Peace Boat

By Richard James

“Electric blaze, Akihabara night. The rain doesn’t fall, it buzzes in the air like static on a broken television. Puddles slashed with neon, illuminated advertising trucks blaring songs and voices. The crowds slosh by, PVC umbrellas up. From above they must look like some slow moving mass of jellyfish – flup-flup, flup-flup – floating along unthinking, caught in a current they don’t understand.”

Opening with the thoughts of a waitress from a maid café giving out flyers on the rain soaked streets of Tokyo, Peace Boat proceeds to take its readers on a journey round the world in twenty four short stories. Following in the footsteps of the eponymous boat’s 2012 voyage this collection contains something for everyone.

Each story can be read individually, but taken as a whole they produce a dazzling, kaleidoscopic effect. Crossing the gamut from flash fiction glimpses of a face in a crowd to miniature historical epics, a chorus of voices cross space and time to tell their tales. They include: an Indian mystic watching the centuries drift by from his perch by a river, a Ukrainian resistance fighter going slowly mad in the catacombs beneath Odessa, a Romanian boy watching royal ghosts inside the ruins of the grand casino and a Jamaican child making a bid for freedom from her kindergarten.

Each story has its own distinct voice and with an accompanying photo from each location it’s hard not to allow this eclectic host of characters to ignite your desire to get out into the world and see the places that inspired this collection for yourself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard James
• Release date: Feb 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310842009

Richard James

Richard James is a tour operator specialising in historical treks of the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea. He has personally led hundreds of Australians across the Kokoda Track and has met many war veterans from the 7th Division who fought in Syria before going on to fight on the Kokoda track the following year. It is from here his passion to write his first book grew.

Book preview

TOKYO (1)

Electric blaze, Akihabara night. The rain doesn’t fall, it buzzes in the air like static on a broken television. Puddles slashed with neon, illuminated advertising trucks blaring songs and voices. The crowds slosh by, PVC umbrellas up. From above they must look like some slow moving mass of jellyfish – flup-flup, flup-flup – floating along unthinking, caught in a current they don’t understand.

Standing by a crossing outside the underground station I offer them promotional packs of tissues stuffed with flyers for the maid café on the corner. From behind its sliding doors, a recorded voice chirrups and chants enticements and welcomes to passers-by. Above the entrance, the number one maid – Nozomi Kitamura (bitch) - poses two stories tall on an illuminated banner. Smiling out from their own smaller posters, and making peace signs or love hearts with their fingers, are the seven or eight next ‘top maids’.

I am not amongst them.

Top maids are not forced to stand in the street in the middle of January (in their maid outfit!) distributing tissues and having their thighs frozen solid by the whipping, winter wind. Top maids are inside in the warm serving coffee and chocolate, drawing smiley faces in their regulars’ milk froth.

Over my shoulder I suddenly get this creepy feeling and turn to find an old man leering at me. He has no umbrella and no teeth and is soaked to the skin. Some homeless from under the railway bridge. I recoil in disgust. A sudden gust of wind catches me off guard and blows my umbrella from my grasp. As I stoop to pick it up, an awkward looking gaijin stops and takes a photo. I stare at him. He offers a toothy grin, which I don’t return.

YOKOHAMA

New Year in Chinatown, Hidetoshi runs between the legs of men and dragons. Burst of firecrackers and a twist of smoke from inside a walled enclosure, gasps and hushed oohs. A passing temple a blur of colour as he rushes past. A gong. A bell. A single storey pagoda hung with red lanterns, a hunched old woman standing still within.

KAMAKURA

Flickering flame of firelight on the blue-bronze body of the Buddha. Kamakura is burning.

As she hurries through the temple grounds, Kumiko can see the city in the distance: sparks rising skywards from the dark feet of the mountains; an orange shimmer on the blackened surface of the sea.

She does not concern herself with who is fighting nor for what purpose. Neither does she worry that the battle itself will extend beyond the seven mouths of the city to this remote place. She knows well, however, the other dangers that accompany such events. Ronin – those masterless samurai, who have descended to the level of thieves and rogues – will be on the prowl tonight, looking for plunder: money, treasure, women.

Kumiko pulls open the shoji of her three-tatami mat room and, from beneath her futon, retrieves a flattened scroll tube, which she places inside the wide sleeve of her kimono before dashing once more into the night.

The other nuns left with the abbess nearly an hour ago, climbing the hill to __ shrine, as soon as the scale of the battle further along the coast became clear. Only when they were halfway to the top did Kumiko remember the scroll. The only communication she had ever received from her father. The one composed on his deathbed. The one in which he begged her forgiveness as he explained the reasons he had been forced to give her up to the monastery before she was old enough to walk.

As soon as she remembered the scroll, knowing that the abbess would forbid a return as too dangerous, she had detached herself stealthily from the back of the group and darted down through the trees to the monastery. Now, running through the empty temple, she knows she has done the right thing. The scroll is her only link to her past and the entrance gate is just ahead, once past that, she can quickly catch up with the others and –

She stops. Holds her breath. What was that sound?

She strains her eyes towards the massive tori at the entrance to the temple. Is that flickering on the pillar from the fire in the town or…?

Quickly she springs out the light of the central courtyard and into the shadow of the stone plinth in its centre, atop which, cross-legged, sits the huge bronze Buddha. She peers out and sees two men passing beneath the tori arch, flaming torches in their hands, swords at their belts and quivers of arrows on their backs.

Ronin.

Crouching, she creeps towards the small hatch hidden in the Buddha’s base, opens