The PenCraft Network

PenCraft.net is launched today, intended to contain information exclusively on my writing ventures that were fortunate enough to see print.

All sections linked are now open, including a comprehensive list of published works as well as a few sample pieces.

Thank you very much for visiting!

Published January 2000, Estudyante Network Magazine, Philippines.

A glance at Lizard, a collection of six short stories by Banana Yoshimoto.

Organized Madness

“I dropped a bowl and broke it, which upset me so much that I burst into tears. Then I decided to sit down and read a comic, which made laugh hysterically. I was a total mess.”

Aren’t we all?

The words were taken from the yuppie-angst narrative of Chikako, the lead character in “Blood and Water,” one of the six short stories which made up the collection entitled Lizard, written by a young Japanese author named Banana Yoshimoto.

Born Yoshimoto Maiko on July 24, 1964, the writer who now had a pop-sounding fruity pectin-filled name hails from Tokyo and has had eleven novels and seven essays published in her native country. Four of her books have been translated into English: Kitchen, N.P., Lizard and Amrita.

Among the four books, Lizard was the only one that was not a full-length novel. I was able to get a copy of it a few years ago through a pen-pal from Metro Manila, who found me a paperback one. The only Yoshimoto novel then available in Iloilo City (I looked everywhere for the whole summer of 1997 and 1998) was a hardcover Lizard, which cost about P 400 and was badly damaged to begin with.

Lizard, translated as Tokage in Nihonggo, takes its title from one of the stories. The other five stories are Newlywed, Helix, Dreaming of Kimchee, Blood and Water, and A Strange Tale from Down by the River.

As a whole, the setting was in a busy city, presumably Tokyo, and the characters were mostly young urbanites who have commonplace jobs. As against common belief that Japanese stories involve samurai committing kamikaze, there was no such thing in Lizard. In fact, the stories could have taken place in any big city, except for the fact that Yoshimoto’s pen infuse the stories with a spirituality and a mental rebellion that only the exotic Japanese could concoct.

Newlywed is about a young newly-married man’s journey in a train. Aboard the commuter system and already past his stop towards home, he meets a mysterious woman who raises questions about his relationship with his wife. It was only then that he had come to accept the he would never fully understand the woman he married.

Lizard, the title story, is about the relationship of a young child psychologist and an aerobics-instructress-turned-acupuncture-whiz. The latter is Lizard, a woman whose life was once blighted by blindness and carried around enough emotional baggage that could only be slowly unloaded when she healed people through her magic touch. She and the psychologist share a very strong bond: Loneliness amidst working with people every day.

Helix is another short relationship story, about how love and hate and contempt could merge into one when a man and a woman know each other so well that words were meant to disguise and not express feelings. Narrated the male writer character: “I had the unusual sensation of having grasped her entire personality in that single expression.” They both had to take another step forward.

Dreaming of Kimchee (kimchee is a Korean delicacy, pickles smothered with cabbage and garlic) presents a rather unusual perspective of extramarital affairs. This time, the mistress narrates the story, from how she felt exempt from the fact that married man do not leave their wives for their mistresses to why she was not feeling any guilt at her position. In the end, the guy left his wife for her.

A Strange Tale from Down by the River is a study in contrasts. The woman in the story (later known as Akemi) started out as wildly erotic bisexual. She confesses: “It was when I came down with a liver infection that I had to quit going to the sex parties.” Later, she meets a rich young man with no ambition but falls for him–at the funeral of the guy’s own father. When she lives with him at a riverside apartment preparing for their wedding, ghosts of her past begin to catch up. In the end, what mattered was true contentment that only hope could give.

Blood and Water is my personal favorite among all the six stories. It is a love story on the surface. This is the only story where the names of both main characters were disclosed; the other stories do not mention the name of some of its characters. In this particular story, Chikako leaves the Esoteric Buddhism (a religious sect) settlement where she had been raised by her parents and starts a faster, modern life in Tokyo. There she meets Akira, a strange young man who could make amulets that had healing powers, and eventually falls in love with him. “When he was at home, Akira was just an ordinary guy, a little wimpy, in fact.” No other love story had a wimp for a hero–and by the heroine’s admittance, at that. The tale throbs with sadness and foreboding, a realization that even the most powerful emotions could not bind people together forever.

Although the characters are not acquainted and no common plot binds them to each other, they all share an honesty that only Yoshimoto could offer with her pen. Through the author’s first-person narratives, each of the people address a significant crossroad in his or her life in a brutally straight way. They all address our very own quirks, our secret thoughts, our humanity’s darkest side – and they show how we could go through this and come out relatively unscathed but marked for life. The characters speak to the reader in a neat and straight manner, aware of the madness that had at one point or another touched their lives. The book is about accepting the past, savoring the present and having hope in the future.

Yoshimoto uses male-female relationships as a take-off point for all of her stories, since these associations often have the most dimensions and flaws. However, there is no significant love and hate in the story. No one expresses love by French-kissing on the streets nor drinking poison just to be together with their beloved. No one even gets angry enough to throw things around or hurt others. The people here are not novel – they are people we meet everyday but never really have the chance to get to know better. People who fear and hope for the same things we do, albeit always in a different way.

Read Yoshimoto for her honesty and courage. Honesty to express her true humanity and not her “image-oriented” façade, and courage to accept that she does so.

And so, Chikako further contemplates: “I am my own home, and this is where I belong, and the things keep going forward, endlessly, just as the blue of the sky dawn soon turns into a bright sunrise, each with its own beauty. That kind of thing.”

A tribute to coffee, above anything else, and submitted as a piece to compete for a spot on being one of the 70 delegates to the Ayala Young Leaders Congress 2000.

Coffee Break

I love coffee.

This is a simple declaration of fact. I am not saying that I love coffee as a last resort to resurrect a dying showbiz career as an endorser for this amphetamine-loaded brew. Neither am I saying this to earn the favor of all my fellow coffee-drinkers to perhaps strengthen my bid for public office in the very near future.

Let’s face it: I’ll never have a blast running around in circles with gossip-mongering talk show hosts, in pathetic, dramatic display of half-truths. Secondly, if I do happen to possess the credentials (whatever they may be) and machinery to run for office, I cannot afford to miss the live PBA games in lieu of all those conscience-draining campaigns, anointment-seeking selection processes, and hyped-up privilege speeches made to crush the other aspirants for the position.

I would rather watch Marlou Aquino dunk any day.

My bookshelf at home houses a stack of chronologically-arranged comic book fanzines. An issue of HERO Magazine features an alternative comic entitled Too-Much-Coffee Man, who is embodied by a diminutive guy with a mug-shaped hat wading in a mug-shaped pool filled to the brim with (duh!) coffee.

A picture of sheer paradise.

I started drinking coffee when I was ten years old. It is the beverage at home that never runs out – “serbe tubig.” We have the instant powder at our disposal.

Granules do not have that much publicity to merit our attention – and subsequent preference. Imported brands and the brewed versions are out of the question; my tuition and other fees come first. All that, plus the baht pulling down the peso value.

Some people tell me that coffee stunted my growth. That if I wasn’t such a frappe fan, I would have made it past five feet by now.

I am a one-drink woman. I would cherish coffee, have a mug, and hold it close to my heart. ‘Til next cup do us part.

Which is more than can be said for those who make vows of this sort in Church. Not with a drink, but with another person.

Three’s a crowd. But why do some people opt for a third party? For the excitement, maybe, of doing something forbidden. Or to satisfy all sorts of needs that the initial partner could not.

Making vows is not as uni-dimensional as making yourself a cup of coffee. If you no longer like the brew or it has gone cold, you could either add something to it or throw the liquid to the welcoming kitchen drain. Marriage is not a trial-and-error run to come up with the perfect coffee blend – it must be the perfect coffee blend.

I love coffee because it wakes me up.

There is that slight biting sensation that warms the chest as the coffee slithers into one’s being. Then one’s eyes get just a little bit lighter. The drooping shoulders wriggle to a more upright position; the sensation that you can make it a little further hits.

This, for me, is an enlightening experience.

We need to drink a proverbial cup of coffee. We need a good dose of the truth floating around us, like Too-Much-Coffee Man’s brew. Let us take the mug from our heads and scoop the truth out for a drink. This is the youth and education both in and out of the classroom. At this very point of our young lives, the truths are floating all around, waiting to be known and imparted to others. Education is a bottomless draught of coffee.

Coffee, at its best when steaming hot, leaves a burning mark on the tongue. The thing with burns is that though they hurt and leave unsightly marks, they almost never fail to wake one up. The truth may never always be welcome, sometimes painful, but it must always be known. It is to the mind as coffee is to the body.

Thus, to this writer, life is a journey chock-full of literal and proverbial coffee breaks.

Published 15 August 1997, The Philippine Star, Philippines.

Living against the odds.

Who Cares?

I live this strange little
existence – I don’t even know
what it’s supposed to be.
Strangled, laden with
shattered stuff:
fragments of a heart once beating
and pumping tangy blood.

I breathe this so-called air of life
that kills me with each
proverbial toke -
when I would have wanted the
glamour of cigarette smoke.

I roam the cruel streets
that scream of my
generation’s apathy.
And bleed with red and sunny-yellow
and acetylene-white.
Words, their wisdom
long lost.

I love this wisp
of a being ready
to be snapped in two.
He’s the one who
means so much;
enough that I just have to
go on.
Living.

Published 1997, The Accounts: August-October 1997 Magazine, University of the Philippines in the Visayas, Philippines.

Written while watching fishing boats and barges, after a mosquito-laden night.

The Voyage

Cutting through waves
A swath of foam;
Green-gray curdles
Trail underfoot.

A raft of makeshift hopes,
Adrift for days
And aimless:
Steered blindly on.

Beyond the mist,
Cobbles and rock-bits
Make a swarthy testament
Of lands beyond.