Karōshi Blues
Always industrious, Atsushi, a young man, never for a moment felt relaxed unless he was busy working on something, whether it be busy working at his occupation — a quintessential salaryman, if there ever was one — or, when in the rare time he wasn’t at work, when he wasn’t working his countless overtime hours without pay, when after his boss tells him he must stop working so hard and to take some time off and go home, to relax a bit, when he was off-duty (so to speak), he was busy cleaning his small but tidy apartment — an apartment that rarely ever really needed cleaning since he was always cleaning it, just as he was always fixing things when they weren’t really in need of repair (it may be safe to say that he was more a tinkerer, a maintainerer, than he was a repairerer) — and when he could not find even one more speck of dirt in his apartment to clean or one more misaligned clock gear or new computer application to tinker with (he considered himself somewhat of a lay software developer), then he would busy himself making lists of things he needed to do — it may be a bit of a stretch to say that he needed to do these things he listed since he was always on top of things, always up on his shopping or bill paying or dental or medical needs — but still he listed them as things that needed being done at some point in the future, trying the best as he may to project out when exactly they would be needing done, along with steps, procedural requirements, applicable phone numbers, website addresses, etc., footnoted in detail, or, perhaps, outlined even, as required, all while constantly thinking, wishing he wouldn’t have to waste his time with such menial things when he could be back at work, working.
Filed under: Flash Fiction Tagged: busy working, culture, fiction, isolation, Japan, karoshi, salaryman, satire, work, workaholic, working oneself to death, writing
