Category: Urban Essays

Konosuyama, for the first time in a while

It suddenly became hot.
If we went downtown, we would get tired from being around many people.
On the third afternoon of Golden Week, our thinking became like this:
A cool place without many people: Konosuyama (a small mountain) near our house: a used book store after walking over the mountain: drink beer in a park on the way home because we are on holiday and it’s hot! And finally: go back home.

It’s called a mountain, but it is not so high.
Even so, our bodies often requested a rest through lack of exercise. Haa. That’s not good at all!

At the used book store, they were holding a Golden Week sale, so I bought a couple of months worth of books, because some books I wanted had become cheap. I also got Volume 9 (Kurotokage, or The Black Lizard) from Kobunsha’s series of Edogawa Rampo’s collected works. (So far we have bought only the essay volumes from this series. We don’t have all thirty volumes.)

At a convenience store, we bought two cans of beer, and went looking for a bench in a neighbouring park. Still the sun was bright and there were not so many shady places, and many kids were playing around there. We walked through the trees, and found a caution about hornets. So scary! Finally we passed through the park and wondered where we should have gone, but then found a narrow stairway leading down to a pond. We sat down there.

Below are the birds, butterfly, and turtles we saw at the pond. The photo at the bottom right is probably a swallow after it caught a fish. It was too fast for our photograph-taking abilities!

– YS, 3 May 2008

3 May 2008