Terminalian Drift

“Water only knows how to flow. It never ceases. Even glaciers thousands of years old are not a stilling of water. A chilling, but not a stilling. The city is likewise, imposing its own flows of seep and sink and evaporation.” Our man has acquired another man’s skin—André Cadere’s to be exact—and he’s wearing it. It’s uncomfortable. It is February 23rd— Terminalia—the day when Osaka’s pharmaceutical manufacturers distribute their excess stock free to the city population. Our man scoops some up. Then stuff happens. He starts to walk, sometimes seeking, other times avoiding, “Moving by signs, scents and surmising pointers, I might as well have been just going lost or grasping after wayward angels.” Along the way he encounters a sculpture that offers empty human husks that viewers can slip themselves into (and thereby fulfill their expected or assigned roles), a blind urban navigator with a sextant, a motivated lover, two blonds, and a city block over-flown with sheep. With its roots in drift, dérive, psychogeography, and mythogeography, this is a defining novel for city walkers of every stripe.