Transvestite Secretary Wanted in Philippines

The Philippines is so much influenced by American culture though it retains its own, of course. The Pilipino people I worked with in Taiwan were all fluent in English with no strong accent. Today again, I was at a fast-food joint for reading and two men sitting at the next table were speaking with a heavy accent. Why?? It is so irritating to hear their off-key English, further corrupting my own. What is funny about the way so many people speak English here is their syllable stresses that are wrongly placed, even when their sentences are grammatically correct.

Graham Greene – Catholicism – Haiti – Philippines… That’s my chain of thought.

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Online job opening information for a secretary’s position in the Philippines; a requirement is "transvestite." Not a bad country.

Whisky Priest's Very Human Existence

“The Power and the Glory” is so profound, even to a layman. A drunken “whisky priest” flees the anti-clerical persecution of a Mexican state. This bad priest, who has an illegitimate child, embodies humanity based upon Catholicism or otherwise. When his safety is almost assured by crossing to another state, the priest feels his deep responsibility to a dying man, the criminal “Gringo.” He decides to turn around even though he is almost certain that it should be a fatal trap set by the mestizo with “two fangs.”

The priest knows how un-Catholic he has been and does not deserve a saint, but after his execution, he is regarded as a martyr among believers. At the end of the story, another priest arrives…

Greene does not tell us what happened to Coral Fellows, a precocious American girl, non-believing but affected by an encounter with the whisky priest. She appears in the dream the priest saw before the morning of his death. Dead or abandoned?

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Now I go to the Caribbean. “The Comedians,” set in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, which is Haiti. The story develops during the brutal rule by “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Mr. Greene, what are you going to tell me?

Haiti is a special country to me. Papa Doc’s son and successor “Baby Doc” went into exile in Paris in February 1986, when in this part of the world, Corazon Aquino stood up against Ferdinand Marcos. These two episodes are my first lesson of international politics. (The first book I bought and read here was about Marcos. Filipinas noticed the book when I was holding it on bus and one of them whispered quite loudly, “Marcos!”)

My Sweet Blood and Defeat Just a Click Away

A fucking mosquito disturbed sleep again. Stealthy, voracious, aggressive, nagging. So many bites. Emptied an insecticide spray. Unable to sleep until morning. Worried about dengue. My blood must be so sweet.

Finally, the company responded. Haven’t read it yet. Mentally not ready. O so scary… I need to get drunk to open and read it.

Received an e-mail from TODAY too, telling me that my letter would not be published. Fine. My opinion is far too radical by the standard of this country.

Notion of Suicide (Observed in a Few Cases)

Sophie and Nathan (Sophie’s Choice), K (Kokoro, こころ) and Henry Scobie (The Heart of the Matter), all commit suicide. And perhaps Ichiro (Ko-jin, 行人) too, though his future is not disclosed.

To me, the only case quite compelling is that of Sophie, a Nazi concentration camp survivor. Other characters’ resolve is not so easily fathomable. It seems they carried it out so soon after the notion of it came to them. (Nathan of course influenced, and was influenced by, Sophie.) While death is inevitable to every human, thus an important subject to be explored in novels, isn’t it treated so lightly?

As Andrew Solomon says, suicide requires the wish to die, to kill and to be killed. This is a powerful combination extremely hard to act on even for a depressive.

Ashamed

How does an author’s brain work? How to start the very first sentence and how and where to end a work. Placing pieces of information in their rightful paragraphs. What to add and what to omit. His/her ability of structuring. Simply amazing.

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Now the man to watch is Stokely Carmichael. Frustrated with the nonviolent movement, he is inclining toward an independent “Black Power/Black Panther” course.

*

What am I doing? Since young, I have been looking for a cause for which I should be ready to sacrifice my life or even kill another soul. Over years, I have been overwhelmed by mundane issues like my own survival when so many fellow humans are fighting for things larger than themselves. Ashamed.

Even My Lens Is Fooling Me

Yesterday, I found the right lens torn. It was the second time. I’m not sure how it happened, but it may be my fingernail that did it. Nonetheless, I was wearing it the whole day feeling some irritation because that damaged lens is the last one and there was no replacement. Trying to sleep, it occurred to me that I’m still keeping the right hard lens. And now I’m wearing a soft lens in the left and a hard in the right.

After dinner, sleep attacked. Irresistible. After about two hours on the sofa, I went to bed. Alas, I was wide awake. As soon as the cooler stopped, I opened the window and heard a mosquito’s buzz. Head-scratching mad!

*

It is so hard to move on… What’s there for me? What’s ahead for me? “I” said years ago, “Guys like us can only be scholars.”

S T R A N G E

This afternoon, I e-mailed the company again. It is certainly strange unless it is their policy never to answer inquiries from applicants. If so, they can say so, can’t they? And I finished “The Heart of the Matter.”

Guilty, Guilty. I'm Totally Guilty

Q messaged me days ago that she wouldn’t come this week. And she did come on Wednesday and Thursday. She looks ochre with rings around her eyes. I’ve forgotten how to talk to her and anyway there is not much to talk about with her. I only feel guilty.

Multi-Broken-Lingual Society, LBJ under Strain

The way people talk here really annoys me. Sitting at a fast-food joint with a coffee for reading, I hear phrases like, “just now…,” “last time…” or “he is naughty.” Build up your vocabulary and improve your pronunciation and syntax! Language proficiency of people of this country is fucking shit. They seem inadequate and all broken in any language.

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Graham Greene quotations;
“It sometimes seemed to [Scobie] that all he could share with them was his despair.”
“In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.”
“Life always repeated the same pattern; there was always, sooner or later, bad new to be broken, comforting lies to be uttered, pink gin to be consumed to keep misery away.”
“Being unhappy together makes one love.”
And…
“People who like quotations love meaningless generalizations.”

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The President somberly anticipated the devastation if not the result. Joe Califano noticed that Johnson gave up alcohol from the moment he unleashed the bombers again. Johnson also severely curtailed the use of his clandestine telephone recording system, as though he had preserved all the history he wanted to make. (p. 435, “At Canaan’s Edge”)

Even I can imagine the tremendous pressure LBJ was under from the civil rights movement and Vietnam. This mercurial man was under great strain. Especially, the mess in Vietnam was not his creation; he inherited it from Eisenhower and JFK.

Ludicrous Gay Talks

The Minister of State for Education, Lui Tuck Yew, says that “he does not subscribe to the theory that [homosexuality] is a ‘medical condition’,” TODAY reported yesterday. Of course it is not a medical condition! The article then adds his comment, “Do you excuse paedophiles or psychopaths because of a medical condition?”

It is merely wrong to talk about homosexuality from the medical point as if it were a trait to be corrected by treatment. And it is also wrong to compare gays to paedophiles or psychopaths.

Lui says, “I’m not ready to move, and I don’t think a major section of society is ready to move [to legalize homosexual acts].” This government has rarely been populist. When it believes a certain policy is right, it pushes it through whatever the population says. If it thinks it is unacceptable to discriminate gays or any minority in society for that matter, it can easily amend the law, educating people along the way. Such a disappointment.

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“The Heart of the Matter” is a different sort from other pieces by Greene I have read. With his wife in South Africa, Henry Scobie, a Catholic policeman stationed in an African colony, starts an affair with Helen, a 19-years-old who survived a drift for 40 days. His wife unexpectedly returns to him and Scobie torments over how he can keep both women happy. Catholicism is here and there in his works, but it is beyond my capacity to understand how deeply it seeps into believers.

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No news from the company. I may be a fool having been waiting for any reply this long. My psycho is uncomfortably wobbling with anxiety, irritation, insecurity. I may e-mail the HR person of a friendly manner and nice smile again. But that should be the last.

Call from... TODAY

When I was to go out for some reading this afternoon, my phone began cackling. A number I don’t recognize but anyway I answered. It was not from the company from which I have been waiting for a call so eagerly, but from TODAY. He wanted to clarify a certain point in the letter I e-mailed to the paper last night. They will publish my letter in a few days.

With no response from the company, I feel suspended midair.

Zappa in Sanitized City

Late Friday afternoon, I dropped by Kinokuniya because it was having a 20% off day. With “Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective” (Archie Brown) not found, I instead bought three novels by Greene, “The Heart of the Matter,” “The Power of the Glory” and “The Comedians.” At HMV, I found a must-see DVD on Robert McNamara, “The Fog of War” but it was the version that does not have English subtitle, so I decided not to buy it. Anyway it is priced more than S$60.

Today, at a small CD shop at TB Plaza, I discovered a Zappa DVD, “Does Humor Belong in Music?”! I had never found any Zappa DVD in this country and it was there at TB Plaza, of all places.

I’m proceeding with “At Canaan’s Edge” steadily but slowly. March at Montgomery, Alabama, Watts riots and of course Vietnam. Nonviolence or violence? Taking a critical stand on this violent war in Vietnam can jeopardize King’s fragile relations with LBJ.

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I watched this Zappa concert in VHS many years ago! This is one of the videos Y lent me.

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According to a TODAY survey of 300 people aged 15 and above, published in its weekend edition, 62.3% think homosexuality should be illegal while only 11.6% say they should not. Meanwhile, to the question, “Do gay people have much to contribute to Singapore’s economy?” 41% say “No” while 32.7% answer “Yes.”

To those who would like to keep homosexuality illegal, Section 377A of the Penal Code is a “necessary moral safeguard, a signal of society’s still-mostly conservative and wholesome family values.” It is certainly a moral issue. Maintaining homosexuality illegal is tantamount to treating gay people just like murderers and thieves. It is not an issue of one’s being conservative or whatever else. I do not understand at all how heterosexual people can claim a moral superiority to gays. You can be a nice person without a “conservative” religious belief. There are nice gay individuals, creative or otherwise, while you can be a heterosexual monster. And what would those who do not accept gays as members of the society say about strongly religious people who have sinned. There is no reason why homosexuality should be criminalized. If you disagree to the lifestyle of homosexuals, you do not have to approve or accept it, which is one thing, and the criminalization of gay people is quite another.

The survey’s third question about gay people’s potentials to economic contribution should shock all sensible people who see others as individuals. What the question implies is, if homosexuals do not contribute economically, they can be safely forgotten, or should remain criminals. In the first place, it is wrong to judge people, gay or not, as if they are only tools for the economy. As Dr Ethan Lim aptly points out in the article, the paramount importance should be “I would rather people see me as a person.” And this must apply to anyone, regardless of sexual orientation, age, race or gender.

If you can put gays behind bars only because they have a different sexual orientation than that of the majority, those who consider themselves minorities in any sense can never be safe from ostracism. A society’s maturity can be judged by its attitude toward “different” people.

Still Waiting... Patience Wearing Thin

After midnight, I e-mailed the HR person to request her to notify me of whatever decision they have made. As of now, there has been no reply, which can mean that they have not yet completed the selection. Or that’s my hope. If they have and the result is negative, shouldn’t I get an answer real quickly?

Euphoria Metamorphosing into Despair

It is amazing to learn how quickly a bit of euphoria can turn into despair. No matter how I tried to contain my optimism, it cannot be denied that I was fairly euphoric after the interview (with those smiles and “see you again”). There was of course this doubt in my mind toward the unfounded optimism as I was not the one who would decide. The doubt is now growing each moment. Last night, A told me that in his own country those who have not selected are not notified of the negative result. Oh yeah, how naïve I was. However, believing I am among the short-listed, should I not expect to be notified whatever result it is? Pessimism > Optimism

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“At Canaan’s Edge” gave us this interesting information about race: … Scientists seldom agreed even on the number of categories, as [Thomas] Huxley [of England, the inventor of the term “agnostic”] counted four races, Joseph Deniker seventeen, Ernst Haeckel thirty-six. Proposed systems faltered on skillful demand for verification, often by Franz Boas of Columbia University, because the skulls of Lithuanians unaccountably matched those of Ethiopians…

The Supreme Court settled the statutory meaning [of “white person”] twice within three months, holding first in November of 1922 that “the words ‘white person’ are synonymous with the words ‘a person of the Caucasian race.’” This anthropological standard doomed the citizenship petition of Takao Ozawa, a Japanese immigrant of twenty-eight years’ residence, who had submitted evidence of his own white skin along with scholarly opinions that “in Japan the uncovered parts of the body are also white.” The test of “mere color,” while obvious, had proved “manifestly… impracticable,” declared a unanimous Court, citing expert accord that skin tone “differs greatly among persons of the same race, even among Anglo-Saxons, ranging by imperceptible gradations from the fair blond to the swarthy brunette, the latter being darker than many of the lighter hued persons of the brown or yellow races.”

Only weeks later, the Justices were plainly vexed to hear in arguments for Bhagat Singh Thind that their own experts considered high-caste Punjabi Indians along with certain Polynesians and Hamites to be of Caucasian descent. Even worse, the racial term “Caucasian” appeared to rest on a single specimen in the collection of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach of Göttingen, who in 1795 had conjectured from the resemblance to his German skulls that ancient Europeans may have lived near the specimen’s retrieval site in the Caucasus mountains of Russia. The Justices reversed the Ozawa test with howls of newfound contempt for “the speculations of the ethnologist,” again unanimously. “What we now hold is that the words ‘free white persons’ are words of common speech,” wrote Justice George Sutherland, “to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word ‘Caucasian’ only as that word is popularly understood.” The Thind decision not only threw up expendable barriers to citizenship but also supported a wave of federal denaturalization actions and state laws against land ownership by Asians… (pp. 341-342)

Reuters-Thomson Deal

I’m still waiting for the result and Reuters and Thomson have agreed to an £8.7 billion (US$17.2 billion) takeover deal to create the biggest financial information provider, surpassing Bloomberg.

As reported by the Daily Telegraph, Reuters’ chief executive Tom Glocer, who will become the chief executive of the new combined business, said that there will “inevitably be some realignment where we have people doing the same thing.” According to the latest issue of The Economist, Credit Suisse sees a 60% chance for the deal to be approved.

Would it affect my life in any way?

Waiting... Waiting...

Waiting is so hard. Each passing day, my optimism diminishes.

Brief Talk with Doctor and Two Books

I had my tablets replenished. And because no patient was in the office and the door open, I talked to the Doctor for a few minutes. Reassuring and comforting.

At Borders, I found “Shimon Peres: The Biography” (Michael Bar-Zohar) and “Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate” (Alicia C. Shepard). Unwise expense again, but how could I have kept my eye from them? I proceeded to Kinokuniya and got the same books.

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「スポーツニッポン」に連載の「職業野球人～大沢啓二」に、日本ハム監督就任頃の出来事で、「あの頃、南海からも非公式に監督就任の打診があってなぁ。監督の野村（克也）の公私混同とかの問題がどうにもならねぇからって、球団社長が訪ねてこられたこともあったよ。でも、オレの心はいつかチャンスがあれば、南海とロッテには借りをかえさにゃならんと思っていたからな。南海にはあまり戻る気はなかったね」と大沢談話を載せている。球団は解任につながった公私混同問題を数年前には把握していたことになる。更迭する方針は以前からあったのか？

また、「この時期、南海もダメになったなぁ。見返してやるという気持ちの方が強かったが、とても寂しかったよ。鶴岡さんが辞めた後、まとめ役がいなくなって、 チーム内がバラバラになっていった。監督の器ではない人がやったのも、まずかったな。かごの上に乗っかって似合う奴がやらないとダメだよ。（鶴岡勇退で後任となった）蔭山（和夫）さんが亡くなったのも大きい。飯田徳治さんも鶴岡さんの後に１年やったけど、勝負には向かなかった。“仏の徳さん”も人の上に立つ人じゃなかった。人を選ぶ目も大切。人気や過去の実績だけじゃ判断できないな、監督って商売は」とも。

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Aunt August travelled all the way to Paraguay to see Mr. Visconti, a war criminal. In London, Sergeant Sparrow was already trying to trace his shady activities. Henry joins her following her “command.” Along the way, he meets a CIA man, Tooley’s father and the omnipresent Wordsworth.

Who Killed Stirrups

It has been about a decade since baseball players started wearing ankle-long (even longer) pants and hiding the beautiful curve of stirrups. I’m not a great fan of the low-cut type but love the way guys were wearing them before this era. The very first player who had the way is Mimura Toshiyuki (三村敏之) of the Hiroshima Toyo Carp (広島東洋カープ). The top part of the longer loop was just covered by his pants and the shorter one was all shown. It was so cool.

My Mind Is Kidding Me

Ahhh… My mind seems not very well arranged. I had a meeting with A tonight and together we went to the Somerset bus stop. I hopped on a 123. Looking up from a page of the Economist, I saw the lit sign of the British Council. I needed a moment to realize it was the wrong direction. I took the 123 bus countless times to go home from downtown. Never before have I made this mistake. Totally impatient, I took a taxi from the Gleneagles side. Extra and stupid expense.

On Monday morning (yes the day of the interview), I found my contact lens case open with lenses ashore, shrunken and completely dried up. How could I have so careless? No choice. I went to the interview wearing new lenses. It often happens the sight is blurry for some minutes after lenses got fit in. My left eye was still blurry during the interview. I realized only after the interview that maybe I should see if I was wearing it correctly, and went into the not so clean toilet at the BV station. I turned it “inside out” and voila! The sight became clear.

There has been another recent instance when I doubted the capacity of my mind. I can’t remember now what it was about. I’ve forgotten what I forgot. Isn’t it serious? A sign of ageing or a side effect of antidepressant?

Pulling and Aunt Augusta

Henry Pulling, a retired bank manger with an uneventful life and love for dahlias, met his septuagenarian aunt, Augusta, for the first time in half a century at the funeral of woman who he had never doubted was his real mother. Aunt Augusta is a bold character with colorful stories. She asks him to go on a trip together to Istanbul by the Orient Express. Days on the road with Aunt Augusta disrupted his daily peace and awakened something nostalgic in him and he decides to visit his father’s grave in Boulogue, France, with the aunt. Where they expected no one, they find Dorothy Patterson who accidentally met Henry’s father on a “49 bus” and in whose arms he died.

Sigh of "Half-Relief" (Feeling Tired)

I arrived for the interview a few minutes late because I got the company’s address wrong (I didn’t check it before I left home) and got off the taxi one block short. They gave me two “tests” for my writing and data reading, both financial. Not enough time to finish and I didn’t have anything to refer to. I was working on them only with the knowledge in my head. I’m not so sure of the quality of my writing because I had to do it long hand, adding and deleting words here and there. But then, the interview itself went well, I believe. Now, another waiting period starts. They told me that there would be one to two weeks for their selection process to complete.

Quite often I find myself feeling better than ok (uninhibited, sort of) talking to non-Japanese people in a non-Japanese language. Today’s interview was one such occasion. The reason may be that the kind of situation reminds me of my Kalamazoo days. Well no regret over anything I did and said in the interview and now it’s totally up to them to decide. In any case, I can’t do anything now to make myself look better. But I’m feeling rather optimistic, after so so so many weeks of pessimism. A big sigh of “half-relief.” This day has consumed a lot of what little energy I still possess…

I-Had-My-Hair-Cut-Short Day

Soka again. Countered by Zappa again.

*

I had my hair cut for tomorrow’s interview. I told him to cut 5cm but this is like 10cm shorter. Ok, lah. It should grow long soon. I thought I should be mentally prepared for the interview and tried to access the web page of the position again to read thorough the job description. I found it’s gone. What does it mean? It seems they’ve got an enough number of applicants.

*

Receiving e-mails on job openings in Nigeria a few times a week. Hmmm… absolutely suspicious. The famous Nigerian frauds? In 1993 when I was working (temporarily) at that completely unethical, greedy, out-of-date, provincial, unsophisticated company in Kyoto, a piece of paper came by fax to be translated. It was from the Yasaka Jinja (八坂神社). The shrine received a letter from an official-sounding Nigerian institution. “Shit, this is a fraud scheme” was what I thought. I had already read about those frauds, I believe, in The Economist.

A New Havel Book, Neutralization of Soka Chant

I got the latest copy of The Economist (S$11). Back in January, I couldn’t afford to renew my subscription of 17 years. The biggest reason I have finished 23 books so far this year is that I’m not reading it. All the same, The Economist is an excellent source of information and I hope to restart subscription to it before long. This issue writes about a strong candidate for my reading, a book by Vaclav Havel, “To the Castle and Back,” as well as the Abe foreign policy.

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“TODAY” of 3 May says that a 26-year-old kleptomaniac woman was sentenced to a fine of S$8,000 and jail term of a day for stealing items totalling S$2,300. What is interesting though is, according to the same report, another woman was jailed 11 years in 2005 and a third woman a year in 2001. The second had stolen a S$700-worth of items and the third a S$1,000 worth. The report does not say if they were fined too. 11 years for S$700, a year for S$1,000?? Why this discrepancy of justice?

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京都・藤森神社の「駈馬」で落馬、小２男児が重傷
　５日午後４時ごろ、京都市伏見区の藤森神社で、疾走する馬の上で曲芸を行う神事「駈馬（かけうま）」の馬から、「乗子（のりこ）」の男性と同乗の大阪市内の小学２年男児（７）が落馬した。
　男児はあごの骨を折り重傷、男性にけがはなかった。
　京都府警伏見署の調べでは、男性が男児を前に乗せて手綱を操り、参道を１２０メートルほど走ったところだった。
　駈馬は毎年５月５日、境内参道の約１５０メートルの馬場を駆け抜けながら、馬上で「逆立ち」などの技を披露する神事で、市の無形民俗文化財。室町時代、武士らが馬術を神前に奉納したのが起源とされ、現在は氏子らでつくる保存会が伝承している。（2007年5月5日20時11分 読売新聞）

*

At 8 pm sharp, Soka folks started again. I successfully neutralized them with Zappa again. Those fanatics cut up important photos of my family only because they showed innocuous Shinto symbols like a lantern.

STOP CHANT ENJOY ZAPPA

I’M PLAYING ZAPPA VERY VERY LOUDLY!

*

According to a Reuters report, the company (Reuters Group) received a “preliminary takeover approach from an unidentified suitor.” This suitor is speculated to be Thomson Corp of Canada or News Corp of Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch is attempting to take over Dow Jones too. He was a board member of Reuters for a time.

Do Not Spoil My Lucky Day!!!

A phone call woke me up at 9 am. For once, I answered a call. Interview notice. Don’t expect too much. It’s just an interview. However…

*

The Yokohama Bay Stars has come on top for the first time, according to the “Sports Nippon,” in “1,097 days.” “First in this many days” is a trite way to make a point in the Japanese baseball reporting. A baseball season lasts for only a little more than half a year. It is absurd to count by day.

*

At 8 pm, those Soka people started chanting at a funeral ceremony for one of their members. At this very moment, they are still shouting. So loud. The man sitting in front, who should be the cell leader, is using a microphone! I went down to have a look at them. A girl on the front row was crossing her legs while chanting. Are you guys supposed to be sitting on the floor? (At the Speakers’ Corner, it is banned to use any voice amplifying device.) Ahhhh, this is nightmarish. This lucky day is being completely spoiled because of them. I need a very competent exorcist.

Hilfe Brothers and My Dream Wedding Party

Row was just calm enough to watch “Cost-Travers-Ford” dial numbers. Row tries to find the person to whom this man with three names was speaking in this phone conversation (“There’s no hope) right before he transfixes his throat. Row’s last attempt leads to the voice of Anna Hilfe. They meet each other at her flat not in the way he expected they would… Row confronts Anna’s brother, Willi, to get the photographs.

*

It was a wedding party dream. For me. Hahaha!! I don’t think I’ve ever seen my wedding, real or in dream. But my bride didn’t show her face until the end of the party. And I don’t recognize any person at the party. Not a big party. No MC. No staged ceremony at all. People were simply drinking and chatting. Some of them talked to “us.” A man of mid 50’s gave me a cash gift envelop (yes, that traditional envelop wrapped around with red-and-white laces). Tell me how much it contains… Turning over it, I found “Tanaka Kakuei (田中角栄)” written with a calligraphy brush. The man seemed to come to the party for the former prime minister. My bride appeared so abruptly and I saw her face so clearly. I know her. She was my immediate boss for a time at that profit-driven English school, which went under last year. But she is married to the mustached Mr CC. Or did she divorce her hubby? Why did she appear? I know there is no point to think why. It was just a dream. (About Mr CC: He, American, was friendly to me, working at the same school. Twice he surprised me. Sitting on a platform bench, he all of a sudden asked me, “Have you been to jail before?” I was like aghast at the question. He went on, “For sexual assault.” Aghast again. That was the first time. The second occasion came a few years later, I believe. He was attending to a prospective customer, e.g. student. And Mr CC tried to, yes, assault him, yes, him, and yes, sexually!! He was sacked on the spot.)

I'm a Traveller with the Wrong Map

Row flees the grip of Dr Forester, who can make a sane soul insane, and rushes to Scotland Yard. His memory is coming back!

*

“It’s as if one had been sent on a journey with the wrong map.” (Arthur Row)

I wish I had been provided with the correct map when I was young.

Girl with Large, Clear Eyes

The Ministry of Fear: Arthur Row ensnarls himself in a murder case at a séance while trying to decipher the mysterious cake episode. Austrian refugees and charity workers, the Hilfe brothers offer help to him. He fled the murder scene and thought about suicide by jumping into Themes. There he meets an untidy bookseller who will not release him. Grumbling he goes up to a hotel room where he finds Anna Hilfe…

Now, an amnesic, Row, with a new identity, is being taken care of by… Dr Forester (!), an attendee at the séance.

*

I don’t know why, but it was 7 pm when I got out of bed. It seems I was seeing a long dream. Not a kind that torments my nerves, but it had pleasant and unpleasant scenes. I was working part time at a familiar CD shop (I worked there over 20 years ago) and everybody there was very critical of my work…

I got to know a group of a few young girls somewhere. Where, I have no idea. I and one of them became very affectionate to each other. And she, probably in her mid-20s, even came to my house to wait for me. I was putting five or six news magazines into a bag, but it was too small. I found a larger bag and was putting on socks while she was waiting. My mother around? I’m not sure. The girl and I left by riding double on bike. She was rather short with large, clear eyes. Pretty. (And I was also young.) Where to?? Going forward was not easy because of a family walking very slowly just ahead, obstructing our way.

Crossing the Shijo O-hashi (四条大橋). On the south (down) sidewalk of the bridge, there were Keihan (京阪) people who were dispensing tickets. With not enough money for the train fare in my pocket, I beseeched one of them, whose nameplate on his chest said “Aka (赤),” to let me through. I promised to come back to pay and Mr Aka nicely obliged. In the car, I found multiracial passengers.

I was on bus too. Limousine type. Not many people, but I was the only Asian. Others were Westerners. Behind the driver was a vending machine of coffee and newspapers. We disembarked once for immigration check. From there, I sent a message to my girl using a palm-size gadget. “Sorry, I’m going…” Where to??

Deadly Silence

ＰＣに微笑んでみる無言の日々