Five Hundred

I had a junior colleague who loved Nakahara Chuya.

Past tense. He died a while back.

Brimming with confidence, fearless, and yet timid and fragile. It sounds contradictory, but there's no other way to put it. People who fall for Chuya tend to carry that kind of contradiction.

He told me he'd published a poetry collection. Self-published, five hundred copies. I couldn't take one. It was the depths of Japan's job market collapse. We were both just trying to survive. No — that's a lie. We'd grown apart in the tangle of complicated relationships. There wasn't enough left between us to accept a book of poems.

I found it on Amazon by chance.

A machine that links servers across the globe and processes trillions in transactions was quietly offering a single used copy of a poetry collection — print run five hundred. I'd never have found it on a bookstore shelf. His trace, lingering in a corner of the cloud.

It found its way to me.

Chuya died at thirty. He published only two collections in his lifetime — Yagi no Uta and Arishi Hi no Uta. He left over 350 poems, but only a fraction ever reached the world. The rest stayed scrawled in notebooks, gathered posthumously by friends. There is always distance between writing and reaching.

I'm turning pages on the anniversary of his death. A passage catches my eye.

"After I die / someone looks at the whiny little words I left behind / and doesn't snort with laughter / even just one person / that would be happiness enough"

I'm reading without laughing.