Citrus - An introduction to that rhythm and blues. Motojiro was a great inspiration to me—so much so that I remain jealous of him to this day. The brilliance of Lemon is actually very difficult to describe. It is Literature. If you had to point to something to describe the word, maybe you’d point to any number of the greats. In my field someone would point to Rashomon, In A Grove, Kokoro, Sanshiro, maybe they would give Dazai the credit he deserves from such things as Merry Christmas and No Longer Human. It’s Lemon. It has every aspect of a piece from the era and it beautifully concludes in such a horrible victory in silence and misery that it really feels like the bomb goes off.

Motojiro Kajii is Japanese Literature.

Choking - I wanted to write about someone who had fully devolved into self-loathing to the point that the self has melted away and become sweat on the pavement. I walked to work a lot when I was younger, even in the cold, rain, and especially in the heat. It’s very real, smelling the exhaust fumes of the cars stuck at a red light. Walking by and seeing the haze at the end of the road.

I hate concrete. I hate glass. I hate steel. It’s not a unique sentiment, I’ll admit. To that end, and to an extreme of that end, she hates it as well.

I don’t hate people. I actually really like people. I find everyone I meet entertaining to some degree. Even those I dislike I dislike similar to how one would a side character or villain. At the end of the day, they’re their own people. I say I don’t judge but I do, and it doesn’t hurt them any because I don’t treat them like scum. Same goes for the other side of that sentiment. I guess that’s called being two-faced? Better than being like her and boiling in my own malaise.

Again - Cycles of self-hate. “The hedonic treadmill” my friend would call it. I guess that’s fair. Psychology is interesting, and to some end how much of her rejection of her own hope is some kind of repression? Trauma? I think the rejection of her own form is an interesting sidebar at that point in the story when she is most vicious against a particular image. She tears him down and then proceeds to rip apart her own reflection. It’s a dark mindset, and it’s very fun to write someone like that. I’m addicted to it like opiates.

Sentimentality - When a person is injured, the world turns into a show. Like, everything looks so far away and suddenly it all makes a kind of sense. Pieces start fitting together, character’s intentions are made plain. The heroes stand out and the extras seem just as low-poly as they should be to get the job done. In doing so, one’s own nature becomes apparent. How others treat them becomes too clear. Concern, consideration, relief, delegation. Abandonment, disqualification, segregation, rudeness.

After a while the injury leaves their minds and everything goes back to normal. Only you aren’t normal yet. You still have five weeks trapped in the audience, watching everyone pretend like you aren’t even there. Doing things you can’t do because why wouldn’t they? They aren’t hurt. Even those who you’ve known for decades by that point will just partake of that behavior like you’re the goddamned wallpaper. That’s when you realize you’re just being jealous, envious. Envy for what? A bite of food?

Such a vile sentimentality is not progressive in the least. It lingers like stale air in the dead night. Better to open the window and let it out, but even so, letting the window air out the malaise is no better that praying for it to be sunny tomorrow. Leave it all at the door, grasp nothing, want nothing, and then maybe you’ll be able to make it. If you don’t, you won’t even care. Sentimentality, hope, is a fickle and yet consistent thing. That feeling of wanting to be carried off by one’s own emotions into success or failure or love or hate. “Like a bride in June.” It’s a nice sentiment, but it doesn’t pay the bills, it doesn’t change the script.

Cigarettes - I like cigarettes because they give your hands something to do while you think. You can drag on them and really absorb the thoughts more totally than if you were just sitting down doing nothing. That’s why I like to smoke, because it helps me think when something really important is on the line. Coincidentally things have not been going my way lately because I haven’t been smoking. But smoking is cancerous and it does reek so to those ends I really shouldn’t.

Nah, that’s bullshit, they’re too expensive, that’s why I haven’t been smoking.

Ramen - Salt is a really good device. It does a lot because it poisons the earth but the vibrant sea is filled with it. Duality, we like it.

Suicide - I said it before, I don’t want to kill myself. However when it comes to characters like this it becomes natural to have the urge to throw oneself into the grasp of nothing but that blazing air. From one flight to the next, from the summit itself. For a beautiful character like her such a thing is just as bad as wanting to be whisked away by some kind of prince charming. Death was just marriage by another name. They served the same end goal—reprieve.

Traffic - “I did not want to change, because change meant difference, and it implied that I would be growing beyond what I was.”

Self-improvement is a damn paradoxical thing. In the pursuit of improving the self you inevitably get to a point where even minor progressions are no more than a “worse” you. For example; If I was learning Kanji at a character a day, then each day I would be a smarter person, but each day the me of “yesterday” would still be a less intelligent version of myself. The ideal you remains on the horizon no matter how far you run, but the worse you is just right there, just behind you, waiting for you to slip back into whatever it was that made you them. Of course, since you would be progressing, I suppose the current you, which would become the worse you by nature of your change into the you of tomorrow, would also be worse. Worse tomorrow.

There was a phrase like that—”I killed myself tomorrow”?

Also, “everyone should work on improving themselves” and “nobody’s perfect” are terrible expressions. Think of it like this; if everyone should work on improving themselves then does that not mean that the current state of “everyone” is undesirable? Then, if nobody can be perfect, then what’s the point in working to better oneself? Even so, to seek self-improvement is admitting to being lacking in some regard. Fault, that is. “I” want to be “better” but without a solid definition of “I” and “Better” how are we supposed to manage? I remains a lackluster title and some people don’t even have a firm grasp on it beyond the surface traits—there really are people out there, in the world, who merely exist as an I that is what you perceive them as (How frightening!). “Better” is ultimately subjective, no matter how much I want Friedrich to rule that definition.

“Since I was still me, that meant I was right.” If the current version of herself is the result of all of her previous choices, then changing that, itself, is a form of murder in her eyes. That’s her conclusion whenever she smokes by herself and thinks thoughts like this. Isn’t that just so pitiful and yet admirable? At least she exists as an object, despite her rotting stagnation in a state of mock-life. Perhaps that’s a hopeful reading, I think she really does bloom into herself in that section. Like, everything collapses in on itself and, at the end of that hot day, she is still who she is and that won’t melt. She chooses not to become someone else because she doesn’t want the world to take her from herself. If all you have is yourself, can anybody blame you?

I think there are people like that, and I don’t actually find them admirable in the least.

Tomorrow - “In the warm spring light, A baseball boy runs out.” It’s like that, basically. Everything moves and sometimes it leaves people behind. I think she wished, once, that she had those things which others found so easy to grasp. Was it her choices? Was it her failures? Did she lack the will to grab that future self? Or did fear control her emotions back then? How far back would she have to go to correct herself? Could she? Or, if she wished upon a genie that she could be a version of herself that had those things, would she even be her anymore? Should she grasp it? Should the current her die so a new her could be happy?

Some people say yes to such a question, but I don’t think they understand the problem. It’s not that she wants to be a happy version of herself, it’s that she wants to be a person who can be happy being her. That’s not quite right either. More like, if she could wake up tomorrow, and the salty ramen tasted just a little better, then that would be enough. Nobody chooses loneliness. Even those who say they do are really just giving in to some form of sentimentality they will one day regret. “Being by yourself, being with someone else, the loneliness won’t stop being lonely.”

We all have our sins. We each define them based on what we value in the world. Often sins are called dreams, and when you attain them you’ve cut out a piece of yourself and sold it to the devil that is progress. For a person who is not naturally inclined to altruism or benefit or even victory, that is how those things really feel. If you don’t believe you’re a good person, then success feels like torture. Why would “I” be successful? It must be because “I” convinced everyone “I” was something “I’m” not. Thus a liar, thus a traitor. This is a general statement. It applies to work, money, and especially love. Because for a person like that, how could they be successful? Only through half-truths and lies of omission.

Conclusion - If you’ve read Lemon you’ve read better prose about a person walking through a town. Good job, I’m proud of you. That was the impetus for the piece but it was by no means the driving force. Solitude in the dense world, that’s trite. Still, the point remains. We all have free will, we could break from our situations whenever we wanted. We choose our sin and our loneliness. Some of us stop long enough to regret our choices, and some of us don’t ever start moving again. Some of us die.

For as grim as this story and this note are, I actually think Grey Dove ends on a positive note—for what it is, you know? As small as it is we are still trying to actually do something. Even if that something is meaningless, pathetic, and will do nothing to further our place in the world or solve the deep problems in our hearts. At least it makes it easier to cope for a few minutes. For some people that’s games, for others its books and work. That’s what hobbies are, a way to cope with the passage of time in a situation we cannot remain pleased with (Okay, that’s overdramatic, but you get the idea). For this woman it’s the vague desire to not have to deal with over-salted ramen.

Sue me, but I think that entire character is goddamned fascinating.