Espresso Love (A Dystopian Japan Novel) #Wattys2014

Making Ripples

For most of the trip, as soon as the doors were shut, it was eerily silent, as if on cue, a dead hush brushed over the crowd. Body heat grows more stifling with each passing station. Though the full-blown ventilation raises a terrible hum, I begin to sweat in my red coat. Shizuka is still buried on my chest. I could imagine how hard it is to breathe for her. I find it uncanny that the temperature of the train is rising. It's usually only uncomfortable in the heart of sweltering summers. The summer months of physical action and adventure, human experience and the craving of the flesh, according to Shizuka. We are safe in the depth of winter. Contemplation, reflection, exercise of the mind.

Outside, from between body parts, cityscape flashes by and turns into suburbs, high rises and coloured signs into small squat square matchbox buildings, grey and beige, half walls fencing a makeshift yard, barely any natural growth save a tree and a park here and there. Electric poles, lamps and wires flicker by like bullets. Solitary men and women on bicycles, a car here and there. Everything is still a drab grey. It's winter after all and winter means grey - until the evening, when the city-that-never-sleeps detonates with artificial light, all year round. When the hosts and hostesses, the club-goers, bar-hoppers, karaoke box rockstars, pachinko billionaires, internet cafe Olympians, drunkards and prostitutes, university students and salary men wake and feed, and when I retreat to the comfort of a book.

No one gets on and off at the next station. There's no more room for those waiting, and the passengers seem intent on staying put for the long run, squirming to find the most comfortable position, scavenging for scraps of room to gain a foothold or a perch to support themselves against the effects of gravity, like old men on canes. Still, Etiquette is too rigid, no one wants to draw attention. No one but us.

My suspicion that there is something happening in Yokohama becomes more pronounced. I look for flyers, tickets, brochures, posters and maps again. There are none. I try looking at her. I try to smile. Look at me, she had said. I try not to avoid her gaze. I try to act like an admiring loving lover, but I feel nothing close to love. My heart feels like an empty room, an empty gateway. I want to let my attention wander. The intensity of her eyes is newly overwhelming. She must have used a few more eyedrops or changed her contacts.

She glares at me.

"Do you have signal?"

I struggle to pull out my phone. No bars. "No."

"Odd."

We get a few glances. We have broken Etiquette, again. No black suits yet.

"We're above ground, there's no reason that we should lose signal."

"I haven't had signal since we stepped onto the train," she says.

I watch the rest of the crowd. Hundreds of heads, sight glued on a particular somewhere: outside, books, phones, shoes. My own paperback is at the bottom of my bag, asking to be read.

"Doesn't look like anyone else is having any problems." I say.

"It doesn't seem like coincidence."

"I think so too."

"I think this is working already," she grins. I can't tell if it is delight or triumph. Perhaps she is excited by the notion of danger.

I decide I like her. I like her risk-taking, danger-seeking, adventure-hungry nature. It may be the anti-thesis of my nihilism and complacent passivity. But still, she prefers winter over summer? She is a tenaciously created juxtaposition, an oxymoronic expression, to confound its reader. I see her scowl and know what she would say. But there are no Sounds yet, surely? She looks bothered. I shut up and retrieve my paperback novel and begin to read. Brave New World has been on my reading list for a long time, but I had never gotten the opportunity to purchase a copy. It may be the fact that it has such high critical acclaim and earth-shattering insight that it had intimidated me. But today I begin, with the philosophical aftermath of the Roaring Twenties and the Modernists: the "Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre". "Community, Identity, Stability." The science-fiction classifying, manufacturing and brainwashing, not too unlike our own.