Throw a dog a bone

"Books, books, books, they'll swallow you up!" scoffed Yumi, my 17 year old cousin. "Life is more than just reading!" His tense shoulders were squared against me in the doorway. In his face there was a kind of ferocity "You should make up your own opinions, your own experience for once, not rely on books to get you through life like it's some kind of test you can cram into your brain." If he wasn't being spiteful, I had a hard time feeling that from him. I had an inner world that worked for me. It was a world he didn't understand.

Ever since I was very young, the only thing my parents allowed me to do involved books. I was the smart kid of my three siblings, the one who they'd decided would go far in the world. I ploughed through them. But somehow it hadn't translated to anything. My siblings were now comfortably ahead of me. I had a sister who became a hotel manager, a brother who was taking over the family ramen restaurant in Little Tokyo. So what happened to me? I guess the pressure got to me. I have something inside me that rejects expectations. A need to be my own character in the world, even if it never takes shape. Sometimes I helped in that little restaurant of theirs, but even there I felt like an outsider. I never had the need to express myself. It just didn't seem necessary. I just had to read a pile of books, and it didn't feel magical anymore to say or do anything else. So I read book after book and knew their structure, their basic premises, the formula of a good book. All of it wrapped up in a business-sense of what would sell to the public.. 

 Yumi slammed my door. It was at times like these that reality hit me in the chest like a sledgehammer. I was still living with my siblings. I stared at my bedroom walls in the wry, low-slanting evening light. It was one of those hot, sticky evenings toward the end of summer. "Still just a kids room," I thought. Or at least a bachelor's room with something inescapably childish about it. I had the usual manga characters in two neatly stacked glass cabinets. 

My parents were somewhat progressive... They sent me to a shrink. The psych said he'd picked up a burning anger. And maybe he was right. It was as if I'd never been appreciated in my fine arts degree by the family, which I'd worked hard to attain. It was as if this wall had been there between us and it threatened to stay. I really didn't want to look behind it to see what was there, because when this happened with most people it meant the end and isolation from her. But family is family, and so I'd worked hard to avoid that outcome. I couldn't lose their trust either, so whatever I felt;  I just shut everything in. And now it happened with Yumi. Yumi was suddenly too close. I was getting older, and not wiser, and he knew it. He was taking my place as an adult, pulling at my ears like a rambunctious young pup. I was working day in and day out in my room, and occasionally being called out to meet authors.  I'd geek out on their work, their visions, but none of it had anything to do with me.

So it's true. At 28 I had pretty much stayed put. Despite the fact that the independent publishing house I worked for, Little Sparrow Publishing was going crazy with orders, my salary stayed more or less the same over the last 10 years."We hope you'll understand Karaki." Orders for all the authors I'd chosen to ghost-write for. I was an asset, and yet, I couldn't bring myself to cut into their margins by demanding a raise. I was the loyal one, and I thought I'd die there. 

I wasn't assertive enough to really go places. Things turned out different in America. But Yumi, even at his age had a promising connection to life. He was the popular kid in school. A naturalized American Japanese kid in the true, if cutting sense of the real word. At 15, he didn't have to hide away. He'd talk to anyone he'd like, even the cool people I'd never dream of speaking with. It's not like I hadn't tried. I'd been to brick Lane in London, Pike's place in Seattle, spoke to authors of an independent ilk over a beer, brought their ideas home to write them for them. The perks were great. I had an eye for good books, but that hadn't translated into any clout. I read those books - sometimes a dozen a week, saw the first drafts; the whole process - But maybe, just maybe I envied my cousin's realism. I thought that what I had was enough. But now I began to think, maybe I wanted his naïve way of seeing the world. Maybe I wondered why it never rubbed off on me, no matter how many artsy places we went and no matter how many great young writers. He always seemed to find a way... He'd do great. 

There's something else. I never mentioned that I met Hitomi. She was introduced to me by a chance encounter on a trip to Kyoto. We'd gone there together on a field trip and days seemed to fade into each other. There were things that didn't matter anymore. Only books. I was getting fat and not unlike a big old puppy, but she didn't care. It had been a while since anything had changed. I could go somewhere but there wasn't anything too do. But now I'd decided I had someone to look forward to. She liked me and that's all that mattered. And unlike my work colleagues, I didn't have the grandeur of a senior position in the company to hold me back. I had plenty of free time in Kyoto. In a way, I was free. The summers in Kyoto were going to be marvelous. We'd see things and go places and I was always felt like I was on walking in a dream whenever I visited her. By the way, we hadn't told each other how we felt. Just felt it, we both knew it.

And then it happened. She got lost somewhere. I know because of the dream I had that night when the pine tree kept thumping against the window, and I saw her ghost ambling around the house. It was a completely unnecessary to question any of it. It was her, and she'd come to tell me that she was sorry, so sorry that she hadn't told me. And The more I said that I was sorry for not telling her either, she kept saying the same thing as if I hadn't heard. Over and over. She was staring right through me as if I were the ghost, and repeating the same words over and over. 

So that's how it happened. She was always by my side whenever I wrote. that's when my career really took off. It's difficult having a ghost for a girlfriend, but in the end it all worked out for the best. Nobody understands why I'm still into books the way I am, and why I'll always love them more than "living" people. But there's nothing like talking about books all day with your ghost girlfriend. This way, I think I'll stay a bachelor in the real world. I might move to an old house with three floors on the bohemian side of los Angeles. And unless they find some way of tracing ghosts with new technology, I'll probably stay that way. After all, marriage to a ghost would make an appointment with the shrink a regular item.