Captivated by the serial one-shot column “ ” / Part 7 Captivated by Fukudapero’s “Tunnel”

Prisoner of “Tunnel”

I'm in the tunnel now. I don't know what kind of tunnel you imagine when you hear the word "tunnel", but mine is small and blue. Your tunnel may be bigger than the Goddard Baston Tunnel, which cuts 57km through the Swiss Alps, and it may be brighter than a spaceship from the future or a Maitreya Bodhisattva. There may not really be a color. Perhaps the term ``tunnel'' refers to a situation that you can't touch and that you can't get out of.

I can touch my little blue tunnel, and I also have an address: XXXXX, Asahi Ward, Yokohama City, Kanagawa Prefecture. The sky blue paint peeling off like an old man's face is adorable, and it's my favorite.

It's about 5 meters long, so if this were a house, it would be a little cramped and I wouldn't be able to live in it if I added a bath and toilet in one room. I'm not saying this to be selfish, it's just reality; I have a wife and a daughter after all.

Every day at sunset, I bring my daughter here to listen to the voices. When you clear your body and mind, you can hear all kinds of voices. My daughter, who is not even a year old yet, listens with curiosity along with me. If there is a difference, she responds. He has just started to have a voice, and he can't help but enjoy using his stomach and throat to make sounds. I never reply. As the folk tale goes, if you turn around or reply, you won't be able to leave.

Of course, what my wife is doing is being with me. A young couple with a baby in a stroller are standing absentmindedly in a tunnel when a halogen lamp flickers on. It was night.

At night, the voices become clearer and rise like smoke. For someone like me who calls myself a poet by collecting voices and putting them into written words, nighttime should be the time when my eyes begin to sparkle with mystery and anticipation, like an elementary school student who loves stag beetles, but I'm already home. I have to have it. My daughter cries.

・A child who sprayed a large “←” on the tunnel wall and was unable to get out.
・Japan Post's Chinese employee prefers to be called "postman" rather than "postman"
・A spider that lives in the deserts of the Middle East and has only six legs.
・A wife who can't help but want to open the roof of a supermarket grand piano that plays automatically.
・The lotus whose gravity went crazy and turned into a vine
・Tax office official wearing a magic suit

I tried lining them up. These are the voices I picked up here the other day. They talk about themselves over and over again, in the same words and in the same voices. This is a monogataru, and this is the origin of the story, I thought to myself as I went home and carefully rolled out the voices in the bottle onto paper using a press. I was happy because I thought I had created a good piece of work.

The strange thing is that the three of us in my family are standing in front of the tunnel and can hear the voices that I had brought home in a bottle the other day. The voice of a lotus, the voice of a spider, the voice of a child... Just like picking an apple from an apple tree, the apple grows again, and my voice grows again. The apples that grew on the same branch last year are different from the apples that grew this year, but I realized that the voices that grow in this tunnel are actually all the same voice. The voices here are prisoners of this tunnel and can never leave.

I'm starting to feel anxious. The fact that I can hear your voice right now makes me wonder what's going on with the work I released the other day. Isn't it blank? It's a matter of life and death. I had to go home and check it out right away.

My daughter was crying. Her cries became even louder and sore that I was worried that she was hyperventilating. As I was pushing the stroller in place of my wife, who suffers from child-rearing tendonitis and can't even play the piano, I suddenly felt that we too might be part of the voice here. Then, that concern gradually became accompanied by the touch of a voice, breathing on the back of our necks. The muscles in my shoulders became so strong that I couldn't move another step. I desperately tried to stop my neck from turning away as if it were convulsing. ``We are not prisoners of the tunnel!'' - that's what my mouth was trying to scream.

Pelo Fukuda
Born in Hyogo in 1982. poets. There is a small blue tunnel near my house. In 2012, he and his wife traveled around the world, living together with local tribes instead of staying in hotels. Currently, she has a daughter and lives in Yokohama City, Kanagawa Prefecture. Based on an anthropological approach, he creates a world that fuses technology and mythology.

Short story: “The Glove and the Baby”, an adaptation of the folklore of indigenous North Americans http://bookshorts.jp/20150905t/
Video: Short film “〇” shot with a waterdrop lens http://eau-film.com/
Translation: tsukao photo book “ALL L/Right” http://www.libroarte.jp/tsukao.html
Art: Scheduled to be exhibited at the ``konjaku story'' exhibition at the Shinshu Takato Museum of Art in Nagano Prefecture from July to September 2016. http://fukudapero.com/