Espresso Love (A Dystopian Japan Novel) #Wattys2014

Rabbit Hole

I want to ask for her name but she excuses herself with a gentle smile, wrinkles creasing around her lips, leaving me with the books. It's as if she had known me from somewhere. She knows me but I don't know her. It's a little strange, but I pay it no particular attention. There are always such people, who might find someone else familiar, but unsure of exactly where or when. It might just be an archetypal symbolic existence: a certain type of person with a certain type of face, or a certain type of character one would dream about in a dream. If people could be classified and put into categories, there would be categories for the type of faces and body shapes, along with personalities.

The door closes on me, leaving me with the vacant room. The only company left are the books. Hundreds of them, perhaps. I follow the walls, walking slowly like I would at a museum. On the shelves are rows of titles both familiar and unfamiliar. There doesn't seem to be an apparent order. The more I investigate each shelf, the more I lose sight of its shelving methodology. I cannot comprehend the "special way" the woman had mentioned. It's like sinking deeper and deeper in the Cretan Labyrinth where it seems to be a single uniform route, yet, mysteriously spirals off into elusive branches. For example, there is an old withering copy of the Tale of Genji but right alongside it, a poetry collection of Pablo Neruda. Equally as intriguing, I see the Harry Potter hardcover series sitting next to the brutally violent 1962 A Clockwork Orange and Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra", "All's Well That Ends Well" and "Love's Labours Lost". Some books are quite old, probably having been passed down a few generations, while ones right next to them would be brand new. If I were to pick one up, they would probably also smell of fresh print. I wonder what kind of correlation there is between them, but it leads to no conclusions.

I reach for a copy of The Trial by Franz Kafka, a story about K. who is convicted of something he believes he didn't do and has no knowledge of, nor is ever informed of. I had read it before but I feel some urgent need to flip its pages and smell its scent, as if it could give me some sort of answer. It bears an ironic semblance to our situation. We are pursued for God knows what exactly. Thinking? Breaking Etiquette? Going on a date? Having sex? Remembering memories? Having feelings? Criticism of society? It could be all of that or none of it. After all, the Emoto man had come and shown us a contract that I never knew existed.

The novel fits in the palm of my hand nicely. It's the 1999 version printed by Kadokawa. A mustard yellow cover scribbled over with odd black lines like a child's doodles of psychadelic creatures, dead trees and shadows greet me, rather joyfully. The scribbles seem to dance and contort, singing weird haunting tunes of another time. I blink and close my eyes for a little before I open them again.

I flip through the pages. The smell of the book is faint, being replaced by a musty wooden tinge of the bookshelf. But it brings much comfort, somehow. Somewhere out there, in this higher realm of transcendence, where creative spirits converge and collide spawning fantasies and mythos, where imaginary worlds and fictional characters exist as reality, where the Muses converse in communion with their human vessels, where prophetic truth unhindered by boundaries feed into the mind, there is this man called K. who is, like me, pursued and sentenced to a certain future by a larger unknown force, or perhaps by himself. There must be countless other people, or characters, who are in the same exact situation, or have been replayed, reread, recreated in a loop over and over again. In that sense, I may not be so alone. In this little library, holding The Trial in my hands, a few minutes from inevitable capture, I realize I'm not alone.

"Mr. Maeda," a voice says to my left.

I jump out of my skin and slam the book shut.