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by Hugh Cook |
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Section 125 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 November 8 Monday.
(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Today I was working at a computer in a building in the heart of Tokyo when an earthquake rocked through. Some seconds later, I still felt as if the building was shaking. I had no doubt about the reality of the initial earthquake. But the prolonged shaking? Was it an event happening in the real world or just something going on in my own head. "Am I just imagining it," I said, "or is the building still shaking?" "It's still shaking." By my watch it was about 11:18. That was our share of the latest "aftershock" (a substantial earthquake in its own right) to hit the Niigata area, which is quite some distance from Tokyo, on the opposite coast. When I got home I found that my wife had purchased new emergency rations in preparation for our big earthquake, whenever that might be. It seems that the rations which we received for free when we attended an earthquake training session last year had expired. Still on the subject of the earthquake, on Saturday the Emperor of Japan, whose name I forget because nobody ever uses it (Akihito?) visited refugees in Niigata, in the company of the Empress. Afterwards, some of the people to whom the royal couple had spoken were interviewed on TV, and it was really impressive how lit up they were. The imperial visit had really made a huge impression on them, and, retelling their stories, they really came to life. Section 125 Entry 0002. Date: 2004 November 10 Wednesday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) At six months of age, baby Cornucopia still cannot crawl forwards, though she is continually trying to do just that. But she can crawl in circles, and this, plus her ability to crawl backwards and her ability to roll, gives her quite a bit of mobility. Overall, progress is fine at this stage. Where her ability lags, perhaps, is in her ability to cope with the great big wide world of noise and strangers. That's one big bad scary world out there, and when she was patted on the head by a menacing stranger (a neighbor's two year old boy) she screamed. We are trying to acclimatize her to a world larger than the ground floor of our house. On my last shopping trip, for example, I put her in the pram and took her to the supermarket with me. I hope this desensitizing process works, because there is a plane trip somewhere in our projected future, and it's not so terribly far away now. We have made some progress on the desensitizing front. On her first trips outside in the pram, she lay back and did not move, frozen into immobility by the shock of the new. But now she does look around. And also fools with the components of the pram. Which is a good news bad news situation, I suppose, depending on what her exploratory curiosity results in. Section 125 Entry 0003. Date: 2004 November 16 Tuesday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) So a guy e-mails me from out of the blue and asks, well, how's it working out for you, the website and the print-on-demand thing? (He's an author; he has a professional interest in this kind of thing.) So I reply, well, the print-on-demand thing is just a hypothetical possibility at this stage. It requires the finishing of something, to start with, and the BAMBOO HORSES novel is grinding along at the rate (currently) of about one paragraph a day. Also, since print-on-demand is more a way of producing books than of selling them, I need to boost the website's popularity, and I don't really have the time to do that. The website's statistics fluctuate wildly from month to month, but this month, November 2004, it's been getting a little over a thousand unique visitors a day, which I calculate as being 365,000 a year, which I think is not nearly enough. To sell even a small number of books you need (I think, though it's just a guess) millions of visitors a year, not just tens of thousands. Still, the website does put me in touch with some of the fans of the CHRONICLES, the hardy souls who (somehow) survived the experience of reading all ten volumes, and have no wish (or so they claim) to take revenge. The fans include the enthusiast who put together the Chronicles fan site www.idlefellows.com/hughcook/ And it also includes S., who wrote (with indecorous enthusiasm) about the pleasing effect that the leech scene in THE WIZARDS AND THE WARRIORS had on his classmates when he read it aloud to them. (I had a vision of my literary future: forgotten but for a small yet pungent piece embedded in an anthology of lowbrow Twentieth Century leech humor. Which I suppose is one step up from being forgotten entirely.) Then there are the people who were personally acquainted with me in the past, not all of whom wish to sustain the past tense nature of that acquaintance. Once such is PT, who wrote, in the last week or so, sending his e-mail winging Japanwards all the way from New Zealand, "Holy plowing penguins! HUGH plowing COOK!" And more of the same, causing me to remember a distant (and, I think, partly imaginary) world, the world of Purple Death (is it still on the market?), electric puha, and exciting nights with rain and collapsing tents and angry neighboring tent people, and a life-preserving retreat down the beach, hatchet in hand .... Nights? Well, there was only one night like that, actually. But how many nights like that do you need? And perhaps the hatchet is imaginary, because for what conceivably reason would we have taken a hatchet to the beach? Then again, we took just about everything else, to the point where a couple of tyres blew out on the station wagon. And what we took included a meat pie which, when we'd eaten half of it, turned out to be rich with crawling maggots, the dominant life form in the remaining half. "Don't look!" said X, urgently. But we looked. Why X? Because I can't remember the name. All blurring together, the dates collapsing, the meat pie perhaps a part of some entirely different journey into improvised possibility. A different world, anyway. Quite different from the one I inhabit now. I'm writing this on a subway train which is somewhere underground, traveling beneath the city of Tokyo. Actually, it's the Hibya Line, the one on which a member of the Aum cult, some years back, released sarin nerve gas. We still see, here and there on subway walls and elsewhere, police "wanted" posters featuring the faces of certain Aum members whom the police are still keen to talk to, even after all these years. But right now I'm not really thinking about nerve gas attacks. Rather, what's occupying my mind is the interesting effect of the crumpled piece of white tissue paper (or perhaps it's a bit of toilet paper) on the subway seat beside me. I didn't put it there. I'm entirely innocent. It was there when I sat down next to it. But it's effect (an interesting effect, I think) is that since I got on the train about forty minutes ago, not one single person has sat down beside me. One woman did approach the contaminated spot and made a kind of scratching gesture in the air above it, as if willing the paper to vanish. Or perhaps the air-scratching fingers were meant to hint to me that possibly the crumpled tissue was mine, and that I should remove it. (I'd have gotten a better idea of exactly what she was doing if I'd turned to look directly, but I was observing the performance of the fingers peripherally, my focus on the computer screen.) And now we're at Kamiyachou. Next stop, Kasumigaseki, where the sarin gas swirled loose, all those years ago. (I was still in New Zealand back then, so for me it's just something I read about in the newspapers.) Anyway, Kasumigaseki, now. And then, I think, Hibiya, where I'll change to the Yamanote Line (you have to walk a bit, but I think I can remember the way) and travel to my evening lesson. More assessment of the website experience later, perhaps, if I can find the time. And, yes, Hibiya comes after Kasumigaseki, which is just as well, otherwise I'd be in time trouble. And now I'm no longer on the train. Instead, I'msitting on a hard greenish-yellow plastic seat on the platform at Hibiya station, and the train has left, and the piece of squalidly crumpled tissue paper (or whatever it is) has vanished beyond recall. And it just occurs to me that I never connected the abandoned white tissue with those warnings we've been seeing in every train and subway station, the warnings telling us to report any suspicious people or objects to the police. And the crumpled white thing is traveling through the heart of Tokyo ... the Anchalchyon Virus oozing out of its semi-sentient pores ... a million dead tomorrow, ten million dead next week ... or maybe not. But, anyway, there's a plot idea for you, if you like. A piece of toilet paper used as a terrorist weapon, and the next thing you know the state security forces are kicking down your toilet door to confiscate the means of destruction lurking inside. Better go. It's getting late, and the clock is running. And, besides, if I sit here much longer I'll start to look suspicious. |
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