Sakamichi (short story)

I was halfway through my second mile, the worst part of any run. Too early to call it quits, too early to surrender. It’s the point when you embrace reality. You’re no longer at the start but nowhere near the end. In the face of infinity, you wonder why you bother.

Rain fell in sharp needles. Frosted wind cut down to my cheekbones. The steady syncopation of breath, feet, and blood in my ears drowned out my other senses.

As I came down the hill and turned a blind curve under the bridge, I saw a body floating face-down in the water a few feet from shore. Several long seconds passed before I remembered how to breathe. The lifeless mass bobbed silently with the current, sending ripples across the surface.

Running never gets easier. You get better at putting up with it.

In the beginning, running feels novel. You tell everyone about your peculiar new habit. It’s walking, only faster. The novelty lingers for a while.

The moment you graduate from jogging to running, people start forming opinions. Everyone runs for a reason. Running without one is a sign of non-commitment. You’re suddenly good enough to be not good at something.

You set a goal, throw yourself at it, and inch long.

Soon you learn the more you run, the more you have to run. Goals are made to be unreachable. “Far” depends on who you ask. There’s always someone slower, and faster, than you. You retreat inwards knowing the end is nowhere in sight. Down the same path, over and over.

Eventually, you find a rhythm. You allow yourself to see how far you’ve come and accept how much further you have to go.

I was fat as a kid. This made me very popular. Last picked, last in the locker room, last in class. “Fat” wasn’t who I was, but it was the only thing I felt. Weight is a costume you can’t take off.

The hobbies I wanted to try required me to slim down. Every time I tried to run on a track or ride my bike, my weight seemed to double, as if stones were tied to my ankles. Classmates piled on, reminding me it would take eons to reach an average size. Even Tai Sensei, my favorite teacher, pointed out areas for improvement.

You can’t start, so you never start.

So you find others who suffer like you. The outsiders accept you the way everyone else should. But they spew their own brand of toxicity. Rather than saying ‘you’re not good enough’ outright, they discourage change. And instead of shedding baggage, you hold onto what little you have.

When I went to university, I still hadn’t dropped the weight and lived by the “I’ll start tomorrow” mantra for two decades. How much longer could I beat that drum?

On the morning of the coldest and shortest day of the year, something snapped. I thrust myself out of bed, yanked whatever was within arm’s reach, and forced myself out the door.

Then I just took off running. First I ran to the far end of the dormitory. I was breathless after 50 meters. Parts of me I didn’t know could hurt screamed in agony. Once I caught my breath, I ran to the next dormitory. Then I ran to the far end of campus. I’d never run so far in my entire life.

Every day I repeated the process. It took three more weeks to make it to the edge of campus without stopping. Runs were sporadic, some as short as 5 minutes or others as far as a loop around campus. By the end of the month, the soles of my shoes had worn through.

A classmate on the track team decided he wanted to mentor me. He gave me advice about brands, diets, and training plans. I didn’t understand any of it. Running was already a lot of work and now there were more requirements. “Give it another week,” he assured me, “it gets easier.” He invited me to join him for a session at a pace I was comfortable with. Despite his best intentions, knowing he’d dumb himself down had the opposite effect.

Another month passed and I felt worse. My weight increased. Joints and toes ached constantly. I woke up in the middle of the night to new pain in unexpected places. Running was a switch and bait.

Yet I was possessed. Running had changed something. There was an impulse resting below the surface without a name or face. I needed to find my own way.

I promised to run every morning for exactly twenty minutes in any direction. No more, no less. However far I got was where I’d end up.

The friends you lean on, the ones you assume eat, sleep, and shit just like you, won’t always support sudden obsessions. You invite them to join you but repel them in the process. Years of stability unravel over a single topic.

Like the burden of fullness I’d carried for so long, I also needed to let them go. Change scares everyone.

After I started working, I kept running every day. Running became one of my few constants in life. My allotted twenty minutes got me further and further, to new paths and neighborhoods I would’ve never seen otherwise. After a year, I comfortably run 2 miles.

You eventually develop a relationship with the paths you take. Familiar sights and faces become nameless friends. The same running group passed me every Tuesday. The shops on the opposite side of the river were perfect mileage markers. You start to give them names out of a mix of boredom and gratitude.

On the days I ran northeast on the hill overlooking the river, I consistently finished near a shrine nestled at the foot of the levee. It was a simple building by any standard and seldom visited, shrouded by apartments and foliage.

This became my only structured route and made directionless method feel like I was wearing the wrong shoes on opposite feet. My days of meandering had finally come to an end. At some point I made the shrine my finish line, intentionally saving my last bit of energy to pass by reverently before collapsing.

My weight had gone down, but I still didn’t look anything like other runners. Every day I woke up disappointed that I wasn’t suddenly buff. Effort didn’t seem to matter. I had to remind myself that running only gets harder. The more effort you put in, the less you seem to get in return.

It gets boring too. One foot up, one foot forward. Pain in your shin, a blister on your little toe, itchy skin. Repeat. Remember, running for fun is a sign of non-commitment.

The shrine became my partner. I promised to visit, it promised to be there. The appointment was always kept. It was more than a relationship of convenience. No matter how much I ran, I was never satisfied. Even after my fitness improved and shrine runs hardly passed as accomplishments, I kept going back. I couldn’t shake the feeling I was meant to be there.

The river reminded me why I run.

Under the shelter of the bridge, the body inched towards the river’s edge. The pale white back arched high above the water, breaking the tension and channeling new currents around it. I watched as it moved gently downstream and into the storm, eventually lodging itself in an island of debris.

Frigid air brought the world back into focus. Panic drained from my chest and thawed my limbs, giving way to misshapen guilt. My first instinct was not to pull the lifeless body from the water.

Without thinking, I stumbled forward. The body was bald from head to toe. There wasn’t a single blemish or distinguishing feature anywhere. Its skin was so clean it almost seemed to glow. The body was small, only about a meter long. Too short for an adult, and yet its limbs were too girthy to be a child’s. From its back, I couldn’t tell if it was male, female, or human.

It must have been dead for a while. The torso was bloated but emitted no odor. Part of the corpse was caught in what looked like a black garbage bag.

The longer I stared, the stranger it became. Everything was out of place. Feet were where hands should have been, and it had too many. The limbs and proportions were all wrong. Arms stretched double the length while legs contorted in impossible directions.

Fear took hold once as the gravity of the moment weighed on me. Was I now a witness to a murder? Or was this a bizarre suicide? I never imagined this was what it would feel like. If this was murder, why was I just standing there? For all I know, the murderer had dumped the body right around the corner. There could have easily been a next victim.

My mind ventured to dark places. What if it wasn’t a human at all? Every culture has a myth about monsters lurking in the water. Our teachers warned us about the kappas who lived in rivers, lakes, and streams that snatched up children who got too close to open water.

The image from the fairytale flashed in my mind, the creature twisting around in the water, its head swiveling to bear a blunt beak and beady eyes. Mysterious power lured me towards doom. Reptilian arms shot up from the depths to drag me under. Razors wrapped around my throat and sapped away my last shred of energy.

Moments stretched into hours. Individual drops of rain echoed across the steel bridge beams before striking the earth. My face was inches from the creature. Dread pulled me down, closer and closer, clawing at my lungs. I was afraid: of being eaten alive, of getting mixed up in the crime, of what would haunt me if the departed hadn’t fulfilled their dying wish.

__

There was a body floating in the river, but it was never alive. The flawless limbs, wrapped in plastic skin and detached from the torso, belonged to a mannequin.

Someone must have broken it up, stuffed the parts into a garbage bag, and tossed them in the river. The bundle must have come apart into a floating mass as it moved downstream. Probably their idea of a practical joke.

No one had died. And yet, I bolted towards the shrine with unnatural speed.

I passed it and kept running along the hill. Faster and further than I’d ever run in my life. I didn’t stop until I reached the end of the path a dozen miles later. When there was no road left, I simply turned and ran back — past the shrine, past the body, past my apartment.

A sense of clarity urged me towards paths I’d never taken. I ran until my feet bled through my shoes. I wasn’t angry at the practical joker. I wasn’t afraid anyone was after me. Nothing was going to devour my soul.

Still, I ran. Seeing the body in the water, and what could have been, reminded me how much I wanted to live.

By James Ong, 2023