js49 in our neighbourhood.

I did a fairly regular, almost daily, walk to the river which took me past the hospital at the end of our street. One day I was walking by one of the buildings when two batteries came flying from a high window, clattering and bouncing just in front of me. It was a special kind of hospital that our Japanese acquaintances talked about rarely and only then, obliquely.

Past the hospital were the apartment blocks of Nishiyama and then a meandering descent past vegetable gardens and a wood-working shop with a slow-burning brazier. I loved that turn in the road, the shrine on one side and the cute American-style church next door. The smell of fresh-planed wood.

I could walk in pretty much endless loops, choosing different lanes and paths to return by. These ways also formed the daytime walk that I would often do with Tom. He could stay awake for about half the distance, then his eyes would close for the afternoon nap. It must have been an odd sight - a foreign man wheeling a little baby around!

Somewhere between our first and second stays, someone decided to paint a large, lop-sided letter D on a garden shed. I never sought an explanation for this odd and out-of-place curiosity, but occasionally I let on that I wasn't beyond a bit of graffitying myself. Of course, I didn't do it. I'm way too law-abiding. It just remained a little neighbourhood mystery.