Slow Boat

^{BOAT TWO} KEEP BOTH HANDS FLAT ON YOUR LAP

I stopped going to school when I was in the fifth grade—in early May, right after Golden Week. Everyone always wants to know why. I had my reasons, trust me. My mom was getting hysterical, for starters. And my teacher was always coming to my house and getting me in trouble… Talk about no boundaries. But I bet they saw things differently. I bet, the way they saw it, it wasn’t me who was giving up on school. School was giving up on me.

Whatever, not even close.

I know what happened. But it’s hard for me to explain, even now. Way harder for a kid ten or eleven years old to put into words—into Japanese.

Anyway… I guess what really triggered it was Children’s Day. “When you write ‘Children’s Day’, don’t do it in kanji,” my teacher said. “Spell it out in kana. If you can read the kanji for ‘children’ then you’re not a child any more.” Ha ha ha. Hilarious.

The whole world was comfortably dumb.

Children’s Day: A day for the children, for their happiness and for their mothers.

Give me a break. As soon as I saw all the carp floating over the city, that was it for me. What the hell is this farce? Tokyo’s full of carp (or streamers acting like carp). What are all these fish-mouths trying to say? It’s a giant farce. True, “farce” wasn’t in my vocabulary back then. But that’s what I felt, in my bones. I had to get the hell out.

Which is what I did, in dreams.

Not ambitions. Real dreams, if dreams can be real.

I said it before and I’ll say it again. This record of mine is nothing without my Japanese and all of its limits. When you talk about life, you have to talk about the Big Limit. Death. It’s a part of life. No escaping it.

OK. Let’s start at the beginning.

Pretty sure it was the end of the fourth grade. February probably. February 1985. I went to sleep. Except I didn’t. After a few minutes in bed, not sleeping, I had this revelation. It just came to me. I might’ve been a stupid kid, but this fact hadn’t hit me until that night. Suddenly I understood: I’m going to die at some point. My life won’t last forever.

I curl up.

That night, alone in bed, I started seeing time differently. History. Followed by a full stop. Try to imagine what it’s like for a fourth-grader to be terrified of death. I had to find a way out. Sleep was definitely scary—a whole lot like death. But that didn’t keep me from getting sucked in.

Into the world of dreams.

The boy who is afraid of death lives for dreams.

I started my dream diary before entering the fifth grade. But writing down your dreams isn’t as easy as you think, so I went looking for help. A guide. Something to point the way. What I found was a how-to book. Dream analysis stuff. Like Freud (yeah, Sigmund Freud). “Snakes represent penises, caves represent vaginas.” That sort of thing. But the real Freud is too complicated for a total beginner. Hell, I still haven’t read Introduction to Psychoanalysis. The book I bought wasn’t the real Freud. It was Freudian. Written by a so-called “expert”, published by a so-called “publisher”. But this book became my bible. It was easy to read. The chapters were short, and there were tons of illustrations. It almost felt like a strategy guide for some video game. Cheat codes for the libido or something.

But what’s a vagina to a prepubescent boy anyway?

Sure. I’d had some sex dreams. But I never saw the female anatomy as the be-all and end-all. Well, I never saw the female anatomy at all. In my dreams, there was nothing but skin down there. Smooth, like a doll’s. You can’t dream about something you’ve never seen in the real world. I hadn’t come yet, either, so all the references to “ejaculation” meant jack to me.

Reading dreams is hard.

I tried my best. I was a big fan of free association. The moment I woke up, I would write down how my dreams felt, using a few clues picked up from my bible. You have to start somewhere. Can’t write about your dreams without the language of dreams.

The problem wasn’t me—not necessarily. The Japanese language has its own shortcomings. But that’s a story for another time.

This is the story of a fifth-grade boy hell-bent on making sense of his dreams. Cracking the code. And that means staring death in the face. Which takes, you know, courage. In the words of Henry Miller, “Sleep is an even greater danger than insomnia.” Or did he mean something else? Maybe I’ve got it wrong.

Story of my life.

Back in the world of the living: Children’s Day. 5th May 1985. Flying fish invade Tokyo airspace. But I’m not there. I’m in bed.

I was so devoted to figuring out my dreams that I never left my bed. I kept on sleeping. Didn’t go to school.

That’s how I became a “dropout”.

What happened then?

By the end of June, I was no longer a resident of Suginami ward. The guidance counsellor at school recommended “a change of environment”. For me. Not my family. They stayed put. I was sent away, on my own, to an alternative school for dropouts. A place for kids who are for some reason unable to go to regular school. There were grade-schoolers—like me—and middle-schoolers. We lived together under one roof, in a dorm. And, following our marching orders, we walked to and from the local school each day. Together.

Out there in the mountains. It kind of felt like summer camp.

But we were still in Tokyo.

Japan Railways, JR, by that name, didn’t exist yet. It was National Railways. Well after the NR Chuo Line stops to the west, Tokyo keeps on going. I never thought about it until then. After Takao? Another prefecture, right? Saitama or Yamanashi or something. Beyond my ken. Hell, I was oblivious to the fact that Tokyo has eight “villages”. Did you know that? Tokyo’s eastern limit: Minamitori Island. Formerly known as Marcus Island. Part of the Ogasawara Islands. Co-ordinates: 153° 58′ 50″ E. To the south: the Okinotori Islands. An atoll, actually, almost completely underwater at high tide. 20° 25′ N. Uninhabited, obviously, and far and away Tokyo’s southernmost point.

Tokyo.

How far does Tokyo go?

There I was. A ten- or eleven-year-old dropout with no interest in speaking to others. Sent away—to the only Tokyo “village” on the main island. Damn close to Tokyo’s western edge.

I was shocked to find Tokyo went that far. It took me two trains (the Chuo and Ome Lines) and one bus (called the West Tokyo Line for a reason) to get there. A solid two hours from home—and I’m still in Tokyo? Are you kidding? For one thing, this place is deep in the mountains. For another, the news-stand at the station is selling wasabi… The news-stand.

It felt like Chichibu Tama National Park.

Nothing around, unless you’re itching for a killer hike. And the dorm was apparently built on land that used to be a village for fugitive warriors.

“Fugitive warriors”?

The village school had opened its doors to us dropouts. Due to a dwindling student body, it had to shut down or agree to educate a wild bunch of losers from all over Japan. It chose door number two and stayed open. That was what everyone wanted—the teachers, the village, everyone. And in my own (unasked-for) opinion, it was the right move. Right?

That’s how I see it at present.

Now, technically, the dorm was for grade-schoolers. But, like I said before, there were some older kids, too. When a dropout was unable to drop back into life, they were allowed to stick around. Indefinitely.

I have more to tell you about the dorm, but let me say something about the school first. It’s a little embarrassing—I can’t remember the name of the place. Wonder why. No, I’m pretty sure I know why. Some kind of complex, some deep desire…

When I first got there, the school felt like it was at the end of the world. So, for lack of a better option, I’m going to call it “The End of the World Elementary”.

OK. Back to the dorm.

Shit hit the fan as soon as I arrived. I wasn’t allowed to keep sleeping in. DORM is a four-letter word. Right up there with FUCK or SHIT. It really was the “change of environment” they said I needed. No joke. My world was violently upended. The director was of the professional opinion that my attachment to my bed represented “a deep desire to return to the womb”. Or something like that. So when it was time to get up in the morning, she had my bed taken away. Rise and shine.

“Get up! Time to go to school!”

So I got up. I went to school.

And that was the end of my dream diary. I mean, there were other factors for this. Maybe you figured this out already—the director was a practising psychoanalyst, an expert in all things Freud, probably in her late thirties. When I got to the dorm, the analyst in me had little choice but to scram. I might have been a really ignorant kid, but even I knew that Freud was a total relic. Session’s up, Herr Freud. Plus, I wasn’t allowed to bring my bible to the dorm (they were pretty strict about what you could have there), and the place had zero privacy. What if someone got their hands on my dreams? Just thinking about it sent shivers down my spine. It’d be like someone messing with your corpse.

And something told me that the director wouldn’t hesitate to sneak a peek.

She was a shrink, after all.

So that put a stopper in my dream-diving. This sucks. I cursed the so-called reality they forced me back into.

That also marked my return to education. Every morning, I made the trek to school with everyone else. To The End of the World.

They made me.

OK. About the other kids. What kind of “pupils” were they? What did these dropouts have in common? Not a damn thing. Each one was like a snowflake. Like, unique. Well, some were sort of typical. They got chronic headaches or stomach aches. Some simply couldn’t stomach school lunches. There were perfectionists and the opposites of perfectionists. Fat kids and skinny kids, bullies and crybabies. It was a zoo—a human zoo.

One kid per cage.

We were like brothers. And sisters. There were girls in the dorm, too. Our living quarters were strictly separated, but we made the walk to school and back together.

There’s one more thing I need to mention about The End of the World.

It wasn’t bad. When I first saw the village, I was convinced I was going to be stuck in some shabby, cobweb-infested schoolhouse. All wood, no windows—just a giant box. But that was all in my head. This place was all right, not in any way inferior to my school in Suginami.

Really, if I had to choose, I’d say I was happier at The End of the World.

The ruins of the stone Buddha (nothing left but his ankles) on the way to school. The thatched roofs on old farmhouses we could see from the schoolyard. The smell of dirt and grass all around us. Now and then, misguided cicadas would land on the monkey bars and cry their hearts out. Even in class, we could hear thirty different kinds of birds singing outside. Behind the school a warning sign read: BEWARE OF BEARS. This place had it all.

But—most important of all—she was there.

She showed up about three weeks after I did.

The day after the last day of school, a new load of loser-track kids gets dropped off. Seven boys, four girls. Summertime at Camp Dropout. Even though I’m still pretty new to the place, I find myself playing mentor to kids even newer to this game than me.

We line up, face-to-face, checking each other out. Nobody says a thing. Not a hello, nothing.

And there she is. She’s in the sixth grade—a year above me—and I guess you could say she’s a looker. Except my eyes aren’t on her face. Because the magnetic thing about her is, like, her… chest. I mean, whoa. My first impression: this girl has some serious boobs.

I’m a little young to notice things like that, but I’ve got stirrings. And something kicks in, makes me stare. This girl’s not a freak or anything, but stuffed into her tight little bra are the finest, fullest-formed sixth-grade boobs in the Greater Tokyo Metropolitan Area. Some things you just can’t hide. And some things are hard to ignore. (I guess I wasn’t ideal mentor material.)

Aside from her boobs, nothing about this girl really stood out. At first meeting, that is. But within twenty-four hours, it’s clear to everyone that she’s nothing like the rest of us. What’s so different about her? Not what you’re thinking. It’s her mouth. It never shuts. Ever.

This girl talks and talks and talks.

Talk—even a lot of talk—isn’t necessarily rare or weird, either. But in my brief time on this planet, I’d never met anyone who talked the way she talked. I was amazed. To use the language I have now, I’d call it hyper-talk—not overtalk. She doesn’t blab endlessly on some boring subject, or gossip about stupid things, or ask a bunch of mind-numbing questions. Blabber like that I could handle. All the kids could. Because that’s how kids are. But she was on a different plane. If she was just darting around, hitting sixty topics in under a minute, we could’ve coped. No sweat. But what came pouring out of her mouth was more like a mash of sixty conversations happening simultaneously—jump jump jump—and she’d go on like that for an hour straight, barely stopping to breathe. What do you do with that? No way you could, like, try to have a conversation with her. What’s she saying? Total gibberish, right? Maybe. Maybe not.

She was like an alien.

Or maybe she was manic? No, this was something else, something—I don’t know—superhuman? I was only ten or eleven at the time, same as the others. But I felt something, like an aura. I could tell she wasn’t fake. She was kind of real. Like, her hyper-talk was about something deep. Even someone in their twenties probably wouldn’t get it—forget about a bunch of grade-school rejects. No hope. So the kids kept their distance.

Within a couple of days, her mouth had totally devastated our peace and quiet (if we ever had such a thing). She rattled everyone’s cage.

In class, it was even worse. We were supposed to be on summer break, but class went on at The End of the World. Like always, only different. For the summer, misfits of all grades were thrown into a single classroom. The powers that be had some plan in mind, to get us to adjust, or readjust, to being in a school environment, being around other students. It was a strange sort of rehab. They wanted us to communicate with other students and relate to kids in other grades.

Communicate.

Her hyper-talk ruined any chance of that happening.

We didn’t have assigned seats. It was, like, sit anywhere, next to your friends, or some kid you don’t know, or on your own—if that’s your thing.

The director was like a saint, kind and easy. But the kids were not.

“Back off, weirdo.”

“Ugh. Don’t even think about sitting here—I don’t care what grade you are.”

“Omigod. Shutupshutupshutupshutup. Put a sock in it!”

“Pleeeze, does anyone have a spare pair of headphones? I can’t take it any more.”

“Yo, Grade Six,” somebody yells to her, “try speaking Japanese for once!”

“I am speaking Japanese!” she yells back. Then—two seconds later—she’s back in orbit, rambling about some alien life form. Next thing you know, she’s going:

“…Millions-in-Ethiopia-starved-to-death…”

Then, without skipping a beat:

“…You-ever-see-Eight-Samurai-with-Hiroko-Yakushimaru?”

You who? Anybody, I guess.

Anybody at all. But who could respond to that? By the time she says something, she’s already in the middle of the next thing.

Our class was totally at the mercy of her careening motor-mouth.

And where was I in all this?

Sitting there, speechless. I didn’t talk for the longest time. The other kids left me alone, or left me out… of everything. Now, for the first time, I was watching it happen to another kid. They avoided her like the plague, rejected her, shut her out.

I didn’t share their view of her. For me, it was the total opposite. I wanted to get closer. I mean, yeah, I wanted a closer look at her boobs, too, but that wasn’t all…

Activities, activities. Before summer started, they had us play sports or “pitch in” with garden work. Around ten days after I got there, they had a big party for the Star Festival. One Sunday, we all went into the mountains, to pick wild plants or something.

But summer was different. Every day was something. Going to Okutama to check out the giant trees, making charcoal, making noodles from scratch, even going to the local hot spring. A healthy body is a happy body. They kept us moving. Volunteers, counsellors and occasional social workers. This was our so-called summer break, and we were busier than ever.

OK, flash to the main event: the big barbecue.

We take a bus to the Akigawa River. We’re given tasks. Mine is setting up the grill, which I manage to make level, despite my serious clumsiness. When we finish our jobs, we can do anything we want until it’s time to cook and eat. Free time. Some kids hang around the director, asking barbecue-related questions or whatever. Some other kids—they called themselves “explorers”—get lessons from a local guy on making goggles from bamboo segments to check out the river bottom. Some other kids—outsiders with nowhere to go—head down to the river to skip stones.

When it’s time to start cooking, I get closer to the girl—through a three-step process. Step one: hop. We’re skewering kebabs at the director’s instruction. Onion, corn, eggplant, beef. Fresh fish from the river. The girl’s sitting there, gleefully piercing a marshmallow.

“…and-the-Marshmallow-Man-bounced-through-the-city…”

“I ain’t afraid of no ghost,” I say, almost in reflex, as I wrestle with a gnarly red bell pepper. She stops and turns and looks right at me—big smile on her face.

“Ghostbusters, right?” I say, pleased with myself. “I saw it over New Year’s. Wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be funny or scary.” It’s been seven months, so my memory of the movie is a little sketchy. Still, I’m pretty sure she was talking about the final scene.

She opens her mouth to respond. But what comes out doesn’t really sound like a response. It has nothing to do with ghosts or marshmallows or anything. More like she’s weighing the pros and cons of dance parties. And the words just keep coming.

Coming at me.

Wha—? Dance parties?

Total gibberish, like I said.

I just smile. Don’t know what else to do.

She’s smiling, too—saying something about, like, a mermaid with human legs.

Mermaid? Because this is a river? Wait, don’t mermaids live in the ocean? A mermaid could never survive in the Akigawa. The water’s way too shallow… you’d need a fresh-water imp, like a kappa… shit, now I’m jumping around. Anyway, before I know it, the mermaid’s history.

But we had a real moment there. A close encounter of the third kind.

Step two: skip. When we finish eating, we’re supposed to make art with stones we found in the river. We’re supposed to think about the shape of the rock or how it feels in our hands and, with that in mind, draw something on it. Presto—a rock of art.

This was almost twenty years ago. I have no memory of what my rock looked like. But I definitely remember hers. Her mouth moving at warp speed—like always—and there was this force field all around her. So no one got close. That’s why I had no problem seeing what she was making, even though she was pretty far away. At first, I thought she was drawing a drowned body. Or maybe a dog? But the neck was too long for that. It had a dog’s face, but the body started to look like… a dragon.

I know that dragon! I’ve seen it somewhere.

No, I didn’t “see” it. I saw it—at the movies.

Time out. What if everything she says comes from movies? What if everything she knows comes from movies?

What if she’s not just making them up?

Maybe she’s bouncing from one world to the next—World A, World B, C, D, E, F… all the way to Z, and beyond. Maybe I’m beginning to understand. Like, make Japanese out of what she’s saying. Not everything, but most of it, maybe.

So this dragon-like creature—it’s got to be Fal-something, the Luck Dragon. From The NeverEnding Story. I saw it over spring break. On a movie screen. Which was what we did in 1985. Remember? Before VHS was the one format to rule them all. Back when Beta was still around. When, if you wanted to rent something, you had to pick which way to go. 1985. Movies hadn’t really come home yet.

You had to go to the movies—the movie theatre.

I didn’t really know movies—only went three or four times a year. I was more into dreams… Then it hit me, like a bolt of lightning. Her movies are just like my dreams! All I have to do is imagine that everything coming out of her mouth is a dream. Analyse. Sure, I’m only ten or eleven, but I’ve had a bit of training. Shit, I was well on my way to cracking the dream code. Before they took all my dreams away.

But now I have a new one. Her.

Step three: jump. Read her like a dream.

On the bus ride home, I listen carefully to every syllable that speeds out of her mouth. I map all of her jumps, from dimension to dimension. I don’t let the sudden changes of scene throw me. I don’t worry about plots or anything. I just try to get a feel for the worlds she’s visiting. Just like when I was writing down my dreams. I concentrate on the sense of her words. This might work after all. Long live Freud!

Movies. That was the key.

She’s not rehashing stories. She’s reliving the scenes.

A scene comes to life in her head. Then she moves on to another.

It’s like she’s playing twenty to thirty heroines at once. Or maybe she casts herself in minor roles. Maybe she’s only a spectator. As I watch her leap from one world to the next, I take a step into hers.

The problem is that she’s seen every movie ever made. I’ve never seen Splash or Poltergeist or Footloose or Dune. But it all works out. As long as I know that she’s playing the parts of all these different people—or aliens or dancers or mermaids—each with a different story. I just need to keep a couple of basic rules in mind. First: Her world is actually twenty or thirty different worlds. Like a solar system. Second: No matter how things look or sound, she’s still in there, somewhere.

Is that a yodel?

Sounds like a nightmare, right?

But I can follow.

By the time the bus pulls up to the dorm, I have a mental log of her several alien worlds.

In class, there’s an empty seat next to her. Of course there is. Because no one’s deranged enough to sit there. Except, well, me.

I sit down next to her (and her boobs) and say, “Hey”.

For the first couple of hours, she’s still jabbering away, but with a look of total shock on her face. Like she can’t believe she’s actually communicating. It takes some time for it to click—someone else is wading through the muck of her mixed-up movie worlds with her.

Her words are getting through.

This is where strangers meet.

An alien makes contact with one of her own.

For the first time, maybe ever, she realizes that she wants to communicate. Then, just like that, she’s talking to me, at hyper-speed.

So I start decoding her, my dream girl, at hyper-speed.

I spent the rest of my summer learning all sorts of things about her. Like why she knew—and how she could remember—all those movies.

“I saw them over and over.”

“Over and over?”

“I was at the movies, all day.”

“What do you mean—why?”

“When Mommy doesn’t want me around, she gives me a movie ticket (she has an endless roll of them—I think they’re a shareholder perk or something), and orders me to stay there.”

She tells me all about her little sister—her half-sister—who stays at home when my dream girl is sent (alone) to the movies. Kind of sounds like my dream girl is being banished. She sees the same movie over and over. She sits in the back row, by the door. That way, when Mommy calls, the staff at the movie theatre know where to find her. They relay Mommy’s orders: You can come home now.

(Pretty sure I don’t have to remind you that nobody had cell phones in 1985. Phone cards had only been around for a couple of years.)

On standby until Mommy calls. She has things to eat and drink, and she goes to the toilet whenever she needs to. Otherwise, she sits back and enjoys the shows. She sucks them in—or they suck her in. She remembers everything.

She’s seen Once Upon a Time in America—a brutally long film about a brutal Jewish mobster. Too complicated for any kid to wrap her head around. Still, she’s dipped into that world.

She’s seen Gremlins. Three rules for Mogwai owners to live by.

She’s seen The Terminator. An unkillable assassin sent back from the future.

She talks and talks. She shares her worlds with me. Worlds I’ve never known.

It’s almost like communing with the spirit world.

I read her at hyper-speed. And I fall for her at hyper-speed. She keeps me well fed with fresh dreams. And because I’m probably the first person in her life to kind of understand her, she wants to be close to me, too. This isn’t like—this is love.

Our dates are limited to The End of the World and its remote territories. That basically means the bus stop, the local shrine, the village office, the hot springs, the mountain trail. Our forest friends surround us: the graceful mourning cloak, the ultra-ultramarine flycatcher, the serow that the other kids see as a three-headed hellhound. Of course, all we do on our dates is talk. Just talk. Or—the way I saw it—interpret dreams.

Our dreams go everywhere we go. We have access to twenty or thirty different worlds (how many are there, really?), far beyond the reach of—and of no interest to—the others. But we never badmouth them. We never look down on them.

All that matters to me is that she’s happy with how we are.

We. Me and my sixth-grade girlfriend.

My first girlfriend.

My most momentous moment at The End of the World happened in the schoolyard—by “the weather station”, the closest thing we had to a monument. And it was monumental. When my first girlfriend gave me my first kiss. History of mine! Let the day be marked.

She’s two or three centimetres taller than me, so she sort of ducks down to kiss me. Her boobs hit me in the chest—with a good amount of force, too. This is all really new to me, but I’m surprised they don’t feel softer. What a letdown. I blame it on the bra.

In the moment, I have no idea what our kiss means.

I have no idea what it means when—for the first time ever—she stops talking.

“Everybody get on the bus,” the director is shouting. “Find a seat, and keep both hands flat on your lap.”

My memory gets a little fuzzy after that kiss. All data for the next twelve hours or so is irretrievable—forever lost. But the next big scene I remember, for sure. It was Lake Okutama. Maybe we were visiting Ogochi Dam? Or the Centre for Water and Nature?

It was the last day of summer break.

Could have been 31st August, or not. Does it really matter? All I know is that it was the day my beautiful summer came to a cold, brutal end.

The bus was idling in the parking lot. I was following the director’s orders—lining up to get back on the bus. But, after a couple of seconds, I realized something.

She isn’t here.

It smacks me like a whip. Red alert. Alarm bells are ringing. WHERE. IS. SHE? I do a three-sixty—to get a full scan of the parking lot. I see her. There. Over by that stupid red sports car. There’s a woman in her thirties standing by the passenger door, a man in sunglasses—age unclear—in the driver’s seat. The woman’s talking to somebody.

To her. My girlfriend.

I watch my girlfriend squeeze into the back seat of the car.

But she’s looking back. Looking at the bus. Looking for me. Our eyes meet and sparks fly. The alarm in my brain goes off. BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP.

That woman has to be Mommy, here to take my girlfriend home.

How could I be so dumb?

I never saw this coming. I never thought she was going to be taken away. When she showed up at the start of summer, I was convinced she was here for the long haul, like the rest of us. But she was just a summer camper. Sent to The End of the World to stay out of Mommy’s hair, until Mommy came back.

She was being taken away.

We were going separate ways. That was our fate.

But I had been too stupid to notice.

Red alert.

Once my girlfriend was buckled up in the back seat, the car took off. I broke out of line and ran after it. What was the director saying? Keep both hands flat on your lap? Are you kidding me? More like, keep both hands on your girlfriend and never let go.

Never let go.

I leap onto the highway that runs next to the lake. The highway that runs here all the way from Hikawa Campsite. National Route 411. I’m a hitchhiker with an emergency. The station wagon coming towards me screeches to a stop. Well, more like I bring it to a stop by standing in the way. They were probably yelling at me, but I don’t remember. I think they were campers, in their twenties.

I’m all worked up. “They took my sister!” I scream. “Follow that red car!”

It all sounded very dramatic—and they took my word for it.

I mean, it was a lie they could believe. My girlfriend was banging on the rear window, crying and screaming, playing her part to perfection. Saying something—to me.

“Come on! Catch them!” I yell. The station-wagon driver floors it. The adults in that sports car had to be completely unprepared for the station wagon speeding after them—this was a scene from a movie they hadn’t seen. We chase them through tunnel after tunnel—Omugishiro, Murosawa, Sakamoto. Drumcan Bridge to our left. Flying west down NR 411.

We’re getting close to Kamosawa. As in: “Kamosawa, Yamanashi Prefecture”.

Tokyo’s about to end.

And we’re catching up. I scream: “Ram them! Make them stop!”

But next thing I know, we get cut off. Something pulls between the station-wagon (that I kinda sorta hijacked) and the sports car. It’s the bus, sliding sideways, blocking the whole highway. The station wagon swerves to a stop.

The bus driver sped up and killed the chase.

A highway with only two lanes. Game over—just like that.

There’s a sign up ahead: “Now entering Yamanashi Prefecture”. End of Tokyo.

I fling open the station-wagon door and bound onto the street. I try to run past the bus. But arms grab me, hold me back. Adult arms. I struggle, start swinging like a maniac—I know justice is on my side. Give her back! You can’t have her!

But Kamosawa, Yamanashi is off-limits.

No matter what.

No way out of Tokyo.

That was how I lost my first girlfriend.