Memories & Conversations

Yuri Chekalin24.10.2026

Time moved differently here than in Shinjuku, where it raced along on roller skates, or in quiet Nakano, which always seemed to have been pressed flat with an iron. Ikebukuro was like the worn pocket of a fall coat, where you might find someone else’s fifty-yen coin, a movie ticket from five days ago, and […]

Yuri Chekalin23.10.2026

That November in Tokyo was unusually cold and rainy. Every morning I got up at six, made coffee in an old Italian moka pot, and watched the gray Tokyo sky grow lighter beyond the window of my rented apartment in Gotanda. My contract was ending in December. Soon I’d have to pack my things, say […]

Yuri Chekalin14.10.2026

That winter I turned fifty-four, and I’d just about stopped expecting anything to happen to me. It wasn’t despair. It was more like the way you stop hearing your refrigerator. It hums somewhere in the background. You know it’s humming, but after a while you no longer notice. I translated articles from Russian into English […]

Yuri Chekalin30.09.2026

Whenever I came home, Rei was waiting for me in the entryway. No one else was. I would barely have the key in the lock when I heard a short sound from the other side. “Meow.” Then I would open the door and find Rei sitting on the wooden floor about three feet from the […]

Yuri Chekalin19.09.2026

At 1:40 in the morning, the March rain turned the neon of Kabukicho outside my window into smeared, dirty streaks of color. She came in barefoot. I noticed her feet before I noticed her face. The soles were scraped raw. Her right knee was streaked with soot and dried blood. A wet trail followed her […]

Yuri Chekalin13.09.2026

I met her in a laundromat in Nakano at half past midnight. Not the most promising place to meet someone. But then, if you think about it, there really aren’t any promising places. People meet wherever they happen to be when they least want to meet anyone. I was fifty-four, and I’d been living alone […]

Kirill Benediktov11.09.2026

According to a popular myth, Americans have never fought a war on their own soil. In fact, they have—and quite spectacularly. In 1812, the United States declared war on the British Empire and came perilously close to losing it. Britain was fighting Napoleon at the same time—which tells you something about the scale of its […]

Yuri Chekalin07.09.2026

A earthly platform. Do not grieve, Nor cry aloud. To all our wails he’s deaf. One of us has left for paradise— He’ll meet God there, for surely God exists. — V. Vysotsky Time flows, time rushes on, dragging us into its whirlpools, shattering the fragile little boats of our memories into splinters. Sometimes it […]

Yuri Chekalin01.09.2026

The rain had not stopped in Tokyo for four days. It did not fall in sheets. It simply hung in the air—a fine, sticky mist that blurred the neon signs of Shibuya and turned pedestrians beneath transparent umbrellas into slow-moving, sexless half-ghosts. In weather like this, the city lost its depth. It became flat, like […]

Yuri Chekalin28.08.2026

In summer Tokyo, the heat never falls from the sky. It rises from below—from the sun-baked asphalt, the blank concrete walls, the metal shells of vending machines. That evening, the air was thick and heavy. It seemed to drift reluctantly from one dark alley to another. I was walking through Nakano without any particular destination […]

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The Narrow Door

A Confession of Love

A Minor Breakdown

Tokyo of Solitude

It’s Cold There

The Last Train

See the Pentagon and Die

Shards of My Memory

The Cat

August 17

The Narrow Door

The Diesel Deal Gets Moving

A Confession of Love

Erdoğan’s Warning