Konbinis Are Churches

I was living on FamilyMart rice balls and low blood sugar dreams. Tokyo nights too hot to sleep and too cold to stay awake. It’s always 3:47 a.m. when you walk into a konbini. The neon light like a kiss from a dying god. The buzz of the fridges like the sigh of someone who’s given up. Meet me at the 7-Eleven by the tracks. She brought a can of Strong Zero and an open wound. Konbinis are churches. Sacred spaces where nobody prays but everyone kneels. Bent before microwave ramen, counting coins. The salaryman, suit crumpled like a used cigarette box. The girl with smeared lipstick, eyeliner like bruises. The boy in a school uniform who’s not going home tonight.

Draw Me Like One of Your Japanese Girls

They say healing is hard. But sometimes it’s just about zoning out. Being stupid on purpose. Watching colors flicker on a screen and laughing like a child who’s forgotten the war in its chest. That’s what I needed right now. And that’s what I found in Comic Girls. It’s soft like cotton candy after crying. Four broken girls. Drawing manga. Living together. Nobody tries to be a hero. They’re just sad and messy and trying. That’s more than I can say about most people. Kaoruko is fifteen. And too small for all this pain. She draws those little four-panel comics, the kind you read and forget in ten seconds, but she still tries. Kaoruko ranks last in a reader poll and cries alone in a hallway.

Food and the City

I’m collecting places like bruises. My plan is to swallow Kumamoto whole. I want its bars, its noodle shops, its grease-stained counters. I want every damn corner of this city that smells like soy and sweat. I want sushi with my hands, ramen burning my tongue, pizza in alleys that look like everyone forgot they were alleys. I want it messy, I want it cheap, I want it at 2 a.m. when only ghosts and drunk boys are awake. Neon-lit karaoke rooms where someone’s always crying into a mic. Dark izakayas where salarymen tell the same story again and again. Host clubs with smiles made of plastic and eyes like black tea. Coffee shops with maids, with books, with silence thick like syrup.

Imagined Conversations

Two years have passed since Sina fled from my apartment. We haven’t exchanged a single word since. From what I gathered, she had taken to her newfound freedom in this city with ease, made important connections, and could be seen at every good party attended by high society. Lately, she had started hosting a few shows on a music channel, occasionally modeled for one or two local fashion labels, and was rumored to have flings with musicians, managers, and television personalities. Every now and then, I encountered this new version of her at various events and even photographed her now and then, arm in arm with overbred celebrities. She smiled and ignored me. Always.

Me at the Zoo

They said it was for our Japanese Arts Class. Something about sketching wild animals to improve our line sensitivity. But in reality, it was about sunshine, good company, and getting to know some new place - at least for me. I walked to the local zoo on the other side of the city. It took hours, but I didn’t mind. I had my AirPods with some cheesy J-pop on and the sky above me was this deep electric blue, full of possibility. I passed babbling creeks that glittered like broken mirrors and old parks where tiny dogs pulled at their leashes like they had somewhere better to be. Streets were quiet, except for the soft whir of bicycle wheels and wind brushing tree leaves like secrets.

A Serene Fairytale

Who gives a shit what Hollywood’s golden boys are sweating over in their hot rooms with their endless rewrites and plastic champagne. Because at the beginning of this millennium something happened. Something too soft to scream and too sharp to forget. The best movie of all time slipped through like smoke. Lost in Translation. And all the computer effects and starlet tits in the world can’t erase it. Coked-up executives can pump a movie full of crap and call it love, but it won’t bleed like this one. It won’t ache like this one. This one didn’t even need Los Angeles, New York, or whatever American tax haven dump bent over the lowest - it had Tokyo like a slow pulse under pale skin.

My Plum Ghost

I participated in an art contest. Nothing serious, but it swallowed me whole. The theme was Yokai. Japanese spirits, monsters, the beautiful weirdness that lives between shadows and dreams. For this, I built a canvas with my bare hands in my Japanese Arts class. Cut the wood, stretched the cloth. I wanted it to feel like something real. Not digital. Not fake. Something that bleeds when touched. I used traditional materials. Glue, brushes, powdered pigments that smelled like the inside of a shrine. Nothing fancy. Just old magic. I spent days sitting in our classroom, hunched over it like a secret I couldn’t share. The canvas stared back at me. It whispered things. Or maybe I was just tired.

A Small Disaster

It was one of those unbearably hot summer days, the kind where the sunlight doesn’t just shine but sears itself into my skin, leaving behind a golden haze that clings to me like memory. The air shimmered with heat, thick and heavy, and the evening dragged on like a spell that refused to break. Even the shadows seemed to glow. The night stayed distant, as though held back by some invisible force. Eva sat beside me, her gaze adrift, following the tender figure of the dark-haired, olive-skinned waiter with a softness in her eyes that seemed to forget I was there. I stirred my drink absentmindedly, poking at the floating ice cubes with my straw, hoping they’d give way. They didn’t.

Call Me Ishmael

I was drifting. Low blood sugar. Air like soup. I hadn’t eaten all day, or maybe I had, I don’t remember. I was walking through a supermarket in Japan, one of those blinding clean ones, all neon light and weird elevator music. Cold, too cold. Fish eyes watching me from slabs of ice. And then there it was. Whale. Rae flesh like wet velvet. Whispering to me from behind cellophane. I stared at it the way I stare at someone I’ve seen in a dream before. Wrong and perfect at the same time. Bought it like buying a secret. No one stopped me. No one said a word. The machine at the checkout beeped after I fed it with some yen. And then the small pieces of a slaughtered giant were mine.

A Neon Disease

Neo-Tokyo is a wound. It breathes smoke and vomits neon. It’s filthy. It’s alive. The streets are soaked in broken dreams. Syringes, sex, safe hopelessness. Skyscrapers scream in color, pink and blue and acid green. And deep inside this cyberpunk hellhole, built onto the ruins of a wiped out city, lives Tetsuo. He was a boy, like so many others. Then a special kind of magic awakened inside him. Power. Screaming, impossible power. Not even he could hold it. And then the men in the shadows came. The ones in coats. With needles. With wires. With orders. Contain him, they said. Because they were afraid, of Akira. Always Akira. That name. That myth. That black hole of a boy.