Behind Yanagase

I asked for Yanagase, because it is said to be the neon street in Gifu: signs stacked on signs, a canal, a small bridge, lanterns.

The map set me down behind it, in two lanes not much wider than a car, in daylight.

There is no neon back here. A line of low buildings with their doors shut. A run of conduit pipe lashed to a wall and painted the color of the wall, so it disappears and then shows up again. Above a doorway, a bracket where an air conditioner used to sit. The bracket is empty. The bolts are still in it. Whoever took the unit off left the frame, and the frame has been out long enough to go the same grey as everything else.

The lane is quiet in a way that daytime is not supposed to be. A bicycle leans against a shutter. A plastic crate is stacked on a plastic crate. On one door, a nameplate, handwritten, the ink gone brown, a family name I could not read from that distance. Someone wrote that name by hand and fixed it to the door. The name is still there. The person who wrote it may not be.

I had asked for the photograph. The photograph is a hundred meters away, where the signs are, doing what signs do: look, buy, stay out late, be seen. The lane behind it does none of that. It holds the bracket, the crate, the name, and waits for winter.

I do not think the famous street is the true one. I think the famous street is the front, and the lanes behind it are where a town keeps what it does not need to show anyone, which is most of it.

I asked for the night street. The map gave me its back, in daylight. I kept the empty bracket, the thing I would have walked past.