The Winter Project

2. Minoru

Minoru spent every morning the same way. His fiancé Stephanie would shout at him that it was the last time she would attempt to wake him, despite it being the first time he had heard it. He would get dressed, drink two cups of coffee and then walk thirty-five minutes to his place of work. Minoru was an analyst for a local government organisation and although he was good at it, he did not enjoy it. He also did not enjoy being abruptly woken by Stephanie every morning and he wasn't sure that he enjoyed living with her or even spending time with her. Nevertheless, Minoru was always upbeat. He found happiness through the little things in his day such as having a good conversation with a colleague at work, eating at his favourite café for lunch or spending time with friends and playing video games in the evening.

When he thought back on his life, Minoru wasn't surprised that he had such a positive attitude to everything. His childhood memories consisted of playing outside with his two younger brothers and two friends who he was still very close to. During his teenage years he experimented with drinking, drugs, sex and parties like most teenagers, and never once had a negative experience during these experiments. He fell deeply in love with his first girlfriend at the age of eighteen and fell out of love with her two years later, although she had fallen out of love with him first. For only those six months between her falling out of love and him falling out of love with her, he felt sadness. He had no regrets and no sad twangs of nostalgia when he looked back at his upbringing because in his mind, he had done everything he wanted to and if he were to live his life again, he would live it in the exact same way. His Japanese father and English mother raised him in a large house, where he was given all of the things he wanted such as nice food, toys and holidays, but he was never spoiled. He had great respect for his father and although he got along well with his mother and considered them to be close, he could not bring himself to respect her. She had moved out of the marital home when Minoru was twenty-four and married another man, but he did not care about that. He didn't respect her because she had given birth to a daughter with her first husband, before abandoning her and moving to another city, where she met Minoru's father. She had never worked a day in her life, but she gave Minoru and his brothers love and attention, and he often wondered why she did not provide her first-born child with the same love and respect.

When Minoru was twenty-six, he met Stephanie whilst he was working at a bar not far from his house. Stephanie was confident, or so he thought at first, organised and dominant, and Minoru allowed her to take control of his life and move into his apartment with him just a few months after kissing her for the first time. He liked her as a person overall, and he enjoyed her company, but he did not love her in the way he had loved his first girlfriend. He assumed that nobody would ever be loved as deeply by him as his first love would, and that this was the case for all first loves all across the world. He was happy with this hypothesis and fell into a comfortable routine of work, eat, sleep, and repeat with Stephanie by his side. Only in recent months, after he had proposed to her, did his mind start to wander onto bigger and more exciting things, such as travelling the world and having sex with strange and enticing women whose name he did not need to learn and who did not continuously complain about laundry or the fact that all of their friends were engaged and wondering out loud when their turn would come. He had proposed to Stephanie to save himself the headache of her constantly rambling on about it when she was drunk or in front of his mother, who was fond of her and wanted to see Minoru settle down and have children. He wondered what his mother would say if he were to have a daughter and then abandon her at a young age.

Now, just shy of thirty, Minoru was still happy but he was starting to think about how much happier he could be if he just followed his instincts. At work he would look up itineraries for trips around the world and plan the countries he wanted to visit. He never actively thought about the fact that Stephanie wasn't in his plans, and yet he actively chose not to tell her about the trips.

He looked at Japan and thought about visiting his father's family in their hometown just outside of Kyoto. He considered what it would be like to visit the bustling streets of Vietnam, or sit on a beach in Thailand drinking a beer. He dreamed of walking through strange cities and meeting people with new stories to tell, with crazy adventures to relive that would show Minoru where to travel next. He thought about being around people who were positive and excited by life, rather than his colleagues and their mundane discussions of what was annoying them at work, or why they were dreading their upcoming weekend because of their long list of chores.

He was constantly distracted by his urge to break away from everything, and he knew deep down that his refusal to share his ideas with Stephanie was because he wanted to break away from her.