“Obsession” by Christopher Green

Excerpted from Takoyaki Tales by Christopher Green; reprinted with permission from Wilton Square Books.

Jeremy rode the 8:19 train to Tokyo station every weekday morning. A long-term resident of Tokyo, he had seen fighting passengers, ill passengers, sneezing, snoring and vomiting passengers. But these were rare exceptions. Most people spent the time in silence, using their phones to shop, play games, catch up on the news or improve their English. Some stared at their reflections in the window, while few peered into a handheld mirror and applied make-up.

Jeremy spent his journey reading the news on the New York Times website. He read The Guardian as well, to get a British perspective. If up to the challenge, he would muddle through the Spanish on El Mundo.

In the busiest trains, such as carriages he’d been pushed into, there wasn’t time for Jeremy to get his phone out of his bag, or even worse, he had it in his hand but couldn’t use it as his arm was crushed against the passenger in front of him.

On one such morning, Jeremy was staring over the heads of fellow passengers, reading advertising content. He grabbed fleeting glances through the window of one grey concrete building swishing by after another. Then he saw, sticking up proud and tall from the head of a nearby passenger, a single white hair. Jeremy studied the head and was able to assure himself that the hair was the only white one on the person’s head.

How is it possible, he thought, for there to be only one white hair? And how is it possible for that white hair to be the only hair standing up? And why didn’t the person know? Had they not looked in the mirror at some point? Maybe leaving the hair standing was a deliberate strategy, a plea for attention. Or could Jeremy be witnessing a new Tokyo fashion?

Jeremy realized the person was a young woman. An office worker, he assumed, as she was precisely dressed in a slate knee-length skirt and jacket, under which she wore a cornflower blue blouse with petite white buttons. Every part of this woman’s attire was evidence of careful planning and excellent dress sense. This wasn’t the type of person to know about a white hair and not pull it out. This woman needed to be told.

Jeremy thought that by explaining the situation quietly to her, she would be able to pull the hair out herself, and not spend the rest of the day walking around, potentially to be embarrassed by somebody rudely pointing it out to her.

And yet, he couldn’t talk to her while on the train. Nobody else was talking, and their conversation would be overheard by others. He would wait until she got off the train, and tell her when they were on a platform.

The train sped on into the centre of Tokyo, eventually pulling into Tokyo station on schedule. The doors opened, the passengers pressed forward and out. Jeremy tried to get as close to the woman as possible but other passengers were in front of him. He saw the woman, solitary white hair still pointing up, heading for the escalator. Jeremy side-stepped a businessman walking in front of him, bounced off the shoulder of another, and lurched for the same escalator. The woman was walking up the escalator to the right of others who were standing on the left, so Jeremy followed suit. He counted four commuters between him and the woman, and was confident he’d be able to catch up with her once he got to the top. He was wrong, for when he got to the top of the escalator the woman had vanished. He looked all around. Gone.

‘Out of the way,’ a businessman barked from behind him, reinforcing the words with a hand thrust into his back. He had been still for only a second, but was blocking the path of commuters desperate to get to work on time.

Deflated, Jeremy plodded on towards the ticket wicket and pressed his commuter pass against the touch panel. He found a concrete pillar to stand next to, affording some shelter from wave after wave of commuters. He stood still, prepared to wait until he was calm enough to head on to his workplace.

That was until he caught a glimpse of cornflower blue, the colour of the woman’s blouse. She’d taken her jacket off, folded it over an arm, and was standing in the ticket office, in a short queue of commuters. Jeremy’s heart pounded. All was not lost. He would not let her get out of his sight again. He kept his eyes on her as one by one other commuters in the queue had their questions answered by the station clerk. As the woman reached the front of the queue, he threw himself into the flow of commuters and seconds later extracted himself close to the exit to the ticket office.

Jeremy imagined how he would explain about the hair and how the woman would listen, her expression changing from a look of doubt to one of understanding, followed by a smile of thanks and her using a vanity mirror to pull the offending strand out. They would part with a gentle wave of their hands. 

His chance came sooner than he thought. The woman strode out of the ticket office, her head bowed as she forced her purse back into her Armani bag. Jeremy stood in front of her.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, a little louder than he’d usually speak to be sure to get her attention. The woman stopped, one hand still in her bag, and looked up at Jeremy. As she did so, Jeremy saw her eyes convey the change in the state of her mind more clearly than words could possibly do so, a change from clarity and confidence to doubt and dismay. The fear in her eyes destroyed Jeremy’s will, and with an open mouth, which had suddenly dried, and a vacant brain, he spluttered, ‘A white hair. You have a white hair.’ He nodded, eyes narrowed, to the spot at the top of her head where the hair still stood erect. With the woman unmoved, he couldn’t stop himself from adding, ‘Can I pull it out for you?’

The woman’s eyes flooded with fear. Her small mouth opened, but she said not a word. What left her mouth was a sound similar to that of brakes shrieking as a train pulled hard into a station, a sound that segued into a full-blooded scream of terror.

‘No,’ Jeremy said, reaching out to touch the woman’s hand to reassure her. ‘I didn’t mean to …’

That touch of skin on skin sparked another scream, scream upon scream. By the time the screams had abated, Jeremy had been pushed to the ground by passers-by. Station employees marched him into a back room of the ticket office, where he was forced to sit and wait for the arrival of the police.

‘I just wanted to talk to her,’ Jeremy blurted between the gasps of air that followed each sob, ‘about her hair.’ Tears streamed down his face, dripping off his chin onto his white shirt.

‘We get people like you all the time,’ a security guard said icily. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’