tokyo mother

Her whole life, my whole life my mother said Tokyo. She spoke Tokyo, she played Tokyo, she was exiled from Tokyo. With time I too ran along the banks of the Han, I too stood looking out over Tokyo Bay. I ran. I laughed. I wrote. I lived. Tokyo will be the book that one could not stop from constructing. And between the sentences you can hear me sighing, powerless to live otherwise. and the missing words are — I would very much like to travel once more to Tokyo, with him. I would very much like to take a train from the airport to Tokyo Central and walk around Tokyo Tokyo. — For me I would have liked to go to Tokyo with my exiled mother. It’s impossible. There are days when Tokyo is a dream, days when I imagine being born or even being conceived in a hotel room, perhaps on the floor, against the wall, bathroom shower, an immaculate conception or more banally in a bed. There are days when I imagine that the houses we lived in north of London, the houses of my childhood were in Tokyo. I was born in a hospital in London. I was born in Barnet, my father would say, i try and imagine him with another woman, one from London. Unimaginable. If not for him she would have lived with Aunt Osaka, as her clone did. In Tokyo in this world, the clone of my mother, she dies with Osaka, did they sob? like Ulysses on the beach with Penelope? It’s been a few years since she left, an old woman with an old man who did not want to be alone, who knows where the universe took her.