Kuramae Mornings

Kuramae, I'm told, means "in front of the warehouses" — and for most of its life it was exactly that: a working river town built around the shogunate's rice stores. You can still feel the bones of it. The streets are wider than they need to be, the buildings lower than the Tokyo average, and on certain afternoons a warehouse door slides open and a stack of paper goes past on a hand trolley as though nothing has changed in a hundred years.

The cafés have arrived, of course. A stationery shop with letterpress cards and a single careful till. A roastery whose espresso is so slow and so good you feel you've interrupted something sacred by ordering it. None of this is loud; all of it is considered.

We walk along the river before the wind picks up. Children in uniform cut diagonally across the park, satchels swinging. A heron waits in the reeds as though it has a meeting in ten minutes.