(just the end to the last thing i wrote, in case i get time to continue writing at work)
The street is narrow, warm, like walking the inside of an artery. A haze of neon from the signs of fugu restaurants, hostess clubs and drinking holes hangs everwhere, reflects from everything; fractured bits of colour - kanji wrought in blue tubing, the stylized image of a fish in purple - slide easily over the surface of a passing mercedes. A group of drunk salarymen, their faces splotched an angry red with alcohol, stagger out of an alley to cut in front of me, oblivious to the world around them. I pause as they walk on, glance at the half-dead puffer fish stuffed into the window-front aquarium of a nearby bar. The light from the tank casts a pale blue rectangle on the pavement, illuminates the ubiquitous statue of a grinning, pot-bellied racoon with monstrous balls. The sound of a woman yelling comes from somewhere and I reach into my back pocket for a cigarette, only to come up empty - I must have finished off the pack sometime earlier. I shove my hands into the pockets of my jeans instead, turn a corner. Archways strung with traditional Japanese lanterns span the street at regular intervals and the sidewalk is dotted with small, back-lit billboards plastered with images of smiling, impossibly cute women, dreams of schoolgirl sex and S&M. Dreams which aren’t that far from reality; to my right a pair of teen girls in mini-skirts stand idly smoking by the curb, their golden legs softened and air-brushed pink in the cast-off glare of a nurse-themed cosplay bar. One of them is better looking than the other, her legs more shapely, and I run my eyes all the way from her plastic heels to the denim fringe of her skirt. I wrench them away with difficulty - she doesn’t need me staring at her any more than I need to frustrate myself doing it.
What time is it? Well past midnight anyway. I must have missed the last train by now and I’m either going to have to take a cab home or walk. I don’t like either option, and I’m too hungry to bother thinking about it; I clock a Chinese restaurant across the street. It's fronted by an outdoor bar that’s been walled-off from the road by a thin sheet of translucent plastic. I walk over, draw back the plastic sheet and sit down at one of the empty stools. Three salarymen are lounging at the far end, the counter in front of them littered with half-empty bottles of Sapporo and grease-stained plates. Directly in front of me a large window faces into the kitchen. I wait, breathing in the smell of cooking oils and steamed pork, until a waittress appears. Only her tired, middle-aged eyes are visible above the window ledge.
“Biru,” I tell her, going with what’s easiest. “Toh Gyoza.”
She nods mechanically and disappears. A violent spurt of laughter erupts from the salarymen at the far end. On instinct I look over, assuming they’re laughing at me, but it’s just that one of them’s dropped his chopsticks onto the pavement. The guy on the far left, the fattest and likely drunkest, slaps his meaty hands together before wiping a sheen of sweat away from his forehead. The one on the right, slouched and crumpled on his stool, takes out a pack of cigarettes, sticks one between his bloated lips and lights up. I watch them for awhile, too bored and isolated to care if I’m being impolite. The waittress reappears at the window with a mug of beer and a plate of dumplings. I take them from her and swallow some of the beer - I can barely taste it, but it’s cold and all that matters is whether or not it works. I eat and drink silently, think about calling someone, but who exactly am I going to call? Try as I might to come up with a name, any name, I can't think of anyone.
The salarymen at the far end get up to leave. They shuffle noisily past me, a reek of alcohol, cigarettes and sweat trailing along behind them. The narrow space between the wall and the plastic curtain, now abandoned by everyone but me, is instantly less appealing. A low gust of wind rustles the plastic, and I start to feel hemmed in, weighed down by the tepid odors from the kitchen, the dull, useless buzzing of a nearby electric light. The fact that there isn’t a solid wall at my back is also unnerving. I imagine someone approaching, a lone man, muttering to himself. He stops directly behind me, his hands nervously playing with the fraying hem of a grey suit jacket. He stands there, staring at my hunched figure through the plastic. I can’t quite picture his face, but in my mind he’s breathing heavily, his wide nostrils flaring. A nervous shiver runs across the back of my neck, but I ignore the urge to turn around. There’s no one there, and even if there was what difference would it make? Let him watch. I finish quickly, pay my bill and leave.
I try to shake off the nervousness from the bar, focus on walking instead, the static rhythm of my feet on pavement. The beer helps, lending a cool, sluicy feeling to my gut, and I toy with the idea of stopping somewhere for another one. I pass a convenience store (parasitic, they feed off street-corners, off-shift salarymen and drunks, and it’s a warm, womb-like feeling to know I’m never farther than 20 minutes from one.) On impulse, I decide to grab a couple tallboys and curb it. I step through the automatic doors. The alcohol in my system and the harsh fluorescents causes the multi-coloured array of junk food, dried squid, sports drinks and bento boxes to drizzle together into a pulpy, visual hum. Dazed, I walk to the back and take a pair of green labels out of the fridge, trying to ignore the emotionless warblings of whichever J-pop princess they’ve got pumping out the speaker system.
The guy working the register is thin, his hair oddly fine and unhealthy looking; he can’t be much older than me, but a bald patch is already festering at the back of his head, and his motions as he rings up my bill have the same lethargic grace shared by drug addicts and the terminally ill. I pay without either of us saying a word and leave, happy to turn my back on him. Outside a salaryman is busy puking the night’s worth of raw fish and sake onto the street.
As I watch him wipe a trail of stomach acid from his mouth I rethink my decision to drink alone on the curb - I may have very little going for me, but at least I don’t have to hang out beside some drunk bastard’s puke. So what else is there? Clearly I’m not going inside anywhere - I’ve already bought beer and I don’t feel like interracting with anyone else tonight anyway. I could head over to Minatoro Mirai, lounge by the bay awhile and stare at water. Watch cars drive across the bridge. A view like that is free of other humans, and I’m tired of having to look at them.
I leave the side streets of Noge, head down a wider road to the elevated tracks at Sakuragicho station. I cross a deserted intersection and turn, following the line of the tracks to the left. In the dim light I can just make out the graffiti covering the wall beside me: generations of tags crowd each other for space and supremacy, the pocked, uneven surface of the wall made a palimpsest many times over. None of the work is bad, although all of it is fairly boring, as if it was lifted directly from the pages of a textbook on New York-style street art. I let my eyes wander along wall to the point where a wide semi-circle of light describes the entrance to a tunnel. I continue walking, spit, run a hand over the back of my neck. Turning into the tunnel, the sound of my footfalls is amplified by the low, concrete ceiling. Hundreds of tiny insects buzz stupidly around the orange, dome-shaped lights on the walls. On the opposite side a broad, well-paved avenue winds smoothly away from the tracks toward a series of office towers.
The sidewalk is empty except for myself and a young J-guy walking in the same direction not far ahead. Further on, the road gives way to a bridge as it spans a canal, and after that it starts to veer to the left. The waterfront is further on, to the right. Wasn’t there a shortcut somewhere around here that’d bypass the road? I look up, hoping to see something familiar enough to point me in the right direction, but there doesn’t appear to be any other option. I focus on the guy walking ahead of me instead: his head is shaved head and he’s wearing a white t-shirt. His hands are stuffed into the pockets of dark, expensive-looking jeans, and a black, studded band is wrapped around his right wrist. I study the way he’s moving, the taut lines of his shoulders clearly visible beneath the thin material of his t-shirt. I get the sense that I’ve seen him before, but I can’t quite place him. I know he’s not a student - nothing about his suggests he’s the type who’d have either an interest or a need to study English. It’s possible that I met him at a party somewhere though, and in that case I was probably drunk, which would explain why I can’t remember him clearly. I watch as he cuts into an automated parking lot on our right. The sight of his body contorting as he ducks below the metal arm at the gate sends a jolt of recognition through my system: I’ve done that before. Just like him, I’ve ducked beneath that metal arm and walked into this parking lot. The memory is vague, oddly disconnected from anything else (When was that? Where was I going?), but the feeling of having crossed the parking lot is real enough. Is that how I found the shortcut? It seems as likely as anything else, so I follow him, ducking (again?) under the gate.
The parking lot is nearly empty. Tall, fluorescent lamps burn at the end of metal poles and the sound of cars passing on the road above is muted to a soft murmur. I watch as the guy heads to the far left corner; in that direction, the lot is dark, shadowed by a corrugated steel overhang stemming from the road. He must be headed for a car, and I leave him to it. It doesn’t matter if we’ve met before anyway - what am I going to say to him even if we have? I look away and walk to the right. The back edge of the lot is walled off from the canal by a chainlink fence and it’s quickly obvious that there’s no shortcut here - the fence ends abruptly as it intersects the brick brick wall of some kind of warehouse.
I run a hand over my face; I don’t like having to double back. It’s a waste of time, and the longer I go without drinking the beers I’m carrying the warmer they’re going to get. The fact that there’s nothing I can do about it is small consolation, and I can feel myself becoming increasingly irritated as I turn back towards the entrance. I glance over at the opposite corner, expecting to see the guy or at least a car with him in it pulling out at the gate, but there isn’t any sign of him. I pause. The stillness of the lot is suddenly hard, tangible like I could pick it up and throw it. I scan the area: lightposts, cars, overhang, road, fence - and nothing else. He’s definitely gone. I walk towards the overhang, peering through the windshields of cars along the way. He isn’t sitting behind any of them. My face tightens. Where the hell did he go? I turn around, and something about the fence catches my eye. I walk over to examine it more closely: just before it meets the road, a rough, three-foot hole has been ripped out of it.
He must have gone through the hole in the fence. Why? I can’t think of a good reason, but if you walk into an empty parking lot after midnight and and disappear through a hole in a fence you’ve got to have one. And in my case, the reason is going to be because I want to find out what his was.
I crouch down, edge my way through the hole. A thin strip of grass runs between the fence and a sharply-angled concrete embankment. Below me, the dark water ripples slowly. I look to the right: the canal widens as it enters the bay. On the opposite shore, the lights of factories and appartment complexes glow placidly. To my left, the underside of the bridge is black as spilled ink. Carefully, I pick my way forward until the ledge widens and I’m standing beneath the bridge. At any moment I expect to see him, sitting by the edge of the canal, standing against the foot of the bridge with a can of spray-paint in his hand, hanging with friends and smoking drugs. But he isn’t here. As far as I can tell, he disappeared.
I remember it that way, like it’s happening now. The edge on everything, each moment, is sharp and perfectly defined. Sometimes they’ll say (whoever they are, people who write books I guess) that memory is like water: it flows, washes over you and can be bathed in. But that isn’t how it is for me, not now, if in fact it ever was. My memory is like a knife. Times, places and people I’ve known return to me with sudden, piercing accuracy and it’s a struggle to remain now, to remember that what I’m experiencing is something I’ve already experienced. I’ll go through all of it again, exactly as it was, reliving a series of minute, meaningless details. For example, before I looked up and noticed the guy who disappeared, three white cars, two black ones, and a kid on a motorcycle passed me on the highway. If I’d bothered to pay attention I could tell you their license plates, but I didn’t.
“Yeah alright,” she’d say. “Your memory’s so perfect what was I wearing the last time you saw me?”
“Low red heels without a strap. I could just see the beginning of the indents between your toes above the V in the shoes, which I didn’t like. You had on black tights under a green t-shirt/dress thing you bought at American Apparel. Your hair was down, but you had a black plastic band across the top of your head. Big, thick, ironical sunglasses, which wasn’t surprising - everyone who was anyone was wearing ironical sunglasses in Toronto that summer. Made you look like something out of a bad 70s sci-fi movie. Didn’t matter though - they went with the outfit. You weren’t wearing any jewelery, but you did have a hair elastic around your right wrist.”
She might agree with me and she might tell me I’m dead wrong. Words are never entirely accurate, and even though I can remember exactly what it was like walking on that road in Yokohama, right down to the cracks in the pavement, it’s impossible to represent what it was like to really be there. I could describe it mathematically, laying out the dimensions of each block of sidwalk and delineating the thickness of the cracks and the angles at which they ran from one point to another. But all of that is just what I saw - if I really wanted to explain what that moment was like, I’d have to go beyond the visual level to include the sounds on the road beside me, the temperature of the air, the weight of my clothes, the feel of the pavement beneath my feet, not to mention the constant stream of thoughts inside my head; there’d be no end to the amount of words I’d have to use to describe that moment, and what would be the point? There’s no need to represent or relive any of that - it’s useless, exactly as meaningless as knowing what you ate for breakfast on this date ten years ago or the name of everyone in your first grade class or the colour pen you used to sign the first birthday card you ever sent. In other words, what difference does it make what she was wearing the last time I saw her? The point is that it was the last time.
All of which is more a problem a problem of theory than anything else. Yes, it’s true that words can’t recreate anything exactly, but we’ve done alright by them so far. The real problem, and the main reason she’d tell me I was wrong about her outfit, is that just because I remember it perfectly, it doesn’t mean I’m remembering what really was.
What time is it? Well past midnight anyway. I must have missed the last train by now and I’m either going to have to take a cab home or walk. I don’t like either option, and I’m too hungry to bother thinking about it; I clock a Chinese restaurant across the street. It's fronted by an outdoor bar that’s been walled-off from the road by a thin sheet of translucent plastic. I walk over, draw back the plastic sheet and sit down at one of the empty stools. Three salarymen are lounging at the far end, the counter in front of them littered with half-empty bottles of Sapporo and grease-stained plates. Directly in front of me a large window faces into the kitchen. I wait, breathing in the smell of cooking oils and steamed pork, until a waittress appears. Only her tired, middle-aged eyes are visible above the window ledge.
“Biru,” I tell her, going with what’s easiest. “Toh Gyoza.”
She nods mechanically and disappears. A violent spurt of laughter erupts from the salarymen at the far end. On instinct I look over, assuming they’re laughing at me, but it’s just that one of them’s dropped his chopsticks onto the pavement. The guy on the far left, the fattest and likely drunkest, slaps his meaty hands together before wiping a sheen of sweat away from his forehead. The one on the right, slouched and crumpled on his stool, takes out a pack of cigarettes, sticks one between his bloated lips and lights up. I watch them for awhile, too bored and isolated to care if I’m being impolite. The waittress reappears at the window with a mug of beer and a plate of dumplings. I take them from her and swallow some of the beer - I can barely taste it, but it’s cold and all that matters is whether or not it works. I eat and drink silently, think about calling someone, but who exactly am I going to call? Try as I might to come up with a name, any name, I can't think of anyone.
The salarymen at the far end get up to leave. They shuffle noisily past me, a reek of alcohol, cigarettes and sweat trailing along behind them. The narrow space between the wall and the plastic curtain, now abandoned by everyone but me, is instantly less appealing. A low gust of wind rustles the plastic, and I start to feel hemmed in, weighed down by the tepid odors from the kitchen, the dull, useless buzzing of a nearby electric light. The fact that there isn’t a solid wall at my back is also unnerving. I imagine someone approaching, a lone man, muttering to himself. He stops directly behind me, his hands nervously playing with the fraying hem of a grey suit jacket. He stands there, staring at my hunched figure through the plastic. I can’t quite picture his face, but in my mind he’s breathing heavily, his wide nostrils flaring. A nervous shiver runs across the back of my neck, but I ignore the urge to turn around. There’s no one there, and even if there was what difference would it make? Let him watch. I finish quickly, pay my bill and leave.
I try to shake off the nervousness from the bar, focus on walking instead, the static rhythm of my feet on pavement. The beer helps, lending a cool, sluicy feeling to my gut, and I toy with the idea of stopping somewhere for another one. I pass a convenience store (parasitic, they feed off street-corners, off-shift salarymen and drunks, and it’s a warm, womb-like feeling to know I’m never farther than 20 minutes from one.) On impulse, I decide to grab a couple tallboys and curb it. I step through the automatic doors. The alcohol in my system and the harsh fluorescents causes the multi-coloured array of junk food, dried squid, sports drinks and bento boxes to drizzle together into a pulpy, visual hum. Dazed, I walk to the back and take a pair of green labels out of the fridge, trying to ignore the emotionless warblings of whichever J-pop princess they’ve got pumping out the speaker system.
The guy working the register is thin, his hair oddly fine and unhealthy looking; he can’t be much older than me, but a bald patch is already festering at the back of his head, and his motions as he rings up my bill have the same lethargic grace shared by drug addicts and the terminally ill. I pay without either of us saying a word and leave, happy to turn my back on him. Outside a salaryman is busy puking the night’s worth of raw fish and sake onto the street.
As I watch him wipe a trail of stomach acid from his mouth I rethink my decision to drink alone on the curb - I may have very little going for me, but at least I don’t have to hang out beside some drunk bastard’s puke. So what else is there? Clearly I’m not going inside anywhere - I’ve already bought beer and I don’t feel like interracting with anyone else tonight anyway. I could head over to Minatoro Mirai, lounge by the bay awhile and stare at water. Watch cars drive across the bridge. A view like that is free of other humans, and I’m tired of having to look at them.
I leave the side streets of Noge, head down a wider road to the elevated tracks at Sakuragicho station. I cross a deserted intersection and turn, following the line of the tracks to the left. In the dim light I can just make out the graffiti covering the wall beside me: generations of tags crowd each other for space and supremacy, the pocked, uneven surface of the wall made a palimpsest many times over. None of the work is bad, although all of it is fairly boring, as if it was lifted directly from the pages of a textbook on New York-style street art. I let my eyes wander along wall to the point where a wide semi-circle of light describes the entrance to a tunnel. I continue walking, spit, run a hand over the back of my neck. Turning into the tunnel, the sound of my footfalls is amplified by the low, concrete ceiling. Hundreds of tiny insects buzz stupidly around the orange, dome-shaped lights on the walls. On the opposite side a broad, well-paved avenue winds smoothly away from the tracks toward a series of office towers.
The sidewalk is empty except for myself and a young J-guy walking in the same direction not far ahead. Further on, the road gives way to a bridge as it spans a canal, and after that it starts to veer to the left. The waterfront is further on, to the right. Wasn’t there a shortcut somewhere around here that’d bypass the road? I look up, hoping to see something familiar enough to point me in the right direction, but there doesn’t appear to be any other option. I focus on the guy walking ahead of me instead: his head is shaved head and he’s wearing a white t-shirt. His hands are stuffed into the pockets of dark, expensive-looking jeans, and a black, studded band is wrapped around his right wrist. I study the way he’s moving, the taut lines of his shoulders clearly visible beneath the thin material of his t-shirt. I get the sense that I’ve seen him before, but I can’t quite place him. I know he’s not a student - nothing about his suggests he’s the type who’d have either an interest or a need to study English. It’s possible that I met him at a party somewhere though, and in that case I was probably drunk, which would explain why I can’t remember him clearly. I watch as he cuts into an automated parking lot on our right. The sight of his body contorting as he ducks below the metal arm at the gate sends a jolt of recognition through my system: I’ve done that before. Just like him, I’ve ducked beneath that metal arm and walked into this parking lot. The memory is vague, oddly disconnected from anything else (When was that? Where was I going?), but the feeling of having crossed the parking lot is real enough. Is that how I found the shortcut? It seems as likely as anything else, so I follow him, ducking (again?) under the gate.
The parking lot is nearly empty. Tall, fluorescent lamps burn at the end of metal poles and the sound of cars passing on the road above is muted to a soft murmur. I watch as the guy heads to the far left corner; in that direction, the lot is dark, shadowed by a corrugated steel overhang stemming from the road. He must be headed for a car, and I leave him to it. It doesn’t matter if we’ve met before anyway - what am I going to say to him even if we have? I look away and walk to the right. The back edge of the lot is walled off from the canal by a chainlink fence and it’s quickly obvious that there’s no shortcut here - the fence ends abruptly as it intersects the brick brick wall of some kind of warehouse.
I run a hand over my face; I don’t like having to double back. It’s a waste of time, and the longer I go without drinking the beers I’m carrying the warmer they’re going to get. The fact that there’s nothing I can do about it is small consolation, and I can feel myself becoming increasingly irritated as I turn back towards the entrance. I glance over at the opposite corner, expecting to see the guy or at least a car with him in it pulling out at the gate, but there isn’t any sign of him. I pause. The stillness of the lot is suddenly hard, tangible like I could pick it up and throw it. I scan the area: lightposts, cars, overhang, road, fence - and nothing else. He’s definitely gone. I walk towards the overhang, peering through the windshields of cars along the way. He isn’t sitting behind any of them. My face tightens. Where the hell did he go? I turn around, and something about the fence catches my eye. I walk over to examine it more closely: just before it meets the road, a rough, three-foot hole has been ripped out of it.
He must have gone through the hole in the fence. Why? I can’t think of a good reason, but if you walk into an empty parking lot after midnight and and disappear through a hole in a fence you’ve got to have one. And in my case, the reason is going to be because I want to find out what his was.
I crouch down, edge my way through the hole. A thin strip of grass runs between the fence and a sharply-angled concrete embankment. Below me, the dark water ripples slowly. I look to the right: the canal widens as it enters the bay. On the opposite shore, the lights of factories and appartment complexes glow placidly. To my left, the underside of the bridge is black as spilled ink. Carefully, I pick my way forward until the ledge widens and I’m standing beneath the bridge. At any moment I expect to see him, sitting by the edge of the canal, standing against the foot of the bridge with a can of spray-paint in his hand, hanging with friends and smoking drugs. But he isn’t here. As far as I can tell, he disappeared.
I remember it that way, like it’s happening now. The edge on everything, each moment, is sharp and perfectly defined. Sometimes they’ll say (whoever they are, people who write books I guess) that memory is like water: it flows, washes over you and can be bathed in. But that isn’t how it is for me, not now, if in fact it ever was. My memory is like a knife. Times, places and people I’ve known return to me with sudden, piercing accuracy and it’s a struggle to remain now, to remember that what I’m experiencing is something I’ve already experienced. I’ll go through all of it again, exactly as it was, reliving a series of minute, meaningless details. For example, before I looked up and noticed the guy who disappeared, three white cars, two black ones, and a kid on a motorcycle passed me on the highway. If I’d bothered to pay attention I could tell you their license plates, but I didn’t.
“Yeah alright,” she’d say. “Your memory’s so perfect what was I wearing the last time you saw me?”
“Low red heels without a strap. I could just see the beginning of the indents between your toes above the V in the shoes, which I didn’t like. You had on black tights under a green t-shirt/dress thing you bought at American Apparel. Your hair was down, but you had a black plastic band across the top of your head. Big, thick, ironical sunglasses, which wasn’t surprising - everyone who was anyone was wearing ironical sunglasses in Toronto that summer. Made you look like something out of a bad 70s sci-fi movie. Didn’t matter though - they went with the outfit. You weren’t wearing any jewelery, but you did have a hair elastic around your right wrist.”
She might agree with me and she might tell me I’m dead wrong. Words are never entirely accurate, and even though I can remember exactly what it was like walking on that road in Yokohama, right down to the cracks in the pavement, it’s impossible to represent what it was like to really be there. I could describe it mathematically, laying out the dimensions of each block of sidwalk and delineating the thickness of the cracks and the angles at which they ran from one point to another. But all of that is just what I saw - if I really wanted to explain what that moment was like, I’d have to go beyond the visual level to include the sounds on the road beside me, the temperature of the air, the weight of my clothes, the feel of the pavement beneath my feet, not to mention the constant stream of thoughts inside my head; there’d be no end to the amount of words I’d have to use to describe that moment, and what would be the point? There’s no need to represent or relive any of that - it’s useless, exactly as meaningless as knowing what you ate for breakfast on this date ten years ago or the name of everyone in your first grade class or the colour pen you used to sign the first birthday card you ever sent. In other words, what difference does it make what she was wearing the last time I saw her? The point is that it was the last time.
All of which is more a problem a problem of theory than anything else. Yes, it’s true that words can’t recreate anything exactly, but we’ve done alright by them so far. The real problem, and the main reason she’d tell me I was wrong about her outfit, is that just because I remember it perfectly, it doesn’t mean I’m remembering what really was.