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for Trish

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-oOo-

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love isn't shown all the time, every day, but it is there
and I thank you for being here
so that I have someone to give it to

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-oOo-

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Chapter One – The Orange That Got Away

His hand was warm and as she held it she felt at peace. But she wasn't able to hold his hand all the time, in fact much of the time in recent weeks she had not been able to hold it at all. School was intruding, as it always seemed to do, but recently more so than usual. The constant studying for tests and examinations, was wearing her down, was wearing them all down. For some of them it was worse – some of them had after school cram tutoring. She could see how bad it was in their faces. In junior high school she had enjoyed such good times with her friends, they seemed to have time to meet after school or at weekends and go shopping or watch a movie or take the bus out into the hills and have junk food picnics. They'd just spend time in each other's company doing almost nothing – laughing, talking about boys, talking about pop music, things that just didn't really matter, and because they could talk about such incidental things it made these times together so precious. But as high school went on she noticed more and more that she saw them less and less. And when they did find a precious evening or Sunday afternoon to meet she saw the change in them. Sixteen now, some of them seventeen already, they were going through the hardest times of school. The education system was crushing them, wearing them all down, squeezing the initiative and imagination out of them, changing them from laughing carefree children into responsible, career-focused adults.

One day she met Nao and was shocked by what she saw. The happy chatty girl with glasses she remembered from those fun lunchtimes spent in Kousaka-Sensei's office was gone, replaced by a fashion conscious contact-lens wearing zombie who seemed bent on climbing the ladder of a banking career at all costs. They had met in a juice bar near the Suginomiya station. They'd only talked for an hour or two but well before they parted, Shizuku realized she no longer had anything in common with this stranger. She'd sat and watched the girl at the counter making drinks. In a glass drum against the wall oranges were piled, all different; different sizes, slightly different colours, different skin textures, different hardnesses. All oranges yes, but each an individual. The girl would take an order for juice and pull a lever and a couple of oranges would drop down a glass chute and be compressed by a plunger, their bodies being pulped under the pressure. Out of the spout at the bottom of the machine would come the juice. It was all the same colour, all the same texture, all the same flavour. If you wanted you could even have the bits filtered out, the last traces of the texture of the fruit banished. You couldn't tell how many individual oranges had gone into making the glass of juice. The last act of this process was the kick back of the machine's handle which efficiently dumped out the crushed skins, the empty useless husks into a plastic bin.

She came home from that meeting deeply depressed. Nao was a girl she'd known for years. It was only about a year ago that they'd camped out together with Yuko, Michiko, Kinu and the boys down by the Oogurigawa River where they'd spent such a fun night telling stories and eating sweets. The girl she'd just met wasn't the Nao she used to know. It made her so sad to see these changes, so bitter. For her it wasn't so bad – she had decided last November that she wasn't going to university. So next year, 1997, would be her final year of school. She yearned for it to end, longed to escape the crushing faceless machine that was destroying her friends. She had a way out planned at the end, she had found a hatch in the side of the drum where the oranges were stored and was leaving, but for many of them she knew it was already hopeless. Why was the Japanese education system like this? What was the point of it when people grew up into corrupt bureaucrats, lining their pockets while the economy collapsed around them? Was the whole point of education to make you into a money-grabbing selfish island? If it was she wanted no part of it, and if it wasn't? Well that was even more upsetting because it had become broken and people didn't realize it. She had only recently begun thinking about things like this, but then she'd begun thinking about lots of new things in recent months. She supposed it was all part of growing up and your mind developing new concerns. To date all her manuscripts (and there were already several) had been works of fiction but a month ago she had sat at her desk, switched on her parents old laptop (they had finally got around to buying themselves a new one and she had been delighted to receive their cast-off), and staring at the blank page of the word processor she had begun to write, not fiction, but a jumbled angst ridden confession of all that she hated about Japan – the Japan she knew, a Japan seen through the eyes of a teenage girl who refused to be crushed, but who was filled with guilt since she knew she was only able to resist being crushed because she was leaving, escaping, running away. In her heart she knew that if she stayed, she too would be crushed. But in a couple of years it would happen. They would marry and as soon after that as the red tape would allow, they would emigrate to Italy. Maybe it was that which kept her sane, knowing it would soon be over. So her first work of non-fiction had been born, she already had over 20,000 words of anti-capitalist, anti-establishment, anti-education critique on the laptop and there was much more to write. She'd found people at school and at the internet café willing to talk about these things who had radical ideas of their own. She'd never before considered doing something against the system – screaming at it, yes, but actually constructively fighting it? This work was going to actually do something, do something positive, to help in a small way, to expose practices, people, the entrenched corrupt inertia of the system. The thing that scared her most was that unlike all her many fictional stories that lived in the box under her bed, she had a publisher for this, a local political magazine. She met one of the sub-editors one evening in a meeting at the internet café, told him what she was writing and he'd asked to see her material. Immediately he'd read it, he'd agreed to accept the series of articles and publish them over a period of months. She knew it was left wing and writing reactionary politics was scary but she felt this needed to be done. She was also torn by guilt because she'd said nothing to this man of her future plans – here she was criticizing the system and at the same time running away. She felt like a cheat, a liar.

But she had other things to worry about as well. Or rather another person. Her relationship with Seiji was a lot like their home town. Hilly. Up and down. Sometimes it was smooth and flat and level and they freewheeled along laughing, loving and sharing. There would be an occasional downhill run where all she could do was hold on tight to him in exhilaration as wonderful emotions and sensations filled them. At other times they would ride uphill, and it was plain hard work. Just struggling along was an effort, it made her sweat. Once or twice she had wanted to get off, not to push but to sit at the roadside and just cry. But it worked, after a fashion, and despite close misses from other traffic, other careless drivers, they kept going. Like today. Let me tell you about today.

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12 to 18 December 2006

For author notes about chapter 1 see my forum (click on my pen name)