The Domesticated River

ひかりの檻

むれをなす

わすれたきおく

cage of light / forming a herd / forgotten memories

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Someone asked me recently: “Do you ever see wild animals?”

The question was innocent enough. They probably expected a story about a fox in the snow in Hokkaido, or a bear sighting in the mountains.

I drank my coffee. It was lukewarm and tasted faintly of paper.

“I see them every day,” I said.

“Really? Where?”

“In Shinjuku,” I said. “Thousands of them.”

The Concrete Current

It was 5:30 PM on a Thursday. The sky was the color of a wet slate. I was sitting on a wooden bench near the South Exit of Shinjuku Station.

If you have never been there, you cannot understand the scale of it. It is not a crowd. It is a hydrological event. It is a flood.

I sat still and watched the mass of humanity flow past me. They moved as one single, terrifying organism. A river of black coats, grey suits, and white masks. They flowed around obstacles like water. They split into streams and re-converged.

To the untrained eye, this looks like civilization. It looks like order. It looks like a high-functioning society commuting home.

But I looked closer.

I looked at the eyes.

The Invisible Leash

Almost every person in that river was holding a rectangle of glass.

Their heads were tilted down at a forty-five-degree angle. Their faces were illuminated by the pale, blue glow of the screen.

They were walking fast, with purpose, but they were not navigating by the stars. They were not navigating by the smell of the wind or the shape of the terrain.

They were following a signal.

We like to think we have evolved past our instincts. We think we are rational beings who make conscious choices. But sitting on that bench, I realized that is a lie. We are still wild animals. We are still driven by the lizard brain. We are driven to seek reward and avoid pain.

The difference is the source of the signal.

Ten thousand years ago, the signal was the scent of a predator or the color of a ripe berry. It was a signal from the real world. It kept us alive.

Now, the signal comes from the cloud.

I watched a young man walk past. He was wearing expensive headphones. He was staring at a map on his phone. He almost collided with a woman who was staring at a social feed. They swerved at the last second, not because they saw each other, but because their peripheral vision detected a shadow.

They were blindsided.

They were wild animals who had been tricked. Their instincts—the deep, biological drive to connect, to find information, to seek status—had been hijacked by the silicon in their hands.

They were migrating, yes. But they were migrating into a cage.

The Digital Pheromone

I closed my eyes and listened. The sound of Shinjuku is a roar. It is the sound of tires, announcements, footsteps, and the relentless, digital chime of notifications. Ping. Whistle. Buzz.

These are the new pheromones.

We follow them with the same blind obedience that an ant follows a chemical trail. We think we are free, but we are being steered. We are being herded by algorithms that know our biology better than we do.

We have domesticated ourselves. We have traded the chaos of the forest for the safety of the feed. We have traded the danger of the wild for the comfort of the loop.

And in the process, we have gone blind. We walk through the world, but we do not see it. We see a render of it. We see the map, never the territory.

The Stray

I opened my eyes.

Across the stream of people, near a vending machine, a crow landed.

It was a large jungle crow, its feathers black and oily. It hopped on the asphalt, pecking at a discarded onigiri wrapper. It looked up. It looked left. It looked right.

It was alert. It was watching the wind. It was watching the people. It was watching me.

It was the only thing in that entire plaza that was actually here.

It looked at me with a sharp, obsidian eye. It seemed to ask: Why are they all sleeping while they walk?

I looked back at the crow. I nodded.

The stream of people continued to flow, a river of blue light and bent necks, rushing toward the turnstiles, rushing toward the next notification, rushing away from the wildness that still lives in their blood, waiting to be remembered.

“Yes,” I thought. “I see wild animals.”

But most of them have forgotten how to howl.