Today is different. For some reason I don’t feel like myself, I cannot explain how I feel. I just don’t feel right. I decide to sell my second camera, a Nikon. Never used. My Samsung camera literally taking all of the action.

I take a bicycle. Thirty minutes later, I arrive at Reisen Park. I step into the ‘We buy and sell any camera’ shop and place my bulky Nikon on the desk. I hand the man all the wires, still locked inside opaque plastic. ‘Charger?’ he asks. Oh, I forgot the charger.

One hour later, I return to Reisen Park with the charger, and the sale concludes. In the park opposite, a stage appears to be taken down. I stop by a bookshop and use some of my camera money to purchase a book; there are so many books I need to read. I spend ¥1160 on the one I choose, ‘Kafka on the Shore’.

Outside the rain drops like scattered gunfire, but you probably don’t care about the weather. I decide to grab an early lunch from the second floor of Hakata Station. I deliberately go via one of the shortest escalators in the World. Just for fun.

Most restaurants in Japan display plastic models of their dishes outside. These models are crafted so meticulously that mistaking them for real food is easy if you didn’t know any better. The attention to detail is incredible. Taking a chance, I enter a restaurant that lacks these plastic models, leaving me clueless about what’s on the menu.

It is one of those restaurants where Japanese is the only language spoken, which is fine by me. I order a set meal of tuna on seaweed with rice, accompanied by something resembling coleslaw but with a different taste, miso soup, a spicy horseradish green condiment (the name escapes my memory), and a delicious red bean cake for dessert. Overall, it’s a nice meal.

After I leave, a woman chases me out of the restaurant with my forgotten umbrella.

I return the bicycle to the hostel, just as the rain stops. I sit on the roof terrace and read eighty-six pages of Kafka on the Shore.

After reading, I take a stroll around at dusk. I walk toward Tenjin. I take a photograph of the city from the river, and then walk back. I was going to fill up space by talking about wasting electricity with all this neon, I will instead waste words telling you that Fukuoka is the sixth biggest city in Japan.

I realise on my walk back that I haven’t been on a train or bus for three days. Maybe I haven’t done anything but read for two. A Chinook passes over me. Ironically, I am on my way to meet a helicopter pilot.

At the bar, the manager pours me a free glass of ice cold rice wine. The helicopter pilot is with his wife. I talk to him for ten minutes, before sitting at the bar with my book. Not to disturb him as his food arrives. The helicopter pilot is Japanese, I met him last night in the same bar. His English is average. He told me to come back again today, “Not a problem,” I told him. “The bar is five minutes from my hostel.”

I sit at the bar for a while, eyeing the skewers of meat atop the glass counter. Eventually, the helicopter pilot’s daughter arrives. She’s studying English at university, and for the next two hours, we converse in English. Her eyes are a deep-set brown, strikingly profound. Her black hair has an unusual texture, reminiscent of straw to the touch.

I agree to meet her tomorrow over a bowl of Paella. She leaves. I pay for six Suntory whisky highballs and her orange juice, ¥2345. A nice clean number.

As I wander back via a Lawson Stores, I see these odd workers:

I see them everywhere, actually. They stand on roads, at entrances to car parks, and next to building sites. They wave on traffic and pedestrians with their red lightsabers. Sometimes there will be three or four, all standing on the quietest street next to a cement mixer or ladder. A very strange job.

Back at the hostel I have a craving for salt and vinegar crisps; another thing that I cannot find here. I sit in the lounge with a can of Suntory whisky highball, and talk with the Koreans. There is a Korean woman who is both the same age as me, and two years younger. East Asian age reckoning.

It becomes one of the Koreans birthday; an amazing cake duly arrives, bang on midnight.

One of the Korean guys is studying philosophy, and his sister is incredibly intelligent. We talk about philosophy, another thing I really miss doing. He quite likes my discussion on M-theory. We also talk a lot about sentient pigs.

The intelligent Korean girl tells me that my eyes look lonely.