‘The Castle Trip’
As the temple bell tolls for the minute of the bomb, 8:14 AM, Amekawa-san searches Motoyasu Bridge for Sayuri. She is nowhere in sight but it is days away from being 50 years. Amekawa-san spots a policeman so he disappears down to a bench near the love hotels. He takes out his manuscript and reads to himself. We learn of how he met Sayuri.
Motoyasu Bridge is written and produced by David Doucette at Smokey Studios.
https://smokeystudios.ca
Read MoreAfter the Edward English House Christmas Party, Randal begins the long drunken walk home. He passes overt Motoyasu Bridge and sees the bench in Peace Park where he spoke with the old man, Amekawa-san, the bomb survivor.
Dead In Japan is written and produced by David Doucette at Smokey Studios.
https://smokeystudios.ca
Read MoreIt's the end of the year. Randal is dressed as Santa for the kiddies. The English teachers are drunk and unruly. Randal learns from Ernest about the American teachers that went missing.
Dead In Japan, written and produced by David Doucette at Smokey Studios.
https://smokeystudios.ca
Read More‘The Great Mistake’
Amekawa-san is 65, a survivor of the Hiroshima bomb. He prepares to go to the Motoyasu Bridge to meet Sayuri, the girl he was going to run away with on the morning of The Great Mistake, 50 years ago.
Read MoreIt’s 1995. Randal Lawrence, an English teacher in Hiroshima, Japan wakes on New Year’s Day in a bomb shelter. He’s imprisoned under a defunct hospital in South Japan, where he was promised the building to start an English school of his very own.
Read MoreShrine leader Fujiwara Yuji moves on to the next life and as Randal assumes power, he begins to tell us the truth of his life's end, he begins to tell us the truth of his life's end.
Read MoreThe souls of the Kumano Shrine gets the ants across the ditch and establish them in their new colony. Yuji wishes to speak with Randal on the return.
Read MoreRandal finds himself working alongside an irrigation ditch to help build a bridge of wattle. An uprooted ant colony is coming and Randal and the spirits are trying to save them.
Read More‘The Forgetting’
It's a move on the through the Kaeda fields for Randal, with the dead, those who help insects out and assist with rain, wind and sun. Randal learns about how the spirits occupy themselves. They are very much concerned and connected to the working in nature.
Read MoreAfter a brief discussion with Yuji Fujiwara-san, Randal joins the other spirits in the pine trees around the shrine. Wafts of smoke rise from burning incense.
Read MoreYuji Fujiwara. Samurai. Samurai code. The family to force Japan’s emperors to marry its daughters. Japan’s first emperor, Emperor Jimmu comes from this region. Bimbo said so. It seemed to mean everything. Why the pertinence, thinks Randal? Why does everthing come with pertinence. And better still? Why should I care? It’s not as if I have any say in the matter.
Read More11. ‘The Shrine’
In the night Randal's guides bring him to the Kumano Kaeda Shinto Shrine. ‘850-year-old,’ thought Nobo, of a tree, near ascending stone steps. ‘Camphor,’ Nobo thought. ‘Camphor?' thought Randal. 'What about the burning bark?’ Nobo: ‘We don’t burn the bark.’ A moon lurked overhead. Randal realized that he must go along with this, all of it.
Read More‘The Rescue’
After losing his way with his guides, Nobo and Bimbo, Randal lands under the house of the farmer he used to pass on his way to school. The farmer and his wife are above him, talking about Randal when the wife feels something strange coming from below the floor. The farmer gets his gun.
Read More‘The Encounter’
Two Japanese spirits on patrol find Randal and instruct him on how to move. They will take him to the temple. Randal is relieved; he thought he might never leave the rice paddy where he haunted and had no way of moving on. He does wonder how all this will play out. Perhaps he was better off on his own.
Read More‘The Beginning’
After realizing that he is in a rice paddy near his former self, Randal watches how the farmer discovers his body and how the police come and take him away. He himself is left in the field where he waits to see what is to come.
Read More‘The Awareness’
It is a hard realization, the sense that what you were is no more and that what is up ahead is an adventure that his beyond your wildest dreams. Randal realizes he is no more, as he lies in the rice paddy below typhoon winds, and yet awareness comes, awareness that he is more than now he has ever been.
Read More‘The Typhoon’
With a head full of thought about how he has been undone, Randal cycles home in a typhoon after class has been cancelled. He sees a truck stopped near a rice paddy, with sheets of 4x8 plywood flying from it. One of the sheets has his name on it.
Read More‘The Banishment’
While at the high school incinerator, while doing his part to keep the school clean, Randal recalls the taking of his rent money to his landlords who were tucked in behind the clay tennis court, just past his cottage. He knocks. It’s a mistake.
Read More‘The Resignation’
Yumisake, Japan. Randal makes that long anxious walk down to Kawakami's office to discuss the fact that his class is overloaded and he cannot teach such impossible girls. He hopes his boss can accommodate his request but the meeting is far beyond obscure. An ill feeling is immediately there between the two parties and Randal leaves the office saying he will resign. He has two weeks to honour. He will not get the chance.
Read More‘The Hallway’
It is in an empty hallway where Randal Laurence, with his schoolbag and uncertain as to what to do. He has just left a class in which the students were impossible to teach.
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