Showa's Last Train

Life has derailed me in recent weeks. Unread texts from people I care about multiplied like dishes in the sink. Maybe I will go back to them before they start wondering if I was purposefully sabotaging our relationships. 

This month, I have been transfusing music from 1981. Yah Yah Yah from Chage and Aska is flowing out from a device I left illuminated—because a girl in a distant dream pulled the worn cassette out from her bag. 

"do you feel it now?", she exhaled with a scent of peach. 

When I awoke, my finger was already tightened on the rewind button. 

Tonight, when I close my eyes, the pale walls of my rental dissolved. The sea breeze comes first, and then the colours kick in—slightly off-green, like a pack of Fujifilm 400. The wood floor creaks gently under my bare feet. The sizzling of korokke and the smell of glazed onions, mixed with her faint peach fragrance. The shoji glows behind me with a dim light. A fan on the chabutai shakes its head in disapproval at her questionable demeanour, blowing away the summer heat as the last train pierces across my balcony into the night, like a whistling arrow. She was there, whispering all the unknown titles close to my ears, as she shared a Midori-menthol with me that was slightly too punchy. I remembered her lipstick marks on the filter.

Perhaps they failed to fully factory-reset me. I was left with the weight of a time I didn't exist. As I opened my eyes, the fluorescent light and the marble floor stung my retina as much as the rejection to leave my trace in this dwelling. "you will move soon". Fuck that. I immediately lit up a cigarette in the cold wind, not midori, a cheap malboro ice blast from the konbini downstairs. I snatched for my phone, memes, braindead rants, sexually frustrated 2025 kids... But then I saw it. An apartment that filmed tokyo love story was recently up for sale. In that same condition I remembered from television, in a price where Japan's inflation forgot to jack up. That is a place I am willing to bleed, I thought to myself. I am not staying here. I will go find her.