The Ghosts of Nagasaki - Enter the Welshman

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.