Ten Songs Drabble Challenge Thingy, Yay
The drabble/ficlet form is a dangerous one in the wrong hands. Quite likely, mine are indeed among them, but what the hell, I've never done one of these before. Though I've never been happier in my life to have done a speed-typing course.
1. Pick a character, pairing, or fandom you like.
2. Turn your music player on and turn it on random/shuffle.
3. Write a drabblet/ficlet related to each song that plays. You only have the time frame of the song to finish the drabble; you start when the song starts, and stop when it's over. No lingering afterward! No matter how whacked out your drabble is. :) (Here's where I was an utterly horrible person and broke this basic rule. I lingered. Linger, and linger, and linger I did. Mainly, however, I was just fixing sentences I considered too grammatically shonky to post under my own name. Sue me. :P )
4. Do ten of these, then post them.
Fandom: Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei
Pairings: Everyone/everyone else, zomg wow
Ratings: R for language, death and sexual themes
1 - Travelling far, in sin
Nozomu
Nick Drake, "Parasite."
Some days are better for dying than others. Wednesdays, usually. That's an average sort of day, isn't it? Not a Thursday, though, that didn't seem right. He never could stick Thursdays.
Nozomu didn't go in to work that day. He didn't leave a note or even call in sick. No, best not to make any ceremony of it this time around, he decided. He simply packed his rope, a note to his loved ones and a will kit, and sailed down calmly to the Northern Line bus stop with the wind at his back.
The ginkgo were turning that day. Their leaves were like tiny gold shells gathering in the gutter. In a few hours, they'd turn brown and sickly sweet. Nozomu stomped on them a few times out of spite.
The coach arrived. That's the best way to approach one's death, Nozomu thought. Calmly, with no more ceremony than getting on a bus.
"One way to the Hakone woods, please," he said, dropping some money into the fare slot.
Nozomu looked out the window for a while. The bus wound its way through the sprawl of suburbs until they gradually gave way to green squares of rice fields, then into the pine-thick foothills. After two hours, they stopped for a break at the juncture between two highways. Nozomu bought a strawberry jam sandwich from a vending machine and ate it slowly. No point dying hungry.
As the highway ended and the woods began, the road began to spiral up a long mountain road. The early afternoon light brought a purple glow to the crowds of trees. Nozomu surveyed the unfamiliar sights from the window seat. A soft English folk song played on the radio; he couldn't understand the words. It was like a lullaby; it tired him. He slept.
Nozomu woke to the sound of women screaming.
"Please be advised, there has been a pedestrian accident," the driver's voice crackled hesitantly over the intercom. "An emergency connecting line will be arriving shortly... please remain on the bus---"
"What happened?" Nozomu sleepily asked the salaryman next to him.
"Tch, suicide. Some kid threw himself in fronna bus," the man groaned in the Touhoku dialect. "There's a sign of the times for you. First comes the recession, then comes the depression."
"I suppose," Nozomu responded noncommittally. "Maybe tomorrow would have been a better day to die."
(NB: The line comparing suicide and getting on a bus shamelessly appropriated from Steve Toltz's masterpiece, A Fraction of the Whole. GET OFF THE INTERNET AND READ IT. NOW.)
2 - Victory
Jun, Kino
Air, "Playground Love."
"And here we find Jun Kudou, on a swing, scarcely a care in this mortal world. A bit kindergarten there, innit?" Kino held his hand-held camera-phone above his rival. Jun kept his eyes fixed on a paperback novel.
"I'm waiting for the tram," he said.
"What are you reading?"
"Death in Venice."
"What's it about?"
"Mind your own business."
"Temper, temper," tsked Kino. "Hey. Tell us a story, how about it?"
"Look, why are you filming me, anyway?" Jun looked up briefly to meet the digital eye. "Is it for school? Film club?"
"Oh, perish the thought, my good man," Kino sighed effetely. "Heaven forbid I use extra-curricular pursuits as a shallow outlet for our eternal--"
"Love?" Jun quipped to the camera. "Oh, how sweet."
"NO. RIVALRY." Kino panicked. "IGNORE HIM. CUT, CUT, CUT."
Kino snapped the phone shut. Jun began to smile a little and swayed lazily.
"You think you're so bloody smart, don't you. But I've got one thing on you, you know," Kino declared.
"Is that right?" There was a slight harshness to Jun's voice as he looked up to meet Kino's gaze; his inner peace was wearing thin. He stood up so quickly a spell of dizziness overcame him, and sank to support himself rather ungracefully against the side of the swing. Kino bared his teeth with a smile and groped his own tragicomic bicep.
"I've been working out, can't you see? Meanwhile, look at you. You're a skinny bastard, Jun. No wonder you just halfway passed out a second ago. You oughtta eat more."
"Well, they don't let you bring food into the library, so."
Jun left Kino to chew on the aposiopesis, opened his novel at the bookmark again and started towards the streetcar stop, reading as he walked.
"If you keep that up, one of these days you're going to walk right into a pole," Kino sneered. "And I won't do a thing to stop it."
"I won't say it hasn't happened before," admitted Jun.
"And I'm going to film it and put it on YouTube..."
"I'll be the first to comment."
"And then I'll post the YouTube link on 2ch, and all the girls you like will see it and--" Kino was desperate for ammunition.
"Will you leave me alone? I don't have time for this, Kino. I've got a lot of things on my mind right now." With that, Jun turned on his heels and walked quickly up the steps, trying to lose Kino in a crowd of other students.
"Hey!" Kino cried. He grabbed at Jun's coat-tails from the steps below the platform. "Stop ignoring me, damnit!"
"Everybody!" Jun called cheerfully aloud. A crowd of faces turned expectantly towards him, as if he were about to begin a story. Instead, he continued: "Look at Kuniya-kun!"
Obediently, the staring mass gawked at Kino. He suddenly felt as though he was standing at the edge of a tall cliff, ready at any moment to fall over the edge. His hands shook. He felt his body reeling. The streetcar pulled to a stop with long, slow screech. Jun ascended its suspended steps with quiet dignity.
"It's what he wants, apparently."
3 - Birthday boy, buyer's remorse
Haga, Aoyama
Morrissey, "Hold on to your Friends."
"Listen, I'm sorry about the shirt..."
"'Sokay. Really."
Aoyama cursed himself the whole time in the line for the Mr. Donut in Harajuku. That birthday present for Haga was a total mistake. The bright purple shirt with a picture of Batman and Robin against a ghastly background of polka dots seemed like a good idea at the time; he parted with over 3000 yen for it. He imagined how well it would suit Haga from the moment he saw it; nothing had ever been so positively certain in his life before.
No. It looked pretty stupid, they both secretly thought. Moreover, it was so small on Haga that Aoyama began to panic and wonder if he'd accidentally grabbed something off the girls' rack. Still, Haga wore it proudly, along with a paper cone birthday hat, and a winsome smile. The line edged forward a little more.
"I'm sorry, I should have just gotten you a voucher," Aoyama sighed.
"What, you kidding? It's awesome. I loved The Dark Knight."
"Maybe it'll be a good pajama top, but..."
"No, really. Thanks. It's the best present ever. Better than Kino's, anyway."
He showed Aoyama the framed picture of Kino sitting in agura with a dramatic expression. He had signed it, "With best birthday wishes to my BFF." He was one step away from dotting the "i"'s with hearts, Aoyama thought. They reached the counter and ordered a packet of 6 to donuts to share, with a 10% birthday discount.
"He ditched us today, anyway." Aoyama said with a shrug. "Said he missed the tram."
"I love that guy, I really do, but I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him," laughed Haga.
They walked in silence for a little while down the grey thoroughfare of Takeshita Street. When they stopped at a level crossing near the HMV building, the afternoon light caught Haga at just such an angle that the shirt's ridiculousness was brilliantly illuminated. It truly was a hideous thing, Aoyama despaired.
"I'm sorry, but--" he began.
"Aoyama," Haga interrupted and held a finger to his lips. "Look, Aoyama. Do me a favour; quit apologising already. You're sounding like Ai-chan these days, you know?"
"I'm sorry," Aoyama drawled sarcastically. "See what I did there?" He added ironically. There is, after all, a crucially semantic difference between the two.
"Friends don't say "sorry," got it?" Haga explained. "Anyway, let's go check out some game stores next. There's another place over in Akiba that does a birthday discount too, I think."
"Yeah, whatever..." Aoyama sighed. "You're just gonna buy some dodgy second-hand eroge."
By way of response, Haga leaned over and snatched the final half-eaten donut out of Aoyama's hand.
"Hey! I wasn't finished!"
"Friends don't say 'please' and 'thank you,' either," Haga declared with his mouth full.
4 - I see you
Kafuka, Nozomu
The Velvet Underground & Nico, "I'll Be Your Mirror."
"I'm sure you know this is pretty twisted; me trying to explain my personal problems to you."
Nozomu wore a hat indoors, having decided against groucho glasses. Through this, he still couldn't hide his terror of being recognised, even on the opposite side of Tokyo. Kafuka simply wore a floral headscarf, and looked like another girl altogether; rather, another woman. How, exactly, had he been strong-armed into this?
"But I asked you here," Kafuka insisted, "so it's okay."
"No, it's not okay," Nozomu groaned, "and I'm imploring you to understand this. It's twisted and..."
It was overcast outside the city cafe where they sat, and pale orange from the sunset glinted off the windows of the buildings that surrounded it.
"It's cheaper than therapy," she offered.
"No, it's just odd. Worse than odd. Taken the wrong way, and I could lose my job." He catastrophised quietly. "Furthermore, I'm planning to die this year, which means I'm too old to be doing the whole mid-life crisis thing and dating a woman barely more than half my age."
The young waitress brought them a tea and coffee respectively.
"I'm already a teenager, you're only in your twenties." Kafka poured a few spoons of raw sugar into her tea. "That sounds better already, doesn't it?"
"Not really, no." Nozomu took his coffee black, before a spasm of despair overcame him. He covered his face again.
"Please put down your hands, Sensei." Kafuka took hold of them. "I just wanted to look at you for a bit."
5 - I don't want to go among mad people, but...
Chiri, Kafuka
Sufjan Stevens, "A Short Reprise For Mary Todd, Who Went Insane, But For Very Good Reasons."
Fuura-san,
I write to you with regards to certain visible violations of the uniform code, which I feel you would prefer to hear from me personally, rather than my referring the matter to Sensei.
Fuura-san, you are old enough to wear a bra. If it is not part of the uniform code officially, you ought to follow the spirit as well as the letter of the law. If you do not ameliorate said matter promptly, it will be raised as a point of discussion at the next meeting of the student council.
Regards,
Kitsu Chiri, 2-H.
PS: Happy White Day.
6 - Treasures
Matoi
Yann Tiersen, "Le Redecouverte", (Amelie OST.)
A chipped teacup. An overdue notice from Tokyo General Electric with a grocery list on the back. The torn-off "DO NOT REMOVE" label from his pillow. A grey-green pebble the same color as his eyes. The cork from a bottle of his favorite vintage of Beaujolais Noveau. A toothbrush, with bristles like the fur of an old dog. A cotton cloth for cleaning eye-glasses. One pair of underpants; boxers, not briefs. The satin cord of his bathrobe. A broken sandal. Three bloodied bandaids and a razorblade.
One by one, Matoi carefully puts the treasures back in their gilt red box. She swears she will carry them with her to her grave.
7 - My Damascan Road
Nami
Belle & Sebastian, "Act of the Apostle II"
As the bus accelerated from the bus stop and out of sight, Nami stopped running, swallowed a mouthful of toast and decided that she would no longer go to school.
This did not come as any sort of epiphany to her. In fact, she gave about as much weight to the decision as she would to deciding what to order for lunch at a Yoshinoya. It didn't grant her any new sensation of lightness as she went back home to drop off her textbooks and change into casual some clothes.
"You're not going to school?" her father asked, still in his pajamas. "I thought you were over the truancy problem."
"Not anymore," she replied. "I'm rejecting your society and all it's crummy values. I'm not gonna drink your bullshit milkshake."
"I can't afford for you to become a hikokomori, sweetie," he yawned. "You'd better start looking for work then?"
Nami leapt up, slamming the door shut with an ungraceful roundhouse kick.
"You're the one who should be looking for work!" she shouted through the drywall.
For lack of anything better to do, she stayed indoors until lunchtime. She didn't feel hungry, but when the 1:00 news began to sound on the NHK radio in her father's room, she got it into her head to go to the city. She pilfered a few thousand yen from her father's wallet in the kitchen, jumped the fence to the security block and started down through the cherry-lined laneway that led to the nearest bus stop. The world is a different place during the weekday, she noticed as the bus sped on to the train station. An old man walked his pet cat on a leash. Mothers sped through the streets on Vespas with little children strapped to their backs. A campaign van representing a local MP had run off the road hit a telephone pole; Nami got off the bus and watched the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles for a while. When she reached the city proper, she bought a Yomiuri Shimbun and three different flavours of KitKats as she meandered through the Shinjuku park. She ate them joylessly under a dead gingko tree. The city was losing its appeal.
Hunger and the scent of ramen from a street vendor woke her. The sky had already darkened, and she was drawn to its soft yellow light thoughtlessly, soundlessly, like a moth. Imagine, then, her surprise to see Itoshiki-sensei, of all the other several dozen million people in the city, at the edge of the table.
"Sensei!" she cried desperately. "I can explain!"
Itoshiki tented his hands over his noodles, taking care not to let his sleeves fall in.
"Explain what, exactly?"
"I mean, I'm not skipping school," she said defiantly. "I just decided not to go. Effective as of this morning."
"Is that so..." He sighed. "I'm terribly sorry, but I hadn't noticed."
"What?" Nami shrieked. "Didn't you remember me? I thought we were closer than that!"
"Please excuse me for being candid, but by way of explanation, I also decided not to work today."
"Really?"
"Yes. I went to the woods near Mount Fuji earlier today, no explanation. I didn't expect to return this evening, but..." he began to trail off. "Humans, I suppose, need to take time out."
He looked at Nami in the eyes, and then spoke plainly the words she dreaded:
"It's normal."
Even in front of her teacher, in the middle of a busy city street, she cried like a starving man eats.
8 - Births, Deaths and Marriages
Rin, Nozomu.
Joanna Newsom, "Emily."
Warnings: Vague Rincest vibes if you squint. Also hold on to your black armbands because IT IS APPARENTLY DEATHFIC TIEM NAO.
You can always choose to have a Christian wedding. Shinto weddings are lovely, too. At the same time you can choose to take your baby to their first visit to a Shinto shrine. You can even celebrate Christmas like a Christian, even if you have lawn decoration of Santa on a crucifix. Most people do a mix of all of them. But no-one ever chooses a Shinto funeral. There's no afterlife, you know.
Rin liked the scents of all the different incenses in the beige tatami non-space of the mortuary hall. It reminded her of the the citronella candles they used to burn on the back veranda of the family estate in Kuraizawa, to keep away the mosquitos in the summertime. She remembered a party there once, it was for the marriage of a distant relative. She remembered crying for some reason, and being sent off to her room for making a scene. Nozomu sat out on such events on principle, so she ran to his room. She told him she hated, hated, hated, hated this family, said she was going to run away. He sighed, set down his schoolwork, and carried her on his shoulders to the shallow rice fields behind the property to look at the stars.
"That one's Altea, and the other famous one is is Vega. They used to be married, but then they were seperated by the Milky Way for having the audacity to fall in love with each other," Nozomu explained to Rin. "So now they only meet on Tanabata."
"But why did they fall in love after they got married?" she asked.)
"Because that's generally how things work in the real world." Nozomu exhaled sharply. "Look, this might be an odd thing to say to a ten year old, but please promise me you won't get married, Rin. It's just going to be a horrendous bother for everyone concerned."
"Pinky promise, big brother!" She giggled, still unaware of the double entendre of her maiden name.
The Buddhist priest bowed to the altar and began to intone an unfamiliar sutra. Rin had never been to a funeral before.
There aren't many things heavier than a death in the family, but it generally takes a while to register someone's absence. Especially since, as it was now the summer between school semesters, and she wouldn't have seen him every day anyway. When she visited his house to pack away Nozomu's possessions and take anything worthwhile to the kura, the whole scene had an air of unreality to it.
"God damn you," Kei growled through angry tears as they reached his bedroom. "Rot in hell, you bastard..."
As Rin packed away her brother's books and journals, she felt as though she were an archeologist dusting away artefacts of a pharaoh's tomb, or a pilgrim kneeling before the bones of a martyred saints. When she threw open the windows wide to rid the room from the imaginary scent of death, a gust of wind lifted and scattered the stack of papers off his desk. She apologised sweetly.
"Maybe we should give these back to the other students," Mikoto suggested as he collected the essays from the floor.
"No good. It wouldn't be fair," Kei sighed. "Not all of them are graded. And what about the ones he failed?"
Rin fell slightly pale when she found her own essay. Nozomu hadn't got around to marking it yet.
It felt to Rin as though the present and the past were getting mixed up with one another. Her older brother had just gone away to summer camp. She was still 5 years old, running to the letterbox everyday with her furisode sleeves trailing, waiting for a postcard. She was also, now, a young woman in black kimono at his funeral. She was still waiting for a postcard. She didn't cry back then. She still hadn't cried.
Rin twitched a little. The sutra seemed to drag on eternally. Worse, she hadn't sat in seiza for a while, and a burning sensation of pins-and-needles started to creep up from feet and into her legs. If there were a clock in the mortuary hall, she would have glanced at it every other second. Her only method of marking time was that, one by one, members of the family rose to the altar and pay their respects at the altar. It ran in strict order of family status: first her father, then her mother, then Enishi, Kei, Mikoto, and down in rank until it was her designated opportunity to grieve.
People say that there's an invisible red thread that ties you to the person you are going to marry. Rin, however, imagined that there also existed another thread, one that ran parallel to her red string of fate. She pictured something like a string of DNA that coiled endlessly over itself and bound her to her brother, but went beyond shallow things like family resemblance. The youngest daughter is always like temporary member of the family, or so goes the theory, because one day she will marry out and join another. Nozomu, by contrast, was aimless, dour and decadent, and therefore just as much considered himself a temporary member of the human race. Like the poppies in the field that grow too tall and are cut down, theirs was, in however vague a sense, a shared despair.
When the time came for Rin to stand and pay her respects, the lightness in her legs washed up over her. No sooner than she stood, she fainted softly, like a meteor breaking up in the atmosphere.
...BUT HEY NOZOMU WAS OKAY IN THE END BECAUSE WITHIN THE CONTINUITY OF THIS SERIES SUICIDE DEATH = ENDLESS LULZ FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY, AMIRITE 8D
9 - Fuck You, Sir Walter Raleigh
Jun, Nozomu
The Beatles, "I'm So Tired."
Ph: 6403 86OO 7O4O
This means whatever you want it to mean.
-Kudou Jun
It truly an odd farewell letter than Jun had written his teacher after school had broken up for the summer.
Nozomu's body ached to the bones from fatigue. It wasn't that he hadn't slept. All he seemed to do, without the structure of the working day as a guideline, was to sleep. But even when he slept, he seemed only to touch at that first, unfulfilling layer of sleep, where the body rests but the mind doesn't. A liminal, anxious dreamless state that leeches out into the daylight hours like a parasite. And it was all Jun's fault, he thought spitefully.
For a few days after the beginning of summer break, he tried various methods of cryptography; rearranging the kanji radicals, swapping letters for numbers, running it through a machine translation and back again, reading it aloud into a tape-player and playing it backwards... It all brought him back to one disturbing, alluring conclusion: this was a particularly pretentious attempt at a pick-up. Moreover, it was one that would leave Nozomu with the whole weight of moral responsibility, and would look very amusing on the international edition of To Catch A Predator. Stupid intelligent lad.
Whenever he looked at the note sticky-taped to the wall above the phone, the various cognitive dissonances associated left him in a hitherto unknown form of despair. Three weeks of this was more than the human mind could bear. He lit another cigarette.
Lately, I have been single-handedly putting the children of the Japanese division manager of British-American Tobacco through college, Nozomu thought as he finally picked up the telephone receiver.
10a
FUCK
I FUCKING HATE RILO KILEY
I REFUSE TO WRITE TO THIS SHIT
WHY ARE ON MY FUCKING iTUNES
WHAT THE FUCK
I DON'T EVEN
10b
The "Bad Horse Chorus" from Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog is also right out.
10c
All possible worlds
Ikkyu, Nozomu
Jon Brion, "Meaningless."
It's difficult to reminisce with people you don't particularly know.
"In that case... do you remember..." Ikkyu began to ask pensively, rubbing at his temples with his index fingers, "when there was a bomb threat at our elementary school?"
"No, I don't remember that," Nozomu apologised.
"What about that time in high school when we locked the exchange students in the janitor's closet? Do you remember that?"
"Like I told you, I didn't even go to the same junior high school as you." Nozomu was beginning to grow slightly exasperated by the evening's discussion, which had consisted of numerous other similar exchanges. "In other words, we missed out on each other's crucial ages."
"It's a shame, I suppose," Ikkyu sighed, defeated.
The restaurant was beginning to grow extremely noisy, as businessmen flooded in for the first stage of their post-work binge drinking sessions. The one-day friends had to almost yell over the noise to reach a consensus on leaving. A skinny waitress with make-up as thick as her Kansai accent brought them the bill.
"Uh, together or what?" she drawled.
"No!" Nozomu waved his hand in protest. "No, we're absolutely not."
"We're not?" Ikkyu shrunk back.
"Am I interrupting anything important?" The waitress twitched awkwardly. "I just meant to ask if you're paying seperate is all..."
"I'll pay," Ikkyu offered. Nozomu leaned across the table darkly.
"No, you won't, and that's the last I'll hear of it."
A warm summer rain fell thickly through the night air outside. On the way to the station, they attempted to share Ikkyu's umbrella, with the net effect that both of them were at least partially drenched by the time they arrived at Shinjuku.
"Itoshiki-kun. Something's been troubling me all night," Ikkyu began with some hesitation as they walked. "Do you think, if we hadn't have met a long time ago, that we still may have become friends?"
"That's an interesting question, Ikkyu-san," Nozomu replied.
Until they reached the station, neither said anything.
"You've got longer way to walk, you'll need it."
Ikkyu handed Nozomu the umbrella from the opposite side of the turnstile.
"Anyway, what do you think? About what I asked you before?"
"The possibility exists," Nozomu concluded gently as they parted ways.
Yay. That was fun. I wanna get better at drabbles now! :D
1. Pick a character, pairing, or fandom you like.
2. Turn your music player on and turn it on random/shuffle.
3. Write a drabblet/ficlet related to each song that plays. You only have the time frame of the song to finish the drabble; you start when the song starts, and stop when it's over. No lingering afterward! No matter how whacked out your drabble is. :) (Here's where I was an utterly horrible person and broke this basic rule. I lingered. Linger, and linger, and linger I did. Mainly, however, I was just fixing sentences I considered too grammatically shonky to post under my own name. Sue me. :P )
4. Do ten of these, then post them.
Fandom: Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei
Pairings: Everyone/everyone else, zomg wow
Ratings: R for language, death and sexual themes
1 - Travelling far, in sin
Nozomu
Nick Drake, "Parasite."
Some days are better for dying than others. Wednesdays, usually. That's an average sort of day, isn't it? Not a Thursday, though, that didn't seem right. He never could stick Thursdays.
Nozomu didn't go in to work that day. He didn't leave a note or even call in sick. No, best not to make any ceremony of it this time around, he decided. He simply packed his rope, a note to his loved ones and a will kit, and sailed down calmly to the Northern Line bus stop with the wind at his back.
The ginkgo were turning that day. Their leaves were like tiny gold shells gathering in the gutter. In a few hours, they'd turn brown and sickly sweet. Nozomu stomped on them a few times out of spite.
The coach arrived. That's the best way to approach one's death, Nozomu thought. Calmly, with no more ceremony than getting on a bus.
"One way to the Hakone woods, please," he said, dropping some money into the fare slot.
Nozomu looked out the window for a while. The bus wound its way through the sprawl of suburbs until they gradually gave way to green squares of rice fields, then into the pine-thick foothills. After two hours, they stopped for a break at the juncture between two highways. Nozomu bought a strawberry jam sandwich from a vending machine and ate it slowly. No point dying hungry.
As the highway ended and the woods began, the road began to spiral up a long mountain road. The early afternoon light brought a purple glow to the crowds of trees. Nozomu surveyed the unfamiliar sights from the window seat. A soft English folk song played on the radio; he couldn't understand the words. It was like a lullaby; it tired him. He slept.
Nozomu woke to the sound of women screaming.
"Please be advised, there has been a pedestrian accident," the driver's voice crackled hesitantly over the intercom. "An emergency connecting line will be arriving shortly... please remain on the bus---"
"What happened?" Nozomu sleepily asked the salaryman next to him.
"Tch, suicide. Some kid threw himself in fronna bus," the man groaned in the Touhoku dialect. "There's a sign of the times for you. First comes the recession, then comes the depression."
"I suppose," Nozomu responded noncommittally. "Maybe tomorrow would have been a better day to die."
(NB: The line comparing suicide and getting on a bus shamelessly appropriated from Steve Toltz's masterpiece, A Fraction of the Whole. GET OFF THE INTERNET AND READ IT. NOW.)
2 - Victory
Jun, Kino
Air, "Playground Love."
"And here we find Jun Kudou, on a swing, scarcely a care in this mortal world. A bit kindergarten there, innit?" Kino held his hand-held camera-phone above his rival. Jun kept his eyes fixed on a paperback novel.
"I'm waiting for the tram," he said.
"What are you reading?"
"Death in Venice."
"What's it about?"
"Mind your own business."
"Temper, temper," tsked Kino. "Hey. Tell us a story, how about it?"
"Look, why are you filming me, anyway?" Jun looked up briefly to meet the digital eye. "Is it for school? Film club?"
"Oh, perish the thought, my good man," Kino sighed effetely. "Heaven forbid I use extra-curricular pursuits as a shallow outlet for our eternal--"
"Love?" Jun quipped to the camera. "Oh, how sweet."
"NO. RIVALRY." Kino panicked. "IGNORE HIM. CUT, CUT, CUT."
Kino snapped the phone shut. Jun began to smile a little and swayed lazily.
"You think you're so bloody smart, don't you. But I've got one thing on you, you know," Kino declared.
"Is that right?" There was a slight harshness to Jun's voice as he looked up to meet Kino's gaze; his inner peace was wearing thin. He stood up so quickly a spell of dizziness overcame him, and sank to support himself rather ungracefully against the side of the swing. Kino bared his teeth with a smile and groped his own tragicomic bicep.
"I've been working out, can't you see? Meanwhile, look at you. You're a skinny bastard, Jun. No wonder you just halfway passed out a second ago. You oughtta eat more."
"Well, they don't let you bring food into the library, so."
Jun left Kino to chew on the aposiopesis, opened his novel at the bookmark again and started towards the streetcar stop, reading as he walked.
"If you keep that up, one of these days you're going to walk right into a pole," Kino sneered. "And I won't do a thing to stop it."
"I won't say it hasn't happened before," admitted Jun.
"And I'm going to film it and put it on YouTube..."
"I'll be the first to comment."
"And then I'll post the YouTube link on 2ch, and all the girls you like will see it and--" Kino was desperate for ammunition.
"Will you leave me alone? I don't have time for this, Kino. I've got a lot of things on my mind right now." With that, Jun turned on his heels and walked quickly up the steps, trying to lose Kino in a crowd of other students.
"Hey!" Kino cried. He grabbed at Jun's coat-tails from the steps below the platform. "Stop ignoring me, damnit!"
"Everybody!" Jun called cheerfully aloud. A crowd of faces turned expectantly towards him, as if he were about to begin a story. Instead, he continued: "Look at Kuniya-kun!"
Obediently, the staring mass gawked at Kino. He suddenly felt as though he was standing at the edge of a tall cliff, ready at any moment to fall over the edge. His hands shook. He felt his body reeling. The streetcar pulled to a stop with long, slow screech. Jun ascended its suspended steps with quiet dignity.
"It's what he wants, apparently."
3 - Birthday boy, buyer's remorse
Haga, Aoyama
Morrissey, "Hold on to your Friends."
"Listen, I'm sorry about the shirt..."
"'Sokay. Really."
Aoyama cursed himself the whole time in the line for the Mr. Donut in Harajuku. That birthday present for Haga was a total mistake. The bright purple shirt with a picture of Batman and Robin against a ghastly background of polka dots seemed like a good idea at the time; he parted with over 3000 yen for it. He imagined how well it would suit Haga from the moment he saw it; nothing had ever been so positively certain in his life before.
No. It looked pretty stupid, they both secretly thought. Moreover, it was so small on Haga that Aoyama began to panic and wonder if he'd accidentally grabbed something off the girls' rack. Still, Haga wore it proudly, along with a paper cone birthday hat, and a winsome smile. The line edged forward a little more.
"I'm sorry, I should have just gotten you a voucher," Aoyama sighed.
"What, you kidding? It's awesome. I loved The Dark Knight."
"Maybe it'll be a good pajama top, but..."
"No, really. Thanks. It's the best present ever. Better than Kino's, anyway."
He showed Aoyama the framed picture of Kino sitting in agura with a dramatic expression. He had signed it, "With best birthday wishes to my BFF." He was one step away from dotting the "i"'s with hearts, Aoyama thought. They reached the counter and ordered a packet of 6 to donuts to share, with a 10% birthday discount.
"He ditched us today, anyway." Aoyama said with a shrug. "Said he missed the tram."
"I love that guy, I really do, but I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him," laughed Haga.
They walked in silence for a little while down the grey thoroughfare of Takeshita Street. When they stopped at a level crossing near the HMV building, the afternoon light caught Haga at just such an angle that the shirt's ridiculousness was brilliantly illuminated. It truly was a hideous thing, Aoyama despaired.
"I'm sorry, but--" he began.
"Aoyama," Haga interrupted and held a finger to his lips. "Look, Aoyama. Do me a favour; quit apologising already. You're sounding like Ai-chan these days, you know?"
"I'm sorry," Aoyama drawled sarcastically. "See what I did there?" He added ironically. There is, after all, a crucially semantic difference between the two.
"Friends don't say "sorry," got it?" Haga explained. "Anyway, let's go check out some game stores next. There's another place over in Akiba that does a birthday discount too, I think."
"Yeah, whatever..." Aoyama sighed. "You're just gonna buy some dodgy second-hand eroge."
By way of response, Haga leaned over and snatched the final half-eaten donut out of Aoyama's hand.
"Hey! I wasn't finished!"
"Friends don't say 'please' and 'thank you,' either," Haga declared with his mouth full.
4 - I see you
Kafuka, Nozomu
The Velvet Underground & Nico, "I'll Be Your Mirror."
"I'm sure you know this is pretty twisted; me trying to explain my personal problems to you."
Nozomu wore a hat indoors, having decided against groucho glasses. Through this, he still couldn't hide his terror of being recognised, even on the opposite side of Tokyo. Kafuka simply wore a floral headscarf, and looked like another girl altogether; rather, another woman. How, exactly, had he been strong-armed into this?
"But I asked you here," Kafuka insisted, "so it's okay."
"No, it's not okay," Nozomu groaned, "and I'm imploring you to understand this. It's twisted and..."
It was overcast outside the city cafe where they sat, and pale orange from the sunset glinted off the windows of the buildings that surrounded it.
"It's cheaper than therapy," she offered.
"No, it's just odd. Worse than odd. Taken the wrong way, and I could lose my job." He catastrophised quietly. "Furthermore, I'm planning to die this year, which means I'm too old to be doing the whole mid-life crisis thing and dating a woman barely more than half my age."
The young waitress brought them a tea and coffee respectively.
"I'm already a teenager, you're only in your twenties." Kafka poured a few spoons of raw sugar into her tea. "That sounds better already, doesn't it?"
"Not really, no." Nozomu took his coffee black, before a spasm of despair overcame him. He covered his face again.
"Please put down your hands, Sensei." Kafuka took hold of them. "I just wanted to look at you for a bit."
5 - I don't want to go among mad people, but...
Chiri, Kafuka
Sufjan Stevens, "A Short Reprise For Mary Todd, Who Went Insane, But For Very Good Reasons."
Fuura-san,
I write to you with regards to certain visible violations of the uniform code, which I feel you would prefer to hear from me personally, rather than my referring the matter to Sensei.
Fuura-san, you are old enough to wear a bra. If it is not part of the uniform code officially, you ought to follow the spirit as well as the letter of the law. If you do not ameliorate said matter promptly, it will be raised as a point of discussion at the next meeting of the student council.
Regards,
Kitsu Chiri, 2-H.
PS: Happy White Day.
6 - Treasures
Matoi
Yann Tiersen, "Le Redecouverte", (Amelie OST.)
A chipped teacup. An overdue notice from Tokyo General Electric with a grocery list on the back. The torn-off "DO NOT REMOVE" label from his pillow. A grey-green pebble the same color as his eyes. The cork from a bottle of his favorite vintage of Beaujolais Noveau. A toothbrush, with bristles like the fur of an old dog. A cotton cloth for cleaning eye-glasses. One pair of underpants; boxers, not briefs. The satin cord of his bathrobe. A broken sandal. Three bloodied bandaids and a razorblade.
One by one, Matoi carefully puts the treasures back in their gilt red box. She swears she will carry them with her to her grave.
7 - My Damascan Road
Nami
Belle & Sebastian, "Act of the Apostle II"
As the bus accelerated from the bus stop and out of sight, Nami stopped running, swallowed a mouthful of toast and decided that she would no longer go to school.
This did not come as any sort of epiphany to her. In fact, she gave about as much weight to the decision as she would to deciding what to order for lunch at a Yoshinoya. It didn't grant her any new sensation of lightness as she went back home to drop off her textbooks and change into casual some clothes.
"You're not going to school?" her father asked, still in his pajamas. "I thought you were over the truancy problem."
"Not anymore," she replied. "I'm rejecting your society and all it's crummy values. I'm not gonna drink your bullshit milkshake."
"I can't afford for you to become a hikokomori, sweetie," he yawned. "You'd better start looking for work then?"
Nami leapt up, slamming the door shut with an ungraceful roundhouse kick.
"You're the one who should be looking for work!" she shouted through the drywall.
For lack of anything better to do, she stayed indoors until lunchtime. She didn't feel hungry, but when the 1:00 news began to sound on the NHK radio in her father's room, she got it into her head to go to the city. She pilfered a few thousand yen from her father's wallet in the kitchen, jumped the fence to the security block and started down through the cherry-lined laneway that led to the nearest bus stop. The world is a different place during the weekday, she noticed as the bus sped on to the train station. An old man walked his pet cat on a leash. Mothers sped through the streets on Vespas with little children strapped to their backs. A campaign van representing a local MP had run off the road hit a telephone pole; Nami got off the bus and watched the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles for a while. When she reached the city proper, she bought a Yomiuri Shimbun and three different flavours of KitKats as she meandered through the Shinjuku park. She ate them joylessly under a dead gingko tree. The city was losing its appeal.
Hunger and the scent of ramen from a street vendor woke her. The sky had already darkened, and she was drawn to its soft yellow light thoughtlessly, soundlessly, like a moth. Imagine, then, her surprise to see Itoshiki-sensei, of all the other several dozen million people in the city, at the edge of the table.
"Sensei!" she cried desperately. "I can explain!"
Itoshiki tented his hands over his noodles, taking care not to let his sleeves fall in.
"Explain what, exactly?"
"I mean, I'm not skipping school," she said defiantly. "I just decided not to go. Effective as of this morning."
"Is that so..." He sighed. "I'm terribly sorry, but I hadn't noticed."
"What?" Nami shrieked. "Didn't you remember me? I thought we were closer than that!"
"Please excuse me for being candid, but by way of explanation, I also decided not to work today."
"Really?"
"Yes. I went to the woods near Mount Fuji earlier today, no explanation. I didn't expect to return this evening, but..." he began to trail off. "Humans, I suppose, need to take time out."
He looked at Nami in the eyes, and then spoke plainly the words she dreaded:
"It's normal."
Even in front of her teacher, in the middle of a busy city street, she cried like a starving man eats.
8 - Births, Deaths and Marriages
Rin, Nozomu.
Joanna Newsom, "Emily."
Warnings: Vague Rincest vibes if you squint. Also hold on to your black armbands because IT IS APPARENTLY DEATHFIC TIEM NAO.
You can always choose to have a Christian wedding. Shinto weddings are lovely, too. At the same time you can choose to take your baby to their first visit to a Shinto shrine. You can even celebrate Christmas like a Christian, even if you have lawn decoration of Santa on a crucifix. Most people do a mix of all of them. But no-one ever chooses a Shinto funeral. There's no afterlife, you know.
Rin liked the scents of all the different incenses in the beige tatami non-space of the mortuary hall. It reminded her of the the citronella candles they used to burn on the back veranda of the family estate in Kuraizawa, to keep away the mosquitos in the summertime. She remembered a party there once, it was for the marriage of a distant relative. She remembered crying for some reason, and being sent off to her room for making a scene. Nozomu sat out on such events on principle, so she ran to his room. She told him she hated, hated, hated, hated this family, said she was going to run away. He sighed, set down his schoolwork, and carried her on his shoulders to the shallow rice fields behind the property to look at the stars.
"That one's Altea, and the other famous one is is Vega. They used to be married, but then they were seperated by the Milky Way for having the audacity to fall in love with each other," Nozomu explained to Rin. "So now they only meet on Tanabata."
"But why did they fall in love after they got married?" she asked.)
"Because that's generally how things work in the real world." Nozomu exhaled sharply. "Look, this might be an odd thing to say to a ten year old, but please promise me you won't get married, Rin. It's just going to be a horrendous bother for everyone concerned."
"Pinky promise, big brother!" She giggled, still unaware of the double entendre of her maiden name.
The Buddhist priest bowed to the altar and began to intone an unfamiliar sutra. Rin had never been to a funeral before.
There aren't many things heavier than a death in the family, but it generally takes a while to register someone's absence. Especially since, as it was now the summer between school semesters, and she wouldn't have seen him every day anyway. When she visited his house to pack away Nozomu's possessions and take anything worthwhile to the kura, the whole scene had an air of unreality to it.
"God damn you," Kei growled through angry tears as they reached his bedroom. "Rot in hell, you bastard..."
As Rin packed away her brother's books and journals, she felt as though she were an archeologist dusting away artefacts of a pharaoh's tomb, or a pilgrim kneeling before the bones of a martyred saints. When she threw open the windows wide to rid the room from the imaginary scent of death, a gust of wind lifted and scattered the stack of papers off his desk. She apologised sweetly.
"Maybe we should give these back to the other students," Mikoto suggested as he collected the essays from the floor.
"No good. It wouldn't be fair," Kei sighed. "Not all of them are graded. And what about the ones he failed?"
Rin fell slightly pale when she found her own essay. Nozomu hadn't got around to marking it yet.
It felt to Rin as though the present and the past were getting mixed up with one another. Her older brother had just gone away to summer camp. She was still 5 years old, running to the letterbox everyday with her furisode sleeves trailing, waiting for a postcard. She was also, now, a young woman in black kimono at his funeral. She was still waiting for a postcard. She didn't cry back then. She still hadn't cried.
Rin twitched a little. The sutra seemed to drag on eternally. Worse, she hadn't sat in seiza for a while, and a burning sensation of pins-and-needles started to creep up from feet and into her legs. If there were a clock in the mortuary hall, she would have glanced at it every other second. Her only method of marking time was that, one by one, members of the family rose to the altar and pay their respects at the altar. It ran in strict order of family status: first her father, then her mother, then Enishi, Kei, Mikoto, and down in rank until it was her designated opportunity to grieve.
People say that there's an invisible red thread that ties you to the person you are going to marry. Rin, however, imagined that there also existed another thread, one that ran parallel to her red string of fate. She pictured something like a string of DNA that coiled endlessly over itself and bound her to her brother, but went beyond shallow things like family resemblance. The youngest daughter is always like temporary member of the family, or so goes the theory, because one day she will marry out and join another. Nozomu, by contrast, was aimless, dour and decadent, and therefore just as much considered himself a temporary member of the human race. Like the poppies in the field that grow too tall and are cut down, theirs was, in however vague a sense, a shared despair.
When the time came for Rin to stand and pay her respects, the lightness in her legs washed up over her. No sooner than she stood, she fainted softly, like a meteor breaking up in the atmosphere.
...BUT HEY NOZOMU WAS OKAY IN THE END BECAUSE WITHIN THE CONTINUITY OF THIS SERIES SUICIDE DEATH = ENDLESS LULZ FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY, AMIRITE 8D
9 - Fuck You, Sir Walter Raleigh
Jun, Nozomu
The Beatles, "I'm So Tired."
Ph: 6403 86OO 7O4O
This means whatever you want it to mean.
-Kudou Jun
It truly an odd farewell letter than Jun had written his teacher after school had broken up for the summer.
Nozomu's body ached to the bones from fatigue. It wasn't that he hadn't slept. All he seemed to do, without the structure of the working day as a guideline, was to sleep. But even when he slept, he seemed only to touch at that first, unfulfilling layer of sleep, where the body rests but the mind doesn't. A liminal, anxious dreamless state that leeches out into the daylight hours like a parasite. And it was all Jun's fault, he thought spitefully.
For a few days after the beginning of summer break, he tried various methods of cryptography; rearranging the kanji radicals, swapping letters for numbers, running it through a machine translation and back again, reading it aloud into a tape-player and playing it backwards... It all brought him back to one disturbing, alluring conclusion: this was a particularly pretentious attempt at a pick-up. Moreover, it was one that would leave Nozomu with the whole weight of moral responsibility, and would look very amusing on the international edition of To Catch A Predator. Stupid intelligent lad.
Whenever he looked at the note sticky-taped to the wall above the phone, the various cognitive dissonances associated left him in a hitherto unknown form of despair. Three weeks of this was more than the human mind could bear. He lit another cigarette.
Lately, I have been single-handedly putting the children of the Japanese division manager of British-American Tobacco through college, Nozomu thought as he finally picked up the telephone receiver.
10a
FUCK
I FUCKING HATE RILO KILEY
I REFUSE TO WRITE TO THIS SHIT
WHY ARE ON MY FUCKING iTUNES
WHAT THE FUCK
I DON'T EVEN
10b
The "Bad Horse Chorus" from Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog is also right out.
10c
All possible worlds
Ikkyu, Nozomu
Jon Brion, "Meaningless."
It's difficult to reminisce with people you don't particularly know.
"In that case... do you remember..." Ikkyu began to ask pensively, rubbing at his temples with his index fingers, "when there was a bomb threat at our elementary school?"
"No, I don't remember that," Nozomu apologised.
"What about that time in high school when we locked the exchange students in the janitor's closet? Do you remember that?"
"Like I told you, I didn't even go to the same junior high school as you." Nozomu was beginning to grow slightly exasperated by the evening's discussion, which had consisted of numerous other similar exchanges. "In other words, we missed out on each other's crucial ages."
"It's a shame, I suppose," Ikkyu sighed, defeated.
The restaurant was beginning to grow extremely noisy, as businessmen flooded in for the first stage of their post-work binge drinking sessions. The one-day friends had to almost yell over the noise to reach a consensus on leaving. A skinny waitress with make-up as thick as her Kansai accent brought them the bill.
"Uh, together or what?" she drawled.
"No!" Nozomu waved his hand in protest. "No, we're absolutely not."
"We're not?" Ikkyu shrunk back.
"Am I interrupting anything important?" The waitress twitched awkwardly. "I just meant to ask if you're paying seperate is all..."
"I'll pay," Ikkyu offered. Nozomu leaned across the table darkly.
"No, you won't, and that's the last I'll hear of it."
A warm summer rain fell thickly through the night air outside. On the way to the station, they attempted to share Ikkyu's umbrella, with the net effect that both of them were at least partially drenched by the time they arrived at Shinjuku.
"Itoshiki-kun. Something's been troubling me all night," Ikkyu began with some hesitation as they walked. "Do you think, if we hadn't have met a long time ago, that we still may have become friends?"
"That's an interesting question, Ikkyu-san," Nozomu replied.
Until they reached the station, neither said anything.
"You've got longer way to walk, you'll need it."
Ikkyu handed Nozomu the umbrella from the opposite side of the turnstile.
"Anyway, what do you think? About what I asked you before?"
"The possibility exists," Nozomu concluded gently as they parted ways.
Yay. That was fun. I wanna get better at drabbles now! :D