Emily Kitazawa
Just a curious observer of life, sharing what I think & imagine through written word.
The Room with the Rose Wallpaper
PART ONE 事故物件 'jiko bukken' Accident Property ... A property where an unnatural death has occurred. ...... IN TOKYO, UNLIKE some other metropolises, there is a boom-and-bust cycle in the housing and overall construction industry. Skyscrapers alongside prototypical apartment buildings rise and fall in a rolling tide of urban renaissance. If you don’t visit a certain ward for a few months, it’s not uncommon to see an entirely new office building taking the place of the previous, less-fortunate business. It’s not all chrome and escalators, however. The urban sprawl is also spotted with droves of old-construction buildings and historical treasures, a reminder that hyper-modernized Tokyo has ancient and well-preserved roots. If you walk too swiftly down tree-lined Omotesando avenue, you might pass right by a centuries-old shrine nestled between a Starbucks and Gucci store.
Emily KitazawaPublished 9 days ago in Horror
Beauty Brings Beasts
“Beauty is a curse on the world. It keeps us from seeing who the real monsters are.” - The Carver WHEN EVELYN WAS a young girl, she remembered the strangely exotic feel of her mother’s hair-prickled calves on her tender hands, evoking the same fascination of one’s first time touching a hitherto unknown texture—an elephant’s skin or the first barefooted step into beach sand. As she watched her mother carefully smooth generous layers of Pond’s Cold Cream over her willowy legs, she wondered when those mysterious, prickly intruders would begin to sprout from her own naked legs. She unconsciously wrinkled her face in disgust imagining the coarse hairs wriggling up, out, and free to break through the boundary layer of her skin. Her mother, unaware of Evelyn’s internal musings, continued to heap on the cream. She would scold Evelyn, too, if she didn’t do the same before leaving the house as it maintained her “lovely, ivory complexion,” which was associated with the coveted women of prominence. Evelyn’s mother came from humble origins herself, being a working-class Scottish immigrant. She lived life with surgical precision yet moved with the graceful beauty of a painter’s hands, introducing a touch of ornate ceremony to even the most mundane tasks. Mother could make setting the table for morning breakfast appear a lavish display, her slender fingers delicately placing each item of cutlery in its place, just so. And it was with this elegant manner that she carefully massaged the last of the thick cream into her hands, while Evelyn sat nearby, lost in her imagination.
Emily KitazawaPublished 26 days ago in Fiction
I Am the One Who Is Lost
1974, MID-SEPTEMBER, HURRICANE season in Central Florida. The usually placid Gulf Coast waters were churning as Hurricane Carmen plotted her slow but intent approach towards the southern belly of the United States. Her devouring winds now largely threatened the marshlands of Louisiana, but even this far away, Bryn could feel the anger biting in the wind-whipped rain left blowing in Carmen’s wake. Moored in Port Tampa Bay on his shipping freighter for the time being, Bryn had no cargo to unload and no way to preoccupy this time not spent working. He leaned against the top-deck railing and stared across the blackening sky towards the Gulf of Mexico, watching the last of the reddened sun sink below a wall of turbulent clouds. A sudden, great wind rose and whistled, slapping his face with cold ocean spray, and Bryn, unflinchingly but with force, gripped the railing tighter. Inside, his mind was a hurricane—howling with ravaging winds and muddling his ability to think clearly. A catastrophe was unfurling that night on the undulating surface of the agitated sea.
Emily KitazawaPublished about a month ago in Fiction
Peace
Peace is not found in our designed diversions, in the escapist blue glow behind a closed bedroom door. In halfhearted connections—
Emily KitazawaPublished about a month ago in Poets
Youth
Heated menthol burns back into her throat, a hazy column rises thin between her fingertips. She lets the wind ash the cigarette
Emily KitazawaPublished 2 months ago in PoetsMemories
Memories build cities, they live inside us, in you in me, neighborhoods where we tuck in the safe ones kiss their foreheads,
Emily KitazawaPublished 2 months ago in Poets
