By Toh Hsien Min

It's closing on midnight. Outside the temperature has fallen to about 5°C. After a wagyu dinner enlivened with sake, the walk back to the hotel had a bit of a nip to it, but was still sufficiently warm to make me regret switching luggage just to accommodate a heavy winter coat. Tomorrow morning a regular business suit is likely to do. Still drying off from a shower even after clearing a phalanx of work emails, I open up Notepad. It's time to work on the last thing before a QLRS issue goes out, and always the one that causes me the most headache by being the least predictable. Maybe the sake will help.

The big difference from usual issues, of course, is that I'm doing this from a hotel room in Tokyo. In over twenty years of keeping the journal running, I cannot recall a previous instance where I've had to complete the issue while on the road. Typically, for personal travel, it is easy enough to plan not to be away during QLRS production week. Work travel is harder to control, but in my second-line capacity business trips do not come around too frequently. In the era of easy videoconferencing on demand on your laptop, the need for business travel reduces further. Unfortunately, for this roadshow in Tokyo, the collective wisdom of my firm decided that I would be the best person to send, and because of external needs the trip dates had to cross over from January into February.

I hate business travel, by the way. Every time nowadays a company sends you on a trip you can imagine that there's quite a bit riding on it, so there's not inconsiderable stress. Moreover, trying to find a way in the high-context culture of the Japanese business world as an outsider is like trying to solve a uniform-colour jigsaw puzzle. And as one of my counterparts reflected at dinner, even as you're racing round the steel-and-glass buildings of Yurakucho and Marunouchi that nobody ever makes a highlight of their own trip, you're expected also to keep up with your own business-as-usual work, which never stops mounting just because you're doing something else.

Still, I suppose it's an experience like any other. I had a moment when, waiting for the executives we were to meet, that same counterpart stared across the street at the squircle windows of the next building and the bare branches of the trees waiting to bud, and reflected on a previous trip he had taken as a photographic project, on which he could swear he had snapped that exact street. Which led to us talking about photography, and then about poetry, and finding a connection in a city that was arguably the most correct setting for Lost in Translation.

At least, as hypothesised, the trip has given me something to natter on about, in the process saving us from the six-sentence Schrödinger's cat editorial that would have gone out had I not been able to sort this from abroad.

Notwithstanding the editorial, the rest of this issue is fairly decent.  The poetry is as strong as it has been, on top of which there are some whispers of echoes between poems.  The short stories are likewise strong, and I have to hope that I don't encounter a mishap such as Ho Ai Li had while on the road.  Meanwhile, Shu Hoong continues to make great hay in the criticism section, with no fewer than seven reviews this time out (and he might have got eight except that I asked him to chill on chasing for the last one!).  Two Proust Qs then round off the issue.  With an issue like this one, who needs an editor's introductory waffle?

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