Sweepstakes

It is the steady swooshing sound that wakes me up.

It vaguely registers that I am on a train as I struggle to reach osmosis through the thin membrane between wakefulness and sleep. I hear quiet Japanese spoken as I strain to open my eyes.

The words flow over me, incomprehensible for a moment. I can pick out a meaning here and there, just enough to know it is a mom helping her child open the bento she brought for lunch. It is an ekiben, one of those train station offerings; not that I have ever had one because I have never been to Japan. My sister, an ESL teacher, hauled a bunch of magazines out of the recycling bin at the refuse station in her town and mailed them to me. There was an article about ekiben included in one of the issues. It took me months to translate.

My eyes fly open as I come to the surface of wakefulness with a jerk.

There is a man. He is Japanese.

I get the faintly sick to my stomach feeling I have whenever I have to talk to someone I do not know. The language does not matter.

“Eto, sumimasen, watashi wa...” I want to say I am confused, but I cannot think of the word. I am not fluent. I have also never spoken Japanese out loud to anyone but myself.

He looks up.

“It’s OK. I speak English,” he is saying. Said. Says. In Japanese. I run through the verb conjugation rules in my mind and give it up to focus on him. Japanese grammar thrives on the vague.

I have wanted to visit Japan for about ten years, starting with the year I grew bored with reading novels. I borrowed the only Japanese language learning book from my local library. After renewing the book for a year and a half, the librarian called to say I had reached the library limit on book renewals. I went out and bought my own copy.

I say it in English this time. “Excuse me, but I’m confused.” I pause. Maybe confused is not the right word to use in this situation. Should I say concerned, worried, troubled? Not abunai, danger, but not daijoubu, OK either. No description that comes to mind seems to fit in this context in either language.

I start again. “Where are we?”

His eyebrows come together slightly. I can tell he is trying to be polite against his better judgment.

“On the train,” he offers as if stating the obvious is part of the lesson found in Chapter 3: “On the Train”.

He looks down, reading the baseball statistics in the daily newspaper.

“Yes, but,” I interrupt, “how did we get here?”

He looks me in the eye. “How does anyone get anywhere?” He goes back to reading.

I think about that for a while. I am an artist trying to be a designer, a designer trying to be an author, and an author trying to be a linguist. I like to garden in three languages, plus Latin.

“Just so,” he adds, still looking over the news.

The last thing I remember before waking up on the train is opening an envelope. It was one of those contest entry envelopes with “You’ve Won!” printed boldly on the outside, with paper check-looking wavy lines in the plastic window with my name on it. I always open them because as the New York Lottery advertisement states, “Hey, you never know.”

I waited for all the inserts to fall out. How many magazines would I need to buy? (No purchase necessary.) Or, how many types of Santa wrapping paper were offered? (in April) Nothing fell out.

Printed at the bottom of the “check” in tiny lettering: You may win a trip to Japan. Enter now. The face value was $25,000. I filled out the entry form.

I only have a few deep secrets, and this is one of them. I enter sweepstakes. Of course, not just any old thing offered. “Kitchen Pantry Makeover”, “Your Beautiful Backyard”, “Dream Bathroom”, “Free Trip to Japan”. These are all on my enter-whenever-you-see-them sweepstakes list.

I also enter writing contests. The odds of winning are probably better than winning at playing the lottery, and it usually costs very little or nothing to enter them. Many would call it a stingy effort, but I prefer thinking of it as frugality. You could say it would be faster to get what I want by taking a second job, but at least when I enter writing contests, I can justify the time spent as self-improvement.

I study his face surreptitiously. It looks familiar. He has finished reading the sports section and moved on to reading reviews in the arts section.

I try it out in my head first. Self-introduction is a skill prized in Japan. My opening should sound something like this: I am (name). Please take care of me. I live in (city). I am a (profession).

Then perhaps I could add another phrase. Would you like my business card? Always give and receive these with two hands. (Chapter 2: “In the Office”)

“Two hands, two hands,” I mutter out loud.

The man looks up.

“I'm a writer.” In my nervousness, I blow the carefully thought-out introduction.

“I know,” he says. There is no sarcasm or irony whatsoever, even in the depths of his eyes.

“How did you know?” I ask.

“We all are, aren't we? Writers, I mean. Here on the train, and everyone in other times and places.”

I look around. There is no one else nearby except the woman and her child. The woman is not looking at us, but I can tell she is listening. Her child has fallen asleep. I look back at the man.

“You are that author, right? Murakami...” Should I say sensei or san? Sama sounds too formal. Haruki seems a bit too informal. “San.” I decide on my choice of honorific out loud.

“I love your work.” Of course, I would choose the most inane sentence ever uttered in the history of stupid sentences, but he does not seem to mind. He smiles.

“I love the books, of course, and the short story about meeting the perfect girl in April, but my favorite is the essay about making up authors and doing book reviews on their non-existent books.” Thinking about it again makes me chuckle.

“I'm not really a writer, but maybe I could be.” I add this, feeling a sudden doubtful sadness. I have always thought people lie because they wish things could be more than they are, or perhaps wish they could be better people. But the strange thing about it is that lying does the opposite to your insides. The more lies you tell, the smaller you become on the inside because the less you are you. I'm not sure how white lies fit into this theory. There could be some exceptions to the rule. How big does a lie have to get before it is not a white lie anymore? Doctors have the “First, Do No Harm” rule, but are there any rules like that for the written word?

“A writer is someone who writes, no more, no less,” he replied. At least, that is what I thought I heard. Maybe I was putting words in his mouth because I wanted him to say that.

I look out the window. Perhaps we are on the Shinkansen bullet train. I am not sure. Outside, the scenery is whipping by except for the clouds. They seem to hang in the sky while we revolve around them.

“Where are we going?”

“The journey is often more important than the destination.” This opinion came from the woman with the child.

The door to the car slides open. There is a conductor. I could say he looks like Colonel Sanders, but I would be lying for dramatic purposes. He just looks like an ordinary train conductor, the type who gets angry when you have the wrong ticket, or worse, no ticket at all. I check my pockets, but there is nothing in them. No identification. No proof of anything. I start to panic.

“Here, take this.” Haruki Murakami is passing me his ticket.

“But what will you do without a ticket?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be getting off this particular train at the next stop anyway.” He gathers his coat and umbrella and walks down the gently swaying corridor past the conductor, who does not even spare a glance in his direction, as if Haruki Murakami walks by every day.

The conductor finally reaches my seat. I timidly hand him my ticket.

“This seems in order,” he says. “Is there anything you need to make your journey more comfortable?”

“You wouldn't happen to have a pencil and a notebook? I'd like to do some writing.”