Espresso Love (A Dystopian Japan Novel) #Wattys2014

Golden Child

For a while, I watch her look through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The surface sheen always makes them seem like murals painted into the wall, pressing the pigments beyond together, flat, embellished, thick and generous so that they appear to have a three dimensional quality. Yet, at the same time, hard to accept as reality; just mere imitation, an impression of realism. If one stares long enough, the colours might blur and distort, blending at the ends, revealing their seams, and where the fabric meets space and where space meets time, they are unbecoming threads strewn apart.

My coffee is still hot fortunately. My paperback is now set neatly on the table, its cover curled up from the way I hold books, and one corner, slightly frayed. In this fashion, the book seems most appetizing. The surface of the paper and its varnish and capitalist value melts away into an eternal dream of the mind. It's an invitation to be opened again like an old friend with pork buns and TV and a few beers from the convenient store.

In the same way, Shizuka and I sit there in silence, an old married couple with nothing to say, but I am confident that she is not here to sit in silence. Her eyes had told me as much - that she might know more than she should. Her eyes are not ones that wandered or experimented. Despite the shine and glamour of her person, she expresses an air of oddly calculated precision. Such that every exuberant or enthusiastic word in her speech, the way she leans forward, the way she sips from her cup or crosses her pale thighs beneath her skirt, each strand of hair brushed behind a wonderfully shaped ear, even the amount of intensity she gave to her gaze, radiates the impression that they are all conscious decisions.

I choose to wait and follow her gaze and watch the moving murals on the wall. Feet are trampling by, a pitter patter of rain drops: winter boots, worn sneakers, polished and waxed old shoes, high heels, clop clop clop, like horse hooves on bare legs, school socks, skinny jeans, creased trousers, ironed dress pants, multicoloured, with varying musical rhythms and beats, postures and urgency, robotic, stomping, swaying, light-footed and ghosting and drifting and wandering, each as alien as the next.

I realize I don't usually stare at feet in such a way. The heads bobbing by, like schools of fish in a tank, a spectacle - or are we the spectacle to them? - backs straight or hunched, clothing fashionable or disordered, a steady stream of consciousness, but they no longer mattered. The feet attract my attention. She is staring at feet. Somehow, whatever she is staring at or thinking of, it is that much more interesting than the rest of the world.

When she turns back to me, I am suddenly the most interesting thing in her world. Her gaze is just as intense, unraveling me, stripping off my clothes, skinning me alive, revealing my bones and organs, piercing through my heart, exposing my soul - I look at my coffee cup.

"It's cold outside," she says and it sounds like a song. "Do you like the season?"

"No, I prefer the warmth of summer."

"Because women can wear less clothing." She laughs. It must be calculated too. Not too loud, not too quiet. I stare at her, perplexed.

"Not all men are like that."

"Sure, you can deny it, but there is a subconscious primal urge to find an attractive mate."

I remain silent.

"It's only natural," she explains, "we exist to reproduce, to carry our species, our memories, our experiences, our skills, our genes. So that we don't expire. Rather than searching for that one person, we are really searching for the concept." I try to laugh it off but grow steadily more perturbed.

"What if I had said winter?"

She sits back and sips from her cup and outside, pedestrians breathe white smoke. She tells me she enjoys the winter because it is the season of the soul. "Like drinking coffee or tea," she says, "no doubt a necessity for the winter. It's when the nights and the hours of the dark are long, when each day becomes significant because the year draws to a close, reaching its turning point. When we are forced into deep contemplation and physical lethargy, with the slumber of the body comes potential for the awakening of the mind. Writers pick up their pens, artists their canvases, musicians record in studios. I mean, we are even obligated to think about our resolutions and what we've done right or wrong, and what the future holds. Like during Christmas, opposite forces and emotions collide: both nostalgia and celebration. The past Christmases rush up to meet the present and the future. Compression into a singularity."

"So summer is the awakening of the body, when life calls us to action, where we seek to experience the external world around, rather than turn to the world within. The awakening of the flesh and emotion occurs – and sexual meaning," I say.

"I suppose so."

I say nothing else as I watch her drain her cup and set it down with a hollow thud. It's loud, despite the wash of background noise from hushed conversations and bustling customers, pinging devices and spitting and gurgling machines.

Why she chose to speak about this is beyond me, yet somehow, what she said registers with a sense of familiarity, like fragrance from an old home, telling me I have known it all along, only never given it any thought.

"Say, have you read Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot'?"

I start to feel like I'm in an interrogation room at the end of a long white table, a single blinding fluorescent bulb hanging above. "Yes," I pause, "but it's a play after all."

"You can read it all the same. In some ways, it's better to read plays than to see them."

"Well, there is more room for personal interpretation I'm sure." I sip from my cup. She has already finished hers. Without a cup, she is transfixed in watching me with those clear eyes.

"I once read it in the winter, in bed, on a fever and painkillers." she says.

"Knowing its absurdist and existential themes – and nothing doing, doing nothing, waiting and taking off a boot for most of it – it can get depressing," I tell her.

"I see it this way: we need the winter season to draw us into our own thoughts and we realize we are stuck in the corner of our minds. Sometimes we think we sit in one spot forever, in constant unchanging repetition like in the play, or maybe we are in constant motion, just one in the crowd marching by, but unmoving in our relative position, and there, we perceive from a single freeze frame, time barely passing. But in actuality, we are temporal fleeting blips in the timeline of history, in the cosmos."

Then she looks at me, like this bright creature coming out of hibernation, and I look at her and I know she's getting to the point.

"At eight forty five in the morning," she begins, "you visit Kinokuniya, head up to the second floor and browse through the manga section, but you never will find one to your liking, since you are a literature major after all and to play the role, you've decided to be only interested in highbrow literature; so instead, you visit the third floor, last row, where there's fiction, but not just any fiction, because you're looking for soul: soul, you think comes from obscure paperbacks that aren't put onto display shelves, the ones with minimalist covers, that look like they might offer some sort of abstract mysticism, and when you happen to find one, you pick it up, smell the pages, shift it from left to right, reading the covers, but you know you've already chosen based on sheer intuition, and then you pretend you're not so certain, meandering down the stairs, pausing at the bestseller shelves and the staff picks and flick through a few jazz records and K-pop CDs and oldies but don't pick up anything, not the magazines, not the CDs, not the stationery and notebooks; you pay for the book, counting out the exact change from your pockets, never missing a coin, come here holding it in your hand, order a seasonal special or a promotional, or if the person ahead of you orders something interesting you will 'give it a try', then you'll take a seat at the back corner, with the window in front of you and the rest of the room behind you so you can easily watch people pass by on the street - and read your book like it will make you wiser; you do this from Monday to Friday, since you don't have morning classes," she says all in one breath. "Now listen, I've been watching you," she says. No sing-song voice, just toneless and flat. Her eyes have changed into the depths of a frigid sea. "Tomorrow, don't take the bus. Take the train and walk the four blocks. Things are starting to change."

She gives a brief little smile, eyes twinkling, shifting, as if the swirls of jet black are changing direction. I watch as she stands and her chair screeches against the floor and without waiting for my reply, she spins around, hair billowing, disappearing into the crowd, the world outside the windows. I sip from my cup and find it still hot.