①
To do the best one can, I believe one is required to be deprived of things. Although I have read this notion being expressed in many places, it is something I came to realise in the context of my own experience. For example, when I was a grade-school student I was very fond of mathematics, and in my spare time would often gorge myself on obscure amateur math books from the local library, which I could not help but find interesting. An explanation of knot theory was a particular memory, and I remember copying out a long list of prime knots - ie knots which are not composed of other knots - from the appendix.
Although in one form, maths seeks deep truths not normally visible to the layperson, any subject that required feats of contortion of one's consciousness - visualising four dimensions, everting the sphere, memorising hundreds of digits of the number pi - drew me in naturally. Thus, aspects of reality firmly agreed upon by authorities in any given scientific field came to settle themselves inside my head, and circulated there until some truth that I could verify as being deductionally previous entered the equation. On realising a logical dependency at a new, even deeper level, often I would be taken by an involuntary physical response: exhaling violenty or, rarely, rocking back and forth in a fit of passion I came to call an 'epiphany'.
The pinnacle of my excess of consciousness came when I was about 15. I had a friend I would play and hour or two of squash with every week, and talk about science or tell stupid political jokes, and that afternoon before we met I had been groaning in my room for something like an hour, hugging my torso and talking and laughing to myself in a kind of hysteric episode: based on a current scientific proposition called the "Strong Anthropic Principle", I had concluded that the entire universe had been created for the sole purpose of bringing into existence a person who could come to this conclusion - me. Of course, now that this had happened, there would be no further purpose for the universe to exist - rather, that it was now free to disassemble at any moment. It was with grandiose results such as these that I warned my friend of my rapture and terror: in a pure atmosphere of doubt I had placed myself in the very centre of all things, only in the following moment to be filled with the fear of already having lost it all.
Although I went on to do science at uni, it was around the time of this great vision that I lost my edge. I felt like I could do anything that I wanted to in the future, and so in the absence of a clear idea of what I wanted out of life, I lost the desire to try my best. It started as a conclusion that I should allow myself to relax in order to understand the workings of the heart, using myself as the test environment, but soon I settled into the pattern of tracking every diversion that came into my head, no matter how evil or perverted, without ever being able to push it's course around and return it to an image of reality. I ended up repeating to myself, 'just follow it and one day the whole picture will be clear,' whenever some terrible thought occurred to me.
The conjunction of all these demons' paths in teenage hell was at around the age of 18. I was in the habit of staying at uni until late at night searching for internet porn, often getting my mum to drive me home. On foot it was around 45 minutes, and I would walk home a lot of the time too, as I liked the feeling of clarity arriving home after having been thinking the whole way. One night, I decided to just let myself go to the most primal thoughts of destruction that I could. I imagined I was strong enough to smash the trucks driving past with simply an outstretched arm, splattering the driver over the inside of the window. Until that night I had based my fantasies at least on the laws of physics as my body understood them, so with the strength of my investment in the possibility of such imagined acts, and the fever pitch of my constant call to follow the meandering of my consciousness, that night I was nothing but pure self-confidence. Various points of quenching for different passions happened later on - a night I managed to link sexual enjoyment with a fantasised murderous hysteria was the point at which I felt I understood perversity, for example - but that night walk back to the family house was the strongest expression of belief in myself I have ever felt.
After being introduced to Japanese animation in the form of a local screening club, I decided to take up language study, and I did well. In fact, notwithstanding I was already a memorisation ace, the effort required to push my expressivity through a tiny sieve of words and grammars was in itself immensely rewarding. While failing out of most of my science units, and even the history units I took with a view to completing a degree in Japanese studies, becoming a better Japanese user became a passionate pursuit. When you have to search yourself thoroughly for the way to convey things as simple as wanting to go somewhere, or asking someone what they do for work, every word is filled with the dread of error, and is impotent before you have even spoken it. To fight with your tongue is to feel like you are doing the best you can continuously, and improving as fast as you are able to, regardless of actual performance.
At 20 I fell in love for the first time, to an older, separated Japanese lady. I confessed the night of my twentieth birthday, and my body shook as I told her how much I loved her. As I considered ethical, I told her she didn't have to answer me immediately. Also as I considered ethical, though we had kissed, I had petted her on the park bench outside her city apartment, and I had a monumental fire within me that would take us to her room right then, I told her she would have to tell me no herself. She struggled briefly before saying no, and with my eyes I extracted from her the greatest sadness and longing that I could, before saying goodnight and walking the two blocks to my own apartment. I lost my virginity to her, in the midst of great romance, but she could not let herself go, at least not as far as I did. In short, I did not accept her evaluation that the affair had no future, and with the strength of my own conviction the let down was severe. I wailed without crying, and tortured myself that I could not cry, shut up in my apartment. I lay on the filthy kitchen floor and set bits of tissue paper on fire. Months later a high school friend of mine that had befriended her invited her to a party I had also been invited to - ignored the entire time, unable to fight her as I had no polemic to stand on, I felt as if the break-up were fresh again. No one had known of our affair, and I told the friend whose house the party was held at that I would like us not to be invited to the same party in future, voice wavering. I'm not sure how much he learned from that.
This friend was the same friend who had introduced me to Japan, and was a Christian, though at the time never proselytised. After I questioned him on this point, he got rebaptised and started inviting me to his Youth group meetings and various youth Christian events around town. I'd been invited to a Youth event before by a different boy, in high school, and during prayer, when the many hundreds of high schoolers in the room all bowed their heads, the prayer leader had looked at me, the only unbowed head, and asked if anyone wished to make a declaration before the Lord. Though the moment seemed to stretch for a couple of minutes, I had nothing to say. The final event my friend invited me to was a weekend camp outside the city. Once again, I was the only non-Christian, but the games were fun, and discussing doctrine was good mental exercise. Particularly, the keynote speaker was extremely intelligent, placing Jesus as the substitute for spiritual cleansing by slaughtered lamb as was practised in the days of the Old Testament - the pivotal point in his argument, which was very sound and consistent with all that I understood about Christian teaching. But when it came to letting myself go and personally accepting Jesus, and though I strained to connect my soul to this greater body all my friends and family were already a part of, I could not push the pieces together. I told him that I finally accepted that I was of the world.
About six months earlier, in the last weeks of 2004, I began reading a very difficult book called "A Thousand Plateaus". It was the first major work of philosophy I had attempted to read, and the meanings of the words used in the same statements were too far divergent for me to make anything of it at first, but I persevered. The ideas started to hang together more and more as time went on, and after I finished the six hundred page book I went back to different chapters, reading bits and pieces, and letting them stew for a few weeks at a time. Instead of the Bible or any other didact, this book became my reference point for how to live - or rather, how it is done. By now, this story itself must be an expression of the concepts of that book which have become part of me, and everything in my life. Not doctrinally, but as a matter of my place with respect to the things stated within it in the same way that, while there exists a description cell division by cell division of the growth of the nematode worm, the worm does that without reference to the description. It doesn't matter if the described thing interacts with the description or not even, if it is an effective one.
One day the friend told me that Jesus had told him to give me money so I could go to Japan. I immediately realised that this was the thing I most needed, and had been denying to myself that I had the ability to do. After a few days of moral torment I accepted the loan, and he had made it clear that it was not his decision, so I should direct my thanks to Jesus. I went to camp, read the book for the most part, and I was quenched of God. The flight to Japan left one week later.
②
I was in Tokyo before, but now I'm in Yuasa. When I wanted to leave Tokyo I asked a friend, Where is a nice place in the countryside? And they said, How about Wakayama? When I got to Wakayama, I looked for a cheap room. There was a youth hostel in a place called Arida, so I called them up, and they let me a room for a few days. I found a proper room, a job, and settled in. The town is called Yuasa, and has about 15 000 people. It's fifty minutes by train from Wakayama city, which is probably an hour and a half from Osaka, which is then an overnight bus from Tokyo.
The room is big, in fact it is a house. It's the largest living area I have lived in since my family house back in Australia. Though I brought all my possessions, it looked almost empty when I moved in. The electricity was turned on soon after I arrived, and the shower had enough oil for hot water to be produced, but I had to wait a few days for the gas to be brought to my house and connected, during which time I could not cook any food, nor wash dishes with hot water. It would be a couple of weeks before I had a refrigerator. The toilet is non flushing, and I will have to get the collecting drum emptied out in the near future.
When I came I was full of the energy necessary to ready a foundation to support living here, which included making connections. But after I contracted with my landlady and my employer, I did not meet many more people. One lady, the daughter of the landlady, and that daughter's friend, began meeting with me once a week for language lessons - really nothing more than a fun timekiller. In my case, as they were in their early and late forties, I didn't connect with them completely. If I should go to Wakayama city to look for a place to make friends, I find there is nothing there and come home again.
Very soon after I arrived I met a few of the other non-Japanese people living in the town, and we had dinner together one night. I had not much in common with them, or at least did not feel like meeting up again much, and lost contact. One night in Wakayama city, I saw one of them with another non-Japanese I had not seen before, but I sat at a table not to be noticed by them, and read by myself.
After I started work, there were very few days I actually had to work, and quite short hours. In a warehouse, a set of conveyor lines order boxes of oranges into size and quality. If one or more categories do not fit, there is an extra line called overflow. These boxes are sorted by hand, my hand, as well as two other older men. The boxes on any given conveyor line may stop moving, and that is also our responsibility to rectify. Work hours will increase towards the middle of the orange season.
Yuasa town has a train station, and a network of thin roads. Soon after I moved into town I bought a bike, and spent much of my free time biking around town. To the west is the port, with a large water lock. Tsunamis are regular over the span of generations, and the water breaks are very involved. The westernmost bridge over the town's southern barrier-forming river is very tall, and I don't like ascending it too often. There is the soy sauce district just east of the port - the town seems to be the ancestral origin of Japanese shoyu - and is very well preserved from an older era. Further inland is the highway, and "Yupia", the shopping centre, which is a beacon for housewives and high school students. One time when I was talking with a foreign teacher of the local high school who I had met by accident, a gang of problem kids appeared on the escalator shouting some simple sexual jokes at his expense. Later, the joker of the gang was calling for my attention, but his superior stopped him and bowed at me. When I walked past to go home, they made some small talk with me, which I engaged in just enough not to leave a bad impression. A separate time, I decided to go up to the second floor where the game parlour is and get caught up with any interesting kids I might find there. Three sixteen year old girls in uniform were smoking outside. The best looking one, the leader, got them to dance for a bit, and they tried to make me believe they had written the song themselves, for a laugh. I got bored and left soon after.
In my house, with few visitors, I let things stay where they were. If I come home with a bento box (a prepared meal) and sweets from the supermarket, the plastic boxes and bag usually stay there for a day or two. CDs I play on my laptop stay on the floor until the next time I play them, and clothes until the next time I wear them. Pubic hair, crumbs, dirt, dust, will soon be more than just noticeable. The garbage bags in the back room have been there since I moved in, oranges I received in my first days still rotting away. I go to the youth hostel every now and then to use their internet, as I have no phone connected at my house. When the manager has her afternoon nap, I put some porn clips on my laptop so I can watch them at home. I got into the habit of buying weekly comics too, called manga, and though they aren't much the sexy photos at the front and back of the magazine are usable when I get tired of movie.
The two men I work alongside, Hayashi in his late thirties, Higashi in his mid fourties, both started on my third day, and seem to have applied at the same interview. Both are strapped for cash, and to both I have lent 10 000 yen each. Earlier, my monthly wage was about 150 000 yen so this is not such a small amount. Both talk very fast and are hard to understand for the most part, but Higashi talks more simply to me, so I can reply normally. Hayashi on the other hand talks to himself seemingly, when he talks to other people.
There is a manga series, called "Death Note", that I had seen in a weekly manga magazine many months ago and had seemed interesting, and one day I saw the entire series had been collected into book form and was being sold at a local book store. I had the money, so I decided to buy them and read them. I took the first one home and read it while I made, then ate lunch, and kept reading until I had finished it. The art was nice, the writing solid, and the subject seemed to have meat on the bone, so I bought book two the next day, and book three after I had finished two. I finished the twelve book series in a week and a bit.
The story had something about it that made me think hard about what was happening. Whether the writer knew or had control over it or not, the transitions between situations were...
Here is something real about me: I like thinking. It is only a feeling, but it's something I know for sure. What makes me think is what draws me to a thing, activity or person. When I bought my bike, I wanted to ride around until I knew the area - or more accurately, riding around, I am looking for something I recognise. The more I ride, the more I recognise, and I go looking for new and unrecognised terrain, which I can then find later on as something I had seen before. I like meeting people for the same reason, and I would want to test them for some novel response.
One night I went to a town called Gobo 20 kilometres south of Yuasa, and by following the most likely roads I ended up at the centre of activity - a shopping centre called "RomanCity". There were lots of young people around, but I didn't see any big opportunities for creating some enjoyment. In spite of this, by the time I arrived back at the station, I had decided I would pull out all stops and plan to spend the night in town: I would see a movie at the mall, then find a drinking spot to make friends at. I saw "World Trade Centre", after asking the counter girl where the best pub, called an izakaya, around town was. It might have been a place near town hall called "Wasabi", but I never got there. The place it should have been was entirely dark so I didn't look too hard. Though the last train should have left, I went back to the station to find a bored free-timer to drink with. There were two skateboarders outside in the car park, and I proposed to them that if I buy them some beer they might stick around with me until first train. Anyway they said sure, and we chatted for a bit, but though I was drinking I went quiet soon. They called someone, who seemed to be on the way to Yuasa, and made them turn around and come to the station. They did, two girls, and the five of us went to Yuasa, three in the back tipsy. In the street-light the girls seemed worth pursuing, but the right situation didn't present itself. It seemed they were going there because there are no 24-hour petrol stations in Gobo, the nearest one being in Yuasa. They filled up, and dropped me off, after I made plans to meet the guys in a few days to hang out.
I had forgotten at the time but, in fact, the day I had made plans to meet them, I had already promised Hayashi from work I would go to Kyoto with him. Instead I drove around with one of the skateboarders named Koji, into the mountains and along the coast. We found a park in the valley of two steep hills filled with cheap-looking animal statues, and made visual jokes for our cameras, speaking in dry sarcastic humour. Towards evening he had to meet someone in the carpark of RomanCity to give them a video, the wife of a friend, who was weaing tiny short shorts and a sweater. While we were in the car park he said hi to about three or four separate groups of friends, and I asked him to introduce me to some of them next time. Later, he brought me back to his work place, a home improvement centre right next to RomanCity. Out the back in the timber section, one young girl was sweepting the floor, bored. He parked inside and we got out but didn't go over to her. He wouldn't take me over and I just kept looking over at her. She seemed slightly uncomfortable. Then he brought me over and I talked for a bit. She said she had been to Canada. I went quiet after she said that, and we made out to go, when I bolted over to her and told her I hadn't made many friends, so be my friend. She agreed noncommitally, and we left. In RomanCity, we saw more of his friends, and though I pointedly made eye contact with them as if about to start talking to them, they were not coming over, and Koji wasn't taking us over to them.
In the evening, after we picked up the other skateboarder from a few nights earlier, his friend Azuma, we were apparently going to go play indoor soccer. We had dinner at RomanCity McDonalds, and joked about the word areola in a funny voice. At the gymnasium, it seemed like a semi-professional arrangement - there were older men sitting in the corner collecting money, and teams, with some people wearing proper-looking soccer gear. There was a set of five pink vests too, probably provided by the older men, to distinguish teams properly. On Koji and Azuma's team, there were two brothers and a muscly guy with big discs in his earlobes. I talked with them for a bit, and they asked me about overseas. The muscly guy asked if I had any foreign porn because it is released without a mosaic over the genitals, unlike Japanese porn. After the game everyone went to the local Lawson for a sports drink, and I said, Let's go drinking at a bar or something. They had a laugh and seemed to enjoy the idea, but when I pressed for details, it evaporated. I went to buy some ice tea, and when I got back outside everyone was already in their cars ready to go home. The muscly guy had seen me as just some object of fun, so my invitation was nothing but words to make him laugh. But since I pressed him, made the atmosphere uncomfortable, then suddenly left it alone completely, his withholding of a proper response became noticeable, and he expressed to Azuma or Koji, in my presence, remorse. It was the remorse that appeals for assuaging by friends.
After, the three of us drove around some more. In the mountains, to a haunted tunnel. Frog bridge. Face house. A temple. I was going to Kyoto at six a.m. the following morning, and really wanted to sleep, but I let them drive me around, making sarcastic jokes with them and listening to punk metal released when we had still been in high school.
Higashi is the older man I work with who I get along with the best. Or I should say, I like the most. On some days off, or after work, he comes over to my place and we drink and chat. One day I was supposed to meet him, he had been late calling me back. When I asked him what was going on, he told me he was at the job centre, called Hello Work, and asked me to come. I was annoyed he changed the plan at the last minute. When I got there, another lady from work was with him. We had worked together on my second day, and I remembered she has three primary school aged children. She had been sacked, and though I wanted to say something comforting, Higashi was doing a better job than I could, and I only asked a few questions, very basic, very direct. Higashi asked if she could come to my place as well, and I said give me five minutes head start to clean up.
I got home and threw out the assorted rubbish on the floor of the front entertaining room, and sorted the papers, books, and CDs that were left, and I had just finished the washing up when I heard his motorbike outside. They came in and I offered some room temperature tea. They talked, and I could not easily add anything, so after a while of fiddling with my phone, brought out after it became the topic of conversation, I announced I would buy some more tea at the supermarket out the back of the house. The fired lady asked for some cigarettes, and showed me her preferred brand. When they first came in the lady had commented how clean my room was, and I had responded that the living room was still in it's natural state, and would be a sight for sore eyes. Peeking through the half-open door when Higashi went to the toilet adjoining the living room, she had not said a thing.
Though they had said they were not hungry when I asked them, after I opened the candy bread I had bought and brought back with the tea and cigarettes, they dug in quickly. They had drunk the tea quickly too, saying it had a very nice flavour. They both left after a bit, I lending the lady an MD as I had nothing to listen to it with, and after I said good luck to her, I whispered good luck to Higashi. I said, She's divorced, right? and grinned at him. After, I cleaned up the front room again since I was in the mood, and it was pristine. My personal room was still messy, and I considered the idea that here, objects follow their own paths according to the forces of the room. There was a line from the door of front room to the back, and to the toilet, discernably free of flotsam - naturally the route for me to walk to the places I needed to. Along the side of my futon the floor was covered, so I guessed that I must only need the thin edge free in order to get to my bed. Similarly, there was a lot of stationary lying around an opened pencil case near my suitcase, but my scissors were lying on the floor all the way over on the other side of the room. I must therefore use them more than the rest, like my wallet and mobile, which I remembered having been left in any given area of the floor of that room.
I then considered the front room opposed to my bedroom, the living room. It was entirely clean, and from now on maybe it should stay that way, as in the separation of my public and private spheres. The bedroom is like the inside of my head, opposed to the entertaining room which is like my social presence. This distinction was like the different rooms depicted in Death Note - a room the three university-student-aged characters of the manga were confined to was like the exclusivity of teenage friendship, which, when the two boys left to an observation room, became as shallow as the monitor screen images showing the remaining girl doing her make up and laughing on the phone.
Friendly in a different way, Hayashi is like a puppy dog. As a puppy yelps for attention, Hayashi tugs my shirt to interrupt whatever I had been doing. I had promised I would go to Kyoto with him on the 30th, but since I was meeting someone that day who I did not have any way of contacting beforehand as I had neglected to swap phone number or phone email information with them, I was apologetic, but said, Why don't we go on the 31st? which we both had free. As if a puppy that had been slapped, he kept saying I don't keep promises for the next few days. When I forgot to bring sugar for coffee at work, Hayashi had taken it as a personality failure on my part. So, it now clear that I would not get along with him until something deep changes, I started to regret making the promise. I had also promised to lend him the 10 000 yen at some point, and apparently it had been agreed on as the day of the trip to Kyoto, though I hadn't remembered such a clause.
Five thirty in the morning, I realised I had forgotten to buy cereal, and had nothing to eat for breakfast. By the time I had stumbled around for a bit, from the kitchen to the living room, I decided there was furthermore no time for a morning shower. Because of my very curly hair, I never brush but instead shower to arrange it in a presentable shape. That morning, my hair was still in a neat enough posture to leave the house without being over-conscious of it. When I arrived at Yuasa station, our meeting place, at exactly 6 o'clock, Hayashi was just pulling up, and called out to me from his car. I parked my bike and got in. So early in the morning, the first thing that hit me was his overpowering bounciness, pinning me down in a conversation that gave me no entrance point. Over the course of the day the extent to which he takes his audience for granted became increasingly palpable.
I asked him to stop at the nearest convenience store for food, and though I was sure he had said yes and understood me, we went past one, and I pointed out that fact. He said, Yes yes. I pointed to one on the other side of the road, but once again it went through without a meaningful reply. Another one appeared on our side of the road, as my hunger and annoyance both became very loud inside me, and I enunciated what I wanted him to do very calmly and clearly. He said, You want to use the toilet? I thought, If I should correct him here, he might take that as a no, don't stop, so I just said yes. He had been talking the entire time. We pulled over, got food (he asking why I didn't use the toilet) and when I got back to the car I reclined my seat and tried to get some sleep.
Later in the day, I would fake being sleepy to get him to stop talking to me. Not even faking, since I would actually fall asleep now and then; it was only to present a door through which I could escape. In fact, even that first snooze had me making an effort to ignore him, rather than trying to stay awake and talk. When I am bored in my house, or have nothing to do, very often I would try to write, and on my computer are about ten text files of musings: really, they are nothing but an expression of my ability to use English. Other times I study Japanese: this is just carrying words from a book to a notepad. Or I would sing: or rather, vocalise like aspects of different kinds of music I have heard before, because in none of this is any great mission, no song in my head, no essay to write. I'm just mucking around. So when I said I would try to get some shut-eye, certainly my body latched hold and sent me to sleep, but the effort on my part, if it was really effort, was to play around with my sense of sociality, see what an ignorable act is, what leaves a feeling of injustice.
I woke up at around eight, and we were in the car park of a large building in the middle of nowhere. There are many buildings of the kind I saw there before me, travellers' service of some kind, scattered along major country roads and highways, but I have never been inside one, nor worked out what other travellers had bought there. We were high in the mountains, the sunlight hazing through morning mist and touched blue, but maybe the blue was an illusion of my just-opened eyes exposed to a blue sky for the first time in a couple of hours. The previous work day, though Hayashi had originally offered Kyoto, he had said, Why don't we go to Nara as well? I had not realised that Nara is quite naturally on the way to Kyoto from Yuasa, and had assumed that Hayashi was being unrealistically greedy. I'd said, It's better to concentrate on one city instead of spreading ourselves too thin, but he said he was a veteran of the drive so leave it to him. I said, OK, I leave it to you. It was his idea after all, so if I don't trust his new plan, why did I trust his old one? Now, in this car park, alone with him and far from most familiar things, he had the map out and was talking about going to Lake Biwako, or only going to Kyoto, or Nara. Or just going home entirely.
Later on he made it clearer to me that it was out of concern for my tiredness that he had suggested going home, and though at the time I had concentrated on the fact that I would have more control over the trip since I would now be negotiating with him over the itinerary, this was very fucking annoying, and I said to him, If we go home now this is the final trip I take with you. In the end we decided on Kyoto and Nara - first going straight through Nara to Kyoto and the Golden Pavillion, then taking a relaxing rest in a Nara temple called Todaiji on the way home. Actually, he had included seeing the Great Statue of Buddha implicitly, assuming I knew that that statue is housed in the temple called Todaiji, but I hadn't realised it at the time.
Borne out of slight regret at getting angry, though I was quite sure the effect of my words was entirely lost on him, I warmed up and made an effort to give responses that fell within the range of what he was looking for, but also did not contradict my own feelings. He put on Queen's Greatest Hits, and we took a wrong turn somewhere in Nara prefecture. I think we arrived in Kyoto city somewhere around midday.
③
When I first arrived in Japan, I lived in Chiba, right in the middle of Chiba city. But, there was no question that at some point I would move from there to Tokyo. The two prefectures share a border, and the train ride takes about forty minutes if I remember correctly. In any case it is a ride I only took infrequently. I left Chiba four months after I arrived, the good friend who had let me stay at his apartment being busy with his university graduation thesis. His job after graduation had already been assured, it was just a matter of completing the thesis for him at that point.
When I moved out and on my own for the first time I had practically no money, in fact having to borrow 40 000 yen from that friend, which I would not be able to pay back until three months later, the day I entered into a relationship with my second love.
I moved out a couple of days after Christmas, and having just settled in in my six tatami mat sized room in a guesthouse in Nishi Tokyo ward, unable to even have my new friends at the guesthouse pay for my night out with them on New Years' Eve, because I had to go to bed early so I could be back out in the middle of Chiba somewhere for work the next morning. I had just enough money for a one way train ride to the station I would be picked up from and taken to the factory or warehouse I would be earning money for my next few meals at, Katsutadai. It was over an hour and a half from Tanashi station, the station I used while I was in Nishi Tokyo. The payment system of the company I was registered to was 'hibarai', meaning same-day wages, and without having looked into it, partly out of fear that there would be clauses that would put me in an impossible position, I had assumed that I would be paid at the end of the day at the place I worked at. In fact, when I called up to ask about it during lunch break, I was told that I would have to go to Ikebukuro, on the other side of Tokyo not far from Tanashi, in order to collect my wages. Well, that was the impossible situation I had dreaded.
I stuck around at work till the end, and a few friends I had made had been kind enough to make some calls on my behalf, but by the time they all left for home in the night time, I had been given some 100 yen bread and told to ask for help at the police box near the station. Apparently, people who are in a difficult situation can go to the police for help home. When I got there though, this turned out not to be the case, and I was once again left without a leg to stand on. Other friends I called either did not pick up or were at their family home in a different prefecture. It was raining lightly when I realised that tonight I would spend outside.
I walked around Katsutadai for a bit, and when by chance I found myself back at the station, I went down to ask the ticket attendant if there was anything I could do, such as giving my details and paying later. It seemed like this was possible, as he gave me a very cheap looking printed paper square with the name of the station on it, and let me through. The next day I was to have work again, this time in a place on the Tokyo-Chiba border called Ishikawa. So my decision at that point was to go home to sleep and get to Ikebukuro on guesthouse friends' money, or go directly to Ishikawa. I needed as much money as I could lay my hands on, so I chose working the next day. In the station in Ishikawa, Futamata Shinmachi, I showed the ticket attendant my little paper square, and he told me about 400 yen. I said, I had been told that with this ticket I can pay later. He didn't get what I meant, so I got my wallet out to show him the entire amount I had with me was about 130 yen. He shouted, Why would someone get on a train and not have enough money to pay for it? I believed that this was the only way for me to go forward, so appealing to any sense of helping your fellow man when he is down on his luck, I said, If I didn't get on this train I would not be able to GET money. The situation resolved itself when he happened to see a train card a friend had given me while I was still in Australia. He put his hand in my wallet and took it out, rang up the register, and gave me about 80 yen change. I didn't really know what had just happened, but when I started to walk away, he didn't do anything to stop me, so I went outside. Later I found out the card that had been exchanged was worth 500 yen on it's own, plus there had been a small balance still associated with it.
In the early hours of the 2nd of January, I walked around the industrial wasteland of Ishikawa. Massive onramps, turn-offs, dark bicycle parking bays beneath a raised highway. The gang graffiti in pedestrian tunnels was frightening in areas, considering the hours of peak activity of such artists should be around about now. I asked an Ampm clerk if I could while away the hours until morning in his store, but he said that would be a problem. I ate the bread one half at a time over about six hours. Eventually, I made my way back to Futamata Shinmachi station, but it was still three a.m. On a bench outside, seated upright, I slept for an hour, hugging myself inside a zipped up jacked made for Australian cold. When I woke up I was shaking so violently I thought I might be close to a medical situation.
...In a lonely corner, across a wide rode, a convenience store was lit up, and I went inside. Across the side street a man was asleep in his car, and inside, at 4:30 a.m., there were two men reading the store's manga. I stayed there until first morning light, reading.
Back at the station, people began coming and going. I sat inside and read a free community paper until about quarter to seven I think, the time I was required to call my job placer to let them know I was leaving my house. I called again at the time I was required to arrive. Looking for my group outside, it seemed there were two groups organised by different companies meeting at the same place, near the Coke vending machine outside the station, and I was registeried to the later group. We got on a bus, and were driven to a factory a little way out. In the assembly room, my supervisor seemed to have already heard my situation, and gave me a heap of sweets he had on hand. I ate most of them before work, and saved the rest for breaks.
We were asked to work overtime, and I made one friend, who seemed to be getting dropped off at the same station as me, Nishi Funabashi. I caught him just as he entered the station, and asked him to give me a hand. He looked slighted, but agreed, and I said, Next time I meet you at a factory somewhere, I'll buy you dinner. I got home and to sleep, and I got my money in Ikebukuro a couple of days later, surviving on food I was given when I left Chiba as a going away present.
Whether it was because of my poor eating habits or I don't know what, I had been feeling a little uneasy during my showers, a couple of weeks into my stay in Tanashi. One morning I was to wake up early for a sorting job at the express post service called Takkyubin. The previous night, the housemates and I had been watching downloaded movies, connecting up the British guy's laptop to the TV in the lounge. A Taiwanese girl had just moved in and I was chatting with her, and she gave me some tea she brought over from her home country, served strong. I had thought nothing of the tea at the time, but caffeine affects the heart.
In the morning, I went to have a shower. My room is very convenient, directly opposite the kitchen, and the shower shares a wall with it, meaning it is no great strain even carrying my entire change of clothes into the privacy bay of the shower. I was a little worried about the health of my heart, because it seemed that whenever the steam inside the shower got too thick, I would have to start breathing quickly and deeply, concentrating on each breath, and my heart would beat faster and heavier, until I had to open the recess door for cool air. This particular morning, this all happened, but in addition my vision started being eaten away from the edges, as well as frequency bands of my hearing it seemed, and in a moment of turning around to open the door or do something else, my legs lost tension, and I fell on the ground, at the same time as I lost my vision entirely, and my hearing dulled considerably. It was the first time I had ever fainted.
Stumbling outside, there was no one around. A postman came and I said I had just lost consciousness, but he agreed nervously and left, and when one of the girls who lived there appeared I had tried to explain what had happened to her, but she didn't understand me or ignored me, and left for work. I knocked on the door of a man from the same city as me, whose room was opposite the shower, and told him what had happened. Really, I just didn't want to suffer alone. I told him, If I stand up straight I feel like I'm going to faint again. Suddenly, I had to go to the toilet. I said, Thanks, but the most massive shit is about to drop. After I evacuated my bowels of fast moving diarrhoea, I sat there until my still wet skin began to feel cold, and I started shivering slightly. I was late for work but my supervisor found no fault in my excuse. Also, I didn't take caffeine for many months afterwards, and whether there was a correlation or not, my hear worries died down from then on.
More pertinently I guess, from when I left Australia until the next time I weighed myself after the caffeine episode - I should say, fainting episode - in my second guesthouse, in Kasai, I had lost 25 kilos. 88 kilo child minus 63 kilo homeless man. And I felt like a homeless man, because I was sitting at the very lower limits of the effort necessary to participate in society - I had looked for a job using the easiest possible method, and ate sustenance rations from the local Shop 99. When I ran my hand over the concavities of my belly that I'd never had before, I thought, I'm thin! and I thought, I'm living honestly for the first time.
Towards the end of February I had run out of money again. No job seemed right to try out for, and by the time I realised I had no means of arriving at interviews, it was too late. This time, either I go back to Australia or I die, surely.
I was sitting in the Kasai living room, telling other housemates about my troubles, and contemplating how to get back to Australia and my family house, when I was alerted of the fact that the guesthouse company was looking for a cleaner for the house. People had been complaining about the manager and her neglect of hygiene around the building, and one of the guys did it earlier in the year, telling me it was tiring, but at least you don't spend much money. Plus the rent is cancelled; all wages are above rent. Normally, quite a good deal, in my case the only option. I went to head office in Higashi Koganei back on the west side of Tokyo, and the lady said she was especially happy to take people on who have no means of support, because they try their hardest. I was looking forward to providing a service everyone could enjoy, and training was to start on the first of March, in the Higashi Koganei guesthouse out back of the office building. I moved in with no food, and about 500 yen.
The lady in charge of my training, in her early twenties, was quite nice and explained things very well. First is the kitchen sink, empty out the waste food receptacle, clean the dishes, put them dry back on the shelf. Clean the hotplates, all tables and surfaces, collect the full bins and replace the bin bags, and replace the tea towel. Next is the living room, dust the tables, return them and the seats to their original positions and pack away the ironing board if it has been left out. Next are the showers, in each stall remove the hair from the drain mesh, and clean the inside drain cavity, spray the walls with anti-mould and wash them down, and replace the mats, putting the old ones outside on sunny days. In the women's shower, empty the bin. Then the toilets, starting on the first floor, squirt cleaner into the toilet basin, scrub and flush, wipe down the lid, seat, external ceramics and water closet, and replace the toilet rolls, including the in-use one if it is almost finished. The second and third floor toilets also have wash basins which should be wiped down, as well as the mirrors above them, and the women's toilets all have smaller bins that need to be emptied. There are two other mirrors around the house that need to be cleaned, on the first floor. Then the laundry, first wipe down the washing machines, including the inside of the ones not in use, then the dryers, emptying the dust traps, and check the balcony for any anonymous rubbish. Then the floors of all those rooms, as well as the stairs, first sweeping by broom - though I used the vacuum cleaner usually for the kitchen and living room - using the appropriate brooms divided into toilet and general, then wet mopping, again using the appropriate mop. Then sweeping and mopping the entrance using a third broom and mop, aligning the shoes in the shoe racks neatly, sweeping outside with the bamboo broom, then putting the full bin bags in the city's designated bags, labelled burnable and unburnable. If these bags were full, and I was instructed to push as much rubbish as physically possible into them, then they are taken, along with full plastic bottle bin bags, steel can bin bags, glass bin bags, and metallic waste (such as batteries or broken fluorescent lights) bin bags, to the waste area beside the building. Also magazine or cardboard rubbish, tied up with string. Then I am to take the dirty rags to main office where they are replaced before the next morning, along with the shower mats if it has been raining, ask for more detergent, toilet cleaner or bin bag supplies for the supply room as necessary, and report on what objects have been left around the premises, or if the guests have asked about anything in particular. After this, I get lunch from the lady who interviewed me, and the rest of the day is free. I got the entire itinerary down to 3 or 4 hours by the end of the 10 days I stayed in Higashi Koganei.
On my first couple of days, I did all this, plus rearranged the kitchenware into a neater system, cleaned the inside of the chairs and sofa and reaffixed elastic straps that had come loose, dusted in places not dusted in what seemed to be many years, scrubbed the floors with all the pressure I could extract from my arms and shoulders, and generally overdid my job. I finished after dark those days. As I had no money to spend over the barest possible minimum, I usually spent the afternoon studying Japanese and watching music videos on cable tv in the living room. Some songs would be repeated many, many times, and they came to lodge themselves in my head. I bought the Asian Kung-Fu Generation album "Fan Club" because of my time there.
I met one girl the first night, talkative out of loneliness, and I felt I understood her after talking for ten minutes. The way she half said a thing, just enough for me to understand what she wanted, and then retracted it in something like social anorexia, I thought, this is like me in a way. After talking for half an hour, anticipating her feelings and speaking in a smooth, comforting voice, she just kept repeating, I think you're such a nice person, and looking down as if embarrassed to say it. She wore a bandana and glasses and might have been Björk's Selma. At some point later on I knocked on her door, and asked her if she would like to go for a walk, but she said no, she was too sleepy, since she usually stays awake until the early hours of the morning. She doesn't go out much anyway, her parents are unhappy with her, her younger sister on the other hand is studying overseas. She has to get a job sometime.
There was an Afghani guy and his wife and sister staying there too, American educated, and I asked him many questions about Islam. There was a British guy there as well, who had been a resident since it opened five years ago. And there were a group of Australians who had just arrived in Japan as assistant English teachers at high schools around Kanto (the area within a few hundred kilometres of Tokyo), and I still get spam mail from one of them, the kind you forward to earn money for 'starving children in Africa'.
Two of the housemates I ended up getting more closely acquainted with. One, Reno from Sendai (pronounced Renault), had just got back from a year studying in Australia, and was staying in Higashi Koganei for four days. We hit it off immediately, drinking together in the evenings and talking, and she bought me a heap of food which I could not eat all of, taking the remainder back to Kasai. The reason we hit it off was her open-mindedness, and though she was a very upbeat person, she would not hesitate to talk on darker subjects. While we were drinking on her last night, I kissed her, and we started fooling around. Her principles stopped her from having a one night stand with me, but she had no problem with me doing, in fact seemed to be encouraging me to do, what I wanted. In the morning she asked me, Wasn't I glad we hadn't done anything the previous night, and I made an ambivalent uh-huh. Then, as she left, I kissed her goodbye, which she smiled after without much feeling. She had said she might be coming back to Tokyo, but a couple of weeks later emailed to say she was staying in Sendai.
...And, Kaori.
In many respects, and I think it is realistic to be categorical, Kaori is the centre of my time in Japan until now. The four weeks we were together - probably closer to two weeks on and two weeks off - were chronologically midway between arrival and now, and emotionally it was the single biggest event that has happened to me in Japan. In the days leading up to Kyoto, it hit me like a train, in my loneliness, that at the end of December I will have enough money to fly to America, where she is studying.
I remember little jokes, and sex, the easiest. Words we invented like bubbles of laughter remain as disembodied vocal loops, which reinforce themselves when I play them and realise afresh that she is gone. Her naked body - NEVER her face - appears in the same way; to recall her face, and the effort to recall a face always brings a smiling one, is a much deeper hole to loop in, much warmer and much more...
What was it that brought us so close? She studies sociology, so she always looks at other people. This is like me, therefore we get along... I'm not sure. She speaks English excellently, and I never once needed to slow down for her.
Resignation. I remember - on the train from Kasai to Chiba city, to visit the friend I had stayed with when I first arrived, and finally return the entirety of his loan to me, she had talked as if she felt she knew nothing, while at the same time appearing luminously intelligent. This is the personal image I also prefer to project when I am fully engaged in a conversation, so without consciously realising this I could very quickly become comfortable with her. In fact, she had brought an old laptop, her secondary-use one, to give me, and without raising her own level for doing a good deed, and without being simply correctly modest and letting the act speak for itself, her constant half-smile demeanour that seemed to always have access to the real truth of a situation presented the air that I seek to present myself. In short, we felt the same.
This kind of evaluation is so easy, and furthermore begs not to be contradicted, as lovers entreat against betrayal. For one thing, she studies in a goal-oriented way, which I can't. Is that true? I am used to attention, whereas she is used to a lack of it, I think. Her older sister, of a two sister house, was apparently an attention seeker growing up. But I also have a history of being alone, so I am comfortable in that space as well. We both read philosophy, and appreciate movies (she more than me though). Used to not keep deadlines well. Had been in love once before. Appreciate modern art. Used to be more chubby. Assembling a list like this, it would be very easy to finish it with an 'I still love you.' But such a statement would here be equivalent to 'I still love myself.' That is not to say that I don't still from time to time let that phrase, or her name, reverberate through an empty chamber which appears coextensive with my heart. But, without saying that such a chamber is a dead heart, I have no more doubts that it was the cause of our break-up.
One night in Higashi Koganei, when I was talking with shy bandana girl in the lounge room until the lights were turned out, Kaori had come down for a midnight snack. I'd seen her before, and though her good looks had struck me lost for words to begin with, I pressed through in the weak light and seemed to have made a good impression. She said people don't usually talk to her out of the blue, people tell her she seems cold, but I didn't notice any of that, and anyway, going to bed that night, I had a good feeling about the impression I had made. After she saw me studying in the lounge room a couple of times, she brought out some translation work for uni and was sitting in a lounge chair by the tv when I came in one night. She gave me a bit of food and some coffee and we chatted about sociology and various things. We both ate hundred yen icecream, I took the green tea flavoured one, and she said she liked that flavour the best. I ate mine from the centre outwards, she from the edge inwards, and I commented that I hadn't seen that way of eating tub icecream before.
I had been looking for a local library to kill time at, and she had said she didn't know any in the area, but the next time I saw her after I asked, she had printed out a map from google and written a description of how to get to one on the lower half of the page, along with its phone number. When someone asks me for directions out of the blue, this is the kind of answer I would want to give.
On my final day there, I was worried that I would not see her again to ask for her details, so I sat in the lounge room studying, but actually waiting for her. After a few hours she appeared, and in making the request seem as natural as possible I had waited until the last moment to say I'd like to see her again. She said ok and... No, I was mopping the second storey floor on the last day when I spotted her and thought, this is my last chance. I'd said, I feel like we get along unnaturally well, and I'd like to see you again after I go back to Kasai, and she had agreed and went to her room to get me her contact. I kept mopping while I was waiting, and the moment stretched out very slowly. She had written everything down on some paper, and gave it to me. We both smiled, she in her ironic half-smile, and I guess me in the same, and I left Higashi Koganei feeling very content. A, Two girls, what good luck! kind of satisfaction.
Work at Kasai started, and Kaori went to Hokkaido to visit her family. The Kasai guesthouse is about double the size of the Higashi Koganei one, and when I thought I would clean it from the start as properly as I had previously, it turned out to be impossible. But at least, I cleaned it exactly according to routine, and my new supervisor's expectations. The manager of Kasai, though completely lax when left to do it herself, was extremely exacting when it came to looking over the work of others. But without food of my own, I didn't care, and was instead very grateful to be given bits of fish and chocolates on break and after I finished for the day. During lunch break I would wolf down some natto on rice sprinkled with wasabi furikake - since I cannot cook at all this had become a standardised meal - and bolt over to the local shopping centre on my bike to use their free internet booth. The first half of my net sessions I would use to reply to emails, first Kaori's, then people such as my family, and the second half in looking up resources for my university studies.
While I was in Japan, I had taken a year off uni. But since about six months of that break had already elapsed by the time I got to Chiba, I had only six months left before I had to resume study. So, I had decided to take units externally and stay put, meaning all my textbooks would come via the post, and all my essays and assignments I would submit via internet. The final exam I would have to find an appropriate supervisor to oversee. Up until now I had failed an abominable number of units, but nevertheless had planned the remainder of my degree tightly, precisely, with no room for slip-up. The rhythm of things being checked off my to-do list for the two history-oriented units I was currently taking, South East Asian and Modern Japanese, also had me juggling and repositioning logical dependencies with all my effort. Once I had resolved some unforgivable position, I would allocate myself rest. The texts for South East Asian Culture had arrived earlier, during work one day, and I was so excited to finally have received them. I knew that this was my last chance to complete my degree, but more than that, I was filled with a passion for doing the best I could with the unit format before me. I knew I was smart enough to do a good job, so there was nothing to say except, Let's go!
I make it a habit not to delete personal mail from my phone, only spam, and so my entire correspondence with Kaori is still hidden away hundreds of files back. The point where things first deepened was when she decided to tell me her love story: first love, lost love. In return I told her mine, and she had been drawn in completely, telling me later she had cried after she read it. The atmosphere of the remainder of our acquaintance was established entirely at this point - that of me telling my story, to her. Every tiny detail was polarisable, everything I said could point her towards loving me. As the centre, I hailed beauty upon her from the very back of my mind, and behind every conscious decision was the subliminal terror: Don't let go.
I sent her a photo of a waste disposal factory in Shinagawa, I told her Immigration was closed when I arrived, I said I love Japan and want to stay here as long as I can, and when she said, I'm looking forward to seeing you, I said, Me too, with all my heart. Actually, not my entire correspondence with her is saved; her messages to me are all there, but my messages to her are at the edge of my phone's auto-delete threshhold, and are in the process of disappearing. Those things listed above are largely from memory.
The day we met after she came back from her family home, I took her to the large bayside park half an hour's walk down the road. It was windy enough to make a level road seem like a thirty degree upwards slope, and was cold as ice. She had her camera with her and took photos of meaningless things that seemed beautiful through the lens - a chance occlusion of the grey sky by the vertical concrete of a bridge arranging fields of light contrary to what the eye is used to. When we got to the sea, I released our range of separation to the width of the beach, and from afar she pointed her camera towards me. I danced around like a preschool child, then returned my hands to my pockets like a world-weary old man. In one photo, I had pointed my body towards the camera with my full gaze, and when it turned out, by chance the entire photo was tinted blue: the clouds, the waves, the low skyline of buildings on the other side of the bay, the sand, the tufts of beach grass, and me in the centre. We both agreed it was beautiful, but she had said it first. On the walk back to the guesthouse, she had told me her life story, and she had put her heart into it. I listened politely, saying, Wow, giving good comments and asking good questions. The story never sank in deeply though.
In my room, we drank the sake she brought back from Hokkaido, and I pressed myself on her, first asking if she would be my girlfriend, telling her how happy I was, later kissing her, telling her how sexy her lips were, and how intensely beautiful I found her face. I felt like I was in heaven, like I was God, fuck, making love to her with all my power. I was so happy, and told her so.
That night we watched "Paris, Texas", her favourite film, which she had brought to show me. It was amazing. In thinking about it deeply, I called forth concepts that I had absorbed from my favourite book, "A Thousand Plateaus". At that point, it was the only book I trusted as a final fall-back line in times I did not entirely know what to make of something. As I watched, I thought about the way in which binary relations had been pierced by a succession of becomings of the lost man in an irresistable movement from the desert to the city, and his reconstitution of a desert of the road in the final scene.
One night we had lain naked, the light turned dim enough that my entire room looked as fuzzy as unfocussed vision, and I had mused to her on the meaninglessness of organs. The only thinig keeping my body together is pain, so if one could be free of that, the parts of your body become choices that you yourself make. You could choose to gouge out your eyes, or snip off your limbs, without being slave to the pain of amputation. She had asked me, Well why do you still have arms then? And I had said, Only because I want them to be there. Afterwards, I put on some clothes and made her my wasabi natto on rice special. In fact, by the following week she had been making it for herself, sending me a photo of the completed object.
Since it was sakura season, she had invited me on a date to the Imperial Grounds in Kudanshita, a famous area for sakura viewing. There, when attempting to use the Japanese word for transfixion, 'kugitsuke', to describe my reaction to the trees in full bloom, I had mistakenly used the word for crucifixion, 'haritsuke'. 'Tsuke' means attatched, 'kugi' means a nail, and 'hari' means a pin. When she understood where the mistake lay, she almost fell to the the floor laughing, and I found myself in hysterics as well. After a good five minutes, she had regained control enough to tell me that was the funniest thing she had ever heard. From then on, I had only to say 'haritsuke', or better yet, use it in a sentence, and she would start to lose control. We walked around for hours, lying in the sun with the cold March wind blowing, and eventually decided to walk to the geek district of Tokyo, called Akihabara. On the sixth floor of Yodobashi Camera, the biggest electronic ware building in the area, there is a maid cafe called Kanzen Sengen Maid Cafe. The name means Ask for whatever you wish, and it is a place for those people who wish they could lock themselves away from the world, as much of Akiba, the cute name for the area, aspires to be. When we arrived, the fifteen-ish aged maids were giving a live performance, in stylised maid's uniforms, singing songs which were not pop as much as they aspired to a deathless cuteness. Well, we stuck around till the third encore, pointing out funny fans, and left before the rush. On the train back to Kasai, she produced two of those maids' laser printed trading cards - Non-chan and Aya-chan. '-Chan' is added to names to make them cuter. We adopted them as super-secret codenames, and laughed the whole way home.
Now that I had a new computer, I had started downloading movies: only the very best intellectual quality, or so I had heard. "Syriana" turned out to be too big to run smoothly, and though I wanted us to watch it together, I thought it was not good enough quality, and told her it was a failed download. Later on, I tried watching it on my own, and when I got used to the frame jumps, it turned out to be quite involving. An art film from the sixties called "Wavelength" we watched together, devoid of story, simply someone playing with filter knobs using an image of a room - according to the synopsis, the panning of the full room shot ends in a close up of the picture on the far wall of breaking waves. In the middle, two people entered the room and put on some Beatles for a bit, then left, and in the night time a man entered the room, only to fall on his knees, then to the floor, not moving until he was entirely out of the shot. I wanted to watch it until the end, but a powerful fatigue overtook me, and though I fought with my falling eyelids and unfocussing eyes, I fell asleep, somewhere half-way through. When I awoke in the morning, Kaori told me that she had watched me, unable to sleep herself, for nearly the entire night. I'll never know what she did.
Though we rented other movies from the Tsutaya down the road, we never watched them - I still haven't seen "Dogville" - and the final movie we saw together was a film version of "120 Days at Sodom" set during the Second World War. The week after we watched it, and indeed for long after we broke up, the elements of the story had circulated in my mind to the point that I took it on as the basis for a new writing project for the forseeable future. I had gotten into the habit of flushing my thoughts on the movie and how to proceed for my own story while talking to an American guy staying at the guesthouse. He had a personal copy of de Sade's collected minor works - which, though he lent me it for research, and I had wanted to read it when he mentioned it to me, I ended up hardly touching - and was an S and M and heavy metal enthusiast. Often he would invite me up to his room, or knock on my door, and we would shoot the shit, as he would say. In any case, he had no problem discussing evils, following any idea that came to light, and would make good comments on things I brought up.
After I warned her about the likely subject matter, Kaori had still said she wanted to watch it with me. But after we had said goodnight, though I don't think she regretted watching it, I realised that she was softly crying, her body turned away from me. I turned her towards me and embraced her, comforting her and letting her tears flow to completion. But I started to hold her tighter, empathising sadness with her more and more strongly, until I began to cry myself. We, both in the other's arms, crying together. But as I started to wail, the sorrow of my voice becoming louder and louder, tension greater and greater, my grip tighter and tighter, everything more and more meaningful, hers had subsided naturally, and I found myself racked in sadness, everything lost but the pulsing of my emotion, and the spasming of my body. I don't remember how I stopped, nor how she reacted. Just comforting me, I guess.
That night is where my guilt crystallised, not in a comprehension of any sin, but in the fear that I had gone too far, and the fragmentation of the relationship, in stages, appeared to radiate from that moment. One day she invited me to her university in Iidabashi, and looking out over the Shibuya skyline, she had seemed distant, and didn't want to kiss me. Back at Kasai, she had said she wanted to break up or take a break. At first I had simply said I was unhappy but ethically it was her decision to make, and I let her get to the door, but calmly at first, I called to her, reversing my decision, saying I didn't want her to leave me. I don't remember if I then started to cry or came close to crying, but I certainly gripped her tightly. She stayed, we had sex, and as she lay in front of me, her back to me, I could not think anything at all, the shock of separation still washing over me, and as I slid a thumb into her, lazily resting the hand on her back as I thrusted, that too left me, and I felt nothing but that she was in my life. This image is always the first thing that pops up in the back of my mind out of all my memories of her - not happiness or sadness, not a feeling of her having been a part of me, but on her hands and knees in front of me, receiving.
Another time, she had taken a few days to think about our situation, and returned to say she didn't care what I considered her to be, whether I loved her or not, she just wanted to stay by my side. Even just for sex. After our previous meeting, not knowing if she would stay or go, fearing the worst, I had felt such hate, myself and her, and I told her I had been hurt too deeply and didn't love her anymore. But she wanted to be with me now, and I accepted her. At some pont she was talking about going to the store, and I imagined it a good time for me to masturbate. I tried to get her to leave, eventually saying why, and she said, Well I might as well go home then.
Although after she called days later, angry, so angry with me, expecting me to know why, I had though about the final events over and over, I soon judged that I had no idea what had gone wrong. When she had made to go home, I retracted my request, she said she wanted to go anyway, so I asked her to wait a few seconds so I could change and go with her. After asking each other again what we really wanted, we left together, and had ramen on the way to the station, joking like normal.
After two days of emailing and trying to call, with no response, she called me while I was sweeping down the spiral staircase of the guesthouse. I had responded calmly to what she was saying, but I had had enough this time. I didn't understand what I had done wrong! And I called it quits, creating a reason to keep myself blameless. Friends from the guesthouse around me, I went to my room and emailed her my even-handed analysis of the situation. My conclusion: 'Fuck you.' And in my head, I knew that would be all she would see, not the great words of encouragement for the future, etc. She responded in all caps.
Waiting for her to call, I had felt like cancer, like murder. Black. This was my only answer, wrath, extermination. And then I plunged...
④
I wanted to write. Not about anything, only to throw words at a white page. It was a pure waste of time, so I got myself a blog on the lowest user-quality site I could think of - xanga.com. In the early hours of the morning, I was acting as if the words I was writing had any value whatsoever. Channelling the voice of my philosophy book, in order to really WRITE, I had looked up some of the internal script files used to form this new source of blanks, as if by reading some Javascript I could become a better writer. When I inevitably gave up on the pages and pages of meaningless code and finished what I was supposed to be writing, for a brief moment I was actually satisfied with it, but of course I immediately came to my senses and saw it for the trite, artificial waste that it was. I turned the computer off and went to sleep, disgusted, just as the sun was rising.
Memories of the things I did for the next couple of months are few and far between, as everything was just lengths and lengths of the same shit. I got addicted to watching anime on youtube.com. Before that, and after I gave up on my capitalism-themed retake on "120 Days at Sodom", I had gotten hooked on reading wikipedia.com entries on twentieth century mathematics - Nicholas Bourbaki got me thinking, as did group theory. In fact, thinking about how every human interaction might be describable by a mathematical group had sent me into an epiphany like I hadn't experienced since I was a child. The American guy had been there at the time, and I told him I might be close to nirvana. He said, Cool. His name is John, and I talked with him every other day.
After awhile, a new girl came to the house, Hidemi from Yokohama, in Tokyo for one month. We'd talked a bit in the wash basin room of the third floor, the girls' floor, and when I was sweeping her floor later on, she came up to me with a flywire window in her hands. I hadn't got what she was on about, but when she left I thought, What a strange girl. I'll try to get closer to her. It turned out she likes Scandanavian metal, and is studying art at technical college. When she and John met they generated such a heat from their excitement, and they are still together.
One night they had a friend over, and were all drinking in John's room, and he invited me up. Actually we had a standing arrangement of not being reserved with each other, so even though he actually didn't invite me, when I knocked on his door, he said, Come in come in. Hidemi had been going to the bar John works at, two stations over, most nights of late, and had hit it off with one of the bartenders named Keiko. So we all drank together, John and Hidemi acting familiar, and Keiko and I flirting each other out. When I talked about it later with John, they had apparently been waiting for me to take her out. In my room downstairs, we stayed in bed for the next eighteen hours. I made her wasabi natto on rice in the morning, and gave her more sex than she knew what to do with, cumming over her back when the condoms ran out, and working her over until my fingers, and her pussy, were tired out and overloaded. She is the last woman I have been with.
My xanga page started to grow, and alongside text entries I would add little coloured boxes that you could poke at, which eventually integrated into the text, and towards the end of my posting to that site, dissolved into pale islands of colour in the background of the entries, and then disappeared. My final entry, at the beginning of June: "And then he dropped out of uni."
I had had a love-hate, or more accurately need-hate, relationship with uni for many years. Unable to write essays to completion, always trying to prove a pre-existing superiority over the material and therefore never able to orient myself towards any finite image of a concluding statement, I had always ground to a halt as the breadth of my intended scope increased to infinity. But though I kept coming up against the glaring psychic pain of units failed through nonsubmission, I kept asking for more units, in a quieter and quieter voice, unable to give up the final goal of graduation. And everyone around me was graduating, all my high school friends in work experience or honours, while I was taking less units in semesters at regular intervals, for a breather, to find myself, and when I did find myself and asked for a standard load again the next semester, I would again fail everything except my language units. This time, though, I was sure would be different, because I was so much smarter now, I had the power of my book and I felt I could write about anything.
The books for Modern Japanese History had not come through, and this time I was certain it wasn't my fault. I emailed my tutor, and though it was during a university break, I conveyed to him implicitly that he should have responded immediately, revelling in moral superiority.This had been while I was with Kaori, and she supported me wholeheartedly. The books had come the day before the Friday due date of the first essay, and I had handed it in on the following Monday afternoon, saying to my tutor, You can subtract marks if you want, but one day is not enough. He said I had put myself in that position.
Well now, after all that, I had my books so no excuses. Then I got sick, and made sure I showed them I was struggling. In fact, I came down with some cold-like virus, or cold with complications, though other people in the guesthouse had been sick, and got sick after me, with the same symptoms. A bit of food got stuck on my tonsils overnight, and in the morning is was all flamed up on the right side. I manouevred most of it off with a cotton tip, but some white crap remained. My throat got too swollen to swallow properly over the next week or so, I had a headache, and what might have been a fever for a day or two. At the side of my neck, two glands I had never noticed before hardened. Eventually, when I ate, the pain no longer throbbed as though skin was being rubbed off the flesh, but I could not defaecate any more. And I couldn't afford to go to the doctor since the travel insurance money wouldn't come for two weeks and I needed my remaining money for food. Cold medicine was 1000 yen, my last big splurge. As my stomach burgeoned, a sickly taste greeted me in the mornings, just as internet medical pages said would come with constipation. I had less and less appetite, and simultaneously was more and more afraid to eat.
In the toilet stalls, I strained so hard that what I thought had to be shit pushing through to the light of day was only some kind of sensation burn, and paper came away dappled in pinkish red, without a single fleck of brown. I was leaving the stalls as full as I entered, but as the outcome of more and more pain, and I could only decide to give up in case I caused actual damage to myself.
In my childhood, the toilet room had been one of my favourite rooms of the house. I could sit, and let my body do what is natural, and after this invisible effort I would let my thoughts roam. Even if I sat for half an hour, an hour, I could at least block out calls to get off, left in the perfect privacy of the room's walls. Once, one of my parents rammed in the door, afraid of drugs, and it was a shock like sacrilege. But for the most part I could sit there, still, thinking, and when my mind was clear I would get off and go to my bedroom.
For a time in my adolescence, when I was testing out various flavours of self-pleasure, I had been interested in my prostate. Eventually finding a tube of hair colouring to be of perfect size, I would retreat to my room with it, wrap it in disposable plastic and push it in, to be overcome with the most intense nonpleasure, nonquenching feeling of pseudo orgasm. It didn't give me an erection, and I never found a limit to its effectiveness, but when I made myself hard and let the end of the tube undulate over a hidden lump somewhere inside, the only thing that stopped me was a vague decision it was time to do something else. I reversed the plastic after I finished, and wiped the same way as for the toilet, the paper usually coming away pinkish red. Sometimes spots of brown had deposited on the plastic, and the smell was as you might expect. I had never read this kind of thing being done before, and I felt the mark of Cain, like I had entered some subterranean level of unforgivable sin. But as a result, I felt at least that I knew my body better than before. I was no longer afraid of any place on me, and if it occurred to me to I could feel the outside pucker of my anus, and it was like normal skin. Similarly, until my constipation sickness, I had never considered a piece of shit as an object in it's own right for more than a fleeting moment, glimpsing the bowl from the corner of my eye. But now I realised that, whatever my effort, whatever the feeling of a movement being almost finished, if I didn't check the result it could be anything, or nothing at all.
I gave in and went to the doctor, saying I had not defaecated in eight days. The nurses made a surprised laugh and said, you must be feeling quite uncomfortable. I was ordered onto a bed and given my first aenema, told that I had to wait until I was almost bursting before I could go to the toilet, or it would not work properly. I lasted something like thirty seconds, the water leaking out in trickles, according to the hidden movements of those muscles that are involved. When I was done, it was a sight to behold. A hardened claw which I could guess had been immobile the longest, moulded into what must have been the inverse shape of my anal duct, sat raised at the back end of the eastern-style squatting basin, followed by a long trail. It was beautiful, a finished product. The laxatives they sold me when I left were a godsend, as I was still unable to defaecate naturally, and as a result now had external control over timing.
I handed in my first assignments for each unit with the very maximum of suffering. The South East Asia unit's one had to be pushed back until after I finished the Japan unit's, and in completing it I went fourty hours without sleep, and nearly lost my temper with the manager for refusing to give me half an hour off to finish the references section. She must have come close to firing me, but I was still the only available cleaner as she would be loath to do it herself. In the end I hookied the necessary writing time, John playing lookout. Later the manager asked me if I had taken personal time behind her back, and I said no, giving her a solid reason. She never found out, but she suspected me of cutting work more and more after that, which I had actually been doing all along.
That was before the break-up. After, all I could do was bang my head and groan, letting the deadlines go by while still believing I could get the extension I needed. Then I gave up on the final essays, and tried my luck on the exam. When I failed to find a supervisor, and my tutor had told me I was the first to in his recollection, I concentrated on next semester. I was to go back to Australia, complete my degree, and return to Japan using it as leverage into a job of some kind. Those days, I left my room even less than when the break-up had been fresh. And one day I found myself crumpled naked on the floor beside the shattered pieces of a wine glass Kaori had given me, many things thrown about the room, hitting myself in the head, still not able to cry. Then I didn't move for a long time. When it got cold, I pulled a nearby towel over myself. Eventually I slept, and when I woke up I put on my clothes, cleaned up my room, clearing out hundreds of fruit flies that had hatched from the depths of garbage, and announced to the housemates I would quit university. And for the first time in forever, I felt genuinely good. In cleaning up loose ends, I discovered that it was a mutual decision: I had been dumped by Murdoch and the letter should already be in the mail.
Before work one day at my new fast food job in Hiroo, I had called my mum to inform her of my decision, and when I started to say, I just can't go on like this any more, we had cried together over long distance. I told her what I was going to do now, and I had power in my voice. Not a single point could budge.
⑤
The same man who had worked as cleaner at the guesthouse earlier in the year and had give me the initial advice about the job, now told me that a business associate of his boss' was looking for foreigners to work in a glass booth making crepes. It sounded like a step up, and anyway I didn't have a job, so I asked him for an introduction. We went down to Gotanda one morning, and when we found the place, on first glance it was essentially the home of any middle class grandma or great aunt, only in an apartment of a commercial district. One such lady sat us down and offered coffee, and seemed to take an instant liking to me. She introduced herself as the manager of a company importing an American soft-serve-like-yoghurt called "I Can't Believe It's Yoghurt", and we were in fact at head office. She said, One of our clients is looking for someone to begin immediately if possible. For someone who can speak Japanese as well as you, there should be no problem. I appeared lost for words, but soon thanked her profusely and said I was very interested. She said, Could you go down there now? And I said, ?! Certainly! So, the job friend and I went down to Hiroo, he shouting me a resumé photo on the way.
We found the store immediately, just up the road from the McDonalds, the bright yellow building: Nathan's hotdogs. I said to the staff, I am here for an interview, and the manager was brought out, a tall, good looking man by the name of Sato. Though I was nervous, he also seemed accepting, and at the end of the interview he asked me if I could start tomorrow. I said, how about next Tuesday, since I had an essay to write, and he said OK.
After I got used to the routine of the store, I had much time for thinking, among other things. The long break from goal-oriented creativity, opened by my xanga blog, had given me time to further absorb my philosophy book. I had begun to wonder, concepts from the book seeming to spring up out of nowhere in all aspects of my work, whether I could use my experiences at Nathan's to compose some story mimicking the progress of the book's chapters. This line of thinking came to me when I had been impressed by something one evening as Sato, along with the at-the-time new store manager Matsuzawa, and I, were closing up the store. I was carrying a tray full to the brim with filthy grill-waste water to the far sink, but it had been too full, and though my arms lost control over the excess water I had managed to aim the spill into a nearer hand basin, though cleaning it up had take more time than I wanted the job to. The details I had selected when writing about it later were the loss of biophysical control over the tray contents, the arc of the falling material due to gravity, the watery liquid which had organic solids mixed within it, and their filthiness. And: a nauseous feeling in my stomach as the liquid fell towards the sink. I wasn't completely sure whether this final percept had been real or not, since it linked everything together so nicely, but in any case I had written of this event as the first time I had ever vomited with my arms. The point being, the way things had approximated vomiting, to the degree that I had, possibly, felt nauseous, was like a textbook example of the concept of 'a becoming' - my becoming-animal in this case, and an associated becoming-unstable of the animal.
For this job, unlike the previous one, I learned my responsibilities one by one in progression. On my first day I was sat down in the back area and run through the basics: packaging for eat-in and take-out and the format of order calls, and reassured that whatever I didn't know I would learn eventually. Then I was taken through to the front and introduced to everyone, with the explanation I had come from Australia. There were two or three crew in the empty morning store, and they hesitated for a moment, unsure about my presence on this side of the counter. Hiroo is an area of Tokyo, between Shibuya and Roppongi, with very expensive real estate, and close to Tokyo's highest non-Japanese population - possibly one in ten customers, and out in the street everywhere you look. When Sato told everyone that I was fluent, they laughed and looked relieved, and one joked, We're counting on you to serve the foreign nationals.
Beside the door to the back of the store is the french fries oil frier. There is a spatula to scoop up and hold fries, and in front of me are the paper containers for to-go, and small and medium eat-in. In the case of eat-in, I pile the fries into the container, push a small two-pronged fork in, and pass it over to the counter. In the case of take-out, I fill the container to approximately a small sized order of fries, or completely full, put it in a paper bag from above the fries pit and pass it up to the counter. That day, from when it would become busy with the lunchtime rush, I was to move over to the side by the main sink beneath the stairs and wait for my new directive. I did the cleaning up for the most part, and when I was asked by one staff to take an order being waited on to it's customer, I had to ask what to say, since I hadn't done service work before and didn't know the set phrases. Since it was busy, he said, Ok never mind, and did it himself. I had little idea of the big machine rattling along around me, and kept my eyes and ears as open as I could stretch them, with zero space for personal concentration.
I soon felt comfortable with the fries, and waiting for my next learning and next responsibility was painfully slow in comparison. One lady who seemed very used to the goings-on of the store, and was unbelievably fast at taking orders, taught me the various recipes I was expected to memorise - hot and ice coffee and tea, lemon and cranberry tea, cranberry cider, hot chocolate, hot caramel chocolate, hot lemonade. Thousand island sauce, onion sauteé. Microwave times for cheese sauce, chili sauce, onion sauteé, sauerkraut. Frying times for french fries, chicken tenders. Assembing and packaging a hotdog. The order of hotdog and french fry toppings. Later, I was taught the making of the burgers - double burger, bacon burger, and chicken burger. Later, the cheese and teriyaki steaks. Forming and presenting a soft serve - the brand was "I Can't Believe It's Yoghurt". I learned the procedure for closing the store up, what to do at five p.m., seven, eight, close at nine, end work at nine thirty. How to disassemble the cheese sauce pump, clean, and reassemble. Though I had no means of comparison, I felt I was a fast learner, the same as ever.
With my colleagues too, I was a dilligent worker, and interesting, informative, and above all friendly in answering questions about my life as a foreigner. As English is taught through middle and high school, as well as for many university courses, the 18, 19 and 20 year olds around me all had a workable spoken faculty. 23 year old Toma, who taught me the recipes at the very beginning, when Sato returned to the office area in the back, on the other hand could hardly put a sentence together. From the beginning, she, as well as 28 year old Noborikawa, who left for Okinawa a couple of weeks into my employ and had an equal English skill, I seemed to be most friendly with.
In between moving things to their places, and looking for such acts to perform, those on shift would accrete in the cavity at the intersection of the major and minor passages of the work area behind the counter. As sound is the first medium to become freed from work between serving customers, personal chat is the commonest reclaimation of work capacity by nonwork activity. On slow days, and towards late morning, mid afternoon, and the end of most days' open hours, the things that are necessary to do for the store also tend to thin out, and standing around, in the natural arena of the intersection, is the typical expression of freedom of movement. Finally, at the end of each day, as well as special moments of secrecy at any time, extra food, or any food at all on some lucky nights, can be captured. Further liberation of capital is of course infeasible, as well as plainly breaking the law.
The store opened at the end of April, so it hadn't been up and running for very long, and during most lunch hours in the beginning, Sato would come out and handle the register, or do burgers. He had another store he was managing in the Nippon Television building in Shinbashi. That had been on it's feet for some three years now, and was apparently much smaller and simpler, but very busy. He would often take the closing crew out for ramen or whatever about Hiroo, and on days I finished with him, when it was just the two of us left riding the Hibiya line together, we would chat about the store, or things in general, with sometimes very long pauses between one topic ending and the next being brought up. He had done many different jobs, difficult ones with high pay. A few times, he had worked on a fishing boat for a month in the seas north of Japan, the subject brought up from a recent news story of a Japanese boat being interred by Russia for crossing the sea border. The pay for each month long haul is one million yen. For such an amazing amount superficially, the work is of course gruelling, and on most trips someone falls overboard and is left in the water. Compensation is paid only in such cases. A different job he did, for one year, was working as a customer service phone operator. In this work, you are required to apologise to callers. Once again the pay is excellent, but the crucial point is that you are apologising for something you did not do personally, and most people burn out after a few months. As a result though, or I should say, he told me this story after I commented that his stoic way of handling customers, given mistaken orders for example, was amazing.
Around that time there had been another new girl at the guesthouse by the name of Naho. She was working part time at a magazine publishers' as an editor, and I think she was studying sociology. She was smart, and we chatted well. Also, one of the younger shift at Nathan's by the name of Emi I found quite cute. I tried talking to her about uni but she didn't seem very interested. One night I took a friend's copy of a Spike Lee movie to Naho's room to watch together, and after I told her what I thought about race issues, playing with some new concepts I had gleaned from my book. I'd later lent her a prizewinning history book Kaori had given me. Though I couldn't talk so smoothly with Emi, I did get to a point where I didn't care if she understood me or not, there was something I noticed and wanted to tell someone, and I wanted to talk more with her anyway, so I just said it. Though Emi's English is quite good, and Matsuzawa can't speak at all, I had to get Matsuzawa to interpret for me, saying everything again in Japanese. But in the end Naho was too busy with work to meet much after that, coming home tired at midnight every night, and I had tried too hard and strained something between Emi and I, it seemed.
A few weeks into the job, a new guy by the name of Meguru started. He had big, bleached hair and clearly cared about wearing fashionable clothes. After talking for a little while I discovered he was quite intelligent, doing law at Keio university - an expensive, prestigious and fashionable Tokyo uni - and could speak near perfect English, having studied in Scotland and the U.S. for almost two years in total. It was fun talking with him, as I could make subtler jokes than I usually do and still have the meaning I give them enjoyed as such, and on the train home swapped contacts before he got off at Hatchobori. The new manager came a few weeks later again, introduced a night Sato invited the Azabu (Hiroo) crew, along with a couple of girls from Nittere (Shinbashi), to Roppongi in the evening after work to watch the Japan-Australia match of the World Cup. He turn out to be an extremely lax manager, giving the bare minimum of orders - at the start reducible to 'do what needs doing' - and Meguru and I agreed that close with Matsuzawa was the best ever, since there was no need for dinner when either of us got home. Before I moved out of Kasai and away from such luxuries as bathroom scales, I had gained between three and five kilos.
After the break-up with Murdoch, Kasai felt old and futureless, and I found myself the cheapest room I could to move into when my current contract expired at the end of July. The housemates were concerned but supportive; my final choice was a 1.5 tatami mat room - about a quarter the size of my current, normal sized room - with a 1 metre tall ceiling, in Asakusa for 21 000 yen per month, all utilities included. This was between one third and one half my current rent, and the district had a nice atmosphere. Asakusa has something of a golden-years feel to it; without really understanding how I came to such conclusions, if Shibuya's Centre-gai feels like the 90s, as does Akihabara's Denki-gai, Shinbashi the 80s, somehow Ochanomizu is the 70s, as might be Shinagawa, then Asakusa is at the latest the 60s. Ginza and Kasumigaseki, parenthetically, seem timeless. In any case, I had the means to, so if I wanted to try living in the cheapest room I could find, then that was what I was going to do. For the guys at work it was a great laugh, and I was to tell them how it turns out.
So my first pay day came around, and I went to Harajuku to get myself some decent rags - my first taste of buying Tokyo fashion - and after hours of footwork and some t-shirts, a sweater, pants and shoes to be proud of, I came home happily exhausted, feeling like I had committed the region from Harajuku street to Omotesando, plus the main through road going towards Shibuya, to memory. The next day, I packed and dragged my suitcase, carry bag and satchel, then futon set, on the train to my new room, in two trips. The walk to Kasai station normally takes 20 minutes - that day it took about 40 both times - and I had to change trains with my copious luggage, at Nihonbashi I think, to arrive at a station without lifts or escalators. I left all my belongings in the upstairs hallway of the filthy, cluttered guesthouse, as the previous tenant was to move at that evening, and said goodbye to the Kasai family, finally riding my bike, shoes I wasn't able to pack bludgeoned into the front basket, the three or so hours to Kappabashi/Tawaramachi, arriving around half past eight. I unfolded my futon and it fit almost perfectly in the room, the head just rising up slightly to meet the wall. But that was perfect, as it freed space underneath to fit the laptop's power cords and my new electric shaver. I paid the owner my first month's rent and 10 000 yen deposit, put my bags on the futon and suitcase inside the doorway, and went down to meet the residents.
At the start, the Asakusa guys - no women were staying in the house - who were open to communication were: Yuki, a Japanese-American mix raised in Hawaii who could speak only rudimentary Japanese, loved clubbing and had sex on the brain; a New Yorker, who could speak significantly better Japanese than me and worked for the anti sex slavery branch of a humanitarian organisation; Hamada, a Japanese who worked for a major fashion magazine, CanCan, and could speak Indonesian; Paolo, a Brazilian-born full-blood Japanese, who possibly could not speak Japanese as well as the New Yorker, and in any case spoke with a Brazilian accent; a German uni student with no confidence in women but was meeting two per outing on average; Yokota, a Japanese widower of a Philippino, who drank two bottles of wine a night; and Taku, a very muscular Japanese, who spoke English well, and was apparently very dangerous when drunk. The remainder were one seemingly mute shut-in who may or may not have left the stench of urine that never leaves the second floor, another pseudo-mute, tattooed, who may or may not be a member of an organised crime group, and one guy who lived above me who I never heard anything about and soon moved out.
After dropping hints at work, saying I was looking forward to it, Sato was finally going to teach me register. Talking with Meguru after the promise, he said he absolutely didn't want to do it - I think it was just because he hadn't done it before. On the day, Sato told me the basic routine - taking the order, pressing the right buttons on the register, money exchange, presenting the order when complete and when being waited on. I made a brief memory sketch, practised with Sato and then Meguru, and when a customer came in I ran away. After a couple of days of this, all to plan, I felt comfortable enough to make mistakes, and took my first order - highly praised, though I thought it was terrible. I had to get Sato to intervene on about my third customer every day for the first few days when my accumulated misses stole my confidence. After a couple of weeks, though, I could take the flow of customers for granted.
Taking orders was far and away more interesting than any of the preparation or cleaning tasks. It was an opportunity to learn about people in general from their reactions to the head space of ordering food, and in some cases though outright side-conversation, a learning that exceeded job content far more than even the 'Nathan's black market menu' that the crew invent and serve each other at break. A lady would place an order speaking quickly and completely in the assumption that her word immediately enters the system, and when she will finish ordering, the perfectly understood statement is to turn into a package perfectly designed for carrying out at that very moment. She would be impatient and place a spread out hand forward on the counter, looking away at nothing in particular. When the order comes, she would shoot an acknowledgement of our obedience into the air and walk quickly out of the store. A different lady would make smiling eye contact with me and wonder what to order, then ask with the possibility of rejection. She would continue to present a posture open to any act on my part, and when given her order would thank me at the same level of polite language a cashier is expected to recite. In particular, this illustrates the higher and lower scales of the size of a person's 'utsuwa', or capacity to put yourself out for others. In a natural way, I would graze at the edges of the first lady, but radiate cordiality before the second, within the boundaries of the job.
Well, Noborikawa left for Okinawa to start up a Nathan's branch himself, just as I was becoming pals with him, and the guy from New York left the guesthouse, after telling me which are the best bars in the area, to finish his law degree. Toma left Nathan's from stress - she had been working there for about a year - and a few others at work moved on. In equilibriation, people were hired at work, and people moved into the guesthouse. One bubbly new design student at work I started to take a shining to, and I could chat with her about Chris Cunningham or Aphex Twin, or philosophise in general and still have what I say responded to meaningfully - in Japanese in her case. At home, the second of two new French guys who moved in around mid-August was a pro at Japanese, having studied law in that language for two years, and it was a great opportunity to test out some new ideas on economics. The German guy, who had never had a girlfriend before, moved in with an architect, in her mid 30s, to live at the top of a 13 storey building in the heart of Shinjuku, and Yuki the Hawaiian got invited to a night in the woods by some crazy nymphomaniac in Yokosuka, two hours away by train. Famous people came into the store. A friend got married in her hometown in Sri Lanka. All in all, I had become perfectly comfortable being everything I was - a foreigner in Japan.
I can't say that the arc downwards from there started from any particular event, as, in retrospect, in was perfectly natural - or it could be said that alternatively there was a deeper force of rearrangement at work guiding me into a deep dead-end tunnel. But here is something that happened: at work, over the course of time, I had fallen into the habit of watching the conversations of my coworkers from afar, since I seemed not to have the entry pass, there was no pinpoint utterance that was able to convey all I wanted to convey about myself at any given moment. Every now and then I might snipe some great comment or short story that would be perfect at the time, and then, having completed my contribution, return to silence, their responses logically old and not even necessary to be said - never consciously looking down from a higher ground, but there was that attitute in the foundation of every thought, every moment's decision to engage or pass over some serif. Talking to any other group of people was different, I just said whatever. But these young, confident Japanese kids were the group I had chosen to aim to infiltrate. They were my entry into the real Japan, I thought one time, and thus decided so once and for all. In this manner, it was an entirely forgettable, in fact completely forgotten moment, if any, that caused the mood of the next couple of months to seem to fall gradually towards the centre of the earth.
While I was making this effort to solve the stream of feelings output into the atmosphere of the store, the design student, Chiro, and Meguru, were on shift together for the first time while I was there. Two strong personalities, both naturally accommodating; the utsuwa overlap was substantial, and their back and forth joking had far more orbital energy than I could hope to latch onto, not for a single meaningful word. It was lonely, and defeating. I told Meguru this while Chiro was on break, and he seemed appropriately concerned: offhand, only slightly. I told him, It was probably unavoidable, and I don't want you to make any extra effort on my behalf, but I thought I should let you know how I was reacting to you guys' thing. The moment ended, I went back to pottering and daydreaming. It happened again some days later, and Meguru asked me in return, What would you like me to do? I guess my honest answer would have been, Make me your best friend. For, at the time, he was my favourite person, and through him I thought I could become more and more Japanese. Instead, I was feeling more and more like the foreigner, ostracised essentially and from the outset.
People came into the store, and I took it upon myself to be the one to serve them. I no longer wanted to become better at preparing the food. I spoke constantly during the rush hours, faster than any of the other staff when they did register. I was perfect, and damn all who would attack my mistaken calls with their eyes, their corrections and apologies to the customers. You, staff and customer alike, who look down on my caucasian face, my uncultured expressions. "Losing My Religion" played on the radio daily. Somehow, my power of perseverance had been captured by something, and now had begun to loop over smaller and triter situations - I would be checking the fridge behind the counter for things needing restocking, then return to a conversation I was completely on the outside of, and already I would want to check the fridge again, was that amount really OK? Should I not open another cheese can? Was someone in the middle of doing it, or had already judged it to be OK? I can't invite their criticism, I have to do a perfect job. And then, every sideways glance, every questioning look, had FOREIGNER written on the eyeball. In fact, I had asked Sato to let me learn how to close the register at night, and though new girl Chiro had done it many times now, I was outside the trusted circle. I had my theories, but I did not want to believe them yet, as I at least understood that my reasoning had taken damage from an as yet invisible enemy.
Jean, the remaining French guy at Asakusa since Michel went back to renew his visa, was sympathetic, but told me there was nothing to be done about it, as I was clearly not Japanese. He has a deep love of the night industries, and worked for a year and a half in Osaka's red light district, before being wrenched out of his position by some covetous fucker and his bitch of a girlfriend. Not to mention the new workers who would try to teach him his job, though he would naturally be their senior and be entitled respect, had be been Japanese. Not only Jean either, everywhere I go I hear the stories of non-Japanese people being withheld normal human courtesy, and Japanese being given priority merely because of their race. On the other hand, I am forever being given compliments on my ability to write, or to speak, things no Japanese person would be complimented for. If I mention a Japanese band someone has not heard of, they would immediately joke that I might know more than a Japanese person. Can I eat raw fish, have I been to Kyoto. Have I experienced JAPAN.
Fuck that. I'm not stupid; whether it's true or not, that's not how to find out dick. I let the first wave of paranoia wash over me, and at the end I had received a solid decision: no more waiting with bated breath on the verdict of some random person as to whether I can speak Japanese or not, whether I am sufficiently Japanese yet. Confidence is the most important thing, not following the book, and so whatever my skill, I am a fluent speaker from this moment on. In fact the shift from words and grammar, to phrases, then situations, as being my basic unit of everyday study, was already moving in that direction. My basic unit of Japanese study is from now on my own person, I have turned myself towards Japan regardless of anybody else, and that places me on the same continuum as children learning about the world from the standpoint of their own particular set of circumstances. No one can tell me what Japan is, that is between me and Japan alone. For example, when I write in Japanese, the English way of writing the same thing surfaces in the very following moment, and vice versa. What does that mean?
At work I felt emotionally stronger, and also as though Tokyo had toughened my heart, like it does everyone's. At home I was watching anime on the free use computer under the stairs in the living room. One series called 'Nana' was about two girls who become friends when they meet on a train while undertaking 'jokyo', the special word for moving to Tokyo from the countryside when you are young. Both are called Nana, but the floozier of the two seems to become more mature as her heart is repeatedly broken. I had one phone-mail friend at the time, a really cute dancer called Rie, who made great eye contact with me one day at work, and I had gone up to give her some free drink when I took my break. When we began exchanging mail she had been guarded in her replies, answering only what I asked, but in one month we wrote each other at least once a day, without meeting as both our jobs were busy.
Meguru does law, and I thought, since I am in this country by virtue of my visa, and I had heard bitter stories of deportation, I should learn about laws so I can put myself in a strong position come whatever may. So I started writing out the constitution, as I thought this is where politics is the most transparent - by logic, everything public and private derives from this, and all wishes are given the chance to be satisfied. The first night I went to the local library to study, I was just about to go home when I was called out to from behind and forced into a conversation by an unknown girl. She turned out to be from Nanking, studying at a language college, and in fact lived on the opposite side of the road to me. She was really bookish, but also had a feisty side, and I liked her immediately, telling her the following night that I would want to start a relationship with her, and we met every night after work to chat. But she had recently broken up with her ex of one year, and was still tender, though this turned out not to be the reason she rejected my advances - one morning I went to her apartment and didn't leave until late at night, apparently having decided that I would let her tell me to go before I would leave of my own accord. It was like I had my mouth wide open waiting for a treat or a kick, just like when I was with Kaori.
At some point, a friend I made long ago out drinking one night had invited me to go out with him to Shibuya with some girls he picked up one time. I had been putting him off for six months, and now I had no excuse not to enjoy myself. The girls were 18 and 19, cute and intelligent, and one of them was randy as hell. All the other guys went home, but the girls seemed happy to go hard and stay out until first train. I told them I lived in Asakusa and they said they had never been there before, so home we went. I wanted to make a quick stop at the house for food and a quick retreat, as I did not want to let Jean get a hand in like I knew he would try to. He and Yuki had become great buddies, playing World of Warcraft, an online game, for many many hours and hogging the computer, and Jean had introduced Yuki to a swingers' website he had used in the past. On a particular social website famous throughout Japan called Mixi, noted for having 7 million users, the links to friend's profiles on his profile page consisted entirely of cute girls' faces, or their naked or half naked bodies, about 150 in total, and though he had a long term girlfriend he was open to everyone else that he was looking for free sex.
...I have already lost. The girls came, and Jean caught them - he stopped himself from doing them, but the upper hand was his. I stuck around till the morning, and after I let one of them have a nap in my room, I took a caramel out of my bag, and stopped the other girl in the upstairs hallway. I told her, a friend from Hokkaido gave me this caramel. A local company, about to go bankrupt, had been faced with the task of gambling their futures on one last flavour. Their decision: Genghis Khan flavour - in other words, mutton flavoured caramel. She said, Eew that has to be gross, and I said, Nah, it's REALLY GOOD. I took it out of it's wrapper and held it between our mouths, and we bit from both sides.
I stopped myself from kissing her.
She squealed, That's disgusting! and the two mashed up pieces of glistening caramel I squashed together into one piece again, and placed it on the windowsill of the hallway. Later, taking her for a walk outside before she was about to leave, I tried to kiss her again, but she stopped me, saying, What are you doing.
I followed protocol, she said she had a great time with me. But I was lost. In the store, I said something to Meguru, and he couldn't believe it, one teeth-baring spasm of a smile, and then dead disbelief. At break, I wrote pages and pages of sweaty, panicked nonsense into my notebook, trying to regain control.
And I argued, coldly, pointlessly, with Jean, on the existence of the individual. For hours it seemed, from this perspective and that. He shot down everything, and in the end I was just some kind of screaming Francis Bacon mouth, Believe me! Believe me!
Then Lily, the Chinese girl. One night in some family restaurant, killing time together, she had said I should stop biting my fingernails. I told her why I shouldn't: there was something very deep at work in my decision to continue biting my nails, even though I didn't really want to, so some greater thing in my life probably had to change before I could stop. She said I should just stop, and I said I can't.
At work, Noborikawa had come back. He knew so much about the running of a fast food store, but he was telling me what to do without listening to MY reasons. I radiated hate until the shop closed, and while I closed the register, no more customers to come in, I told him, this job is killing me.
I would lock my jaw with younger staff, but when I said to Matsuzawa, I think I want to quit, he said, Me too.
One day some people from Tokyo TV came to the guesthouse.
They were shooting a celebrity program, going around to cheap rooms around Tokyo. They had found out about Asakusa.
They talked with me and Jean for a bit, and when I showed them into my room, we talked privately.
Their questions were basic - What do I think about Japan. Japanese food. Japanese women. I told them stories, and these location scouts, in their late 20s, appeared to enjoy talking with me.
I was to have a short segment with some celebrities: two members of the teen pop group Kat-tun, a hot girl and the show's presenter.
They came the night before my 22nd birthday.
The first thing to do was: BE NATURAL. They told us.
We arranged ourselves in the living room. Be natural...
They opened the door, Floodlights searing. Said hello.
SLAM.
Not good enough.
They opened the door, Floodlights searing. Said hello.
SLAM.
Not good enough.
They shot me, shyly leading them to my room.
When I was there, I told them I had a girl over one time. But then she left. They said, REALLY?
I asked for a photo, they said their manager didn't allow it.
I thanked the producer.
I felt raped.
Later, towards the end of September they came again. I had packed my suitcase, and earlier in the day had done my last clothes shopping. This was my last night in Tokyo, and the overnight bus was about to leave, but they had to shoot my room one last time.
From one angle the shallowness is accented. From another, the haphazard suitcase. Another shows the thin corridor out. My skin tingled like my mother was cutting my hair when I was eight and had told me not to move, saying, Don't move, my child. Stay right there.
I ran to the countryside.
⑥
The cable car that transported people up to and down from Koyasan was on a slope of at least forty degrees, and though it seemed I was near my destination point and would be able to rest soon, heaving my thirty-plus kilos of luggage up the stairs to the first open door was tough beyond belief. My muscles ached, and there remained an unknown exertion still ahead of me. Up in the mountains was a lot colder than Osaka seemed to be, or even Tokyo, and I was glad I'd bought a jacket, even if it was a little on the flimsy side.
I had called Matsuzawa around nine, before I was supposed to have arrived at work, from a train station of some brilliant green forest, to let him know I would not be coming in for awhile. He had tried bargaining, but then got angry when I started to look for a way back into the job in case of emergency. In the end, he said to drop in and say hi whenever I'm in the area. I thanked him, apologised one last time, and cut the line, squatting in exhaustion next to my bags. The connecting train would be coming soon.
Train was followed by cable car, cable car by local bus. I was dropped off in what seemed like the central strip - I had not really expected a temple town to look like a ski resort town, shops latched onto demand niches created around a main activity, but I guess the people here need supplies like the rest of us. All I really new about Koyasan was that it was a group of Buddhist temples that offered lodging. I had thought, you can stay free at a temple, surely? In Asakusa, Taku had said Yeah, many young men do, so I have to watch out for gays! And I hadn't cared in the slightest. Who knows, I might turn out gay myself.
At the first temple I found, to the right of the bus stop, I put my things just inside the wooden doors of the gate and approached the building. An older lady, head shaved, came out to greet me from the verandah.
I said, I am looking for a place to stay.
This temple only has Japanese people staying here... Can you speak Japanese?
Kind of, I guess.
Well, there are other temples specifically trained for receiving foreign guests. Why don't you go past the Tourist Information Centre and see what they have.
I thanked her, and did so. It should be just back here past the bus stop...
I found it, happy to have been able to read the traditional style messy script title the building, and went inside. Just a normal office, and the man at the counter said, May I help you. I said, I'm looking for a place to stay, and he showed me the range of prices - 9500 to 13 500 yen per night. I was lost for words for a moment, and he switched to English. We have a backpacker's for 9000, would you like me to check if they have a vacancy? I thought for a moment, I'm already here, I have the money, and looking for somewhere else might leave me without any room at all, so far from the city. I said in Japanese, Yes, please do. There were none, so I told him the 9500 one would be fine. There was a vacancy, and so I paid the fee, was given a map with the temple I was to stay at highlighted, and was thanked in English.
I arrived, and a younger bald headed man greeted me from the verandah. I said I was to stay there for one night, and they checked my name. As I stepped up onto the wooden platform, the man, a boy really, lifted my suitcase and bag, straining, and carried them in for me. I felt a bit sorry for him.
In the reception room was a short shaved-headed man with a large mole on his face and a lazy eye. He spoke with a lisp, playing with a pen in very intricate hand movements, and I got a creepy feeling talking to him. Once the recording of my passport and contact details was completed, I was shown to my room - a traditional style room, average in every way, except for the view of a beautiful tended garden out the clear glass sliding doors. This must be one of the chores of the monks that live here, I thought.
I got out my phone charger and plugged it in to recharge my nearly-dead phone. I got my new 20 000 yen laptop out from my satchel, plugged it in and placed it on the main table. There was nothing on it's desktop screen yet, I had not used it once. And I relaxed, finally at rest. The sky was cloudy, and the tended garden was bathed in ambient grey light. The laptop's screen saver came up, still the store one of some fighting game, and I reverted it to the default, nothing screen saver. I sat there for a long time, drifting in and out of light sleep. I remembered my mother in some moments, soon pushing her from my mind. I remembered Kaori, ashamedly, transitorily. But for the most part I remembered nothing, and considered nothing. The room and garden, computer around me, I was soaked in. They were nothing, as I was, my relation to them not even possible to think about outside of utility. When the moment came to move, I left, outside to explore the area.
Down the road was a large, ancient-looking cemetary, and middle aged tourists were milling about the gate. I walked in and amongst the stone shrines and totems inscribed in sanskrit, many hundreds of years old surely, with green moss cradled between segments and drawing up from the ground. Stones were cracked in some places, toppled in others, and many inscriptions were too weathered to read. I started to think - that these stones were not death stones, they were the statements of living people made against death and time. I came upon monuments, nonpartisan, to the dead of World War Two battles. Religious groups. Corporations. Names carved deep into the stone, offering receptacles, business card receptacles. A statue of a rocket. At the far edge of the cemetary was a shop, a rest area, people taking photos. Had I been thinking too much? In any case, I saw a restaurant and realised I was hungry.
I began back in the direction I came from, but midway found a small path up a hill lined with modest wooden arches, and following the path led to a shrine. When I arrived, its name had the word 'inari' in it, like the name of a suburb near where I used to live. There was nothing here, really. But regardless, I sat down and looked out at the tall trees and mountains around and above the path of arches, and was in the middle of lining up a shot with my phone camera, when I saw a movement of white on the screen. A person, a tourist? Two caucasians, on the heavy side, a mother and son? Americans? The young man, tall, cheeks rosy, I called out 'Konnichiwa' to. He responded with the same. I talked with them for a bit, the mother had given her son an 18th birthday present of a three week trip to Japan. She was a friendly person, but soon began to turn her body away while she was still, smilingly, talking with me, secretly impatient to leave. I engaged with her in a way allowing her to leave at any point, but she kept responding as openly as she could. She said, I'm sure he's getting sick of me, but we make a good team. The son was turned towards her the entire time, even if his feet wanted to point to me, and he agreed with his mother. This dynamic, everything was so familiar. I realised, 'But we make a good team' was the exact wording my own mother used when talking about us, her and I. Looking at this lady who was unable to leave, I could not help but think, I am more calm than her, and that her presence was more loud than I would like to be around for a long time.
Eventually they said goodbye, and I left fifty paces after them. At the lodging, I took the first bath I had taken since a trip to the Kusatsu hotsprings last year. It was glorious, and I laughed out loud. After I got dressed, I came out into the reception room, where a few guys were chatting behind the desk. I said hi, and asked them a bit about the place. I don't really remember what they said. Then I said I was considering going for a bit of a walk, and could they suggest something to go look at. They said a couple of big temples were lit up at night, about 20 minutes that way. Ah thanks, well, off I go then. They politely wished me a safe trip.
I walked around for a bit, spotted a couple of young female sightseers behind me at one temple, found the local high school and spied on a guy in a lit classroom for a few minutes, walked back, bought a drink, heard the 8pm bell for the closing of temple gates, saw some westerners walking back to their dorm, and then arrived back at my own lodging. I sneaked around the corridors a bit, finding the kitchen from afar, and discovered the second floor toilets w