Whoever suggested that living in Japan would be a great source of screenwriting inspiration (okay, it was Jess) was right. At least, for the types of themes I like to write about—alienation, culture clash, future technology. I'm a bit mystified about where I'm going to find the time to write all this down—Nova works its teachers pretty hard, and I've got a lot of sightseeing I want to do—but I'll figure it out. Like Ridley Scott and William Gibson already discovered many years ago, Tokyo is a bottomless wellspring of creative ideas. But what inspires me isn't so much the lights, the colors, the traffic and the noise, it's the feelings and rhythms to which any foreigner would be sensitive.

It's the eerie, communal quiet on the train, punctuated by the dramatic "kwuh-SHUUSH" of the other train speeding by in the opposite direction.

It's the way the strange, misty Japanese rain falls in slow motion, like snow.

It's the way Tokyo has transformed the 26 letters of my alphabet into a new language of ultra-modern hieroglyphs.

Feeling inspired yet?