Walking down sort-of wicked Kabuki-cho back street. The halfway mark to Yasukini dori and still a long way to Draft One. It's like a slow headache orange train ride, only with feet.
(For the words: It’s before the Goka Jyu-Pun Senso, but well after the Ramen Bomb, so the hidden rooms still quietly fold and transform sight unseen by anyone inside of themselves.)
8am summer drizzle sheets, sweat and gray. Tea-colored hair hosts weave in and out of Mazy dori, the way shown on their pointy white Sagbreed by ESPE shoes. One walks past Pedro Edogawa just long enough to size him up. Both spend too much time and money on clothes and hair, hence odd fascination and attraction. Still, it’s a contest of sorts. Which of them had the longer night and how much is still left over the next day? The truth found from the taste in their mouths. Pedro is all yakiniku charcoal and sour Doutour skim milk and coffee from a desperate conbini run. Host One Million is lukewarm champagne and breath mint breakfast. Neither of them has slept much; the Host from what they call “work” and Pedro because of the male voice on the phone at XO, with a single question that unnerved him so: “Kono heya wa hitori desu ka?”
Are you alone in that room?
Pedro retreats into details. Repair man from Namco briefly appears on the street, coming to applying red electrical tape to a busted up Hajime no Ippo punching game in the outdoor arcade, behind the batting cages, which are finally, briefly silent for once. Who runs these things? He eclipses a Manba Gal squatting in a doorway, breathing husky-quiet into cell phone, surrounded by papery remains of fast food breakfast. Big Brother Frank Takada’s face, his middle age moustache and glasses plastered seemingly from every possible surface, the heel behind a thousand “King of Dandy” flower bouquets, the true mayor of Higashi Shinjuku.
View from the Secret Window of Shin Okubo. The NTT building hangs in the gray, no weather ever seeming to affect it. Pedro has walked seemingly everywhere in Shinjuku but has never been to the clock tower’s foundations. Perhaps it creeps over the edge of the world then, like Godman’s distant stopwatch. Enough pain behind his eyelids to want to close them, but Pedro walks forward, just inching towards the station. Fingers pocketing the change in search of 210 yen. Too early to catch the express, but the Doubutsu-sen should already be up and running. Transfer at Chiokure. Best to get a move on to meet the Bald Winn and accept a foxtail from Sukeren.
The Government of Darkness is holding your favorite mecha designer hostage. Or maybe just captive.
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TOKYO (Reuters) - Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi announced on Tuesday that Japan will withdraw its troops from Iraq, ending the Japanese military's riskiest and most ambitious overseas mission since World War Two...Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso said the troops had won high marks for their military discipline. "I think such views have made a very big contribution to improving the brand image of Japan as a country," he told a news conference ahead of the official announcement.
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"Brand image"?
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Japan has said its withdrawal from the southern city of Samawa had to be coordinated with Britain and Australia, whose troops provide security for the roughly 550 Japanese soldiers engaged in reconstruction and humanitarian work...Australian Prime Minister John Howard said the Australian troops would keep "looking after the Japanese until the Japanese have gone, and I expect that to be quite soon".
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I'm sure that wasn't meant to sound quite so patronizing (and accurate).
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Koizumi had stressed the need to back the United States in Iraq to ensure Washington comes to Japan's aid in the event of an attack by its unpredictable neighbour, communist North Korea.
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Let's helping with peaceful effort in Iraq, so please please please to honor Security Treaty in case Kitachosen nuke Japan as like 'Gojira'! Ha ha! Please to honor! Please!
Posted by: Carl Horn | June 20, 2006 at 05:37 AM
didnt a machine at xo ask u that 'do u have a members card'?????
Posted by: Paper BoyXXX | June 20, 2006 at 08:21 AM