Under the tracks

Whenever we feel out of sorts we take a walk -- mostly down around and under the tracks at Kanda. Life under the tracks has an earthy, hobo-like jauntiness about it, a contagious sense of freedom that anything might happen (and probably already has) under the chipped red brick arches. Besides, there is simple comfort in the honesty of a brick.

Under one arch, Tome Kuzu, wearing the indigo-dyed samue of the countryside, sits bent-backed on a blue plastic chair with produce laid out before her like a Persian carpet. Oblivious to traffic, to bicycles, to the rattle of a pachinko parlor meters away, she chats with another bent-backed woman haggling over the price of bright orange carrots. For the last 45 years, Kuzu-san, from far Narita, has been here under her arch at six-thirty every morning in sun, snow or rain. She's eighty-three. And she'll be here when she's a hundred she boasts. Today she convinces us to buy her deep red tomatoes. Tomatoes, she says, picked just that morning.

A short walk away under another arch near "Imagawa Koji" (a dark, slightly sinister alley crowded both sides with pocket-size nomiyas) sit two gents on red velvet swivel chairs. These elderly entrepreneurs, as carefree as kings, listen to the radio or read a newspaper as they wait -- with infinite patience -- for someone to buy the last fresh egg or the few crooked spears of asparagus remaining from the produce boxes now piled empty around them. They too have been here since morning, calmly sitting in the shade with a coffee or a beer on their small, cigarette-burned side tables. The nearby nomiya rely on these fellows to supply provisions for the evening's mizu shobai. Working out of the same small truck, they have both sides of the deserted alley staked out.

At quitting time Kuzu-san's styrofoam produce boxes will be stacked as neatly as Lego blocks on her blue chair under her arch. And those red velvet swivel chairs will be chained together to a railing -- secure for tomorrow. Such thrones, we're sure, are not easy to come by.

The shadows seem permanently etched into the pavement under these arches where a livelihood has to be jimmied out of a space no bigger than a pipedream. But a short sharp length of dream is just the type of lever needed for life under the tracks.

-- mjk