Hernandez Kohl Again

by Richard Alured

Not having a streaming service, not wanting to get too screen addicted, that’s how, languidly hopping terrestrial channels, Kim happened to have his run in with the exquisitely unpopular Japanese sitcom, Teachers’ Room (職員室, Shokuin-shitsu).
The premise, at least, teased some relatability. It was plausible, predictable even, that the writers had been teachers at some point and might therefore have a few grievances to sublimate. And sitcoms are rare in Japan, so that was interesting. Visually, it was deadly conventional. All the ‘action’ was confined to the titular teachers’ room, of which only the back three shadowless walls were ever displayed.
His first three episodes opened identically: portly vice principal Munetaka Shoji, seated back left on a yellow-green armchair, occasionally drawing a surreptitious sake bottle from an under-desk cabinet, would deliver a crookedly translated aperçu to his audience. Next there’d be a bang – dropped dish, knocked door, nothing too creative – then maybe the vice-principal’s wife, Munetaka Michiko, head of home economics, would burst on set in a custard or ketchup smeared apron to trumpet the tidings that would kick off the instalment’s romp.
Or perhaps it would be Mr Takenoko Ryuki, college fresh instructor and the closest the show came to a protagonist. Mr Takenoko arrived battle damaged from the writers’ room, victim of an irreconcilable creative stalemate. One moment he’d be childlike and naïve and in the next he’d be scheming and sneery. In one scene he’d translate a student’s composition into Japanese from the original Sumerian, overdubbed in deformed English, while in the next he’d fail to recognize Michiko in a taped-on beard. You might say, but people are complex! Geniuses are wont to be fools! – but, no: to suffer the show was to squirm as Mr Takenoko’s temperament ping ponged and his IQ yo-yo’d in the sweaty, untactile hands of his writers.
Slightly more interesting – though still not very interesting – was Takenoko’s competitive ex-girlfriend, Ms Saiko who, by unhappy happenstance, had been set to work at the same school. Saiko was generically smart. She’d slayed the SWAT subjects and now served science and a side of IT. But what Kim found quietly touching was how clearly her precociousness functioned to plaster an unsightly boil of insecurity. In one episode she bragged that she never spent more than four minutes on hair and makeup because, honestly, weren’t there so many more pressing things to contemplate on our shithole planet? But then, in the next scene, Takenoko somehow snuck into her ‘mansion’ and stealthed a camera onto a bookshelf overlooking her bedside mirror and the resulting footage, uploaded to the interactive whiteboard in the hub that was the teachers’ room, revealed thirty or forty minutes of her prinking herself and testing clothes and feminine ornamentation. Confronted with this conclusive evidence, the accomplished go-getter flounced off set, with clownish gesticulations (to free the audience of any sympathy) and, in the after-shudder of the slammed door, twenty or so gathered teachers high-fived.
‘Serious art takes people seriously,’ said Sontag somewhere. This was basically the opposite of that. Still, Kim watched it out of morose curiosity because, for a season, he was too enervated by misery to look away. And this whole situation was new for him, because he really didn’t use to watch much TV. He used to live in a small Norfolk town surrounded by nature and, back then, with no screen of his own to detain him, he’d go off walking whenever things became insufferable at home.
He called it ‘nature’ though, really, it was all farmland. Still, he enjoyed the narrow liberty of the paths that edged the fields and it was while sitting within a copse of seven trees, on a dry bank overlooking a silent thoroughfare that, maybe a shuttlecock serve ahead, he beheld a man lumbering over the path carrying an armful of branches. Dog walkers were rare here and he almost never saw farmers so to encounter another soul was akin to being awoken by a sudden intrusive question.
What was Kim doing before the intrusion? He was mentally untangling a novel he’d been arranging in his head for half a year and swatting off irksome thoughts about his life – he’d narrowly qualified to be a teacher and now he was appealing to schools to accommodate him; his family was growing prickly about his stalled progress, so he’d come to these trees to be soothed by the Autumn mildness and to revive some sense of harmony with the slowly strobing sun.
The man saw Kim. Kim waved. The man approached and Kim donned his glasses. The man’s hair was longish and he wore a threadbare coat that appeared antique although he and Kim looked to be of the same generation.
His speech was hesitant and he seemed half amused by his own florid style: ‘An admirer of nature, do I perceive?’
Well, here was a quandary. To respond in kind would be too earnest too soon in the shadow of a stranger who might be deranged or in a cult, but to say something sarcastic or facetious would be needlessly ugly.
Kim asked, ‘Whatcha doing with those sticks?’
‘I’m taking them to the slope, over yonder. It’s an art project.’
‘Oh? Now I’m interested.’
‘Yeah? The farmer’s letting me appropriate a field over summer. I’m building… I haven’t decided what to call it. But I have to be quick about it, nothing professional, and it’ll all have to come down in October. But it should be roomy enough to dwell inside a bit.’
He dropped his branches by his boots and unpocketed a pencil sketch. The rendering seemed to describe a small chapel or shrine thanks to a roof which rose like a steeple over the entrance.
‘This is only a rough blueprint, obviously. I want it to look like something out of nature so it’ll probably Ovidize, that’s my word for metamorphose, as I build it.’
‘Cool. Looks like a church.’
He winced. ‘Et tu? Many have said that. Was not my intention.’
‘What is it then?’
‘Eeee. That’s a vexing question. I’d put it like this: The trouble with people who’re awake is they never tell the truth. They give “correct” answers, if you get me. You ask them what they want, and I mean what they want on the large scale, and they’ll say something sensible like “world peace” or something. Which is nothing dastardly, obviously, but it’s not what anyone really yearns for deep down. It’s when you’re asleep, that’s when your dreams tell you what you really yearn for and dreams’re often spitefully sincere.’
‘So you’re saying this church-looking thing was in your dream?’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ he laughed grimly. ‘I do dream of normal things too. If I’m hungry I might dream of maybe a rare cheesecake, drizzled with honey, or raspberry zest, but will that lead me to anything of any more gravitas than cheesecake? No! Emphatically… But I’ve also dreamed of this structure, many many times, recurringly, and my wager is, if it means enough to keep bullying me in my dreams it must mean something for someone else too. I think.’
Kim was witnessing a constant battle. As the man talked, his impulse for ostentation would, now and then, slip its leash and then he’d rein it back again with painful laughter.
Kim asked to maybe glimpse the work in progress and the man looked doubtful a moment, then agreed adding, ‘My name’s Gowleth, Gowleth Layne.’
‘Kim Pritchett.’
‘Lovely!’
The site was behind a windbreak of poplar trees and the structure stood atop a slope under fragile summer clouds. Thus far, it was only a skeleton of long branches, much of it still held loosely together with twine.
‘Warned you it was crude stuff,’ muttered the architect as they were halfway uphill. ‘It’s my first project of this kind. Doubtless a pro would have it habitable and battle-proofed in a day.’
‘I could help.’
Kim boasted even less construction experience but he felt suddenly eager to use his hands. It would be an adventure, like when he and his friends were in school and they made dens from discarded tyres and crates, or whatever else they had to hand, then fought in them.
For the remainder of August, Kim traipsed daily to the site. He offered no ideas of his own, not wanting to dilute the final form of this odd man’s haunting. Lifting and sawing and tying and hammering without query, unaware that hindsight and the vagaries of memory might one day transform this week into one of the most precious of his life.
They chattered avidly in the mornings, before the heat and their labour tired them quiet. Gowleth owned neither a cellphone nor a computer, didn’t want to, though, he admitted, this made him something of a leper roughly circa Leviticus. He had a sincere phobia of technology though he spurned the tag ‘Luddite.’ (‘Generalizations obscure!’) He said he was awaiting a technology that could accurately assess the injury already done to us by our technology. Kim said he considered hopeless worry self-sabotage and he tried to spurn it but, before his words were out, he overheard the hostility in his own voice and, to partially recant, he recommended some sci-fi writers who seemed to glom with Gowleth’s pessimism. The architect only mumbled, eyes down, that he didn’t read contemporary authors.
Which again irked Kim, aspiring, as he was, to be, by definition, a contemporary author. He retorted that Gowleth was, by definition, a contemporary artist and, for the first time, the creator looked sourly at his work: ‘So that’s what’s wrong with this.’
‘I hope you’re not thinking of bailing on me.’
‘No… good grief!’ Gowleth winced and resumed sawing.
At the end of the week they had a small wooden building that looked like a chapel, but wasn’t. A spire rose over the entrance and the interior was divided into two rooms. The wished-for unevenness of the wood made it appear to have bloomed up from the soil, self willed, impervious to human cunning. They chainsawed a couple of logs to make seats for each room.
Dusk fell and they descended the slope and looked back to see their structure as a stern silhouette against the wide sky, implicit of some memory that pinched like a half-remembered utterance, a frail afterimage of some shaded country where Christians interlinked fingers with Pagans.
A few visitors came and took pictures with the structure, children ran around in it, then October arrived and the farmer helped them pull it all down.

The following year Gowleth committed suicide and Kim finally landed a job as a primary school teacher which, at least, made him a ‘professional’ in the eyes of his family and peers. Was he a natural teacher? Most days he left his desk almost bewildered to have got away with it again. Bones broken: zero. Fires: zilch. Was he an inspiring mentor? Did he kindle a thirst for knowledge in his charges? He often said: ‘Teaching is a lot like writing: anyone can do it, but it takes a kind of genius to do it well.’
Early in spring a vivacity awoke in the children. They became mischievous and easy to giggle. He wondered if, perhaps, the warming of the season was making them bloom. They didn’t seem to notice it in themselves but nor had Kim noticed it in any previous year… then this thought tripped to its cold conclusion – he perceived it because he was outside it, because he was sick.
By the start of holidays his contemplations were as fuzzy as his eyes without glasses. He craved rest and sleep as if a century had aged away inside him. He surveyed his misconstructed novel but with each gesture at renovation a pipeline of embarrassment shattered and flooded his foundations. To finish quickly, he decided, would be better than to continue squirming through a life that amounted to an elongated dying. It was coming time to ‘take the leap’, to quote the poster outside the career counselor’s office. Yet that decisive violence was still daunting so he postponed it for a day, then another. There were numerous small pleasures to say goodbye to. Songs to listen to one last time, tastes to savour one last time. All things were tempting and he found a kind of subhuman restfulness dwelling in a death row of his own creation, vacillating from judge to warden to prisoner and back. No need to watch what he ate. No need to study when uninterested. No obligation to reply to emails. And by way of a punchline, this grim serenity fatally tempered his resolve to ‘take his leap,’ then life with all its humdrum dross resumed – a full revolution sans motion.
And it was during this season of torpor he developed his habit of daytime TV. Thus Teachers Room. It was broadcast daily and it was surpassingly rotten. But there’s always trash. Why rail at it? Well, no, the point is neither satire nor even critique. The point is what transpired when Kim watched the show a third time. It opened with vice-principal Munetaka announcing to an audience of ten or so that his half cousin from England, Hernandez Kohl, would be dropping by that afternoon. Most odd! Kim couldn’t imagine anyone in this ‘school’ having a half cousin from England and he was curious as to which English stereotype they’d unpacket. Prissy lord? Footie hooligan? But what kind of dysfunctional writing room would name their Englishman Hernandez Kohl?
Before the vice-principal finished this briefing Michiko crashed through the door with a subjugating groan to say, ‘Once more little Riku tried steal that reticulated python from my desk drawer!’ The subtitles didn’t display a ‘to’ after ‘tried’ and the voice actor made no attempt to intuit the likely grammar. One thing Kim genuinely enjoyed about this show was that whoever composed the subtitles did so in a spirit of sabotage, then the American voices that dubbed the actors simply read those tattered lines, typos and all. Or maybe this pedantic literalism was a kind of cry for help and the translators and voice actors were trying, in their converse ways, to communicate something of how dismally they viewed the roles life had handed them.
So Michiko was concluding her anecdote about the python, which turned out to be too heavy for little Riku’s satchel, when a knock silenced her as cleanly as an ad break and a youngish man staggered on set in natty but weathered apparel. His first remarkable quality was that he’d clearly bypassed the usual make-up routine and his cheeks were slapped with a stunningly untelevisual smear of rosacea.
‘Must be quiet injurious to the spirit, trapped here day in day out,’ said the voice while the face gave a mirthless laugh and winced.
‘So this is the famed Hernandez Kohl,’ said Takenoko, raising an eyebrow to Saiko, who raised one back.
‘You flew here?’ asked Michiko, raised eyebrow, ‘Musty be quiet an odyssey.’
‘This?’ replied Hernandez, unpocketing a fat book. ‘It’s a fair new translation of Homer.’
‘You mean Simpson?’ smirked Saiko with a sparkle of malice in her eye.
‘No no,’ replied the visitor. ‘It means “maker” in Greek and as to whether he liked oh nuts well those being a confection of the nineteenth sea, your question is on par with asking, Is the monarch of Paris a bonehead?’
‘A bonehead!!!!’ exclaimed Takenoko with an aggressive face palm. ‘Why! That two bit city’s just bones and heads all the way down!!!’
Munetaka looked up sagely: ‘The oldest story I know is that probiotic yurt Michiko flung up the shaft of our elevator last winter. We couldn’t command a big enough net to fish it all out!’
‘You say net. I say web,’ muttered Hernandez. ‘Either way, it catches prey.’
Then he explained that, for now, he was only interested in truly ancient texts, as in Homer, or the Old Testament, or Gilgamesh, or what have you, because they were stories transmitted orally for centuries before they could be transcribed so, even if they had an original maker, or ‘maker’, that glacial odyssey from mouth to mouth, brain to brain, would’ve forced a kind of evolutionary pressure on them till they expanded into stories that voiced whole peoples for epochs at a time. Modern writers, ie. those who set off with the steam engines, leaped into their idiosyncrasies, which could be enlightening, don’t misunderstand, but there was a narrowness there, a weakness for neurosis and petty prejudice, etc.
As Kim watched all this he felt as though a filter had been cast over his life and de-aged him by decades. The actor who played Hernandez Kohl had perfected all the gestures, tics, and sartorial peccadilloes of Gowleth Layne and now he was conveying thoughts Layne had once tried to articulate, though never before so brashly, so garishly, and though the Tokyoite actor who played him bore absolutely no physical resemblance to the man with whom Kim had once constructed a shrine, or not, and though his harsh American voice had even less in common, in his performance he was transparent, as if Kim were truly beholding his vanished comrade, with that same intelligent loneliness, like a face under a skin of water, sometimes clear, sometimes confused by a ripple.

The Web had little to say about the show. Kitamura Yudai, who played Kohl, resided in Tokyo but had studied in the university of Edinburgh. So he presumably spoke some English. But where did he imbibe those mannerisms or, indeed, that ideology? And as he looked at the actor’s portrait, a beautiful thought he’d once buried at the back of his mind burst into flower: that if a person is not exactly a brain and not exactly a body and not exactly an identity and not exactly a spirit, might it be said that a person is an idea? Breakable into smaller molecules of ideas but still conceivable as one coherent idea? Like: gestalt. Like: This is how Methuselah lived so long. For nine hundred years there was always another body around to be the Methuselah. Like: we gestate as ideas, from time to time become embodied, become ideas again and, by this rationale, it was no longer that Hernandez Kohl was reminiscent of Gowleth Layne, but that – underline this – reincarnation is real, meaning, emphatically and unmetaphorically, that Gowleth Layne had been reborn as Hernandez Kohl, midwifed into the screen realm by a coven of writers and micro-celebrity thespians who all happened to have converged on the unwatched, unwatchable sitcom, Teachers’ Room.
Kim called up the show’s homepage, found a contact address for Kitamura Yudai and, for the first time ever, wrote fan mail. It might’ve communicated more weight to send physical mail but he was restless for correspondence.
But what if Kohl turned out to be a one-episode novelty?
The next day he awoke the TV ten minutes ahead of schedule, just in case. A wordless nausea seemed to brim through his catastrophic living room when the opening jingle concluded and all he saw was the regular cast in their regular puke-yellow armchairs.
The door creaked open.
But, no.
It was only Michiko, her apron splattered with ketchup, this time clutching the head of a rubber serpent.
After suffering through ten minutes of false alarms Kim regretted his fan mail. He wanted to crush something in his hand. Dull resignation was drawing up, irresistible, but then the door hinges whistled and, praise be, here he was! Hernandez staggered on set with a stack of child-size wooden chairs obscuring his face. He said he’d filched them from an empty classroom (children were discussed but never seen in this school). He said he had little time to elucidate, but he needed to move every removable wooden thing to the far end of the playing field posthaste.
He stood the chairs by the bookshelf, selected a textbook, and waved the others into a crescent around him. The inside cover he’d defaced with a scribbly blue pen sketch of a cylindrical tower like a thick Doric column or a thin soup can.
‘We’ll going make this!’ he said.
‘Looks like a call Ron the health unsafety,’ quipped Mr Munetaka with a swirl of the eyes and a quick swill of sake. The translations had fallen into even greater disrepair than usual today. Or maybe Kim was witnessing that precise juncture in history wherein the humans began to adapt to their technological usurpation by unconsciously mimicking the glitching bots that had once been trained to mimic them.
‘Ron? Why Ron so safe and healthy?’ asked Michiko, raising her head and blinking.
Munetaka parted his hands. ‘Why Ron’s gay, you mean?’
Saiko interjected coldly, ‘You know he was only gay in a previous life.’
Takenoko parted his hands, ‘By your logic everyone was gay in a previous life!’
Munetaka roared and slapped his thigh, ‘This reminds me of add joke later!’
After the laughter, Saiko quit the room for the time it took Kim to wipe his glasses, then she stormed back in again with crabby interrogatives about her chair-less classroom. Takenoko hugged her and said, ‘We’ll be find!’ Then Hernandez pointed at his drawing and Saiko smiled and said it would really be pretty satisfying, actually, to behold all her little hellions learning all their lessons cross legged and cross armed and cross eyed on her frigid, grease-dusted parquet flooring.
Then she hunkered down alongside the others, gathering armfuls of anything that looked wooden. They ripped up the very set on which they performed. Shelves torn from walls, drawers flung to the carpet, paste board walls wrenched up and splintered. Then the camera journeyed where it had scarcely seemed possible: through the front entrance, through the car park, and over the dusty playing field to where an impossible cylindrical soup can column stood already half complete.
Thanks to the conventions of editing, the long toil of construction could be conveyed in one piss length montage then, above the three floors of the school, a tower loomed that Kim’s cliché-riddled mind couldn’t keep from calling ‘Babylonian’. The camera lurched ahead to centre Hernandez as he pulled back a flap of pasteboard and ducked into the hollow masterpiece. The interior was unlit, the passages gaunt. Chair legs and wooden beams jutted at all angles like tusks. Blades of light from gaps in the walls cast zebra stripes over whatever moved in them and hand sized windows fenestrated in clear plastic illuminated the rope ladders by which one could rise to higher floors. Three imprisoned birds cast rapid shadows through the lines of light as they flitted for freedom. The camera followed Hernandez up a hanging ladder, lost him as he scaled up through a domain of purest black and, as his fingers briefly clarified on the next ladder, it surged over him, ascending alone into the next shadow where all motion was past finding, all life, and all that remained was the white outline of Kim’s hair in the window glimmer to his side.

The holidays ended and two weeks slipped past. A charming email arrived in Kim’s junk folder, drumming its fingers, swinging its legs: 

Dear Kim,
Thank you so so so much for your support! This is the first fanmail I got so I frame it on my wall! I was so so frustrated with my acting career so I was thinking about giving up. But your message touched my heart just on the night I was thinking of giving up and now I have strength to fight fight fight! So I’m gonna keep doing this crazy life!!!
Thanks a million, Kim!!! It is so wonderful to hear from you!!!!!!!!!

Richard Alured was born in England but currently lives in Japan. Bits of his fiction have most recently made it into Isele, Bar Bar, and Blood + Honey journals.