I don't notice much during my hours of commuting across the Kanto Plain and at the same time I notice everything. For it's mostly all the same . . .
The same accordion crunch of passengers . . . The same draped adds for tattle-tale tabloids, over-priced condos, and last-chance lotteries . . . And the same blur of suburban scenery, house after house after house, veined by narrow asphalt streets.
But when this foreigner with freckles and a cornfield grin bumped in alongside, suddenly things were not the same. And, of course, I noticed.