silence

EELS4

Down to the stumps now, two joins gone from each leg. Two smooth skinned caps between me and the floor. I am sinking lower and lower. The remaining eight cables tighten, the forgotten four hang listlessly around me. I want to imagine listening to their frustrated snapping, but they make no sound.


Mechanics and light. Longer cylinder. Smaller focus. The cables retract, jerking my legless torso towards the ceiling. One girl, maybe six, sinks weeping to her knees in the middle of the mall as her mother marshals her three siblings in exasperation. Click. She looks up quickly but stays down, sobbing, a marathon runner who can run no more. Brief second of respite as the cutter hits the dead air between my legs, breathing in frantic refills before plunging onwards. Both legs gone, sacrificed to her need for photographic memories. Click. She loses dignity. I lose a slice of hip. Always one more sale, one more store, one more shop assistant ready to urge on stragglers with boundless enthusiasm. I am, surrounded by all I despise, by the symptoms of the epidemic. The camera flashes over item after item, sale-sorted and ‘new line’ tabled piles, lines and rows. Clicks. Penis and testes gone before I can fear their loss. Lose change. There is no appeal for me in fingering racks of sweaters or fondling designer bag leather. Is that what I am missing, that connection between the carnal and the consumed? This is life. Sex gives life. This much I know despite my painful lack of experience. Now it’s too late. So many slips between the understanding and the attainment. It’s too hard. This is easy. Why don’t you try it? She steers us into Ralph Lauren, a shrine to cheap garments with ultra-expensive logos. Polos arrayed rainbow fashion. Fuschia. Click. Lime. Click. Aqua. Click. Maroon. Click. I am growing used to the pain as I shrink. A shopping mall in Odaiba may be the only thing to remember me by. Third world beggars on skateboards, pushing themselves along dusty pavements using calloused hands at the ends of over-sized arms. Begging for coins from tourists, but tourists are Japanese exports, not imports. Trends are for those without ideas anyway.

Meika steers a course between blindingly-lit displays, radioactive icebergs in the dark carpet sea. Titanic customers searching for the items that will complete a unique look preferred by their million closest friends. This is a process for logic, not the impressionable. It should take approximately three minutes. Style, colour and size. In that order. No vacillating. Thirty seconds to select the cut. One minute locating garment in least garish colour and most appropriate size. Trying on optional. Remove from display. Proceed to counter. Exchange money for goods. Ninety seconds to process payment. Depart store. Regret everything.

Large red polo shirt takes forty-seven seconds to locate and cull from the stack. Too big for her, probably for me too. Certainly will be in twenty photos’ time. ¥8000: ¥200 for the shirt; ¥7800 yen for the tiny man on the horse. Will it fit you? Maybe one bigger? Shopping for the ogre she has never seen, creating my image from the outside in.

‘Are you a loyalty club member, lady?’
‘No.’
‘Are you aware of the many benefits of joining our rewards scheme?’
‘No.’
‘Would you like to take an application form?’
‘No.’

Twenty-one seconds of the shop assistant’s face progressing through the miniscule changes in appearance that only trained observers can identify: affected congeniality, eager suggestiveness, surprise, shock, bewilderment, despair. Caught ultra-close through the optical zoom. Minefield acne scars betray the painstaken haircut. A casual observer would note only a slight uncurling of the plastic smile, a tiny narrowing of the eyelids, and an infinitesimal hardening of vocal tone, no more than the difference between a statement and a question in a foreign language.
The camera points down, catches fingernails drumming time on the counter glass, every tap increasing the tension in Salesman’s voice. She is playing Wheezer’s sonata, the finger movements all I remember of him now. Could be Mozart, could be SMAP. I don’t listen to music.


A millimetre perfect refolding of an already immaculate arranged shirt precedes its envelopment in feathery tissue paper, which is then bound with a strip of Lauren-branded ribbon. An opaque plastic drawstring bag follows – more corporate heraldry. She reaches across the counter to salvage her purchase before it is embedded in a block of concrete carved into the shape of a polo player. Her forearms are hairless and smooth. New vision from the forbidden floors. But Salesman is not done with it yet. He pulls away as politely but resolutely as possible.

‘If you will excuse me, lady, I will just pop it in a bag for you.’
‘It’s already in a bag.’
‘That isn’t THE bag, miss.’

He reaches below the counter and, with a flourish, withdraws a stiff cardboard bag that echoes as he opens it. Resting this new covering on the glass, he steers the pre- and rewrapped package inside as carefully as if delivering it in reverse. He stands the cardboard bag up so that its massive logo can remind us both of where we are, flicks the sides to remove any lingering creases, and slides it across to Meika two-handedly. He thanks her loudly for her custom, bows until his breath leaves clouds, and then disappears.


Back into the current, the bag bulging with bags rather than goods, one more pregnant reminder in this nursery. Whisking us away again like children late for school, the beckoning hands of shop assistants now waves of farewell, as if they know that their work is done. We have done our bit. Back to the Wheezer’s wet dream on wheels, a place to sit, to pause and think. A very successful trip, don’t you think? The tunnel tilts downwards, towards the bulging bag. So much fuss over one shirt. The tunnel lengthens, burrowing deep through the layers, the eels jerk me from side to side in mid-air, desperation in their movements, as if they know they will die if left in me. I strain for the floor with long-gone toes, trying to ground myself, to fight them, but I can only hang immobile as she takes each piece of me. The bag looms in the window like a multi-lipped mouth waiting to swallow, but in the space where the tongue should be, neatly furled and bright red, there is nothing.

The small boy picks up shells from the storm-dirtied beach, always looking for the creatures inside. Hollow after hollow, the sea’s roar scornful behind him. His face screws up in disappointment. Father reads a newspaper in the dunes, hidden from everything.

EELS2

A fat man’s breast in a cheap sky blue skirt. View zooms back from the fat, allows more male cleavage in. Suddenly there is a space between me and the cotton covering his sweaty milkless nipple. He is too close to her, his porky fingers klip-klopping silently as if playing a midair sonata in the hope of luring her closer. I can still hear what he is saying, but the words are no longer clear. She has stopped listening, and so must I.

She tunes in again. Cutesy pong ping noises, the electronic orchestra of modern life. ‘Odaiba’ ringing out in a polite but urgent voice. Constant reminders of your place and responsibility to follow directions in the most non-threatening manner possible. Spaces bordered by sounds, the aural map of the city with your route painstakingly defined.

The tunnel swings to the left, scanning a carriage half-full of pre-programmed consumers dedicated to future spending. One last lingering view of the metal cocoon before ejaculation into the retail orgy. There is emotion in her vision, I see through her lens and feel the frenzied elation of signs, but deep within that feeling, hidden below layers of admiration and optimism, there is an all-pervading boredom, as if nothing she does will make any difference. Maybe that is why I am here, must be the reason she is showing me all this. Even she can’t stop it, so how can I? Is there no way to stop this mindless fervour, this shrink-wrapped seduction that consumes people over and over and over again?

There is lust in the eyes of the other passengers, glistening behind thin-rimmed glasses, through side-cut fringes. Every spare inch of wall space is foreplay, plastered with advertising for English schools, shopping centre grand sales, mobile phone companies and JTB holiday packages. Every face is smiling, bathed in the glow of morning and the prospect of enlivening an existence by purchasing some service or good previously and unaccountably absent. So much for the advertising. The three-dimensional faces surrounding me are not joyful, but rather pensive, as if waiting for some unheard command to adopt the approved expression of the day, or worried that their performance here will disappoint. Japan Rail signs suspended from the already low ceiling caution that “Any masterpiece just becomes noise disturbance when emanating from earphones”. Two green alien silhouettes on a white background explain this for those who can read neither Japanese nor English. The aliens have featureless heads attached to featureless torsos by hourglass necks. Their emotions are just as difficult to guess. The other passengers seem more interested in their mobile phones, the electronic umbilical cords of this age. Wheezer uses his to check the schedules for the service he is already on. He jots a notation in a frayed notebook, drawing another circle beneath a column of identical marks.

The carriage doors slide open, exhaling relief and compressed air. Breathe while you can. Welcome to the newest world. I know this tale of the new Tokyo. The only way to find an unfilled place was to create it from nothing, a modern-day Atlantis built on reclaimed earth in the middle of Tokyo Bay. Odaiba, the future city, the last chance to create something free from the empty-headed delirium of life.


Everything feels so real, but cannot be. I am lying on a futon in a dimly lit apartment room, surrounded by empty cartons and the stench of my parents’ shame. I am inside, she is waiting outside the door in her striped socks, all energy in the face of my lethargy. But she has powers and secrets I cannot share. I am not floating, I am seeing, watching through her camera’s lens. Her face must stare back from the reflections in the carriage windows or even in the eyes of the fat man, but the window never stops long enough for me to catch it, to pick her out. She flits away on impossible angles, and the most I can hope for is snatches of her trailing shadow, handfuls of dark that fill but don’t flesh her silhouette.

I imagine her as I must: the sum of the Polaroids tacked to my wall, an unfinished collage with white bordered scales for armour. Emptiness above, the irony is poisonous, because I want nothing more than to know what is there. I need a face to make her real, so she can become a memory instead of a dream. There is only one way I will ever know, and fifty-nine nails stand ready to resist that urge.


She follows the other passengers as they shuffle off the monorail in their invisible shackles, eyes flicking from image to image as they follow the middle path. Proclamations loom on every side, sights and sounds advancing in leaps and bounds. The forest of advertising and the soundtracking storm of commercial messages are the only nature they will experience during this trip. The daypacks and walking sticks favoured by weekend hikers have been abandoned in favour of an ample stock of low-interest credit and the approved attire of the week. Printed messages appear in both English and Japanese; the announcements solely in the latter. Foreigners are not the targets here; not yet. I read about ‘year sales’, ‘happy down prices’ and ‘climax bargains’ – time, emotion and sex. Shopping is for life, not just for Christmas. The window stays open, forcing me on in their wake, the smell of photo booths, perfume and baked goods filling my prison. They are being drawn in, moths to the bright lights, forever fluttering but never finding the inside. Wheezer’s heavy breathing has been replaced by the cries of small children, the rustle of banknotes, and the shicking of mental checklists being marked off in every head.

She turns away from them, sneaking through a fire door so furtively that I expect a security guard to call after her. Come with me, Masa-kun. The dank stairwell smell lasts seconds, replaced by an odour I had almost forgotten and cannot immediately place. Light fills the box, blinding me again. The eels whiplash back, slamming me into the wall. Their struggles become plaintive, burrowing deeper as if afraid to be seen, as if my body is safer than what lies beyond the glass. The smell grows stronger; tiled bathrooms in once-visited restaurants, an artificial mix of the sea and the forest in a can. Air freshener worlds sanitized for your enjoyment. Why must all toilets smell like nature? No-one shits outside anyway. An olfactory world for 150 yen per can. Yet there is salt in this ocean breeze, and the smell of cut grass around sandy baseball fields, and the acrid taste of industrial fumes, of stagnant sewers underfoot where last week’s dinners have found their niche. The smell of memories buried deep; of scattered food on the playground; of baseball team liniment; of fresh air.

EELS1

I stretch tentatively, first side to side and then in front. I feel like a puppet; can feel thin metal cables in my flesh. Three in each arm: shoulder, wrist, elbow. Three in each leg: hip, ankle, knee. There are no barbed hooks cutting into my flesh, no adhesive pads to bind me to them, but I can feel their ends twitching just below my skin like the jaws of an eel. With my right hand, I try to pull the left wrist cable out, seeking the pain that will reassure me this is real. My fingers can’t find a purchase; it is slick with oil, memories of fish market tuna dripping their last onto newspaper. I trace the cable away from my arm, seeking its anchor point above my head, but I can’t reach high enough. I loop it around my hand and tug at it, but there is no reaction from either my body or the binding. The embedded tip wriggles as before, impervious to my efforts.

There is nothing else but darkness, but in that cold enveloping something I feel almost at home. I am alone here, hidden from everything. The floor is unyielding but tilts away from me. I can feel a pounding noise beyond wherever I am, not close enough to be distinct. Something like the relentless rhythm of a metal press in a distant factory. Alternately reassuring and infuriating; the knowledge that I am not entirely alone. Mosquitoes circling summer night sleep. I feel my legs and arms, finding comfort in the knowledge that my flesh is intact. There is no water welling inside me, no discomfort to speak of, just an all-consuming sense of displacement. This is not my room. No scuttling in the corner, no beam of light from under the door, no tatami beneath my feet. Metal floor and immediate silence; total darkness and distant pounding.


Nervous fingertips explore a round metal protrusion a step to the right, sliding over its friction-less surface to meet in the space beneath. They dance along and across it. The flat end is before me, curved sides extend to a featureless metal wall perhaps sixty centimetres away. My eyes adjust to the darkness, seeing nothing but accepting their uselessness. Knocking on the wall sends echoes neither far nor long – my invisible prison is built for one. The round shape becomes a cylinder: a cannon with no mouth aimed at a man with no face. I step closer, tracing its circumference with my hands. It is nearly as wide as my arm span. There is nothing to reveal its purpose save for a diagonal line dissecting the metal of the gun mouth. I slide my index finger down it from top to bottom, a single knuckle-deep path. No tributaries or veins to follow.

I feel out the rest of my fingertip world, leaving a trail of fingerprints. There is not far to go. If I should commit some crime here the police would not find resolution difficult. Metal walls as plain as I can tell, distinguished now with my sign. The cannon’s mouth is the only feature I can make out. Rampant imagining sees me blown apart in an instant like so much surplus flesh. Is there a word for human meat? Like pork or lamb or beef. It should be called ‘memory’. The remnants of what once was a person, slowly disintegrating as time betrays presence.

I rearrange my body of memory in a corner. I wedge myself into the unyielding joins of the walls as best I can, knowing that simple imprisonment is too easy. The cables lodge no protest at this rearrangement, almost as if they had wanted it from the beginning. They refuse to entangle, ensnare or release. I am lowered and crumpled, free to stay wherever they permit me. The eel-heads begin to squirm more violently, and I know they must soon tear my flesh.


They say that deprivation of one sense heightens the others, but the darkness reveals nothing. No smells, no taste, no sound other than the feeling of it somewhere far away.

It happens without any notice, the slick smooth sliding mechanical drive. Unseen parts switching and locking into place, heralding the transformation and, at that moment when I have convinced myself nothing will come of it, there is suddenly light, noise, and a world outside. The muzzle springs open, split down the knuckle crack, metal halves disappearing impossibly into a thin rim as the light from without blinds me. The sound of a small train clatters everywhere, echoing on the metal surprisingly loudly. Cutting through the din, I can make out a layer of chatter flushed with the inane tones of the every day, punctuated by the desperate wheezing of an excited man, the robotic pleasantry of random station announcements, and the distinct chirp of her. Entranced, the eels cease their writhing.


Wheezer: ‘This is the world’s best driverless mass transport system. The automated guideway transit system for the future city.’

Meika: ‘You sound like a tour guide. You really know this stuff? How fast can the train go?’

Wheezer: ‘It isn’t a train, actually, but models such as this are not so much designed for their speed as for their reliability and punctuality.’

Meika: ‘But if there is no driver, what happens if it crashes.’

Wheezer: ‘Don’t worry about it, little lady, there can never be a crash. The Yurikamome driverless system is the product of the finest minds in our nation. 100000 passengers a day and never one crash. Sixteen stops from Shimbashi to Odaiba and never so much as a wheel out of place.’

Meika: ‘Oh my, you seem to know so much about trains.’

That voice speaks volumes in the gaps between words.

Wheezer: ‘Perhaps if you are free one afternoon you would like to accompany me on one of my little expeditions. There are some incredibly complex junctions on the Yamanote Line I have been looking forward to studying for some time now. Another camera is always welcome.’

Can’t blame the man for trying. Or can I? The train geek has seen her face and he doesn’t know her at all. I have parts of her, half an image on a wall, he has the whole flesh right in front of him, the luxury of memory stored in his brain. Weeks of listening to her warbling, of enduring hours of inanity for each Polaroid fraction of her. And for all that I have two legs and a slim waist, topped by a void, a laugh, and a smell. He is much easier to imagine: a sweating, balding man with thin-rimmed glasses too tight for his nose. Little red marks where they pinch the bridge, inflamed by the salt in his perspiration. Short-sleeved shirt, high-high pants, sensible shoes and white socks. Lots of pockets in the pants for all the things that train otaku think they need.

Pencils and memory sticks and tissues and breath-mints and notebooks full of train-related minutiae. This multi-pocketed single-faceted man has the other half of my picture, and he has done nothing to earn it. Years spent jotting down train numbers, counting carriages, profiling drivers, wrestling with stopwatches and studying with timetables. Decades misspent in the pursuit of meaningless data, geek trivia to be shared with people who never talk. Even he has her face neatly filed in his memory, there to savour for a rainy day or more likely a lonely night, a fridge-full of three-dimensional Meika snacks to chew and drool over whenever the solitude becomes too much. He gets the ten-course meal while I suck on grains of uncooked rice which look the part but can never satisfy on their own.

My eyes begin to adjust to the glare, and I get up and move across to face the cannon’s mouth. I see a black ring, a cylinder stretching impossibly far into the distance. Just another trick of the light, but in the centre, at the end, there is life.

PHOTO

'Masa-kun, oh Masa-kun!’ A mother calling a young child. Hint of teacher summoning unruly student. Slightest hint of menace in the multi-coloured voice. Starts in her mid-riff. Warms to the task as it rises. ‘Masa-kun, I have given you many photos of myself.’ Seventeen at last count. Nearly twenty pieces of her to learn. ‘But I have none of you. No-one does. Only the old ones from before, but they are school photos from five years ago.’ Relics of my allocated five seconds. Step forward, turn right, smile, flash, next. Hurry hurry children, so many to get through. I have three more schools to do today. Now one of the teachers. That is a nice suit. From Aoki? How much? Really? That is a very good price indeed.

‘I want to take a photo of you. I am tired of talking to a door, Masa-kun. I know the door is very important to you, Masa, but you are skin and bone and blood, not wood. You don’t have to open the door. We can start with a foot if you like. Nothing big, just a foot. If that isn’t too bad we can keep going. Is that OK, Masa-kun?’

I don’t say anything. There is too much at stake. I have no desire for a photo. But if I don’t give her one, then what? Will she stop giving me kitty polaroids? That can’t happen. I need them to understand her. I am nearly halfway there. So much rides on this decision. A photo lets her in. Just a tiny bit. Never through the door. Not that. She can hear me thinking anyway. She must be able to. She can make me do whatever she wants. But not open the door. Maybe a photo isn’t so much. What do you think, Meika? ‘A photo can’t hurt you, Masa-kun. It just stores a little piece of you, a back-up only. It doesn’t take a part of you away with it, just a memory of you in the moment it was taken. Can you spare me a part of one moment, Masa-kun? I have three more photos for you.’ Plain bribery, a child’s trick, all dishonesty. Give me this and I’ll give you that. How the world works today. But I want those three photos. Three plus seventeen makes twenty to one. One photo of my foot by the slot. That’s all. One snap of my grimy, smelly, filth-encrusted foot. The dirt is now part of the calluses. More a paw or a pad than a foot. Long black nails curling into themselves. Almost a claw. Not the foot I remember. Not one I study through the slot. Not a part of me anymore. Not me. I can give that to her. She won’t get closer to me than that. ‘One photo, Masa-kun, that’s all I ask.’ Left or right is the only decision remaining. Toss a mental coin. Right it is.


The trapezoid of weak light by the slot. The bright invader of my gloom. Bravest of the watts surviving the entry. A frame for the claw at leg’s end. I can’t look at it. This abominable sign of what I am now. I endure it because the alternative is worse. The pain of laughter and stares outside. Cramps can disappear. Muck can be washed off. Nails can be trimmed. The world can’t see me like this. But she isn’t the world. She’s just a girl with a camera. I plant my foot in the light. Soil and light combine for growth. I imagine my foot growing if it lingers. Sprouting extra toes and broadening at the instep. Prize organic feet, are they cage or free-range? Masayuki: winner, amateur grower division, Tokyo Show, 2009. Blue ribbon feet, black ingrained skin.

The light feels warm on my feet. Dipping the toes into a weak sun. Just like being at the beach again. Flesh on show, best in show. I don’t know how it should pose. Raised or flat; front-on or side view? Front-on is easiest. No chance of her getting both feet in her shot. No two-for-the-price-of-one customer specials today. Not ever. I centre the right in the light. Five toe-claws to the fore. Left off to the side. Face inches from the door. All of me so close to outside. Two inches of wood from me to there. I haven’t been this close in five years. I can’t smell it, not past my stench. But I know it’s there. In the hall with her and her camera.

I hear more scuffling and scrabbling. ‘Are you ready, Masa-kun?’ Does it matter? ‘Are you smiling?’ For a picture of my foot? ‘The rest of you speaks when your mouth does not, Masa-kun. Hold still now.’ There are shadows in the light now. A chime as the digicam is switched on. Orange glow on my ankle from the flash. Bigger shadows: she must be focusing. ‘Ready? Ichi, ni, san!’


The flash explodes through the slot. Bursting and filling the dank air like fireworks. Bouncing off stained walls and curling posters. Dancing across the filthy floor. Split second glimpses of my world. Jarring visions of my shame. And the light is not fading or flying. Becoming impossibly stronger instead. White light arcing and spinning, weaving its web. I am still rooted to my spot. The left foot still awaits its glory times. But the light is gathering around me. Sweeping up the memories and the dust. White brilliance melting into silver. Silver rushing everywhere around me. Closing in on me, shy to the touch. No relenting now, my mind cannot function. This is impossible. The thing that can’t be happening is. The silver is settling, collapsing on itself. The mercury falls inwards, dragging me along. I am collapsing, origami in the rain. The silver speech shrinks, drawn inwards, downwards. Towards the slot, towards the camera’s lens. It is the mouth of this word. The home of this exclamation. Spat out into the world to fend alone. Now it returns with me.

She draws me in, the mouthless face getting bigger and closer. I am dreaming, falling, drowning. And stop.

5PIECE

MAST

I tried another’s eyes before. Maybe two years ago now. The last time he came.

I hear his weight shifting from foot to foot. So long accustomed to enduring stoically, he is unsure how to breach or even address the cocoon of silence I have woven. I imagine it glowing, absorbing his words and deflecting his phrases, throbbing with soundless energy fuelled by his rising frustration. I don’t resent him, just who he is. As a father, he is probably no better or worse than other trapped fathers, doing his best to enthuse about the affection he is supposed to show at school baseball games and weekend excursions. He is a two-sevenths father. I am his part-time project, no rival for the position of man of the house, a role he fills well enough. It’s not like there were any other applicants. His greatest failing is in the ‘god’ function: his national duty to mould me in his image, reactive and malleable, duty-bound and unquestioning, a robot with the ability to bleed. I have made myself bleed, does that void the manufacturer’s warranty. What can he do? Return me to the manufacturer? That poses certain physiological difficulties.

‘Your grandfather took me to the mountains when I was twelve. His hometown was there, a small village sunk into a valley that used to have a river. Just outside Matsumoto was a peak, I can’t remember the name now. I’m not even sure he told me what the name was anyway. It doesn’t matter. We stood at the bottom looking up; it must have been summer because I remember the sweat stinging my eyes. He pulled two white towels out of his pack. He tied one around my head like a labourer does when they are outside. He tied the other around his own. My towel was too tight, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. He was smiling, so pleased with himself for having thought of this eventuality. He had two metal water bottles tied to his belt, and with every step he took they clunked together. The sound became sharper every time we drank. There was a gravel path leading up to the top. There were boulders to climb over, tree branches to duck under. He made me hold his hand in the places where the path skirted cliff tops. He warned me not to tell my mother about those parts, because she would be so very worried. She thought it was just a walk. He never said anything to her about a mountain. So we followed this path, and it was so long because it was never very steep. Winding around and around the mountain until I was dizzy. I wanted to cut up the slope to get to the top faster, but he told me stories of other little boys who had done the same thing. He pointed far down into the valley, where the rocks danced in the heat haze, surrounded by pebbles bleached white by the sun.

“See those pebbles down there?”
“Yes, father.”
“They aren’t pebbles. That’s where the boys who cut the path wait. They have been waiting a long time.”
I didn’t say anything to him. I didn’t believe him and I am sure you wouldn’t either. The valley of bone pebbles was a warning; his father probably told it to him as well.

We stayed on the path all the way to the top. It took us three hours in the shimmering sun, light from above and heat reflecting from the stones of the path below. A direct route would not have taken much more than an hour, most of it shaded by trees and overhangs. Just before the summit there was a false crest, and we stopped to drink flasks of green tea and eat somen from plastic bowls he dug out of his pack. We were on the mountain side, and there was nothing in front of us but peaks and slopes, with the highest capped permanently by snow. Tufts of greenery stuck in the valleys like an old man’s nostril hair, sparse and resilient. Veins of dark rock slithering up the slopes. Hidden blood pulsing through the shadows and defiles. Weakening by the thin air; struggling to reach the head. I asked him why we had stopped there, so close to the true summit, but he shook his head and said nothing. We finished our noodles, tipping up the bowls so the salty liquid would not be wasted. He flicked them with his wrist before replacing them in the pack. Like he was tempted to throw them off the mountain just to see how far they would float but checked himself at the last minute. The last few drops flew from the plastic, staining the boulder we had been sitting on like the first drops of rain.

We reached the summit in less than five minutes. It was guarded by a white and orange radio antenna, towering over the bare peak with no sign of how it got there. The wire mesh fence around it was rusting in places, as was the once clear sign warning in both English and Japanese that any interference with the antenna would be punished.

“They built the path after the war, when everyone was desperate for work and didn’t mind what they were being paid for. The Americans wanted a network of radio masts down the spine of the country to relay their military signals. The war was over. Money meant more than pride by then. Your grandfather helped make the path. The local men spent six months digging and cutting and carrying sacks of gravel up from the valley floor. Six months to build, all so they could put a radio mast up here. When the trucks arrived with the parts, the American officer took one look at the mountain and called for a helicopter. He and his men never even set foot on the path. The radio network was never finished because technology made it redundant. The tower has been sitting up there ever since because no-one wants to take responsibility for bringing it back down.”


Looking out from that side of the mountain, the rocky arteries in the distance were disrupted by houses and even factories, replaced by highways to nowhere populated by day-trippers too lazy to climb. Off to the north, the wall of the dam seemed to bulge in the heat, threatening the toy towns downriver. But the disaster will never happen, not while the concrete holds.’

I wait for more, for the moral, the hidden message, the meaningful truth I am supposed to derive from this marathon telling. If you can call one person talking at another a conversation, then it is the longest he and I have ever had. The material of his suit pants shimmies as he bends, the light through the slot disrupted by the shadow of his hand and its contents. He pushes an envelope into the darkness and walks away. The timing of his footsteps is irregular.

The white envelope is stuffed with ten thousand yen bills, clean and crisp as if brought direct from a bank. I count them out to one hundred, a million yen in a pile by my toes. A small white card is stapled to the envelope. I tear it off, snakebite holes in its top right corner. He always had neat handwriting. The characters are aligned like tiny black soldiers, clear against the white card even in this gloom.

“You chose your own path, Masayuki. I cannot follow you. Goodbye.”
He won’t approach the door again, not even on birthdays or during O-bon. Mother brings a bowl of udon at dinner time, sniffling as she pushes it under the door. Thick white noodles cords adrift in a fishy broth. This night’s serve is too salty. My sense of triumph vanishes. She can’t be bought off that easily.

4PIECE

HARAJUKU3

Black screen. Time to think. So little of it. Use it well. Too late. White on top again:
“Scarf Girl, Pumpkin Girl, Lolita Man and the Rabbit.”

7.07-9.16 “The corner at the park end is home to the freak shows. The king lives here: a towering transvestite in a pink and white Miss Muffet overcoat. He is Goth-Lolita meets French Maid meets Rocky Horror, with legs that are too long, pigtails that fall too sweetly, and a square-jawed face too hardened by life to ever be sweet enough for this look. His is the very corner position, the trickiest spot for tourist cameras to penetrate without invitation, next to the hard-core dressers and just over from the lone Buddhist monk who waits for alms. He sucks on a lollipop. Pom-poms and a stuffed rabbit hang around his neck; a red bonnet is a dainty summit on this most unfeminine of man mountains. Just like Pink Man, he looks to be in his early thirties. He has three teenage disciples, who block all but the accredited photographers. They manoeuvre like army squads, checking lines of fire and moving to snuff out any danger. Two of them seem unremarkable, dressed in dark jackets and street pants, but the red and black scarf on one reveals her devotion, just as the plastic pumpkin hanging from the waistband of her friend does. His final acolyte wears a white rabbit suit. She is eating vanilla Pockies from a box. From a distance they could be miniature carrots. She nibbles at them furtively as she scans the surrounding crowd. Lolita Man choreographs their movements with his masculine hands, the fingers too long and strong to be feminine. They arc around him, chaff to the pose-seeking missiles fired from a hundred lenses, blocking clear views of what he values most: his face.


He does not see the irony in courting privacy in this most public place, but he reserves his poses for the times of his choosing, resting between times in a nest of small suitcases stuffed with makeup and costume changes. The disciples suck on lollypops too, eyes alternating between concerted nonchalance and the search for intruders. For one brief moment they are standing in a line, and the tourists descend with their fun-size cameras, desperate for that one shot that will stand above the hundreds of blurred, interrupted or incomplete images already stored in their memory cards. The four twist and swivel in silence. Scarf Girl bows her head, arms hanging limply; Pumpkin Girl raises one arm to cover her face, warding off all attempts to capture her with a mittened hand; Lolita Man simply turns his back, showing off a swathe of fur-lined coat and red and pink striped knee-high socks. Only the Rabbit looks straight ahead, gnawing on a Pocky, frozen in the camera flash-lights. She starts to sway, left to right, back to front, and the cameras track her, drawn to her, ever following this most unlikely of white rabbits.”


So hard to think when she is talking. Her voice flows through my ears. It washes every stray thought from my brain. Cascades out the other side, leaving me empty. I have no choice but to agree. I have nothing left to argue with. I reach out to pause the file again. There is too much happening here. Can’t escape the feeling I have missed something. She is driving me along, carrying me away. But from what? She can’t get me out of this room. Fifty-nine nails can resist striped socks. In the silence there is light. I haven’t worked as much because of her. All this time with Polaroids . Now the memory stick. They should be adding memories, not replacing them. She wants me to stop. She wants me to use her eyes. What is wrong with my own?

This last section of the file puzzles me. I can’t hold it in front of me. That thought keeps swishing out of reach. It circles the plughole as the water sinks. In and out of reach. I can’t play the file again. I want to be clear about this. Her voice will suck me down as well. But only if I let it. Think about rabbits and Pockies and cutesy men. Think about sweating tourists and camera flashes. Think about raised arms and military precision. There it is.

How could she film him, film them? How could she capture these expert escapers? A girl with a video camera. A girl who looks the part. To her waist, at least. How did she get that close to them? Close enough to find makeup flaws. Close enough to pick Pocky flavours. Unless she staged it somehow. Or she is one of them. Or she works for an international fashion magazine. All that detail she provides about them. But one piece about her is missing.

11.27 The time meter is almost full. Black screen but no name. Ticking forwards to the end. Tiny letters appear. So small I have to crane forward. ‘Wait three seconds. Pause the clip.’ I count aloud. On the third she appears. Freeze-framed. No street sounds, no guiding voice. No movement, trapped on the screen.

12.34 Black and White Girl. She is facing away from the camera. Against the wall, her back to the crowds. Like she doesn’t need them. Or doesn’t know they are there. Oversized black backpack covered in grey stars. Goth Maid black skirt, three layers of ruffles. Black and white striped convict socks. Chunky platform shoes showing wear. Only a cheap white t-shirt. She is half a character. The outfit stops at her waist. But a whole person. Her hands rest on the parapet. She looks out between concrete balustrade pillars. Down onto the train lines below. Yamanote Line trains every three minutes, both directions. Just a girl watching the trains go past. Watching them spit out instant crowds. The crowds that are here to see her. Her and the rest of them. In this moment she is different. The group are camera flash darlings. The group are playing to their audience. Ensconced on centre stage. All the love they need is theirs. But even here, she stands out. Blazing colours, bleeding makeup; carefully costumed, maximum shock. She is just a black and white girl. The girl who stopped to look around. While her world went quietly mad.


She has the patience they lack. Maybe even the optimism they can’t trust in. A keitai clutched in her right hand. Toys dangling from it, bigger than it is. Red and white fluff too hard to make out. The only colour bright against the grey concrete. I know the phone won’t ring. Maybe she does as well. But there is always hope. Hope amidst this sea of rebellion. A dream that there is more than this. There has to be. With every week the cast swells and blends. Characters are loved and discarded like the children inside. Their moment lasts as long as the next photo. The more photos, the better you are. The brighter you are, the more they take. The crowd votes with its feet and digital cameras. It is becoming a popularity contest. Maybe it always has been. But the crowd is bigger now. The only way out is her way. Forget the colours and the heels. Leave aside the scarred makeup and dolls. Dismiss the suitcases of spare clothing. There is only one person worth seeing here. And she isn’t even interested.

I strain my eyes and see the tissue. Crushed in her left fingers. A corner peeking out from the flesh. Maybe escaping, or trying to breathe. I can’t make out her knuckles. Pink or white. The file quality drops when I pause it. Shouldn’t it be clearer? When you stop to consider, the world stops. You have the time you never had. That they don’t have. The time to think about things for yourself. That place in time where no distractions live.

I can’t see her face. She never turns while the camera lingers. Her back to it all. All I will ever see of her. I want to know if she’s been crying. I need to know if she’s sick. No one keeps tissues here. Too unhygienic, always have been. It must be clean, must be waiting. Just like she is, needing a purpose.

The seconds still tick away all but forgotten. No movement for so long. The statue in the cultural typhoon. Winds of fashion, storms of change. A small girl clinging to the stone bridge. Hoping not to be swept away. Take my hand, little one. I want to say it to her. Want to see her eyes turning to me. Need to feel like I can help her. But she never moves. The time drips away in second long droplets. The storm swirls over her. Whips her short hair upwards. Slices through her thin t-shirt. And then, after it all, comes the blackness.

No more images, no more white letters. Just the voice, only hers, no more script. “I am your eyes, Masa-kun. You don’t have to use them in the daylight, the sun would be too strong for you after all this time. It is too strong for me sometimes, just like everyone else. My eyes are yours now, and what you are looking for may arrive at any moment. You cannot miss that. You must promise never to close them.”

HARAJUKU2

2.31-4.41 “Pink Man wears a plain pink smock dress over his schoolgirl sailor suit with white trim and scarlet neck-scarf. A dark pink teddy bear with grey feet hangs from a strap around his neck. Its black eyes stare straight ahead as his scan the crowd for takers. His black hair is cropped short, mostly hidden under a plastic fairy princess tiara from a hundred yen shop. The accompanying veil is pink as well; dirty furry Mickey Mouse ears the cherries on his sundae. His eyebrows have been thinned, and his sad eyes are framed by circles of peach eye shadow. He smiles awkwardly at the passersby, holding up a homemade cardboard sign with the words, “Hello Free Hug” written on it in English. He stands by the wall like all the others, but he stands out because he wants to interact with the watchers. He needs to be noticed, but his outfit draws more photos than hugs. He smiles for each photo, refusing no-one, unlike the veteran posers at either end of the bridge who rarely deign to pose for amateurs. He smiles and makes the ubiquitous peace sign with his other hand, his eyes betraying the anxiety of being noticed but not being noted.

I occupy his gaze from the safety of the crowd; see the makeup crusting around the corners of his eyes and the skin of his face beginning to sag despite the best efforts of his smile. A fat tourist waddles over, points to the sign and mimes a hug. Pink Man steps in cautiously, bending in at the shoulders and out at the waist like a schoolgirl at her first high school dance class. He drapes rather than hugs, his face grimacing slightly as the fat man pulls him in for a hearty Western-style hug, all arms and meeting torsos. Offering free hugs here, where we suffer without proximity to others but rarely subscribe to actual contact, is a recipe for confusion. Maybe he is already confused. I think he just wants to be noticed and loved. Doesn’t everyone? Don’t you? Nonchalant teens in shiny jackets also hold hastily scrawled ‘free hugs’ signs. They do better business than Pink Man. An invisible busker’s hat fills with passing smiles. So much easier to hug when you aren’t carrying baggage. He watches them strut: every hug they get is one stolen from him. He is older than them: last year’s or even last month’s model. It wouldn’t matter if he was yesterday’s. The world is moving on without him, a man in his early thirties. There is a difference here. The confidence is lacking, the eyes are sad but willing. It is like he has created an expectation that can never be fulfilled here. The emotion is missing, the actions almost mechanical. He wants to be on a magazine cover too.”


I don’t know how long I have. How long I can stay here. This place that gives me hope. These people are different, are free to be.

Black screen, “Singing Man” beaming from the darkness. The time meter is creeping forwards. It grows as the video dies. Always moving forwards, ever closer to the end.

4.49-6.54 “Over where the road to Yoyogi dissects the bridge-top, there is a new contender for originality champion. An escapee from the ranks of the dancing Elvises over in the park, Singing Man wears their uniform of black jacket, pants, and boots although his jacket isn’t leather and his Elvis quiff is not nearly as tall as most of theirs. He faces the road, toes aligned and feet spread under the knee-high chain link that separates the two forms of traffic. He may act as though he does not want to be seen, but this is the most photographed place in Tokyo. He will certainly be heard, with the portable stereo by his feet blaring out U2 classics. He doesn’t so much sing as scream along with them, tapping his heels and throwing his hands out in supplication to an imaginary audience. Karaoke may well be our national sport, but as you know, solo public karaoke is almost unthinkable.

Why is he singing an English song, one that his teenage audience will not know? Every tourist passing stops to admire and marvel, hoping their cameras have video functions so that they can record this scene to amuse their friends back home. Singing Man’s eyes are screwed shut as he sings; he is not on a Tokyo street but in a European stadium somewhere; not singing alone but with thousands of backing vocalists. He is not here to pose or to make the pages of some foreign fashion magazine—he is here to escape. Where is the embarrassment at performing before peers? Where is the shame of revealing one’s inferior singing ability to a gaggle of strangers? He has worked out the secret to surviving the SHAME culture: you can’t be shamed if no-one knows who you are. Look around, see all these people playing dress-ups, trying to assume the identities of their favourite anime characters? Hours spent on makeup, on hair, on outfits which can only be worn every so often before they need to be discarded. All this effort to become someone else.


How many tourists, snap-happy and footsore, stop to wonder what these kids’ names are? They all want to know what they are supposed to be, but no-one ever bothers to ask who they are? Singing Man has found his freedom for a few short hours, safe in another language, another culture, another place.”

Pause the file. She is right. The thought burns in me like bad indigestion. She thinks like I do. She can see the great lies tying us down. She knows how to escape them. But it can’t be that simple. We can’t all hide in another language. We can’t all sing in Harajuku. Imagine that: one hundred and twenty million singing. Millions of quiffs, boots and portable stereos. But then no one would be alone anymore. We would all be doing the same thing. Just because it was fashionable or ‘right’. Just because people expected us to. Because no-one wants to be left out. Something is wrong with you if you are. No-one wants that knowledge. Except me.

HARAJUKU1

One day there is no Polaroid. Just a kitten cradling a memory stick. ‘Plug and play’ written neatly on the label. Plug in to life and play your hardest. There is only limited memory. When you fill it you wipe out memories. Day of mall bashing in. Mother’s first words gone. An evening of cooking shows on television lingers. The first baseball bat Father bought me gone.
The stick dangles on a key chain. Swaying on my fingers, before my eyes. Something in me resents this. I want the next picture instead. I was in the middle of something there. The stick has a silver metal casing. Same size, same looks as a bullet. I think she wants to get my attention.

The work station accepts the tiny offering. Food for the electronic gods inside. The top of my desk is sticky. Dirt fights shadows in the gloom. The screen throws it ghostly light. The dirt is only fighting itself. The shadows are grime. My mind skips through them. Hopping from clear patches to clarity. She must feel my impatience. This will be the rest of the photos. Or maybe just one. One of all of her. I need to see her, need to know. I can’t go much longer without her image. My imagination is exhausted and fading. The photos last forever. Stuck to the wall by the window. A figure growing up. But only part of figure. It lacks depth and dimensions. Not hollow but not alive either. Light dancing two steps at a time. Not yet the whole routine. More rehearsal is required. My fingers tiptoe up the left leg.


Pause and turn at the stomach. Wandering across and treading water on the colours. Keeping afloat but not moving forwards. There is nowhere left to go right now. Blank wall above and right leg below. My fingers will creep down, they always do. It is a well-travelled path holding no surprises. The novelty is wearing off but promises more.


A new icon in the file manager. K drive available and open to visitors. One word title and unlimited potential. Somehow I knew we would go there eventually. Eight letters or four characters: Harajuku.

Fingers tapping mouse buttons, expanding files and horizons. One movie file; no pictures. No name, just numbers:

0.0 – 0.58 Black screen. Just words creeping out, fighting the traffic soundtrack. Her voice, young and vulnerable. It battles along with a purpose. There is a direction in her words. She is speaking to a lecture hall. To an audience of one.

“This is the prison yard, the showcase, the cathedral, the high temple of Japanese zeitgeist. A concrete plaza over a bridge beside a station in the most fashionable place on Earth: Harajuku. For five days each week it is home to transiting pedestrians, office workers and schoolchildren, but on weekends it becomes the inexplicable. This space should not be filled in this way, not in a society of suicidal work ethics, of conformity, of teahouse rituals. There should not be this freewill, this radical departure from the mainstream, this counter-cultural shock therapy playing in surround sound by the Yamanote Line. Just metres away is Yoyogi Park, home to both the dancing Elvises and the Meiji Jingu Shrine, where the souls of Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken are enshrined. Harajuku is a Mecca of shopping and fashion, of anime and music, of religion and contemplation. It is here that East and West collide and breed, producing the children of the future world.”


I pause the recording. This does not sound like her. She’s reading from a script, not the heart. She is telling me things I know about. I have lived in Tokyo all my life. Does repetition give authority? Does it? Play.

0.59 – 1.19 “This is not about a place, Masa-kun, it is about people. Places are fixed, people have freedom to move wherever they need to go. We move from place to place and maybe take a little of each for ourselves, building and improving, growing inside as out. Some places offer more than most.”

Silence and black screen. File still running as seconds tick by. There are stories here, I can feel them. So many stories but my time is precious.

1.27-1.48 “Cultural phenomena are the world’s new insurgents. Forget terrorists creeping across midnight borders; witness the power and influence of the media and the internet. In 2004, an Australian man began a campaign in a shopping mall. In 2006 it hit YouTube and exploded. Now, it has made it to Harajuku.”

Just another item to be received. The crowd goes mild. The flow of ideas and cultures unabated. Filling up the islands, replacing the old ways. The before shots are in black and white. This new after image is technicolour. Matter-of-fact reporting as we succumb to the inescapable. The future is being recorded. We have little choice in the programming.

She sounds like a newsreader. That is a dangerous person to be. So much power and detachment. This is nothing like she should be. More words, hurried and almost apologetic. As if she has forgotten something important. An afterthought creating context after the image. They mean nothing without it.

1.48-2.25 “These, surely, are your people if ever there are to be any. They come here to be different, to stand out, to be admired for their courage. Homage is quickly snapped photos, is being asked to pose by fashion magazine snappers, is being on the other side of the camera for once. They might pop up on a news-stand in a foreign city, or just in the holiday slide shows and Facebook albums of the fat Western tourists who piggyback the consent given to the professionals. They are the suns rather than the moons for a change, and every hour of preparation becomes worthwhile. So many faces and looks to choose from, but I will start with the standout, the mass appeal candidate who could not have come from anywhere but here.”
Black screen again. Two words loom in white letters: “Pink Man”.

Now there is colour and life. Vision from the bridge. She describes what she sees. Doesn’t matter that I can see it too.

3PIECE

RED

At night I try to clear my head. Keep out the world’s noises. Noises from outside. From the places that don’t want me. That I don’t want to be. But it is never quiet here. The brash chorus of daytime traffic and industry. Their nocturnal agents are active into the evening. I lie perfectly still on my futon. Its shape fits my contours now. Like black lines on a white weather map. Like a trawler’s net around tuna. Hugging the fleshy landscape. No coffin ever fit so well. Underground there would be silence. Temptation to finish it with a charcoal stove. A devil that stalks me silently. It would be so easy. Here in the darkness. The muffled crackle of the coals my eulogy. Smoke filling the room, filling my lung. Spirits rising after their final fall. That is not the coward’s way out. It would take more courage than I possess. I would need to be certain. Know I will never have the knowledge. Cannot reveal the truth. To know that I must first know everything. My work is still so far from conclusion. Every day there are revelations. Tiny puzzle pieces that expand the margins. A little more light falls with each piece. Never enough to illuminate the centre. The part I really want to see.

And so I prepare myself for my work. Always when the sun has fallen. Feeling safer in the knowledge of darkness. Doesn’t only hide those who wish me harm. I know they are close. I can hear them. There in the humming of the kitchen heater. The uneven throbbing of the bathroom exhaust fan. They are relentless, wearing me down. Wind-blown sand on an exposed rock. A slow-motion race to the ever-changing finish line. This is the time for nocturnal sounds. Unnoticed during the daylight hours. Like me now. The ticking of the elderly fridge. The intermittent rattle of a loose window. In my parents room over their cold bed. Carried through when the wind gusts. Incoherent fragments of drunken street conversation drifting up. These are the fluid jigsaw sounds. They jockey for position in my ears. Tidal rises and falls seeking to distract me. I see it as a comfort. The undeniable sign that I am getting closer. They cannot stop. For the resulting void is what they fear. Silence I can speak and be heard in.

Street level is far below me. The city sleeps while I work. The reverse-vampire kicks in. Nothing happens in the dead of night. People are afraid of the shadows that follow. Still night, lamp light, six shadows for all. They surround you, chase you, overwhelm. Hostess bar stragglers pissing in doorways. The sterilising dirge of the street sweeper. It never removes all the dirt, just rearranges. And then silence, almost. The big yellow men have gone. Back to their wives, mistresses, loneliness. The little red men stand guard. Metallic ping pong tattoo; beating time, slowing it. They do their best in black metal prisons. High above, far away, seeing all, the watchmen.

Black metal ravens, calling but never chirping. There were real birds on this street once. Flesh and blood and feathers. Perched on the tree branches, hidden amidst leaves. They sang so sweetly in a honeyed chorus. They made you feel alive, never alone. Faceless residents complained to the local council. The birds were too noisy. They could hardly hear the factories and traffic. Clearly unacceptable. What were they paying rates for? No-one wanted to be reminded of nature. Nature was strictly for weekend day trips. Construction of a concrete world their life’s achievement. On cold mornings you can imagine it cracking. And so the birds had to go. Cherry-pickers carried fluorescent-vested men with chainsaws. They cut off the branches, leaving only stumps. Upright and featureless like tombstones. A mess of shattered eggs offered at their feet. The egg smeared where they dragged the branches. Falling, fallen, felled. I don’t know what happened to the birds. Now the iron ravens hold sway.

Their fate is sealed by a pushed button. Banishment is random, is seconds away. They are forever replaced, vanished, banished, callously forgotten. Not so much people as images of them. Missing a dimension and the ability to breathe. Forever ticking like tiny bombs, but never detonating. They talk to each other in metallic notes. Red function trumps blue emotion every time. Power lies in their faces, until they fade. They control a nation with their faceless orders. Armies are raised on their signal. A nation is unleashed on their command. Always, always, above it all. Power is theirs but never known. They are often cursed but never overthrown. And in the night they guard us. Safe in their towers as we sleep. Their life spans lengthen as I listen. I hear their life stories in night’s death.

Footsteps float up from the cold concrete street. A drunken killer approaches, not a murderer. He staggers unsteadily, his echoes sporadic. The tattoo beats on despite him, no urgency yet. I imagine him stopping to think. Empty street versus a lifetime of training. No cars against unseen eyes of shame. Choose your own course, I urge. Don’t succumb, or conform, or crumble. But he does all of these. I knew he would. He never had a chance on his own. The red men overpower him, make him obey. Impulse tells him to go, to step out. The tattoo hypnotises him, holding him in place. Just for a few seconds. Not for long. See us counting down. His life shortens by twenty-three seconds. Time he could have spent with his kids. Or his wife if he loves her. Or that new hostess who rubs his arms. Short short dress, long long bill. She makes him feel like a man. A man who waits on tiny red men. All alone, no witnesses, unseen crime tempts. He resists for the last few seconds. Permission comes slowly; an elementary school final bell.

And then the release, access granted. The red man’s dying sighs spur him on. Green light, deserted street delight. A usurper takes the throne. Sits astride it with spread legs. Doesn’t even look at the body being removed. He knows his own time will come. All he can do is walk on into the night.

The little red men will never see me. I am too high above their hat-brims. No need of their services or advice. But still they guide those left below. They give their lives to save others. For a few brief seconds they shine. Before the darkness or the green men claim them.

2PIECE

AIKO

Aiko could have stopped this. She was everything. She had strawberry half-moons on her finger tips. A constellation of flaming stars fluttering like snowflakes. Nothing about her made sense. That was why I loved her. She was perfectly imperfect. Her eyes were too big and her mouth was too small; it sloped down to the left if you looked closely enough. She was a cartoon made whole. Her lines sketched by some hidden genius. Fingertips flaming like sun spots on closed eyelids. Skin surely warm to the nervous touch. Hair flopping over her right eye. Fingers brushing it back behind an ear. The left slightly lower than the right. I studied that ear for hours. I watched it through history, centuries passing by. It never rose or fell as civilisations died. It flushed with embarrassed heat in winter. Roses bloomed it to life in summer. Everything I thought I wanted. So much in one small, perfectly lopsided ear.


Her breasts were nothing to speak of, her legs were short and bowed like all the others, and her keitai was at least two years old. It wasn’t even a clamshell. I thought no-one else noticed her, noticed how she cupped her fingers when she covered her mouth to speak, how the sock glue on her left leg always failed and she walked around half-sock-up half-sock-down. She was never the most fashionable girl in my class, never the one flashing flesh under a too short skirt. She never wore make-up on her face, never laughed inanely, never got fake tanned. She didn’t dye her hair, never squatted outside the konbeni in the evening, never sat in the back row staring into her compact for hours on end.

Her face was a teaser, never easily read. Half-smiles curling up like wavelets. Spreading like ripples through her cheeks. Dying eyes that concealed more than they saw. I thought I could save her. But she bobbed along, never waving for help. I thought I knew her. But her face was always ahead of me. One emotion too late, one glance too slow. Connection lies in anticipation, not reaction. Time is earned as it passes. Is lost with each missed flicker. She was always one desk too far away. One seat from sharing her happiness. One chair from consoling her sadness. The strawberry stars fell to other Earth’s. Gravity held me back.

I over-thought everything in those classroom days. Built sand-castles too far down the shore. Teenage currents swept me away, melting my dreams. I would watch her hand for hours. Cradling her head over the chewed-spine books. Holding her high above the scratched weary desktop. Fingers buried in her hair. A thumb rubbing under that left ear. Wearing down the bone beneath her porcelain skin. A patch of shining white. Catching shadows from certain angles as afternoons bled. Eroding the foundations below the lobe. Dragging it down away from parity. A millimetre a year at the most. Three years of watching the shadows deepen. Caught in that bowl beneath the lobe. Drops of light pooling and dying. Caught in the hollow of her skin.

I thought no-one saw how she floated as if driven by the breeze, never making quite enough of an impression to ever be memorable to anyone, except me. I lived a world dreaming of glances and smiles, of looking away in embarrassment when our eyes met for too long, of walking in the same direction, if never actually together. She was the girl I had loved since elementary school, back when her fringe used to bang against her forehead when she walked, just as her pink thermos on its yellow strap used to bump against her right thigh. They always seemed to slow her down, driving her ever so slightly backwards for every step she took, as she pushed the thermos aside when it strayed in front of her and the fringe away when it crept into her eyes. Both of us marched in the crocodiles of children that snaked around monuments and through tourist-crowded temples during school excursions.

I had it all planned. We would walk out after school, down along the overgrown river bank to the avenue of cherry blossoms blooming and shedding in the April sunshine. I had two bento boxes, bought especially from Kenzo-san, the old lady from the back-street shop that had somehow survived the developers. She makes them so beautifully, the real version of those plastic models you see in restaurant windows. Salmon and pickle and rice and tofu and vegetables – every grain, every drop, precisely where it should be.

I should have known she would do it. I pleaded with her on the sandy baseball field, the two of us alone amidst five hundred others screaming, shouting, running. It wasn’t too much to ask, was it? I already had the bento boxes, and a flask of cool cha. But she didn’t want to know, said I was mad, said I hadn’t talked to her in eight years and now I wanted to sit under the cherry blossoms with her. I grabbed her wrist, wanting to pull her towards the gate, knowing that if she would only come with me and think about everything she would know that it was what she wanted. She jerked her hand away, a red ring on her wrist where her blood had rushed to meet the pressure of my fingers. I held out a Kenzo bento, its many parts perfect under plastic. She dashed it out of my hand, and when it hit the ground, it exploded in a spray of pinks and greens. I asked if she had a boyfriend, wanting there to be someone for me to hate, wanting to know that she was with the captain of the baseball team, or a senior from the upper class. I wanted there to be someone else I could point to and tell myself that it wasn’t my fault; that he was better than me and that’s why she chose him. But there was no one and she didn’t need anyone, she said. She was much happier alone.

There was no-one better, how could there have been in that place of sand, slippers and sadistic bullies? Not all of them wore uniforms, and none stood out. Just her, and she was my way of being someone. But I wasn’t good enough for her, and the whole school knew it after that day. Kids who didn’t even know me would seek me out just to laugh in my face, my lunch rations were always slopped out with an extra grin, and an invisible wall had formed around Aiko that repelled every atom of my being.

I was one hand in a forest of upright palms and outstretched fingers. Clawing at the ceiling for attention but she could only ever pick one, and it was never mine. Too much competition for me to be noticed. My voice died in my throat, unheard for so long that it withered within me, curling itself into a knotted ball that may never be unravelled. Every time I am ignored another layer of knots was added, pulled tighter and tighter by the group’s laughter. The most delicate of fingernails could not untangle them. Somewhere in the middle of that ball of other’s voices was me, held prisoner within their strings of words.

They wore me down on the playground, in the classroom and in the toilets. Wherever I went followed the sniggering knowledge that I had died a public death. From there there could be no afterlife. There was nowhere else to go but home. What else was there?

1PIECE

SUGAR

The third time she says nothing. I hear her rummaging in a bag. The mono quality insect chorus of makeup containers. Lipsticks and compacts, mirrors and plastic handled brushes. Disjointed, muffled, protesting the intrusion of light fingers. The displacement stops with a final falling din. From the fresh silence, envelope sounds emerge. Rasping paper opening; soothing smooth withdrawal of contents. I hear a knee cracking as she squats. Not enough calcium in the diet. She is of the knock-kneed generation. The crippled hunch of old age too far away. The aching of bones an afterthought. Fashion never favours sensible shoes or posture. It’s about freedom to express yourself. Just like everyone else. You have the freedom of the prison yard. But only from five until six.

Knee uncracks, foot twists on the mat. Shuffle slide slip stand. I cannot move. I want to. She is holding me there, my ears open. My eyes wait for glimpses, my ears words. Her voice is floating. It rises like helium through the slot. High pitched and bouncing, smiling in sound.
“This is for you, Masa-kun. There is time on our side if nothing else. I will bring one more each time I visit. People are not as easy to judge as you may think. Maybe we will see more of each other. Maybe we won’t. It’s up to you. We are the sum of many parts, and this is the first. I hope that by the time you have seen me I will be able to see you as well.”

I taste sugar in my mouth. Sickly strawberry bread on my tastebuds. I swallow despite myself. Sweetness coats my tongue; slides down my throat. With the taste comes energy. It carves lethargy into bite-sized pieces. Easier to digest that way. Red jam meets red blood. The warmth is spreading as memories return. There was happiness back then. I forget that sometimes. But only sometimes, just like happiness. She is force-feeding me small pieces. What will happen when I am full?

“I will come back tomorrow, Masa-kun. Is that OK?” Consent escapes my lips before I can think. The word spits out, flying treacherously away. I am making it too easy for her. I don’t even know who she is. Just a foot and a voice for now. Her sounds accompany her receding presence. I sense she doesn’t look back. She has that certainty in her words. Why would she need to?

I slump down by the slot. Sugar crystallizes in my veins. Slows my heart rate. Anticipating whatever lies behind the wood. My eyes strain as I drag them upwards. Dark floor to light mat to something. She is mocking me, I am sure. A stuffed Kitty-Chan doll meets my eyes. It has no mouth. No-one can hear me speak. It can’t move; I can’t leave. We have more in common than I thought. But I scorn what it represents. That face value cuteness belies emptiness. It sits, arms outstretched, offering to my temple. A single Polaroid reflects the ceiling light. No one uses them anymore. Not in this megapixelled digital age. You can’t plug them into a computer. You can’t share them with the world. They are invisible to millions. Just for you and those close by. The personal touch and the naked eye. You can’t alter a Polaroid snap. They will curl, fade and spoil. They will crack and bend. But for one moment, they are the truth. They record what is real. There is no choice but to believe them.

WATER

All the world is water. A bitter and unrelenting mass, smashing the sides of the SS Nippon as it sails east to the West. Water, water everywhere; I want the ship to sink. The ship is stacked high with containers, a galaxy of metal-sided worlds buffeted by the storm and lashed by the vitriolic spray. The phalanx of salt-kissed soldiers weighs the ship down with their memories and battle scars, but provides ballast that saves it becoming lost in the fury. There is no scale, no count for these massed ranks of corrugated sentinels, taken wherever they are needed by forces they have no comprehension of. There are no volunteers amongst them; they are conscripts all. My container grinds against the others, its bindings wearing thin as they rub against corroded metal. One more gust, one more wave, one more trough could do it. The unseen steering from the distant cockpit see nothing, blinded to the storm by the harsh lights above them. The ship is on autopilot guided by human hands, man and machine second-guessing one another until they become alike, indivisible in the battle with nature. A voice on the tannoy blares commands, blurts orders, but the metallic tang of the speakers distorts the words so badly that by the time the storm’s fury has finished with them they become nothing more than white noise beneath the howling of the typhoon. They won’t be heard until it stops; won’t be understood until much later.



One last great lurch, and the grinding of metal stops. I am falling. My container has left the mass and is hurtling down into the maelstrom below. There is no more screeching, just the sound of anticipation filling my ears as I wait for the shock of impact. If I could see through the unflinching walls, I would see the Father beaming down benevolently with its snow-capped eyes, a purple myth in the distance. But the Father waits on dry land, far from the mayhem I inhabit, nothing more than a long-past lament, a story from childhood. I see you in my dreams, Father Fuji, but now I can sleep no longer.



The impact flings me from side to side, I have no control over my body, only watch the walls as they loom before my sorrow-flecked eyes, smashing into me again and again, until all that is left of me is lump of battered meat seeping blood from every opening. I cannot feel any more, can barely see, can only taste and smell blood, but one sense does not fail me. I hear nothing. The silence has me, will take me away from the storm, from the pain, from Father Fuji, and as I sink ever deeper into those black depths, I know that I can’t be hurt any more.

It isn’t really me that’s falling; it’s everything else. This land is weighed down by the burden of fashionable desire. Its people have become the labels they lust after: two-dimensional and over-priced. Chained forever to their origins by the forlorn hope of reversion to the old ways, they are as directionless as a flock of blind sheep. They are sinking into the darkest of futures, and no amount of imagined uniqueness will save them. They have been bought; and now they must pay. It is too late to save the nation; everyone must save themselves.



Yet I know it is futile: they will keep feeding the machinery that devours them until there is nothing left to consume. A fallacy of fads, fashions and freaks: this is my country, the land I had to leave.

Home for me is not this room, is not this country, is not amidst a laughing crowd at a neighbourhood festival, the smell of gunpowder lingering overhead. It isn’t in the sex-smeared room of an anonymous love hotel, or marching in besuited ranks, standard suitcase side-armed. It isn’t surrounded by the cute, the fluffy or the open-mouthed amazing. It isn’t ancestor worship in stone pillared cemeteries or ghostly temples, isn’t mad autumn sales or summer fireworks over the rice fields, isn’t even spring blossoms painting the world pink and white. No welcome chorus from shop assistants, no serried ranks of glass-fronted vending machines, no concrete skyscapes of neon horizons blight my home. Home is a place where red warning lights don’t blink from too distant building tops, where life isn’t a cartoon, where mountains are forever in the past and typhoons eternally in the future.