Leaving 2046

I just had the most vivid recollection of a night last year. This in itself is strange but in addition, the memory was incredibly lucid. I could picture myself exactly then. Slot myself right back into the moment. This is something that has never happened to me before. To tell the truth, it freaked me out a little.

So, it was a night in early winter and S and I had gone to see a movie at a multiplex in the middle of nowhere. The area was obviously destined to become a huge housing estate but as of yet all they’d done was lay down roads and put up streetlights. An organised network of flat emptiness, something you just do not see in Japan. It had been a crisp, clear winter night when we had gone into the theatre but by the time we came out it was pouring with rain.

We’d been to see Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046, a film that I later found out was about a novelist living in Singapore in the 1960s who was trying to convince the woman he loved to follow him back to Hong Kong. While this took place he was writing a novel about a man trapped on a train in the year 2046. The film was gorgeous, as is most of Wong Kar-Wai’s work, with amazing colour and some sublime period sets. However, the story was jumpy and non-linear and I had a hard time following what was going on. The film being in Cantonese with Japanese subtitles had not aided my comprehension greatly. I emerged from the theatre with a pile of questions I wanted to ask.

The whole complex had that new, unscuffed sheen to it, bought out even more by the rain on the wet concrete. The whole area seemed deserted, most sane people long since being at home in bed or tucked up in the warm. We ran through the empty gravel wasteland of a massive temporary car park and stood on a huge concrete bridge, connecting nothing to nothing, over an empty highway. The last train to Kobe rumbled by underneath, the light from the windows illuminating the empty lanes on both sides.

S has an amazingly infectious laugh. Her whole body shakes, she slaps her thighs and guffaws until you think she’s going to run out of breath and pass out. Spending any amount of time with her is akin to being on some kind of comedy marathon, last man standing. I started asking specifics about the movie we’d just seen and she grinned and told me she’d tell me in the car.

So we drove back slowly, in the pouring rain, while she laughed at my utter incomprehension as to what had been going on film and Kasabian played in the background.

Posted in Mwah on Thursday May 26, 2005.