Ayameike

[allesfliesst]

This is the first story I'm posting here. Like I said in my introduction, I'm German and English isn't my native language. So please don' hesitate to simply tell me about grammar mistakes or wrong words. And of course, any kind of feedback is greatly appreciated.

[allesfliesst]

1

He should have been used to the fact that encounters like this one happened to the body at its most unfit time.

He was certain to be particularly unsightly right now: an overtired tourist, his hair mazy, dried blind as there had been neither a socket in the bathroom nor a mirror in his room, a cement-grey jacket sagging over his arm, and a gait, uphill, which had to be reeking of cheesy feet. Whence the words hit him by total surprise. Shanghaied him.

He stood there like someone who’d been attempted to trip up, who saw it but didn’t dare to react. He stood there like a conscious fool, silent—no, worse, mute, at a loss for the simplest of commonplace phrases in the country’s language. Every second turned him into even more of a fool.

But that as well, like the gross heaviness of his limbs, might only be an interior view. The woman suddenly looked scared. Her almost aggressive glance when she had squinted at him in passing yielded to an expression of terror, or shame. She slapped her own mouth with her hand as though she had committed an unpardonable faux pas. Which she had.

Now the evening would depend on composing a more or less accurate sentence. On composing and pronouncing it without mistake. Or he could answer her in English, of course. She had asked in English.

He considered. Someone in his blood calculated.

The woman was in her early twenties. Quite smallish (which made her look, according to one’s point of view, even younger or a little like an object: one couldn’t help moving her between one’s fingers, twiddling her to and fro). Her outgrown perm added a slutty charm to her face.

Additions and subtractions left something extreme as their result. He finally replied, though he felt neither up to her nor to the situation. When she lifted her bag, along with her eyelids, he caught a glimpse of her wristwatch’s dial. It was shortly after six. For her the evening must have been just about to begin. She smiled now.



2

After an overstretched journey with pick-up trains, confusion in Yamato where he had to change, confusion searching for the suburban line in Nara, and a half hour waiting at the station forced upon him by a droning downpour, he’d made it to the ryokan. Surprisingly slim, like a discrete private home, the hotel stood vis-à-vis an impressive four-storey wooden building he had first mistaken for it. The owner, an old hunched matron who crawled up the stairs because she couldn’t walk them anymore, welcomed him with an excitement that he wondered was cordiality or merrymaking. She explained to him that the huge black block at the other side of the street was a clinic. A specialized clinic. Specialized on what, he didn’t understand.

As he kept repeating to himself, the house had a nice cozy atmosphere. With its six-mat size, the room wasn’t luxurious, but neatly furnished and in any case better than the depressing cells of the standard Western style accommodation where you had to scrape by the bed and didn’t even find a closet to unpack your suitcase. Using the toilet required some acrobatic exercise. He removed his briefs from under the yukata before he hushed trough the corridor, and not without a certain pride did he peer between his legs at the fat, light-brown turd which didn’t break off until its tip touched the faintly yellowed surface of the narrow bowl embedded in the ground.

Back in his room, he realized there was no alarm clock. No clock at all. He intended to get up at seven again the next day. He’d have to if he didn’t want to miss the train Reiko had picked for him. She’d be waiting for him in Ise on the platform.

It was probably okay to ask the owner for a waking call. He postponed that conversation, only cheered a jovial good-bye while lacing his shoes, and almost crashed into two ladies in old-fashioned travel attire at the doorstep. Their disenchanted gaze crawled up the house’s front. Behind them, a happy-faced man, whose type was that of the one woman’s cousin and the other’s husband, carried an immensely heavy-looking, somehow brutally deformed sports bag on top of two trunks.



3

After he had fumbled around between books, cookie boxes, his and her clothes and others from her whose crumpled innocence delighted him and raised a little jealousy, he found a sort of egg that told the time.

6:03 said the saucer eyes of an indefinable aniline-blue creature, apparently the mascot of a pharmaceutical corporation. He turned the egg and opened it. A dozen tiny white pills came rolling into his palm.

She seemed to be sound asleep. Her arm and a corner of the blanket held each other tight as though each was ready to replace a part of the other in case of an emergency. The toes of her left foot (she lay more or less on her stomach) had dug into the slit between mattress and frame.

Outside, a bird’s monotonous rasping chirp sounded like an overlarge cicada. When he slid back one of the shutters and the mosquito screen, his attention was caught by the mop-sized wet leaves of a shrub whose branches had been creeping out over most of the roof. Their almost white blaze reflected the rain-laden sky.

He stuck out his head through the crack and cocked his ears. Yes, it was true: a fine, nearly invisible drizzle was drumming mildly onto the shingles, supplying the bushes and small trees in the garden with a ... rustle. He spent a long time searching for an adjective. He could find none. It was a very earthly, quite specific, but in no way extraordinary rustle. Nothing alien to language. His mind was simply too dull, or he didn’t want this splendid gravity of standing and searching to fade.

He stood unchanged, face covered with a layer of driblets, when the egg-clock started to beep. He could hear the duvet fissle. Her hair and her skin.

Somewhere behind the ocean of roofs and the strangely isolated green balls of the Japanese pines, which floated above them as though the residents had thrown them in the air and then forgotten there, a commuter train sped past on its way to the center of town.

[J_M_D_Telvatia]

Your story is very beautiful; your description of characters and the lead character's internal struggles. The first part seems spatially mysterious, perhaps this is intended; does he meet the woman at the top of a hill? Do specifics matter here? And in the third part is the woman in the bed, her slumber so beautifully described, the same one as in the first part of the story? And does it matter if she is?

[allesfliesst]

thank you very much. your questions are so beautifully in keeping with the atmosphere of the story, they could almost be a part of it. which makes me think i shouldn't destroy the mystery by aswering them, or should i? a fragmented story that would make readers think about the connections between the parts was just what i wanted. so mabye i'll just say that i thought of the woman in the third part as the one from that chance encounter at the beginning—but she remains a "creature from the floating world", as they say in japanese, to me as well.

[J_M_D_Telvatia]

awesome