fiat lux (cahier lukhnos)

‘”Yoibito Kurushii was a hard-working programmer who loved his job and his girlfriend. One day when he came home, his jaw dropped. Every piece of furniture, every book from the shelf, everything that could be said of their shared life for the past few years, was removed. The house was so tidily cleaned that he began to wonder if he was experiencing a scene in fiction. Was his girlfriend abducted by some secret service aliens? Or space pirates? Or was his girlfriend in fact an alien herself?

Just as different scenarios went on in the different cores of his head, he noticed a piece of letter-sized paper on the floor, all uppercase letters, in Arial (yes, in Arial):

‘THE OTHER DAY I WAS NAKED AND YOU WERE STILL DOING YOUR @#$%! CODING ?!’”

I was laughing out loud and told the person sitting next to me. “Hey, it’s such a nice story! I should blog it. In fact I’m blogging it right now!”

She shouted at me:

“I AM NAKED NOW AND YOU ARE TELLING ME YOU’RE @#$%! BLOGGING ?!”‘

I was rolling on the floor laughing and told the person …

lukhnos :: Jan.02.2009 :: fiction :: No Comments »

It rained, serendipitously, when he was deciding which part of his past to throw away, whom to avenge, and how to forget.

Matsumoto Shinosuke, also known as Dr. T in his pro circle, was an ASP .NET programmer who wrote bespoke, or customized, blog systems in Akihabara, Tokyo. But his real job was a professional assassin. Ironically, the blog systems he made had such a good reputation of having very little spam. Probably it’s because Mr. Matsumoto applied his pro assassin knowledge to spam killing, at the expense of his victims.

There was once when Mr. Matsumoto’s cover and real jobs overlapped. A certain telecom conglomerate was suffering huge bandwidth loss because of botnet attacks. The conglomerate, run by one of Japan’s oldest families, had finally had enough and sought the help from the underworld. While picking up the hit man was not hard, finding out the mastermind behind the botnet was trickier. An anti-spam strike team finally identified the man, a script language black-belt who scoffed anyone whose expertise ends in the word dot en ee tee. What the man, let’s call him the V, didn’t realize was that, he made some of such scoffs on a free, anonymous blog system, which, to his haughty ignorance, was a bespoke work implemented by no one but our Dr. T, in, to the V’s horror, ASP .NET. And Mr. Matsumoto hated it most when people scoffed at his being master of ASP .NET, even if he was equally fluent in any script language the source code of which requires to start with a shebang.

So a detective service paid Mr. Matsumoto’s cover job employer (actually, one of his cover job employers) to locate the V, and the conglomerate paid Mr. Matsumoto, indirectly through layers of underworld connections, for the ultimate strike. It couldn’t be a happier assignment: a fat double-pay. But of course it would not be a happy ending for the V.

On a rainy, quiet night Mr. Matsumoto arrived at the door of the V’s posh apartment in the equally posh community of Daikanyama. The doorbell rang, and exactly 180 seconds later, a spammer was totally unwound just like a most insignificant exception in a try-catch clause, and to Dr. T’s delight, one less ASP .NET scoffer. A bloodstained laptop was left in the scene, the signature of Mr. Matsumoto’s yet another tour de force.

lukhnos :: Apr.29.2008 :: fiction :: 2 Comments »

(r and I were playing this silly word game and suddenly this short piece got its own shape. The last time it flowed out so naturally was in 2001. So here it is.)

I used to be a Friday night usher when I was an exchange student in Tokyo. There is a Japanese saying that goes, “Only those without boyfriends work as Friday night ushers.” How true.

The theater was located in a shabby apartment in the hustle-and-bustle district of Shibuya-ku. It specialized in gay porns, or “pink movies” in Japanese. As for why such a theater needed a girl usher remained a mystery. I was 15 then. It is hard to find a decent baito, or a part-time job, when you are 15, unless you want to do McJobs greeting customers with McIrashaimase’s. It is especially hard when you are a gaijin. I was young, fearless and curious about the world. So when I was offered the job I was happy to take it. And anyway I could watch films for free, even if they were gay porns.

Sekuhara, or sexual harasssment, was not a problem in such a theater. There was really only one downside about this job, and it was that, sometimes the theater would rerun the same film so often, that eventually I could recall every line of, say, “Harajuku High School Student Sprees” (there weren’t that many lines, anyway). But I could reassure you, the actors therein were well over 18, that no sane person would ever believe those were really high school student sprees. Still, what is theater (or film) if you don’t have faith in things not real?

Sometimes there were porns that were obscure. Some of them were trying to be arty, and some of them really were. Occasionally there was one film that had a plot like those of Kieslowski’s La double vie de Véronique or Shunji Iwai’s Love Letter. There was even a film noir porn that was probably made in the late 1950s, with all the montage techniques that you could find in Battleship Potemkin, but had a plot set near the end of the Edo Bakufu era and colored by some chanbara scenes here and there! And if you still believed what I said, you would suspect if those were really gay porns. I had to say I was bewildered, too, when I was watching that very film, e.g. one nude 40-something aniki engaged in chanbara fights with a juicy (relatively so in that era) late 20-something. Perhaps the film tried to work on the level of metaphor. I just didn’t get it.

At this point you might wonder how I reacted to the scenes in the theatre. You know what I mean by that. I wouldn’t say I didn’t see anything, but I didn’t care much either.

There weren’t many young people that frequented such a theater. Pink movies were already in decline when I was in Japan. Naturally I didn’t expect to get to know anyone either. There was once, though, that I met a university student (claiming he studied at Waseda) there. He was totally out of that place, as he didn’t seem to blend in well the toilet scene there. He visited there a few times and eventually we exchanged snail mail addresses.

I worked there as a Friday usher for around 4 months. Later a fellow exchange student referred a Lawson job to me. I had memorized enough film lines, and the timing was good for a change. For some unknown reasons, I still wrote New Year cards to the university student. I never received his card in return until last Christmas. Then I received a beautifully printed card. It was a wedding invitation, with his name on it. With a woman.

There was no point to go to the wedding, as I didn’t really know him. Still I wrote him a thank-you card, thanking him for inviting me and wishing them well. Writing that card, somehow I felt a little sadness inside, as if I missed or lost something.

Ah, atashi tachi no fiaresu na seishun jidai (we girls’ fearless youth).

lukhnos :: Sep.09.2006 :: fiction :: No Comments »