I arrived home from Tokyo four weeks ago, running lean and inescapably jet-lagged. The route back through Frankfurt was uncomplicated but long, ending in a Saturday night arrival at London Heathrow. I came back with photographs, research, and maps assembled into a working draft of the pilot volume of Tokyothèque Neighbourhoods, a tentative step into travel-guide publishing. The trip had worn me down to a clean edge, yet the task now was to edit and design the material into something readable and usable.

To achieve this, I’d been counting on a period of quiet, uninterrupted focus. But that Monday morning a new obstacle appeared: a property under construction beside my office. At 8 a.m. the soundscape of development started—hammering, drilling, and grinding.

In Zen meditation classes, when construction interrupts from outside the studio, leaders often use it as a lesson. The approach is to meet the sound directly until it loses its oppositional quality. Sitters are asked to release resistance, notice the tonal qualities of drilling or hammering, and let the noise be “just sound”. My hearing is particularly sensitive, though, and I have never managed to reach this state with intrusive noise.

The works next door sat close enough to give me a clear view into the site. When I first looked in, the scene was disorder: girders and pipes propped against pallets of cement bags, half-dug holes with mounds of rubble and dirt, and tools and plans scattered across the ground. As I worked on the book amid the disturbance, my office started to take on a knowledge workers’ version of that scene. Instead of tools and rubble, I found myself encircled by untranslated texts and books, printed layouts folded into mock-ups, and digital clutter as photos and documents spread across my desktop.

This is the depth of a project’s middle phase. Overwhelm is never far away at this point. The moment of inspiration and its excitement have sobered, and the route to execution that once looked clear has become markedly more complex. What remains is the labour, with gaps wide enough for self-doubt to settle. Many creative ventures stall here. The clean slate of a new idea becomes more appealing, setting off a cycle of conception, early progress, and eventual abandonment. Carried on over time, it leaves creative people with a gradual sense of stagnation, as nothing reaches completion.

Meanwhile, down on the construction site, abandonment is not possible. Excavated ground, demolished walls, and half-raised structures cannot be dismissed as easily as digital files or loose papers. The builders must continue. They arrive each day and work steadily towards a distant result where, a full day’s labour may leave almost no tangible sign of progress as they inch towards the final form. Yet, the plan is followed with confidence, realised in small, steady increments.

Over the weeks, their chaotic workspace has appeared to organise itself through the sequence of the work. Materials are used at the moment they are needed, holes are filled as the foundations settle, and blueprints are put away once a phase is finished. Debris is removed bit by bit, and a gradual sense of equilibrium returns to the environment.

A music producer once told me that, to an outsider, a skilled mixing engineer can look scattered. The workstation appears chaotic as they switch between tasks at speed. But the movement in fact reflects an internal map the outsider cannot see. What seems disordered is actually non-linear problem-solving by someone who understands the entire system.

The changing state of the building site began to read in a similar way. While I am still not capable of meditating on the high-pitched sound of drilling, its meaning has altered as I have witnessed the work advance. It is now the sweet sound of progress—another bolt in the wall en route to the finished article. I found myself rooting for the tradesmen, buoyed by their consistency and discipline.

Construction continues outside my window, but my work has reached its conclusion. The office has recovered its sense of order. Tens of thousands of words have been edited and proofread, thousands of photographs culled and retouched, and hundreds of locations whittled down, mapped and illustrated. Everything is now rationalised within the structure of the book’s design, set to the right technical specifications, exported in the proper format, and sent to print in Japan.

The production timeline is running slightly behind the target schedule shown on the bookstore listing, though only by a small margin. I’ll share a separate update on that through the Tokyothèque Books newsletter, received by all who have pre-ordered.

One of the levers available in a project’s final stretch is absolute focus, letting everything else fall into background bokeh. This week’s story is, in part, an explanation for the absence of last week’s newsletter, any social media activity, and why, if you have written to me, I have likely not replied yet. Setting all of that aside gave me my period of focus, even if the conditions were far from quiet.

If this is your first Tokyothèque newsletter, detours like today's into creative process, wellbeing, and the demands of modern existence surface here from time to time, outside our stated remit of Tokyo’s culture and urban design. It may be helpful to revisit an earlier newsletter to see our usual format more clearly; I’ve unlocked several archive editions below for this purpose.

The end of deep, deadlined work brings a layered sensation: relief as the pressure lifts, a sudden openness in time, and the return of possibilities set aside. Yet this expansion carries a faint void—the structure of recent days falls away. With momentum still in the mind, it is easy to reach for the next task simply to feel movement. Better to resist, though, keeping the space unclaimed for a moment, and to reacquaint yourself with possibility. For me, that means a carefully brewed pour-over coffee and my first open-ended Saturday in some time, before choosing what comes next.

Until we meet in Tokyo,

AJ

Tokyothèque Neighbourhoods

Print edition: limited copies available for pre-order
Digital edition: available now

Unlocked Back Issues

Super Deluxe
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Tokyo Quietude
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