Leaving 2046

This morning, I awoke from an incredibly vivid recollection of a night last year. As someone who rarely remembers their dreams this was unusual, but to confuse things further, the memory was incredibly lucid. I could picture myself exactly then, slot myself into the moment, and hear and smell the rain. This is something that has never happened to me before and, to tell the truth, it freaked me out a little.

It was a night in early winter and, on a whim, Keiko and I had gone to see a movie at a new multiplex in the middle of nowhere. The area was destined to become a western-style housing estate, one similar to the many others springing up on the outskirts of smaller cities in Japan. So far all they’d managed to do was lay some down roads, put up streetlights and run a train line through the centre of an enormous expanse of dusty gravel. House markings neatly laid out in white chalk against empty driveways. A network of interconnected emptiness, something you do not often see in Japan. Although it had been a crisp, clear winter night when we set out, as we pulled into the temporary car park, it had begun to pour with rain.

We’d seen Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046, a film I’d pieced together as being, at least in part, about a newspaper journalist living in Hong Kong in the 1960s, writing a novel about a train returning from 2046, as he skipped from one doomed love affair after another. This was merely a best guess, as the story was jumpy, non-linear, and with the film being spoken in a mixture of Cantonese, Japanese and Mandarin, with Japanese subtitles, I had a hard time following what was going on. It was gorgeous though, with exquisite cinematography and artful use of mirrors to show off the period sets. I spent most of my time goggling at the scenery, at Ziyi Zhang looking radiant, and frantically trying to keep up with the subtitles.

When we emerged from the theatre, and ran out into the rain under a shared plastic umbrella, the questions began to spill from me. She grinned, pulled at my hand, and said she’d explain to me in the car. The whole complex had an unscuffed sheen to it, accentuated by the rain on the wet concrete and the huge empty spaces. Her car, a glistening child’s toy atop a field of gray, sat alone amidst hundreds of identical street lights. It was silent, most sane people long since being at home in bed or tucked up under a warm kotatsu.

And so we ran. We ran through the empty gravel wasteland of the massive temporary car park and stood on a huge concrete bridge, connecting nothing to nothing, over an empty highway. The last train to Kobe rumbled by underneath, the light from the windows illuminating the empty lanes on both sides.

Keiko has an amazingly infectious laugh. Her whole body shakes, she slaps her thighs and guffaws until you think she’s going to run out of breath and pass out. Spending any amount of time with her leaves you gasping for breath as you too grin and giggle. We drove back slowly, down single-lane roads in the pouring rain, while I explained my ideas of what had happened, and she laughed at my utter incomprehension, her voice mingling with the beating of rain on the roof. And all the while Kasabian is singing, “I just cant stop losin’ control.”

Permalink Posted in Mwah on Thursday May 26, 2005.