Bad day for a music-lover

One previously pointed out to me that as I’m living in a fifteen-square-meters flat, I might be working for peanuts –actually, my pay may sometimes be so but that’s not the point here- I’ll avoid any misunderstanding by telling you not a bias but the simple truth: in Tokyo, we’re living literally cramped together. Unless you’re an enthusiastic member of the orgy circle –and I am not- this fact is known to drive Japanese people… anxious, to say.

Let’s take an example: next to my luxurious less-than-one-room flat is living my quite charming neighbor. He breaks off all ties with his desk-and-computer at home only to find again the same osmosis in his employer’s building. My “physical and moral decaying state” –end of quote- seems to move him greatly, and he does not understand why I’m indeed allowing myself to decay in joblessness.

True, he thinks I’m on the dole: considering the specimen’s pedigree, I didn’t feel brave enough to explain him that I happen to be a kind of facilitator for yôkai and ghosts summer camp. I think the good fellow would have been quite disturbed by this revelation.

So, there’s no ordinary day without him asking for my story life: did I find a job, did I stop eating junk food –he caught me in the act with a chocolate spread jar and put me on file since - and shall I give a try to the latest trendy health pills to solve my chronic fatigue issue –when you can’t sleep during two days because you’re hiding away a kitsune, sucker, you may appreciate to do so without being bothered by random fella offering little pills.

Lately, he started a new how to wake him up on mornings: playing the very best of –or worst- Japanese and American pop music, and up to my own flat thanks to walls thin as paper –maybe with a tiny bit of plaster on top-. Believe me or not, but Avril Lavigne or Ayumi Hamasaki as morning alarm clock may drive anyone to a state of rage. I’d like to think that may surely be tagged “extenuating circumstances” in a nasty crime case –and I have a lot of ideas about that.

The first time it happened, I went to his door, knocked and asked him if he’d like to lower the volume, mite below the giga high-decibel level. It seems that the rare fact he recalls from my visit is: my hair was a mess, my eyes shadowed of cerulean blue and I was in my underpants.

The second time, I hammered his door, and the third, I purely and solely promised him that when the next note of “Complicated” would come buggering my doziness, he will be driven to his office in a white taxi with a screaming siren. He answered dryly that everybody has not the joy of being a burden to the society and a dropout like me, and that I was the only one buggered by his music. O, the delight.

Everything seems quiet now, kind of a day off because nobody seems to need my services today. So I’m ready to relax in the garden, a chocolate jar and a manga on my lap –in mangas, sending a ghost back where it belongs is always quick, efficient and without ever a single drop of blood split… makes me jealous.

“Everything is all right, Hirose-san?” I ask loudly, starting the second third of the jar with a big spoon.

Raising my eyes from my book, I can see my neighbor beyond the garden door, trying for the third time this week to unlock his car. Repairman may start thinking he’d like to propose…
He rubs his hand and looks at me, disappointed.

“I’ll be late again… that’s a bad day.”

You bet. From what I understood, he mistakenly deleted files he was currently working on, his tire went flat twice this week, and considering the stink floating next to his door, his flat has a nasty leak issue.

I give him a chastened smile and shrug, as if resigned.

“Try to go to the temple, maybe that’s a sign.”

“I tried. Three times!”

“Shit happens…” I conclude with a smile, back to my book, spoon in mouth.

It happens even more when an akashita is following you everywhere: often shaped as a black puffy cloud, this nice little yôkai really loves human company. Like a Japanese variation of Lassie, it has only one little flaw: although it’s neither harmful nor violent in any case, it tends to carry bad luck with him. Totally involuntarily of course, and besides, it’s still a sweet little demon (and very fond of you).

One of them seems very fond of my neighbor, and he’s following him everywhere since two weeks. Speaking of it, while Hirose prepares to hurt his hand by forcing open his car door, the black shape on his shoulder moves a little, pops out a hairy head, yawns, and casts a yellow-eyed glance to me. I wave him a “hi” and watches him going back to sleep.

Satoru Kondo, Japan’s first onmyôji, warrant of the balance between deads, livings, yôkai and humans. Sober, pure, devoted to his government and neighbor’s cause, he is the symbol of the archipelago spiritual greatness.

But that does not mean he doesn’t hold any grudges.
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Source de l'image :  http://www.flickr.com/photos/andilicious/4279831984/

It’s mailing time!

Lately, I was switching between sweat soaked waking ups (nightmares came to inquire about my health, how nice aren’t they) and freezing showers (you may know that icy cold water immersion is a mandatory ritual before a big job). So I necessarily allowed myself to catch death. Right in the middle of July. As a matter of fact, in Tokyo it’s now pouring down like it will go on for ever with a merely 86°F.

One and only positive fact: there’s absolutely no way I can work when emptying three tissue boxes in one hour, looking like a dead drunk man and the doctor thinks you may be an interesting applicant for a formaldehyde jar. So here I am, dignified in agony, stuck in my bed since Sunday. But, as I’m still not dead with my two lungs glued together, I managed to crawl along the room to the computer to type (ain’t I a true Lord, using up my last living hours to tell you bullshit).

It couldn’t last forever as I was bound to not being left alone. Anyway between a pill and a graveyard cough I managed to check my e-mails, somehow hoping to find an urgent one I could have answered, with a smile if you please: Being utterly busy dying under my sheets, I therefore will not be able to come exorcise the two-headed little girl hiding in the attic of a shitty suburban house.

Score, shit happens.

I classify emails in two piles: first, we have government e-mails, basic and formal. Go there. Do this. See him. They pompously call them “mission orders”, naturally first-class priority, urgent, unable to suffer any delay from me as in these spicy little sentences reminding me I indeed am a Japanese state civil servant. I love being kicked in the butt on-mail, seems so much more subtle… And in the other hand, we have the average joe managing to hit upon my email address I don’t know how the hell, mistaking me for Miss Cleo. From obstructed pipes to the family youngest eight-pounds-of-excess-weight, they seem convinced that all harm is due to spirits, yôkai and revengeful ghosts.

Well, let me set the record straight:

Right now, I can tell you yôkai’s ambitions are a bit more sophisticated. Yes they are. Getting back the territory on which we humans indulgently spread ourselves, for instance. And believe me when I tell you they can do a lot more than making your bathroom pipes explode.

So I had a fabulous specimen of an e-mail, of the tearful kind, URGENT titled, spelled in block capitals and followed by a good procession of exclamation marks. A good lady, living in Shinjuku, assuring me her son is possessed. She doesn’t know him anymore and I must absolutely do something before it is “too late”. But it’s only when I read the description of the “possessed” ‘s behavior I understood this respectable family mother’s issue: even if you don’t want grandchildren, you must confess that one may be bothered by, well, having your eighteen-years-old son sending burning up love letters -politically correct term, because in fact it was displaying a rather excessive amount of hormones- to his English teacher… said teacher roughly celebrating his thirty-five birthday and displaying the funny main feature of being male.

In case you were wondering why the hell did she call for an exorcist rather than the vice squad, I honestly answer that I fucking don’t know. Considering my fever and my blocked up nose, I managed to sum up the issue as following: “Forty-years-old homemaker finds her son is not attracted towards women.” What the heck with me? Yes, a blocked sinus drives the brain into shortcuts.

Here is a copy of my answer in full (minus snuffling, swearing about dirty tissues on the keyboard and sneezing).

Madam,

I went into the trouble of reading your e-mail from one end to another and as you can see, I’m answering you as soon as I’m able to.

Firstly, you are lucky, because I’m currently dying of suffocation caused by billions of used tissues, full of syrup, therefore I am in the absolute inability of being ill-mannered or coming at your place for the pleasure to express my deepest thoughts to you in person.

That being said, as I am touched by my fellows’ distress, I advise you to offer your son condoms rather than an exorcist. That would require a lower budget and, I bet, more efficiency. If you were in a true state of deprivation, I would gladly buy some to your son. About you, my advice is to start a therapy or maybe try to bear another child if you hope having grandsons one day.

Dear madam I hope I was able to help you, and kindly asking you not to pass my email address to all your weekly gym friends. I would be quite upset to find more emails cast in the same mould once cured, when your issues obviously come within the competence of whatever sexologist, plumber, animal scientist, cabinetmaker or color-blind koto player.


Yours sincerely, please accept the expression of my most hypocritical compassion.


S. Kondo


And I added, for the early son’s improvement:


PS: if, as I’m thinking, you’re spying on your mother’s mailbox, let me give you another advice: choose them younger. Best wishes.


Luckily, no other existential issue email occurred, from a business-man deeply convinced of having married a ghost -he found it hard to believe before the wedding night, obviously- or a student convinced she failed to pass the exam because of her teacher cursing her (truly, I’m still laughing). So everything was rather quiet.


With these venomous words, I’m going back to bed for the next three days at last, as long as my body has not been cremated to avoid further contamination.