Here’s an update on my ongoing apartment hunting. After I saw the room and deliberated, I decided on the place which price was 20 percent off. A week after I submitted the application form to the real estate company, its agent told me that she hadn’t been able to reach the owner. A few days later, she called me again and said that she finally contacted the owner. But she asked me to wait a little more as the owner wanted to consider the price. From then on, both the agent and I have been just waiting. Now I noticed absurdity.
The 20 percent off price was offered by the owner in the first place, not by me. Is he or she considering his or her own price? And is he or she going to decline the price by himself or herself? What kind of game are we playing? Two weeks have already passed since I applied for the room. I have no idea how it unfolds hereafter…
During my school years in the late 70s and the early 80s, many teenagers in Japan where I grew up were hooked on late-night radio shows. It was the time when SNS didn’t exist and video games just emerged, and I myself also used to be excited to turn on the radio every night. I was fascinated by the feeling that radio personalities such as comedians and musicians were talking right beside me about what had happened to them in daily life or something funny. Listening to the show let me visit the blithesome world of celebrities and forget the reality of my hopelessly boring rural school days.
I was not satisfied with just listening, but regularly sent messages on postcards to the show. Not email or texting, but a postcard by mail. I would hold a pen in my hand and write down a message, a comment, or a request for a song by my own made-up radio name with a pun. Then I would edge the card with a coloring pen to make it distinguished, attach a stamp that I sneaked from my father’s collection, and go out on my bike to drop it in a mailbox. That was one of my daily routines. Sometimes the local station picked up my message or a request and introduced it on the show, which made me explode with joy feeling as though I had become a celebrity. I would patiently wait to experience such an ecstatic moment again while listening to the radio in bed almost until dawn. Because of that, I used to lack sleep on weekdays and was always sleepy. I would sleep in class at school and sleep on the local bus that I rode home from school for 50 minutes. I often slept too tight on the bus to miss my stop and woke up riding far past.
I still listen to radio shows of U.S. online with my smartphone. Now, I have finally started my Podcast program. There, I read one episode from the books I wrote and talk about it. As I set up the instruments for that in my home studio, it looked awfully like a radio show. I was thrilled. Although I also felt nervous and couldn’t sleep well the night before recording, I was excited again to see me sitting in front of the microphone like a radio personality and pushed the record button.
I recorded an opening message for the show that I had prepared and read an episode from my book without problems. When I was about to talk freely next, suddenly and unexpectedly, I froze. Nothing came out of my mouth. I couldn’t figure out what to talk about and inside my head was completely blank. As I tried to squeeze out something, only sweat spewed out instead of words. I was speechless. After a few minutes of silence in which I writhed in agony without a single word, I gave up and pushed the stop button.
I had overestimated myself as a person who could speak fluently as long as circumstances allow. But things weren’t so easy as I had expected. In the end, I made a list of what to talk, and then did the recording over again from the top. The finished take disappointed me with my extremely nervous, faltering talk although it was redone. However, I strangely felt good, having a sense of fulfillment somehow. Before I knew it, I already looked forward to the next show and began to prepare some ideas for it.
Come to think of it, I have managed to realize what I had wanted to become. I’m a singer-songwriter and a recording engineer both of which I have wished to be since I was a teenager. This time, I have become a radio personality that was my answer to the graduation questionnaire of what you dream to become in the future when I finished the elementary school. But only few people know any of what I have accomplished. Needless to say, none of them have brought me money of course. I may have wasted so much time and effort all these years for the totally meaningless. One thing is for sure, though. I have spent a remarkably enjoyable time throughout.
I ask you to keep what you are about to read in here to yourself since it concerns an illegal activity I was once engaged in. Until I was about sixteen years old, my parents, my younger sister and I had visited my grandparents’ home every year during the New Year’s. Limited for that time of the year, a quiet countryside house of my grandparents’ would turn into a family casino. It consisted of three different areas. In the card game area, which was the living room, a card game called ‘kabu’ that is similar to blackjack would be played. In the coin game area, which was my grandparents’ room, would be for a game called ‘mortar roller’. And the break area, which was the dining room, would be for those who didn’t like gambling or who needed food and drink. It would be open for 24 hours but only the family members could play. The coin game was organized by my grandmother. She set up a huge china mortar for sesame on the tatami floor and the players would sit around it on the floor. They would take turns and roll a 10-yen coin, which is worth about ten cents, inside the mortar. The coin rolled along the side of the round mortar, descending gradually toward the bottom. If it landed on other coins at the bottom, the player could get them. Although the game was simple, we would be absorbed in playing and our heads and eyes were rolling above the mortar with a coin inside. My cousin was good at it with her own devised technique to throw in a coin. I would also win snugly with my fixation on money. Beside the excited circle, my grandfather and my father, who were not interested in gambling, would talk over Japanese tea that my grandfather would make. My grandmother would start fretting after midnight and tell us to be quiet because she had believed that the military policemen could bust in with bayonets. We laughed at her anachronism while seeing her try to mute the mortar and still live in the WWII era. She upgraded the mortar one year by putting a round piece of cardboard near the bottom. The mortar’s floor was raised and became wider and flatter so that it was harder to make the coin lie on top of the other. More coins to take would be left at the bottom and the game got more exciting. Those were such fond memories and I can still hear the sound of a rolling coin inside a mortar during New Year’s. Later on, the joyful grandparents’ house was burned down by my grandmother’s carelessness with a candle. It’s gone forever…
It happened a long time ago when I lived in Tokyo. My partner and I had dinner at a restaurant one night after we hung around the mall. We came back to our apartment that we had rented on the top floor of the building as our home and the office for our record label. When I tried to turn my key on the front door, I noticed the door had remained unlocked. It was weird. I may have forgotten to lock the door when I left, which was highly unlikely since I was fussy about locking and couldn’t leave without making sure that the door wouldn’t open by trying the knob for a couple of times. I got in feeling dubious, but our apartment didn’t look unusual. Then my partner suddenly said, “Why is the cabinet open?” My heart began to beat fast with overwhelming uneasiness and I hurried into the bedroom that had a balcony. The tall window to the balcony had been smashed broken. It was a burglary. I called the police right away while my partner was gingerly looking into the bathroom, the closet, and behind the drapes to see if the burglar wasn’t still hiding. Those minutes were the scariest as too many movie scenes flashed back to me. Thankfully, there was nobody. The police arrived quickly since the station was ironically only a block away from my apartment. Such a location apparently wasn’t safe enough to prevent burglary. The policemen came in and looked around. As they saw the messy rooms, they showed sympathy saying, “It’s played havoc, huh?” It was funny because my apartment had been messy as it was long before burglary. But probably thanks to it, the burglar didn’t notice an envelope that held a few thousand dollars for the bills and was mingled with scraps of paper on the table. Instead of cash, a dozen of Disney wrist watches that was my collection, a cheap wrist watch that was my partner’s memento of his late mother, an Omega wrist watch that I received from my grandparents as a souvenir of their trip to Europe decades ago, and one game software were missing. Actually, those items had been the only valuables in my office apartment. Other than those and litter, my apartment had been quite empty. The reason was simple. I was near bankrupt at that time. I had started up my music label with my partner and it had grown steadily as business. A person I had trusted offered substantial financial support and I took it. I rented this apartment and hired staff with that money. Then the financial supporter tried to take over my label and threatened to suspend further finance if I refused. Amid horrible disgusting negotiations, money stopped being wired into my account. The label came to a standstill for lack of funds. I laid off all staff and saw what took eight years for my partner and I to build from a scratch crumbling down. The blow was amplified by anger and self-loathing from the fact that I was deceived by a person I had trusted. Despair and emptiness led to apathy. I stopped doing or thinking anything and had played a game every day. In hindsight, if there hadn’t been burglary, my partner and I would have kept paying the costly rent for the apartment and playing a game until we spent all the money that was left. But something clicked when I saw the very game software I had played every day picked among other many games to be stolen, and the glass window of my dream penthouse apartment smashed. It marked the point where I hit the bottom but also was a wake-up call. We moved out the luxurious apartment immediately and rented a cheap studio apartment in a small two-storied building. That move left some money in my bank account. The deposit of the penthouse apartment was returned, too. Also, I received an unexpected insurance payout. The expensive rent of my former apartment included a damage insurance. The insurance company assessed the damage based on the report I submitted to the police. For some reason, they calculated the payout more than the total price of what were stolen. I discussed with my partner about what to do with the money. We decided to go to California. A new start form zero. And that was to be the beginning of all these, everything that I do at present. My works have been taken to the world by that decision, made by the burglary.
Hidemi Woods 