On late nights like these, days when I don’t have dates, I rest on my balcony and smoke my life away, reliving the memories of my childhood. Feeling myself drift away into the cloud from my cigarette. I watched the thin wisp of smoke trailing away, up into the polluted 21st century air before reaching the tiny patch of the clear night sky amongst all the buildings and dissolving.
Molding myself into the body of a child, and trying to retrieve, to reach out and grasp, my pure innocence from seventeen years ago. I close my eyes and imagine that all my childhood memories will wash up right here in my mind as I stood on my balcony.
I used to have a life. I had parents, I had a name, I had friends; I was a someone. But as you grow older in Tokyo, you become a noone. My father was a no one, as well as my mom. My father had always been a businessman, and every morning he would change into his business suit. He was impossible to distinguish amongst thousands of other buisnessmen that made up the sea of Tokyo. He wore the same suit, like thousands, day after day, life becoming more dull as each day passed. Hour after hour, he sat in front of the soft glow of the computer screen, mersemized; brainwashed. In the world where everything were made of pixels, nothing was real anymore. It would become dark, and he would go to a bar alone, drinking his life away. He sometimes arrived home from a taxi, being sent by someone for being so drunk.
One day, he jumped in front of a train and killed himself- didn't even leave a note. I don't even remember what day it was when he commited suicide. In a place where you have no position, you stop keeping track of days.
And I remember my mother crying and saying, "Kaori, don't ever do what your father did."
My mother was in the same position as my father, not much better than him. She was an office lady, leading the same life as my father had. She left 1000 yen on the table for me to buy dinner at the convenience store. She came home late.
School was not much different, and I asked myself, "Why am I getting an education only to end up like my mother and father, the people of Tokyo?" I could see myself in the future, a figure exactly as my mother.
I stopped going to school and decided, why not get an early start? I got into hostessing, where I received a new name: Akiko.
I don't have a name anymore.
I am not recognized by anybody.
I do not know who I am,
nor do others know that I am.
