Espresso Love (A Dystopian Japan Novel) #Wattys2014

Things Are Changing

No one moves. No one disembarks. No one embarks. No one appears to notice. I watch the interior of the bus with my peripheral vision, of whatever I can see past the Gibson guitarist in front of me and his wall of business suits.

Nothing. Silence. Blank faces. Blank expressions. Oblivious faces. Dreary, lifeless faces. Eyes frozen in place, burning holes into their cell phones. No one is looking outside. No one sees the Seven-Eleven. Maybe it doesn't even exist.

For a full minute, it's as if time has stopped. No one gets off. No one gets on. I realize I have been holding my breath, watching this performance, waiting for when the actors will suddenly smile and wave and bow for their spectators. Then I will be expected to applaud their act and pay for the show. But they don't.

When the hiss of the doors finally dispels our purgatory, I exhale. All of a sudden, the world is breathing again, life resuming, the woman taking down her laundry, far off somewhere, the whine of a siren and we continue on. I feel its vibrations in my throat. Just like that, the bus continues. Away from the Seven-Eleven. Away from the new station, Shin-Akinoseki.

"Aki" in the original station, Akinoseki, is written as Autumn. "Seki" is a barrier or a gate. Its full meaning would be something like Autumn's Gateway. But quite curiously so, Shin-Akinoseki is distinctly different, seeming like an out-of-place typo, a linguistic anomaly. Its "Aki" is written with the Chinese kanji character for sky, "Sora", which is also the same kanji for emptiness, vacuum or void. Behind it, an additional Japanese hiragana "ki" piggybacks like a child on his father. Together it should mean an open vacancy or an empty space. The kind of word one would use for an empty apartment. A word with a hollow, lifeless sound, where dusty wind echoes through abandoned, barren halls. A word with an ominous, apprehensive quality.

Altogether it would be:

The Open Gateway.

Or with the "Shin-" prefix: the New Open Gateway.

On the other hand, if the "Seki" for gateway is a character typo, and if it was replaced, Akinoseki can then mean "empty seat".

Though the sign for the bus stop - this thin piece of metal bolted to a scrawny pole - was small, that much I could read.

Seven-Eleven disappears in the distance and I hear the announcement for Shimanomachi, Island Town. Across from me, behind the forest of knee caps, ironed black pants, and black shoes as their convoluted roots, the two elderly women get up stiffly, moving in slow motion. Their floral dress patterns swirl and flicker. I can't see their faces, but I begin to wonder if they have back pain. If they have granddaughters or grandsons. Whether they get pension benefits from the government and if they read secondhand books by an old lamp at night.

I feel overly conscious. Like every detail is out to pounce on me and tear me to pieces. If I miss something, just something small, or anything at all, it might make all the difference. It might bar off my return to a comfortable Kinokuniya, to my seasonal coffee in the adjacent coffee shop, to my apartment that houses thousands of eggs and maggots somewhere. I'm not too fond of my apartment, but all the same, I don't despise it. A shower and a bed seem more attractive than it had been before.

First, I check my Navtime app. The screen lights up enthusiastically, and coloured lines intersect and weave like abstract artwork and optical illusions into a dizzying tray of spaghetti. I select my bus route. I zoom in. I find Akinoseki. I follow the orange line. It goes down the street. I study every millimeter towards where the Seven-Eleven would be. Sure enough, there is a Shin-Akinoseki in the middle of the street, with its mismatched characters and all, strangely lopsided and off balance, tilting over, ready to fall apart stroke by stroke. There it is. It is real.

To check, I follow the route the rest of the way to Shimanomachi. It is there too, in its rightful place, staring me face to face, bold and stern, as if there to assert its legitimacy: that there are no lies, no tricks, no illusions. It's all in your head, Maeda-san, it tells me. Either there is something wrong with my memory or something wrong with the world, and it must be my memory.

But the human mind is not a simple machine that works when one wants it to, and retreats aside like a parked car when there is no need for it. No, it's what keeps the insomniac awake at night as he tries to sleep, or what might trigger the growing rift between jealous suspecting lovers. It is surely what prevents a student with good intentions from being diligently prepared, instead of the night before a deadline. Such is the mind, a rearing wild beast that tries to throw off its rider, interested in everything other than what it should be doing - and a complex intricate contraption that connects the obvious to the abstract, reality to the dream world, the here-and-now to the past and the future.

Indeed, when I close my app, there's this feeling and then the feeling along my spine disappears, but I'm certain he had been looking at me. Behind his black suit, black tie, black sunglasses, he had been watching. I had seen the slight tilt of his head, taut twitch of his jaw, as I exited the app, done with my business, done with his business.

I slip the phone in my pocket and lean back.

There, sure enough, another man, almost exactly identical - black suit and tie and sunglasses - turns his head away, as if he had noticed me noticing him noticing me. He lifts his arm and looks at his wristwatch and puts his hand in his pocket, excusing his movement.

No one speaks, but like an epiphany, something dawns on me. I am not alone and they are not alone. Would Shizuka Kaneko have noticed it? Had she meant these eccentricities when she told me "things are starting to change"?

These black suits, black ties, black sunglasses are almost exactly identical. Their hair cut short into varying buzz cuts like lawns side by side, mowed at different times. There are a good ten of them here. It's as though they had suddenly appeared as soon as I opened Navtime – out from within the app they came into existence. I had never noticed them before.

Between them, there are ordinary salarymen, some wearing simple prescription glasses, others wearing coloured ties, some old and wrinkly, others young with styled hair, some huddled in winter jackets, others gripping briefcases. They don't seem to notice anything.

It might be strange if I leaned over to the woman on my right and asked if she could see the men with black sunglasses. She would think I'm crazy because she couldn't, or think I'm paranoid if she could. She too, wears sunglasses of course. It might be just as strange to ask the mother to my left as well – she's busy with the child, trying to keep him preoccupied maybe, so that he wouldn't break Etiquette. On the other hand, the guitarist is much too tall to speak to, as I am sitting and he is standing. If I try, I might as well speak to his solid guitar case instead. In any case, if I speak, surely the black suits would hear. They might look at me again, listen in on me, observe me, or more. I decide not to attract attention to myself.

We reach Shimanomachi and I watch the elderly ladies disembark with their slow mechanical steps. Along with them, a few men in ironed shirts duck out and begin a jog through the cold air to catch connecting trains. I can see the little puffs of air in front of their faces like white rabbits escaping in the wind.

The bus is now a little emptier - no less silent - and its metal frames are no longer bloated with passengers as before. However, in my predicament, I am only concerned with the ten or so black suits. These have not moved. Not even as commuters jostled past them to get off.

I reckon they are here for a reason. Perhaps because I had opened Navtime and looked for Shin-Akinoseki. Or was it before we reached Shin-Akinoseki? Or when I broke Etiquette and asked for the next station? There is no way of telling.

I wonder if I had gotten off - at the last moment, leapt off my seat and dashed out the doors before they closed - whether these men would follow me in a hurry. I wouldn't be surprised. It's as if they are simply meant to do such a thing. Maybe I should have heeded Shizuka Kaneko's warning. Take the train and walk four blocks, she said. I didn't.