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It’s beginning to get cold here in Tokyo. This is the time of year in which leaves start to turn and eventually snow down in a flurry of red, orange and yellow. Other things happen at around this time that not many people - I suspect - seem to realize here in Tokyo.

One of the things I’ve noticed over the last few years in Tokyo is that fortune tellers seem to come out of their Summer hibernation and attract many different people of different social statuses, by promising to tell their futures and give advice on how one should behave in the (relatively) foreseeable future in order to have a happy life. As I walked by one of the more established street fortune tellers on my 700-pace walk between my research desk in Mercury Tower and Kunitachi Station, I couldn’t help but feel hollow staring at the middle-aged fortune teller holding the hand of a youngish man dressed in a black business suit in her left hand and tracing invisible lines onto the lines of his palm with the butt of a plastic ballpoint point. She was also sounding out the meaning of each of the lines as she snatched deep glance into the eyes of the young man with a genuinely concerned look on his face. His only reaction was a torrent of rapid nodding. I have no idea what she was telling him, but I’m sure that the nippy weather added some sting to how he must have been feeling standing there, with his palm being poked at with a plastic pen by a strange woman.

I have a habit that I cannot seem to shake off when the weather begins to get cold. I think of all the Gulags described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, all of which seem to be colder than anything I have ever experienced, and all of which bring out the worst forms of isolation within a person.

I guess my ‘personal isolation’ is here to stay for the foreseeable future, and I don’t need a fortune teller to tell me that. I am in the last stretch of working on my graduation thesis, and I’m literally sweating bullets now thinking about ways to strengthen the arguments in my paper and thinking about my plans for next year which are most likely going to be along the lines of pursuing a PhD degree (depending on how things fair).

In this time of change, I have no choice but to be optimistic about things, regardless of market meltdowns, political turmoil and other disasters happening that seem to be here to stay for a while to come. None of that stuff matters right now. All I know is I have a paper to finish, and the leaves in the trees will start falling soon.