It Happened One Night (Again)
Japanese Alps
Author’s note: This story follows on, of sorts, from It Happened One Night – you may like to read this one first.
A waxing moon bathes my room in pale light and I feel profoundly alone. I toss and turn and beg sweet Morpheus to come and claim me, but his caresses seem so far away. My loneliness presses down on me and I half recall a snatch of poetry:
The wind is hushed, the starlight pales,
The dismal moon her features veils…
Disgusted with myself, I get up, dress and head out into the thick cloak of Japanese night. This is my third night without sleeping.
My lover has left me. Tonight and every night from now on there will be no more bedtime stories, just emptiness. Bedtime stories are not only the forerunners to my dreams but they shape and form my life by autosuggestion. They are the gateway to sleep. Perhaps, I think, as I wander aimlessly through a sleepy Japanese town, I will never sleep again.
I wander along cobbled streets, through temple grounds and past glowing convenience stores. Another quote, Shakespeare, pops into my head, ’tis now the very witching time of night,’ and I think of my lover at home with my children whilst I spend another sleepless night lost in Japan.
Later, I find myself standing outside a brightly lit convenience store with a phone receiver in my hand. Despite the dawn still being a few hours away early morning Salary Men peruse the porn selection whilst nervous looking housewives dart around with the makings of their loved-one’s breakfast. I am bathed in a synthetic looking pale green light. It makes my face look long and drawn. It rubs out my softer side and makes me look both desperate and sad. People exiting the store give me a wide berth and shoot reproachful looks in my direction. Bull frogs croak in the rice paddies and I tap a fifteen digit code into the phone. I swallow nervously and because I have never developed any real limits to my emotions and can experience such catastrophic extremes of despair, fear, separation anxiety and sheer terror, I feel my palms become clammy and my breathing becomes laboured. I am terrified.
I press the receiver to my ear and wait. Somewhere on the other side of the word a phone starts to ring. I hold my breath. The answering machine kicks in. I hear my own voice.
Fuck.
I slam the phone down.
The owner of the convenience store frowns at me. I sit on the curb, hang my head in my hands and cry a little. Time drags by. The sun begins to crest the mountains. To kill time I take a copy of the latest Murakami from my pocket and try to immerse myself in the story.
Sometime later I look up and a young Japanese boy is watching my curiously. He has a can of coffee in each hand and a cigarette in his mouth. He nods at the book, offers me a smoke and a coffee and says that he is curious to know why I am sitting on a street corner, watching the sun rise and reading Murakami. By the time we have put the world to rights and discussed the complexities of Muramki’s writing the sun has crested the jagged peaks of the Japanese alps and we are surrounded by empty coffee cans and cigarette butts.
This time when I dial the fifteen digit number she answers.
‘Where are you?’
‘Japan, the Alps, alone…’
The silence between us rings heavy and portentous.
‘Can I come home to you?’ I ask.
The silence thickens. A gaggle of school girls leave the convenience store and laugh behind their hands at me. One of them makes a suggestive comment in Japanese and I crush the phone closer to my ear and give her the finger.
I wait for what seems like forever but is perhaps but a single heartbeat.
‘I don’t think so.’
I bang the phone against my head and once again the convenience store owner scowls at me.
I housewife shuffles past carrying a box of rice and a bag of sour plums. I notice that her make-up is perfect and she trails an aroma of fresh lilies behind her.
‘It’s too complex now. Too much is wrong. There is too much…’
I watch a pair of school boys cough on their first cigarette of the day.
‘OK, I understand.’
Clearly, I don’t.
‘I will call you later. Perhaps we can talk more then.’
I gently hang up the phone and shake my head sorrowfully. The sun has now climbed over the peaks of the Alps and is throwing shadows into the rice paddies. I rub my eyes and wonder how long before I can finally sleep again. As there is nothing that I can really do I sigh deeply, take a deep, deep breath of mountain air and wander back to my hotel.
It feels like the end of the world.
Philip currently divides his time between his home in Middle England, SFO International Airport and some grotty little town in the Netherlands that is best not spoken about in polite company. He constantly worries about using the word ‘awesome’ too much whilst in the USA and dreams of a day when he can go a whole day without resorting to Diet Coke. His greatest ambition is to raise his son to be a much better person than himself and to see Liverpool string a run of wins together. At least one of those, he believes, is possible. He can be contacted, when not bouncing around the world at 32,000 ft: nihon_news at yahoo dot com and his own personal homepage, www.philipblazdell.com, is updated daily.
