Hey Mortality Read online

  And as the shadows break away, and the void cracks open, a light begins to shine. A light I discover by Hanazono Pond. Something more beautiful than life itself. A painting. A beautiful painting.

  10

  Standing in silence, I look at the painting on the shutter door. It is of such detail, a wonderland of creation. I am fascinated. The shutter is layered in parts by thick dust; the dust covers the sections of the painting that lay in the grooves. It has been some time since this doorway has been cleaned. It has been perhaps many years.

  And even though I have walked past it so many times, the splatter of paint, the symbols of joy, I have never noticed it. Paint hidden behind years of dust, and before presumed only to be another stained shutter; a shutter down. When you are searching for something, anything, a symbolic meaning or something incredible, something will eventually find you. And it does.

  I soak it up, I embrace it as I let it wash over all of my thoughts, as I allow it to cleanse me. The box, the photo, the man, gone for now and replaced by this beautiful piece of artwork.

  The painting itself is so very detailed, and depicts another world, a world most beautiful. Small colourful people live in vast treehouses of blues and greens. A crowd of gold carry a portable shrine. A boat sits on a river at the bottom of the mural, a party seems to be taking place. A green and black spotted giraffe carries children to the peak of a red mountain. An array of small characters dressed in the same blue outfit make a pilgrimage across a bridge that stretches to a world of colour. I want desperately to be inside that world, a world of colour and smiles.

  If you looked at the shutter door from a distance you would notice nothing. It looks like a random splattering of paint and dirt. Even from just a metre away it is difficult to make out the details, but the closer you get, and the harder you look, objects and people emerge. Giant colourful mushrooms where the children play atop. An orange tree branch laid across a beautiful blue pond filled with carp. Every part of this image is so detailed, and the sheer size of this work must have taken months to complete.

  A huge red chasm of white rocks and climbers. Panda bears crawling to their feeders. Birds of green and blue and orange feathers float onward toward their young in nests so high. Yellow birds perch on blue vines and green hillsides. A true paradise.

  To the top of the shutter, small white squares are houses of blue thatched roofs, shrouded and masked by stalks and trees and other foliage. Far too much is happening, too much to describe. But the people, the tiny people look happy in their surroundings. Happy with the world created by someone’s mysterious hand.

  Whoever dreamt this up was surely living in a place so much better than the area of misery that this painting so finds itself located. A world of joy enveloped in a world of darkness.

  Floating platforms and a fading blue tower see people cheering and worshipping as they release balloons. Small cliffs attached to nothing float idly in the sky. Islands and occasional people. Pebbles and cliff faces.

  I want to enter this world and leave behind the place I stand. Leave behind me the Yoshiwara area, the Nihonzutsumi area, and walk through this ever closed shutter to the world contained within, the beauty contained within.

  I smile for the first time in a few days, and wonder how something as delightful as a painted shutter or a piece of graffiti can look so glorious. How there is such beauty in such small details and places. I wonder how I let myself become so wrapped up in the horrors of existence, the misery of living. I will free myself from the darkness and enter the light. I will find love and amazement in everything around me. I will look for life in things, rather than wait for life to end me.

  And, every time I let the suffering return, I will return here instead. Stare at the abstract beauty that sits as paint before me now. Search the image for more and more details, things I don’t see the first, second, and third time I view it. So much to see and absorb. A reason to return.

  Back at the Plum Ship I feel like I have been reborn; a new me. Optimistic and cheery as I perhaps once was when I was a child.

  From my apartment, I can hear somebody quietly playing the piano from the building next to mine. I stand and admire the music for a while, before deciding to rest for the day and let the images of the shutter fill my mind in sleep.

  11

  The Fat Man is wearing a white crash helmet as I leave the Plum Ship this morning. Perhaps he is waiting for the sky to fall in and crush his restaurant. He glances briefly in my direction as I walk to the entrance of the arcade. A smile on my face, a glare in his eyes.

  Along the arcade I see hordes of sleeping homeless. It is still fairly early, around eleven. It pains me to say that despite the conditions here, at least it is warm, and at least, other than the rats and the cockroaches, the homeless of Nihontuzsumi can get a relatively undisturbed night of sleep. It also make me feel a little better about the life I lead, despite its previous sorrowful moments, I am actively seeking joy today.

  I wander half the length of the arcade, not wanting to get too close to the Kangaroo Hotel, and take a right. I loop back around, passing the willow tree, and into the Yoshiwara area. Justice Eyes follow my every step, and eventually I arrive before the painted shutter.

  I stare once more in delight, mapping the images with my mind. Searching for some hidden meaning. If this is, and I oddly hope so, a manifestation of my own thoughts, then I can be pleased knowing that such beauty can be contained in a web of my thinking. If I created this, then I will die happy.

  The shutter rattles slightly in the breeze. I whistle softly to myself a tune that I might have heard in the early hours bellowing from the piano in the building next to my own, before starting off back toward my house.

  As the mood is good, I stop by at the Family Mart convenience store to collect a bottle of wine. I sit and drink on the steps until hours pass and my bottle of wine eventually becomes three. I lose track of time, drinking and smoking until the light makes way for darkness. I continue to consume alcohol until I can’t possible drink any more.

  I return to my room and study the photograph once more. It looks aged enough to be from around the late 1800s, and I suddenly recall Ichiyō again. She too lived in this area, not so far as a stone’s throw from the Plum Ship, in the same era that this photograph of me at the parade looks to be taken. I once again recall reading her masterpiece, Takekurabe, a story about a young woman who ends up becoming a prostitute in Yoshiwara. Ichiyō Higuchi herself was inspired by the slums and lived in poverty, but due to her fame as an author, she has now become the ironic face of the five thousand yen banknote.

  In a drunken stumble, I wander the five minutes, taking me ten, to the Ichiyō Memorial Hall. It is brightly illuminated, and the small park of yesteryear is abandoned. It is strange, but on this incredibly hot summer evening I begin to feel a chill. The wind around here is up, and perhaps it is down to the open space, the over consumption of red wine, or something else unknown is here.

  I wonder if the ghost of she visits this park at night. The coldness doesn’t display a dark or ghostly gloom though, more of a positive energy to cool me down from the Tokyo city heat. An energy that can’t be seen, but oddly felt. Like a power all around me, like her, a powerful woman in the world of Japanese literature.

  I think to myself as I shudder and leave the hall, will she be walking with me, as a ghost, side by side right now? Or did she in fact see me that day of the parade? Perhaps she was the lady who took my photograph; the young woman trying so hard to become a writer, a day at the parade for inspiration, and me, there, in my traditional clothing and big smiles. How did this come to be? I wonder.

  Back through the heat of summer and to the steps, I sit again smoking. Three shutters up from the sushi restaurant, I watch as a white van stops. Two men get out and open the boot. They place a large blue pallet on the road, then proceed to place a red object wrapped in plastic onto the pallet. It looks like meat, but at now almost one in the morning, it could easily be a body. Anyth
ing is possible around here.

  A shutter slides up from the inside, and the two men lift the pallet and struggle and place it into the half open doorway. As the shutter crashes down, they dart into their truck and drive away.

  A prostitute walks past, then another, more beautiful than the last. A few moments later, a young man on a bicycle dumps two huge bags of empty beer cans outside the vending machine at the top of the arcade. A strange act, perhaps, but one of genuine kindness. The first homeless person to wake up in the morning can lay claim to the bags of cans, and take them over to the recycling centre. Nobody else sees him, nobody around to thank him; a silent interaction.

  I extinguish my cigarette, and on the way back up the steps I check my letter box to find a bulk of papers tied together with frayed brown string. A manuscript. A response to my advertisement that I had completely forgotten about, possibly, or something else entirely. The front page displays nothing of a name, only a title: Hey Mortality.

  12

  Hey Mortality

  I had never been great with relationships. Having dated just a few girls in my life, always ending before anything really got started. Sex with Lucy was different. Of the girls I had slept with, it always felt like it was me who was doing all of the work. Girls just lying there silently waiting, as if being raped. Their screams to match the act.

  Lucy, being half Japanese, felt incredibly unique. When inside of her, it felt like a connection had finally come together. Like two broken distant worlds had collided, merged together to form just one perfect world. It was as if my body was designed specifically for her. A puzzle of time with just one missing piece. I was that missing piece, or perhaps she was that missing piece to a puzzle of my own. During sex she would caress me, hold me, and always beg me to hold her for longer than time would physically allow. I wasn’t used to so much contact during sex. Her hands and lips would match my caress almost equally. When she came, she held me tightly, her long fingernails softly digging into my back. The only screams were those that represented absolute joy. She was nothing like the other women I had slept with. Lucy was a world apart.

  ***

  Lucy was born in England to a Japanese father and an English mother. At the age of four, her father mysteriously left. Vanished without a trace. No note. No explanation. Her mother was left to raise her alone.

  When she was fifteen, Lucy wanted to learn more about her father. Her mother had told her that at the time he abandoned them, their marriage was going well. There was no reason for him to leave. No warning, and nothing that would have frightened him off. He loved his daughter, and often spent whole days playing with her, teaching her Japanese, and showing her how to paint.

  After he vanished that day, her mother never heard from him again. He was there one day, and the next, he had somehow disappeared into oblivion. Perhaps he went back to Japan, but there was no way to be sure.

  Lucy spent the most part of her late teenage years obsessing about her father. She would frequently scour the Internet for information, search his work history, company records, but for some reason her father remained a ghost. She never found one piece of information, not one lead, nothing that would guide her in the direction of her father. Eventually, at age eighteen, she finished school and told her mother that she wanted to move to Japan. If her father was anywhere, Japan would be the place. Initially, her mother wasn’t too happy about the idea, but coupled with entry into a Japanese language college, her mother couldn’t argue with the fact that Lucy would also be getting an education, and eventually agreed to let her go.

  Lucy was an only child, and at first it was hard on her mother. Not only was she abandoned by her husband, but now her daughter was ready to leave her too.

  Three years after Lucy had left for Japan, and toward the end of her three year Japanese language course, her mother died suddenly, albeit peacefully in her sleep.

  Lucy went back to England for the funeral, she helped to sort out arrangements and her mother’s will, all with the help of a distant aunt.

  After the funeral, Lucy decided that there was nothing keeping her in England, so she headed back to Japan to finish her studies.

  At the time, Lucy was twenty-one, and had almost given up on her earlier obsession with finding her father. Once again, he was a distant figure in the back of her mind, living on in only the fragmented memories of her four-year-old self.

  After graduating from Language College, Lucy found work as a freelance translator. The sort of people she worked for were the important-looking business-types. She was helping to translate the words of meetings between rich clients, and company directors, and to assist them in sealing important business deals.

  Her attractiveness was often exploited, and because she was half Japanese, she looked different; alluring. Businessmen quite often thought that the sight of a pretty woman on their team would help make a deal go more smoothly, and this was often the case. Something about Lucy both relaxed and excited the men in these meetings, and after the deal was done, she would usually be invited to drink with the clients and the bosses. It was at such a meeting where Lucy and I first met.

  ***

  She was twenty-seven, and I was twenty-eight. I was working for my father’s company. We were creating state of the art machines that could detect counterfeit banknotes to an accuracy of 99.99%. Place a banknote in the machine, and it would instantly, within half a second, tell if the note was real or fake. Our machines were already selling quite well in Asia, and now we were ready to break into the U.S. market.

  The meeting took place in a classy restaurant in Ginza. My boss and two colleagues of mine sat on one side of the table. The chairman of an American company, a large man wearing a polished suit jacket, white shirt, slick black trousers, and over-polished shoes, was sitting across from us. His company was big, and he came to Japan to conduct business on his own.

  “I know what’s best for my company,” he had stated at the beginning of the meeting, “I don’t need no colleagues or people that work for me to come over here to cramp my style.” It was as if he was trying to make a point to demean everyone else at the meeting, including my boss.

  Sitting to the left of the American man was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Tall, maybe five-five, slim, long blonde hair neatly tied behind her head with a pink ribbon. Her eyes incredibly deep-set, brown, soft. The rest of her face made me think she was born in another world. A parallel universe where everyone was beautiful. Her ears slightly sharp at the top, almost elf-like but still completely human. Her red lips displayed the only trace of make-up she was wearing. Her teeth were whiter than the softest snow on a winter morning.

  She wore a white dress with red polka dots, her breasts were of generous size compared to her slender figure. She spoke softly and enunciated well, both in English and in Japanese.

  The meeting had gone well, drinks were topped up. The American chairman had a big hearty laugh that seemed to go on until the end of time. At first it had irritated me, but after ten minutes I had grown to like it. One day, it would be one of those lost memories I try to grasp at fondly, but can never quiet recall.

  ***

  After the meeting, we all went out to a small bar that only played blues music. I was indifferent when it came to blues. B.B. King’s Please Send Me Someone to Love played from the twelve speakers. The number of speakers in the bar, a fact proudly shared by the barman the moment we walked in and took our seats. Can you count them all? He had asked us; but it was plainly obvious that none of us really cared.

  I ordered a glass of red wine, Merlot from some unknown vineyard, presented to me cold and served in a chilled glass. The wine didn’t display any hint of its age, or have anything that could even be considered a good flavour. Cold red wine not something I ever really troubled myself with. Lucy ordered a flamboyant cocktail, though I doubt she planned on paying for it. A beautiful girl like her, the sort of person who never had to pay for a drink in her life. Her drink was a mix of blue liquid mar
rying orange, with a green cocktail umbrella that served no obvious purpose. The combination of colour reminded me of some exotic bird, its name though, I couldn’t quite recall.

  The American, my boss, and my two colleagues got chatting about baseball, another thing I was indifferent to. Lucy, also seemingly uninterested in the baseball conversation came over and took a stool beside me. As she sat down, she flashed me that snow white smile.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello,” I retorted, almost to directly mimic her pronunciation.

  “Want to get out of here?”

  “Now?” I asked, surprised by her approach. I wasn’t what I would consider overly attractive, somewhat plain looking and lacking overt charm or apparent charisma.

  “Sure thing,” she had said, her smile not once leaving her face.

  “Okay,” I started to say, but before I could finish my word, she was already reaching for her jacket.

  ***

  In bed the next morning, I woke to find Lucy already dressed and getting ready to leave.

  “Can I see you again?” she asked.

  “Sure thing,” I said, to mimic her reply from the bar the previous night.

  “Great, I would like to see you again, here’s my number, call me any time.” She handed me a hand written scrap of paper with a number scrawled across it, as if she had wrote it just moments before; the ink still waiting to dry.

  Perhaps she had already decided that I would be seeing her again, though not her choice to make, she was right. A woman of this beauty, intelligence, and with such strong sexual empathy; the type I couldn’t let go of so easily. I took the paper from her. She leaned in for one more kiss before she left. And then she left.