No. 1 · October 2026
Under the eaves
In February 2020, some weeks before Japan’s first state of emergency, I spent an afternoon walking the old covered street in Echigo-Yuzawa. I had walked it many times before. That day there was almost no one else in it. The shops were shuttered, the snow was still banked high beyond the eaves, and my footsteps on the boards were the loudest sound for some distance. I walked up and down it for a long while, alone, not quite sure why.
That covered street is called a gangi. Niigata was once the province of Echigo, and Echigo is snow country: the clouds that cross the Sea of Japan set down their weight here, and in a hard winter the snow on some streets stood taller than a man. So each household extended the eaves of its house out over the street, propped them up on wooden posts, and left the space beneath open to anyone passing. House by house, the eaves joined into a timber arcade running the length of the street, and through the deepest weeks of winter people could still reach the market, the temple and one another.
What struck me that afternoon, in a town that had suddenly emptied, was what kind of space this is. Each section of a gangi belongs to a private house: the land, the roof, the upkeep. Yet the space beneath it is given to the street. It is neither home nor road, but a passage between the two — a bridge between the private and the public. It took a time when there was nowhere to go and no one to meet for me to notice it properly.
Gangi are quietly disappearing from Niigata. Takada, on the western edge of the old province, still keeps some sixteen kilometres of them, more than anywhere else in Japan. Elsewhere they are giving way, one house at a time. I think of the people who walked beneath them: looking up at the low winter cloud — not dramatic, only thick and patient — resenting it a little, then lowering their heads and walking on. And thinking.
Some of them were my ancestors. Not all: half my family comes from Sado, the island off the coast, which was long a province of its own. Sado has a few gangi too, but far less snow, and they have left no strong mark on me. The gangi belongs to Echigo. So why name this letter after it, rather than after the island of my roots? I am honestly not sure. I suspect the answer will settle as I write. Sado will have its turn in these pages; I hope you will keep me company until then.
That is the pace I would like this letter to keep. Once a month I will write from here: about Niigata, about the Japanese thinkers I keep returning to who are barely known in English, about whatever I have been turning over beneath the eaves. Nothing urgent. Nothing that needs to be read today.
The lost chorus
Three times this past month, on three different days and about three apparently unrelated things, I wrote the same sentence in my notebook. I only noticed when I read the month back.
The first was about Japan. Late in August I was trying to describe a feeling I have had for some time: that we are living through a kind of new Middle Ages. Not plague and castles, but the loss of the large story a society tells about itself. What replaces it, I wrote, is something like a landscape of countless small mountains. Everyone gathers on their own peak. From where you stand you can see that there are people on the next mountain, doing something — but not quite what, and you feel no particular need to find out. Climbing your own was tiring enough.
My example was baseball. When I was a boy, the Yomiuri Giants were simply the team. You could loathe them in Fukuoka or Sapporo, but you knew them. Now people increasingly call them the Tokyo Giants: one club among others. Nothing wrong with that. But something shared has gone quiet.
The second was Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, which I saw in September and could not stop thinking about; my notes on it run from just after midnight to nearly midnight the following day. Here was a story told, more or less without interruption, for three thousand years — a story that for most of that time people did not read but heard. And I found myself writing: how strange to watch this now, when we are losing the ability to hold any story in common. Even the Bible is no longer a common story.
The third was Oasis. A documentary about the band, Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger, came to a cinema in Niigata, and I went in a bucket hat and a Fred Perry polo — in uniform, that is. I have been a fan for twenty-six years. To my surprise, the audience was full of people in their early twenties, and I ended up talking to a group of them at the concession stand for ten minutes. I told them, rather more in the manner of Noel Gallagher than I had intended, that I had been right at the front at Fuji Rock in 2009. They listened as if I had just returned from Mars. Walking home, I wrote: music loved across countries and generations is becoming rare. There are not many bands left who can make a whole crowd sing.
A diagnosis, an origin and an exception. The small mountains are the diagnosis. The Odyssey is the origin: in the Western tradition, the oldest surviving story held by everyone who heard it. And the chorus at an Oasis gig is the exception — one of the last places where thousands of strangers still know the same words.
What links them, I have come to think, is the voice. In 1982 the American Jesuit scholar Walter J. Ong published Orality and Literacy, a short, quietly radical book about the difference between cultures that speak and cultures that write. In a spoken culture, a story lives only in the moment of its telling, and only among the people present. It has to be remembered, which means it has to be shared. Writing frees us from that. And in freeing us, it lets us drift apart: each reader alone with a page, and each of us, eventually, alone with a feed.
A chorus is what remains of the older world. Tens of thousands of people singing ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ are doing roughly what Homer’s listeners did — holding a story together by voicing it together.
I do not think the small mountains are going anywhere, and I am wary of anyone who promises to flatten them. But the gangi suggests another possibility. Nobody in Takada built a grand arcade. Each house gave a few metres of its own roof, and the street got a path. Perhaps that is how common stories survive now: not as one great narrative, but as many small, private offerings that happen to join up. A podcast here. A local festival there. A letter like this one, sent from one small mountain to another, in the hope that someone on the next peak will wave back.
From the notebook
- A translator. The Odyssey led me, by a winding road, back to Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ and then to Emily Wilson, whose 2017 translation was the first English Odyssey published by a woman. Her essay ‘An Uncomplicated Man’, in the London Review of Books, is one I have not stopped thinking about.
- A bookshop. At the end of September I went back to Tsubame Coffee Books for the first time in about ten years. I was looking for a book they did not have, and came home with one I had not been looking for: Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, in its Japanese translation. A fitting find for someone who writes this letter out of a notebook.
- A neighbour I never knew. Only this month did I learn that Shigeko Kubota — video artist, pioneer of the form, and wife of Nam June Paik — was born in Niigata Prefecture. Another Echigo person better known in New York than at home. I suspect she will not be the last to turn up in these pages.
Before you go
Gangi will arrive once a month, when it is ready rather than when it is due. In time it will be joined by a shorter weekly letter called Lagoon — after the lagoons, kata, that gave Niigata its name: the ‘new lagoon’.
If something here stirred a thought, simply reply. I read everything, slowly.
Until November,
Junpei Takeya
Niigata