Danger Somewhere

high up, lion spirits
ignite the sky in red
dear color, death

in sunned blankets,
a pair of eyes halve the sky
like fresh grapefruit:

in secret, a fire beyond
spills without procedure
over beds of pine.

Birthday! (Dec 10th)

Since the eves of winter, two coats and me.

The remarriage of Henry Gout

At once the neighbors gathered
in a tool shed late at night
to point their livid fingers
at a portrait of the wife,

She’s stealing him! She’s ruining
our unity! They’d chant,
each neighbor’s rant hard-boiled
as the duties of an ant.

The heaving, bloated body
of the chairman shuddered out
his ardent plot to choke the
boorish wife of Henry Gout

but many disagreements
leapt into the air like moths,
her neck was far too thin to share
amongst the hungry mob

Then, what? (the question came around
each time the council called,)
We eat the things we’ve brought for snack
and exercise our thoughts!

The smell of grease escaped
a row of foil-covered plates,
as neighbors shuffled, porcelain clinked
and mounded savory weight

The chairman split into a grin
to see what fruit had come,
He loved to loathe that woman but
could never skip a plum.

Kyoto is Girls!

A bus came by the same as they had been coming by all day; sometimes I got on and sometimes I didn’t. It was all about the number. Is it the right number? If not, I would let it come and go and do nothing more than shuffle away from the paths of exiting bus people. If it were, I would shuffle into it and try to get a seat (if there were no place, I would stand). I was doing it all day by now. When I bought my 500 yen 1 day bus pass, the girl who spoke enough English to sell it to me gave me also a detailed map with all the most famous, accessible-by-bus destinations in Kyoto. With it, I went to the Golden Pavilion, the Silver Pavilion, to a flat-forever sized park, Kiyomizu temple, and to three different Family Marts and walked everywhere in between. The bus had become kind to me, it had become friendly and familiar. Once, not knowing which place on the map to visit next, I got on a bus just so that I could sit to eat my Nikuman. I was alone, so one open seat was always enough and Nikuman was always delicious. That day, every single thing offered a warm consistency; the quiet Japanese people, the hundreds of camera-carrying professionals, the on-time buses, the Nikuman. Until now, buses had come and gone all day and I hadn’t any mind at all for where they had come from or where they would go.

A bus came, the same as they had been coming. Outside it had become dark by now, and lights from the building behind me rolled off the bus's large windows as it hissed to a stop in front of me and a small group of people at the bus stop. It hissed again to kneel and then people started to come out of the front. The people who stayed in the bus were transparencies. The girl who was staring at me with dark, gleaming eyes didn’t seem real. We looked at each other shamelessly under the protective cover of the glass barrier between us. It must have become a game between us, to see who would lose their nerve first and look away. I thought that maybe no bus had been stopped for this long all day. The way that they make you exit the bus is always by the front, and so if everyone is exiting, everyone is paying on their way past the driver. She must have been hearing the microphone’d driver’s muffling of “Arigatogozaimasu, Arigatogozaimashita, Aritagozaimasu, Arigatogozaimashita” as each passenger slipped out the front. Her gaze was frighteningly human. Fully beautiful, she was staring at me. I lost our game. I couldn’t help nervousness. Hit with smiling, I looked away, and then looked back again. She was still looking. Now her friend too. I could’ve gotten on. Would it have scared them? I thought that if I got on I would run into something difficult: I might walk into a situation where I must impress two hot Japanese girls with my limited Japanese. If that were all, I would have gotten on the bus. But all the while, I would be subject to the silent scrutiny of a whole bus worth of Japanese surveyors. I didn't think hard. Her eyes were black. I couldn’t tell if it were because of their depth or pigment itself. I could feel her attention. Her eyes were real eyes; eyes that by looking affect the body of their owner and the body of the subject of their peering. I thought nothing about what I would say if they came out or if I went in. We stared through the window.

Outside, on the wet sidewalk, the bus made a sound. It rose up again off its knees and began rolling forward. They waved at me. I waved back smiling, feeling happy to have been played with. They got thinner and thinner and soon all that was left was the back end of the bus, a square getting smaller, rolling up the street.

I wonder what would happen if I did things like getting on that bus? Is it something I avoid? or deprive myself of? Even in this case, because I don’t live in Kyoto, and I was leaving in two days I could say it was better what I did, not getting on, but I think I know better, even though I don’t act like I do. I can’t imagine looking back and saying, “I should not have boarded that bus with the two pretty Japanese girls.” Silly!

(Then ヤン says, "Distance makes beauty.")

Temptation in Kyoto

As obese time shuffled forward, cheeseburgers continued being built atop the grill three meters in front of me. I had already eaten meat dumplings from the Family Mart. Delicious ‘Nikuman’ cost just over a dollar, so I always get two. But even with a full stomach, I had such an urge to buy and devour one of the burgers. I was just outside of a temple on a narrow walking path where there stood tent-vendor shops on both sides selling lots of tasty looking, tasty smelling things. The air was blanketed in the warm steaming smells escaping each colorful stall. Elsewhere, the air was cold; it was night. I imagined the juice from the burger falling onto my tongue with the bread, the lettuce, cheese, the ketchup, the warm mayonnaise, the hot center. I would do it, I decided, watching three couples share great, giant cheeseburgers underneath a lamppost. But my stomach would punish me, I knew. If I dropped something so large into my system now, I would keel over and, instead of becoming like a sponge to devour the lively night, I would be promptly searching everywhere for a bathroom (or anywhere secluded) and wouldn’t find either. Reality stood like a high gate between me and the burger stall with the busy cooks making more burgers making more smells. Things had turned out so great: I was in Kyoto on an adventure with a happy stomach. But for a moment, I couldn’t imagine walking away. Then finally, and suddenly, I did. Walking up the path again, away from the little pancake balls and roasted hotdogs on sticks, I caught a first glimpse of the illuminated center of the temple between the bodies of two people higher up on the road. In full, it was a big stage walled in by white, electric paper lamps. To the left of it, people prayed in front of a darkened room filled with gold, shaking giant ropes that hung from above to sound big tin capsules with metal pieces inside. The sound was like that of a drawer of silverware being removed and shaken. Walking back with still enough money to buy a burger, I got away again and walked for a long time around the district of Kiyomizu temple.

Mr. Beast #6

Mr. Beast waves me over from the edge of the hole. So deep! Inside, rock walls creep down and down and down and disappear into dark. He looks over his shoulder at me.

We had gotten lost. When the splinter in Mr. Beast’s foot had finally been scratched out, the world went dark. Upon realizing our shivering beneath the shadowy branches that blocked out the stars (if there were any), things became more serious. We could die out here, I thought. But still, Mr. Beast had that childish way about him. During our attempt to escape, he would be stopping along the way to investigate notches in tree trunks and taking bark samples and pointing out to me the dark excrement of animals. In between the distractions, I worried. He grunted at his foot. We had no clear technique of finding our way back to the take off point. We thought it smart to start off walking in the direction that we remembered the Professional walking off in, hoping to be led back to the road, where from there we would climb. But even after walking what felt like twenty minutes in the Professional’s footsteps, we still hadn’t found any road. Surrounded by more eerily abundant, flickering leaves, Mr. Beast dashed into the darkness away from me through brush. It was so sudden, it was as if he had been snatched away. Afraid of being alone, I sprinted as fast as I could, following the sound of rustling leaves in pitch dark. Cold wind punished my face and hands for running this way through the eerie trees but I could not lose Mr. Beast. If I were alone, it might kill me, the night. From far away, the silhouette of Mr. Beast appeared and began to grow in my trembling vision; he had stopped. The doe had gotten away. Now we were so completely lost. I wanted to strike him. Then I noticed the hole in the ground.

After contemplating the pit, we conclude that someone built it, which means that it leads to somewhere or something. With my frost-bitten hand, I feel a plume of warm air. It rises from the hole and then collapses under the chilly glare of the eerie, flickering leaves. Mr. Beast and I huddle over again, clutching our own bodies against the icy breeze that returned again to molest our skin and hair. This time after it passes, Mr. Beast walks away from the ridge and disappears into the dark. A few seconds later, he appears again carrying a heavy stone. Marching over, he heaves it into the pit. We listen.

Climbing down is difficult. Yet Mr. Beast seems to have no problem whatsoever. It is such a terrible ladder made of rocks in the wall that stick out just slightly more than the others, enough to grasp each one with only the very first knuckle of each of my fingers. For certain I will die falling backwards into the pit. Lowering myself slowly, painfully, pathetically. It's then Mr. Beast begins his lecture: telling stories of himself, from his past. His voice rolls upward from underneath my trembling feet. He wants attention is all; I refuse it. But the echoes of Mr. Beast's grumbling travel from his tongue to warm stone to warm stone and then enter my ear like a tongue. I want to strike him, but my hands are trembling, slipping every moment. My body is collapsing, pathetically clinging on to the small stone shelves and going lower and lower. Mr. Beast’s stories let themselves into my ears. They must be lies. I find it hard to imagine him in Amsterdam with drugs and girls. And then, mid-sentence, he goes quiet. Worried, I look down. I can make out only his white face: floating in the center of darkness away from the wall, but not screaming, not shrinking. Not falling. He found the bottom.

Japan: for english poetry.

For instance, this advertisement for a tuna sandwich:



and raisin bread



Black Man

Mr. Beast #5

The sky darkened. All of autumn’s colors were ducking under a veil of dusk. In that place, they lost their souls until dawn. Vibrant colors dimmed and disappeared from the day like the orange glow of once unthinkably hot lava crawling across an ocean floor. The Professional’s feet shivered, blue; His shoes had been lost, but that wasn't the reason for his shuddering. His shirt had been torn to rags; His hand was crushed beneath his skin but he hadn’t yet realized what was done to him. With one trembling hand, he clawed the top of his thigh, hissing through his teeth. The Professional's head lie rested on the steering wheel. His mouth, slack open, dropped spit between his legs and onto the floor mat below, where it landed warmly in a small pile between his fetal feet. Watching it fall, he could only have been thinking of what had happened. Realizing for a second time that he was alone, inside a locked car, his body started to feel more pain. His broken hand, laid over the curve of his knee, began to sting from within. He moaned and gurgled in pain, holding it upright, looking for a way to stop it. He noticed the bone of his smallest finger: Halfway up, at his knuckle, the skin covering was stretched with swelling, rosy pink and shiny. A frenzy of pain arose suddenly: in the very center of his palm, displaced bones, like fish-bones, caved in from every direction to stab opposing flesh whenever there was a muscle spasm. He whimpered and hissed, throwing his head around and then downward again, his unbroken hand cradling a now torturous, animal trap of a hand. Fuck. He could do nothing for himself but stay still, resting his head on the steering wheel. He remembered, ten years ago, his Driver’s Education teacher’s words on the day of their last class, “With a license, you are responsible for driving a machine that kills people.” Spit continued to fall from his open mouth, seeping deeper still into the floor-mat. Tortured physically, he dared not leave the car yet. He didn’t know what all had been done to him as it was too terrifying a thing, escaping the nightmare women. Frozen in his car, the professional coughed up everything.

Uchida Sensei's Poem

it's hard to remember, having been so loud and crowded all around, but I think this was the poem she said was her favorite.

THE SORROW OF LOVE

by: W.B. Yeats

HE quarrel of the sparrows in the eaves,

The full round moon and the star-laden sky,

And the loud song of the ever-singing leaves,

Had hid away earth's old and weary cry.




And then you came with those red mournful lips,

And with you came the whole of the world's tears,

And all the sorrows of her labouring ships,

And all the burden of her myriad years.




And now the sparrows warring in the eaves,

The curd-pale moon, the white stars in the sky,

And the loud chaunting of the unquiet leaves

Are shaken with earth's old and weary cry.

The letting loose of all the little boats into places where you might never see them again.

“LISTEN UP! EVERYBODY STOP! STOP! STOP! LISTEN UP! ALRIGHT! WE’VE GOT A CHOICE! WE CAN BUY MORE BEER AT THE SEVEN ELEVEN FOR 100 YEN EACH OR BUY AT KARAOKE FOR 400 EACH!” Tuomas was screaming wisdom out as though a corkscrew were being twisted into his gut; those sounds coming out shaped as English words were duly worthy of being one’s last sequence of human utterances; a flawless demonstration of the profoundness and ferocious capability that the human voice can muster when necessary, when a house is burning up in giant monster-shaped flames from the floor leaping up into themselves, motherless, leaping up over and over again; when you want to save someone you love so much, and your body begins to die, it's the same howl shaking your chest. No matter of age, each human of eight and of eighty will howl the same to get that which cannot be physically taken or given like the exchanging goods except by way of convincing another human to do as you say for a great cause, you must think it in order to bellow that special gift hidden in the very deepest documents of the human voice. It would be named ‘primal.’ That word cannot be used. It mends intangible objects; unravels entire inner metaphysical intricacies like sheet music. It's the same thing Tuomas used stopping us in the street that night. It unfolds stories.

“THEN WE’LL SMUGGLE THEM IN-“

“Hey! Quit yelling so loud! Someone will hear!”

“WHA- NO ONE UNDERSTANDS A FUCKING WORD OF ENGLISH HERE! IT’S OK! OK, SO TO THE KARAOKE PLACE WE’LL SMUGGLE IN THE BEER WE BUY RIGHT HERE INSTEAD OF PAYING 400 FOR EACH INSIDE!”

Everyone had stopped to listen, but only two or three guys darted into the Family Mart afterward to buy more beer to smuggle into the karaoke place. The rest had just stopped to continue the small conversations they had been having before when they were walking, before the stopping. Each person stood in the illumination of the Family Mart, some with umbrellas, some giggling quietly to themselves at something funny, some just standing about doing nothing, and others, like that one tired-looking guy, asked us, “Are you guys working your game tonight?” in a tone I took to be honest. Sveinn and I had drunk at the nomikai like every other person standing there (eat-as-much-as-you-can and drink-as-much-as-you-can for 2600 yen, two hours afterward, be ushered out by impatient employees wearing red leather hats). Sveinn and I looked at him, thinking of what to say.

“What the fuck are you talking about!?” Sveinn said (and then I erupt giggling again, at everything about this moment: the question, Sveinn's answer, this Nomikai aftermath situation, the Family Mart employee behind the counter watching us in horror, the drunkenness of my friends and this weird guy, this weird guy who says to me, 'Rachel, right?' (who is standing a few meters down the street to my right, facing her Chocolate-Boy with the apartment where such things as alcohol drinking, movies and sex can happen, such things as make Japan a pleasant place again, finally.) and me giggling with that 'too wide' smile, so much so wide and unclosable that i believe in it.)

Looking nowhere in particular, the weird guy goes, “Are you guys trying to get laid?”

“Oh, well, my wife is inside the seven eleven in the bathroom…”

The rain was struggling to fall, yet the road had become full black and wet. We stood in a pool reflecting the blue/green lights of the Family Mart sign above us.

ジーンズの中の地図

Law: When trading a beautiful thing for a beautiful thing, agree it is the received thing that is much more beautiful. Be confident that ugly things stay ugly and enjoy learning more about the new beautiful thing. Do things such like: take walks, see movies, hold hands, drink alcohol, do all things. It is unnecessary to mind happenings that surround the ugly thing, as they certainly in no way compare to the what, who and where involving the closer, hot, beautiful thing. If the ugly thing is suddenly chosen by a person and taken up for enjoyment, it is a phenomenon that occurs next. In time, in the mind of the seller, the ugly thing, after being taken up by a stranger, will have become the pinnacle of high, sophisticated beauty, and all of the most poetic, erotic and otherwise good components of humanity itself will be believed to reside humbly in its center. Furthermore, the thought of it belonging to someone else will cause self-doubt and loneliness in the seller. Although the thing will not have actually changed, it will seem unbelievably so. Meanwhile, the once-beautiful thing received by the seller in the initial trade will lose its fervor over the span of one week; continuing to function as before with less self-esteem.

Mr. Beast #4

Tracing the faint shadow of the splinter in Mr. Beast’s foot with a toothpick, I came to discover that it was much deeper down than I had originally thought. Sitting in the tree, Mr. Beast hadn’t noticed that we’d come to save him at first. He just sat there; letting insects crawl onto his skin wherever, coming so close to the insect-sized tunnels that lead into his body but still doing nothing. He appeared incoherent, watching the way they would scurry across his naked parts, getting lost in his pubic hairs. I howled his name upward once and waited a moment but nothing happened. It was as if nothing had been said. Once again I called out and, to my relief, a few moments later he began to climb down the tree. It was then, with the professional and I waiting dumbly at the bottom, when Mr. Beast’s feet stomped the ground and met the sharp end of a piece of thorn-wood, looking like sadistic crooked-scissors, risen barely 4 inches beside the tree trunk. His body refuted in a terrifying spasm and recoiled away before floating back down with this sort of sorrowful, pathetic elegance. It’s so strange saying this. Even at the time, it gave me chills. His face, having been poised in its usual stern, stone-like manner, suddenly became all wrinkles, like a stack of pancakes. His ice lips, his chiseled nose, those hard eyes, they all became so sad and hopeless. He fell at the tree trunk, his hands opening out to catch his failed body like in some Greek mythological illustration: he was the damned soul begging at the knee of some impossibly enormous male figure with gorgeous golden skin.

I needed something sharper and thinner to dig it out. Mr. Beast’s large hands came around the sides of the foot again. Wanting the splinter out, his monstrous fingernails clawed the rubbery skin, molesting the same area over and over. Too much skin began going to waste; old skin became new skin became young skin became flesh as the thorn-seeking inquisition came over and over again, digging harder and with more enthusiasm as each time the area got softer and softer. My seconds of focused inspection weren’t enough to solve the problem or remove the splinter, knowing those hands would just return again like curious demons, unwilling to wait any longer. The skin became darker. Clawing with such mindless ferocity, one hand turned to diffuse hatred at the other, tearing down two thick, fleshy lines. It was disturbing to watch. I had never seen any living thing in such a confused, terrifying state as this. It was then I began to wonder about my own well being. Would he turn on me as well? Suddenly I realized my predicament. I sat thinking, if I refuse Mr. Beast help, he could easily kill me there in the heavenly meadow where Mr. Beast crashed the hang glider. The meadow was heavenly. Also, it was quite romantic: with the violently red leaves that covered all of the ground below and obscured the sky above. Red leaves tumbled across the ground like the living inhabitants of this place where I sat alone with Mr. Beast. The professional who had helped me find Mr. Beast before could not stay or wait any longer for us. Given no further excuse, he began walking back to his car, carrying both the ladder and the stick. The wind died down, and all was silent for a moment. By then, I still hadn’t known much about Mr. Beast. This thought catalyzed a production of terrifying scenarios in my mind. My spilling blood could be caught by the red leaves and blown away by a strong passing wind.

It makes sense to not be able to do it!

It doesn't seem, maybe, like you can believe yourself that not being able to do it is not expected of you, because it seems that every person is in the middle of doing just that, that which you can't imagine yourself doing. But it's really true! You aren't at all strange! And it seeming so just is, not the doing of someone. It's that you are surrounded by people who can do this thing that you don't want (i want) or know how (i don't know how) to do that makes it seem normal and you obtuse. You always say, 'what's normal?' and you have to be saying that. Do it while knowing that no one can help you. Every single person: operate in ways that feel normal. Someone of earth: build a robot to keep my room clean.

Love Hotel

I was thinking, “Maybe this is why I can’t have meaningful relationships,” when I saw the woman’s face again. As I had learned to do, I jerked my head sharply, wincing until it purged itself from my imagination. A flinch like this would always make it disappear temporarily (nearly a full minute) as if being physically thrown from my head and onto the ground. But soon after, always, it came clawing up the side of the bed to return home to me, re-entering my imagination. Was it mine? I didn’t want it to belong to me. The face was someone I knew from school, someone who in person could conjure absolutely no desire in me. She was small, but big-boned and square-ish. Her face, large, was far from kind or young-looking (as the woman with such warm skin before me,) it was loose and frightening! Yet, I was aware of the truth. Something inside me was making it appear. In my waking mind, could I ever see beauty in such a horrid thing? In that decaying face that tormented me and came between me and the purring woman? Of course, art is art. In that way, nothing can’t be beautiful. Of course, that's so. But it should have never ever followed me into a warm place. In bed with the warm, peach-skinned woman whose lips always kiss wetly, I was lost in effortless thoughts.

of song or kiss or weeping

The voice that is in her is shaking. With head full
of blood, passionate, love, each piece of surrounding, love
her arms, how they rise of ease. Om
bare feet to dark grass, easy heart, the sruti box hums,
consumes edges, think of kissing, the voice
is a pleasant mirage hanging, an array of colorful curtains, transparencies, a
such dream. Anywhere or nowhere,
long with her, the sound of shaking winds out of the woman.
Any spine can be perfectly still, or
contort like jelly.

雪田先生

クマ：雪田先生はとてもきれいで、頭がいいだけど、私の先生だ。雪田先生の心の習い方を教えてください。その後、先生にラブレタを書く。

クモ：たいへんだね。こいは。でも、教えることができるよ。まずさいしょう、勉強しなくてはいけません。いい学生だったら、先生はあなたが好きになるかもしれないんだ。あなたのために、僕はいい贈り物のえらび方を教えてあげるよ。女じゃないんだけど、だいたい女の思いが分かると思う。あなたが買ったプレゼント、見せて。

クマ：うん。どうか。

クモ：女の人が好きかどうかよく分かるから、かえして、このお皿を。そうしたほうがいいと思うよ。そのあなたが持ている花も、かえして。悪い物だろ。いらないんだ。

クマ：分かった。じゃあ、何をしたらいい？

クモ：クラスで日本語の文を作りながら、思い出して。前に。

クマ：えっと、分からない。

クモ：かっこいいにならなきゃ！

Mr. Beast #3

Mr. Beast! He’s caught inside a tree, far down! I was the one to see it happen. On landing, he was flying too low, he tumbled into vast, shimmering redness. He is mangled now. His legs are over his head, tearing from the bottom. His arm, twisted wrong. His hand is broken in his glove! Poor Mr. Beast! His face gets so stuck between his legs and strings hanging down from the device, being bothered by nasty insects. Wet with each other, and their pointy legs stick into him. Mr. Beast’s throwing of his head over and over again becomes shocking, but the disgusting, eerie things want him too much to let go of his warm cheeks. He is helpless and alone now. Even from here, it’s obvious, the place where he entered the tree. It’s where you see a mangled, yellow hang glider caught in the middle of all the red. Everywhere shimmers red. That's where I imagine he is. Helpless. “The wind today is very good. Ideal for hang gliding,” the professional said as each of our necks fell over backwards to watch colorful triangles fly over us. He’ll be dead before long, I think. If, for instance, he were bitten by one of the venomous spiders. For instance, one is waiting there to feel a snag in its web. On the edge of sleep, this spider has the same dream again, that all spiders repeatedly have, a warm body pulls her two long teeth into itself, more, more in, getting warmer, more wet, more, more in. And then Mr. Beast will come crashing in through the red leaves, making a lot of racket, ruining the web and the dream, and then struggle around in his trap that he’s made of himself and scream and howl and be terrible. He’ll be dead before long, I say.

From the edge of the jump off point, looking into the distance where Mr. Beast disappeared to, the depth and openness of the chilly air recalls for me a time when I was brought to the Grand Canyon with my little sister. Dad had taken us, he had given us both train tickets. It was the first time that I had ever been on a train. The car in front of us was a breakfast car, I remember. When it began, I would be coming back and forth carrying a paper plate balancing muffins and grapes and so on. A white woman stood in front of me in line, once. It was because she had cut. She had cut in line in front of me and twisted her neck to sneer at me. That's why I remember her. When we arrived at the station, the Grand Canyon was just up the hill. We crossed a road where cars had stopped to let us pass, and climbed up 10 steps, then left 6 steps, and then right 9 steps. By construction of the land, the top was flat and easy to walk across. When I finally peered over the edge of the world and saw unfathomable space, my spirit flew out of me! far away! straight out in front of me! It went to touch the other side of the world, the far side of the canyon, through the dust, returning with it seconds later. In those moments, a gust of wind could have blown me into the canyon. I had become a bodhisattva all of the sudden and become corrupt again. It was all so quick. We walked a long ways away from the station, on the rim of it. Then rain came. The buses overfilled. The buses where chased by running people. Lightning came. Cold wind came. Wet, we hardened. Beneath pine tree branches, we waited like spiders for lights or motion on the road, but none came. After, it was a long time.

The wind forever tears leaves away from trees at the jumping off point in Nagano. Sitting in the backseat of the professional’s car, I am telling him where Mr. Beast crash-landed. We veer to the left of the road where it widens for a moment. We open and close our doors and are standing on the ground again, much lower, listening together for Mr. Beast.

Of course I hear him. Mr. Beast is not far. Walking toward the direction of the voice, the professional carries a ladder over his shoulder, and I carry a long wooden stick with a metal hook attached to one end. Finally, we arrive at a pile of clothes. Good! I think. Mr. Beast has freed himself! But I cannot celebrate with my body. The forest is meditating. In every direction, bright white light reaches in through the spaces between branches full of violently red leaves to pet our heads. Sitting nude on a branch, high up in the tree, Mr. Beast is silent. Soft wind tosses his hair. He doesn't know that I've come. At the base of the tree, we wait with our ladder and stick, unable to speak.

Halloween

On the morning of Halloween after waking, sitting at my computer, I did something awful! Something so, so terrible! Of course I’ve done it before in my life, but I was in grade school then when it happened. Of course I’ll tell you, reader. But to save the rest of my story, I can’t say yet.
By bike, I went to the annual performance arts festival at my university after having the yogurt and toast breakfast with Misui-san. We went together. I was full from breakfast, but still, walking through the food stands and the shouting, Misui-san bought each of us (first) a chocolate cookie thing, then a little pancake/beef sandwich, and then shish kabob sticks. We split up after watching the Jazz Club and an air-instrument (no instruments) band lip synch to a set songs for a giant, smirking audience.
I saw a parade that changed me just afterward at the festival. Forty hands coming from glittering green sleeves were ticking on so many drums and cowbells, and shaking full, rectangle tambourines up and down forever so fast. It was Mardigras. There were the king and queen, in giant, wedding-cake dresses and headdresses and holding staffs and carrying smiles, and spinning like bubbles. There were the almost naked half-bird girls dancing to mime each tiny tick of the 100 tiny hands’ beat (just as there are). I thought to myself, when this stops I wont know what to do. When it did, I felt good.
It had gotten dark. I rode home on my bike. From there, I could’ve ended up staying home, but I met Svienn in Asagaya, and then went to Roppongi to go to a live art/music/DJ dance party in a basement club for only 1000 yen. On our way to Roppongi, Halloween became more and more obvious. The foreigners were routy. The white-bald man we saw lifting his crutches up to the sky before later nearly fell into a moving train on its way out. Someone pulled him back. I didn’t know whether to feel glad or not. On the street outside of the station a Nigerian solicitor picked up our steps, ‘All you can drink! All you can watch! All you can touch!’ The place was magnificent. The gigantic Hills Plaza, built as a commune, has everything you need. We came upon a small shrine while looking for a place to drink my bottle of vodka off of the main street, 'Shall we bless our hands?' Svienn. We did. We didn't drink there. The club was underneath ground, and was kind and cozy and intimate, and dark. Giant projector images danced on the walls to glitch DJ music. The music was invigorating. While the place was still spacious, we watched the creation of an art piece on the wall done by a group of people. The hot, intelligent, independent art girl with a mustache drawn on her upper lip drew phrases in the spaces between black lines, ‘the pain necessary for growth.’ Admiring everything, I met Tomo, dressed like a gentleman. He had been living in San Francisco for 10 years and just returned to Tokyo in March. We both liked the idea of making friends. I met a tall white guy from Stratford-Upon-Avon, England; Shakespeare’s birthplace. He says there are so many right-wing American tourists, it’s like a red state. It’s the first place they go. He says he’s almost been to Washington. He was driving up the coast having sex with this yoga instructor and when she told him she had a boyfriend, he was in Oregon. ‘Two hours of crying and I was alright, but I didn’t have enough money to go on, so I went back to California.’ I thought I understood. I didn’t see him after that. Three hours pass and so much has happened. A rapper rapped in his crunchy voice, a three-piece wearing native American clothing and screaming and being two guys and one little, monstrous, terribly cute, screaming, wailing, chirping girl. The DJ music went on after that when I started receiving wine from the girl with green hair. She would dance close to me with a glass and then turn and hold it up to me and say in my ear, ‘White wine.’ I drank a little each time and smiled. In my head, I thought that I wouldn’t have minded it if she had drugged me and stole me away. Svienn, by the way, has been the coolest club partner there is. I look over at him and he’s looking forward at the video artwork with his upper body pumping forward ten centimeters and then back the same distance and hammering over and over and doing it so genuinely, this move, with such intelligence. I haven’t found a way to describe it. Anyway, when he notices I’m checking on him his eyes move to their corners on my side as if to say, I think, something like, ‘Cool, huh?’ The girl with the green hair moves away. Maybe I didn't show enough interest? She gets with a tall Japanese wizard. Svienn and I leave the club after seven hours of dancing. We leave the green haired girl and the wizard. Outside, there are a beautiful Japanese girl that says hi to me, there are angry foreigners that want to fight each other. Svienn and I sit waiting for the subway. On the subway car packed with drunk and tired 18 to 35, the first stop takes on an old fisherman with his net. He squeezes through the young girls, his short stature. On the next stop, his net is caught on someone who tries to get off! He’s fighting it with his strong old hands! To get the net off this girls purse who is leaving and the train doesn't know so it will leave! He rips his netting apart and frees the girl wearing sexy leggings. When I get back to my bike at Musashi-sakai station, the pale sun is rising. I scooped up the dew that had collapsed overnight on my bike seat.
Well that's it. Oh, that thing I was going to say. ...I can't say it! I'm sorry, reader.

Mr. Beast #2

Driving up a mountain, on a narrow road, wind pushes inside the car and lifts my hair! Is it ok? The feeling is good. Mr. Beast has his window down, but its only a little, I don't know why. The view looking out from the mountain to our right is beautiful. But it’s too big. It’s almost saddening how little I can put in my eyes at a time, seeing everything and only see a little of it. Like being spoken to but only recognizing a few words. Anyway, I feel calm. And wonderful, like a germ in a watercolor painting. The trees are changing color this season, and so we came to watch it. ‘Now is the best time to be here,’ one of the photographers said. Mr. Beast stops the car on the side road near a sign. I can’t read the sign but Mr. Beast does it for me, out loud. I nod and pretend to understand. We walk up a gravel path overlooking the crevice where two mountains meet. The shape of the land, all the lines and dimples and dots, it’s naked bodies. I think of my own. At the top of the dirt path is a little park! Mr. Beast has run ahead. Of course, he had found another bathroom. Mr. Beast had used every bathroom that we’d passed on our way up here, each time upon his return saying, ‘They’ve got very clean bathrooms.’ We take picture of each other near the yellow trees, trees with leaves aflame in red too. So beautiful. Unreal. We say stuff like that. Meanwhile, my eyes are sore. My pupils get closer and closer to collapsing. ‘It’s bright!’ I say to Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast was quiet. After that, I said nothing, and everywhere was silent. We got back into the car, shut the doors and continued climbing up the narrow road toward where we saw hang gliders taking off from higher up.

心の使い方

心の使い方を教えてください。

そうですねえ。それはむずかしいでしょう。初めからが一番かんたんと思います。では、もし、好きな女の人に会いたったら、手紙を書かなくては行けません。それに、ひるご飯に、クラスの間、この女の人のとなりに座ったほうがいいです。

その時、どうしたらいいですか？

その時、かのじょにしつもんを聞いたほうがいい。たといば、「どんな映画が好きですか？」とか「家族は何人ですか？」。その後、電話番語をあげます。あなたもかのじょのをもらいます。

それから？

さいごの事は、あなたの目で、しんせつでかのじょの目に入らなくては行けません。でも、入った時、音をしてはいけません。音をしたら、このきれいで、げんきで、おもしろくて、うれしくて、好きな女の人と結婚しては行けません。

覚えなかったら、まだ帰ってもいいですか？

覚えても、帰っては行けません。

気持ちが悪くなっている。。。

The Private Quarters of a Bald Magician

Here is my song for the upcoming 'I Know Alot About Magic' compilation cd!

you can go to here to hear it: www.myspace.com/davidplellbro

the song:

I saw my card slide from the deck, the man’s eyes had been trained in LA by a had-been actor.
I stole into his dressing room, after the act there was no one around to catch such a serious boy.

I wanna be a magician myself. A real magician.

When Mother came inside and saw me floating off the ground and how she screamed. Yeah, she screamed so high that I could hardly bear it.

‘What kind of monster are you, taking up the body of a little boy whose body won’t do much. What is this demon magic? Would you rather take my husband, surely he’s the better one to haunt.’

I let loose all of my tricks at once, the colors came all of a sudden vomiting from my sleeves the room filled with elephants monkeys and parakeets and my mother’s eyes got so sugary. Surely she became proud!

(something in nogawa park a few days ago)

A woman doesn't keep her diary on top of her pillow. It isn't neat like every other thing in her room, I imagine. So where does it go? In the wastebasket, I imagine seeing the binding of a book stretched by clumsily gathered papers (hundreds) sandwiched between covers. I walk over to the waste basket to investigate my hallucination - My hands are carefully lifting used tissues away like dead skin from someone's body. Beneath the tissues there are lots of things - crumpled receipts, old assignments, a plastic bread bag, empty pill packets, empty beer cans, empty deodorant, this is all typical. Near the bottom, after carefully emptying half of the waste bin, the hallucination occurs again. I see a corner of some think paper cover. From my crotch a surge runs upward, through my body like carbonation and fizzles over my eyes and in my ears. I throw the waste can over like a lever and the whole loot within sprawls the room, sliding across the tacky green tiles stained by dirty feet no doubt. But not everything has been thrown into the room. Something remains in the waste basket. At the bottom, a flat stone. There, at that moment, I heard a noise and had to escape the way I came in. Afraid that someone was coming, I couldn't clean up.

Mr. Beast #1

I went to a city where apples were being sold beneath colorful, striped awnings that flittered and snapped in the wind like carnivores. The shops came every 20 meters with the same signs, the same product, the same table with slices of each type of apple for customers to try. Incentive. Mr. Beast couldn’t get enough of them; standing in his hunched way, bound as if by defiant muscles into a rigid shape. He finished all of the green apple, snatching up one slice after another, then moved on to others once it disappeared. Watching him, it seemed to be he were always hauling some invisible weight behind him. When he moved forward, with his hands in his pockets, he moved as a refrigerator moves, awkward, as if not meant to. Sometimes his hands weren’t in his pockets. Then it was because they holding chopsticks and a bowl of rice below his chin, or holding an apple and a knife, quickly stashing things between his lips where they’d disappear. Mr. Beast loved to drive. When the bus from Tokyo dropped me off in Nagano prefecture, he was prompt and waiting, stopped in his car near the bus stop.

We had met once before.

We had stayed in the same little cabin on the base of Mt. Fuji one weekend. I had finished stowing away my luggage near my futon when I first met and began to fear Mr. Beast. He was sitting silently in a chair in the living room, gripping the ends of the armrests with his long, brutish fingers as though he were prepared to be tortured or put to death. His eyes seemed to reflect nothing, the way a dead person’s eyes do nothing. I sat down, across the low table opposite from him to look at a book I had brought from home, Dave Eggers. Mr. Beast made no reaction to the new company I made for him, he only continued to look (if you could call it looking) diagonally downwards into the ancient wooden table top between us. I couldn't read a single sentence. I had hallucinations of him lunging at me with a knife. I expected he hated me, resented me, would risk anything to destroy my life. Later, in bed, there were more hallucinations. He would be waiting downstairs for everyone to fall asleep and then climb up, one step at a time, each thump heard only to me, and then he would step over the two men sleeping near me, and, careful not to wake them up, he would choke me to death with his huge hands and there would be nothing more to hear than the hush sound of a sleeping bag being dragged across the floor and into the forest. Though I was prepared and waited for him, he never came up the stairs to kill me. The next day everyone went to the tennis courts down the road. A wonderfully kind old couple gave me a small tennis lesson wherein after they tossed a ball at me I would count ‘ONE, TWO, YAMA!’ and hit the ball over their heads, toward Mt. Fuji. But for most of the time I sat on the sideline, on a bench watching them play together. Watching Mr. Beast play. He was magnificent! His arms could hardly bend past a 90-degree angle yet his power and precision with a tennis racket was supernatural. His body moved as if thawing and yet he was a fabulous player. That night, I imagined Mr. Beast climbing the stairs again; this time carrying a tennis racket to bludgeon me and to then stomp my skull like a carton, and then, to mash the rest of me up with his stony fists. To my pleasure, the next morning, I was alive and it was a beautiful day.

Breakfast

As soon as I was awake, I had forgotten my dream.


“Good.”

“Why ‘good?”

“It was just a dream.”

“It could have been interesting. It could’ve been something I’d have wanted to write about.”

“Like what?”

“There was something surprising in it… but I can only almost remember.”

“Have you remembered many dreams?”

“Of course.”

“How many?”

“Maybe a hundred.”

“How many pieces of toast do you want?”

“Just one. I get stomachaches when I eat this early. What a treat, the sun hasn't even eaten yet.”

“The Sun? When do you think that happens?”

“When it falls on the ground."

"Well what, then?

"Plants and people and everything. Imagine how big things would get if the Sun weren’t constantly eating away at them, little by little, like a gentle acid on growing mold, or spontaneous wind on a spider-web.”

“Here’s your bread. I think you’re making this up.”

“Look at your cheeks, you were at the dog park, reading on a bench all yesterday, weren’t you? I met you there at sunset and we talked about our studies until the Sun took back its tentacles, off from our planet, and we got growing again. Couldn’t you tell?”

“That’s just a sun burn. The sun isn’t eating anything. It can’t. All it’s doing is exploding out far away and its energies go everywhere, not just here. Do you disagree with that? That the sun’s rays shoot off in all directions?”

“They go all over, 360 degrees.”

“What about where there is nothing but space? What is the point in sending out a hand where there isn’t anything if you want something to eat?”

“We have to think that, having only two hands. It’s sad, we have to be so precise. It matters to us because to catch a fly we have to be careful not to miss it. Remember that couple we saw?”

“In the bathroom. We saw them sneak in together from that bench, we waited to see if something would happen. Ten minutes later, they came back out, the guy first, and then one after the other they saw us watching them in the distance. They shrieked and ran off laughing! I couldn’t help but laugh too, even though it was awful. If they hadn’t run off laughing, I may have felt upset. But because they did, it was sort of cute.”

“It had to have been planned. Not well planned, but do you remember that silly signal the boy made when he came out of the stall after looking around?”

“Yeah! How funny! Like a ‘Ha!’, and then the girl crept out looking careful too, it was then they both saw us.”

“The sun eats everywhere because it has to, because it cant decide to explode in just one direction. That boy and that girl are catching flies, hiding in ditches, wearing dark clothes, seeking out bridges to go under, lying in wet grass, imitating sleep. Probably, they’re spending all their free time imagining themselves without clothes together, soapy-bodied, floating in hot water, or maybe dry, someplace warm- someplace ridiculous; inside an old train car parked at a historic platform that ceased use, in the cabin of a docked submarine, in the back seat of a limo driven by a robot. But they have to choose always, and plan even, to find privacy, which they want, somewhere, and in a bathroom of all of the dirtiest, infamous places to be alone in... They aren't at all like the sun, who eats everything at once.”

“How fun! It doesn’t seem that sad to me. So what if you’re never in the sun? You don’t get eaten, right?”

“Yeah, that must be right.”

“Hm.”

On this day Lovers prevailed!

The kids outside sound like cats. Those have to be cats. Or are they kids...

the elbows of administrators and my plan to stay

I decided to keep it up. The way I speak in Japanese is idiotic! It’s got to be! The things I say are all in the wrong tenses. And who am I talking about or even to? I forget to use the correct particle in a room with no one else but who I’m talking to and its confusing people. If I can help it, I shouldn't leave Japan in November. Not with knowing that I’ll just have to come back again later, when things have become harder, more inconvenient, more expensive, more distracted. Of course I want this! How sexy bilingualism is! My skin is glittery sometimes here. On either side of my nose its sometimes brittle like a butterfly’s wing is. Snap-able. I have thought of home and thought, it’s hard to be away for so long. I love the soil at Mom’s house. The carpet. I’ll be back so soon. And I should do this. It’s this or that. That. That school in the middle of nowhere that, for now, is culturing the new flu. But that’s not my biggest concern there. I don’t want to drive all that way in no where again yet. I can never forget the smell of the warm summer air as long as I live. Is it the same anywhere? Today, on campus, lying on that vast grass garden of the flat would-be golf course, little kids were riding their little bikes all over the place. Bikes so little that they didn’t need real, rubber tires. Their drivers, tiny, are toys themselves and so their wheels can be plastic. Their game of rock, paper, scissors can be called something else because they speak this new language I’m learning. ( ????, ???, ????! –those little kids playing the game). I really enjoy the thought of understanding something I never would understand otherwise, unless I tried so hard and spent a lot of time. It isn’t long, really, even. I would write stories in English here, I would compose songs and get a broken heart and write good and then bring all that stuff back to the United States with me and my new cool trick I’ll have learned if I stay. Anyway, I put it into motion. I want to stay and take advantage of the adventure that’s begun so easily. One other thing, Mom. In 1955, Japan became so rich. The economy went flying upward. Before then, people here used to eat lots of rice, vegetables, some fish moderately, and meat rarely. Since then, food culture here has become internationalized. Western breakfast is popular. Bread with jam and butter. A banana (Yum!). What this is all for is… people eat lots of meat here. Here, it’s almost impossible to eat only vegetables unless you come up with some plan, make connections, and cook yourself. Protein is something we've talked a lot about… And hey! I had forgotten about that milk thing in America! That incident where for five years they were injecting cows with a hormone that they didn't realize affected the growth of kids. I was part of that generation of kids! I wonder what if I have any unrealized abilities. Super strength, or x-ray vision. I hope things are well, I love you.

-David

The arrival of a dangerous Typhoon

From your bed, you can hear it rain. Now is the same as it has been for four days; you walk into class 2 minutes late with a chilly, wet head and soaking clothes like you were standing in a shower, the windows are all blurry, that sound is always there, every leafy thing outside is tremoring. Some people have become real worried. A typhoon has been meant to come. The rain has made my bike wet, my notebooks have gotten wet. The bikes at school, parked in their rows of hundreds of them, looking like such junk, all get wet. Tonight it’s here, the enormous typhoon is outside the window and I can hear all the rain hitting from bed. I’ve heard things about it (the typhoon), like that it roughed up Thailand and flooded everything and killed people. It's out there now, wanting to flood my pretty, narrow neighborhood, my tidy ant-farm that I live in. The ambulance is screaming tonight, like every other night, with that loud-speaker-voice that is saying something like, “This is an ambulance, please stop your cars and let us through, we are an ambulance.” Eventually people do pull their cars over and people beneath umbrellas do stop crossing the street so it can get by. The ambulance’s whine sinks away and goes beneath the sound of 10 lb. rain carried down onto the cobblestone, the whistle of wind, and the thud of potted-plants falling over. My eyes have barely opened from coming out of sleep, it isn’t enough to be afraid. There is only that terror, and I am nowhere yet.
The morning comes and I wake up at 9:20, but, as always, it is a small failure. My alarms are set at 7:50, 8:20, 8:30 8:50, they’re scattered like proximity mines that I always manage to disarm. I need to find a better way to trick myself. To have myself believe that there is some emergency, that “GET UP NOW!” or else. I climbed out of bed and put on my pants that I wore the other day and picked a shirt from a hanger in my temp. closet, the same as in the basement of the house in Spokane, Andrea’s. I am dressed now, and I walk through the laundry room and into the living room and there’s a conversation at the table. Renato has come again for an interview at Konami, except that in Japan they don’t just give you an interview, they have these pre-interview seminars where hopefuls submit lots of documents and answer questions and the like, and then after that, out of the hundred applicants maybe ten or twenty are picked. Renato’s Konami pre-interview seminar is today at 2:00. Okaasan is there at the table with Renato and they’re talking. I’ve stepped into something. Hana-chan (this may be the first ever mention of Hana-chan in this blog), the cat, is lying next to my feet. What I’ve stepped in didn’t come from Hana-chan. White, warm Sunrays are coming in through the glass slider-door to the little garden. Looking from Hana-chan to the outside, the sky drops like a curtain into my vision. Unbelievably blue. I think of machines flying through it infallibly, making straight white lines. The leaved things are still shaking around in spurts. The wind is still here. It’s sweeping away every speck of cloud from up there.
I get on my bike, then I'm at school, gliding into the bike parking lot that's to the left of the building where I have my class. All the bikes in the lot, save a few small clusters, lie on their sides on the ground. Almost every one, vandalized. Junk again. The men who tidy up the bike lot aren’t righting the bikes, they’re not around like they usually are: standing together observing the students or formally spacing each bike in the lot. It's a diligent job. They must have given up against the wind. I don't know where they go. How sparse the bikes are today, there are less than usual. The trains stopped running this morning. The Chuo for sure has stopped running. The sky is swallowing me as I look up into it. It is fully over the top of me. BLUE. I’d like to bring it closer, looking so kind. After class, Rachel fights me on the neat grass lawn, the vast one, with trees placed conveniently for shade, with cicada skins, shells, like ghosts!, lying here and there to trick you, scare you, fascinate you, make interesting presents for your friends who like bugs. The Sun feels warm. Before the lemonade can that I bought empties, I take the last sip of all pulp and, while lowering my head again after its all down, a tiny Japanese kid stumbles by in a blue jumpsuit saying some strange words, sucking on his hands, not looking where he’s going.

Journal Practice 2

今日はくもりです。雨がふります．今、寒くて、くもと雨がある．私の日本語のじゅぎょうは毎日十時十分から、十二時四十分までです。時々そのクラスだけがあるけど、今日は後でほかのクラスがあった．このクラスはたいていとてもつまらないです．四時間です！午前はたいてい家でテレビですもうを見ながら、しゅくだいをします。それから、さらをあらって、行きます．学校に行きますね．そうですね。あっ！草間山にメールをまだおくりません！いいね．メールを送りました。明日、吉祥寺でラメンを食べて見ようと思います。アメリカのラメンと日本のラメンはぜんぜんちがいます．アメリカより日本はおいしいですよ。おなかがすいた時、たいていあまい食べ物を食べにいきます．たといば、ケーキとかアイスクリームとかチョコラトでしょう．でも、それで、おなかが痛くなります．安い食べ物を食べた時、おなかが痛いでしょう．させぼはおいしかった．友だちと行って、アボカドバーガーを食べて、お酒をのみました．後はとてもつかれたんだ．

Practice Journal

明日は友だちが新宿に行っている間、私は家にいる．多分、おふろに入いったり、食事を作ったり、こえんでさんぽうしたりする。この本、このさっか、エッガルズ、とても面白くて、よく読みたいけど、最近は少しいそがしくて、よく読めない．日本人の友だちを作りたいので、日本語が上手になりたい．たといば、『こんにちは！もう食べましたか．じゃ、一緒に上野でよるご飯を食べに行きませんか．ほんとにおいしいでしょう！このレストランはピザを作っています。りょうりするの人はイタリアから来ました！だから、このピザはとてもおいしかったよ！友だちをつれって来てください。先週の週末は上野に初めて行きました。三人の友だちと電車に乗って．。。しかし、ひるご飯を食べに行きませんでした。美術館ではたくさん古い事を見ました．たといば、この大きいかおの近くインドから来ましたの人のしゃしんを取りました．今、コンピューターを売っています。でも、コンピューターを打つのが好きだと思います。電車は便利ですね！いいえ！不便です！トイレは大きいですね！行きたいです。もちろん。

Musashi-Koganei and Kids

Once I went the other way of Musashi-Sakai station. Musashi-sakai is on the west side of Tokyo, and so when I go out, I’m always going east. Rachel found this park in Musashi-Koganei that was supposed to be nice. We had a day off of school on Thursday and there would be another international student retreat, where they would be playing yard games at the moment we were standing on the train to Musashi-Koganei. Because of the day-off, the park was full of kids and parents. Not at first. At first it was just trees and lots of shade and an old train platform and more long and dead grass, but past a few bathrooms, past the empty tents and the empty stage with just a latter on it, and past the place where I discovered how inhuman Rachel is with how high she can kick her legs, and then past where we lay down in the grass and ate her little sushi’s. We saw some playground stuff with kids on it. Then we saw a bigger, more complex hill of slides and climbing holes and things and we wanted to go on it and took pictures, and in that same spot we finally uncovered that this park was a huge fun party for kids! Hundred of devices built for fun! Kids sliding through the air clutching two parallel rope swings, getting back on again and again and again! How fun! Even a baby wants to! The babies here understand. The babies point upward to the height tabs, wanting it, whatever it is, wanting to jump up and try to slap it like the bigger kids and the two white foreigners who are adults and who are taking pictures of babies because they are so cute! Their mothers are cute! The way they interact! Rachel lights a cigarette. It’s funny, we thought nothing of it at the time. We thought it was fine because there were no ‘No Smoking’ signs on the road in the park, so it was probably ok. But, in hindsight, I think that the campaign against public smoking that happened included in its argument that cigarettes are held at eye-level with children and that children were being burned. At present, here we are at a children’s park play area, burning the end of a cigarette and trying to kick the highest point of the sign that doesn't say “No Smoking." She kicks a plastic water bottle off my shoulder in a dress. An ambulance comes into the play area whining and red and drives almost past us. Just around the corner, you can see the tops of little people’s heads stopped and looking at something, who were always there waiting for the ambulance to come with their heads poked just over the hill for us to see but we haven’t noticed until now. The ambulance parks with it’s top half visible to us. People are running under the hill where we can’t see what has happened. Adults wander, kids sprint to see what happened to who and we are watching from afar. Rachel’s cigarette is burning up and shriveling and she's squinting. Another ambulance comes. We walk on a little, away from the ambulances, away from the other side, the giant grass/stone-step sled hill that kids are still sliding all the way down, and we walk to some flowers. We wonder about going in them- there’s a little bar between us, all the way around. And the bees are working in there.


(Photo Credit for Rachel M. D.)

Shinjuku (Part 2)

Shinjuku is big. At first I wasn’t sure that it was because all the stations, from the inside, look just the same. They all have the same white and something tiles, the same color-coded routes hung from the ceiling (Chuo Line, Yamanote Line, these are mine that I use: Orange and Green), the same little shops selling stuff, coffee shops, the same beeping of the gates where people swipe their wallets across that green circle to get into the station. It’s convenient having that card. It’s in my wallet too. I put money on it when I have to, and just slide my wallet to come in and get out, and there’s never any stopping ever required. Most people use them. In Shinjuku, we’re all still here, the same party coming from Tokyo station: Rachel, Nick, and myself. All of us are so thirsty, but we don't tell that to each other until later. The station is enormous! It’s 'the largest station in Japan!' is what someone told me. We want, are on the streets now, to find the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building for a reason we know. It’s why we are going. The reason. Underground again, we’ve turned upside-down somewhere, we’re jogging on horizontal escalators, hurrying, Where is it! From the street... It’s gigantic! It’s god holding two wrecking balls on top of palms on top of arms reached skyward. Where will they come down?
This is the Shinra Building from Final Fantasy VII. We walk into the all-concrete courtyard, a giant slanted half circle with benches on the aloof edges. We survey the cleanness, the fountain at the base, where a disc would lock into a Discman. There are signs that we follow into the underneath of concrete, towards the glass entrance of the Building. The signs are the same as what we thought. We celebrate without celebrating. We follow them into a door and into a line of people. The elevator that we're waiting for arrives when it comes and opens and empties. It’s empty! We will be in there next.
We’re going to die in here. It’s so stupid! It was irresponsible to have come here… Squished into the corners of the gold, mirrored elevator, it reminds it’s customers of the inside of a crumpled-gold foil space capsule. We’re going up. 10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27… 37,38,39,40… We’re going to die in here! It’s become so hot. We have not water. We are meeting the atmosphere. I sweat. There are only hushed voices. I wipe my forehead like an egg timer because there isn’t room to open my arms... 43,44,45. We are where it's going. The Observation Tower. Cool air rushes in when the doors open… wait, no. Not at all. Cool air only waits lazily as we walk out of the elevator. We can breath well again. Around the restaurant and souveneer shop, we see the metropolis before seeing the windows. 'This building is Shinra.' The city spreads every way forever and fog covers up the rest of the world. 'I’m here, this high in the air,' I’m telling myself. The sun is setting over a huge metal mess. It’s so well organized. It’s so complex. The Sun seems easy. The Sun is turning red, surrounding is pink and purple, some yellow, some blue. I’m in Japan. This is anime. This is Shinra.
At places like these, I would feel here, or I would feel elsewhere, observing myself observing massiveness. Knowing it, I want to become primal to get out of my head. I always pick a vowel, and a consonant, I always pick A, I always like W… No, I decide that language won't help this at all. Thinking isn't touching. I have to feel things. I imagine my feet: they're holding my body up on the 45th floor of the Government Building. 'It's real.' It begins to feel real.

Day Trip to Tokyo (Part 1)

After school, we get together on the slant of the popular grass mound. To watch the on-campus dormitory presentations- a group that's large enough to fill a dormitory with themselves and their stuff stands in crane-ish formation on top, headed by white dudes in costumes. These guys are taking turns to walk forward, destroy their own costumes in some slap-stick comical way, and then introduce themselves (and continue being surprising or comical) screaming in Japanese. I know the fat American guy inside the cardboard ballot box, he, the loud, sloppy, terrible stereotypical American student, doesn’t speak Japanese. In Japanese 2, he curses it every moment he’s trying, every moment he drowns out the voices of everyone with his jabbing, wet, forceful pronunciation, it’s like he’s being dunked in water and popping up to gasp and deflate of his terrible, wet voice. I know this guy. He doesn’t know shit! Yet, he’s doing it, introducing himself. He’s regurgitating what he’s been told to regurgitate. After a rant, he backs up the hill, back into formation.
Nick and Rachel are watching with me. Today we’re going to the Imperial Palace. Soon, it’s over, the boys, white dudes and all, run away screaming and flailing. We leave the thing and walk to the bus stop, up the long runway entrance road to the college (which used to be an actual runway for planes before the college). The bus comes and gets us, we go into the ear and I pay my coins (210 yen) 1 (100), 2 (200), 3 (210)! GREEN. We sit in the back while the bus moves to Musashi-sakai and I worry about my bike. I left it unlocked. There’s a little key that you’re supposed to pull out of it after parking so that the spokes are blocked by a metal loop. All bikes have this. This morning though, I came crashing into the parking lot late. Trying to shove my bike between others, parked bikes starting falling over to the left of mine. Dominoes! Grabbing the furthest fallen bike in fall, I stopped the chain. And in all this embarrassment (there’s more that I won’t go into), after it was resolved I forgot to take my key with me. We arrive at Musashi-sakai and I call my host mom to ask what she thinks. She says it should be ok and I’m relieved. I didn’t want to go back for it, the Imperial palace closes at 4pm! (it’s 1:30) and the center of Tokyo is about 30 minutes away by train.
We get on the train together. Watching the outside- the buildings, so massive and decorated and numerous, mostly decorated, like they’re wearing armor. Everywhere. So many buildings. Watching the river the runs along this railway, my stomach is getting sick looking at it. I look away, at the white guy opposite of me in the train. Always surrounded by Japanese people. He’s probably not here for long because he’s giving me that look like, ‘hey, I bet you speak English, let’s discuss something.’ Which is a thought I have had numerous times since being here. But somehow I manage to feel in power. ‘I’m not here to baby you! Foreigner!’ I manage to politely think at him. We get off the train into Tokyo station where there are so many businessmen. Salary men. They’ve been described elsewhere, you probably know them though, if you’ve ever thought of Tokyo. But if the term is strange, here’s my perception of them: They wear nice clothes, work overtime in them, drink heavily in them after work, are exhausted, think of love hotels, think of boating, think of drinking heavily, work often, more often than anything, sleep while standing in the train across town. Seem sad. Seem miserable.
Nick, Rachel and I cross the salary men, who are all stopped before the end of the shade like vampires, and stop at the edge of the crosswalk. The buildings here are gods. So heavy. The Earth can’t hold them. How can it? There are cranes in the middle of them, building them higher and higher. We’re walking under them, unnoticed by them, toward the green. Outside the imperial palace there is a gang of policemen at every entrance. We avoid them, trying to find the right entrance but then have to ask, time is running out, the place will close, we’ve come a long way. The closest guy in a uniform, who has been watching us so cautiously as we approach, says, ‘This is a private entrance, the public entrance is back where you came from.’ ‘Thanks’ I think we say. We’re running back to where we came from past foreigners who aren’t running. ‘What fools!’ I manage to gain power again. ‘This isn’t America! Where running is uncool! This is Japan, everyone does this! This makes more sense to do! Jesus! Run!’ We get tired at the bridge and cross it walking. We cross the bridge looking at the Queen of England’s swan, floating in the giant mote. We get inside and go under an old metal/wood gate. I know its old, the metal looks like wood! Or is it wood? It’s cool. It’s big, that’s why. We get a free ticket from the kiosk and begin our walk inside the walls of the Imperial Palace. After turning a handful of times and walking for a while past neat things, we come across something unthinkable. It’s unthinkable that this exists in life. An expanse. Of flat, green grass, cropped hugely into an organic shape, round. It’s like a cell from god’s eye. Forever, there is green grass. And above, everywhere above, thousands of dragonflies. I feel here, but it's hard to believe. It’s really beautiful. And here people some people are sleeping on the grass, one man’s journal lies open while he does tai chi beneath a tree. Further up, a little girl roars into the air, surrounded by grass. Her dad watches from ten feet behind, crouching. The imperial palace will close soon. We walk around, posing for pictures that we take, enjoying the green, enjoying the contrast of the vast garden we are in and the machine-ish horizon, with the massive armored buildings that are being built higher by cranes from their centers jaggedly discomforting the sky. But the sky is blue and beautiful. The sun is getting emotional. It’s time for us to leave; there’s something else we want to see today. We walk back to Tokyo station.

Saw a crow feather.

I want to remember something about being small.

I am walking on top of a small plain of dark soil near the cafeteria (every flat surface is geometric, an aesthetic treat for crows) beneath the reaches of heavy trees. Here, there is something I’ve touched before, at one time, a thing exactly like this, that’s below me now, was in my small hands, spun by my treaded fingertips. A black feather- pressed down into wet dirt with it’s white stem, a bone, curving up, praying without a sound or movement. No song. The tiny black lashes which make it up... once in my fingers. 'Little by little,' Little Fist, pulling up the lashes again. Little Fist, holding the white stem with its messy, mangled black lashes (like they'd just woken up in a scary place), pulled upward so hard to make them pretty. I would find the last black lash sometime later stuck on my shirt sleeve. The spine became alone, became an unimportant piece of something. Something not necessarily unfixable, but uncared for, less, unthought of. The feather, whole, how pretty. But, the stem, like plastic, probably garbage, probably someone’s litter. Terrible, ugly. How strange- while playing, while petting and twirling a feather, I never once thought the feather, a crow.

Kichijoji festival/Dancing with Strangers

Today was a festival. I don't know exactly what it was. But what it was, was those robes everybody was wearing, those thin blue cloaks with some kanji printed on the back like a team name. Like everyone had the same last name. It was all those hundreds of people with the cloaks lifting the same big gold throne on their shoulders and yelling and choppily walking, dancing down the street together, and somewhere else there were taiko drums, I felt it on my skin. That vision of their arms… Those flailing arms! Banging those two thick sticks on the center drum, making it loud! The flute, the chime, the simple hit, hit, hit, hit, hit, hit, hit, hit behind it. So consistent. It was beautiful. I’m in the back row, watching the arms of men flail like crazy making sounds of tension, taking turns keeping the drum going, I am smiling like crazy and drinking my can of beer I have bought. It was those same people, in the cloaks, smashing sticks into drums, that are wearing small pants. If they were men, they might have been wearing no pants at all, just one thick, white rope. Babies were wearing this white rope, blowing whistles, running around, others chased them with smiles. Above us, lots and lots of those red paper lights hung on wires along both sides of our narrow streets. The exciting streets. We get another beer. More beer. The police eye us, us sitting, us speaking, us sipping, eating a small sandwich at night when the festival has wound down.
At the park in Kichijoji, we are drunk. We are thinking in our heads of cuddling with each other somewhere but know there's nowhere. We’re sitting, facing the water. Behind us, that guy is still playing guitar and singing. We want to dance! There is a Japanese girl dancing there alone! We get up and act silly in front of the music player. His voice is so hard and broken and so persistent. Like someone always driving their car with one tire missing. It is unbelievably silly. We are (some of us) not so drunk. More drunk Japanese strangers join! We’re dancing around, laughing at everything. Everything is funny. The music is funny. The dancing is funny. The people are silly. We are silly. We speak some Japanese. They speak some English. They tease us. They want our girls. But they won't. It is so nice.

ICU Health Examination

You talk to the guy in the hall to get the cup. The one in the lab coat. When you see him, his arms are filled-up (full with clip boards and one long stack of white cups, hugging all inside his elbows), he pulls one cup part-way out for you and then you pinch the rim and hoist it out. It’s the cup that was there at that wedding you were at. That white, thick paper-cup that was waiting in numbers at the table with pink juice and bubbles in it. This cup you have is empty. You know what to do with this cup.
Today is a health examination for all the new students at ICU. If you look into the big room where most of the testing is being done, you see all the stations. They will take your height, your sight, take your pressure, your blood, your hearing, and lastly, Station #9, a woman will wait behind a curtain for you. But for now, you aren’t even okay to get in line yet. You know what this cup is for.
The cup is for the woman at station #1, which is just in front of both bathrooms. You are there, in the full bathroom. Facing the urinal, putting your penis half-way into the cup, you pee a little into the cup. They just want a little! Outside of the bathroom, the line is an accordion of co-ed kids holding open Dixie cups of their own piss. In the front of the line, Lady #1, in a mask and gloves, dips a pH stick down through your pee and lays the stick across the top of the cup. Looking into your cup, it’s obvious that your pee isn’t as dark as the guy who is just ahead of you. You become proud. Your pee is in Lady #1’s hands briefly and she drags the stick through, lays it on top, writes down numbers. (The stick is green, which, universally, is good. Right? Green means go.) You take your form that she has written something on that has your name printed on it and take it to the big room with you, where the other number stations are busy processing the perpetual line through. After having your height taken by this cute machine that comes down from the sky and gently pats you on the top of your head once before climbing back up to its starting point, you are ready for the musical chairs! You’re actually still in line. But now the line is a snaking chair trail where you scoot one or two chairs forward every time someone gets up at the front. At the front, you’re asked to sit down by one of the two people doing the eye check. You look in at little ‘U’s and tell them where the opening is, for instance, up, down, left, or right. For this ‘U,’ you say ‘up.’ If the ‘U’ actually opens the direction that you think you see it open as they get smaller and smaller, you get proud. Next, your blood pressure is taken by a woman in a mask. “When did you eat breakfast?” “I had a little lunch, a little rice” “…When did you have that?” “An hour ago, is that okay? I didn’t know we weren’t supposed to eat anything.” “It’s okay.” There is no winning here, just sitting and being squeezed by this arm thing. Next, a long line again. People have seen this coming. This is the one that hurts. People think about past experiences that they’ve had. Peoples’ eyes are glassy. At the front of this line, two women get blood from your arms with needles. They want three vials of it! Once there, you sit down and they shake the vials in one hand to kindly show you how much. It’s a wrist rotation, not a swinging, not involving the elbow or shoulder, their hands roll back and forth. Your arm is down. Belly up. It’s soon. Something sharp will poke you! Aa--- She is the best you’ve had. She is fantastic. You want to tell people about her. You need to sit down now, with the others who have bandaids, and apply pressure to your hole for 5 minutes. In 2 minutes, they’ll ask for you at #8, across the hall. They’ll get you, bring you across the hall. #8 is the listening thing. Press the button with the rhythm of the quiet beeps. Tch-tch-tch. Tch---tch---tch. You get better as the sounds get a little higher. You get your form back from her after she’s written on it. Your form is almost full of numbers in boxes you cant read the labels for. You don't even have an idea of your own height or weight because you were raised counting inches, feet, lbs. You're clueless! It’s ok. It probably hasn't changed a lot. Your weight. Your height. 145lbs. 5’11’’. The woman behind the curtain labeled #9 calls people in. She’s wearing a mask. You think that she wants to test your genitals, to make you cough. You listen to see if people are coughing in there. You walk in through the curtain when it’s your turn. She asks you questions in English because you didn’t try to act like you could understand Japanese like you did before with the blood pressure woman. With English, she's blessing you like some adorable spirit-woman. She wears a stethoscope. It’s about to happen, something wonderful. The connection proved to be possible between humans that makes your rib cage feel like melting mint. She asks sincerely, closely, behind thin glasses, gazing kindly, through a surgical mask, “May I listen to the sound of your heart?” "...Yes." She softly presses on my chest, through my shirt, on four separate inches of me, listening through those tubes. I feel like peppermint. The corners of my lips are uncontrollable.

Akihabara/Meeting Alex

In the morning, I get up. Renato is ready to go. Wearing that one suit that he wears to his meetings with people. It’s something I am beginning to notice in Japan. People often wear the same clothes, generally have one nice outfit. Which is lucky for me, because I only brought one with me. I walk out of my bedroom, through the laundry room, into the house. The living room is asleep beneath a blanket of cool, pale light. It’s let in by the sliding doors, it’s coming through the transparent curtains. Renato talks with me at the table while I eat the morning yogurt (Okaasan makes this yogurt herself, I don't know what it’s made of, it’s bland until you put in honey and bananas). I have put the honey into the yogurt, laying it out in a spiral, the way I store the garden hose below the window outside of my house in Spokane. I have sliced the banana into inch-fat circles. I have an inch-fat banana circle impaled on the tip of my spoon. We need to walk to the station soon, we need to get there by 10:00. The time now is 9:30. The station is about 15 minutes away. We’ve walked there before together. Yesterday. But when the phone rings and speaks, the plan changes, and now Okaasan and Otoosan are coming back from their tennis game, they’re going to drop us off at Musashi Sakai station. The door knocks. It gets open. There they are, with their visors. No rackets though. I’m not finished eating. I finish quickly. Wash dish quick. Brush teeth quick. I get in the back seat saying, sorry sorry sorry sorry. And then Musashi Sakai is there again; a building that I have seen on the LIFE game board. I know that once I’ve held this place in my hand, upside-down. Renato and I walk through the maze of up stairs, down stairs, lefts and rights, stairs that go up and down, and then we get to the platform. I have put 2000 yen more on my Suica, my train pass, just to be sure. The train hisses politely coming in. Something becomes airtight somewhere. That sound is there. The doors open and in twenty seconds we are leaving Musashi Sakai, standing on the train toward Akihabara, Electric City. But it wont be electric city in the morning. It’s too hot and too bright. It is hot again. We’re going to meet Renato’s Welsh friend from older school days in England or Scotland. We meet him outside the main exit of Akihabara station. This is Alex. Short dark hair. Fair skin. Some eyes above his white dress shirt. His eyes are blue. His cheeks are red despite his fairness, like he’s cold. Like he’s got something in there. Our goal is to sell back Alex’s little laptop computer because he just got one for free. Now he’s got four and doesn't need all of them. “My apartment looks like the bloody Batcave!” (he said bloody, right? I saw Boondock Saints!) So we go around in the heat, back and forth, in and out of computer stores. They are more like aisles, the stores. Akihabara is a place where tiny electronics sellers have tiny stores all over at every turn on both sides of the street and up ontop of those stores and on top of those stores, more and more stores. You can buy all kinds of cheap (and expensive) junk here. Renato pulls a little device that beeps when you whistle (so you can't lose your keys) off its stem while Alex watches another computer guy frisk his tiny laptop. There’s a little squeeze whistle that comes with it too, so if you can’t whistle yourself, here you go, use this thing, the squeeze whistle. The guy frisking Alex’s computer now is a lean bean computer nerd. He’s offering 4000 yen for the computer, about 40 dollars. Our offers so far have been: 100 yen ($1), redirected, redirected, 0 yen ($0), and now, this. This is good enough. Renato has been having to help. Alex has lived here for four years but can’t really speak Japanese, “What is he saying?” to Renato. Alex works as an English teacher for something called Gabba. Anyway, the guy wants Renato’s information, why? I don't know, it’s not his computer, but he insists. He says he’ll need 40 minutes for the inspection. We go to the ‘Excelsior’ Café (which seems silly to me, the name) to get some lunch. A potato salad and tomato and some other meat sandwich is what I buy for 350 yen. Alex has, along the way, along our long walks around into old video game cartridge stores and action figures collectable places, some really cool stuff has been seen this morning, but it’s also hot, it’s tiring. But Alex. He's bought a Transformers action toy and opens it up at Excelsior café at the table. Renato and Alex and turning this ice cream truck into two robot-killing robots. “They’re supposed to be twins.” In the show, they speak with ebonics, which Alex says became controversial, but shouldn't have. Renato has a meeting soon, so he’ll be leaving. It’s 2:00. Renato, Alex, and I walk back to Akihabara Station with one less computer and one more action figure and say our goodbyes. I am alone on the railway after Renato gets off in Shibuya or somewhere. Next: Musashi Sakai, is what it says on the screens in the train.

Friends/Shibuya

I am walking away from the house and heat is in the air, trying to get into my body. The sweatshirt, which is a lump in my backpack (which Okaasan said wouldn't be necessary to bring because today it will be hot all day and night) is collecting warmth and handing it off as sweat onto my back. Renato and I are walking the 15 minutes to Musashi Sakai station from Kusamasan’s house, we’ve just started. We turn onto a main street and balanced down our side’s narrow sidewalk, pushing against the fence to let bicyclist by. My fingernails have become very long. Maybe the shape of them makes it hard to fingerpick my guitar, maybe the long, flat sides that cling to the strings are the reason that my having finger-picking finger nails makes finger picking much more difficult. On the corner is a 100 yen store. It’s fine with Renato if we go in to the 100 yen store so I can buy some fingernail clippers. So we do, and I do (though yet, I haven’t used them, I will use them now… I feel better). Renato is British sounding. Though he was born in Peru, he lived in England for 8 years, before immigrating here. He is the eight years former exchange student of the Kusamas, and has been living in Kyoto for five years getting a sociology degree at Kyoto University; he is very, very good at the Japanese language. And at languages in general, I suspect. He is fluent in Spanish, English, and Japanese. And probably something else. He is clever. He is British. He has that British charm. Looks good with a mustache (I’m sure), although he hasn’t worn one since I’ve known him, which has not been long. But his “five-o-clock shadow” gives a pretty good idea of the type of facial growth he is capable of. It’s all very classy. Classy chap. Really good guy. Renato. We arrive at musashi-sakai station and meet Rachel and Gwen and Eva and Ericka, and Maud (Who is from France and who, interestingly, I think, speaks almost as little English and she does Japanese. And so to communicate with the other girls, they mix English with Japanese and get the point across. And her chest is pierced. Not her nipples, you know, just on top. We don’t really communicate a lot yet.) We get on the train to shibuya with all of us, Renato too. Renato is meeting someone at Yoyogi park for business opportunity, networking sorts of stuff. The rest of us all are going to Shibuya to walk around. Shibuya is one of the places you see on television, with the big intersection and the big, huge TVs built into the faces of buildings. It’s tremendous. It’s enormous! The height of the buildings is dizzying. We’re out of the crowded train (Which, by the way, was crowded. Though Rachel says that it isn’t usually so crowded, now is the most crowded she has seen since she has been here. Inhaling in that train… you know the feeling, you can feel the sickness of someone else going down your throat when you breathe it in, it’s sort of a minor scratchy, itching feeling. That’s what breathing in the train became after 5 minutes of obliviousness, although altogether it was a short ride.) So now we’re outside, in Shibuya, faced by these mountainous buildings screaming advertisements that I don’t understand. Mostly. The streets are narrow and crowded in Shibuya. The six of us… six?... me, Rachel, Eva, Ericka, Maud, and Gwen. The six of us are trying to follow each other and are losing each other, getting separated, getting partially reunited except for one person, being alone and searching for the others (me once), being separated while walking, because Rachel and I will walk fast but the others won't. Everyone is stimulated. Ericka is afraid to get lost, so she will always stay next to you. She has lived in Northern New York state her entire life but has never been to New York City. It has been a few hours. We ate. I ate salad, because I wasn’t very hungry and it was cheap! 100 yen! When night comes, it’s just Rachel and I because the others decided it was best to go back and have free dinner. Rachel and I eat at Mos Burger (we shortly mock the name as we enter) I have the TERIYAKI BAGA and she has the SOMETHINGSOMETHING KATSU BAGA. She is usually vegan. These Bagas are small. Afterwards we think to go to Yoyogi park, because a Brazilian festival is going on there! Maybe Still! We don't know which way is North, so instead we go sing Karaoke. We’re on the 6th floor, in room 601. Our two ‘presents’ are a pineapple filled with pineapple ice cream (hers), and an apple filled with apple ice cream (mine). The drinks are unlimited, but we paid for it. We didn’t really make the unlimited drink thing worthwhile, and we didn't have songs in mind to sing part of the time. It was very very fun. Shibuya is exciting. Partially having-had-some-alcohol, we get back into Shibuya station and we go into this train. This is the first time I have ever sat on the train, there are lots of empty seats. There are very few people on this train. I get back to Musashi-sakai at 9:30 and walk toward where I think my home is at. I’ve never walked to the station from home except for today with Renato. It’s dark and peaceful. I am comfortable here. (Most) People are to themselves here. I don’t look behind me much. I am not paranoid much walking into the dark alleyway alone. My house should be close. A few lefts up (I know only one street name, ‘Nishino’), I see my house. I open the gate. I close the gate behind me. I unlock the three locks. There is laughing inside.

Japanese crying television show

A narration. A man’s voice is rolling over the video feed of watermark images spliced with a panel of people listening to the story, watching the watermarks on a separate screen. Everyone is holding back tears. The camera zooms slow in on their faces. It’s one and then the next. It’s trying to pull out their sadness to let us see. The watermark becomes a boiling bowl of yellow soup, strips of meat floating in like memories. A box in the corner screen shows the panel, they’ve all receded to let the watermarks become frontward. The panel will watch from the corner with lips pursing… eyes blinking… triangle faces, base side down, dragging downward. They cry. Every one of them does. The video comes to an end. They sigh, relieved by a joke. Then all together dig spoons into the soup and feed themselves. The video is over. Tears are still stuck to their cheeks. Next, a dessert. Someone’s tragic story (I assume, I can’t understand Japanese anyway) ends with the consumption of what was his favorite meal. This is a metaphor for life. Isn’t it? The video feed switches, commits. But to who? To what? It can’t decide. We see, The Faces. Then, a golden Dessert. Then the faces. Then the dessert! The faces! The Dessert! More Crying! What in the hell is happening?!

typhoon day

I am on a shore watching tsunami swells roll toward the house. We rush to the basement (my mom’s emergency advice for tornado) and the weak window breaks open, and I knew that it would after remembering it’s one broken latch. We hold our breath underwater… Slowly decide that we must get back outside, it should be safer outside. More swells, a wave pool in an empty aircraft hanger. I’ trying to move away from the wall, where waves go to punish, kamikazes heavily fall onto the aluminum, then get quieter and quieter. I wake up from my dream. I’m dry. I need to pee. The floor in the living room and then in the entrance way is all groaning wood. It’s making my presence known. It’s ok. Today a typhoon will hit Tokyo. There is rain. But things are still. Could it have hit last night? Did I misunderstand? All the leaves outside are stone, asleep. The wind is not pushing. I take a Vitamin C and Centrum with a glass of water and a peanut butter flavored granola bar.

Bus/Kusama

I get out of the plane. I get through immigration and customs in ten minutes. It’s all so easy. They don't look in my bags even! There isn’t a flood of people waiting for us at the narita airport, just flocks here and there. I try to figure out phone numbers from my Verizon phone which only will work at this airport. I buy a ticket, I talk to Okaasan for the first time, she is a baby chick, she is so kind. The bus stop that is mine is #9. The Bus to Kichijoji Station comes at 5:35 sharp, I have been in line for 20 minutes and have mistaken only one bus to have been mine. I take my guitar on the bus too. When it comes, I give my bag to the baggage guy who places it into the body of the bus, I walk into the ear and cash my ticket, fit my guitar up in the shelf, and sit down next to a window on the right side near the back. I meet Mike in a minute. He asks in very proper English whether it would be alright if he sat next to me and I say yes. He is married, a father of children, a businessman of business, a young father, my tour guide. He shows me the names and ways and reasons of the city on the otherside of the glass and of the bus itself, what the bus driver is saying. Apologizing for the traffic. There must be an accident. A police car with a red spinning siren rushes by. Rainbow bridge passes without us over it, the usual route. This bus driver is going another way trying to dodge the traffic probably. It’s gotten dark and we pass ginza. Very expensive, he says, the most expensive place in Tokyo to buy. Kichijoji is close, I think of waking Mike (I have his business card in my wallet), he wakes up on his own. Outside, the air is the coolest Japanese air that I’ve felt in my life. A woman is saying my name, she is mine. She is with a man who shakes my hand. He is mine. They take me into a taxi just before a group of girls. The woman, Okaasan, talks to me in Japanese, sits with me in the back, I try hard, I smile, stop, I stop a lot. We’re home and I enter between them. Soft, low bells ring on the other side of the door, fixed at the top. My room, past the laundry room, is beautiful, and I move in. I take a shower, then we have a first dinner, tonkatsu, pork cutlet. The house favorite I think. There are adventures that I have to write about in hindsight, the first two days have been spent recalling the first day. Note to self: remember the bicycle ride, the college campus, the gym, the grocery store, the restaurant, the next day, the bicycle ride, the college, the department store, the rain, the cellphone store, the umbrella, the parking garage, the music at home.

airport/airplane

I do it all. I enter the Portland airport. Walk up to the counter. Scan my passport in a thing. Give my ticket away. Get my ticket again. Pull my luggage to the conveyor belt and hand it over to luggage security goons. Walk one hundred yards east to the D-E Terminal security area. Get through with my guitar, taped kind of shut, and my backpack and now I am clean and can do anything from this point forward in the airport. I walk past the shops on a walking conveyor belt, so twice as briskly I walk, and past the arched sun roof and just past the bronze loiterer, who is a statue in the middle of the way who is the president of something long put away, and it has gotten hot and then I arrive at the end: four international terminals. After sitting for awhile trying my computer, making the airline employees suspicious (they wait for a few customers that haven’t entered the plane yet for the Amsterdam plane and yell out the names, I look up when they say a name and they look at me, I’m not far away, so I look down again, so they continue to wait and yell his name, and now its directed at me), I find the Delta Skymiles club, an elevator, one floor up with the fat man, then we both immerge into the haven of condescending businessmen, mostly white and ridiculously old. Two impatient men having a conversation, having to yell into the others ear repetitions of what they have already said. I hear it all, I am a few seats away. They are bitching about their delayed flight, hoping to catch a sympathetic ear, one would assume one who can give some compensation on behalf of the bastards who flew too slow. I eat here because the food is free. Food is cookies, small dried fruits, nuts, soda, orange juice, coffee, crackers, green olives, cranberry juice. My little black plate empties. My little clear cup empties, except for one orange drop stuck in the round ravine at the bottom. The small trash near me suddenly fills with my empty things. I decide to leave. I look out the glass that overlooks the way below, in the terminal. The people have no idea we’re here, eating free food, drinking free drinks and in comfortable leather chairs all around while we do it, and watching them pass beneath us like small animals in our house! They are human, but so beneath us! Hahaha! I was about to leave. Then, I do. Out of the elevator, it’s still hot in the terminal and people are still sitting in metal stools at high circle tables in front of the McDonalds and the Bruchies. To get back to my terminal I would turn right. I turn and straight ahead, past the bronze statue, more people have come to sit down in front of Gate 15, the plane leaves in 40 minutes.
In the plane now, against the window but still on the ground, I meet Happy, who is a nurse, an old Asian woman with sparse hair but at huge volumes. Her scalp is visible through wiry mesh that rises 3 inches above. We talk off and on throughout the flight but what’s most important is to mention her so that you can know who is there. Because there has to be someone there. You have to know so you don’t make something else up. The flight is 10 hours of daylight. The sun is chasing our plane west, around the earth to Tokyo. Lunch is served, my first airplane meal. The rice and chicken is lukewarm. It is good but gives me a painful feeling of presence within my stomach. Let’s wait. Wait for awhile. I waited awhile with this feeling in my stomach like a knife at my throat! I lose my mind, I climb out of my seat... I am back and feel good. The plane’s intercom has requested that all windows be shut. The movie is one, the pillows are out. The sun is out. We have made night for ourselves. But when the time comes when a solitary curiousity acts on the window covers and reveals the light again, the entire plane is pissed. The light outside is so bright in comparison to our artificial night that people are in pain to see it. We watch four movies in our dark, then some music videos mixed when sitcoms, then another meal. I eat most of my fried rice and half of the fruit, my tongue still hurts. The Lights come on, the window covers come up and we readjust to the light like animals being taken out of the basement.