Sato Sushi

This short piece I wrote for a writing class on Character development. The assignment was to create a short scene with two characters from things I recently read, and then add a third character of my own creation. The first character in our scene is Hugh Glass, the main character from the Revenant. Glass is a hard frontier man who wants revenge and to get his gun back from the men who betrayed him. He has a strong relationship to the American frontier, which both awes him and tries to kill him continually. The second character is the persona Walt Whitman adopts for his collection of poems in Leaves of Grass. In it he is an explorer, of both the physical landscape of frontier America and of the more philosophical  experience of nature, and a zen like reveling in life itself as it is. In our scene both are wildly out of place in a small fishing town in Japan, Onjuku. Sato owns and runs Sato Sushi, the one restaurant that is reliably open in Onjuku. Glass wants to take a boat out of Onjku and back to America. Walt wants to have a friend to talk to. Sato just wants to have a calm night so he can leave early and go to bed. 

Scene:

Glass ducks his head through a Noren curtain labeled “Sato Sushi”, and surveys the interior of the bar. Six wooden barrels sit in front of a low counter made from dark wood, smooth with use. Manning the counter stands a stocky Japanese man with a bandana across his forehead, a blue apron, and a large knife in one hand. Sato he assumes. Behind him white Sake bottles fill the wall, each with a script of characters on its front. A tall white man in a cotton shirt and triangular beard sits hunched over the bar. Sato looks from Glass and back again to his previous white customer, waiting for someone to explain the impossible level of foreigners in his shop. Glass ignores his gaze and sits down. Squinting at a menu on the wall, Glass realizes has no idea how to read Japanese and after days of hiking over the Boso peninsula, he’s too hungry to care what he eats. He puts a handful of coins on the counter and says “whatever you have”. Sato continues to stare for a moment before taking the coins and saying in Japanese to no one in particular “I don’t understand one word of what you are saying, but grilled mackerel and sake for you, please wait a moment”. Watching the exchange, Walt chuckles and sits up from his drink. “The sailor, the trapper, the traveler. I welcome him as I welcome myself!” he blurts in the direction of Glass, throwing his arms wide as he speaks. Glass offers no response. “Captitain, O my captain, your trip is completed here! Come share your tale.” Glass glares at him and says sharply “I am a captain no longer, nor my trip finished. Where may I find passage across the Pacific, back to America?”. Walt ponders a moment then addresses Sato as he delivers a plate of grilled fish. The exchange between Walt and the proprietor continues and as Glass eats, Sato's muscles tense, and lowers his voice, almost hissing his answers. Finally, Sato storms off into the back, ending the conversation. Walt watches him leave before turning to Glass “The mysterious ocean ebbs, bringing impalpable breezes and storms as black as night to us. We must wend these shores until this storm passes before moving on”. Glass’s look sours and he takes a long drink of the fragrant sake. He'd rather travel alone, but it may be helpful to travel with this man who speaks and knows the local ways, and there is safety in numbers for what he is facing. Glass extends his hand across the empty seat between them and says “The name is Glass”

The monument IV

Eric unlocks the buzzing phone to a hand holding a stubby GPS labeled “Onjuku Miskatonic Marine Institute” on its side. Flat grey ocean stretches out behind the hand. In the far upper corner of the photo, sky and ocean are connected by blurred streaks of black, forming a dark swath across the scene. Eric can make out what must be house size waves in the darkened area and pulls in a breath of excitement. Looking below the photo, and translating from the texts Japanese to his native English, Eric mouths “Almost there. Looks like rough seas…do we really need to be out here?” He sighs and replies, “Yes, I am very sorry for the inconvenience, but appreciate your support in setting up the data collection buoy. Mission make OMMI famous together start!. A bored face emoji and a thumbs up appear on the screen. 

Eric replaces the phone and swings a backpack to his chest, pulling out a tripod with a laptop attached to it. After a quick inspection, he mutters “drop the buoy out there, put the receiver up here, data goes from there to here, we figure why the Kuroshio is expanding, and then we get our research published”, his free hand pointing in time with his thoughts. Satisfied, he slips the machine back and looks up to a mountainous path in front of him. A dense green forest falls off to the left, and to the right a white cliff face with jagged angles protrudes upwards. He can hear the ocean softly lapping into the shore beyond it.

As he walks briskly up he sees a small cave in the stone cliff. He stops mid stride, and peers in, making out a statue in the back wall. With its snake-like body, thin whiskers, and lion-like face Eric imagines a Chinese dragon. But while the figure's left arm holds up a sphere, where the right arm should be, a mass of thick stone tentacles bursts out of the body and into the wall. Eric stares at the statue with a confused look on his face and mutters “Where have I seen that - Something in the Institute library?” Pulling back from the cave, thoughts keep flowing “The box with the war time photo of the Institute staff? Or the file of that old Spanish Galeon crash research?”. He tries desperately to grasp the connection as he returns to his stride up the trail.

Lost in thought, Eric walks on until suddenly he breaks free of the forest. He stands in a sandy path running the length of a short mountain ridge. The path ends in a rough circle before falling back into the forest below. Incongruously, jutting out of the sand circle is a tall grey stone obelisk, its details somehow blurry in his mind. Involuntarily, Eric’s eyes slip to the ocean behind it where Eric can see the black mass of the Kuroshio, now with strands of mist flowing out of it across the sea. He concentrates and looks back at the obelisk feeling it twist in his vision and quietly says “How have we not seen that from the Institute? We're right down there". 

Breaking his concentration, Eric’s phone rings urgently. “Hey, what are you doing?! Hurry up! It's too dangerous to stay here long.” Yells the voice on the other end. Kenji again Eric thinks, but a deep rumbling in the calls background makes it hard to be sure. "I am very sorry, I just arrived and will set the receiver up as soon as possible” Eric shouts back. A moment's pause, then a softer reply “It's getting weird out here Eric, the visibility has gone to shit. Clouds or something in the air. And how can the waves stay just in this circle, I don't get it” The call drops with another loud rumble.

Eric skirts around the structure, drops to one knee, and reaches back into his backpack. Soon he is back up, extending the tripod and laptop up with him. The laptop flashes and the words “signal strength” appear with text showing 0% to the right. Eric begins pressing the directional keys, while looking between the screen's readout and the ocean, the number moving up and down as he works. Finally the readout settles at 96% before flipping into a similar “GB received” display.

Eric stands up from the laptop and pumps his fist once in the air, a wry smile on his face. Still smiling, he sends a text "Receiver up, data coming in from the Kuroshio. Get back soon, safety first!” and squats down. He opens a small can of coffee from his backpack, lets himself lean back against the structure, and lets out a long relieved sigh. As Eric lazily sips his coffee and watches, he notices the mist expanding into thick bus size tentacles of grey that blot out the horizon and push outwards to the shore. One large tentacle is slowly reaching out towards him, “maybe forming a bridge between me and the Kuroshio, just like our data” he thinks smiling again at himself.

Suddenly, the mist touches the obelisk, and events superimpose together in Eric’s head. The laptop makes a sound like tin foil being smashed and turns black. Where his back touches the structure, shocks of electric ice rip through him, along with a blinding migraine. His hands involuntarily pull to his forehead, and the can crushes into his temple. Through dripping coffee, he sees the mist ripple, somehow turning inside out as an immense, something is pulled from the outer reaches of the mist’s tentacles back towards the ocean. A stomach churning shriek spews from the cell phone, the sound twisted and stretched into something unrecognizable. On the verge of unconsciousness, Eric feels a presence seeping through him from the structure, feels an impossibly heavy weight in his mind, and a malicious, uncaring thirst to know. 

Police report

Chiba prefecture police office - incident report

The superintendent of Sea Side surf, Tanaka hideo, an apartment in Onjuku Japan turned over the following documents to Chiba-shi police station one the day of 2027-04-01. According to Takanak-san, the documents were found in number XXXXX apartment during search. XXXXXX owner Eric had not paid 管理組合 fees for 12 months, and as per apartment regulations was evicted (see document XXXX). During the eviction process, while Eric was not found, the following documents were found on subjects desk