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estebanana -> Dispatches from Akune (May 5 2013 3:07:56)
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Found in translation
It’s far off the common track here.
Crows, fishing boats, sea eagles. There are no gulls. I think the sea eagles must have eaten them eons ago during the Jomon Period. Beds of tender white potatoes grow in terraces perched on cliffs over the sea up the coast on Nagashima Island. The water is Mediterranean, rocky bottomed. Viridian green shallows blend to dark manganese blue depths. Small black octopi try to hide on Styrofoam trays under the canvas tented fish market stalls.
One could write all kinds of touristy road trip details designed to flatter the countryside. Any real portrait of this town would have to side track the stunning beauty of nature here and cut to Tachiko’s story of how packages of shrimp and gyoza constantly went missing from the big dented freezer she keeps in her cardboard box and plastic bucket cluttered carport.
Tachan, the familiar endearment form of Tachiko, lives across the street. Well it’s hardly a street, unless you’re from a really small village in Italy and the streets are narrow, scattered with loose pea gravel and allow only one tiny non American sized car at a time. Where I am from it would be called an alley, but I shy from judging this thoroughfare by naming with diminutive like 'alley'. It’s a tough little street full of amorpropio, but like most side streets in out of the way Japanese towns, it has no name. Taxi drivers would know the street if you were to climb aboard and say "Fumotosan’s house!" or "Tachikosan". With efficiency your taxi man would deliver you to the precise door you requested.
At the opposite end of Tachiko and I there is a large hospital, and a building behind it which is the Akune City branch of JTT, Japan Telephone and Telegraph, although I have not actually seen the telegraph lines, yet, it would not surprise me to see a guy in an upper story window tapping out Morse code. I’ve seen stranger things already. Fifty meters down the road the hospital raises like a squared up white stucco boulder three stories high; smaller than Godzilla, bigger than a shoebox. As if to give the albino Godzilla hospital something to climb on, JTT has a grey iron tower that looks like a seven story tall clipper ship mast with a wide octagonal observation deck. The deck is a grid work of steel mesh platforms silhouetted against the sky and stocked with several flat radar dishes ready to be torn from their mounts and tossed into the sea and hills like a terrible monsters' Frisbee golf set.
You would think all this urban funk and infrastructure would loom depressingly over the little delicate street with no name, but it’s saved by a tree filled city park situated between us and Godzilla’s playground. In 1765 there was a fire in Akune which burned a great deal of the city, the park is quite old, at least from the time of the fire. It features a Shinto figure three feet tall made of the indigenous basalt rock, a fire protector diety. He is the usual demon like diety, scary angry eyed, several arms, a flaming headdress, stony feet which stomp furiously on a lotus shaped base. All meant not to be demonic and Satan like in the Christian sense, but to tell future fires to “stay away or I will kick your face in” kind thing. Not sure if fire has a face, but if it did this little rock bastard would crack free of its moorings to beat it silly. Lucky for me, he is about 30 paces behind my bedroom, and up a short grassy slope. Quite near enough to stave off any guitar incinerating conflagrations. The Japanese, I must surmise, gave up centuries ago on making anti-mosquito Shinto deities, for I have not seen a single one, unless you count those cans of repellent in the drug store. I can see the TV advert scene: Ancient Shinto shrine, can of bug repellent on the altar, priest devoutly hands can to young acolyte, says it is secret of peace and harmony……wait…..I could get a job in advertising here……
Well the mean street I live on has its feline denizens as well and my favorite so far is Tachiko’s tom cat. He is a swaggering punk rocker tabby. His right foreleg is completely white; the outline of the white fur is a contour drawing which perfectly circumnavigates the tip of this pointy shoulder. From paw tip to haunches it looks like he is wearing a tabby print tee-shirt with one sleeve rolled up around his boxers arm. He reminds me of Joe Strummer from The Clash.
Trouble in the Casbah.
Tachiko used to own a restaurant, I’m sure it had a name, but I have not ventured to ask it, yet. It must have been called something tough and scandalous like Samurai Village Coffee Shop or Rudy’s Can’t Fail Ramen. She now gets up about 4am and cooks in her added on catering kitchen next to the carport and delivers her delicious goods to grocery stores that sell them to the business lunch crowd. Well, I have not seen the crowd, but I can attest that Tachiko’s wares do not last long in the groceries. You seldom see a hair of them past 4pm.
Tachan drinks beer from a can, she wears her hair in a poodle sprawl of a short brown perm. She looks like a 1980’s MTV Japanese band leader, maybe she founded Shonen Knife? She looks to be around sixty five years old and burps at the table with gusto. She speaks low and deep, with force, like the big man in a “sword and sandal” film. She could probably one punch deck your lights out in a fight, even though she stands tall ring side at about 5’4”. She also had that problem with disappearing frozen ebi. Ebi is sprimp in Japanese, you might know it from those ridiculous ‘pencil in the item’ sushi menus from the United States. Sorry boys, everything here in the back forty is written in Kanji, Hiragana and Katagana. No numbers on the menus and no pictures of food. You can’t read Japanese? You go hungry. Or you have someone order for you.
The shrimp and fish fillets were not fin walking out of Tachiko’s freezer by themselves, so she took action by calling the policia. Fish capers were low on the priority list they said, but at some point they would tear themselves away from the 7-11 doughnut section ( It’s not bad I must say) and make a drive by to secure the ‘hood and hopefully catch the fish thief. They never arrived. The seafood kept swimming off into thin air, so she called them again. This time she asked them for surveillance advice. She proposed that she sit in the carport after the deliveryman dropped off her daily food supplies and hide in her car with a baseball bat after she put the ebi in the freezer. The police responded, horrified, that she herself might get hurt and that they would make haste to patrol the ‘street with no name’ during the times Tachiko was out delivering foodstuffs on her grocery store route. Try as they might the Akune Police Force could not crack the case of the missing crab cakes and purloined ebi. Joe Strummer the cat was pretty useless too, as Tachiko thinks the thief bribed him to keep his mouth shut.
One afternoon she forgot some of the bamboo leaf wrapped mochi packs that were needed by the massive hordes of hungry businessmen across town. As she gunned her Honda economy car back into her carport to grab the leaf swaddled mochi, she trapped the vile predator red handed, with freezer lid open and one arm clutching a jumble of bags filled with frozen chicken gyoza. It was the old lady down the street, her rival. Tachiko threw open the car door and cussed her up a blue streak, except that, um well, the Japanese language does not really have any cusswords, you just have to get your point across by talking angrily.
Luckily no blows were exchanged. The frozen goods were dumped back into the freezer by the brazen aggressor and she was chased back down the street by Tachiko at broom point. Still, Tachiko has refused to put a padlock on the freezer, it’s just not that kind of street, or that kind of town.
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