Samurai Sales

The Boeing’s right wheel grabbed the blacktop first; clunking the seven sixty seven askew from the desired direction ever so slightly; slamming an eerie silence throughout the cabin.
Gravity released as the aircraft’s industrial strength shocks tested their limits. Stomachs clenched against the feeling normally expected at the top of amusement park rides. This time the experience was far from uplifting. Time seemed to slow down just enough to allow passengers to question whether or not the shocks would hold such an impact and were they going to live through this. Eleven tons of jumbo jet began to slide before any passenger had time to draw their next breath.
So, why was the passenger seated on the inside aisle of row thirty six smiling as the heavyweight continued its three wheel drift towards Seattle airport?
It had been a rocky flight from the get-go, Jin recalled. The co-pilot’s stomping of the pedals left and right to adjust for the discovered turbulence had not been successful the first 30 minutes of flight and had not done much for the nerves of the passengers during the last. To his knowledge, the stomping techniques had been amended since a crash over New York a couple years before which caused a tail fin of a plane to shear off, making it impossible to recover. All passengers had perished.
The fingernails of Jin’s neighbouring passengers began to dig in his hands and loose articles seemed to move as if in slow motion or somewhere in orbit inside the cabin. The initial manicured pains subsided as Jin gave in to the moment’s irrelevance and he smiled to recapture a moment just a few days before – “I’m going tornado surfing!” and the memory of that conversation completed Jin’s smile well up into his cheekbones back on board the aircraft.
He was arriving in style! All three pieces of landing gear gleefully squealing like an uncontrollable toddler to announce his arrival! He could have laughed out but for the reminder of what he was leaving behind.
“You’re not fully dressed until you put your smile on” the wisdom of Jin’s Gran was repeated each day as Jin got ready to greet it. Even that day, his most woeful day, it would be necessary to do so though his heart wasn’t at all in it. He’d have to fake it until he made it. Habits are difficult to break, whether they are good habits or not so good habits.
Jin’s ritual habit began each day began with a regime of callisthenics including one hundred crunches, one hundred press ups and a run through of his martial arts forms which got the blood flowing sharply and his attention spans focussed on what there was to do that day.
Today he’d be visiting family in the wake of his mother. It used to be he wasn’t permitted breakfast until the morning these rituals were completed as well as teeth brushed, washed, clean shaven (a relatively new additional rite of passage) and his hair made presentable. It still eluded him how Gran always knew when he skipped on one or the other.
A lovely lady, Jin’s Gran. Brought up when the highest of standards of morality were strictly enforced by all in village. A fall out in the village meant your family might go hungry in the winter time…she lived by the standards of being honest through and through. The solemn peace created from living this way allowed Gran to perform her yoga at a level that young Jin could admire and aspire to.
“You’re just not ‘fresh’ if you forgo any of your rituals.” She’d say. “It may not always be possible to have fun all the time, but by choosing your attitude, you open yourself up to the possibility of humour discovering you. Be open for it and watch it come to you, you’ll see.”
The day seemed the longest of his life. It dragged on and on as he missed his mother more and more. Even later in the day as friends of his mother arrived to pay their respects, their warmth felt misplaced though well intended.
Jin’s cousin, Art and he had grown up together. They’d grown up ere brothers than cousins after Jin’s father left when he was still a baby. His uncle took Gran, mom and himself into his home while still in Japan. Uncle D’s advertising business was very successful and had grown enough that he’d moved to the Americas four years ago. The transition was made easier by the fact that Uncle D had an American wife he’d met while she was on vacation visiting her homeland. They fell in love in a café they frequented at the base of Mount Fuji. Uncle D had to travel an hour each way to see her and came home smiling each day he saw ‘his little missus’ claiming she’d one day be ‘his missus kisses’. They moved to Washington shortly after getting married. It was a happy time for all. Gran took it on as her responsibility that everything went smoothly. She made sure all the families involved like each other. She just seemed to have the knack. She guided people in conversations and listened with such enthusiasm that it was impossible not to like her.
Like all good brothers, Art and Jin had fought. They were, after all, only a year and a half apart in age with Art being the senior sibling. Fact is, Art gave Jin his first broken nose after Jin chased him screaming bloody murder for something he could no longer remember as being important when Art spun round with a closed fist and squarely connected, knocking Jin out cold. Art ran home to Jin’s mom crying all the way thinking he’d killed him. Too upset to say where Jin lay, the entire family had to wait until Jin regained consciousness and walked in still damp and cold from lying in the field where they’d been playing. Art was so happy to see him again that he threw his arms around him and professed how sorry he truly was; how much he loved him his only brother; how silly a thing it was to do and upon realising he was hugging the person he’d killed, he feinted.
Today was just that day where Jin wanted so much to fall into mourning. Was he being disrespectful for not showing his compassion? Old wounds seemed to resurface in his memory as everything about his mother seemed so perfect. Jin remembered the sternness in his mother’s voice whenever discipline was required, the understanding and forgiveness when he disappointed her. The caring in her smile that although Gran most certainly must have forged itself from a very early age, it was in an old photograph that Jin found of his mother as a teenager that the simplicity of her smile seemed to come from somewhere else.
Jin’s mother was always presentable, immaculately groomed and being a single mom had kept her hair relatively short throughout Jin’s childhood…apparently as a baby, Jin had a grip that he could hang from for nearly an hour and would do so as often as possible. She’d grown her hair out for many years as a statement of her son’s coming of age (and getting out of some old habits) for all those whom knew her to see. Jin was at school when he heard of his mother’s accident while carrying groceries. It was said that a broken milk bottle might cost his mother her arm. Panic set in immediately as he rushed off to her to know that she was going to be alright. For two days, it seemed, Jin held his breath as the glass was removed, the nerves repaired and the okay given that the arm would regain mobility after some physiotherapy. Tears of relief flowed uncontrollably from Jin when his mother was forced to cut her beautiful long hair as she couldn’t raise her arm to wash and brush her hair out.
He just couldn’t bring himself to care what happened to him…live or die. It all seemed so immaterial.
It was just as this memory was at the forefront...