Jawck (the W is silent unless you want to say it) @scamuel-likely - Tumblr Blog

Week 3 of writing workshop with @bettsfic & @books

Stories of a place:

The place I wrote about was Rokkō Island in Japan, and the surrounding area where I used to live.

I only used the common facts that anyone could find out.

1. The Rokkō Liner is an automated tram that transports people from the mainland to the manmade Rokkō Island.

2. Kobe was hit by a devastating earthquake in 1995.

3. Rokkō Island was made by taking the top off nearby mountains and compressing them to form new land in the ocean.

Tangled Up In Blue:

The tram snakes its way across a thin stretch of vibrant water, a thousand crystalline waves dance far below its metallic carapace. Inside, it carries precious cargo. The kind of cargo that thrums with the rush of blood and the spark of life, the kind that reads the morning paper and taps away at their cellphones. The tram is a noble beast, and it carries its task of transport out with no direction, no driver at its helm. It’s an entirely automated system, ferrying travellers from the densely packed mainland Sumiyoshi to the equally dense Rokkō Island. A commuter tram for many, as Rokkō Island houses few attractions and the heavy boom and bustle of harbours echo from its shores. This island is a freak of nature. It has been stitched together by the hands of mankind, mountains ripped from the earth and shoved into an orderly rectangular form. A picture perfect piece of the modern industrial world.

The tram, the Rokkō Liner, announces its destination to the passengers in singsong Japanese and again in a similarly musical yet somewhat mechanically clumsy English. Many, many foreigners, live and work on the island. Stacked into towerblocks and gated housing complexes, these expats make their livings in finance, shipping and translation. The early dawn illuminates a sea of suits, Japanese and foreign salarymen shuffling to work. Their faces are lined with stress and their company-issued tie clips shine in the newborn sunlight. One of them trips and falls, his briefcase letting loose a deluge of papers onto the pristine pavement below. He looks up at the sky, a tangle of telephone and electrical wires crisscrossing from granite apartment to granite apartment, and beyond that a vibrant cloudless blue. His suit is scuffed and he’s grazed his palm, but no one stops to help him up. So he’s left to shake himself off and pick himself up, as his spreadsheets and quarterly reports are pulled away by the soft morning breeze. He sighs and that too is snatched away by the wind. His boss isn’t gonna like this one bit.

His boss, the one who requested those quarterly reports to be on his desk by nine am at the latest, is sitting on the Liner reviewing a book his wife recommended to him, on Goodreads. He’s giving the thing, an American book called All The Pretty Horses, five stars. He’d sat down to read it one evening, with a glass of port in one hand and a cigarette in the other. After three refills of port and eleven more cigarettes he was done and, despite his insistence to the contrary, there were tears in his eyes. And tears freely flowed again when he conversed with his wife about the book over breakfast. Something about the book’s message of freedom and hope was inspiring, and made him hark back to the days of his youth. He was once a young revolutionary student who campaigned to end uniforms and for the school to stop getting funding from the nearby American airbase. He used to be a free spirit, used to wear a beret to school and sport Groucho Marx style glasses. Used to quote Karl Marx to teachers and Keats to fellow students. Used to organise film festivals, write in the local newspaper and mitigate street showdowns between young Yakuza members. And then he’d grown up. Life had caught up to him, forced him into a suit and pushed him through the sliding doors of a faceless office building. And he’d lost the joy in his life, crushed by timesheets and shipping mandates.

The review he was writing, on his wife’s account, was full of beautiful prose and cascading metaphors. He unleashed his creative streak, the one the grindstone of society had oppressed, and crafted an excellent essay-like review of McCarthy’s book. While writing this, his mind filled with such raw emotion, he let loose just one more tear. The teenager sitting across from him pretended not to notice him wipe it away with his shirtsleeve, which had been neatly ironed the day before by his wife.

The boss’s wife, an American-Japanese woman who’d grown up in Kobe, had first discovered Cormac McCarthy in a quaint little bookstore tucked away in the shadow of the Kobe Tower. The red light spilling from the tower reflected on the window display, dousing all its contents with an eerie blood-red glow. She’d taken shelter in there, as it was raining something awful and the karaoke bar she’d been at had closed early due to a leak in the roof. It was late at night, she was quite tipsy and in no mood for the noise and light of a train station, so she tapped on the window of this bookstore. It was closed, but light was spilling from a beaded curtain partitioning the shop from its backroom and her hurried and frantic tapping soon altered the owner. He was a man around her age, his eyes were ringed with the telltale dark circles of the sleepless. He wiped a stray eyelash away from his eye with one slender hand as the other fumbled for the door key. She wondered, somewhat drunkenly, if he was single.

He let her in, gave her a cup of green tea, and asked her, in excellent English, “What the hell are you doing dancing around in the street during a typhoon?”

She admitted to being a little drunk, and he gave her a blanket and a book, telling her to rest while he finished up his work for the night.

“Then what?” She enquired, but he clearly hadn’t heard her, as he’d slipped through the beaded curtain into the shop and was busying himself with the shelves.

Having no real other option, she took a sip of the piping hot tea and blearily glanced at the book.

The cover was well-loved, the spine supple and the edges fraying. Emblazoned on its front were the words: No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy.

She took one more sip of tea, and began to read.

Eleven years and a long marriage later, she’d finally recommended the author to her husband. She knew he loved old Clint Eastwood films, and she knew something of his creative side, remembering him writing her elegant haikus when they’d just started dating. They’d been quite distant as of late, with her time mainly spent working from home and his in the office. She knew full well he didn’t do anything of substance, it was all delegation. His boss would tell him something, then he’d repeat it to his own employees, mimicking his boss’s angry demeanour best he could. The stress of his job had been making him snappish and standoffish, so she thought a literary diversion might be just what he needed. And she was right. He openly sobbed into his miso soup when they’d talked about the book at breakfast, the tears mixing with the broth and dissipating like rain into an ocean.

The ocean the tram was crossing was prone to violet outbursts. This was mainly due to the fact Japan sits in between four different tectonic plates, making it prone to earthquakes and tsunamis. One such earthquake had occurred in 1995 and had wreaked Kobe. Water had been forced out of the soil used to build Rokkō Island, causing pavements to crack open as water bubbled onto the surface. The rush of underground water brought with it geysers of sand that burst pavements, tearing down towering red construction cranes and shiny new bridges alike.

The bookseller remembers that earthquake well. His shop had been flooded by a burst sewage pipe, and his parent’s house had collapsed in on itself, a supernova of rubble and debris. He had wandered through the wreckage days after the quake, trying to find anything that remained. Quite a bit of the ground floor walls still remained, jaggedly and abruptly ending at around shoulder height, giving way to a sky still grey from debris dust. His parent’s fridge still stood, remarkably, dented as it was. A lone survivor of the now mostly-unrecognisable kitchen. He swung open its door to find a mush of foodstuffs, mulched up berries, squished meat, crushed pasta, eggshells, juice cartons spilling their contents onto the rubble-strewn cracked wooden floor below. A line of orange juice ran through a contour in the wood and pooled at his shoe. He glanced at his reflection in its vivid bring surface, a colour pop in this grey world, a world still shaking from the events of the past few days.

He looked just the same as he had on that rainy night in the bookstore, only now his hair was being eaten by wisps of silver and his shaded eyes were adorned by wire framed glasses, these two effects combining to make him seem scholarly and intellectual, though doing nothing to aid his never-ending quest for long term companionship. His parents, who had luckily been on holiday in Hokkaido when the quake had struck, had tried to set him with so many women in the past but nothing had ever stuck. He’d gone on a few dates with a girl in university but when her grandfather died she had to move back to Kanazawa. Their relationship slowly fizzled out after that, the fire of passion dying through increasingly rarer and briefer love letters and phone calls. Since then he hadn’t really had much luck with love, even going to a love hotel, just out of sheer desperation, only to find that sex was something he utterly didn’t understand, even when doing it. It was the human element that he fell for.

Take, for example, that woman he’d met when he was working late at the bookshop. Her tipsy little smile as she sipped her tea and opened No Country on her lap. Then the awe and raw excitement that flitted across her face as she read further and further. He had spoke a few more times to her that night, to refill her tea, to answer some basic questions about himself and to ask her where she lived so he could phone her a taxi. Her replies had all been witty and polite, and he’d etched them into his mind, despite her actual appearance fading into the obscurity of his memory, long since tarnished with taxes and neighbours and train times and the pressures of adulthood.

The teen on the tram didn’t want the pressures of adulthood. If adulthood made you cry on your morning commute, like she had seen that salaryman do just moments ago, she wanted no part of it. She was heading onto Rokkō Island to meet her girlfriend for early morning coffee. Her stomach was filled with a buzzing static that built and rose to her throat, making it hard to swallow. Not only had she called into school to tell them a family emergency had come up, which she had never done before, but she’d also slipped from her bedroom window and tiptoed to the train station in the waning night, which she’d also never done before. She was now sitting on the first train out to Rokkō Island, a doughnut in the shape of a lion in her hand. She bit into its adorable face, the soft sugary flesh splitting with the force of her teeth, spraying forth a tsunami of cream filling onto her hand. Another doughnut, this one a plump porcelain-like Hello Kitty face, with a jammy centre, sat in a paper bag on the seat next to her. It was for her girlfriend. The static in her stomach surged at the thought of that. She had a girlfriend. They’d met playing netball, it was a sweltering summers day and the tarmac had felt like lava when her palms had smacked down onto it after she had tripped trying to defend the net. After the ball had rushed through behind her, the girl that had scored, a very pretty girl with shoulder-length brown hair and sparkling eyes, had reached down and helped her up. She was so surprised that this girl, who was far better at sports and probably far more popular than she was, had helped her, instead of hugging a teammate or somesuch celebration. She was even more surprised when that girl cornered her by the changing rooms and gave her a tiny slip of Snoopy-branded notepaper. Etched on it in elegant gel pen was a set of digits. And a heart. They’d spoken over the phone a lot since then, and met for a few whirlwind dates when either school was competing. But now, now they were meeting up not in school hours, bunking to go to a boba & coffee place together. She felt so alive, like someone had lifted up her soul from her body and she was floating freely among the candyfloss clouds that hung in sparse bunches over the horizon. But there was a worry, a deep and suffocating one, that sat squarely in her chest and didn’t budge. It was the anger of doubt, of wondering if she was unnatural, of fearing her parents wouldn’t understand, of having to keep it all a secret. She finished the doughnut and wrung her hands together, her nails digging into her palms, making deep white marks that drowned out the static inside her.

“Miss, are you okay?”

It came from the salaryman. He’d put his phone down and was looking at her with deep concern through his thick-rimmed glasses.

“Yeah, yeah I’m alright.” She managed to stutter, her hands shooting apart and onto her lap.

“That doughnut for someone?” He, rather redundantly, pointed at the bag with the smiling Mr Doughnut mascot on it.

“Urm, yeah, it’s for a friend.” She said, mostly to the gum on the underside of the salaryman’s seat.

“Well I hope they enjoy it,” He smiled at her, a kindly tired smile, “do you read much poetry?”

The question hit her like a freight train. A salaryman asking a teenager about poetry? She was astonished.

“No, no I don’t really, sorry.” She spurted out.

He leaned forward on his knees and with an exclamation of ‘yoisho’ lifted himself out of his chair and motioned to see if he could sit down next to her. She nodded, like a frightened rabbit.

“Well you should,” he said, sitting down, “it can free one’s mind of all sorts of heavy burdens. Can I read you a haiku?”

She was strangely at ease with this stranger, and so mumbled, “Yes, you may”.

He cleaned his throat and read, from memory;

“Even with insects-

Some can sing

Some can’t

It’s an Issa poem,” he said to her, “ and I think it relates to you somewhat. You seem different to others your age. And that’s fine, I was different once. I was a communist! Or I thought I was at least. And look at me now, huh? Another cog in the machine.”

The machine of the tram ground slowly to a halt and the lilting voice of the automated announcer proclaimed they’d reached Rokkō Island. The few passengers flooded out from the train and made their way out of the station. Passengers going from Rokkō to the mainland queued in orderly lines at the side of the tram doors, waiting for everyone to exit before stepping on. It was an intricate and well-executed dance of etiquette and unspoken rules. The salaryman picked up his briefcase, loosened his tie a bit, and walked off towards the shining sliding doors of his office building. The teen half-walked, half-tripped her way to the coffee shop, her brain was alight with hope and happiness, and all the static washed away on the wind.

The wind had carried the man’s papers far far away and so now he sat in his puffy, uncomfortable swivel chair, awaiting his boss’s arrival with a glum look on his face. His cubicle neighbour and best friend, a man with dyed blonde hair and perfect teeth, was consoling him.

“At least he’ll give you saké, he does that with everyone he fires right?” The guy grinned, leaning over the cubicles.

“I’d rather keep my job than have a bottle of saké, if I’m honest.” His mate glumly replied.

“Well bossman isn’t even here yet, maybe he’s been chopped up by the Yakuza, or run over by a car or-“

And in walked their boss, his tie loose around his neck and an odd spring in his step. He smiled, yes, smiled at them as he passed. When the door of his office was shut, the two men looked at eachother, then looked around at the puzzled looks on the faces of every employee in the room.

“What the hell just happened?”

“I think you’re not getting fired. Or maybe we all are.”

Music began to drift from behind the boss’s door. American music. Rather old.

Tangled Up In Blue by Bob Dylan.