46 posts tagged “writing”

I've been thinking a lot about surveillance / security cameras.

Chapter 5, page 16.

“Around the second week of January, I think.”

              Junko bit her lip, and secretly cursed Kaori. That would mean almost a month would have to pass before she could see him again. She made a mental note to accuse her for not having decided on some code phrase beforehand to indicate she didn’t need an interruption.

              Junko watched him head over to the counter to settle the bill as she buttoned up her coat. Studying him chatting up the bearded guy, she wondered how well he would be able to understand it, how it was like to be her, to grow up with her father’s rules and orders internalized like she had her own prison built up inside her head.

              David, perhaps feeling her stare on the back of his head, looked over his shoulder, and gave her a wink. Something in her heart smiled back to him as well as her mouth, and Junko thought she might be in trouble. She always thought she would be ready when the guy she had been looking for would walk into her life. Instead, life decided to teach her it always had its way of knocking at unexpected moments. So she was knocked off balance, and couldn’t tell how ready she was.

              “He’s half Russian,” David said in the elevator on their way down.

              “Sorry?”

              “The guy at the café? He looked a bit non-Japanese-like, you know? I asked. Turned out his mother’s a Russian.”

              “That’s interesting.”

              “Want one?” He offered her a gum.

              “Thanks.”

Chapter 5, page 15. For past chapters in pdf format, check here.

            “You want to spend more time with him. Good. All the more reason to leave for today. Don’t rush. Make him wait, and meanwhile you cool your head down a bit and think it over as well. I’m in front of Mitsukoshi right now.”

              “I really am not-”

              “Get up from your chair and meet me over here now, or I might actually walk into this super uncool department store. This place looks so dark. They should rebuild the whole interior, you know? Are you getting up from your chair or not?”

              Junko realized she wouldn’t be able to come up with clever remarks to make her friend understand she really wanted to change their plan.

              “I’ll do that.”

             “Good. Let’s go to Isetan and check out their bargain stuff. You know I’ve been looking for a muffler. They might have the right one for me. Maybe I can wear it when I see Paul tomorrow. Don’t make me wait too long all right? Bye!”

              “Bye,” Junko gave her phone a hard push and cut the connection.

              David was finishing his tea.

              “Are you seeing your friend?”

              Junko avoided his eyes, and gathered her things together.  “Yes, I have to go.”

              “Can I see you again after I come back?”

              “Come back?”

              David stood up and took up his jacket from the chair. “You know I’ll be visiting my family for Christmas.”

              “Oh. You told me that, I forgot. When will you be back?”

Chapter 5, page 11. These posts won't suddenly end, unlike two consecutive Prime Ministers of some certain obscure Asian country.

            In her world, a person who didn’t know Camus would not be considered to be an intellectual. She was amused by his innocent question, but it also made her aware such education wasn’t necessarily considered to be useful or worthwhile for those who had their focus on their career.

              “Sort of.”

              “What did he write?”

              “‘The Stranger’. And ‘The Plague’. I prefer ‘The Plague’.”

              “What is it about?”

              This gave her another moment of tea tasting and pondering.

              “It’s about a group of people trying to do what’s right. Against all the odds and obstacles.”

              “Doing what’s right shouldn’t be so hard. It’s always the best path to take.”

              “Don’t you think sometimes it’s more difficult than to take an easy path?”

              David stuck out his lower lip, and gave it a thought for a moment. Then he shrugged. “Yeah, I guess, but you’d feel bad about it later if you settle on the easy path.”

              Junko felt they were talking about seemingly the same thing, but were on a different track.               “Have you read ‘The End of the Affair’? It’s not written by a French author though.”

              David frowned, but this time she could see he was faking; he was not remembering anything - he was trying to pretend he of course knew it, but somehow forgot. The kind of expression you’d quickly become familiar with in college.

              “Who wrote that one?”

              “Graham Greene.”

              “Right.”

Chapter 5, page 1.

Kaori said she didn’t understand why Junko suddenly started to act all shy and hesitant when she had found an e-mail from him in her university e-mail account, asking if he could see her some time this weekend. Kaori said she should, at least for once, and find out what kind of guy he really was, threatening she would steal him if Junko wasn’t interested.

              “How unfair is it, a good looking guy like that walks in just after I left the stupid bar? You should be feeling lucky I wasn’t there,” she would tell Junko, sitting next to her in the crowded university computer room. Every computer room on their campus had an air-conditioning system with very un-Japanese attitude that just didn’t seem to know modesty; it was always either too hot or too cold.

              “I thought you were with Paul.”

              “You only live once,” Kaori said playing with her breached light brown hair, “It’s sometimes pretty hard to keep my hands to myself.”

              Junko had been leading her friends to believe she had been having her share of fun, and she just had been a bit secretive about it. The truth was, she had been tired of her toy-boys from her high school days, but couldn’t find someone she could build a solid relationship with. She wasn’t even sure if there actually was anyone who could understand her, and take all the trouble and pain to break through her shell and reach out for her. Her heart skipping a beat wasn’t a proof enough that this man from across the ocean was the one, but she was afraid to find out she was wrong.

              “Just have a cup of coffee in the afternoon or something. There’s no harm in it. If the guy turns out to be a moron or an asshole, you just cut it short and walk off. Isn’t that simple enough?”

Chapter 4, page 16. This completes Chapter 4.

             “She went to the convenience store to buy some cigarettes.”

              “Are you going to wait for her till she comes back?”

              “I think.”

              David saw Tim coming out of the crowd, his eyes scanning all over the bar. He looked at David, then at the girl, then back at David. Tim pointed at the door, did some imitation of typing and shooting off a machine gun in the air, then pointed at the door again.

              David gave him a wink.

              “Did you come with your friend?” the girl asked.

              “Ah, yeah. But he had to leave early. He had something to do.”

              “I see.”

              The silence that followed was strangely not uncomfortable. David saw the girl noticing something, and turned his body a little. The African girl he’d noticed before was standing up from his stool, still holding hands with her man.

              “Shall we sit down?” David suggested.

              There was a moment of hesitation on her part.

              “If we don’t go secure that table, someone else will be sitting on those chairs very soon. Would you rather be standing up?”

              “Good point,” finally said the girl, starting for the stool. “My feet need some rest.”

              “What’s your name?” David asked as he put his drink down on the table.

              “It’s Junko,” the girl said taking her seat, “What’s yours?”

Chapter 4, page 15.
 

            She smiled a little when David finally caught her eyes, and looked away quickly. For a moment David felt like the world around him lost its color, and only her dark brown eyes had any meaning behind them. Inside those eyes there was something that reminded him of a budding grove, or a chrysalis waiting to be awakened.

              “Hi.”

              “Hi.”

              He took a step closer.

              “Quite a crowd tonight.”

              “Yes. Is it always this crowded in this place?”

              Her English was much better than he would have imagined.

              “No, it depends, sometimes it’s very quiet.”

              He noticed she was looking about in slightly nervous way, like she was a deer lost in the middle of a forest and was afraid of the hostile creatures lurking about behind the trees, waiting for her to turn her back to them.

              “Do you come to Roppongi often?” he asked.

              Her eyes came back on him.

              “No, not really. I don’t go out much.”

              “Are you waiting for someone?”

              She looked into her drink, turned her eyes to the bar, and then back to David.

              “I came with a friend of mine. She brought me here. But she took off to go some place else.”

Chapter 4, page 10.

             Three months of late night gaming and beer consuming later, on one Friday night before they each would be flying home for Christmas holiday, Tim and David came to the conclusion that the best way to forget about their worries over grades was to get out of their Love Hotel district apartment and go out to Roppongi, and celebrate the holiday season coming just around the corner.

They were both sorry to be going back to the States for Christmas and miss the chance to observe, at first hand, what really was like to spend the Christmas Eve in Tokyo. They had heard all about it, of course, from the other foreigners and Japanese friends, how important it was for lovers to spend that night of the year together.

All the fancy restaurants and Love Hotels would be reserved at least a month in advance, every one of them offering some sort of Eve Specials. This was the season when the women had the leverage. All the brand shops known for their Japanese clientele such as Tiffany and Louis Vuitton would be having more business than the rest of the year, with guys willingly opening up their wallet- it was very important not to lose their date for the Eve- otherwise they would have to lay low and try to avoid running into someone they knew, so the whole world wouldn’t know they had to endure the Unthinkable Act of Uncoolness, spending the Christmas Eve by yourself or- even worse- with the members of your family.

Okay, I have a writing problem.

I'm going to write a sci-fi novella (of about 80-100 pages) for this contest held by a Spanish university (In English- never done any creative writing in Japanese, for some reason). I know the story I want to tell and what kind of people I want to put in this world. However, I can't get past the first page without the story starting to sound like a fecking bad episode from The Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Partly because my story is political suspense cyberpunk that is The Ghost in the Shell in the first place, and partly because, I'm sure, I happen to be a huge fan of S.A.C. (personally I like it better than the movie version- you just can't separate Major Kusanagi and Batou into two different worlds!)

So when I thought about it, this happens a lot. If you are a producer for tv drama in the U.S., your suspense drama would have to be as good as 24, but have to be different. Your mafia drama, even if it's about Irish or Chinese mafia, it has to be different from The Sopranos, yet good enough in its own way. If you are in a punk band, you'd better sound as good as your predecessors, yet different.
I certainly don't aim to create something as cool as S.A.C., but you get the idea. And in almost every single area/genre you could turn to, there's always someone who went down that road before you. Obviously you learn their works, you love them, and that's why you want to write/draw/create something like that. But you can't copy them, you'd have to "digest" them, mix and mash them up with your other interest and your own taste, and come up with something you can call your own. In other words, being creative in today's world cannot happen "stand alone", it inevitably involves "re-mixing" of those who came before you. You are not competely original, the best you can do is to be different enough to stand out among the others. I guess me keep worrying that it sounds too much like my favorite cyberpunk series means that I haven't found the right tone for this story yet.

Chapter 4, page 1. Who else has "6th Grade Literature" and "Bollywood Online" on one AdSense page??

For a while David had been thinking of studying abroad for a year after his college graduation, partly to see the world and build some useful contacts for the future, but mostly to have more fun before settling down to the corporate life. Having cast off the confusion of growing up in a single mother family by his high school graduation, David was in the thick of the time in his life when his longing for one true romance was blurred by the urge of his youth to leave his signature on every tale of love, carnal or otherwise, but mostly carnal. He had no idea what impact his casual choice would have on the course of his life.

               He tossed a coin over Spain and Japan- the pick having been made according to the image he had of the girls from these countries- and the tail sent him buying a plane ticket to Tokyo out of his savings. He picked the university, applied for a dorm room, tried to read a few books on Japan, and watched a few Kurosawa movies and Japanimation films. By some stroke of luck he didn’t bother to check, even after he’d packed his things, the number of Chinese characters he needed to learn before he could make out even the basic sentences. He made the discovery when his plane was somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. By that time, it was too late to reconsider his decision.