London's relationship to gomiwas more subtle, more oblique. To Kumiko's eyes, the bulk of the city consistedof gomi, of structures the Japanese economy would long ago have devoured in its relentless hunger for space in which to build. Yet these structures revealed, even to Kumiko, the fabric of time, each wall patched by generations of hands in an ongoing task of restoration. The English valued their gomiin its own right, in a way she had only begun to understand; they inhabited it.