Mid-afternoon journey aboard the Local. Standing. I lean forward and, to my astonished eyes, there's Sigourney Weaver battling an extra-planetary serpent. A bit more tactful leaning confirms a student-aged youth wearing fashionable Japanese long-toed winkle-picker shoes absorbed in watching Alien on his keitai. Just the thing. Double rows of razor teeth. Lethal saliva. Acid blood. Tentacle lashing. Nosferatu, more aptly Godzilla, next? Maybe a longer journey and he will be watching the whole five (or is it fifty-five) TV series of 24 with Kiefer Sutherland at the helm?

Which brings one on to reading. Today, same journey, I count about seven people book-reading in the carriage. Both seated and standing. The Odakyū as Open University library-branch. When bookstores sell a book they usually give you a book-cover – in part to advertise but also, one has to suspect, in anticipation of trainreading or the like. And this, for fellow-passengers like me, causes a frustration. I can't be alone in wanting to know what's being read – all you see is the brown cover. MARUZEN, KINOKUNIYA, TAKASHIMAYA, REGULUS are typical, not to mention ODAKYŪ BOOKMATES and one simply labelled BOOKS. But what is inside? Sheer none-of-my-business carriage curiosity.

It may or may not be Buddhist writ, a sense of the world appointed as it is and in necessary equipoise. But that does not help the gaijin passenger when an empty can starts rolling across the always meticulously clean carriage floor. Its tinny back-and-forth clang with each sway of the train, the clash against a metal seat fitting or even a passenger's foot, brings no corrective action. This is Odakyū Japan as something like train-karmic, the rolling drink-can as the sound of universe. As we head into Kyodo, no passenger will disturb the comment c’est. No reach-down. No recycling as it were. However ear-grating. My own instinct is to kick the hell out of the thing or boot it out of the door. Grab it and crunch it. But I want to be the good train guest.