Honestly, I wish more people would draw pictures of me decked to the nines in muscle flattering armor, shouldering a sword that could cut a VW bug in twain . . . In fact, I think that would be the perfect Christmas gift.  Hint hint.

(Tokyo cont’d)

There’s a strangeness in sound to a dying forest. On my way to board the Cat Bus, I crossed through the mitaka no mori. I left my iPod sitting back at the hostel and for the first time in a long time let my ears drink in the intoxicating bubbling, twitter, cough of the world.

The music sang in on the wind for a fleeting moment, pulling me offcourse, away from the river path with swan boats and swaddling ducks to a bubbled space where my moon-glow watch stopped ticking, leaves froze in their arched fall, and the rest of the world turned into a dull and distant hum, rushing outside.

There’s a girl, dressed in green, playing an instrument carved from bamboo; its sound hollow and mournful as if its naturally sprung from the wind through the trees. The music is without beginning or end. I have the feeling this girl has been here forever and, after I leave, she’ll stay forever still.

I’m leaning against a leathery-skinned tree on a bed of soft brown nettles and bite-sized pine cones. She’s sitting on a log, fameless, her eyes are closed.

All the J-pop infecting my veins seems to bleed away. Old Japan lifted his shaved head and I beheld a world where our culture never; all the tradition, the ugly and the beautiful restored: the boiling, the feudal system, hari kiri, men measured in koku. An army with armor that looks cut from flames rides in with screams that confirms the suspicion, and a red line drawn across my throat with sharp steel, the sword slicing the chrysanthemum, and my head falls . . . gaping like the eel.

She’s noticed me.

“Kiite mo ii desuka?”

“Hai, ii desu.”

And so on . . .

I gave her my phone number, spoiling the moment, and walked back to the path that would take me to fat and fuzzy grinning giants, and rusting robots.

There are much more beautiful things in the world, I realize. Things that hide themselves because I have my ears plugged up, or my eyes turned to something glowy and electronic. An answer comes. Do not layer your universes. Meet the humans of this Earth. Hand some of them your heart and see what happens.

I heard the light patter of rain falling gently on my shoulders. I’d like to think she never called, not because I was unworthy, a decapitatable barbarian in the eyes of Edo, but because she was only a spirit, washed away with the music by the sound of the river.

-C

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 28th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under All Comics, Incompletes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.