A premonition of Love

Ichariba Chode

The ride down through the clouds was tougher than any flight he'd been on, and he was double glad that Jeff insisted on him using the private jet. It was the right decision this time. He avoided flying private whenever he could. It always made Harry feel weird, like he wasn't a normal person or something.

Jeff often reminded him he was the most normal non normal person he had ever met. A normal person perhaps with a crazy abnormal life.

Commercial flights meant fans and at least one Instagram or twitter tag with his at. A geolocation attached. Then people would know where he was. 

Where he was, he felt like he was about to enter another world, another phase of his life. A much anticipated and talked about phase, but one not explained or complained about yet.  He could see the Sumida River below him and the light dawning over Tokyo. He grabbed his tattered, leather notebook and pressed it to his nose, like he always did, before opening it. 'A sunrise over its homeland, welcome to Japan.'

There had been a little rash of songs about this place as of late, though the interest in it wasn't exactly new. Harry loved this place, its sights and sounds, and the language that he could replicate in very short carefully memorized sentences. 

He loved the sentiments expressed in those untranslatable sentences.

That's why he picked it.

When he'd been near finished with the last album and realized he had a three month hole in his schedule, Jeff asked him what he wanted to do. And Harry wanted to do another movie. There was a script he'd been secretly hoarding, one he really wanted to make. He'd procured the rights to it, and a few others to cover his tracks.  It had a lot to do with his absolute love affair with this city. And his love of rom coms. And because he liked to either defy or supersede expectations.

Everybody expected him to do a rom com, so he would, and he'd do the original with a current twist.

Tokyo Holiday.

The script was fun and pithy and used the landscape and culture and language he'd found so entrancing. He'd even made a solo trip once he'd read the screenplay, to visit some of the places and see a friend. He fell in love here. With the city. It would be easy, what he had to portray. He could easily imagine it. That was, he could imagine falling in love there.
He wanted to fall in love, in Tokyo. On screen at least.

It was the one he wanted to make, and since Jeff liked to exceed his expectations, they were doing a condensed shooting schedule. Jeff had gotten him just about everything he wanted.

Including Ada Scott.

He'd been enamored of her work for years, and he'd met her father, Garner Scott, many many times. He was a close friend of Irving's, and had been an influential producer and maestro in the music industry for so long, it was more accidental than anything else that Harry had never directly worked with him.

Ada was the mystery though, he'd never met her anywhere in LA or New York or London.

He thought he'd heard she went to school for some time in England. He was fairly certain she went to the Sorbonne for University. Ok, he was totally certain, he had spent a lot of time researching her.

Ever since her little movie cum critical darling, Wildflower, had taken up permanent residence in his mind and inspiration bank.  It wasn't a love story, not really, so it was weird he wanted her to direct his rom com. And he wanted her at the helm so bad he had insisted and said he wasn't doing it, even after they had gone through all the set up motions and contracts pending, unless she was the director.

It was the way she framed the sexual moments in 'Wildflower', a coming of rage story about the daughter of absent parents who struggles with addiction, to substances and love.