Eight Miles Over Siberia

 

There is an island country off the coast of a continent where the people drink a lot of tea and liked the Mini a lot. The indigenous people of this land may seem strange at first to outsiders with their unusual customs, odd ideas of manners and bizarre language but they are quite friendly when you get to know to them and they have a great, off-beat sense of humour. The country had an inglorious imperialist past but that’s all over now. The country is, of course, Japan.

Mid-way thro a ten hour flight, eight miles above some Siberian wasteland one Akiko Izumi gazes expressionless at her little screen on the back of the chair in front, sips her coffee and lights another cigarette. She is wearing a pale pink dress and sensible flat shoes although she is not tall. She is half-way thro her second film of the flight and she is trying to stay interested but it’s a dull film she considers. She is leaving her whole life behind in Tokyo to start a new life in London where she knows practically nobody. She is just twenty two, very pretty, and she is coming to study English and accountancy. She is as brainy as she is beautiful. Then she plans to get a well-paid job with a bank where she can use her Japanese and what will then be her English too. She speaks reasonable Chinese as well.

Her lover Hirome of some three years standing had come to the airport to see her off and Hirome had cried.  They hadn’t exactly split up but Akiko is not planning on going back to Tokyo for a long time and Hirome has no plans to visit London. So that is that thinks Akiko. She is a realist to the roots of her long, straight black hair and she had not cried at the airport but she is still sad. Hirome was an older woman, twenty seven, and they had been good together but she was conservative, if there is any such thing as a conservative Japanese lesbian. And she didn’t know any English. Akiko wants to stretch her wings a bit more. She isn’t entirely homosexual but had had a very bad experience with her previous boyfriend and feels safer with a woman lover now. She is bored with the rubbish film she is watching and tries for some random music instead. ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ by Elton John comes on and she listens to it. Westerners call the Orientals Yellow People she knows. She doesn’t mind. It is the faintest, most delicate shade of yellow. She pulls out her very good, expensive and heavy English-Japanese dictionary, which was written by a British man who lived in Japan for over twenty years. It contains many colloquialisms and nuances not found in most dictionaries. Akiko wants to learn as many of the subtleties of English as she can. She looks up the word ‘brick’. She knows that it means the building blocks of houses but wants to know if there is another meaning. Ah, here we are: -”A solid or reliable person”. That was Hirome all right she thinks. “Goodbye yerrow blick” she sings along and now she cries for Hirome. After a good cry she feels purged and better.

 

Every now and then she switches the console to the little map of the tiny plane inching it’s way slowly West, Tokyo getting ever that bit more distant and London that bit closer. They have passed north of the Korean peninsular, across the narrow section of China and are now over the easternmost part of vast Russia, Siberia. She looks out of the window down at Siberia some twelve kilometres below. She can see a red line stretching for what must be many miles. A forest fire she thinks. No one lives in Siberia so no one will be hurt by this and it won’t make the news. All she knows of Siberia is that there are rare tigers there. The tigers are so rare now that it is no longer cost effective to hunt them but tigers, while solitary, have an excellent sense of smell so they can still find mates despite their rarity. So they probably will survive. She hopes so anyway as she likes tigers a lot. The good thing for the survival chances of the Siberian tiger is that, unlike giant pandas, they are nearly always randy and almost always when a female and male tiger meet they will have sex. Good randy tigers she thinks with a smile. The Siberian tiger is the largest living cat she knows and she would like to see one but overall the tigers will be happier not seeing people.

She ponders on Siberia, this vast area with practically no people. There was a huge explosion in Siberian in 1910 or sometime around then, covering a dozen or square miles but Siberia is so sparsely populated no one was killed. Although she has no plans ever to visit Siberia Akiko is glad it’s there. The planet needs vast spaces where there are very few humans she considers. There are twenty eight million people in Tokyo. It’s the largest city in the world by a long way. Siberia is the other extreme from that. Only seven million people in London she knows.

In Japan foreigners are rare. Generally they are Chinese or Korean, westerner foreigners rarer still. The Japanese word for foreigner is gaikokujin which means ‘outside country person’ and some people think that it is racist term. Akiko has always had a soft spot for these rare, lonely-looking people in Tokyo. She feels empathy for outsiders in general. Soon she will be a gaikokujin herself, an outsider in London. The passengers on the plane are about half Japanese, half Westerner which is appropriate in this half-way place between Tokyo and London. The Japanese will all dissipate into the metropolis of London and little Akiko will be alone to find her way.

She is a good Igo or Go player and will find some Go players in London too. She doesn’t think she will be lonely. Her college is providing a flat for her in somewhere called Bayswater where she will share with another Japanese accountancy student a Yuki Cho so she will have one acquaintance at least. She has done her research on the lesbian scene in London and it sounds promising. There is a large women-only dance night called ‘Venus Rising’ which is held in a club called The Fridge is a place called Brixton …

 

 She has read quite a bit about London and overall she thinks it will be a lot of fun.

 

Oh it will be Aki, oh it will be…

 

She looks out of the window again. There are tigers down there somewhere. She hopes so anyway …