Stories and Pictureswithout order
Andrea and I at the International Festival. This one's for the Grandparents, people.
In the Midst Of
a story
The other night my Cinema teacher decided we should watch Kairo, this ghost-horror film by Kurosawa Kiyoshi. I tend to get so absorbed by stories—every narrative I encounter, without exception, captures me briefly, and then flings me away into the arms of another narrative. So there I was after class, walking to the cafeteria alone, surrounded by this ghost-story. To make things worse, there was this very cold mist in the air, pricking my skin—making me feel itchy and angry. I kept half-imagining the ghosts from the film, these figures of the wailing long-past, drifting into my field of vision. I was in that kind of strange space when the florescent lights of the cafeteria came into view, blurred to fuzziness by the mist.
When I got there, I just wanted to be alone. This wasn't for my own sake but others—I had determined that there was no way I could communicate. So I sat alone for a while and ate my curry rice--thought about ghosts and things. There aren't many people in the cafeteria at night, so I figured I would be left alone, which was fine, I thought.
Then I saw this kid, holding his tray and looking around the room with this strange kind of confidence. I'll be honest in saying that I wasn't very impressed by his appearance—he seemed to be the standard kind of American kid who decides to abroad in Japan for a year. He had this curly brown hair, flecked with white, and a neck that was too long. His hoody was too big, yet his skinny wrists still managed to poke out too far from beneath his sleeves.
I was considering this when he approached me. “Mind if I sit down?” He seemed genuinely concerned.
I shrugged. “Of course not,” I responded, although I'm not sure if I meant it.
“I decided not to bug any Japanese people tonight,” he said, looking out the window.
“Mmm.”
“That's what I usually do,” he continued. “...bug Japanese kids.”
“Sure,” I grunted.
After that, he just started talking. Without any probing on my part, either. Just wanted to talk, I guess. Apparently, he had been to Japan before, to travel the country playing Go with old men.
“Yeah, I'd just go to different clubs across the country,” he explained. “I'm not very good, most players were far stronger than me, but every once and a while I'd impress an old guy or two.”
“Wow.” I was interested.
“Yeah but I couldn't talk to them.” he went on. “That's the thing, I could play them in Go but I couldn't say a word to them. So I decided to come back to Japan to learn Japanese. For all those months I couldn't talk to anyone I played, and that was kind of upsetting. Communication and all that. You go crazy if you don't talk to people, you know.”
“I do know, yeah.” I nodded.
We just talked like that for quite a while. He would talk and I would sit. I started to become impressed by this kind of articulateness he had about him. I would call him genki in Japanese, which translates poorly as “spirited.” Yeah, he was one of the genki-est people I'd ever met, actually. I usually don't sit and let a guy talk like that but I was completely taken, I think, by this kid I wouldn't even nod at in the hallway. I was thinking about all these things, or maybe I was absorbed in one of his stories, when he clapped his hands together and said “Well, shall we go then?”
On the way out I shook his hand.
“I'm Corey,” I told him.
“Josh.” he replied.
“Josh, huh...thanks a lot for sitting with me.” I said, reluctantly. I thought this may be too forward, or obvious.
“Of course. See you around campus.”
At that point he walked away, with purpose. Surely he had somewhere to go.
On the way to the bike racks I looked at the street-lamps. As misty as it was, the light from the lamps had a very physical quality—like I could have reached up and cupped the yellow light in my hand, or waved it away like cigarette smoke. I stopped and looked at this light, then pulled off my hood and breathed in the mist. I must have looked like a complete idiot there, standing under the light with my face in the air, eyes closed and palms pointed upwards like I was absorbing something. But it felt like the perfect thing to do, so I did it, and at that point resigned to breathe in richness wherever I could find it.
The Locked-Up and Long Dead
a story
This kid Jesse with black hair like a helmet invited us out on Halloween. Andrea and I hadn't really decided on anything for Halloween so I thought it may be a good idea to make some official plans. I told Jessee 'yes, we'd love to go,' and he gave me the details then and there, in the middle of the library. He may have been too loud but none of the Japanese students would ever mention something like that. “So it's basically like this izakaya thing, but also like a bar, but also like a haunted house.” he explained.
“What?”
“Yeah, it's like a bar but the waiters are all dressed up and scare you and stuff,” Jesse went on. “Oh yeah, and the rooms where you eat are like dungeons, kind of. It's called 'The Lockup.' I rented a room for the night and there are like 15 people or so going. You guys should come.”
“Yeah, definitely. It sounds perfect.” I told him.
“Oh but if you don't dress up you can't come. So come dressed up or not at all.” he warned.
“Okay. I'll let Andrea know.”
On the day before Halloween Andrea and I still hadn't bought costumes, or even thought about them, so we went down to this mall kind of place called “Vivre.” Vivre is one of those dying malls, where all the stores are dated by like a year or two and there's hardly anyone ever around. So we went around in there looking for costumes. Andrea eventually decided to be a “Golf Doofus.” She got the idea from a particularly gaudy sweater I had back home. I didn't know what to be, but then I saw this ski-mask knit to look like a panda. I put it on, and it felt so great, so I decided to build my costume around that. I'm this tall, very skinny kid so I needed something in black, very tight, to put focus on the mask. I found some pants and a shirt and these black gloves that had skeleton hands printed on them.
I didn't really know what I was so I came up with this great theory about how people on Halloween always dress up “as” something instead of just dressing up. So I had just dressed up. Or dressed up as a panda-mask thing. Plus I came up with this joke about what I was, just in case anyone asked. I'd say I was “a panda man” and when they said “what's that?” I'd say “Half-panda, half-man, all man.”
We got to the station about forty minutes late and about twenty angry foreigners and fifteen Japanese girls were waiting for us, all dressed up as zombies and stuff. The train ride was kind of funny, too, but I think Andrea was embarrassed how silly I was being. I think wearing a mask does that to you—makes you act silly or whatever. People in Japan don't celebrate Halloween much so I'm sure they knew, at least, that it was a white person under the panda mask, even though they couldn't see my skin. I'm pretty tall too, like I said, so they probably guessed I wasn't Japanese.
The Lockup was about a five minute walk from the station and when we got there we had to walk through this very long hallway with fake cobwebs and stuff to get to the actual restaurant. On the way there was this very dark section with a barrel lit from beneath in red. A couple Japanese girls were in front, and I guess they don't watch a lot of movies here because they were so surprised when this fake, rubbery zombie popped out of the barrel with this loud hiss and sprayed smoke at them. They screamed, clutched at each other and all that. It was pretty funny.
They eventually led us into the dungeon room, which had these very fake bars and stone walls. Plus, we had to take off our shoes before going in and I'm not sure they'd make you do that at a real dungeon. There were two long tables and we all sat down and ordered drinks from our waitress who was dressed like a cat or something.
We were at The Lockup for a long time—about 3 hours maybe—but there was this one moment that stuck out to me. We were all sitting around talking, relatively early in the evening, when all the lights went out. Then these two voices came on very loud over the restaurant's speakers, all in Japanese. It was a guy and a girl and they were talking frantically about something and there was an alarm going off in the background. It was so cheesy. Then all the sudden 'Thriller' started playing, and the girl and guy started screaming and stuff. 'Thriller' got louder and then these black lights came on. Black lights always make people's eyes and teeth look weird but for some reason the guy across from me looked particularly scary. He was Japanese and when he caught me looking at him he took his chopsticks and put them in his nose, grinning at me. I laughed but honestly the whole thing kinda freaked me out.
Then the strobe lights came on, and the music got really loud, and all these people started running around the restaurant, screaming and banging on the walls, dressed up as stuff. These guys weren't dressed up “as” stuff at all, actually, just “dressed up,” like me. One guy had a clown suit on but he had a hockey mask on like Jason for some reason. Another guy had a kind of duck suit on without pants and at one point he ran in and pulled up his shorts and kinda danced around for everyone to see. Then there was our waitress, the girl in the cat outfit. She was running around too. All of this was while the music was playing and the lights were going and everyone we were with crowded around the “dungeon bars” to watch, and took pictures and leaned on each other.
Finally, the alarm came back on and the two Japanese people started talking over the speakers again. They sounded relieved. Then the lights came back on, everyone went back to their seats, and the night continued on until we caught the last train home at about 1 A.M.
I guess it's obvious why that moment stuck out to me. It was kind of chaotic, like a sensory overload or whatever. Besides that, though, there was something else about it. I think it was that everything was so cheesy—so fake and over-done in The States—but so very real, and so very scary, here in Japan. It was like every fake and overdone horror moment in Western History was transplanted to this bar in Kyoto, but only for about three minutes, and given new life by this deep history Japan has with ghosts and the very-long dead.
But maybe I was the only one who was scared. I'm sure Andrea would laugh at me for months if I told her about all this, but I don't care. It made me think about all the things we don't get in America, death being only one of them.
Apocalyptic Fuji
Apocalyptic Fuji
