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So I'm in the back of this taxi, trying to keep track of the twists and turns of this journey by night through the backblocks of nowhere, and suddenly, as we take a corner, the headlights illuminate columns of angular stone, an organized geometrical jumble, and the word for this leaps into my mind, and the word is botchi.
The English word comes trailing along a couple of heartbeats later: the corner is landmarked by a "graveyard". However, I haven't had occasion to use the word "graveyard" in years, whereas botchi got a really good workout during the months spent house hunting - it's surprising just how many places turn out to be built right next door to a graveyard (or downwind from a large-scale urban garbage incinerator, or right on top of an underground shinkansen line which makes the whole place shake every time a train goes through.)
And now it's 2100 and I'm on an actual shinkansen, the MAX "Toki" 338 to Tokyo ... one of these really smooth double-decker trains, one of the supreme achievements of Twentieth Century engineering ... and shinkansen is definitely the automatic word for this machine. The English "bullet train" never enters my mind from one week to the next.
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