Espresso Love (A Dystopian Japan Novel) #Wattys2014

Things Are Changing

-Things Are Changing-

The next day, I settle into a comfortable routine once again. I begin the morning as usual at 7:30 AM, stay in bed for another five, listening to track 6 from a Clark Terry jazz album orchestrated with rapid ear-piercing trumpet work - a song with a title I could never remember. It drifts from my cell phone's tiny speakers and is swallowed by the covers.

I follow Terry with half an hour of stretches and warm ups, set the kettle to boil water, then step into the bathroom for a quick three minute cold shower, all the while brushing my teeth in one go. I apply moisturizer on my skin and dry my hair with a towel. I don't bother to open the blinds or turn on the lights. I check the messages on my phone - though there are never any - while I pour boiling water over a Lipton green tea bag in a cup I had got from a cheap 100 yen store, and start up the pan to scramble an egg. An adjacent pot holds my breakfast oatmeal. Scrambled eggs and oatmeal. A glaring touchscreen. Two pieces of bread go in the toaster. I wash an apple. It's only after my breakfast is done, when I return to the bathroom and blow dry the rest of my hair.

I take a look outside and watch the streets before sitting down to eat. There is usually no one around, maybe one or two in suits rushing to work. Maybe a student hunched up against the cold wind. A few flakes drifting lazily from the sky, like ballerina dancers, but in a strange waltz. Most of the time though, whenever I look out from my second storey window, emptiness greets me. On my side of the street, wedged behind a few taller buildings, the sun is grey and sullen, lethargic through the cracks between each blind, like leaking water from a faucet. It is especially dull in the winter, the season of the soul. Fine by me.

It should be exactly 8 when I sit to eat. I adjust the speed of my breakfast consumption to finish at 8:15. While I eat, I turn on the 20" television for the morning news. The news anchor blazes through several headlines. None of them particularly demand my attention. I am always on the look out for anything of importance. This morning, one of them mentions the death of a baby boy thrown off of an apartment balcony. There is also a police pursuit of a few suspects who had allegedly sexually assaulted an old lady in public. A war in the Middle East. Another reports on the increasing suicide rates and gas prices. Nothing much worth noting.

I switch off the television.

Then, I would typically head for the bus stop towards my campus - but not before stopping by Kinokuniya. Even if I already have a book to read, it is a force of habit. Like a haughty drug addiction.

It's Kinokuniya I would be thinking about - down the rickety dank stairwell, lit by broken lights at irregular pulses, past the Yasuda's where the sounds of their bedroom endeavours could be overheard, the Korean Choi family with two toddlers, the old man only known as the Old Man, into a blast from the dust-filled duct that had been once a heater - before I am deposited on the doorstep of winter.

But this morning, as I step into the arctic, a face appears in my mind, her lips moving in slow motion, without sound. I can only see the shape of her mouth. But in my head I hear: "Things are starting to change." Like an old espionage movie.

On the day of our first encounter, I had managed to shut Shizuka Kaneko out of my mind for the rest of the time. Handshakes and smiles were exchanged, groceries were bought, small talk about superficial superfluous things and long lectures from monotone professors filled my lungs until I could breathe no more. In the evening, as per usual, I had a few Sapporo drafts with some friends and karaoke was sung. But today, she comes back like a haunting memory. She returns so naturally, I might honestly have been expecting it.

Her words are warm and wet in my ear and send shivers down my spine. But to me, they are utterly meaningless. I can't see from where to begin to take them seriously. They are peripheral like the fly that had been buzzing loudly against my windowsill. Come to think of it, there had never been flies at this time of year in my room.

Flies have never been an attractive concept. Most of the time, they seemingly come from nowhere, uninvited, unwanted. They just appear one day, sitting on a windowsill beneath the blinds like entitled property, returning home from vacation, minding their own business. Yet no doubt, they can only be there after stages of full maturation. Hundreds of invisible eggs must be tucked away somewhere, somehow. Squirming larvae, maggots crawling, wiggling, feeding, snivelling away until they're ready to move on, forming their own pupa, retreating into cocoons to mutate - "mutate", quite unlike "transform", which indicates a potentially charming result. Indeed, their buzzing wings and glistening shells only carry disease and ill omen. They hope not to be killed too prematurely - always tenaciously purpose-driven - so they can spread germs and corrosive saliva on as many surfaces possible. But ultimately, their fates are bound to expiration dates: thirty days, or according to the whim of human hands.

If we are flies, there must also be human hands somewhere seeking to wipe out our existence. Yet most of the time, we don't think about it - we, as modern society, no longer struggle against fates or life or death; we aren't desperate to seek out the light beyond the windowpane. We simply exist and fall into comfortable cycles of repetition. Time passes.

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