Prose & Poetry

Yuri Chekalin08.11.2026

Part I. The rain went on all week It didn’t come down in sheets. It hung in the air, blurring the signs and turning people into ghosts. I went to work and explained to managers the difference between the Present Perfect and the Past Simple. One describes something that’s over but still matters. The other […]

Yuri Chekalin07.11.2026

“Flowers fade, and who can remain in this world forever? Today we cross the mountains of existence and will no longer be intoxicated by empty dreams.” — Iroha-uta (Heian period) The train was twenty minutes late. In Tokyo, that’s an event. The announcer apologized twice—once in Japanese, once in English—after which everyone on the platform […]

Yuri Chekalin31.10.2026

Morita-san first appeared near Yoyogi Park in late April. He wore yellow pants, a green jacket, enormous red shoes, and a round nose that, for some reason, kept falling off. Apparently, the nose was the only part of his costume with a mind of its own. Morita would try to put it back on. The […]

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 […]

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 […]

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The Last Stop. Part II

The Last Stop. Part I

The Clown at Meiji Shrine

The Narrow Door

A Confession of Love

A Minor Breakdown

Tokyo of Solitude

It’s Cold There

The Last Train

The Cat

Who Will Decide the Future of Europe

Judge Pauses Most Discovery in Kash Patel Defamation Lawsuit

The Media Misses the Global Shift

Dostoevsky’s Paradoxes of Goodness