(Note: I thought I'd tamper with the Nabokovian style -- I've recently read some of his stuff and will give it a try.)
A Simple Complex
There is a belief in the Uchiha clan, said to have stemmed back from the very tongue of Madara Uchiha himself when his brother married a fourteen-year-old prostitute, and asked, "Where can I get one of those?" And sure, enough, my own dear, sweet grandmommy was a carefree genin running carelessly along the hot springs of the small and hospitable Yugakure, whereupon my grandfather (hot and devilish soul he was!) yanked her by the foot and lanced her through with his demon's eyes. Of that became Fugaku Uchiha, who repeated the tradition with his own bride selection.
Which leaves me in a hot predicament, a pacing father with a red face and a mother whose hands have been wrung dry. He says lightly, each time I leave the house, to pick up a nice girlfriend or treat a lady to dinner. But each time I arrive home empty-handed his eyes tear up and he mourns his failure as a parent. My mother watches helplessly on the sidelines as Father and I duke it out in a apathetic-pathetic duel of no wits at all.
"Meet anyone today?" he asks slyly as he slurps up his noodles. He only slurps his noodles so loudly when he's trying to control himself. I don't think it's working.
"No," I say.
"You'd think after all this time... " he gushes on and gulps, gulps, gulps from his sake cup until the tips of his ears are red. He comes back to himself with a smacking Ah! and a hearty burp. "You'd find a girl."
At this point, he's not even worried about my upholding the sacred tradition, only that I meet someone with a uterus and a vagina (preferably not too large, or it might stain the family tablecloth of picnic romances). Hips are optional, as well as breasts.
He's getting old and gray now, I notice this each morning as he has to fight with his flak jacket to fit it on in the mornings; his stomach is swelled enough one might think I may have found someone to impregnate. His jowls have sunken even lower since when he was a robust Konoha Policeman. In his place, I must uphold the law. And sometime in the near future I must uphold his place as head of the Uchiha clan (none of whom especially trust me, or do I trust in return).
"I'm too old for this shit," he whines, restocking the kunai pouches on his hips and breast pockets. "Graveyard shift, from now on, should be kept for the young'uns."
"You're absolutely right," I tell him. If he doesn't work the graveyard shift, I don't have to work with him at all. Period.
"I know I am!"
What has happened to that once proud father who dashed like lightning from place to place and blew nimbus clouds of fire from his grimacing lips? He is hobbling out the front of our happy home, with me in tow, rubbing his pot belly with a clammy hand.
"What about that woman?" he asks pleadingly into the silence.
"What woman?" I lie. I remember her very well.
"You know. That girl with the... " He makes a crude gesticulation.
Yesterday I'd been walking through town in the late afternoon, kicking pebbles across the path, where I heard a mewing. Up in a tree was a cat bawling, down at the base was a girl doing the same. The back of her was cute; a short pink dress and brown sandals, flossy black hair. I walked up with a gentlemanly smile and asked, "Is something the matter, ma'am?" She pivoted around so quickly I found myself applesauced and lodged between two throw-pillow-sized breasts. She squealed, "Eek! A pervert!" and the cat hissed and returned to his mistress's life only to spare her from a great evil. After my eyeball had been almost scratched out, only then had the girl seen the Uchiha fan on my shoulder and tugged away her monstrous vermin. "I'm so sorry!" she began to cry and cry. I walked away her number and an appointment on the 25th.
"Oh, her. Not till later this month."
"That's good, son! Getting into the playing field, at least! Atta boy!" he throws out into the night air with his sake-stained tongue and turns around to leer at me over his shoulder with impossibly proud eyes. "You'll finally make something of yourself."
"I'm glad to know that, Father," I say as I kind of push him along to the police headquarters where a small squad of fiery-eyed branch underling Uchihas will be tapping their feet and pursing their lips. They don't like their superiors much and are just as nasty-tempered as a branch of Hyuugas.
"Goodnight, boys," Father hollers out the door to the sour men as they stalk off, probably dreaming up ways to slit his throat. They used to like him a big, when he carried a bit of integrity. He turns to me at his desk. "Graveyard shift, graveyard shift, graveyard shift, boy, I hate the graveyard shift," he sings into the bottle of sake he's pulled out from his desk drawer.
He, of course, has a key for it.
"I think I'll go out now."
"Good boy, you do that," he brandishes the bottle and sinks back into his desk chair. It makes me halfway want to snatch his titles away from him and do them myself. But that's not really what I want.
A brief stint in the Anbu did show that I was a very capable warrior, a genius since the day my mother pushed me from her carefully chosen womb, and a worthy candidate for Hokage maybe someday if I ever felt like flexing my political connections and boring a hole with my Sharingan. But a ninja cannot depend on physical skill alone and thus I had turned to a bloodless art honed by the oldest of nins: deception. "Ouch! My leg! I'll never be able to walk again!" I cried one day in my early teens. With a false lurch, I'm able to live a fairly comfortable, brideless lifestyle in the same house of my parents.
Of course, I probably should try to find a place of my own. Dropping my father off in his room after a heavy drinking night then walking down the hall and to the left is a bit of a blow to a man's dignity, I think.
Since Father wants to retire soon, and join the ranks of elderly Uchiha men smoking pipes and rocking on the pavilion in the middle of the compound, he understandably can be concerned about having a proper heir. To find a proper heir means the heir must have the qualifications all written in on a little scroll that the ancestors made after producing their own heirs. One, you must have a wife. Two, this wife must be fertile and produce lots of good smart Uchiha kids with Sharingans. Three, you must have good taste in a wife. Young but not too young. She must at least be able to be impregnated (so dictated Madara Uchiha). And four, the clan must have a sturdy deposit of trust in you.
Looking upon the qualifications, my father might begin to weep. But he has a plan to mold me into the next Uchiha heir. Not only has he coercing me to chat up women, he's been dragging me by the arm to speak awkwardly with flippant branch members who sit on their porches and go ho-hum when they see us walk by. Since Shisui's tragic death in a freak training accident, I haven't made much contact with anyone outside my nuclear family.
In good taste, though, I smile a little at two girls running along a stretch of dirt street as I return home. They both inspect me cautiously and run away with their flailing limbs back to protective fathers. Such is the Uchiha curse.
Today is Sunday, which means a Sunday dinner with my family. Everyday there's a meal cooked up by Mother, but only on Sundays does she real put forth any effort for it. Only on Sundays does little Sasuke run back home from his bravery and steel-plated missions in far stretches of land away from Konoha. While he, a most humble but eager storyteller, spiels off with rice flying from his motored mouth, Father claps in time and hiccups with laughter while Mother and I sit serenely like two whores on the side. (I suppose I do keep my hair long, but it's pretty.)
Sasuke and Father usually end up under the table with bowls of udon resting on the heads and broken sake bottles smashed up behind their well-fed ears. Usually I clean them up while mother clears the table. (Sasuke's such a robust drinker for a boy of onlys sixteen.) Today Sasuke's bringing his girlfriend and Father's heart is leaking in his direction now. He's actually thinking of making Sasuke the head of the clan. "Genius you might be, but social skills you don't have," he last Sunday he belly-laughed after cracking a sake bottle over Sasuke's head. He would never say something like that to me sober, but he's never entirely sober so I'm not entirely sure what he would say if he were sober.
"I'm home," I holler in. Nobody will probably hear me.
"Good, you're home," Mother calls from the kitchen. "I want you to meet someone."
Sitting at the table when I go in is Sasuke with that brooding (and entirely sober) look of his. To his left, though, my heart freezes for an instant and I feel as though I've been thrust into a parallel universe by a mischievous hand. Her eyes (the green, the green they are!) are watching me closely, and her smile is tentative and hiding behind a shock of pink. Uncomfortable with strangers, I can assume. All over she's coarse and tense. The body of sticks connected with sockets and joints. The tenderness in the face. The gooseberry fuzz on her arms. She's perfect.
Ah, you see, I too am afflicted with the Uchiha curse.
Sasuke must be a man after my own heart as well, because his dark and stormy eyes travel over to me and we share a moment of recognition and approval. His face shows no traces of possession or really anything towards the girl, his mug is the only thing important to him right now. I sit across from her and feel my heart fit to burst.
"You must be Itachi Uchiha," she says politely, eyeing me cautiously still and fiddling with the little finger of her glove.
"I am, and who are you?" My voice has never sounded so smooth to my own ears.
"Sakura. Sakura Haruno." Her voice is a little stronger now, with a thin layer of confidence on it. Easily breakable like ice if given the chance, but she's too perfect to screw around with that.
"Good, very good," I murmur and exchange with Sasuke another dark-sighted glance, this time he is the victim and I the villain. It makes me want to chuckle.
You see, as the great Uchiha un-myth goes, Madara, rather than actually asking "Where can I get one of those?", snatched the bride away from his brother and married her himself. Such is the truth of how events usually play out.
History may repeat itself in this man and his own brother. I can only hope it does.