It’s mailing time!

Lately, I was switching between sweat soaked waking ups (nightmares came to inquire about my health, how nice aren’t they) and freezing showers (you may know that icy cold water immersion is a mandatory ritual before a big job). So I necessarily allowed myself to catch death. Right in the middle of July. As a matter of fact, in Tokyo it’s now pouring down like it will go on for ever with a merely 86°F.

One and only positive fact: there’s absolutely no way I can work when emptying three tissue boxes in one hour, looking like a dead drunk man and the doctor thinks you may be an interesting applicant for a formaldehyde jar. So here I am, dignified in agony, stuck in my bed since Sunday. But, as I’m still not dead with my two lungs glued together, I managed to crawl along the room to the computer to type (ain’t I a true Lord, using up my last living hours to tell you bullshit).

It couldn’t last forever as I was bound to not being left alone. Anyway between a pill and a graveyard cough I managed to check my e-mails, somehow hoping to find an urgent one I could have answered, with a smile if you please: Being utterly busy dying under my sheets, I therefore will not be able to come exorcise the two-headed little girl hiding in the attic of a shitty suburban house.

Score, shit happens.

I classify emails in two piles: first, we have government e-mails, basic and formal. Go there. Do this. See him. They pompously call them “mission orders”, naturally first-class priority, urgent, unable to suffer any delay from me as in these spicy little sentences reminding me I indeed am a Japanese state civil servant. I love being kicked in the butt on-mail, seems so much more subtle… And in the other hand, we have the average joe managing to hit upon my email address I don’t know how the hell, mistaking me for Miss Cleo. From obstructed pipes to the family youngest eight-pounds-of-excess-weight, they seem convinced that all harm is due to spirits, yôkai and revengeful ghosts.

Well, let me set the record straight:

Right now, I can tell you yôkai’s ambitions are a bit more sophisticated. Yes they are. Getting back the territory on which we humans indulgently spread ourselves, for instance. And believe me when I tell you they can do a lot more than making your bathroom pipes explode.

So I had a fabulous specimen of an e-mail, of the tearful kind, URGENT titled, spelled in block capitals and followed by a good procession of exclamation marks. A good lady, living in Shinjuku, assuring me her son is possessed. She doesn’t know him anymore and I must absolutely do something before it is “too late”. But it’s only when I read the description of the “possessed” ‘s behavior I understood this respectable family mother’s issue: even if you don’t want grandchildren, you must confess that one may be bothered by, well, having your eighteen-years-old son sending burning up love letters -politically correct term, because in fact it was displaying a rather excessive amount of hormones- to his English teacher… said teacher roughly celebrating his thirty-five birthday and displaying the funny main feature of being male.

In case you were wondering why the hell did she call for an exorcist rather than the vice squad, I honestly answer that I fucking don’t know. Considering my fever and my blocked up nose, I managed to sum up the issue as following: “Forty-years-old homemaker finds her son is not attracted towards women.” What the heck with me? Yes, a blocked sinus drives the brain into shortcuts.

Here is a copy of my answer in full (minus snuffling, swearing about dirty tissues on the keyboard and sneezing).

Madam,

I went into the trouble of reading your e-mail from one end to another and as you can see, I’m answering you as soon as I’m able to.

Firstly, you are lucky, because I’m currently dying of suffocation caused by billions of used tissues, full of syrup, therefore I am in the absolute inability of being ill-mannered or coming at your place for the pleasure to express my deepest thoughts to you in person.

That being said, as I am touched by my fellows’ distress, I advise you to offer your son condoms rather than an exorcist. That would require a lower budget and, I bet, more efficiency. If you were in a true state of deprivation, I would gladly buy some to your son. About you, my advice is to start a therapy or maybe try to bear another child if you hope having grandsons one day.

Dear madam I hope I was able to help you, and kindly asking you not to pass my email address to all your weekly gym friends. I would be quite upset to find more emails cast in the same mould once cured, when your issues obviously come within the competence of whatever sexologist, plumber, animal scientist, cabinetmaker or color-blind koto player.


Yours sincerely, please accept the expression of my most hypocritical compassion.


S. Kondo


And I added, for the early son’s improvement:


PS: if, as I’m thinking, you’re spying on your mother’s mailbox, let me give you another advice: choose them younger. Best wishes.


Luckily, no other existential issue email occurred, from a business-man deeply convinced of having married a ghost -he found it hard to believe before the wedding night, obviously- or a student convinced she failed to pass the exam because of her teacher cursing her (truly, I’m still laughing). So everything was rather quiet.


With these venomous words, I’m going back to bed for the next three days at last, as long as my body has not been cremated to avoid further contamination.