Zary Fekete

The elevator in the Urayasu complex always smelled of damp concrete. It took exactly fifteen seconds to rise from the ground floor to the thirteenth. On the thirteenth floor, there were only two doors. Ours, and theirs. In the first week, the silence between the two doors felt heavy, like an unanswered question. Back home, a move meant noise with boxes scraping across the floor and introduced names with waves from the driveway next door.

When I first began learning Japanese, I thought I was learning how to say things correctly. Instead, I began to hear my own language rearranged. 私はアメリカ人です. Watashi wa Amerika jin desu. “As for me, America person, it is so.” It sounds like a cautious worker building a tower. Identity laid down carefully, without hurry. First, position yourself. As for me. Then name the tribe. America person. And only at the very end, almost as taking permission to live: it is so.

Do people still mosh? I don’t mean the ironic elbow-waggle in a TikTok clip or the shuffle-in-place at a suburban ska revival. I mean the real thing. The body-trust of it. The joy. The sacrament. The kind of moshing that makes you believe…in rhythm, in strangers, in something loud enough to knock a thought clean out of your head. In the late ’90s, I went alone to a Fishbone show at Ground Zero in Minneapolis.

I am here. I let my breath settle inside me, the way a small lake settles after a stone has been thrown. My eyes sharpen. I step forward. The cobra on the left uncoils slightly, just enough to let me know it sees me, that it has already measured the shape of my shadow. Its scales whisper against the sand. The other snake holds steady, a single, waiting line carved from the earth.

Japan’s Sumida River is old, older than the city of Tokyo that folds itself around its banks. In the early morning, it moves slow and silver beneath the bridges, carrying the memory of centuries…boats and blossoms, lanterns and rain. I run along the path that traces its edge, my feet finding a rhythm that matches the hush of the water, the distant hum of trains, the soft shuffle of city life waking up.