tokuon

“will continue tomorrow…” was one week ago, but who’s counting? I wish the downpour in the stock markets would stop….and maybe figure out how to find more focus on this damn blog. Thinking about starting yet another website to focus on more non-fiction research, marketing, trends tracking type of writing. “Matcha Everything dot com” maybe?

Sayuri actually hadn’t noticed any thunder, but she kept the thought to herself for the moment. She sat down at the table near the window. It had gotten quite dark outside. Suddenly, a flash of light reflected off the wet pavement outside. A moment later, the sky echoed a BOOM.

“There’s another one!” The woman picked up a thin black covered book and opened it up to a page with that day’s date. June 21st. Laying it on the table in front of Sayuri, she said, “Let me know when you’re ready to order.”

“Thank you.” The woman was already making her way back to the bar counter. Sayuri looked down at the book. A short selection of coffees was handwritten on June 21st. On the facing page, a list of teas and cakes. <note to self…find myself a list of coffees and teas to populate this mess> She turned back and took a look at the room. One wall was lined with well worn books, the other displayed four framed sketches of what seemed to be foreign, pastoral landscapes and townscapes.

The cafe was quaint. Sayuri felt as if Hemmingway would walk in at any moment. And he did. In Sayuri’s mind. Walking through the chingling door. Taking off his hat and shaking off the water. Did Hemmingway own a hat?

The woman returned with a small glass vase holding a two withering miniature hydrangea blossoms that looked as if they had been cut from the bush outside the door now being pelted by the rain. From her position at the windowfront, Sayuri could see the blossoms falling apart under the attack. She wondered briefly which of the flowers would last longer. “I’ll have a cappucino, thanks.” Again lightning and a moment later, thunder.

“Sure, coming right up,” the woman said almost absent-mindedly as she looked up at the bit of sky visible from the window. She left.

It is now 1:15 am and I should be sleeping, but having spent half the night working and the other half of the night procrastinating not knowing what to do with myself, I feel like putting down on digital paper what I put down on paper over 10 minute minutes of coffee here and gyudon there. Click here for the first section: A Glass of Wine.

Sayuri had been frequenting the small cafe for some months now. She had moved into the neighborhood after selling her parents’ home in Chiba to be in a more convenient location within the city. As with many of the stations in the city, the area in the immediate vicinity was filled with shops, cafes, restaurants and other bits and pieces of clockwork that blended with homes and apartment buildings there further you walked. It was this brackish area between the shops and the homes that she found fascinating.

A week after she had moved into a small 1LDK apartment at what she called her little mura, Sayuri exited a store selling white linens intending to continue her exploration. A narrow alley caught her eye as she navigated the maze of pathways. It was lined with ivy and at the far end, where the alley seemed to intersect another small pathway, a black iron-cast sign above a glass door read Cafe Hands.

A heavy drop of water hit the top of her head. She lifted her palm to the level of her chin as she looked up past the rooftops into dark clouds that had gathered below the dull overcast sky. Yabai.

She started walking toward the cafe hoping it was open. On a Monday afternoon, it was very possible the place was closed. The black pavement started to get spotty as Sayuri picked up her pace. A moment later she was sprinting in her low-heeled sandal, purse clutched against her chest.

A bell tingled still air inside the cafe as Sayuri crashed through the door. Outside, the rain railed against the pavement and lashed against the door. And, failing to break through, it haurried away abashedly into a small ditch.

Sayuri stood behind the closed door in a growing pool of water. Why me? she thought. The small room she had entered held two tables with two chairs each, and a coffee table cut from the trunk of a tree with red sofas at either side. At the back, a counter sat four stools facing a small bar out of which a tall woman in her mid-30s came rushing.

“Wow, what a downpour!” the woman exclaimed as she handed Sayuri one towel and spread another out to soak up the water dripping from Sayuri’s skirt.

“I’m so sorry!” Sayuri apologized.

“Not at all. Not at all,” the woman looked up with a quick smile. Sayuri felt, somehow, that this smile on this face was reassuring, satisfying…but, satisfying for both its owner and its recipient. It was a fleeting whisp of a thought, gone as soon as it had arrived. “Please, have a seat…at one of the tables would be best I suppose. The rain was quite sudden wasn’t it? I bet you were caught by surprise. Did you hear the thunder?”

getting sleepy….will continue tomorrow….sorry!

A few short comments before I begin.

Publishing my story sketches for the world to see…what am I thinking? Writers, artists, musicians, performers they’re supposed to wow, amuse, bedazzle, entrance, captivate, mortify, elicit powerful emotions in you with the finished product, not with the crap that comes before.

There. I laid it all out on the floor. All those thoughts that keep my flimsy attempts at writing on pieces of paper and out of this space that has gone through so many incarnations in the past year. The problem is, I lose those pieces of paper before ever polishing them into the treasures I hope they’ll become.

Fuck it. This blog is a for rough drafts anyway. Read as you will, think about how crappy they all are, and watch as I forget about some and start polishing others. Here goes nothing.

“We cannot know the future of course, but we can see possibilities. And, we can reason out the probably outcomes of our actions.”

The woman took a sip, then held the glass of red wine up to the incandescent bulb hanging down from the ceiling. The wine was not thick and the light peering through at her was distorted, dimmed, twisted as she swirled the liquid gently. Rubies danced against her white skin.

“Will that be the only prophecy tonight?” The girl sitting across the table from her giggled. She had her own glass, and it had been emptied one too many times that evening.

“If, for example, I tipped this wine glass on its side, what would you expect to happen?” The girl looked perplexed. As if challenging her, the woman began to tip the wine glass onto its side. “The wine will spill, of course,” the woman laughed, but kept tipping the glass until the wine was teetering on the edge. “You can predict the future in a way by drawing logical conclusions based on the information obtained through your senses.” The woman’s hand was steady as she spoke. “And, you can cause certain outcomes by acting upon the information given to you. Put you glass beneath mine.”

The girl did as she was told. “What you have just done was to act upon the information obtained by your eyes to prevent the most probable outcome.” The woman let some of the wine spill into the girl’s glass. “The probability of the wine spilling onto the table was changed from 99% to 1% by your action. You predicted the future and changed it.”

“Actually, you’re the one who changed the future,” the girl laughed as she pulled her glass back.

“Sayuri-chan, don’t interrupt. I’m not finished. This is, what, your fifth time visiting my cafe?”

“Sixth, if you count the few minutes I was in here the first time. And, if I drink any more wine, it will be the third time I pass out here.”

“Weak! But as I was saying, probability and possibility. What if you had the wherewithal to notice what causes the improbable instead of just the probable? What if you chose to see what common sense would say is so improbable as to be impossible?”

The girl tilted her head in thought for a moment. Her eyes followed the flow of the woman’s long black hair down as it rested on her chest. “I’d say you were a bit loony.”

“True!” the woman laughed. “But, if you can see and calculate probability, you can also change it by taking action.” In her eagerness, the woman leaned further into the table. The girl watched the tips of the woman’s hair brush against the surface. Suddenly, she brought her eyes up. The woman was tipping the wine glass again. The remainder of the wine, a mouthful, rested on the inside edge of the glass.

The woman smiled, looked up into the girl’s eyes, and tipped the glass upside down. Quickly, she brought it upright and drained the last mouthful of wine. She placed the wine glass on the coffee table, and leaned back into the sofa. She crossed her left leg over her right slowly, placed one long, slender left arm on her knee, and one long, slender right arm across the back of the sofa. And she smiled. Satisfied.

I should be asleep. It is twenty-seven minutes past three o’clock in the morning, and as I write this, it has turned twenty-eight.

But I need to face the facts. I am scared. Scared shit.

I awoke perhaps one hour ago, and I was only able to get out of bed maybe thirty minutes ago. The only thing certain is the time on the bottom right corner of my PC screen, although it too may not be accurate. Certain but not accurate but certainty is what’s important now.

I awoke to the sound of a deep, malicious voice in my right ear. It was chanting something incomprehensible and the tone was certainly not amicable.

I awoke but could not open my eyes, nor move any part of my body, so I am not quite certain I was awake. I could have been asleep and dreaming still, though if dreaming I was experiencing a nightmare of such clarity as I have never known before.

The voice started soft–a quiet resentment, a spite being nurtured. I thought on its origin, the source of its hate, and came to a conclusion. It belonged to the cat I had lured on a whim to my house door. The cat, a stray, was brown with black spots on it front paws and seemed tame enough. Tame enough to know a human meaning to give it a few mouthfuls of sustenance, but it was not so domesticated as to know the difference between human play and genuine generosity.

And I prudent enough to realize I would have a cat at my apartment door each evening begging for food. And I not gracious enough to accept that responsibility. And I bearing such irresponsibility as to make play of such a creature’s desperation.

And I intelligent enough to realize the viciousness of my actions, feeling guilt for what I have done, but it was too late. Too late.

So off I shooed the cat, and here I was, in bed, rendered immobile, with a spirit having received an invitation and denied courtesy. It stood at the threshold to my soul opened wide by my guilt and grew stronger and more confident as it chanted some incantation to seize the entire, dreadful, emptiness of my terrible heart.

I began to pray the only prayer I knew by heart, a prayer taught to me by thirteen years of Christian schooling, though I had long ago sworn off my reliance on religion. I prayed the Lord’s prayed silently in my mind. I poured my remorse into the prayer attempting fill the empty container of my soul.

Because I had never known such fear before in my life. Such malevolence, such desire for vengeance, such incredible, overwhelming, penetrating power. The spell was invading me through my right ear. Freezing my body, it sought to freeze my will.

But the prayer began to take effect as I repeated it with desperation over and over and over again. The voice retreated, the incantation waned in power till finally, it shrunk into the infinite distance beyond the mortal world, and I was released. Saved.

Now awake, I am faced with a dilemma. This encounter with the world of spirit contradicted my Christian upbringing, though I had harbored doubts over the existence of both Christian and non-Christian spirituality since studying the Christian Bible. And what of the prayer that had such success in rescuing me? Did that truth have meaning enough to alter my belief and my unwillingness to rely on that religion which I had come to despise?

The incident, not and hour over, had confirmed (maybe) the co-existence of two worlds (perhaps–if it had any truth and not simply a creation of my subconscious guilt). I close this entry with only one certainty–here in my apartment before dawn’s twilight, I am afraid.

The bar I ran in Shimokitazawa was designed, built and of course, owned by the Furukawa’s, an architect/interior designer couple. The bar was part of an elaborate 3-story apartment building that housed their penthouse, five decently-sized 1LDKs on the second floor, and six 1Rs on the first floor behind the bar. A staircase from the bar led downstairs to the restroom and their design office and a sunken atrium with a classic Roman-style fountain. At least, Roman was what they told me when I was hired. The apartment building itself reminded me of something from Southern California rather than Southern Italy, but I really didn’t know shit about shit.

What I did know was that today was stifling hot and I was in Ginza to pick up a set of wine glasses from Holland. A friend of the Furukawa’s had ordered it for them, and had it delivered to his gallery in Ginza instead of the bar, which meant I had to trek halfway across town to pick it up.

The metal staircase that led to Gallery JJ was squeezed in an alley off a side street of a side street. It was wide enough for one person to walk up single file, and left just enough room for a person to squeeze past. In any other city it might simply have been the space between two buildings, but beyond the staircase, I could see the unlit signs of maybe five small "snack bars" and "pubs" with names like "Lily" and "Ayako" and one named "Paradise".

The alley was isolated from the main thoroughfares and the silence that resulted when you stepped into the alleyway was dramatic. The staircase clanged with each step announcing my arrival to the empty alley as I ascended. This JJ would have to know I was coming. From the street, the Gallery had a small sign in the dirty second-floor window that stretched the length of the building’s face, but behind the sign was a white panel that kept the inside hidden from view. The white tiles that covered the building’s wall were stained gray with city dust. I looked upwards toward the wooden door and past it at the narrow slit of blue sky beyond.

The door itself had a small window that revealed a short, dark hallway lit by another window at the opposite end. Several frames empty of canvas leaned against the wall in the center of the hallway blocking any sign of the Gallery’s actual entrance. The entire look of the building gave the impression of the door to make a loud squeak as I opened, but was greeted instead by a springy heaviness and had to kick the bottom with my feet to push it open. The door itself was battered at the bottom from what was probably years of kicking. As I stepped in, I could see another door beyond the empty frames.

"Irasshai!" replied the muffled female voice after my knock. I opened the door and was greeted by a wall of a bookcase filled with cardboard canisters of varying lengths. I leaned to look past the book case with one hand still holding the door slightly open. As I let it go, the spring at the top pushed it shut.

"Excuse me, I work for the Furukawa’s. I’m here to pick up some wine glasses."

"Oh right, come in. Sit down, please," said the voice. "I’m afraid JJ is out right now. He’s picking his daughter up from school. Apparently there was a suicide."