excerpt

So we're at Edamame, on a summer evening, and I've a glass of choya and a bowl of edamame and a platter of sushi in front of me, and outside laughter hangs in the air like sunlight, long and mellow.

He says, picking at unfamiliar sushi -- I want to set up a commune.
I lick sticky rice off my fingers. I have visions of hippie communes sprouting up in the middle of the Yorkshire dales (he's a Yorkshire man). -- What kind of commune?
-- With people in it.
I laugh; I can't help it.-- That's a start, sure.
He grins. Says his father's house was peaceful and unstressful and he'd like a place like that to live in. He saw something like that in Wales (name of a place I didn't catch) and there were these people just living peacefully and happily together.
The Singaporean in me -- But how did they live? Oh but I suppose they all had their own jobs.
-- No, they were just born rich.
-- Ah.
We contemplate the endless possibilities open to one just born rich. I tell him about the artist's house in Harajuku -- the one Fay and I found quite by accident: three-storeyed, brilliantly graffitized on the outside, with studios on the ground floor, residential rooms on the second and a shop on the third. He is politely attentive -- or attentively polite perhaps; I can't tell a courteous restraint from polite indifference.

No I don't know where this is going either.