25/06/2012
It's a late evening in one of the fow-bamboo style outer villages of Tokyo. One of those quintessential Japanese towns that consists of a dirt track with thirteen or fourteen simple houses. It would have a shop too; witch more resembled a pre-world war two hole in the wall than an supermarket, dispensing mainly tinned food, raw ingredients, eggs, dishes, cutlery, sweets, matches and other necessities of the living. Nearly all of the non-perishable products were most likely brought in by someone's cousin or a distant in-law in the trunk of an over worked Volkswagen. The things that would not last where purchased swiftly, from the farm, before that year's crop was taken to the feeding to the five thousand. The farm holds the place of honour at the rear of the village. It has several fields; the contents of witch are chosen by whatever's hot in the city or the whims of a rather fickle farming family. These fields lead to the village, and stone shrines built to varies kami in the hope Mother Nature may yield unto us of her person, now abandon and left to subside and collapse and decay. But still there may be a sheaf of rice or some burned tofu left in the hope the Gods red, furry followers might do something. Round the front of the farm some of the more manageable farmyard animals; chickens, from where the aforementioned eggs came, cluck and scrabble at the dust in the shadows of small tractors; and tow looming storage units of grain, the bastions of industrialism, just behind the farm house.
When the street is clear of the inhabitancies' few vehicles it, with escaped chickens scatter across the track and the bollard like wooden fencing, hammered into position with would bolt, only the starlight dishes atop the low roofed houses distinguish this town from it's feudal counterpart. But this rural idyll is, on occasion broken by the presence of a rattling buss. This rust corroded monstrosity has been relegated, like a dyeing relative, to the outer reaches of the rout, where is can cause the least damage, embarrassment and harm. Twice a day 'the tub', as its regular and older patrons affectionately dub it, trundles through the town like an insultingly slow scalpel through perfect flesh. In it's wake comes the smoke, farted from it's behind like the coals of the devil, personifying the image of the inexorable approach of the steam age, brought belatedly to this hamlet, and this illusion of rigidity most likely accounted for it remaining alive. And in side the body of the beast held together with smoke, mirrors and sticky tape? An endless supply of people; white, brown and all the hues in between, who in a form of convergent evolution donned the garbs often worn by their far eastern hosts; gawping, gawking, snapping pics on unnecessarily high quality digital cameras and talking loudly in there obnoxious Greco-Roman languages.
"Golly, isn't this awfully quaint." or "Jaiden, Kristal! Put that down NAA!" and other triumphs of eloquence.
But among the constant flux of tourists and zealous, shrine visiting pilgrims, there was Natsuko Sato, or Sato Natsuko, depending on cultural preference. Miss Sato took the tub almost every day. The smoke expectorating transport taking her round alleys, under surreptitiously placed bridges, always avoiding the shiny shop fronts and polished businesspersons and only seldom pushing it's way through the incorrigibly hyper modern city, to the sanctuary of the bus station. From here it was a short walk to the suburban "Inari University hospital", home to the country's largest fertility clinic hence the idolatrous name. So it's here where she works and learns, moving the old, injecting, observing for more senior members of staff and following all who are flung in her way. And as a result managed to maintain a reputation for head-down hard work, a heavily ingrained ideal, drummed into her by her short, but often stern father.
"Life Grants us nothing with out hard work." Her father would bellow at her, hairy faced, grown infinitely tall, his study infinitely vast to her twelve-year-old eye. That was over a decade ago; back when her father was a big, bloviating, beard in the sky, before time and husbandly duties, withered every thing down to the thin wisps witch now straggle his chin. But who knows what from a past will stay with us today.
Today Natsuko was twenty-three, as she shell remain until of the New Year. A twist of fate that always saw her playing the role of mummy in childhood fantasy games, and later the bigger sister in far realer games of affection and vomit. Although on the occasions where literal and biological sistering skills where called upon they would stand up zealously; her sister, more that four years younger, would take any opportunity to snatch attention away from her more academic older sis. This often manifested it's self in tendency for covert operation and childish warrings, witch invariably ended in sobs, bruised apologies and balled pleas not to tell Mummy.
So in to one act of rebellion she retreated, Britney Spears style, in the hair, cut and sliest in to an insultingly careless urchin-cut, jelled and spiked at random and then breaking all the bonds of parental and professional constraint dyed. Lime green.
This was her mark in the on going battle for ownership of herself, a war played out every day in the depths of her mind. A war long abandoned by her farther, which see still thinks of as the opponent.
Now she rises from her seat, ignoring the defunct handles and frayed poles. She has a preoccupied face, her poise is perfect and the packed backpack is clutched tightly to her hip. She sways and staggers down the beleaguered interior. Frayed the seat leaves liberated strands of fabric on her light blue sleeves, as she clutches for support against the rocking. Dismounting; she waved a brief salute to the forever anonyms driver. Natsuko was of the opinion that her home was something of a training route for all the buss drivers of the country, an opinion given some weight by the general look of wide-eyed fear at being given command of this expiring leviathan. Leviathan, is that too much? Maybe, but all things are relative. Natsuko alighted on the sidewalk, as the tub vibrated off, It left a slight haze of dust witch staled. She watches it totter down the dusty round, there's a gust of wind witch lashes her fac and she lifts her arm. Now the buss is a shrinking dot on the horizon, but even with the familiar clucking of the chickens, the therapeutic sweeping of an old lady forever cleaning her porch and the floating cherry blossom, the air seems stilted and unreal, like someone's watching her, an actor on a stage, as if there's someone to whom she must direct all her movements. All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances. And this actor takes her leave.
But she is right. What she is feeling is her world, like fragile skink, like old porcelain cracking. For the presence she feels, the cut in her world, is I. From the shadows I watch, with my large round yellow eye, like a deep gash in dark skin. But what impudence brings your humble narrator, your Scheherazde, to bring himself to your attention. Do I wish to prolong the story and thus my life like that noble woman of myth, perhaps, you will have to weight for the tales to be told. But I must say; I do not see as humans do. I make no clams on omnipresence, but the lives of some are laid bare to me. Pretty good deal? Maybe, but I cannot look away; I am forced to endure every hollow melodrama, every soap opera of a performance, as I am permitted in to the innermost harts of the few it is my charge to follow. I see the marks of fathers, mothers, people leaning over shoulders, fears, scars, unmentioned prejudices. For Natsuko I see her family held, Atlas like, across her shoulders. I tell you this so you know I am not to blame if things get a bit… let me see… unexpected. All that happens happens and who are we to judge.
Now I feel my attention, my vision, the great citrine my in face, being pulled, from the fading young girl and flung around the world. So, through seas, up across china, the would spinning like the marble of a child, I dash between the Himalayas, over, across, round, under the highest peek in the world so fast I cannot tell you witch. Over the vast impossibility of the Eurasian Steppe, endless grassy vistas cut down to less time that anyone can imagine. I feel my self almost ejected from your world by the sweet pull of my own, but every fibre! No! There is a better way of explaining. Every one of my fundamental particles, written in to the very core of my being is the task of following, recording, so I must stay. I continue whizzing over the land witch defeated the armies of Napoleon and Hitler, but even this harsh terrain dose not hinder my ethereal passing. Like a John Duntze's painting I skate up the Rhine, made sepia by the waning light over the sugar cake frost. I pass glassy vineyards and Villiers, turned doormat, Mary Celeste like, abandoned by its inhabitancies for warmer climes. I look back at the top of the sun just poking over the horizon, the last light before the night, as if we are in a race, I must be there before the sun sets, if so it is a race I know i will lose. And I do, for as I'm ejected in to the Le Manche; The Sleeve; The English Channel the light goes out. And I am left in darkness, watching tankers and ships like fireflies, until. From Gold to chalk, Dover's white cliff offering a symbolic shield for the United Kingdom, I reflect as I fly past the bite marks in the English cost. Here I stop and begin to plummet, I fall in to a mysteries world of suppressed emotions, jingoism and tea. A whole world away form the nation I just left.