Goose Lady lives on the streets of Ginza and eats fried breadcrumbs dropped from the sweet-cream crepes of winter shoppers. At night she huddles up to the braziers outside Luis Vuitton and drinks cold mango lassi from the yaki-imo man. She sing songs beneath her breath of the days when the Emperor walked the streets as a God, with a red sun forever blazing over his head. Now she scurries and hides when the black vans roll round, beneath a park bench, in the guttering of a tall glass phone box, in the shadow of a koban.
Goose lady watches skittishly from a street-corner.
Part of the reason I bought my new camera with zoom lens was to take shots of the people of Tokyo. I’m still not sure what I want to do with these photos, or how to present them, but for the time being we’ll roll with some light fiction.
Goose-lady’s neighbour, they live in back-alley trash-cans like Oscar the Grouch, passing bento tid-bits they have made through the rusted holes in the weary metal.
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Goose Lady’s erstwhile suitor. He fashions braids of fallen human hair he gathers off the street, weaving all the shades of black by moonlight on the rooftop of the Hermes building, entwining the scarce few blonde threads in figure eights with curlicues. Goose Lady takes his braided locks and sells them for second hand books in Ebisu.
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Grandma Iron guards the Ginza line subway entrance 3b, where Goose Lady is forbidden to go. Once she snuck past and beheld horrors her simple whimsical mind reeled from. Iron Grandma will never forgive herself for that.
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Swan Girl is Goose Lady’s acolyte.
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She aches to have the long sweeping locks of Goose Lady, to enjoy her many suitors, to eat the sweet cream crepe crumbs and enjoy the bento tid-bits as delicately and with as much grace as Goose Lady. She stands on cross-walks and stares up at the reflection of building’s in each other’s facades, seeing an infinity in their smirking mirrored eyes.
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Little Mo Peep is her friend.
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Charlotte LeGray Bronte, she interviews the neighbours.
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Scarlett nurses Goose Lady when she’s sick, using tisanes of kocha and mugicha to revive her wilted feathers.
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The Captain ensures all goes according to plan.
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“Eeh! Goose Lady! Honto da!”
“Yes, it’s really Goose Lady!” Spectators gawk.
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Another suitor, he offers full crepe tastings but Goose Lady, only able to nibble at crumbs, has to turn him away.
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The Locksmith, he buys second hand books off Goose Lady and sucks the information out of them with copper wires.
After some thought, and reading the comments below, I’ve decided not to continue with fictionalizing these kinds of shots. Further posts in the ‘People’ category will be the usual straight documentation through the lens of my experience. I’ll probably even change this post to be in sync with that.
TOKYO
You can see all MJG’s Tokyo content here:
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