- 8 Mar 2005
- 2,139
- 89
The year is 2022, Kuboshima, Bunko, (names have been changed to protect the innocent), gets off the Toei Shinjuku Line. She's tired. Very tired, she's worked very long and very hard today, from 8:00 this morning, until now, a little after 7:30, excluding transit.
This isn't her normal stop, Kuboshima-san, her friends at work call her Kubo-kun because of her hard working ethics, lives in Chiba prefecture, a little more than an hour away. Tonight she is traveling close to work on personal business to a shop, almost the decor of a loan agency that specializes in 「恋商売 」(こいしょうばい）, or "Love Trade".
It's been 2 years, and 17 months since she married her husband, a successful media developer for a division of Avex, his name, Saitou. In that time, they have approximately, shared two dinners out together, and very little time alone at home, together.
Kuboshima-san feels not just that time is running out on her biological clock, she's getting old, at age 26 she can feel it, but that she is missing out on something. Her husband Saitou spends a good deal of time at mizu shoubai entertaining new up-and-comming artists, most nights he does not return home. His work is important and it affords them the flat where they live , located within an upperclass neighborhood between Setagaya-ku and Meguro-ku, (prices skyrocketed after the Nikkei crash of 2015). It's very comfortable, but the sound of construction has been getting to Kuboshima-san, more lately than ever.
Tonight she is seeing a 「恋先生」 or love-doctor, to translate it roughly. Her sensei is more like a friend to her, someone to talk to, the plan she has payed for has each week provided her with gradually increasing intamacies, exactly as she had wanted it. Tonight is the big night, it serves two purposes: Kuboshima-san will be having sex again for the first time since highschool, an awful event, if you really want to know, but most importantly, she hopes, she will become pregnant, (hopefully with a boy--- whom she plans to name Yui, or if a girl... maybe Yuki); it was the best White Day present that her husband had given her in ages.
The End...
An exageration maybe... But, with the cost of living, the cost of raising a family, of getting a home, one that stays in your family from generation to generation, many Japanese are 'just saying no', to sex (not so, says Area magazine... a magazine who also portend that Japan loves poor people, and how great binbo life must be due to the lack of complexities...), unchecked social anxieties, the labour crisis exhibiting additional stress on those who are not friita or neets... The increased need to exhibit social awareness through product purchases drive the birthrate, marriage, and the act of sex between married couples down to epidemic levels as Japan's population plumets.
Maybe a bit of science fiction, but a lot of truth in the way that future generations of Japanese will deal with sex, marriage, employment, money, and the way all these things intertwine in a country so attached to the "traditional values" inherant to these types of things.
This isn't her normal stop, Kuboshima-san, her friends at work call her Kubo-kun because of her hard working ethics, lives in Chiba prefecture, a little more than an hour away. Tonight she is traveling close to work on personal business to a shop, almost the decor of a loan agency that specializes in 「恋商売 」(こいしょうばい）, or "Love Trade".
It's been 2 years, and 17 months since she married her husband, a successful media developer for a division of Avex, his name, Saitou. In that time, they have approximately, shared two dinners out together, and very little time alone at home, together.
Kuboshima-san feels not just that time is running out on her biological clock, she's getting old, at age 26 she can feel it, but that she is missing out on something. Her husband Saitou spends a good deal of time at mizu shoubai entertaining new up-and-comming artists, most nights he does not return home. His work is important and it affords them the flat where they live , located within an upperclass neighborhood between Setagaya-ku and Meguro-ku, (prices skyrocketed after the Nikkei crash of 2015). It's very comfortable, but the sound of construction has been getting to Kuboshima-san, more lately than ever.
Tonight she is seeing a 「恋先生」 or love-doctor, to translate it roughly. Her sensei is more like a friend to her, someone to talk to, the plan she has payed for has each week provided her with gradually increasing intamacies, exactly as she had wanted it. Tonight is the big night, it serves two purposes: Kuboshima-san will be having sex again for the first time since highschool, an awful event, if you really want to know, but most importantly, she hopes, she will become pregnant, (hopefully with a boy--- whom she plans to name Yui, or if a girl... maybe Yuki); it was the best White Day present that her husband had given her in ages.
The End...
An exageration maybe... But, with the cost of living, the cost of raising a family, of getting a home, one that stays in your family from generation to generation, many Japanese are 'just saying no', to sex (not so, says Area magazine... a magazine who also portend that Japan loves poor people, and how great binbo life must be due to the lack of complexities...), unchecked social anxieties, the labour crisis exhibiting additional stress on those who are not friita or neets... The increased need to exhibit social awareness through product purchases drive the birthrate, marriage, and the act of sex between married couples down to epidemic levels as Japan's population plumets.
Maybe a bit of science fiction, but a lot of truth in the way that future generations of Japanese will deal with sex, marriage, employment, money, and the way all these things intertwine in a country so attached to the "traditional values" inherant to these types of things.