Culture
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July 2015: Three months ago in an apartment on the outskirts of Osaka, Japan, Haruki Watanabe died alone. For weeks his body slowly decomposed, slouched in its own fluids and surrounded by fetid, fortnight-old food. He died of self-neglect, solitude, and a suspected heart problem. At 60, Watanabe wasn’t old, nor was he especially poor.
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The Thurso River cuts through a landscape of murky brown bogs and wind-scorched grass, through mounds of craggy Caithness rock, soggy sphagnum moss, treeless flats, and through the strange silence of the mid-winter afternoon. It is a ghostly body of water, a lonely 26 mile stretch of shimmering slate gray. On one of its sludgy
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The dining room was empty save for me, a plate of steaming venison pie, and a chubby waiter. As I chomped the chewy deer the waiter fidgeted with cutlery and waddled between tables like a boat bashed between two waves. He hummed to himself as he set places for patrons who would never come and
Matthew Bremner: Journalist 