Winner of the White Enso award for fiction.
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Street Blessings
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She’d walked these streets many times before, but tonight she didn’t know them.
It’d rained sometime while she was drinking gin and eating chocolate and trying her
hardest to smile through the strangeness, the ache of the freshly made gaps inside of her.
The bitumen, black and damp, caught the reflection of streetlights and spread them
glowing from her feet like a carpet of stars. A night sky, inverted.
Her whole life, inverted.
Because her husband left that day.
Oh, it’d been a long time coming. And he’d been sleeping in the spare bedroom all week,
as they sorted and divided a shared life, then packed the parts that belonged to him into
boxes and left hers on half-empty shelves. But today was the day he loaded the last of
those boxes into his father’s car and lingered awkwardly at the front door to say goodbye.
The dog, locked in the backyard so he wouldn’t get in the way, whimpered and whined in
confusion. She felt much the same way as she stood awkwardly in the hallway, hands
shoved in her pockets and tightened into fists, shoulders tense and high. How was she
supposed to behave in a moment like this? What was the appropriate reaction to such an
unreal situation? She’d done all her crying at the beginning of the week, when they’d
made the decision — a long time coming, remember, but no less hurtful — and she
finally let go of the image of herself as a married woman.
In its place? A void, a numbness.
Who was she if she wasn’t this?
‘So then, I guess I’ll see you,’ might have been what he said.
‘Will you?’ is possibly what she replied.
‘Well I mean yeah,’ he may have continued. ‘Visit the animals and all.’ He’d left her
with two cats and a dog but taken all the gaming consoles. ‘We’re still friends, right?’
She probably agreed with him because it was easier than examining whether that was
what she wanted. Probably, because the actual words they’d spoken that afternoon were
quickly lost, tumbled and rewritten as she examined the scene in the tumult of her head
and heart and gut, over and over until she couldn’t be sure what parts were real and which
imagined. She’d never be sure what they said to each other, standing in the hallway with
the front door open and his father — who’d never liked her anyway — waiting
impatiently on the other side, but she remembered the feeling. An airlock had opened up
within her and she was being sucked out slowly, dissolved strand by strand.
A final hug. The last of his scent, breathed in, the unique tannin of his sweat. And then
she took his keys and closed the door and locked him out. Aimless, she wandered rooms
riddled with gaps in his absence, before sitting on the floor in the lounge and leaning
against the glass doors with the sun on her back. The dark tiles, heat soaked, were almost
scalding.
The empty house got the best of her by evening, though. So, she accepted an offer to visit
a friend down the road, on the other side of the railway tracks. They drank gin and baked
brownies while her friend’s young daughter slept, then sat close on the couch to watch
meaningless TV, and very carefully didn’t talk about the man who had left that day, or
the fact that she was empty now. Nothing but a void with a false smile and no appetite.
Much later that night — or was it early the next morning? — walking back across the
tracks, she was so lost in her own thoughts that she almost ran into a group of council-
workers making their own way through the darkness. At least, that’s what she assumed
they were at first, dressed in hi-vis and carrying flashing red-light batons. The group
walked slowly, two by two, past townhouses that had been fenced-in yards with horses
when she was growing up, along the edge of the park that had almost been paved over to
make room for a train station. She’d had too much gin by the point to question why they
were here in the middle of the night and what they were doing. Perhaps that was also why
she was having trouble counting exactly how many they were. The edges of each figure
seemed to blur into the other, stirring the night like muddy water, the entire group a
sweep of wind-blown smoke.
She noticed them just in time to stop herself walking right into them and teetered on the
edge of their tide. A faint trace of something like incense, the dimmest rhythmic tapping
sound, like wood knocked against wood, and they were gone.
The streets were no less strange without them. She waited for another moment, toes
dipped in the night sky, before resuming her journey to the darkened windows of that not-
home, that just-a-house, that collection-of-rooms. And wondered, as she walked, what
happened to that path she was on?
Would she ever find a new one, the right one again?
#
She’s walking home from Kita-Sakado, after a day exploring the Edo-era streets of
Kawagoe with David, when she sees the procession. It’s been a lovely day, if a little surreal. David is another ex-pat English language teacher new to living in Japan. Much
younger, American, an entirely different life experience to hers. He’s not a particularly
close friend. But he’s easy to talk to, so she makes the long journey on multiple trains to
see the historic part of the prefecture where he’s based.
Over ‘all you can eat’ naan at an Indian restaurant, he explains his motivations for
leaving everything behind and starting a new life in this place. He thinks he wants to be a
teacher and has always been in love with Japan and Japanese culture, so it seemed like
the perfect thing to do. Try it out, see if he liked it, meet new people, have some
adventures. At twenty-three he has no responsibilities, nothing tying him down. Why
not?
As they meander through Edo-era buildings like the set of a samurai movie she tries to
reply in kind. Yeah, she also loves Japan and has always wanted to spend some time here.
As a divorced middle-aged woman (if almost forty is middle-aged which, to him, it must
seem) she also has no responsibilities. Nothing tying her down. She never planned to be a teacher and isn’t all that fond of kids, but here’s the thing, she doesn’t know what she wants to be anymore. She knows it’s an unrealistic thing to ask of a place and a people, but maybe Japan can help rebuild the parts of her that have been hollowed out. The void that nothing seems to be able to fill.
He does his best to understand, she thinks. Over the day they snack on dango from a
street vendor, lollies from a speciality sweet shop, beer and fried squid on a stick from a
festival stall. Then a hug farewell, and they part ways. She heads home again.
Does this count as friendship? She’s not sure she can tell anymore.
She’s slowly getting to know the streets of her new adopted town, but sometimes she still
takes a wrong turn. At night, in the darkness, even in the glow of pale streetlights hanging
like unripe fruit, they warp, at times. They change. A shrine she thought was on the other
side of the railway tracks suddenly looms before her. That empty, burned-down house
she noticed when she first arrived seems to wander like it has a mind of its own, surfacing
on the strangest corners. The little bar her co-workers took her to at the end of her first
day, when she was exhausted and hot and overwhelmed by the stress of impenetrable
foreign bureaucracy, has never appeared again.
On this night, following a well-worn, well-known path home from the train station, she
somehow takes one of those wrong turns. And the streets that were starting to become
familiar suddenly are not.
And that’s where she sees them.
First, she hears the chanting. Then bells, and the soft tapping of hollow wood against
wood. Rhythmic. She doesn’t think much of it. There are plenty of temples nestled in
these old neighbourhoods; it must come from one of them. So she keeps walking, trying
to find her way back to the path.
It’s a few blocks before she realises the sound is following her. She pauses in the act of
crossing an unidentified main road, toes dangling off the edge of the curb, and catches
sight of a small procession.
They look, at first, like parking inspectors. Older men and women, all of them, wearing
thick puffy jackets against the chill. Over these, they all wear hi-vis vests of yellow or
pink, in varying degrees of brightness. Two at the front and two at the back carry red,
illuminated wands. It’s the mundanity of them that strikes her. It looks like they’ll stop, at
any moment, to patch a pothole or ticket incorrectly parked cars.
Apart from the chanting.
She squints at them as they come closer. It’s strangely difficult to see how many there are
— twelve, maybe, or twenty. There are other figures, she’s sure of it, at the heart of the
procession, but they’re somehow obscured. On the other side of the red lights and hi-vis
the air is different, thick as though with smoke or fog or maybe just that incense she can
smell, suddenly, sharp like a smack to the sinus. Whoever’s making that chanting,
whoever’s ringing the bells and tapping the hollow, echoing blocks of wood are shadowy
and blurred.
The parade crosses her path, following the empty main road, ignoring her completely.
She might as well not exist.
What are they doing? If she was born and brought up here, if she knew the culture and
the traditions the way you only can when you’ve been a child in a place, perhaps they
wouldn’t seem so strange. Whatever it is that swirls behind the hi-vis would be visible, if
only she knew how to see.
Won’t you bless me too, she wants to call to them. But her lips won’t move and anyway,
how does she know this is a blessing? It could be a curse. Or it could be nothing of the
kind.
The procession moves slowly, but in an instant they are gone, and as soon as they’ve
passed she realises where she is. Recognises the FamilyMart down the end of the road,
the small tobacco shop with its faded sign, the house on the corner with the stone lantern
in the garden.
And rediscovers her path.
#
She will return to Japan eventually, but it won’t be for many years. And it won’t be the
way she imagined.
The eyes she will see through, as she gets off the express from Tokyo and enters the wide
streets of her old hometown, they will not be her eyes. The skin that feels the humid
touch of the sun won’t be her own. Not her tongue that tastes the dango, or her legs that
walk the well-worn path home.
With her body ageing and withering, despite the newest in biotech implants, she’ll have
little choice but to visit this way. Even if she could afford the flight there, she won’t be
well enough to touch the soles of her own arthritic feet on familiar soil. And few people
will be able to afford to fly. She will invest in a ‘ride’ on another person’s younger and
more able body. We will all be connected, more deeply than we could ever have
imagined.
Though this body won’t be her own, for a day she will have paid enough to control it, to
feel it — all the sensory input picked up on implants and fed through satellites back to
her brain in real time. And in this day she will recreate the best parts of her brief time
living in this town. Not the touristy adventures, but the normal day to day, the path from
train to apartment, well-worn and well known that used to, and will continue to, make her
feel like she’s home.
The landmarks are simple, but each one will spur a little flutter in her heart — her real
heart, not her borrowed. The Community Centre where she used to attend language
classes and once took a cooking class. She will remember the crunch and the squish of
homemade agedashi tofu. The town’s cute mascot will be erected in the courtyard in
hologram, dancing and waving as she strides by. Like an old friend.
It will be too early in the day for the yakitori bar to be open, but she will still stare
wistfully at its menu. Thanks to translation software in the implants in her borrowed eyes,
she won’t need to have learned all the kanji — which is a good thing, because she’ll still
be lamenting the awkwardness of her Japanese.
Finally, she will pause at the small bakery that was once so close to home. There she will
buy a peanut-cream roll on sweet, fluffy white bread, and a cold can of black coffee. She
will consume these as she walks, savouring the bitter and the sweet.
She will not be able to climb the stairs and open the door and step into the narrow
corridor of home. But she will stand at the bottom and look up, and remember the way
the cramped collection of tiny rooms with its loft bed was hot in the summer, and cold in
the winter, and the walls so thin she’d be woken by snoring from the apartment below.
She can feel the silky smooth of fake wooden floorboards beneath her bare feet. Hear the
click of the lock when she closed the door behind her. How she filled and decorated it
gradually with books and crockery, pictures and omiyage, and how empty it seemed on
the day she left. So many years ago. A lifetime, even.
Through borrowed eyes and a world away, she’ll wander the streets of a place that once
was briefly, but always will be, home. It will have changed, of course. Buildings taller
than she remembered, streets denser and more crowded. But she was expecting that, and
will not be disturbed by it, because enough of the place of her memory remains, and she
will be too busy layering the streets of her past over the streets of her future to lose
herself in the differences.
It won’t be not until the end of the day, when her credit starts to run out, that there’ll be a
strange moment, one that could almost be a glitch. Almost.
At the edge of a main road and waiting to cross the street, suddenly she won’t remember
where she is, and all these places will be so unfamiliar. From a distance, somewhere, a
ring of bells. The faintest tapping of wood on wood and ghostly, echoing chants. A glitch
in the feed, it might be. Someone else’s stream tangling with hers. But she will know
better. Because she’ll remember that sound, and the flicker of hi-vis.
It’d rained sometime while she was drinking gin and eating chocolate and trying her
hardest to smile through the strangeness, the ache of the freshly made gaps inside of her.
The bitumen, black and damp, caught the reflection of streetlights and spread them
glowing from her feet like a carpet of stars. A night sky, inverted.
Her whole life, inverted.
Because her husband left that day.
Oh, it’d been a long time coming. And he’d been sleeping in the spare bedroom all week,
as they sorted and divided a shared life, then packed the parts that belonged to him into
boxes and left hers on half-empty shelves. But today was the day he loaded the last of
those boxes into his father’s car and lingered awkwardly at the front door to say goodbye.
The dog, locked in the backyard so he wouldn’t get in the way, whimpered and whined in
confusion. She felt much the same way as she stood awkwardly in the hallway, hands
shoved in her pockets and tightened into fists, shoulders tense and high. How was she
supposed to behave in a moment like this? What was the appropriate reaction to such an
unreal situation? She’d done all her crying at the beginning of the week, when they’d
made the decision — a long time coming, remember, but no less hurtful — and she
finally let go of the image of herself as a married woman.
In its place? A void, a numbness.
Who was she if she wasn’t this?
‘So then, I guess I’ll see you,’ might have been what he said.
‘Will you?’ is possibly what she replied.
‘Well I mean yeah,’ he may have continued. ‘Visit the animals and all.’ He’d left her
with two cats and a dog but taken all the gaming consoles. ‘We’re still friends, right?’
She probably agreed with him because it was easier than examining whether that was
what she wanted. Probably, because the actual words they’d spoken that afternoon were
quickly lost, tumbled and rewritten as she examined the scene in the tumult of her head
and heart and gut, over and over until she couldn’t be sure what parts were real and which
imagined. She’d never be sure what they said to each other, standing in the hallway with
the front door open and his father — who’d never liked her anyway — waiting
impatiently on the other side, but she remembered the feeling. An airlock had opened up
within her and she was being sucked out slowly, dissolved strand by strand.
A final hug. The last of his scent, breathed in, the unique tannin of his sweat. And then
she took his keys and closed the door and locked him out. Aimless, she wandered rooms
riddled with gaps in his absence, before sitting on the floor in the lounge and leaning
against the glass doors with the sun on her back. The dark tiles, heat soaked, were almost
scalding.
The empty house got the best of her by evening, though. So, she accepted an offer to visit
a friend down the road, on the other side of the railway tracks. They drank gin and baked
brownies while her friend’s young daughter slept, then sat close on the couch to watch
meaningless TV, and very carefully didn’t talk about the man who had left that day, or
the fact that she was empty now. Nothing but a void with a false smile and no appetite.
Much later that night — or was it early the next morning? — walking back across the
tracks, she was so lost in her own thoughts that she almost ran into a group of council-
workers making their own way through the darkness. At least, that’s what she assumed
they were at first, dressed in hi-vis and carrying flashing red-light batons. The group
walked slowly, two by two, past townhouses that had been fenced-in yards with horses
when she was growing up, along the edge of the park that had almost been paved over to
make room for a train station. She’d had too much gin by the point to question why they
were here in the middle of the night and what they were doing. Perhaps that was also why
she was having trouble counting exactly how many they were. The edges of each figure
seemed to blur into the other, stirring the night like muddy water, the entire group a
sweep of wind-blown smoke.
She noticed them just in time to stop herself walking right into them and teetered on the
edge of their tide. A faint trace of something like incense, the dimmest rhythmic tapping
sound, like wood knocked against wood, and they were gone.
The streets were no less strange without them. She waited for another moment, toes
dipped in the night sky, before resuming her journey to the darkened windows of that not-
home, that just-a-house, that collection-of-rooms. And wondered, as she walked, what
happened to that path she was on?
Would she ever find a new one, the right one again?
#
She’s walking home from Kita-Sakado, after a day exploring the Edo-era streets of
Kawagoe with David, when she sees the procession. It’s been a lovely day, if a little surreal. David is another ex-pat English language teacher new to living in Japan. Much
younger, American, an entirely different life experience to hers. He’s not a particularly
close friend. But he’s easy to talk to, so she makes the long journey on multiple trains to
see the historic part of the prefecture where he’s based.
Over ‘all you can eat’ naan at an Indian restaurant, he explains his motivations for
leaving everything behind and starting a new life in this place. He thinks he wants to be a
teacher and has always been in love with Japan and Japanese culture, so it seemed like
the perfect thing to do. Try it out, see if he liked it, meet new people, have some
adventures. At twenty-three he has no responsibilities, nothing tying him down. Why
not?
As they meander through Edo-era buildings like the set of a samurai movie she tries to
reply in kind. Yeah, she also loves Japan and has always wanted to spend some time here.
As a divorced middle-aged woman (if almost forty is middle-aged which, to him, it must
seem) she also has no responsibilities. Nothing tying her down. She never planned to be a teacher and isn’t all that fond of kids, but here’s the thing, she doesn’t know what she wants to be anymore. She knows it’s an unrealistic thing to ask of a place and a people, but maybe Japan can help rebuild the parts of her that have been hollowed out. The void that nothing seems to be able to fill.
He does his best to understand, she thinks. Over the day they snack on dango from a
street vendor, lollies from a speciality sweet shop, beer and fried squid on a stick from a
festival stall. Then a hug farewell, and they part ways. She heads home again.
Does this count as friendship? She’s not sure she can tell anymore.
She’s slowly getting to know the streets of her new adopted town, but sometimes she still
takes a wrong turn. At night, in the darkness, even in the glow of pale streetlights hanging
like unripe fruit, they warp, at times. They change. A shrine she thought was on the other
side of the railway tracks suddenly looms before her. That empty, burned-down house
she noticed when she first arrived seems to wander like it has a mind of its own, surfacing
on the strangest corners. The little bar her co-workers took her to at the end of her first
day, when she was exhausted and hot and overwhelmed by the stress of impenetrable
foreign bureaucracy, has never appeared again.
On this night, following a well-worn, well-known path home from the train station, she
somehow takes one of those wrong turns. And the streets that were starting to become
familiar suddenly are not.
And that’s where she sees them.
First, she hears the chanting. Then bells, and the soft tapping of hollow wood against
wood. Rhythmic. She doesn’t think much of it. There are plenty of temples nestled in
these old neighbourhoods; it must come from one of them. So she keeps walking, trying
to find her way back to the path.
It’s a few blocks before she realises the sound is following her. She pauses in the act of
crossing an unidentified main road, toes dangling off the edge of the curb, and catches
sight of a small procession.
They look, at first, like parking inspectors. Older men and women, all of them, wearing
thick puffy jackets against the chill. Over these, they all wear hi-vis vests of yellow or
pink, in varying degrees of brightness. Two at the front and two at the back carry red,
illuminated wands. It’s the mundanity of them that strikes her. It looks like they’ll stop, at
any moment, to patch a pothole or ticket incorrectly parked cars.
Apart from the chanting.
She squints at them as they come closer. It’s strangely difficult to see how many there are
— twelve, maybe, or twenty. There are other figures, she’s sure of it, at the heart of the
procession, but they’re somehow obscured. On the other side of the red lights and hi-vis
the air is different, thick as though with smoke or fog or maybe just that incense she can
smell, suddenly, sharp like a smack to the sinus. Whoever’s making that chanting,
whoever’s ringing the bells and tapping the hollow, echoing blocks of wood are shadowy
and blurred.
The parade crosses her path, following the empty main road, ignoring her completely.
She might as well not exist.
What are they doing? If she was born and brought up here, if she knew the culture and
the traditions the way you only can when you’ve been a child in a place, perhaps they
wouldn’t seem so strange. Whatever it is that swirls behind the hi-vis would be visible, if
only she knew how to see.
Won’t you bless me too, she wants to call to them. But her lips won’t move and anyway,
how does she know this is a blessing? It could be a curse. Or it could be nothing of the
kind.
The procession moves slowly, but in an instant they are gone, and as soon as they’ve
passed she realises where she is. Recognises the FamilyMart down the end of the road,
the small tobacco shop with its faded sign, the house on the corner with the stone lantern
in the garden.
And rediscovers her path.
#
She will return to Japan eventually, but it won’t be for many years. And it won’t be the
way she imagined.
The eyes she will see through, as she gets off the express from Tokyo and enters the wide
streets of her old hometown, they will not be her eyes. The skin that feels the humid
touch of the sun won’t be her own. Not her tongue that tastes the dango, or her legs that
walk the well-worn path home.
With her body ageing and withering, despite the newest in biotech implants, she’ll have
little choice but to visit this way. Even if she could afford the flight there, she won’t be
well enough to touch the soles of her own arthritic feet on familiar soil. And few people
will be able to afford to fly. She will invest in a ‘ride’ on another person’s younger and
more able body. We will all be connected, more deeply than we could ever have
imagined.
Though this body won’t be her own, for a day she will have paid enough to control it, to
feel it — all the sensory input picked up on implants and fed through satellites back to
her brain in real time. And in this day she will recreate the best parts of her brief time
living in this town. Not the touristy adventures, but the normal day to day, the path from
train to apartment, well-worn and well known that used to, and will continue to, make her
feel like she’s home.
The landmarks are simple, but each one will spur a little flutter in her heart — her real
heart, not her borrowed. The Community Centre where she used to attend language
classes and once took a cooking class. She will remember the crunch and the squish of
homemade agedashi tofu. The town’s cute mascot will be erected in the courtyard in
hologram, dancing and waving as she strides by. Like an old friend.
It will be too early in the day for the yakitori bar to be open, but she will still stare
wistfully at its menu. Thanks to translation software in the implants in her borrowed eyes,
she won’t need to have learned all the kanji — which is a good thing, because she’ll still
be lamenting the awkwardness of her Japanese.
Finally, she will pause at the small bakery that was once so close to home. There she will
buy a peanut-cream roll on sweet, fluffy white bread, and a cold can of black coffee. She
will consume these as she walks, savouring the bitter and the sweet.
She will not be able to climb the stairs and open the door and step into the narrow
corridor of home. But she will stand at the bottom and look up, and remember the way
the cramped collection of tiny rooms with its loft bed was hot in the summer, and cold in
the winter, and the walls so thin she’d be woken by snoring from the apartment below.
She can feel the silky smooth of fake wooden floorboards beneath her bare feet. Hear the
click of the lock when she closed the door behind her. How she filled and decorated it
gradually with books and crockery, pictures and omiyage, and how empty it seemed on
the day she left. So many years ago. A lifetime, even.
Through borrowed eyes and a world away, she’ll wander the streets of a place that once
was briefly, but always will be, home. It will have changed, of course. Buildings taller
than she remembered, streets denser and more crowded. But she was expecting that, and
will not be disturbed by it, because enough of the place of her memory remains, and she
will be too busy layering the streets of her past over the streets of her future to lose
herself in the differences.
It won’t be not until the end of the day, when her credit starts to run out, that there’ll be a
strange moment, one that could almost be a glitch. Almost.
At the edge of a main road and waiting to cross the street, suddenly she won’t remember
where she is, and all these places will be so unfamiliar. From a distance, somewhere, a
ring of bells. The faintest tapping of wood on wood and ghostly, echoing chants. A glitch
in the feed, it might be. Someone else’s stream tangling with hers. But she will know
better. Because she’ll remember that sound, and the flicker of hi-vis.