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.