Daniel Clausen's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-ghosts-of-nagasaki"

Pasted below is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Ghosts of Nagasaki. Enjoy!

In my Tokyo apartment, staring into the screen of my laptop, I simultaneously stare out the window of the Shinkansen into the Japanese countryside. Though the fingers typing these words to you are twenty-six, my eyes are now twenty-two. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s overcast, I can’t explain exactly why, but as a twenty-two-year-old I’m much older than I am at twenty-six.

The train continues on its way to Fukuoka. There I will switch trains and go to a place called Nagasaki. The name bears no meaning yet, but when I say it quietly to myself it comes easily, with a disturbing amount of familiarity.

I brood.

I brood for my very life, and I wonder why I’m even here.

I clutch my chest. I don’t know why, yet, but I’m starting to experience a kind of pain there―heartburn perhaps. What will I miss when I die? Eighties hair bands, the movie Heavy Metal, high school cheerleaders, and V8 juice―yes, thank God for V8 juice.

I’m looking over my newspaper―my pornography of disasters and misery―when I notice her. The girl in the school uniform with a face even grimmer than mine. She must have been wearing normal shoes at the time because nothing seemed off. But now, when I think about it, when I think hard and deep the way dispirited ghosts in the mountains do, I can see her red shoes with the dirty shoelaces―old-school Converses. They somehow make me feel more comfortable with the world. They come from somewhere deep and pure, not a shoe manufacturer but someplace more beautiful.

She looks so young and awkward, her navy blue school girl uniform clashing with her bright red sneakers. Do all the girls wear nerdy shoes like these? I think to myself now, though I have no way to think it back then other than through the movement of these fingers.

There is something infinitely sad about her: her face, long and motionless, her eyes on the verge of tears, she sits there quietly waiting for something. All this clashes desperately with the silence of the train and the blank faces of its passengers.

That’s when we enter the long tunnel. I look down at my paper and notice the word “politician” and “politicians”—these two words seem to be everywhere. My mind turns to people in my past: to the con artists of my youth, my foster parents, and the vague memory of an elementary schoolteacher. I’m twenty-two, but I feel old. My hands ache, my knee hurts, and the newspaper in my hands seems forced, the means of an oppressed soul to shoo away the time.

The train comes out of the tunnel. I look once again to try to find the girl, her downcast eyes searching the Shinkansen floor. My hands search across the keyboard for this sliver of memory, hoping to pick it up with my touch. But it seems lost for the time being.

That’s when I realize that somehow I’ve left the gloom behind. Suddenly, I’m traveling

through tall hills, looking down at vast green valleys. The world is flush with interesting angles, colors, and textures. Instead of just seeing what’s around me, I feel as if I can fall into it and rub it in my eyes.

The geography of my situation suddenly upsets the logic of it. I wish I knew some famous Japanese travel writer to plagiarize. I would, too. I’d steal the phrases like so much unattended baggage and not think twice. As it is, my eyes overcome the poverty of my words. They fall out the window and deeper into the mountains. Somewhere, out there in the mountains, I see myself as I could have been―a Lost Boy. Safe, content, I fall asleep.

On the surface, I am an unremarkable thing: a businessman going on a business trip.

Without ceremony, I take a plane bound from Tokyo to Hokkaido. I line up to get my ticket. I wait patiently to board the plane, my copy of the Nikkei Shimbun in hand. I sit on the plane in my tight coal-black suit, no tie, one button down, with my laptop. My face is the silent, serious face of a man working on yet another project of some importance for his company.

If anyone were to ask me what I was doing, I would dutifully respond that I was being sent to Hokkaido to take one of many steps necessary to earn revenues for company stockholders. If I was to line up the sequence of events in a row—all the events leading up to this flight and my existence there in the third row of the business class section, aisle seat— nobody would give them a second thought.

The plane lifts off, the plane climbs higher, and yet I find myself descending.

I take myself to the middle of the park where the families and couples are starting to make their way back to their cars and homes. I stop near the entrance of the park and find myself waiting for something. A superreal something tells me that this is the right thing to do.

Before long, the flow of people coming down the park steps thickens. They finish their packed dinners, tell their kids they can have one more go on the swings, and then they’re walking down the steps toward me. It’s only a matter of time before I see them.

Red shoes.

Their logic, simple and superreal, makes it that much easier for me to follow. A pair of high heels at first, some sneakers there, a pair of red sandals of all things. One person, one pair of red shoes, and I follow them until the voice in my head says stop. Then I follow another. Red shoes to red shoes. Red shoes stop, and I wait for another pair to come along. This is stupid, the voice of reason tells me. This randomness will get you nowhere but lost. But my better self knows that really lost is better than simply lost and that if a vision could take me here—to a place as vague and surreal as Nagasaki―it must have greater plans for me.

You can read the full excerpt here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...

Where do these reflections on writing take me?

They take me to a place. The second floor of the Sumiyoshi arcade in Nagasaki, Japan. There is this cafe on the second floor. I'm the only one there.

This cute college student hovers over me.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm writing," I say in bad Japanese.

"Sugoi!"

Is there any better word in the world for what I'm doing?

*

When it's good, it's very good. But writing will also break your heart. At times, when I write I'm as cold and hard as Sam Spade.

I think of that small cafe the same way I think of my writing. So much love put into every decoration -- decorations from all over the world. Pictures of graffiti in Vienna. A trophy on the wall of a traveler.

Can you get beyond a point of fear? Can you get to a point where everything becomes a source of joy?

There is an old tin print of Elvis when he was younger. This young Elvis reaches past the tin and tells me, "Don't let your passion be derailed by a turkey club, ya' hear?"

"Yes, Elvis!"

The Japanese waitress is still hovering over me.

"What was that?"

I understand the question, but don't know enough Japanese to answer.

"Writing!" I say simply and continue.

She wouldn't understand the part about Elvis and the turkey club.

*

What was a writerly moment of joy for you?

I remember this moment in Nagasaki when I started writing about very personal things -- about my experience with the world, my experience with moralists. My thoughts about “shit” and what “shit” meant to me. The cleansing nature of it.

But I wasn’t writing scenes -- that’s something I’ve avoided. What if I could write these confessions as scenes and not just corny scenes, but as real scenes?

I have to think that people in the theater often feel a pure performerly moment. A moment when their performance becomes sublime.

The young waitress looks over at me. "Anything else!"

"Latte!" I say. It's the same in English and Japanese. I wink at Elvis.

The thoughts I'm writing in my journal -- joyfully -- will end up in my novel "The Ghosts of Nagasaki" some year later. Hopefully, they end up as a scene, but I don't think they do.

The owner is a middle-aged Japanese "dude." His salaryman days are behind him. He wears a Hawaiian shirt and an apron. His ownership of the coffee shop has to come from love, right?

I want to tell in Japanese that I had a novel once that I wanted to write so bad that it hurt to pee. I move my mouth but don't actually say anything, and then I'm writing on the page.

"Kaitteriu," I say over and over again as I scribble.

My writing brings me places like coffee shops on second floors overlooking people, hopefully they have loves -- things that work out more often than not.

I hope they have writerly moments, just, you know, in their own ways.

I hope you do too reader. This is not the end.

More odd reflections will take me further and further into a world that becomes more beautiful with every act of wordplay.


Like readerly moments?
Try out

The izakaya suddenly goes silent. When I turn around all I can see is a row of salarymen lining the entrance. And there he is. The regional manager casually walks in, wearing full samurai armor, his fat oozing from the sides, his rosy cheeks and smile masking a mind made for cruelty.


“Oh God, who invited this cunt?” the Welshman says out loud.


I see the majority of the people scatter and flee for the door. They hurry to pay their bill and leave, but it soon becomes apparent that no one can leave with Inoue’s large frame blocking the entrance. Inoue lingers there, taking in deep gobs of air and letting them out slowly.


“Hot in here, eh,” he says and gives a short little sputter-laugh.


And it is. The people previously trying to make their way out the door fidget and try to find places to stand and sit. With so many people in the izakaya and none of the jolly merriment of seconds before we all seem to be sweating. I see out of the corner of my eye Kichijiro’s head shoot up from the table and his hands start to tremble with fear. Inoue finally begins to make his way over to our part of the table. He gives a kind of half-sputter laugh, then sits down next to the Welshman.


“You guys are dressed a bit formally for a party, aren’t you?” the Welshman says.


The samurai gives that same sputter-laugh and then calls for beers for him and all of his men. “I just came to congratulate you for a job well done and to wish you farewell on your journey back to your country.”


Kichijiro is shaking all over, and I’m rubbing my eyes, desperately trying to see what is there in front of me. I blink my eyes. When I close my right eye, I can see the same fat man in a full business suit. When I close the left eye and open the right, it’s my foster father Chuck. When I open both my eyes again, there is no mistaking it—it’s Inoue in full samurai armor.


All of us sit still. Our sweat and musk soon fill the room. I look to see where Aussie-Grunge is, and when I see her even she has a look of panic. One of the salarymen comes with a small Japanese folding fan and begins to fan Inoue. While the rest of us remain silent, Inoue and his troupe make off-the-cuff remarks in spattered English about foreigner arrogance, lazy work habits, and a lack of respect. I expect Mikey Welsh to do something—come up with some witty insult, pull down his pants and flash them, something—but all he does is shake his head. I soon realize that I’ve now met the one person who intimidates even the Welshman.


Inoue puts his flabby arm around Mikey. “I will miss you, you little arrogant foreigner—‘arrogant,’ is that the correct word?” He gives another stunted bureaucratic laugh. “My English is so poor. But what do you expect from us Japanese? We are just a simple people with simple ways.” Finally, Inoue and his troupe stand up. They ask for their tab, and I see Kichijiro settle down with a sigh of relief. “It’s okay,” Inoue says. “I did not mean to interrupt your party. Have all the fun you can handle. Everyone knows that the common worker is the soul of Japan. I just came for this one,” he says, pointing to Kichijiro.


“You see, he is my sister’s son. I try to look out for him. I give him a good job and a nice salary, but look what happens. Family, what are you going to do, eh?”


The look of disgust on the Welshman’s face is pronounced. Is he seeing what I’m seeing?


If you want to check out more, read "The Ghosts of Nagasaki"

My novel, The Ghosts of Nagasaki, is free to download on Kindle for the next day or so. Here is the link:

https://www.amazon.com/Ghosts-Nagasak...

Download, share, enjoy!


Here is the first page of the book


The long backward perspective one gets from the angle of a word processor some years later is a tricky one. As a connoisseur of biography and autobiography I know that there is nothing less reliable than someone writing about his or her own past from his or her own perspective. And for the general welfare of those who look for the bare facts of the matter, I am obliged to stamp on the very first page, in the very first paragraph, in bold italics: All fact-seekers beware.

But if the skewed vision of someone determined to live out their ghosts through words is permitted, then perhaps we may leave the world of pure facts behind and look for an ounce of truth, perhaps the only ounce that matters. One thing is certain, however: I cannot tell you with any great certainty where I am from, what I do, or what I did, for as soon as the telling begins the things that happened change. The only thing I can tell you reliably is that soon I will be dead. The fact that I am not already dead, that I have lived on years after my heart stopped, is indeed a miracle. Perhaps this silly bit of narrative will put the matter to rest.

To sleep, to dream, but to dream of a life past twenty-six, my age at the time of these words... well, that seems a fantasy beyond imagination.

This excerpt is from the novel "The Ghosts of Nagasaki".

You can download a free Kindle copy until July 31st. So, please pick up a copy.
amazon.com/Ghosts-Nagasaki-Daniel-Cla...


Description of the Novel:

One night a foreign business analyst in Tokyo sits down in his spacious high rise apartment and begins typing something. The words pour out and exhaust him. He soon realizes that the words appearing on his laptop are memories of his first days in Nagasaki four years ago.

Nagasaki, the non-birthplace of atomic warfare, but instead its brother, second cousin, was a place full of spirits, a garrulous Welsh roommate, and a lingering mystery. Though he wants to give up his writing, though he wants to let the past rest, within his compulsive writing is the key to his salvation.

Somehow he must finish the story of four years ago--a story that involves a young Japanese girl, the ghost of a dead Japanese writer, and a mysterious island. He must solve this mystery while maneuvering the hazards of middle management, a cruel Japanese samurai, and his own knowledge that if he doesn't solve this mystery soon his heart will transform into a ball of steel, crushing his soul forever.



Enter the Welshman


My workspace in Tokyo is bland and depressing. Yet somehow, I've managed to conquer a part of my small cubicle. I have usurped the space under my desk. When I crawl under, I find my own fortress of solitude, constructed out of books. Stacked way in the back, they lie half hidden by the shadow of the desk. If any of my coworkers were to see me with my feet dangling out of the bottom of my desk, I could always say that I'm searching for the magic portal to former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's head.

Among basic guides on financial analysis, here and there are the books that sustain me: a copy of Barbara Leaming's biography of Orson Welles, here; the History of the Peloponnesian War, there; a few books by Haruki Murakami; and good ol' Maniac Magee. And there, in the very back, is T.E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Perfect.

I take it with me to lunch, in part to ward off the evil spirits and the office lady courting me as a suitor. In part I take it to help me remember.

I walk to a café located near the subway station, an old place with dimmed lights--someplace that seems so forgotten its existence is questionable. Smoke hangs like a fog as the old-timers sit around with their newspapers, cigarettes, and bitter coffee. The older men wear black suits and ties, but it's impossible to tell what they do or even if they're still employed. The older suits and I leave each other to ourselves.

I open the book and read some of my crude handwritten notes from college: ideas about essays, notes on bills I had to pay. All these things remind me of those haphazard, fast days that were finished before they ever began. Eventually, I focus on the words because I want to be sitting next to Lawrence. Not the real T.E. Lawrence, but the one that exists in my head.

If every moment has a rhythm, then every discomfort has its book, an author who shares in your feelings with solidarity. Today, T.E. Lawrence is my confidant. My eyes go over the words, feeling his uneasiness, feeling the awkwardness of writing, the relief of expression/confession, and the frightening sensation when an expression catches the tail end of something hidden in truth's basement.

"A man who gives himself to be a possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life." In my buttoned-down suit, necktie choking my face red, my hair nicely trimmed, I can feel T.E. Lawrence's cold, clammy sentiment on the back of my neck. Glancing over the pages I'm reminded that I'm an Englishman in Arab garb. I am here in Tokyo, and cannot explain my own existence. My shoes, dress, tongue, and nationality clash beautifully with what is around me, and for a moment I'm sure I exist unreal as mountain gods oppressing the lives of salarymen, the supernatural management of Japan waiting to weed out the malcontents.

***

Though I sit in the coffee shop with Lawrence, my mind lives in that short time when I first arrived in Nagasaki four years ago. As I unpack my books from my suitcase and pile them in the corner of my tatami mat room, my Welsh roommate looks on, speaking quickly, a little bit incomprehensibly. He makes his way from a self-introduction to the finer points of Japanese customs in the time it takes me to wonder how he changed the subject so quickly.

"What's your name?" I ask.


This person, my roommate, he could be real. He could be real in the way you and I know real. Or he could just be a figment of my imagination. I choose to hide his real-fantasy under tasteless pseudonym.

"Let's see, you can call me beer-belly Mike," he offers in his thick Welsh accent, showing off his protruding belly.

"Nah."

"How about Long-schlong McFaddon?" he says.

"They're pseudonyms, not stage names. It's not like we're porn stars."

"Speak for yourself, mate. I aspire to greater things."

"How about Mikey Welsh?"

"Oh I see, because you want to constantly point out my nationality.

Is that how you're going to play the game? What do we call you then, Joe America?"

"You don't need to call me anything, because I'll be narrating this adventure."

"I see, fancy yourself as the protagonist, do you? Well, good luck with that."

"Thanks."

"Now, on to other issues of concern."

"Okay."

"So you're from the States, right?"

"Yeah."

"Do you or have you ever owned a handgun?"

"No."

"Right. Are you at all religious? Do you babble a lot about finding Jesus and the horrors of evolutionary theory?"

"I don't think so."

"Do you believe that your government really needs to spend as much money on defense as the rest of the world combined?"

"I haven't really thought about it," I say honestly.

"Do you call football 'soccer'?"

"Uh . . . you mean the sport where they kick the ball around. Yeah, I call it soccer."

"That might be a bit of a problem. Confusion and what not. We could soon have a whole Tower of Babel thing going on before you know it. These things have a tendency to snowball, you see. Okay, fair enough, though at some point we really should discuss US defense spending a bit more. Let me give you a fair bit of warning: right after I get off the can, the bathroom stinks for a good twenty or thirty minutes. The fan in there works, but I don't think it's sucking up any of the stink. I can't speak very much Japanese, so I haven't been able to call any maintenance people to come and fix it. By the way, I've had quite a few guys look over at my johnson. Japanese men that is, not Americans. Don't be bothered mate, it's not because they're queer or anything, it's just that they're curious. Same thing with the touching. I was waiting at the tram stop the other day, and I saw two boys feeling each others' muscles. Not just touching them, you understand, but really checking each other out, going for a good rub. Nobody much worries about these kinds of things because nobody even considers the idea that they may be homosexual, at least not in Nagasaki. Are you homosexual?"

"No."

"Are you a homophobe?"

"No."

"Well, that's a relief. That you're not a homophobe that is, not that you're not homosexual."

I soon realize that he doesn't plan on stopping anytime soon, that he's going to continue talking, and that I can either wait for him to run out of breath or I can move on with my life. So I continue to unpack my books and stack them in the corner. Meanwhile, he seems to make himself more comfortable in my room, settling in for the long haul.

"I had a mate who was a homosexual, but he didn't know it till one day when he gets a good look at me coming out of the shower. Anyway, that's at least what I think happened based on information I got from a mate of mine. You can imagine how awkward that must've been. He was a real monstrous hooligan looking dude as well. So imagine this butch, hard-ass dude coming up to me and being like: 'Hey Mikey, I caught a
glimpse of your johnson and now I got a thing for the schlong.'" He says this last part doing his best hooligan impression.

"Now that I think about it, I guess I should be a bit flattered. I mean, I have the kind of johnson that turns men gay. Gotta figure there're worse things out there. After all, I could have the kind of prick that turns women lesbian. Or who was that American guy who got his cock cut off? I could have a detachable. We could go play catch with it if we ever got bored. Imagine playing 'catch the genitalia.' That would be a hell of a first date."

This catches me at the right moment and I find myself laughing.

My mind is swirling, trying to digest this. Unable to, I go back to unstacking books. Each book has its own history. I get to the T.E. Lawrence book and something about it touches me. I was supposed to read the book for a university class but never got around to it. When I touch it I'm reminded of the accumulated weight of unfinished projects.

"Aw look at that--Lawrence of Arabia. Heard the guy liked a bit of the sadomasochism from time to time. Punishment for all the bad things he had to do in the desert. The weight of guilt tends to have unusual effects on people."

When he says this, I just shrug.

Before I even finish my shrug, though, he's off on another subject.

"I see you like to read," the Welshman says, looking through my books. "I had a friend who went to America one time, somewhere in the South. He was reading a book on politics at a bus station and someone comes up to him and says: 'Watcha readin' for?' Not 'Watcha readin'?' but, 'Watcha readin' for?'" He says this trying to do his best impression of someone from the American South.

"I tell you what, though," he says to me. "I've only known you for about ten minutes, but as long as you don't start pummeling me with a detachable penis, I think we're going to get along just fine."

He was Mikey Welsh, the Welshman, my Welsh roommate. As I would find out later, his ranting was a way to keep his mind healthy--a good rant before work, a rant after supper, and then he would stop for a cigarette or to eat on occasion, although I'm sure he babbled in his sleep. Great Ciceronian speeches no doubt.

It's hard to know now whether he was real or not. Long after he said he was supposed to leave Nagasaki, he stayed behind, transmuting his body into a fire-breathing, drunk and garrulous dragon. He was my professor in all things Japanese, better than a Lonely Planet because he knew how to make an observation entertaining, twist it a bit and turn it into something philosophical. He was also the one who convinced me to treat my stay more like a getaway than the start of a new life, less seriously than I was inclined to, though I had my heart set on this not being Hemingway's Spain.

***

Back in the café in Tokyo, I take a break to go pee. I'm holding my member trying to relax and let nature take its course. The guy next to me casually turns his head my way and smiles. I try not to look perturbed. I stare straight ahead, trying to ignore him. But this proves easier said than done. Soon he's nonchalantly looking downward, examining my penis.

"Not bad," he says in his best English with a nod of approval.

I smile to myself; thoughts of the Welshman cross my mind. And as I give my member a last shake, I realize that I'm shaking it in two places at once, and that when I leave the bathroom there's a good chance I'll be twenty-two again and back in Nagasaki.

You think you know me from what that American dude wrote about me in his novel, The Ghosts of Nagasaki.



Think I'm some slovenly Welsh cunt that just up and rolled out of bed one day and popped into a novel, do you? A bit of comic relief here? A bit of social commentary there? European flavor of the week?

That Florida boy has told some Burger King whoppers in his time, flipped a Big Mac lie here and there, and he has a way of taking the piss out of people that can make you look like the cuntiest cunt that ever cunted up a city. Had me whipping my one-eyed trouser monster at karaoke (never happened) or at least that's what my mate told me who read the book.

Still, I did have one too many trips, though it wasn't acid so much as the ecstasy that made Mr. Sparkles appear. Wasn't no lizard or dragon either. Was my childhood teddy bear that came to life. He was pink, though, and filled with sparkles.

Questioning my manhood, are you? No bother to me, mate. Not sure if this makes a difference. Not sure if any of these fucking words are going cure a genital wart or feed some starving baby in Africa. About as useful as a bag of wank...that's something my younger self would have said. My older self now works in finance and is creating the biggest fucking turd of a financial instrument that's going to end the world. Naw, just kidding, but I am trying to find the right kind of ecstasy pill to get me through my dull-as-fuckity-fuck day job.


*A special thank you to The Welshman from my novel for returning for this blog post. Now piss off, reader, and buy a copy of my book, The Ghosts of Nagasaki, before I starve to death.

Here it is:
https://www.amazon.com/Ghosts-Nagasak...

Chop. Chop.

The novel "The Ghosts of Nagasaki" is free to download on Amazon Kindle for a limited time -- August 18 -- 22.

The novel in a nutshell:

"Blurring memory and myth, The Ghosts of Nagasaki follows an American expatriate in Japan as he confronts specters of war, love, and loss that haunt both the city and his own past."

https://a.co/d/7EUOuQr