for my friend's last night in japan, we splurged a little and stayed at a spa resort, by which i mean "shinshu health land", an aging bathhouse-centered hotel a few stops south of matsumoto. it's possibly the least-fashionable hotel in the entire matsumoto basin, the interior was a flawless time capsule of the nineties preserved through decades of fastidious maintenance and lack of capital or particular demand for upgrades, despite the shabbiness the place was still bustling with japanese visitors looking for a cheap soak. we may have been the first foreigners to stay there in months or even years, not a single thing was in english and they were so hardcore that you weren't even allowed to stay at the attached hotel if you had a tattoo.

their baths were of course uniformly clad in little beige tiles and they even had a rare retro "electric pulse path" (電気風呂) that's exactly what it sounds like, it's like nothing i've ever felt before but i'm not sure i can exactly recommend it, it would definitely freak most people out (my friend LOVED it though and said it may have been the best bath he did in japan). the baths did actually have one new thing: a bunch of signs advertised that they had just added an "authentic finnish-style sauna", to avoid disturbing the retro ambiance it was concealed around a corner and down a back hallway, where it was a little jarring to stumble upon a brand-new wooden structure done in a tasteful modern design, the brushed aluminum "HARVIA" logo on the heater inside still shiny and unblemished. the best part was just outside the sauna, a rustic wooden bucket mounted high on the wall with a rope hanging down, it would fill with cold water and then you could pull the rope to dunk yourself. i finished off the night lounging outside in a shallow bath equipped with a tv at one end, watching an entire NHK-E mini-documentary about a korean grad student girl who was researching japanese railway cultureshe tagged along with the university railfan club (three somewhat-nerdy japanese guys) on an expedition to ride the full extent of an obscure private rail line (they refer to this activity as “noritsubushi”), they had good fun onboard using the camera crew’s boom mic to listen to the sounds of the engine and the tracks. at the terminus of the train line, the grad student gets out but the club members stay in, she asks “what, you’re not going to take a look around?”, and they say “no, we’re going right back, we're only here for the train”.

my friend and i parted ways the next morning, he headed south towards shiojiri to catch the train back to tokyo on the chuo main line, whereas for lack of any better ideas i headed a couple stops up north to matsumoto, the biggest city in the region. you can't miss it passing through on the train because they have the most attention-grabbing station announcement i've heard in japan, for some reason the lady in the recording really draws out the ending "o" like "matsumoto~~, matsumoto~~", a little mountain yodel. in order to plot my next steps, i went into a vintage kissaten with UCC signage (always a good sign) on a street just outside the station, it was a very legit one because the obachan running the place brought me an ashtray with my cup of water after i sat down. i had to try one out at least once because C**** M** is obsessed with these places, he even wrote the book on them, you could say his entire brand is being the "kissa and long walks in japan" guy. he's also a big matsumoto fan, surprisingly he only "discovered" it relatively recently despite it being pretty much his exact vibe and not all that obscure, meanwhile i've been on the matsumoto hype train since i first visited on my epic rail pass trip six years ago. we only stayed one night but matsumoto made an outsized impression, its famous black castle is one of the most beautiful in japan (and it's original to boot), though what my friends still bring up all the time is mostly the "horse restaurant".

the longer i thought about it, the more convinced i became that the best thing to do was probably to linger in matsumoto a bit. you could do a lot worse than matsumoto, it's one of the "winners" among mid-sized japanese cities that has largely avoided decline, there's still plenty of young people and a vibrant food/arts scene. i think its proximity to the mountains has helped because it's also a great outdoors destination, it's a bit like the boulder, CO of japan except that because it's japan it's not ruinously expensive to live in or visit matsumoto. after the whirlwind trip i'd just done with my friend (the previous four blog posts took place over four consecutive days), a chance to stay put for a couple days and relax was very welcome, but most importantly, now that i was alone i could finally get some writing done. i was feeling a lot of pressure from my overwhelming backlog, for some reason i HAD to record everything notable that happened as soon as i could, it was as if it wasn't "real" until i wrote it down and assembled a "canonical" account. every day where i did stuff instead of writing only added to the backlog, i wasn't allowed to experience anything else until i got caught up. "i am NOT leaving matsumoto until i finish my masterwork!" i vowed to myself.

when it came to booking somewhere to stay for the night, i decided it was finally time to start looking at hostels again. on my prior trips to japan i had exclusively stayed at airbnbs or hostels so i had been trying to balance things out by staying at business hotels this time around, but by this point i figured i had expanded my horizons a satisfactory amount (having stayed in business hotels nearly every night for the two weeks since my first stay at one ever) and was "allowed" to stay at hostels again. a couple factors were driving me to seek out hostels again, i was starting to feel some financial pressure after withdrawing money from the atm for the first time upon arriving in matsumoto, i could no longer farm cash from my friends by paying for group dinners on my credit cardit's crazy how many more places accept credit card in japan now, six years ago i couldn't even get mcdonald's to take one. i try to use a credit card with no foreign transaction fees as much as i can while travelling abroad because i've noticed that they always get you the best possible exchange rate, it will be nearly identical to the rate you see when you google "x yen to dollars" and having them pay me back. the business hotels in matsumoto were a little bit pricier than i was used to, i had been in japan long enough by this point that my financial intuitions had recalibrated and i'd think "wow, FORTY DOLLARS for a hotel room, bit rich for my blood...", the days when i would casually drop $70 on a stay at phoenix seagaia ocean tower were long gone. also, hostels are more social than business hotels, and perhaps staying at one would help lessen the blow from being truly on my own in japan for the first time ever.

matsumoto has a great hostel scene so i didn't have much trouble finding a spot in one last minute, though it was pretty far from the station and ended up being the furthest away of the ones i stayed at. it was located a couple blocks past the far corner of matsumoto castle, pretty close to the site of the 1994 matsumoto sarin gas attacksby now i’m sure everyone knows about japanese doomsday cult aum shinrikyo’s infamous tokyo subway sarin gas attacks and that they possibly detonated a nuclear bomb in the depths of the australian outback, but many don’t know that several months before the subway attacks, they also did one in matsumoto spraying from the back of a truck, killing eight and injuring hundreds. i walked down the street where it was supposed to have happened but couldn't find any traces, no monuments or anything.. i accidentally walked past it the first time because for some reason they still have a big sign up that says it's a "guesthouse" named something completely different, so much for trying not to rely too much on my phone map. i was checked in at the front desk by the owner, an androgynous japanese guy in monkish attire who was unusually lively despite the late afternoon hour. i dumped my stuff in my bunk-capsule and immediately posted up in the lounge with my laptop to do some writing, in front of a wall covered with hundreds of volumes of manga, though nothing i really recognized besides this one long-running mountaineering manga that seems popular in the area. i sat there until i felt hungry enough to go out for dinner, watching the other guests pass by on their way to the dorm. the clientele seemed to be almost entirely japanese guys doing motorcycle touring or mountaineering (the mountaineers are always clad head-to-toe in montbell gear), i suppose the distance from the station kept everyone else away.

come dinner time, i went towards the lively main train station environs to check out the matsumoto food scene i'd heard so much about. on the streets i noticed there seemed to be a lot of foreign tourists in matsumoto, all europeans though, you had to have good taste to make it out to matsumoto. over the course of an hour or so i went down almost every single street in the area without anything catching my fancy, it was turning into another one of those disastrous nights where i could not choose someplace to eat. it felt like i was craving something specific but i wasn't sure what it was, all i knew is that i would know it when i saw it and i wasn't seeing it. eventually i tried to go into some hip basement "creative cuisine" restaurant and got turned away because it was reservation-only, absolutely humiliating, why did i possibly think i could just walk into some place like that? things were getting dire because by that point it was getting so late (after 8pm) that all the normal restaurants were closing, all that was left were fast food and izakaya-style drinking establishments. in the end, i headed back in the direction of the hostel and went into a teppanyaki-focused izakaya restaurant that had actually been one of the very first places i passed by. the problem with the izakayas is that it's not a very pleasant experience if you're there alone and not drinking, everyone else comes in with a big group of friends or co-workers and it gets rowdy inside like it's a bar. izakayas can be more expensive than a normal restaurant too because of the "otoshi" table charge, you do get an appetizer with it but they vary greatly in quality depending where you go, from "this is pretty good, i'm not even mad" to "this is just a pile of slightly-moist lettuce". i tried to get out of there as soon as possible, being around drunk people while sober is kind of annoying and i found myself interpreting miniscule lapses in the service as the waiters silently judging me for coming in pathetic and alonesometimes it even feels like the universe is in on it, when i settled for an izakaya-type place near my hotel on a similar indecisive night way back in beppu, i sat alone in the corner at the base of a tall counter and there was this freak accident where the guy cooking on the other side accidentally dropped a tub full of pickles off the top of the counter and very narrowly missed me. it did take out my little half-eaten otoshi dish of moist lettuce (yes, it was that place), which after cleaning up the spill the waiter carefully replaced with a fresh one... thanks.... the worst part is, after all the time i had invested trying to find a restaurant, it hadn't even been that great...

the next day, i checked out of my hostel and got breakfast at a local bakery, where i booked my next hostel for the night. at some point i decided that i was going to stay at a different hostel in matsumoto every night, i had stayed somewhere different every night for two weeks straight and for whatever reason i wanted to keep the streak going even though i planned on staying in the same city for a bit, it would keep me on my toes and could be a good gimmick for an eventual writeup like "reviewing every hostel in matsumoto" or something. the problem with bouncing from place to place in the same city is that i had to find something to do in the few hours in the middle of the day between check-out and check-in, i couldn't kill a bunch of time on the train or anything. ideally i wanted to spend all that time writing so a coffee shop or kissa was a good bet, except that the standard socially-acceptable loitering time you get per purchase is approximately 2 hours and i was looking to save money, which after 2 hours at one place led to me wandering around town looking for other options.

eventually, walking beside the nice little river that goes right through the heart of matsumoto i spotted a little stone bench by the riverbank and set up right there, a good find because public park benches are surprisingly rare in japan. i was grateful for my new laptop since this was only possible now that i had a laptop with an actual battery life, until now i hadn't experienced the true freedom of laptop ownership because i had always been restricted by the need to find someplace with an accessible power outlet. now there were really no limits, the world was my workplace, and i wondered why so many laptop-users still chose to confine themselves to the cafe or the library because it was so wonderful out there down by the riverbank, i'm fairly certain a tourist with a big camera on the opposite side even stopped to snap a picture of me on my laptop down there.

⊕on google maps the label for the japanese main island "honshu" is right near matsumoto and it doesn't go away unless you really zoom in, which sometimes leads to amusing misunderstandings. i overheard somebody at the hostel reception desk getting directions using google maps on their phone ask “so, is this region called ‘honshu’?”, to which the japanese reception girl responded, “ummmm, well... technically we are in honshu, but...”my next hostel was the most "international", it was owned and operated by an american guy and his japanese wife right above an american cafe/bar they also ran. it had the newest and most spacious facilities, leave it to the americans to take care of that, the shower room even had this baffling extra empty corner area that for sure would have been put to some use anywhere else. the clientele was entirely middle-aged european tourists, including a big rowdy group of spaniards and a french couple that spent the entire evening in the lounge trying to figure out how to properly ship a package of souvenirs home or something. i have to admit i was a little irked seeing this, whatever happened to places being YOUTH hostels, these boomers had a lot of nerve coming here and taking up all the cheapest lodging after ruining the economy to enrich themselves, and what's more when they had been my age they probably got to experience the golden age of european hosteling when youth hostels were still youth hostels and the interrail pass wasn't overpriced bs with more strings attached than a marionette, they should grow up already and stay at a proper hotel befitting their station.

to take a little break from writing, in the late afternoon i decided to do some sightseeing. from a bunch of ads around town i found out that the matsumoto city museum of art has a permanent yayoi kusama exhibition, apparently it's because matsumoto is her hometown. truth be told, i hadn't heard of her before looking her name up after seeing the ads plastered everywhere around matsumoto, even though wikipedia claims she is acknowledged as "the world's most successful living artist" (there are a lot of ways to measure such things...). i had heard of her work before, though: she's the one responsible for the "infinity room" i couldn't get into at that contemporary art museum in los angeles nearly two years ago! now was my chance to finally see it because it turns out the infinity rooms are a series and there was one right in matsumoto at that exhibit, you didn't even have to make reservations or buy an expensive extra ticket, it was probably the best place to see one quickly and easily.

⊕the matsumoto city museum of art was easy to spot because they had a bunch of polka-dotted yayoi kusama stuff outside like big fiberglass scluptures and coca-cola vending machines. it seems she has a pretty strong "brand" centered around the polka dots, you could slap them onto any surface for an easy "kusama collab". but, i suppose having a distinct "brand" as an artist is not necessarily a bad thing, almost every artist has their own idisyncratic aesthetic and obsessions that are a key part of the appeal of their work, it's usually referred to as "style" when not trying to be derogatory. can we really complain that kusama keeps pumping out polka-dotted pumpkins when monet painted literally hundreds of paintings of his backyard water lillies, just because kusama's pumpkins are popular and sell for lots of money even though she's still alive? of course, nobody really cares about "selling out" anymore, that was the obsession of the nineties, now it seems almost quaint to worry about that...

the kusama exhibit was contained within a little labyrinth of rooms in the top corner of the museum, each room contained just one or two pieces and photography was strictly prohibited, stern docents were posted on watch in nearly every room for enforcement. although i didn't recognize any individual piece, they all seemed familiar and almost cliché, kusama is nearly a hundred years old and has been active in the art scene for a very long time, she used to hang out with the likes of georgia o'keefe and andy warhol, her influence must be embedded somewhere deep in the dna of modern art and it subtly comes out in the work of everyone who came after her, which in a way makes her own works seem unoriginal or derivative, the "seinfeld is unfunny" effect.

the infinity room was a room-within-a-room, a black box inside one of the museum's biggest exhibition rooms. leading to it was a queuing area where you'd wait for your turn to experience the infinity room for 20 seconds, even though that doesn't seem too long and the museum wasn't too busy, i still had to wait in line for a good 5-10 minutes for my chance to go in. it felt a bit like waiting in line for a roller coaster because in the typical japanese fashion there were several redundant methods of informing people of the proper procedure for safely experiencing the infinity room. it's not like the procedure was complicated at all, a staff member would open the door and let you in, you'd stand still on the viewing platform for your 20 seconds after they shut the door, then they open the door and let you out. you could probably figure it out using common sense, and there were of course staff members guiding you through the whole process. nevertheless, there was a sign posted on the wall with the instructions, a tv on the wall with a looping video showing the instructions, and then when you get to the head of the line there's a staff member that explains it all to you again.

so what was in the infinity room after all? it was a mirrored chamber with a bunch of colored ping-pong ball lights suspended at various heights from the ceiling. as the guy at the museum back in LA had told me, the infinity room really was quite small, i was careful to crouch the whole time but as i exited i still hit one of the light balls with my head and left it gently swaying. it occurred to me that i had been alone and unsupervised inside the room, there was nothing stopping me from pulling my phone out and taking a quick picture, i didn't do it but i wonder how many people have. the next room was the "grand finale", a room with a giant polka-dot pumpkin in the center, it was also the only room photography was allowed in and i watched as the phone cameras came flying out of pockets as if people had been desperately holding in the urge. there's an idea for another twist on my art exhibit idea from kanazawa: what if you make something people really want to photograph, leave it unsupervised in a room completely covered in "no photography" signs while secretly surveiling them on hidden cameras, and then as part of the "art piece" in the next room you confront the people who took photographs anyway? if you pass yourself off as an "artist" you can do these kinds of "social experiments" without the flak prank youtubers get, and without all the bureaucratic IRB nonsense you'd have to deal with in academia.

i hurried out of the museum because it was closing time, then got dinner at an authentic place nearby that unlike many restaurants in matsumoto had only locals dining there (the food court at the nearby aeon mall matsumoto). then, i grabbed a can of strong zero at 7-11 and went back to the lounge at the hostel to do another few hours of writing. working in public like that is one way of doing what i call "passively farming random encounters", though i was finding that the passive encounter rate in those matsumoto hostel lounges was vanishingly lownot like it's ever that high in the first place, as i continually have to relearn the most effective method will always be approaching people yourself, the number of people who'd like to be approached is an order of magnitude higher than the number of people willing to do the approaching. in retrospect, a good part of it is that i probably appeared exceptionally unapproachable, if people see you furiously typing on a laptop for multiple hours in a row they're unlikely to think it's something you're subjecting yourself to by choice, it looks more like you're desperately trying to get some work done before a looming deadline and people think it's best not to disturb you. meanwhile, people probably aren't nearly as hesistant to interrupt somebody engaged in effectively the same activity but with a more casual appearance, like the guy sitting by me in the lounge writing a travel journal at a relaxed pace in a muji notebook.

after checking out the next morning, i went down to the café below, it looked exactly like a place you might find in portland (i wasn't far off, they called themselves a "seattle-style" establishment). it might have been comforting if i had felt homesick at all, instead it felt like i was wasting my precious japan time on stuff i could easily get back home. i stuck around anyway writing on my laptop for a couple hours because i had a 50% off drinks coupon from staying at the hostel, i used it on a steady stream of cold brew, which unlike most "cold brew" in japan was actual cold brew, not regular hot coffee with a bunch of ice dumped in. i was so buzzed off it that i was completely unfazed when an entire japanese school group came in to interview the american owner as part of some "cultural exchange" activity, i can't tell you at all what they talked about because i was so locked in. i left right as i began to overstay both my welcome and my caffeine tolerance.

by then the rain outside i had been hoping to wait out had mostly abated, now i just had to find someplace to chill until check-in at the next hostel. i went down to the good old stone bench by the riverbank from before, only to find that the rain had turned its surface into a puddle. i looked down the riverbank and spotted a promising dry spot: right underneath a nearby pedestrian bridge. it had a flat rocky ledge to sit on with a concrete backing at a comfortable angle to sit against, similar to the lighthouse at aoshima, and it was a pedestrian bridge so there were no concerns about noisy cars rumbling across it over me. the best part was that i'd be fine under there even if it started raining again, which was definite possibility.⊕i pulled out my laptop and got to work, but i got almost nothing done before a guy appeared on the other side of the bridge and asked if he could sit under there too, as though discovering a cool spot had bestowed upon me the right to be its honorary gatekeeper (because it's not like i felt i had enough ownership to say no to someone). a few minutes later, he asked if he could smoke a cigarette, i said sure. now that the ice had been broken by not one but two brief exchanges, it wasn't long before i was smoking one of his cigarettes myself and chatting with him. he was from shanghai but currently living more-or-less permanently in tokyo, up in matsumoto to meet his "boyfriend", i never asked him to clarify so i'm still unsure if that was merely a poor choice of words by a non-native english speaker or if he was actually gay. he had some time to kill before his boyfriend or boy friend got off work and i was waiting for my next hostel check-in, we talked for a while about our observations of japan from our perspectives as foreigners from opposing countries, and i asked him if he recommended visiting shanghai (he did). it didn't feel like long before our time was up, he went off to meet the boyfriend/boy friend while i stayed behind a little longer trying to do some writing before giving up and heading to my next hostel. in the end i got almost no work done under that bridge, i thought about how funny it was that THAT was the only place where somebody actually approached me, hiding under a bridge.

i had deliberately left the third hostel for later because it was the only one i'd actually been to before, it was the one i'd stayed at with my friends for a single night the first time we'd gone to matsumoto. it was pretty much the closest you can get to the hostel ideal, the service and amenities were on par with a hotel but with a personal touch, a coziness, an endearing slight jankiness. the interior was phenomenal (the japanese are the best in the world at them, i think), tasteful wood surfaces, a curated collection of eclectic antiques and knickknacks, carefully-maintained clutter that made the place look casual and lived-in, photos and praise from former guests posted on the walls. this is where the youths were actually hanging out - an australian travelbro who would have been at home at any bar in southeast asia chatting up the british girl from some dreadful city like liverpool trying to "find herself" through travel, a shy german boy coming out of his shell travelling abroad for the first time to celebrate finishing his IT degree, a little group of chinese malays cooking up a big batch of their local cuisine in the kitchen and sharing it with everyone, a Wholesome 100 hostel scene. you could have taken a photo right then and it would have looked like one of those glowing staged "candid" stock promotional photos capturing a group of people mid-laugh, the angle of their gazes calculated precisely to avoid looking at the lens.

it was sickening, i left my laptop on the couch and ran out the door down the street to 7-11 for a strong zero, which i drank while admiring the nearby keep of matsumoto castle, its bright reflection in the water of the moat distorted slightly by light raindrops. i was convinced that matsumoto was slowly poisoning me, it wasn't lingering sarin gas, it was just that it was too hip, too charming, too perfect, i couldn't endure it much longer, i was like some kind of creature that evolved to live in a toxic environment and now couldn't survive without the toxins. for some reason, despite writing for eight hours a day three days in a row i had the impression that i hadn't managed to chip away at the backlog at all, i had barely gotten anything done, if i had to stay in matsumoto until i was finished i would be there forever. i left the next day.