The Konbini and the Happy Tree | 2 - Aoto
Fiction in three parts: the uncanny meeting of an immigrant, a cashier, and an old woman
Read the first part here: 1- Éloïse
⬩
2 - Aoto
I’ve calmed down now and it’s a normal, quiet night.
I keep reminding myself why it’s worth it, necessary even, as I tap bits and pieces of the next novel onto my phone. Can my clumsy thumbs hold the same insight as the piano fingers I use on the keyboard at home? I get into rhythms that move me toward the abyss, pulling me deeper toward the origins of language and thought. Some nights I’m reading Kafka or James or Tokarczuk or Murakami on the little screen instead. Their words haunt my present as if floating in a protective energy field — a beehive — one wrong move and they will sting.
All this is invisible to any customer or manager at the other end of the CCTV. The edgy tensions of life live freely in this digital vortex, like my own multi-dimensional doll house, trying out surreal speculations to arrive at truth.
Tonight this was all disrupted while characters seemed to burst out from my stories and into my stage. The theatre of the absurd offset the cadence of my synapses with something mundane but threatening. Usurpers who thought they were merely getting away with a small infringement on the law.
Early in my shift, two drunk travelers came in and stole a pack of donuts. Plain donuts, worth about 150 yen. I would have bought it for them if they were hungry. Instead, they disturbed the natural peace and order, so I had to call the police, who came swiftly and eventually arrested the travelers. Although they could easily have claimed they were about to purchase the donuts, they were without passports, which is against the law in Japan. An easy way to arrest foreigners that I’ve seen before.
Despite my sympathy, I was grateful when they were gone and near-silence, only the incessant hum of the lights and refrigeration, returned in the wake of uproar. I hadn’t really wanted to call the police as I knew it would interrupt my night’s freedom and progression. But I also knew the cameras would capture it and I could get in trouble. This job is important to me. I can’t be a student and writer without it.
Since then, routine has returned. The regulars have all come in for their hand-rolls and their ice creams and their chewing gum. I love watching the details of their movements around the shop, their hesitations or their drive toward their desires, their needs. I try to guess who will add an impulse buy or go back to to get a second beer.
Everything gleams under intense cool-white lighting, trying to trick my inner clock, but the quiet of the world and the dark out-of-doors remind me of the witching hour.
I keep my phone out on the cashier counter and charging. Flashes of language arrive as part of that story I’m telling about flight and roots. About coming here from Tokyo and our shared existential threats.
In the hour since anyone has come in, I’ve written seven hundred words on my phone. Most of it will be erased when I move it to the computer, but the essence will remain. Sheer fragments of life shaped into an offering.
There’s somebody now, a relaxed looking foreigner, a European, over in the snacks. She’s got her phone out to translate whatever she’s going to get. Some are like this, and others just grab and try. Her hesitation makes me hungry. I buy cold katsudon on my employer card and put it in the microwave. The cheap bento plastic crinkles as it revolves.
In sync with the ding, a much older woman walks in as well.
I check my phone but it’s only three o’clock, well early for the elderly walkers by the river.
She moves through the aisles like she inhabits them frequently, deftly picking up a bag of pepperoni-pizza-potato-chips, a packet of Meiji chocolate macadamia nuts, and a cold green tea. But it’s the first time I have seen her. Not one of the expected patrons on their way home from a late shift or to the 24-hour gym or escaping their families for a ten minute walk.
I watch her through the movement of my wooden chopsticks, using the thin plastic container cover to distort my curiosity.
Ah, those Meiji chocolate macadamia nuts. Hard to stop once you start...
Another great instalment. I love how you capture Aoto’s reflective isolation against the sterile hum of the konbini. You always do this so well in your writing.