FAKKU Writers' Lounge

Dawn of Dark, your entry is heavily influenced by Japanese cartoons. Indeed, your entry called for readers to imagine the characters and scenery that are portrayed in these cartoons. For me, it succeeded in doing so and I do really hope that you'd be happy with what I thought about as my mind turned to those cartoons. This following parody will express these thoughts in head somewhat:

Japan, as any patriotic person ought to know, was mired in war between quarrelsome tribes or cliques as they like to call themselves midway in the second millennium of the Common Era. We all know that the aftermath of these wars resulted in a unified Japan ruled by Generalissimos, (known in our tongue and worldwide as Shoguns) the Generalissimos deciding to bring their wars to the rest of East Asia, the birth of a nation of war fanatics and quite a lot of bad blood.

Never mind all of that, point of the story is, young man, is that the town you are in was a centre of a major conflict between some feudal lord and some other feudal lord. One of them won, the other lost.

To bury the hatchet, the defeated offered his daughter to be wedded to the victor. All seemed well in this marriage of convenience until a snowstorm struck the convoy that was transporting the would-be bride. That woman escaped into a wood filled with allergic reaction inducing cherry blossom tree pollen.

Finger pointing and quarreling ensued. That quickly escalated to arson, murder, head-chopping and all-out war. The defeated feudal lord lost once more and his estates, his posterity and his family were wiped out because no one forgives people who loses a second time.

Strange thing though, after these events, the town hardly sees any snow. While some say it was the doing of the bride that vanished in the allergic reaction inducing wood, I say it is global warming!

These were the words of a drunk and self-proclaimed academic who called himself leonard267. Whatever he was however, he definitely wasn’t Japanese. Yara, a high school graduate who was a newcomer to that town, was a member of leonard267’s one man audience. As much as he would like to kick that drunkard’s head in, his limbs were slender, his body light, his skin looked tender and he can’t start a fight.

He wanted to know more about the history of the town, its background and origins ever since the first day he stepped there to stay with his parents after graduating from a private boarding school somewhere in the city. Unfortunately, he was duped into listening to that leonard267 character who promised him an analysis of this town’s history only to go into a stream of thought, near nonsensical and borderline xenophobic rant.

Just as Yara thought that he would be stuck listening to leonard267 whine and moan on and on, someone struck that drunk rather hard on the head, incapacitating him. Yara’s heart felt a rush of gratitude as he turned his eyes to the person who struck leonard267. She was a ravishing beauty dressed in the finest of traditional Japanese clothes, her features were well-chiselled and her personality extremely horrible. The first words she spoke to Yara, shortly before brandishing her weapon in front of him, were,

“WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?!”

Yara’s eyes quickly turned away from her and was about to walk away when that woman shrieked,

“HEY! LOOK AT ME WHEN I AM TALKING TO YOU!”

Yara obeyed that instruction only to be verbally rebuked thus,

“WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME AGAIN?!”

It was a case of getting out of the frying pan and into the fire. That woman turned out to be even more of a psychopath than leonard267. Yara started to walk away briskly but not before he heard those words from that crazy woman,

“It is not as if I want you to look at me…”

In normal circumstances, Yara would have fallen head over heels over her voice that might have felt like music to his ears but after having to deal with a drunk and her, it made him start to break into a run. No matter how fast he ran though, she had some way of catching up with him.

There was no shaking off her, there was no escape and there can be nowhere to hide. The days that followed Yara’s first encounter with her were absolutely plagued by her turning up at the most awkward of locations namely the more awkward locations in his house like toilets and the place where one’s pornography collection is stored. Many times he considered calling his parents, calling the police or calling whatever was the Aunt Agony equivalent of Japan. However, Yara never close got to doing that.

Was it because he would be laughed at if he were to make it known that he was stalked by a woman around his age (and a good looking one as well)? Was it because Yara was a masochist? Was it because of some supernatural power that made him change his mind? One can’t tell.

What was peculiar about that woman was, whenever Yara was in the company of others she would disappear. Yara did consider sleeping with his parents or mingling more with the townsfolk, yet for some reason he never got round doing that.

What Yara suffered from that young woman was verbal and psychological abuse then strange attempts to make up with him. That threw the poor young man into emotional distress, delicate he was. Topics of conversation could be about he reads, (Yara read in his spare time) it could be how he sleeps, it could be how he uses the bathroom or it could be even how he breathes. She had an interesting fashion of speaking, a fashion that Yara grew to hate:

“Why are you reading like that? It is not as if I want you to read like that!”
“Why are you sleeping like that? It is not as if I want you to sleep like that!”
“Why are you s****ing like that? It is not as if I want you to s*** like that!”
“Why are you breathing like that? It is not as if I want you to breathe like that!”


Then, around a week after they first met, Yara finally got to know her name. The following was the conversation that led to Yara knowing her name. It begun with that woman shrieking,

“Why don’t you want to know my name? It is not as if I want you to know my name!”

Yara apologised profusely even though he did no wrong. After a few more moments of that woman’s shrieking, it was then followed by what Yara found a sickly sweet and soft voice,

“If you really want to know, my name is Sanae.”

Followed by a very abrupt and ear-shattering yell,

“IT IS NOT AS IF I WANT YOU TO KNOW MY NAME IS SANAE!”


Sanae knew Yara’s name after ransacking his entire collection of books and letters addressed to him. Yet, knowing each other’s names made a bad situation even worse. Sanae apparently saw it as a license to badger Yara to reveal his intimate secrets be it the more embarrassing of his life or his deepest fears.

Ironically though, it was this innocent question that made his time in that town the most miserable and it involved a seemingly innocent question that is used to start most conversations, namely the weather. When asked rather rudely what sort of weather he liked, Yara simpered,

“I like the snow; please don’t hit me!”

By then, it was one month since Yara met Sanae and it was in mid-January. All this time, the weather was cold but calm. The following day after the conversation about the snow, Yara and his parents decided to take a walk in that wood filled with allergic reaction inducing cherry blossoms, the very same wood leonard267 spoke about a month ago. Yara welcomed it as an opportunity to spend some quality time without Sanae breathing down his neck.

Everything began well. There was a gentle breeze, the sun was shining and the birds were chirping. But so was the calm before a storm. Very suddenly (relatively speaking of course), in the course of one hour, dark clouds began to gather, what seemed like a gale begun whipping through the wood, the birds were squawking and soon after, tonnes of snow fell from the heavens in the manner of a violent blizzard.

Yara and his parents had no plausible way of leaving the wood where visibility is low and temperatures are cold. They could only huddle together to keep their bodies warm and hope that the blizzard subsides as soon as possible.

However, Yara’s parents were old and their bodies cannot handle such pressure from the elements. Hours into the blizzard and into the evening, Yara’s parents could not speak, their bodies seemingly frozen on the spot. Yara was about to succumb too when he saw a figure approaching him.

It was none other than Sanae herself. She looked very different from usual. She appeared not to be made of flesh and assumed corporeal form, quite alike a spirit. The thought then occurred to Yara that Sanae might be responsible for the weather. Could it be that she was bride of leonard267’s story that perished in this very wood?


“I thought you liked the snow!” Sanae cried.

Yara could not muster the energy to speak and could only mouth,
“I will kill you…”

Sanae paid no attention to that and appeared to be weeping,
“It is not as if I want you to die!”

Yara mouthed the same words as before,
“I will kill you…”

Sanae screamed in a voice much louder than roaring wind around her.
“I loved you ever since I first set my eyes on you! Why can’t I marry the person I like? Why can’t the person I like marry me? I don’t want to be like this, a wandering spirit with no shape or form. I want to be like other girls and have fun!”

Notwithstanding the emotions Sanae felt, Yara felt sick to the gut and rather confused at his tormentor’s confession of love and her screams about marrying someone she did not like. He was not in a position to reply but if it could, the words will be,
“Can it stop snowing? I take it all back, I hate the snow. I don’t want us (my family and I) to be caught in a blizzard. We just want to be alive,”

And, if he could express his feelings to Sanae, he would have said,
"You are a horrible woman, leave me alone!"

Perhaps due to the blizzard or perhaps due to hearing the revelation of what Sanae
was, Yara blacked out only to find himself in a hospital when he came to.

A rescue team found Yara and his parents hours after the blizzard subsided. They were lucky though; if Yara’s neighbours hadn’t informed the authorities that they went on a trek in the woods, the entire family would have perished in that blizzard.

What about Sanae? She was the spoilt daughter of the defeated feudal lord. The latter was only too happy to marry her off to his foes. However, she disobeyed her father’s wishes to be married off and escaped to that wood of cherry blossoms. The spirits of the wood, being stick in the mud conservatives, cursed her for her act of disobedience and turned her into one of their kind. She had no shape or form assumed powers, one of which is control over the weather near that wood. Maybe through strength of will, she manifested herself before Yara, eager to relive her days as the daughter of a (somewhat) powerful family. That was the conclusion Yara came to after reading through the myths of that town without leonard267’s help of course.

Yara never saw Sanae again and he was rather relieved that it was so.

Moral of the story Author’s note of the story: