Tokyo Stories
Current mood: Storied

I'm a real blogger now. My blog is called Tokyo Stories. It's the tale of one tiny life in the biggest city in the world! I want you to read it, and I want it to read you.

Currently listening : 1000 Hurts By Shellac Release date: 08 August, 2000

8:14 AM - 4 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

Something Happened Today
Current mood: it hurt to write this

The interior of the oven turns blue and makes a sound like wind. I drop the red Turkish flag lighter and walk over to my telephone to call 911. Screams fill the apartment and, I imagine, tumble out the open windows into the pedestrian-thick street below. Can't anyone hear me? Help me. Why isn't anyone helping me? Where is my telephone? The terrified cat excapes under the organ bench.

Layers of my arm are sliding off in large pockets. I put it under running water and look into the bathroom mirror. My hair is blasted back and I'm unfamiliar to myself. My eyebrows are a different color because their ends have curled to ash. At this triviality, bolder, higher-pitched wails echo off the shower, the plunger, the tweezers.

Hasn't anyone heard me yet? The door slams and I am walking down the stairs to the barber shop. Larry will help me. The row of barbers and their red-bibbed clients smile at me. I watch the slow change of their expressions and wonder which element of my appearance or manner leads them to realize I am having an emergency. I am acutely aware of how fresh it feels to sob.

The EMTs impress me with their professional calm as I howl inconsolably about my inability to pay for this ambulance ride. Morphine dulls my arm to a hot tingle, and mixes uproariously with my panic.

At my bedside, Jamon tenderly shows me a video on his iPod; one headphone in his ear, one in mine. I can't stop laughing or crying--which one am I doing? Nurse Connie peels some of my epidermis off like an Alaska-shaped sticker. She mummifiies my right hand, delivers a prescription to kill my second-degree pain, and I'm free to board bus #85. I sit in the handicapped seat.

Outside, it's a hot day. Jamon and I go to the bike shop for a new chain. The bike mechanics tell us their morphine stories as I live mine. We stop at the video store. I am staring and mumbling. My fingers can't make it through the miniscule fire-knots around my face. How did the back of my head get it, too? At home, I one-handedly wash my hair, scrub my eyebrows, vomit three times with dramatic force, and swim into bed. I don't wonder why, in spite of everything, I feel so good.

Currently listening : The Doldrums By Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti Release date: 12 October, 2004

1:20 AM - 8 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

how to leave
Current mood: mellow

Sayonara has been several days long, beginning with spidery gift portraits of me holding hands with neck-less children. They've waved their usual "see you"s (they won't), and I've tried to memorize their pink sandals and incredible haircuts. 

The grayer students have imbibed rice wines, revealed their loneliness, and shone their eyes at me, trying to take something away from my hands into their smaller ones. 

Two lovers have caught me with a wet face in Shimokitazawa. They've said they'd like to have a look at my goodbye party and I've told them to go ahead; it's a three minute walk from where we're standing, here in front of Lawson's. There's plenty of wine left.

I've given my pink boom-box away, and purchased a pink pianica.

I've tried to imagine myself not walking up and down hills with these traction circles. I've tried to picture whole bags of apples for $2. I've tried to imagine being attracted to men. I've asked myself whether I will still be an inattentive driver. I've dreaded gasoline. I've barbecued farewell eggplant with my housemates by a crowded river. I've ridden on the back of a Honda motorcycle to the post office with my eyes closed, wearing the hot pink geta that were given to me for my year of service to the island nation of Nippon. 

Perhaps it's ok to be leaving. 

7:58 AM - 4 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

my family, spiders, and fluorescent light
Current mood: breakfast

My family's faces were still contorted pink and weeping in my heart on the day Emily Tucker first led me down the path. I could feel my daddy's scratchy cleft chin dripping onto the jam and toast she lent me that morning. We'd had a typhoon the night before, and hard umbrella rain that day.

Tonight the leaves are nearly as thick. It's oppressively damp again, and the spiders are out. Their webs are four feet wide against the moon and they are waiting. They're waiting for me to leave, and begging why don't I stay?

I ask them, Can true love ever occur in fluorescent light?

I'm still a kid, though.

9:25 AM - 3 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

the best place to drink espresso from a van
Current mood: writing her resume

The best place to drink espresso you bought from a van is on the narrow steps of a silver building, in front of a highly-utilized metal door. 

8:39 AM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

a wondercut and four men at the conclusion of the "rainy" season
Current mood: burning

The smooth-armed shampooist got his usual zen-like joy out of foaming up my head today. As he poked the towel simultaneously into each of my earholes for the last time, I wondered why I had never spoken to him. It was too late now.

Kaz dropped all his middle-aged dreadlocks and dyed what was left a sensible maroon. I told him it was my last haircut and he said he would do his best.

He did so well that a boy-actor approached, offering to show me how small and cute Japanese penises are. He looked like Mishima and told me he will play The Nihilist in his college's upcoming theater production. I had pictured him a handsome sailor.

Later I was asking a permed one the location of the internet cafe that my membership card belongs to, and he miraculously inquired, "Where do you get your hair cut?" "Amerika," I replied. The words for "cut" and "come [from]" sound the same. The latter is everyone's first question (everyone's). What an odd coincidence, I surely thought. What a true, true miracle.

6:40 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Normal and Surprising Things

An aunt with a triangle of fabric over her jet black head is serving humid soba to a standing counter full of uncles in short sleeves and ties. Damp children are asking questions and mothers are perspiring delicately in their summer florals. I am holding a Casio in its box, packed solid and ready to be sent to Joan in New Jersey.

A boy my age approaches and, smiling, holds out both hands. Unsure what he wants, I hold out both my hands in response, and he starts reciting his numbers in English. I tell him that his English is very good. His appearence suggests presence of mind. He begins doing equations, but the math is not correct. For example, he says, "three times two is YOU!" and "one plus one times ten is YOU!" I am laughing with him, truly entertained by his nonsense, but the lady next to me is looking on in blank scorn. I walk away from him to get on the train and he is shouting things at me from the platform, sweating. I can't understand him, nor can I tell what language he is speaking. He is smiling, smiling at me, and I at him. He walks with the train as it leaves, his hair stuck to his forehead, but we will never meet again.  Everyone around me sighs into sleep and a bottle falls from a plastic bag. It rolls between pointy heels and longish patent leathers. It's cold on the train.

Macy Gray really touched me in eleventh grade. I sang "I Try" with Brazilian Bia at karaoke last week and it brought me back to the school play and the past-tense feeling I had throughout its production. It was as if, as I was living it, I was also remembering every rehearsal and performance from twenty years in the future. While it was occurring, I already felt like it was over--something I was looking back on. I have the same feeling about Japan. I wake up in the morning surprised that I'm still here. I thought I had already told stories about this to my children.

Currently reading : The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon By Sei Shonagon Release date: 31 January, 2005

3:55 AM - 3 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

when young japanese girls are clothed

Japanese girls are (famously) the cutest creatures in existence, but still call every girl and sweat rag around them "cute" without a shiver of jealousy or animosity.

Currently reading : The Unbearable Lightness of Being : A Novel (Perennial Classics) By Milan Kundera Release date: 01 May, 1999

8:00 PM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

when old japanese ladies are naked
Current mood: thankful

When old Japanese ladies are naked, they like to lounge in Elvan  formations on manufactured rocks and talk about their daughters.

6:12 AM - 3 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

if you are what you eat, then i am a tiny morsel of raw horse
Current mood: busy

The salaryman, whose name means "dragon," takes me to a bamboo-curtained izakaya with fresh-squeezed grapefruit sours. Our collection of plates arrives, and I notice among them a rosebud-shaped arrangement of red flesh. When I refuse to try it, he slowly, deliberately tumbles into a speech about how no one knows when they are going to die and there may never be another chance in my short and precious life for me to eat raw horse meat. That kind of thing gets me every time.

How did it taste? It tasted like what I covered it with: soy sauce and green onions, which are two examples of things that sound nicer in Japanese. "Raw horse meat" would naturally be a third.

Another new one: the polyester-pantsed elders in my neighborhood on the hill have begun to say neighborly things to me on my way to work. A few months ago, I observed the confetti shower of well-wishes bestowed upon a Japanese girl my age as she tiptoed down the sidewalk to begin her day. At the time, I had yet to ever hear anything from the aproned hedge-pruners, and felt like a jealous sister. I accept that I still can't expect acknowledgement when returning home from Tokyo at dawn. That's serene dog-walking hour and my smoke-stained jeans and greasy hair are a little too disonant. But progress has been made, and I feel good. Maybe someday soon the one who holds the mantra circles on Wednesday nights will invite me to join.

Currently reading : Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World By Haruki Murakami Release date: 28 September, 2001

6:15 AM - 5 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment