Rainebowy is a positive life attitude which I want to share. This may be in the form of written out thoughts and ideas about the beauty and struggles in life, love, friendship and society, in recommendations of books and other art, or my own fictional writing.
When I present my personal opinion, I’m always happy to listen to different ideas and discuss them. If you feel like I’m talking bullshit, let me know your side of the story.
As I was sitting in my kitchen, typing, calm piano music in the background, the wall opened. A black, oval hole appeared on the right side of the wall, where no posters were hanging. It was accompanied by a faint sound, like a sliding door opening. I could not make out if there was any path leading somewhere, it was just a black shape, impenetrable, about half my size in height. I got off my chair and walked around the table to approach it. One song ended, a new one began. I stepped right in front of it, moving a chair to the side with my foot. I lifted my arm, reached out – but did not dare to touch it. Suddenly, I realised this was not normal. So far, curiosity has driven my movements, only now reason flared up. Was I imagining things? I had not consumed anything that should alter my perception like this. It would also be an incredibly strange dream, since everything else was completely normal. Nothing was blending together, no past running alongside the present, no familiar people behaving in an unfamiliar way, my identity had also not changed. I was still female, a student, in my mid-twenties. The song in the background reached its culmination, emotions stirred inside me. I made one step forward, my hand still stretched out. It moved into the wall. The physical sensation did not change, I noticed quite surprised. I had expected a change in temperature maybe, a different density, some resistance. However, my fingers still moved in the same way. I stooped down a little bit, trying to peek in. Pure blackness, nothing else. I reached farther, now both hands searching for walls, objects, anything solid. No success. I was not sure if I could step inside, since there seemed to be no ground to place my foot on. One foot firmly on the kitchen floor, I tried to enter with the other. There was a ground. Not visible, but it was there. It could have been wood, or maybe stone. I let the other foot follow and I stepped inside what should have been a solid wall. All I could see was nothing. No sound reached my ears, not even the piano music from the speakers of my laptop. I turned around. My kitchen had disappeared. The solidity below my feet began to dissolve. Grew soft. Then it felt like bubbles, popping under my weight while I started sliding downwards, right through them. The bubbles surrounded my body, fizzed in my ears, entered my nose. Just as I grew desperate for air, I was released, and I fell to my knees, clutching my arms. They felt furry. I touched my face with my paws. It felt furry. I could not stand back up anymore, my legs could no longer hold me upright. My ears, long and pointy, caught noises. Laughter, a child singing. Light, first blinding me, allowed me now to perceive my surroundings. I could see greens, a blue sky, a little girl skipping over a meadow. I took my pocket watch out, checked it while keeping an eye on the girl. I began hopping away from her. I was late.
Like a bubble, Nakano’s thrift shop conserves the static lives of Hitomi and Takeo. 
As young adults, they still cannot quite grasp concepts of love, sexuality and identity. They approach each other, swerve, elude each other and collide again. The middle-aged shopkeeper, his sister, their lovers, all appear to be more experienced. Yet, they struggle with similar issues. Despite being separated by age, they learn from each other’s perception and indirectly push each other’s personal growth. The protagonist Hitomi, who narrates in first person, often fails to understand and to express her emotions clearly. Nevertheless, she is an observer with an eye for small details, which are left for the reader to interpret.
It is a peaceful novel, capturing everyday life rather than great adventures. Hiromi Kawakami depicts gradual personal development without forcing dramatic, lifechanging experiences onto her characters. The focus lies on interpersonal bonds and the impact one utterance can have. As such, I recommend it to be read in quiet moments or when life requires one to step back and take a breath. It leaves one more calm for sure.
Setting
Modern Japan
Characters
Hitomi is very observant yet oddly purposefully ignorant. In her mid-twenties, she struggles to recognise and identify love, attraction and lust. I guess we all sometimes do.
Nakano-san struggles actually with the same thing, but on a different level. While Hitomi is already completely overwhelmed with her attraction to one man, Nakano-san juggles with different women.
Masayo, his sister, is probably my favourite character. She is outspoken and cannot be intimidated. Even though she recognises the difficulties Hitomi has, she respects her and does not push her too far.
Takeo, Sakiko and various customers are more sketched than fully outlined, nevertheless, they do not seem incomplete.
Storytelling
Some would call it slow, I call it going for a stroll rather than a race. Over the timespan of a few years, only certain events are pulled out and described, leaving lots of jumps in time in between.
The Book:
Original title: 古道具中野商店 (Furudōgu nakano shōten)
German translation: Herr Nakano und die Frauen
Date of publication: 2005
Reading Experience:
Where: Stockholm, preferably near water
When: Spring 2018
Mood: Reflecting on life
Children
Children!
Hope of the future Our pillars of time to come Researchers, politicians, plumbers, developers and parents
Their paths still open
for them to choose
Until the gates crumble before their eyes
Fragments raining down
Burying the paths in front
and behind
Innocence blocked out forever
For them,
reality has shifted.
When play becomes survival
When family becomes graves
When future becomes a wasteland
and home turns into dust
Then the rich have become richer
The powerful make speeches
The helpless look away
and humanity tears in half from pain
Orange, yellow, pink…awful colours. The shower curtain was full of those bright, happy-mood blots, screaming “Good morning, sunshine!” in his face while he was trying to wash away the hangover from a night full of whiskey and underpaid strippers. He was definitely not in mood for kindergarten friendly, colourful blobs. He was in the “if I don’t get a hot cup of coffee within the next five minutes I will go on a murder spree”-mood. Dripping wet, he checked his face in the mirror. Ran a hand over the three days old stubbles on his chin, wondered if the dark circles around his eyes could grow any deeper, rubbed his hair dry with an awfully orange towel and left the bathroom. Fully naked, he strode into the bedroom/lounge/kitchen/living room – modern hotels try to satisfy all of your needs in one single room – not caring even one little bit that the people working in the office opposite his window could see all of his manly glory. Scratching exactly what he didn’t care to hide, he walked over to the nightstand, grabbed his phone and checked for messages. Nothing. He tested the wi-fi connection, just to make sure. It was working. Still no texts incoming. Of course, why would she reply. After all the lies he had told her, all the bad excuses he had made up. She found out about them. Probably not even all of them. Every day, he had twisted more and more of the little details in his stories, in the end he wasn’t even sure anymore what the actual truth was. He couldn’t expect her to understand. But one part of him had hoped it would last a little bit longer, this time. A knock on the door interrupted his brooding over the past. Damn, he was probably late for checkout. Just in time, he grabbed a pillow to hide his genitals before the cleaner opened the door wide. She flinched, obviously not expecting him to be standing there. He tried a half-hearted smile and said apologetically: “Sorry, I think I overslept my alarm. I’ll be out in a minute.” She didn’t say a word, just nodded and stood there for another few seconds with a hand still on the door handle, staring at him. Then she turned around and closed the door. He dropped the pillow, got dressed in the clothes worn yesterday, picked up his car keys from the floor where he chucked them away last night at four in the morning, and left the room. The cleaner was waiting on the corridor, he could feel her eyes on his back as he walked towards the elevator. Without looking back, he entered as soon as the doors slid open and pressed the button to go down. He had only a few seconds to reach the ground floor, only a few seconds to put his professional face back on, to add the harsh tone back to his voice and to adapt a fast walking pace. When the display over the doors showed a yellow glowing, capital G, his expression had hardened. He was ready to continue.
The pebbles in the old lake started to do something most peculiar. They started to float up, as if drawn to the surface by an unseen force. As if gravity had changed direction for them. Some of them plunged upwards with great speed, while others seemed to take their time, moving slowly through the water, as if meeting with more resistance than their companions. Or maybe they were just enjoying the journey they had never made before. One by one, until the surface of the water was covered with wet, glistening pebbles of all shapes and sizes. A ripple went through the lithic mat and the movement upwards continued. The pebbles floated through the air, levitating towards the clouds high up in the sky. There seemed to be a flickering between the fluffy formations, one spot that would irritate a human’s visual perception, if anyone had been there to observe the spectacle. The grey mass of tiny stones was heading in the direction of exactly that spot. When the first pebbles reached it, they disappeared. Vanished, from one second to the other, without producing the faintest sound. Within less than a minute, all the pebbles were gone. The surface of the lake was calm again, only a little lower than before. The flickering seemed to intensify for a moment, then it was gone too. One single pebble fell from between the clouds, descending through the air, finally following the rules of gravity again. With a splash, it broke through the mirror-like surface of the water and sank to the sandy ground. The ripples it released slowly died on the shore and everything was quiet again.
Love for life.
Love for the living beings around me.
Love for the warmth that is spreading from their hearts.
My heart responds, a connection builds up
a thin thread of golden crystal, thickening
whilst stretching towards them
towards the strand thriving from their chest
until both ends meet in the middle
intertwining,
merging,
growing into one inseparable thick strand of glowing light.
Pulsating brightly,
the bond remains, multiplying the warmth,
fulfillment
and love.
We all struggle. You might feel alone with your struggle in life, but you are not. Sometimes we have the feeling everyone else’s life just functions perfectly and we’re the only ones feeling torn inside, insecure and without the tiniest idea what the flick the purpose of our life is. That is the greatest illusion, greater than anything Wolve..eh, Hugh Jackman could pull off in that mind-twisting magician movie of which I forgot the title. There is this idea that an adult human being just knows how life works, knows what they are doing, has plans and everything just goes the way it should. Nobody, literally nobody is like that. And that is the great thing about being a human. Our existence is so wonderfully complex. We have the ability to reflect on everything, our emotional range is extremely nuanced and wide and perception varies from person to person. While this complexity is responsible for our daily struggles, it is also the reason why we can experience so much joy in life. It’s a give-and-take. Most importantly, this complexity is embedded in each and every person around you. Awkwardness, insecurity, feeling lost and aimless, feeling out of place, loss, despair, grief, we all have been there. Keep that in mind when you go through life. Keep that in mind when you look at a stranger in the train. Keep that in mind when you meet an acquaintance on the street. Keep that in mind when you hand your money to the cashier at the checkout. Keep in mind we are all human beings, bearing complex thoughts and emotions inside of us, sometimes never sharing them with any other person. Lastly, treat each other like human beings. Be aware your vis-à-vis may be struggling, just like you, even if it is not visible. Because in the end, existence is one fragile construct that depends on mutual support.
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