache in the fluorescent light.

I watched a man mouth words to himself
across the carriage,
rehearsing something —
an argument, maybe,
or a prayer.

I do this too.
Ima doko ni iru ka na.
Where am I now, exactly.

The window gave back my face
laid over East London passing:
off-licences, curry houses, scaffolding,
a single magnolia
still somehow clinging.

I am the overlay.
I am the glass between.

When I was ten in Shinjuku
my mother called English the other tongue
as though I kept a spare one
folded in my pocket,
damp and forgotten.

Now I translate for a living —
I take what one world means
and hand it, slightly bruised,
to another.

Some things don't cross.
Wabi-sabi. Mono no aware.
I've stopped trying.
I let them stand
in their original silence
and hope the reader leans in
close enough to feel
the untranslatable
against their cheek.

---

II. What the Body Knows

My body knows things my languages don't.

It knows: the specific loneliness
of a rented room
where someone else's pictures
still leave pale squares on the wall.

It knows: okaeri, the sound of coming home
to no one — the word a lantern
lit for a ship
that isn't coming.

It knows: the way rain on a city skylight
is neither Japanese rain
nor English rain
but only this —
water on glass,
now,
you awake underneath it,
listening.

I am not between two places.
I am the place between.

A translation
that has outlived
both its originals.

At night sometimes I type in English
and dream in Japanese —
the syntax scrambles,
nouns float free of their verbs,
and I wake
holding a sentence
that belongs to no grammar
I was ever taught.

I write it down anyway.

It might be a poem.
It might be a forecast.
It might be the name
for what I am
when nobody is watching —

just a person,
standing in a city,
hearing the rain
say here, here, here
in the only language
either of us shares.

#poetry #identity #belonging #Tokyo