Something I've writ, and am still revising and stuff. Email me with suggested changes. I won't be back on for awhile. The name "ALice Lang" WILL be changed. suggestions welcome.




“Oh, Excuse me,” Ken`ichi said, bumping into a girl.
“Gomenasai,”# She said, rushing off.
‘Good lord,’ Ken`ichi thought to himself. ‘She was beautiful! She had long blonde hair and such a beautiful white skin tone. However, she was obviously not Japanese. She did not carry the same features as most Japanese people. Ah! She is carrying a Kendo practice sword! Maybe this is her first year as well!’
Ken`ichi was on his way to the store to buy supplies for his dorm. He was still thinking about the girl, and he hoped she was in his class. Still deep in thought, Ken`ichi paid for the supplies and made for the dorm. He also thought to himself what a wonderful city Osaka is, and wondered why he hadn’t come more often before he moved here.
When Ken`ichi got there only the dorm leader was present, and he was watching TV. He sat down on the other end of the couch.
“Yo. What’s up?”
Ken`ichi did not say anything. He just stared off into space.
“Speak, Dog!” The dorm leader punched Ken`ichi’s arm.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Seta. I was just thinking.”
“’Bout some girl you saw while you were out, I’ll bet.”
“Oh… Yeah. She was carrying a Kendo sword, and looked American.”
“Gah. You’d do best to stay away from foreigners; they’re not worth much.”
Later that day, Ken`ichi went to kendo practice. The dojo was surprisingly white, and had traditional tatami mat flooring with mirrors lining the west wall. Ken`ichi looked at the other students in the room, and noticed the girl he bumped into earlier. There was time before class, so he sat next to her.
“Hello again.” Ken`ichi said casually.
“I am so sorry for earlier! I was in such a rush to get to the bookstore before it got crowded I wasn’t watching where I was going!”
“My name is Kobayashi Ken`ichi.”
“I am Lang Alice,” she replied, smiling.
“You must be an exchange student. The name and face are a dead giveaway.
“Hai,”# she said, smiling still.
“Thank you for the chat, Lang-san#”
“Alice-chan# will do,” she giggled.
Class commenced shortly, and the master introduced himself.
“I am Watanabe Kentaro, your Teacher.”
“Good evening Watanabe-Sempai#”
“Your first order of business is getting to know your classmates, who will be your opponents. Knowing your opponent is key, because mannerisms can tell a lot about movement and the vice-versa.”
“Hai,” the class responded, turning to face the ones near them. Naturally, Ken`ichi and Alice spoke to each other.
“As you already know, I am American. I am 19, and come from a small family on the west coast. They sent me here to live after I learned the language. I play guitar and I am taking lessons for it at my prep school.”
“I am 19, coming from a long family line rooted deeply in feudal Japan. I am learning Kendo in honor of my grandfather, a great Kendo master who was mortally wounded in World War Two.”
“Oh… My grandfather is a veteran of the same war!”
“Wow…”
Another girl was walking up to them. Tears were welling up in her eyes, and Ken`ichi felt sad looking at her.
“There is no partner for me, and the others ignore me…” She pouted, wiping away potential tears, “Would you… let me join you two?”
“Of course we would. You must be a high school student. My name is Kobayashi Ken`ichi.”
“I am Lang Alice; you both can call me Ali.”
“And you two can call me Ichi.”
“Thank you both. My name is Suzuki Michiko,” she had brightened up a little, but still looked sad. Ken`ichi wondered what bothered her. He was always concerned for people.
They talked until the end of lesson one, and Ken`ichi and Alice learned that Michiko is from a working class family in the city, and they can barely afford her kendo lessons. Ken`ichi was perhaps the nicest person in “The Land of the Rising sun,” so he quickly offered to help payment.
“You would do that for me when you barely know me?”
“Hey, we’re friends, right?”
“Of course! Thank you!” She was instantly a lot happier. It must have been that she was feeling guilty for taking that sort of toll on the family’s budget. Now the toll would be on Ichi’s budget. It was rough, but he was able to keep helping her out. Kendo was 1500¥# per week, 3000¥ a week for the two of them. That is very close to the monthly phone bill at his dormitory! Ken`ichi didn’t mind though. She was cute!
The three of them met almost daily in between lessons. After about a month of friendship Ichi invited Alice and Michiko over to the dorm before the next kendo lesson, but the two said they would rather not be in the same room as all those other boys, which Ichi understood. They decided to eat a lunch at the park instead, and Michiko packed a lunch. When they got there, the park was mainly empty, and they sat at a table beneath a tall oak tree. The temperature was nearly perfect, as was the lunch Michiko had prepared.
“Wow. This is some kind of high quality meat isn’t it?” Ken`ichi commented as he began to eat.
“No, it’s just something I seasoned and cooked myself, that’s all.”
“It’s good.”
Michiko smiled at Ichi, and he felt something in the smile. It was a good feeling.
“Wow, it is!” Alice said after her first bite.
What Michiko said next shocked him.
“You two are the first true friends I’ve ever had.” Michiko said, looking embarrassed.
“No way. You’re very pretty and nice, why wouldn’t people like you?” Ken’ichi said thoughtfully.
“Its not that I’m not liked, it’s that I dislike most of the people I meet. They are always nice to me and then cruel to others or the opposite, which I really hate… I’m not all that good looking.”
“Of course you are.” Anyway, that is just the way the world is, Michi. You just have to learn to forgive and play the hand you‘re dealt.”
“I know, but why is the world this way?”
“Well, I don’t know… but what I do know is we just have to make do with what we have, because when it’s gone, it’s gone.”
Seta and a few others from the dorm had seen Ken`ichi and started on their way over.
“Well look here, Ken`ichi is a player!” Seta said, laughing
“Hey Seta. These two are Alice and Michiko. Michiko, Alice, this is my dorm leader Seta and a few of the others.
“Oh, it’s the foreigner.” Seta said with sarcastic enthusiasm.
“Be nice Seta!”
“What’re you gonna do about it?”
“I… er…”
“Hey you,” Seta said arrogantly, “Yes you, the high schooler. We’re going somewhere else.”
Seta grabbed her firmly by the arm and began to lead her off.
“Let go of her!” Ken`ichi roared.
Seta let go of her in shock. After a second of thinking what to say, he came out with, “I am your dorm leader! Never talk back to me! I’ll have you booted in two seconds flat if you do it again!”
“Back off!” Alice screamed.
“Keep your foreign dog quiet Ken`ichi!”
What happened next amazed the entire group. Ken`ichi grabbed Seta’s right shoulder with his left hand, brought his right hand back, and sent it flying at Seta’s face in the form of a fist. Seta fell to the ground, and did not get back up.
“Holy crap Ken`ichi! You knocked him out!” One his dorm-mates said.
“You’d best not show your face at the dorm anymore. He is liable to throw something heavy at you, and the TV is pretty close to the door. I’m serious, don’t come back,” another commented, “It’s for your own good.”
The blood feud was over, and his ex-dorm-mates carried Seta off. Michiko spoke soon after.
“Ichi, thanks,” she voiced, “I really appreciate you sticking up for me.”
Alice had her head down against the table.
“Don’t let what they said get to you.”
“I’ll never be accepted here…” She sobbed
Ken`ichi switched sides of the table, and put his arm around her, saying, “Give it time. Once people get to know you it’ll be fine.”
“She looked up at him, and wiped away the tears.
“I hope you’re right, Ichi.”
A male student walked up to Ken`ichi and began to speak.
“Your name is Ken`ichi correct? I saw the entire thing, and I invite you to join the dorm I lead. What happened here means you’re tough and reliable when it comes down to the wire.”
“I accept your offer, but we should talk about the details some other time.”
“Yes, I agree.”
Ichi was given the dorm’s address with the leader’s name, Kazuya, and he then went back to tending to Alice. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a slight amount of jealousy on Michiko’s face.
At the kendo practice, the three of them alternated sparring with each other. First, it was Ichi vs. Alice, then Alice vs. Michiko, then Michiko vs. Ichi.
When Ichi and Alice were up, Ichi let Alice take the first move, which was a standard thrust, which Ichi dodged and countered, his sword striking hers near the hilt. She made a swing for his legs, which he jumped over and sung back at. In this short time period, it was over. Ichi’s sword stopped about an inch from the right side of Alice’s neck.
“Very good, Ichi-kun!” Watanabe-Sempai exclaimed.
“Thank you Sempai.”
Next, it was Michiko was against Alice, who was beat again with a move similar to Ichi’s final attack. It took only two seconds, after Alice took a swing at Michiko’s chest, which she dodged by ducking and then sent her sword up to stop just millimeters away from Alice’s chin.
“You are too aggressive, Alice-Chan. You must learn to let your opponent strike first,” The Sempai lectured.
“Yes Sempai, I will improve on this,” she responded.
Next was the match between Michiko and Ichi. Ichi started with a vertical swipe, which Michiko dodged by stepping back. She then came at him with a low center of gravity that caught Ichi off guard. She came at him and made an upward slash that would have entered Ichi in the right hip and came out his left shoulder if she had hit and they were using real swords, but Ichi fell to his left and sent his sword at Michiko’s legs, which she was just barely able to block in time. The two backed off for a few seconds, then caught their breath.
The Sempai called time on the lesson, and asked everyone to leave. He bade Ken`ichi and Michiko come and speak with him.
“I want you two to have a match in front of the entire class next time. You have only had a month’s worth of training and you already perform like 2nd year students! You two are prime examples of kendo students.
“Yes, Sempai, We will do our best!” They responded, bowing.
When he was fighting with Michiko, he felt a kind of feeling as if she was trying to get him to like her by going all out. He liked her too, but he was sure that Alice liked him as well.
After kendo, he headed off to his new dorm and the dorm leader introduced him to his new associates. The dorm leader explained what happened in the park, and they gave him a hero’s welcome.
Kazuya turned to him and said, “Just don’t punch me!”
He thought about the two girls over the next few weeks. Ichi wanted to date Michiko, but he was certain that Alice loved him. He decided he would talk to Alice before Michiko, so he called her to meet him at the park at eight and invited Michiko over to the dorm for a movie thirty minutes later. The other students would be out at a party that night, which he had politely declined earlier.
Alice was late.
“Hey Ali, I’m over here!”
“Hey Ichi. What did you want to talk to me about?
“I dunno, a few different things.”
“Okay then.”
“Have you ever liked a person and didn’t know what they thought of you, and you were left wondering a long time?”
“Yes, Plenty of times. It happens to me quite a bit.”
“Like right now for instance?”
“Oh… I….” Alice blushed, and what she wanted to say was obvious.
Ken`ichi noticed the time. It was 8:21
“You’d better go now, and I need to too!”
“Why? Oh yeah that is right! I have guitar lessons in a half an hour and I need to shower!”
They ran their separate directions, and Ken`ichi barely got home in time to meet Michiko. She knocked on the door about 10 minutes after Ken`ichi got back home, which gave him enough time to shower and get ready for her. She was wearing a white kimono with red Rose imprinting, and her makeup was perfect.
“Sorry I’m late, Ichi”
“Michiko picked out a movie titled “A Romance in Tokyo,” and they sat on the couch and watched it on the dorm-owned HDTV. It was a movie about a guy and a girl meeting in a Tokyo Coffee shop and falling in love. Michiko sat right next to him, and about an hour and a half into the movie, she was sitting on his lap sideways with her head against his chest and her left arm on his right shoulder.
Alice was on her way to Ken’ichi’s dorm, her guitar lessons now over. She had not been focusing on her lesson, she had been focusing on Ichi, and she decided she would tell him that she was in love with him. She walked through the city and her shadow raced her after she passed each lamppost. Alice was deep in thought about Ken`ichi. She jogged back to her house and then took the railcar so that she could get to the dorm before he turned in for the night.
After about five minutes of Michiko sitting on top of him, Ken’ichi finally got the nerve to ask the question his mind embraced.
“Michiko… Do you…”
“Do I what?” she looked up and said with an innocent look in her eyes.
“Do you… Love me?”
“Ichi…” she managed, caught somewhere between replying and living in the moment.
Their faces hovered in front of each other, and time stood still. Nothing moved around them, and there was no sound. It was as if someone had stripped the audio of their life to emphasize the moment. Then, the only ones in the world, their lips touched, and locked. An eternity passed, and thoughts raced through their minds. Thoughts of the future, thoughts of the past, thoughts of the present all ran together like watercolors to represent a beauty no words could describe, no art could define.
Suddenly, as if fate was undoing an accident, the universe crashed. They did not hear the footsteps outside, and the door was cracked open.
“Hey Ichi, there is something I want to tell-”
Alice gasped. Her eyes and body shook, and Ken’ichi was the same. Tears came to her eyes in such a flood she couldn’t see a thing. She turned, and ran.
Ken`ichi took off after her, and Michiko just stood by the door and then hit her knees and cried. She was sure she had ruined their friendship, and she felt ashamed for it.
“Alice wait!” Please don’t-”
“I hate you!”
The words pierced Ichi’s heart. He just stood there. He stared in her direction, his face as blank as a doll‘s. He stood there for at least fifteen minutes, his mind almost completely shut down. The words replayed repeatedly in his head, tormenting him.
“I hate you!”
He shuddered.
“I hate you!”
He closed his eyes.
“I hate you!”
His brain clicked back into function. Even if it was a solemn function, it was working again, and he turned around and headed back to the dorm. Michiko had gone back inside and the other students that lived there had gotten back already. They were inside asking why she would enter a male dormitory alone.
“She’s with me guys. I would appreciate it if you would leave us alone. You got back at a bad time.”
One of the other boys noticed she was fighting back tears, and said slyly, “Oh, she must be having second thoughts about…”
“No!” Ichi quickly responded, “It’s nothing like that! We’ve just had a problem with a friend, that’s all!”
“Sorry. That was stupid of me,” He apologized.
“How was the party?” He asked quietly and sadly.
“It was really dull. Only one lamp broke.”
Ken’ichi half sat, half laid down on the couch with his head propped against the pillow, and Michiko lay against him, still crying. They were both asleep in a few hours.
Ichi’s did not dream that night, but Michiko did. She dreamt of fixing it all, she wanted to fix it because she had broken it, or at least she thought she did. In the morning, she decided unconsciously, she would right this wrong.
Ken`ichi awoke as Kazuya prodded him, very slowly opening his eyes.
“Hey Ichi!” he said, in a voice someone uses when they are trying to talk to someone on the other side of a classroom while keeping their words from reaching the professor, “The police and some woman are at the door asking about the girl!”
Ichi got up quickly and quietly, laying a still sleeping Michiko back on the couch. Kazuya was answering questions for the people at the door when Ichi arrived.
“Where is Michiko?!”
“She is here, sleeping,” Ichi took into account her even more worried expression, and added: “and before you get any strange notions, let me explain.”
Ken`ichi told the mother the events of the night before, and how everything had happened. Kazuya backed him up on this, saying that he and another tenant were up watching TV in the other room with the door open the entire night. Michiko’s mother sighed with an air of understanding, and went back home saying that Michiko needs to be home an hour or so after she wakes up.
Ichi went in the kitchen and ate some of the sausage the appointed cook for the week had prepared. The kitchen was kept a lot cleaner than his old dorm, and the utensils were all put away neatly. Sitting at the table, he heard Michiko stir a slight amount, then walked over to the couch and sat on the other end. She opened her eyes slowly, then levered her body up to see Ichi’s face.
“Oh no!” She exclaimed sleepily “It is morning already, and-”
“Your mother has already been here, and I explained the situation.” Ichi interrupted.
“We need to go over to Alice’s house and talk to her!”
“No.”
“But she is our friend, Ken’ichi!”
“If we both went over there, it would be a little awkward, and it would probably offend her even more. I will go soon, and then I will set up a time when we can all talk. In the mean time, we can‘t let this get in between us. It is a big deal, but we have to enjoy our newfound love, regardless of whether or not she is still our friend, but I am sure she will understand”
Ichi offered her a hand, which she took and got up. He rode with her to her home on the railcar, and Michiko sat close beside him, and held his arm.