![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petronia(http://www.livejournal.com/users/petronia/tag/31days)
Bohren & der Club of Gore – Kleinerfinger
Huh. Does it count if it's readable but unfinished?
***
Chiaki arrives by car at dusk. It takes forty-five minutes to cross the suspension bridge, but once within city limits the traffic miraculously eases. On the highway the black silhouettes of electric poles and radio towers flicker past like ghosts. Behind them the sun descends, transforming the mirror-glass facades of skyscrapers into blocks of solid flame. As the web of the city swallows him streetlights come on in his wake.
At one intersection a train flashes past overhead, thundering. In the flickering light that falls from its windows he glimpses a dense black squiggle, spraypainted large on the concrete support of the overpass. With a jolt he recognizes it as the bonji of Aizen Myouou. Or is its form accidental? He has no time to meditate. The light turns green.
Each car is a scene in a discontinuous narrative. The city is filled with signs.
***
The jazz club is located downstairs from a karaoke bar and next door to a massage parlour. The approach to the front door – such as it is, an airless opening in a brick wall – necessitates ten paces down a dank alley and a flight of corrugated metal fire-escape stairs down to the basement level. The windows are square, covered with steel grilles. The interior appears much the same as when he used to frequent the establishment two or three years ago. The barman does not recognize his body, and scowls in a menacing manner when he tries to order a drink.
"Listen, kid—" he says. Chiaki pushes his glasses up his nose and looks him in the eyes. The man falls still.
"Draft Asahi," he says. "You're a good guy, master. Card the little bastards for all they're worth."
He takes his beer to a corner table, leans against the wall and lights a cigarette. After taking the first drag he drops the match into the ashtray instead of extinguishing the flame, letting it burn to a curl of charcoal. The room is three-quarters filled, and every few minutes more people slip in through the door. Chiaki watches the stillness fall over each face as soon as they take their seats, as if the music touches them in the manner of an unwary finger, making them withdraw their softness within. Then they appear alone, even if they arrived in twos and threes. The air is blue and heady with smoke.
Onstage the drummer sets the pace, a slow, hypnotic dusting of snares – rattle, rattle, the sweeping shiver of a cymbal – over which the keyboards expound in mournful, bell-like chords. The double bassist is a woman in a black dress, her long brown hair caught to one side of her face. She leans over her instrument as she plays, attentive to the point of monomania, as if it were a child. The sound she produces is a subterranean groan underlying the melody, felt rather than heard.
The sax man stands a little left of centre stage, his weight on one leg, the other carelessly bent. He is young, with non-descript looks and an angular build that gives an impression of gauntness rather than fashion. He wears frayed jeans, an eyecatching cap of knit purple wool, a leather vest that leaves his shoulders bare. Under the stage lights the skin of his arms gleams with a fine sheen of sweat. He is smiling, a vague smile fixed on nothing in particular.
The cue is invisible, inaudible. The other instruments whisper or grind to a halt, leaving the drummer to play on – rattle, rattle, tap – the sax man straightens, lifts the mouthpiece to his lips and blows.
It is a voice; a wordless, human wail cutting through the smoke. The sound crescendos, maintains, vibrates like the beating of blood in the ears. There is something unbearable about it, a sort of rapture. Each long, ululating note pierces the listener with monotony, weighs down his limbs, fills him until no space is left – not even for memory to echo. The next moment the keyboards come in again.
A minute motion in the corner of Chiaki's eye captures his attention, and he turns. There is a woman leaning against a pillar at the back of the room. She's wearing a red halter dress. The flat pleats of the skirt fall over the top of her tense thighs. Her hair is long and tumbles down her back in dark waves. She lifts her head, and the warm light from the bar falls full on her face.
From across the room she meets his gaze.
Her eyes are large and dark. Her lips part on words he cannot hear.
She turns and disappears down a hallway he knows leads to washrooms and storage, and a locked door. He waits, but she does not reemerge.
***
That night he pays 4000 yen for the right to lie in one of a hundred and fifty-three capsules in a place called the Hotel White City.
By his reckoning each unit is four times as voluminous as a funerary coffin. The interior is slick white plastic extrusion-molded into a simulacrum of habitat: a shelved compartment for holding personal objects, another enclosing a television screen and its controls, the largest by far for the human body. The corners are rounded, inoffensive. A bamboo curtain separates his feet from the rest of the room; he is perversely glad for its lack of soundproofing. The futon and blanket and soft woven paper-covered pillow have the surreal texture of these same objects on a plane or train, as if they are not really a futon or blanket or pillow but reproductions thereof, designed to mimic form and function in the absence, mysterious, of substantiality.
"Misplaced nostalgia," he says to himself, aloud. The first time he died was in a barracks where men slept two to a tatami mat, curled up in their own cloak and sharing fleas. The fever consumed him from the inside out: wracked him with unquenchable thirst even as he drenched his bedding in sweat, tore at his bowels, liquefied his flesh. When the end came he was half-mad and covered in his own filth, too weak to even ask for the mercy of the sword.
What is glory in the face of that? What is duty? Honour? Virtue?
Concerns of the living. Baubles prized by children who do not yet realise the cruelty of the prison into which they were born. Death lasts longer; as such it carries greater weight.
When he takes his glasses off his surroundings are blurred and slightly brighter.
He has grown used to the body's quirks. Its previous owner bequeathed him only a name and the fleeting impression of a life not worth returning to – a best-case scenario. He takes care of it "as if it were his own". Over the past two years the limbs have lengthened, the frame filling out to adult strength. He bought himself new glasses, let his hair grow. When he glimpses his reflection in a washroom mirror it is "himself" he recognizes.
The body serves as the soul's purgatory. It is the sentence meted out for the crime of life, no more. It takes a connoisseur to distinguish the prisoner behind the bars: a stance, an energy, a look about the eyes.
As cells run this one passes for comfortable.
***
Bohren & der Club of Gore – Kleinerfinger
Huh. Does it count if it's readable but unfinished?
***
Chiaki arrives by car at dusk. It takes forty-five minutes to cross the suspension bridge, but once within city limits the traffic miraculously eases. On the highway the black silhouettes of electric poles and radio towers flicker past like ghosts. Behind them the sun descends, transforming the mirror-glass facades of skyscrapers into blocks of solid flame. As the web of the city swallows him streetlights come on in his wake.
At one intersection a train flashes past overhead, thundering. In the flickering light that falls from its windows he glimpses a dense black squiggle, spraypainted large on the concrete support of the overpass. With a jolt he recognizes it as the bonji of Aizen Myouou. Or is its form accidental? He has no time to meditate. The light turns green.
Each car is a scene in a discontinuous narrative. The city is filled with signs.
***
The jazz club is located downstairs from a karaoke bar and next door to a massage parlour. The approach to the front door – such as it is, an airless opening in a brick wall – necessitates ten paces down a dank alley and a flight of corrugated metal fire-escape stairs down to the basement level. The windows are square, covered with steel grilles. The interior appears much the same as when he used to frequent the establishment two or three years ago. The barman does not recognize his body, and scowls in a menacing manner when he tries to order a drink.
"Listen, kid—" he says. Chiaki pushes his glasses up his nose and looks him in the eyes. The man falls still.
"Draft Asahi," he says. "You're a good guy, master. Card the little bastards for all they're worth."
He takes his beer to a corner table, leans against the wall and lights a cigarette. After taking the first drag he drops the match into the ashtray instead of extinguishing the flame, letting it burn to a curl of charcoal. The room is three-quarters filled, and every few minutes more people slip in through the door. Chiaki watches the stillness fall over each face as soon as they take their seats, as if the music touches them in the manner of an unwary finger, making them withdraw their softness within. Then they appear alone, even if they arrived in twos and threes. The air is blue and heady with smoke.
Onstage the drummer sets the pace, a slow, hypnotic dusting of snares – rattle, rattle, the sweeping shiver of a cymbal – over which the keyboards expound in mournful, bell-like chords. The double bassist is a woman in a black dress, her long brown hair caught to one side of her face. She leans over her instrument as she plays, attentive to the point of monomania, as if it were a child. The sound she produces is a subterranean groan underlying the melody, felt rather than heard.
The sax man stands a little left of centre stage, his weight on one leg, the other carelessly bent. He is young, with non-descript looks and an angular build that gives an impression of gauntness rather than fashion. He wears frayed jeans, an eyecatching cap of knit purple wool, a leather vest that leaves his shoulders bare. Under the stage lights the skin of his arms gleams with a fine sheen of sweat. He is smiling, a vague smile fixed on nothing in particular.
The cue is invisible, inaudible. The other instruments whisper or grind to a halt, leaving the drummer to play on – rattle, rattle, tap – the sax man straightens, lifts the mouthpiece to his lips and blows.
It is a voice; a wordless, human wail cutting through the smoke. The sound crescendos, maintains, vibrates like the beating of blood in the ears. There is something unbearable about it, a sort of rapture. Each long, ululating note pierces the listener with monotony, weighs down his limbs, fills him until no space is left – not even for memory to echo. The next moment the keyboards come in again.
A minute motion in the corner of Chiaki's eye captures his attention, and he turns. There is a woman leaning against a pillar at the back of the room. She's wearing a red halter dress. The flat pleats of the skirt fall over the top of her tense thighs. Her hair is long and tumbles down her back in dark waves. She lifts her head, and the warm light from the bar falls full on her face.
From across the room she meets his gaze.
Her eyes are large and dark. Her lips part on words he cannot hear.
She turns and disappears down a hallway he knows leads to washrooms and storage, and a locked door. He waits, but she does not reemerge.
***
That night he pays 4000 yen for the right to lie in one of a hundred and fifty-three capsules in a place called the Hotel White City.
By his reckoning each unit is four times as voluminous as a funerary coffin. The interior is slick white plastic extrusion-molded into a simulacrum of habitat: a shelved compartment for holding personal objects, another enclosing a television screen and its controls, the largest by far for the human body. The corners are rounded, inoffensive. A bamboo curtain separates his feet from the rest of the room; he is perversely glad for its lack of soundproofing. The futon and blanket and soft woven paper-covered pillow have the surreal texture of these same objects on a plane or train, as if they are not really a futon or blanket or pillow but reproductions thereof, designed to mimic form and function in the absence, mysterious, of substantiality.
"Misplaced nostalgia," he says to himself, aloud. The first time he died was in a barracks where men slept two to a tatami mat, curled up in their own cloak and sharing fleas. The fever consumed him from the inside out: wracked him with unquenchable thirst even as he drenched his bedding in sweat, tore at his bowels, liquefied his flesh. When the end came he was half-mad and covered in his own filth, too weak to even ask for the mercy of the sword.
What is glory in the face of that? What is duty? Honour? Virtue?
Concerns of the living. Baubles prized by children who do not yet realise the cruelty of the prison into which they were born. Death lasts longer; as such it carries greater weight.
When he takes his glasses off his surroundings are blurred and slightly brighter.
He has grown used to the body's quirks. Its previous owner bequeathed him only a name and the fleeting impression of a life not worth returning to – a best-case scenario. He takes care of it "as if it were his own". Over the past two years the limbs have lengthened, the frame filling out to adult strength. He bought himself new glasses, let his hair grow. When he glimpses his reflection in a washroom mirror it is "himself" he recognizes.
The body serves as the soul's purgatory. It is the sentence meted out for the crime of life, no more. It takes a connoisseur to distinguish the prisoner behind the bars: a stance, an energy, a look about the eyes.
As cells run this one passes for comfortable.
***
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-08-09 04:18 am (UTC)(and oh god Chiaki in a jazz bar my heart. Lovely.)
no subject
Date: 2005-08-09 02:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-10 05:19 pm (UTC)Now I'm fascinated by the second half of the story. I hope it's not finished at this point? ^^ *unsubtle hint* And I want to go on about how it made me feel and what it made me think, but I realize fanfic comments isn't where discussions should take place.. ^^;
So, what I'm trying to say is "Thank you for writing such a wonderful Nagahide fic" and "please write more...?" ^^ *hugs*