ken.ichi

i had his parents' phone number and luckily he was still living there, so i could arrange to meet up with him: i hadn't been back to nagasaki for a couple of years, so my hopes weren't particularly high. and then when i met him, well, obviously i wished i hadn't. he was looking strangely bloated and his hair was gelled and swept back into something that wasn't a quiff, just a kind of salaryman bulge. his face was sallow and almost masked with a kind of brown discolouration. like a stain. i tried to make some sort of conversation, but i kept wondering if i had just imagined that he was a friend, that we could talk. we had decided to go to panic paradise and it was pretty much as it had always been.

i was desperately trying to keep the conversation going, but it was feeling like work, like my work, conversation whoring. he made me smile once, when i said he looked different and he said "well, you know, don't trust anyone over thirty". i wouldn't have smiled if english had been his first language, or if he'd been any good at it. actually, i smiled because he smiled.

then i asked some kind of "what else have you been doing lately?" question (really, you can't have been doing nothing all this time? just living with your parents and working part-time restaurant jobs and arguing with chefs?). and he said "oh, i wrote a novel"
"what about?"
"you. you and me."
"uh, in the style of haruki murakami?" (i knew he loved murakami)
"no. raymond chandler. raymond chandler and smis"
"smis?"
"you know, smis. morrissey"
"oooooh, THE smiths"
"yes"

i would say i was naive but obviously the truth is that i was vain and self-absorbed. i still am, to a fairly great extent. i should have taken it as a warning. instead, i smiled and left feeling like the evening had been worthwhile, like i'd ticked something off my list of Things To Do With My Life. i was 27, but a dumb 27. should have never spoken to him again. i would now.

i'm still a little glad someone wrote a book about me.

in the style of raymond chandler and the smiths.

it was rejected by 30 publishers, more or less.