Behind the Words: Happy Café

This story grew out of New Year 2006/07 and went through a few misfires before reaching this final flash version. I find short stories harder than almost any other form, certainly of prose. I like the sprawl of a novel and the uber-tightness of the haiku, and short stories are somewhere in between: more sprawl than a haiku, tighter than a novel. But some ideas just suit that form, and this is one. Could it be the opening chapter of something? Sure, I guess, though anything happening beyond that time and place would undermine the power of the moment, make it a doorway rather than a window, and short stories should be windows.

As a writer I think once you’ve said what you came to say, get out. Or more accurately, once you’ve learned what you needed to learn, get out, because we should never write to teach, we should always write to learn. Some moments require 80000 words to understand the complexities of, some need a few syllables. This moment needs a handful of paragraphs, no more.

New Year 2006 I travelled through to Tokyo with a few friends (including Thom, above, this photo was taken that night). I don’t think it was my first trip to Tokyo but I feel it might have been. Maybe my first non-work related trip. We were there about four days, and in general I have fond memories - we went boating in Ueno, visited Asakusa, Yoyogi, Akihabara, all the tourist stuff. We visited the Imperial Palace for an audience with the Emperor. Around New Year they open the palace grounds and appear on the balcony to greet their subjects. As a republican (Scottish version, an anti-Monarchist, not an American Republican) this isn’t really my scene but everything else is closed at New Year and you get to wander around the gardens as well, so why not?

Hogmanay itself was a bit of a bust. Early evening, the rest of the group paired off - some couples, some with friends visiting from abroad - with plans to meet later. I hadn’t been aware that this was in the pipeline and so at 6pm I suddenly found myself alone until everyone met up again at 10:30.

There are few more miserable experiences than drinking and eating alone, in Shibuya, on December 31st. By the time 10:30 came around I had of late lost all my mirth. I put on a happy face, aided by numerous shots and some dancing, but not long after the bells I was hit by a wave of sadness. I walked out of the bar without saying anything to anyone and wandered aimlessly through the streets, following the crowds. I ended up at Meiji Jingu, the heart of Tokyo’s New Year celebrations:

Being alone in a crowd like this is easier than being alone in a bar, so with beer and various articles of street food I saw in the new dawn people watching.

Happy Café grew out of that feeling, that mix of togetherness and isolation, of stasis and flow. There’s a strong Murakami vibe to the story, for me anyway, as I was reading a lot of him at the time. I go through winters and thaws with Murakami, times when his prose is just what I need, times when it seems like so much treading water by someone who could do so much more with his talent and platform.

New Year has never been my favourite occasion. In my memory - probably selective - it’s when I always felt most alone. There’s a party in Glasgow, on the streets in Aberdeen, a night in London. The 2011 Hogmanay in Beijing with Robert, during the trip I mentioned in the Chinese Fractures post, was a good night, drinking and dancing in a Uyghur bar. That’s the last one I remember actively celebrating. Minori volunteers for night shift (she’s a nurse) on New Year’s Eve as it buys her gratitude and flexibility over holidays for the next six months, and I’m in bed by ten. On the second we go to the in-laws, but even that has been off during the plague times, as it is this year.

Happy Café is then, probably my most honest take on New Year’s Eve, the closest I’ve come to capturing the melancholia I feel as one arbitrary number ticks over into another. I guess we need a reset point and that is as good as any. New starts are to be welcomed, new dawns, new springs, new years. I hope you have a happy one.