The
MAD KYOTO SHOE SWAPPER
AND OTHER
Short Stories from Japan
REBECCA OTOWA
with illustrations by the author
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Copyright © 2020 Rebecca Otowa
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Library of Congress Control Number:
ISBN 978-4-8053-1551-4
First edition
24 23 22 21 20
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 1911VP
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Contents
The Rescuer
Genbei’s Curse
Trial by Fire
Love and Duty
The Turtle Stone
Rhododendron Valley
Uncle Trash
Watch Again
Showa Girl
A Year of Coffee and Cake
Three Village Tales
Rachel and Leah
The Mad Kyoto Shoe Swapper
The Rescuer
Ican tell what you’re thinking. I know it’s unheard of, committing something like this to writing. But I have received dispensation to record exactly what happened, before I begin my journey, because mine is a special case. Whoever ends up reading my report, I want to say that I believed I was acting for the best. First, I want to remember it all so it’s clear in my mind. For the record, my name is Satoru Takeguchi, and I am an insurance agent working in central Tokyo.
I know where the story ends, but where it begins … that’s a little more difficult. I guess I should start at the moment when I woke up on the train platform. At first I didn’t know where I was. The light was so much brighter than I’d been used to, you see. It cascaded down in coruscations of gold. All the colors were much more glorious as well. For example, the yellow number 8 and the yellow triangle. They were closest to my eyes, and they glowed on the cement like the dust of a million suns. Another yellow thing caught my eye—a long strip with bumps on it. Following this, I saw that the brilliant golden numbers marched off into the distance, and beyond the bumpy strip I saw a sharp edge like a cliff face, where the cement just stopped. Beyond the edge, there was a misty blue space, like the gulf between distant mountains. It seemed so far down to the shining silver rails, laid across sharp reddish gravel. My eyes hurt from the magnificence of it.
Lying on the cement, right next to the yellow number 8, I saw a smartphone.
I recognized that smartphone. It was dull, scuffed silver, the screen blank and black. Peeping around the edge was a plastic zebra-striped case. Every detail of the phone was familiar to me. It was mine.
I figured I must have fainted and dropped the phone. Probably I got a bump on the head, and that was the cause of the change in my eyesight. I hurried to pick up my phone before anyone could step on it. I saw my arm reaching out, but somehow my hand couldn’t pick the thing up. I tried several times, thinking I had bumped my hand as well as my head and numbed it, like when you hit your funny bone. This feeling was different, though. Not a flinching flash of painful sensation in my elbow or a tingling in the wrist. Just … nothing. I was puzzled. How could I have hurt myself so badly I didn’t even feel any pain? I thought I’d go and find some help.
I stood up slowly, with my feet on either side of the smart-phone to keep it from being stepped on. That was when I noticed that there was no one nearby. Turning carefully, I saw that a small crowd had congregated at the front of a train which was stopped on the other side of the platform behind me. The light and the colors were still blinding, but the sound of the scene came up only gradually. I began to hear exclamations, and one or two women were screaming breathlessly. Suddenly a brilliant flash of light rushed past me—two men dressed in white, with a stretcher between them piled with blankets. A group of policemen followed closely behind. Like the light and the colors, the movement of the men was so intense it made me dizzy. The policemen hustled the crowd aside while the men in white jumped down in front of the train and busied themselves with something there.
Gradually, I noticed more details. An ashen-faced man in a dark uniform with a peaked cap was being helped to one of the platform seats by a kind old lady. The crowd was pushed farther back by train officials who were stringing yellow tape across the front of the train. Other officials hurried down the aisle inside the train and motioned the passengers to get off. Some of them tried to go forward and take a look, but they were firmly prevented. They moved slowly down the platform toward the stairs, many of them dazed, others avid, talking excitedly, craning backward for a glimpse. Then, one after the other, almost all of them started to use their smartphones. That characteristic pose with neck bent, one hand holding the phone, thumb working away at the buttons. Probably texting their friends about the unexpected blip in their day.
After a few minutes, the white-uniformed men maneuvered the stretcher, now heavy and full, onto the platform. Their uniforms were daubed with red dust, and the knees were soaked in red as well. In the blazing light that fell on everything, it was clear to me that those spots were someone’s blood—the blood of the person who now lay on the stretcher covered with blankets. This blood seemed to glow with a baleful energy. As the men passed me with their burden, something slipped out of the blankets and dangled off the stretcher. No one noticed but me.
Yes, I noticed all right. I recognized the shirt sleeve. My favorite blue and white striped shirt, now torn and grimy. I knew it was mine because the cuff button was undone, and hanging by a thread. The shirt, and the dead arm that was wearing it, belonged to me.
I was dead.
Everything began to make sense.
I looked down at the phone lying at my feet, trying to feel a connection between it and the hand I had just seen dangling out of a blue and white cuff. Suddenly, a reaching arm appeared, and the phone was whisked away. Right next to me—I could almost feel their breath—a policeman held it out toward a white, shaking girl. “Is this the one?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she quavered. “He was walking along, looking at his phone, the way everyone does, when he lost his footing just as the train came in. Ohhh …” She closed her eyes and swallowed. “When he fell, the phone went flying in the air.”
The policeman nodded. He glanced toward the scene of the accident, figuring out the distance, then picked up the phone. “Please take a seat,” he called over his shoulder to the girl. “We will need to get a statement.” She sank into a seat next to the white-faced man, who was now bent forward, his shoulders shaking. I realized he must be the train driver.
I watched the rest of the scene play out. Another driver appeared and the train rumbled off. The police escorted the girl and the train driver away down the platform. I heard a few PA announcements saying the station was temporarily closed and service suspended because of an accident. Pretty soon the place was deserted.
I thought I’d better leave too. I wanted to follow my body and see where it was being taken. I could move, it felt just like ordinary walking, though it had been obvious in the last few minutes that no one was aware of me. However, I soon discovered that I couldn’t leave the station. Every time I tried to climb the stairs, I found myself back on the platform again. It was like an endless loop. I wondered what to do next. I went down to the place where the accident had occurred. Nothing was to be seen but a large patch of fresh blood on the red gravel and the silver train track. It was horribly disturbing, and somehow alluring. That was my blood. No use to me anymore, yet it was part of me, and I didn’t want to leave it there. It seemed kind of lonely.
Eventually, two men in work clothes appeared, dragging a long blue hose between them. They hopped down onto the tracks, turned on the hose, and began washing the blood away. I sat on a nearby seat and watched them. When they were finished, they left.
I sat on. The light was tyrannously bright outside, but under the roof of the platform was an island of cool blue shade. It was very peaceful. Early morning became late morning. I began to remember the last moments of my life. I was on my way to work at the insurance company, where I had been hired as a new recruit the previous year. I sifted through the contents of my brain as it had been that morning—little snippets: my girlfriend’s hair lit by street lamps as we walked home after dinner last night, the aftertaste of the rice ball I had gulped down for breakfast, the slight irritation on my chin caused by my new electric shaver. Since it was summer, I hadn’t been wearing a suit coat. All of Tokyo was in its shirt sleeves. No tie, either. I liked summer because of the slightly more relaxed dress code; but I always wore long sleeves because the air conditioning at the office was a little too cold for me. That morning, in my solitary apartment, I had put on the blue and white striped shirt, and I noticed that the button of the cuff was about to come off. But I also knew that if I stopped to fix it then, I would be late for my train. So I decided to do it after work that night. I had left the button undone because I thought the buttonhole would tear it off and I would lose it altogether. Such a tenacious little white button. It had hung on grimly throughout the drama of my death.
I saw the last moment of my life. Walking along, head bent, holding the phone with my left hand while with the right I stroked the screen, looking for a text message from my girlfriend. My feet straying across the yellow bumps of the Braille blocks, closer and closer to the edge. The left foot in its black business shoe missing the platform edge, pawing thin air. The sudden looming bulk of the train, and the roaring noise. It all happened so quickly. I didn’t feel anything.
I sat there on the platform seat, reliving it. I wondered if it was okay to call it “reliving it” when you were dead. In one second, my life was gone. I didn’t feel sad, or cheated, or resentful. It was just an occurrence, like not buttoning my button that morning, or cupping my girlfriend’s face in the bluish light of the street lamp, just before her warm kiss. Dying was another experience of my life.
But now, for some reason, I was stuck at the scene of my death. My poor broken body could leave, but I couldn’t.
Was there a reason I was still here? Something I needed to see, to notice? I gazed around and realized that the station had opened again. Passengers were beginning to wander around on the platform, avoiding the patches of summer sunlight and staying in the shade. Some were buying drinks from the vending machine, others lining up at the edge of the platform, fanning themselves or wiping their sweaty necks with handkerchiefs. I heard the swish of summer dresses and the crisp crackle of new-ironed shirts; I saw the pretty, delicate sandals of women and the boat-like, comically long shoes of men. And of course, lots of them were looking at their phones. The universal pose of modern man. If we don’t watch out, our spines will curve back into a Neanderthal shape, and our evolution will start going backwards. I chuckled at the thought, and at that moment, a young guy in dreadlocks passed me. Of course he wouldn’t have heard me even if I’d been alive. He was bopping to music only he could hear, his ears firmly plugged by earphones as he flicked his phone screen with his fingers.
There was a PA announcement for the next train. The music that signaled the approach of a train began tinkling, the railroad crossing began pinging. It seemed very noisy to me, but most people didn’t seem to notice the noise. They walked along oblivious, glued to their phones. I wasn’t oblivious, though. My phone-staring days were over. I watched the people.
Oh my god.
A young girl, beautiful clean hair swinging around her bent face, was strolling along the extreme edge of the platform grinning at something on her phone’s screen. She wasn’t looking. She was going to go over. Her feet, in high-heeled platform sandals, got closer and closer to the edge—the train was coming in …
Before I knew what I was doing, I took a huge breath, filling my lungs, and shouted in a great, booming voice. “Look out!”
Somehow, it worked. The young girl looked up, realized she was in danger, and swerved away from the edge just as the train roared in. She didn’t seem that concerned; she was looking at her phone again almost immediately. Other people nearby hadn’t seemed to hear me. Of course I hadn’t physically shouted. It was like a blast of energy I was somehow able to aim directly at her.
That’s when I knew why I’d been unable to leave the platform. I had work to do here. I had to rescue people who were in danger of falling off the edge because they were staring at their phones. I wasn’t sure how long I would have to do it, but this was my destiny. I sagged with relief and depleted energy—one person had been saved—but then I became vigilant again. It was my duty to make sure that at this station, right now, another one of these people wouldn’t become a pool of fresh blood and a blanket-covered mound, because of a second of carelessness.
Time passed. After I had been at the station for a day and a night, I began to be comfortable with my situation. I strolled up and down the platform, taking my ease between trains, observing this person and that. I enjoyed the colors of the air around them and the music of their voices. But when a train was due I was all attention, raking my gaze across the crowd, looking for inattentive phone users. Most of them confined their wanderings to the center of the platform where they were in no danger; but still, that first day, I saved two other people—a middle-aged man trying to connect to WiFi and a university student who had just discovered a site featuring naked women. (I was starting to be
able to see what they were looking at on their phones, as well.) I was getting quite skillful at aiming the warning blast of energy, and both times the men looked up and around in time to save themselves from tumbling into the path of the approaching train. I felt almost like a station employee, one no one could see. I wondered why the big stations didn’t hire people to do this very job, to stem the increasing tide of phone-related accidents. I didn’t see any living person attempt to save or caution anyone else. Of course, they were mostly looking at their own phones. How oblivious they all were, as if they were each traveling in their own impenetrable bubble of space. I didn’t see them this way; to me, they were all connected by tiny details—resemblances of hand or ear, bag or hat, print of shirt or blouse. They were like drops in an ocean of humanity. But they didn’t understand this—they all thought they were alone and all-important.
The following day, I pulled off a more complicated rescue. Just as the next train was due, I spotted a young man walking along very slowly, completely engrossed in his screen. His phone screen was alive with jumping and cavorting game figures and he was determined to win. Nothing else mattered. He was walking along the bumpy yellow blind man’s strip—and just then, up behind him came an actual blind man. He was walking the strip with confidence—I guess he did this every day—his cane just lightly tapping in front of him. Quite rapidly he walked, and soon closed the distance with the slowpoke gamer. Just as he was about to ram into him from behind, I achieved an amazing feat. I actually aimed a blast of energy at both of them at once! The blind man stopped short, and by the time he’d recovered and started walking again, the gamer had shifted off the yellow strip. He was still playing his game, but he was now out of the other man’s way. Accident averted. I felt quite proud of myself.
You might be wondering what I did at night, when there were no trains or passengers or phone users. Well, of course I didn’t need to sleep. I used to sit on the platform seat and just feel the energy all around me. It was quite beautiful. This particular station happened to be in the middle of a relatively residential area, considering it was central Tokyo, and what I found most amazing were the dreams of the sleepers in the beds in the apartment buildings that surrounded the station. It was like watching hundreds of movies at once, or maybe like a fireworks display or a kaleidoscope. I couldn’t zoom in on any one person, but still, it was fascinating. All those dreams, all that life, streamed upward from the buildings, out the windows and doors, and seeped through the roofs like many-colored auroras. It was really lovely. I used to sit there entranced for hours at a time.
The Mad Kyoto Shoe Swapper and Other Short Stories Page 1