The Cat and The City

by Nick Bradley

He put it down, just to the right of a coaster on his desk, and idly scratched his crotch.

‘Where you can’t stop thinking. You look back at every choice you ever made in life, and all you can see are the mistakes. The things you did that brought you to where you are.’ Keita stared into space, as if he were looking at something Ohashi couldn’t see. ‘And how if you’d just done a few things differently, if you’d just made better choices, then you’d be in a better place right now.’

‘Kochira koso, yoroshiku onegai itashimasu.’

Like, even if something dramatic or terrible in your life

doesn’t happen, just the act of growing older is

like a massive traum...

He used to be such a happy kid, but it’s like the very act of growing old is slowly killing him .

Closing the door of her apartment, she took off her shoes at the genkan, and as she did so, she thought to herself as she did every evening how it was impossible to translate the word genkan. You could translate it as ‘entrance way’ or ‘porch’, but it was neither really. The whole point of the genkan in a Japanese home was a space that indicated where the outside ended and the inside began.

tsundoku – a word that required a sentence in English: buying books and piling them up on a shelf without reading them.

But she would always tell herself, Who needs friends, when you have books.

‘Yeah. You know, like, a seasonal word. Every haiku is supposed to have a seasonal word that relates to one of the four seasons.’

I like to sniff at my armpits surreptitiously when I am on the train. I have also discovered it provides me with a larger amount of personal space than other Tokyoites are privileged to.

two not washing would do that

I emit an aura.

Stink lol