Extract: Christmas is Elsewhere

From Life is Elsewhere/Burn Your Flags (Liminal Ink, 2021)

Back in Dublin, it’s still Christmas Eve. Saoirse will be wrestling the kids into bed, stockings over the – where do you hang stockings if you don’t have a fire? Off the bookcase? Stockings up, tree lights on, Santa on his way. A glass of wine, her and Gerry wrapping presents stashed on top of the wardrobe for a week at the most. Saoirse was always last-minute. Homework at school; ready for a date; driving me to the airport in March, the rush to get back to Japan before the borders closed. We only noticed as we came off the last roundabout that she still had her slippers on. You’re getting just like Ma, I said. Well don’t be telling Gerry that or he’ll be off after a younger model. Just the excuse he needs, she said. Problems there? I asked. Nothing castration wouldn’t solve, she said. And that’s where you leave it because there were bigger problems than whether Gerry had been at it.

Only just got home. Japan closed the borders in March and us lifers weren’t allowed back in until October and even then there were more hoops than at Celtic Park. Permanent residence. Contingent status. We’re here under sufferance. Thanks for the taxes but once we perfect the robots, you’ll not be needed. Right now entry to Japan is banned except for Japanese nationals. As if the virus checks your passport.

Eri picked me up, threw a mask at me, a bottle of hand gel, even though I already had both. Don’t tell anyone where you’ve been, she said. Don’t tell the neighbours you were in Europe. Should I wear a badge? I said. Tattoo something on my forehead?

She wasn’t laughing. She hasn’t laughed much recently. Not much to laugh about. Even schadenfreude took a hammering this year. Can’t laugh at the suffering of others when there’s so much of it about. Where to start? Schadenfreude, like charity, starts at home. Laugh at thyself, you fucker, if you want something to laugh at. Christmas Day and you’re on your own up in the hills. Not a present exchanged. Not even a merry or a happy. She was up late, locked in the spare room with her old boxes and that sake we got from Kochi, all of it. I could hear her snoring in there as I went downstairs and pulled my boots on.

Christmas really is fucking ridiculous when you think about it. Kids aside, of course. The niblings will be excited as anything for Santa and the works. Eighteen years in Japan and the word has lost all meaning. Grown-up adults decorating the house and putting on paper hats like they don’t all hate each other 364 days. I kick a rock and before I realise it’s gone over the edge and is tumbling down, gathering speed, gathering no moss. There’s a golf course down there somewhere. Good. A rock, like the Indiana Jones rock at the start of Raiders, battering through the twelfth green, knocking some old executive in a pink cap and one glove flying.

A few Facebook Merry Christmases, a retweet of a retweet of a retweet. No news.

I stop and take a drink of water. It’s even colder than when it came out the tap. Or maybe I’m just hotter. It’s been a while since I got much above sea level. At the start of lockdown I did a bit, made myself get outside, but all the enthusiasm drained somewhere around June. Best intentions.

Every year Eri and I get in a couple of good hikes and every year one of us says, we should keep it up this year, get fitter. We should have a goal. Maybe Kiso-Komagatake in the summer. Camp on the plateau like we did back in the day. Under the stars. By February I couldn’t tell you whether the piping on my boots was red or yellow.

Shouldn’t have taken the car. It’s a faff with the trains but I hate retracing, going back. Makes the walk seem twice as long, half as interesting. Plus I could have a drink. A wee flask. A couple of cans. I know I shouldn’t but it’s Christmas. The Lord forgives a drink at Christmas. The Lord forgives but the body doesn’t. The doctors won’t.

Very, very cold water, water just above freezing, tastes of nothing, tastes of absence, tastes of the void. Swallow it inside me, swallow it down, taste the emptiness.

Hiking here is a recent import, 150 years or so. People climbed mountains, obviously, but mainly for religious reasons. Temples at the top, pilgrimages up the long and winding roads, barefoot, carrying a rock, devotional. Mental. No one did it for fun, as a hobby, as a way to fill the time while you’re waiting. Not until some mad westerners showed up with poles and tennis rackets and buggered off up these divine slopes for a laugh. They didn’t half embrace it, though, that mix of suffering and satisfaction potent, contagious and oh so human. Old women carrying enough equipment to restock basecamp for a forty-five minute round trip because you’ve gotta have the gear, and what’s a climb without a cup of ramen at the top? Without a wee flask?

on snow

so easy

to slip

I’ve always liked the haiku. It’s what brought me to Japan in the first place. Like most men I had a Beat phase. On The Road, wine and jazz, girls and drugs, cut up and the best minds. But I never had much concentration for reading. Kerouac’s haiku, that got me. That short sharp shock, the single moment, a story in a few words. Why does Tolstoy need so many when Bashō needs so few? Brevity is the soul of wit, said Shakespeare, so a haiku poet is wittier than a novelist. Joyce should’ve done Ulysses as a haiku.

On June 16th

Bloom had a shite

Stephen had a drink

Molly had a ride

Yes, they did, yes.

Not really a haiku but there you go.

I write haiku in the hills. Write; not right. Don’t write them down. I say them to the wind. Declaim them to the sky and then they are gone. About the moment; of the moment. There for a second, then gone. Haiku like cherry blossom. Writing them down is cheating, preserving something that claims to express the transient nature of existence.

on snow

so easy

to slip

A wee flask. The little Jizō statue catches my eye, the tiny stone figure, a buddha, or a monk of some kind. A wee flask. A wee slip. So easy. But no, the flask is in the bar, on the shelf by the bottle of Bushmills. Three weeks without a drop. Must be the longest since I came of legal age. Three weeks. Two weeks, six days and some hours. Since the pain in the morning was too much to hide, to hide from her, from myself. Since I took myself to the clinic and Dr Endo took some blood, asked some questions, and scheduled me in for a scan. Yes, little Jizō-sama, no news, but the pain is still there, sometimes at the front, sometimes the side, mobile, a moveable feast, but always worse in the morning.

I didn’t get anything for Eri. She didn’t get me anything. I can’t remember when we stopped buying each other presents. We used to, for sure, at the start. Then it became trips. I’d pay for a holiday around her birthday; she’d pay for one around mine. Bali. Seoul. Okinawa. An onsen in the hills. A cabin by the beach. Then we got busier and the trips became less frequent. I quit the teaching, opened the bar. We bought out the language school. Two businesses. No time for trips, for anything, for each other.

I got presents for the niblings. Books, Japanese snacks, things unremarkable to kids here, foreign and weird to my three wee Dubliners. Like me, their uncle Cormac who they are shy around every time we meet because a couple of years is forever at that age. Weird like me, a name at the edge of the map, where dragons be, their mother’s brother on the far side of the world. A name. A concept. The reason Sean and Niall have to share a room for a few days when I’m home. A bringer of gifts; an inconvenience. He’ll be gone soon, I heard her tell them at bedtime, the two of them taking their frustration out on each other. He’ll be gone soon.

Well, maybe I will be, sister dear. Maybe I will. Wait and see what the good doctor has to say.