Month: September 2015

The Modern Tokyo Version of the Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen
Creative Writing

The Modern Tokyo Version of the Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen

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It was a summer day in August where the concrete of the road reflected the heat of the dazzling sunlight. It was a busy day in Tokyo, where the mass amount of people constantly walked with hasty steps and disappeared into and appeared from buildings.

On a such day in a such place, this girl, who was almost sixteen, had to sacrifice herself to survive. As her mother could not affort to send her to high school, this was the unbearable nightmare when the normal girls of her age enjoyed shopping and summer vacations.

Her job had to be simple, for the work that kids without education could do were limited in this advanced country, but she was against committing any crimes.

What she had to do was to distribute the packets of the pocket-sized Kleenex, whose covers were the printed ads of the notorious loan shark company, to those walking people.

Who to blame was her father who had disappeared five years ago, leaving the crazy amount of debt. Who to protect was her mother who was currently hospitalized due to her chronic heart disease, incapable of working. Poverty was the pronoun of hers and her fate was cruel.

For hours and hours, she kept on distributing the packets to all of the people she could reach to. Her fake smile brutally hid her exhaustion and the sunburn made her skin uglier. Some received the packets and some did not. It was the job with no thank-you. The sweat running on her skin inside the pink tank top and her wet long hair gradually absorbed her energy. Those people were so unfriendly and her fate was indeed cruel.

As the sun rose over her head, her exhaustion reached its peak. The world was demanding too much of her. She could not stand this.

She crept away from the central road to the dark alleyway and started to wipe her body with the Kleenex. The more she wasted the tissue papers, the more she thought and worried of her sickened mother. But, the more she used the tissue papers, the more she could be free. Her mind was filled with the happy moments from the past when her fate was still gentle.

The Disney Land she went with her parents on her 8th birthday, the delicious miso soup her mother used to always make for her breakfast, the piano contest she participated every year till she turned 10, the boy from junior high school who once said he liked her. The memories came and went like a cool sea breeze.

When she finished the last packet of the tissue papers, she took a deepest breath and silently collapsed to the ground.

  • “Tissue-pack marketing is a type of guerrilla marketing that is a phenomenon in Japan. Companies use small, portable tissue packages to move advertising copy directly into consumers’ hands.” by Wikipedia

© 2015 Miki Martinez

Creative Writing

Dear Our Beloved Golden Retriever

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When the yellow-whitish-haired angels were about to sleep on the warm blue carpet, the outside world was already surrounded by the cold darkness. It was the snow-colored February, their birthday, their a-day old. Sniffing the smell of the brand new world mixed with bitterness and sweetness, their curious brown noses searched for the milky scent of their mother. It was the perfect family structure of the beautiful golden retrievers: a mother, two sons and three daughters, perhaps their happiest moment together when the love was the only thing they knew of.

Sorry that we broke it. Sorry that we changed your destiny. When your half- opened light brown eyes shone like marbles, we thought you were the most outstanding beauty among your siblings. When your lively moving small legs kicked your sister, trying hard not to sleep, you were actually the healthiest, so tomboyish. That was how we fell in love with you. And you eventually became the princess of our family with your girlish looks and boyish attitudes though you had to be far away from your mother.

Your wild white teeth broke your wooden toys whenever you got a new one. You stupidly got hit against the big gray walls and the tall telegraph poles many times, making loud noises like bicycle accidents. And, you became as gigantic as a human child, making your hair grow gold. Even though you were such a big blunderer, you really had no flaws. And you know what? You were so loved by us and everybody else. You lived for six years like that, such a short and tiny life. Were you ever happy? What are you doing above the clouds now?

© 2015 Miki Martinez

That ESL Kid
Mindful Living

That ESL Kid

Miki7 Comments

I assume a majority of the readers of my website here speak English as your first language. And, you probably had no troubles dealing with it in your daily life when you were young.

Or perhaps, some of you might be from those countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, whose educational systems are so marvelous that English has always been there for you during your entire school life, and you actually find English easy since your mother language is so similar and more complex. Or you might be from Singapore or India that English is treated as one of your national languages, thus you did not have to struggle that much.

Well, neither was my case. My mother language is not even made of alphabets to begin with. And, yes I struggled and I am still struggling when it comes to English. And If I make mistakes, please do correct me. I will be a better writer.

And, I wonder if anybody can relate this to your own experience or come up with the people you know with the similar background.

If you went to high school or college in the States or Canada, you can probably recall someone from overseas who could participate in gym, art and math classes with you but his/her other classes were all ESL. I was that kid and that was how everything started.

Even after you successfully completed the ESL program, your battle still continues. When you take an economic class, it takes four hours for you to finish reading just one chapter when it takes only thirty minutes for Americans, and you have to finish four other courses like that per semester to graduate.

And, when you think you finally wrote a great essay, your teacher gives you an A- with the footnote, “please take it to the learning center for grammar checks.” And when you take it there, the American tutor merely glances at it, obviously not reading it, and tells you that you should rewrite everything because it sucks, and your entire confidence in writing diminishes.

When you sign up for a creative writing class, some Americans look at your name listed on your works and shrug, as if to tell that you cannot write because your first name is not Elizabeth, Jennifer or Diane.

But, all of the sudden, when you keep on trying, some people start telling you that they like what you write and praise you that you are a good writer. And, you are on the Dean’s List for semesters, receiving multiple academic achievement awards and you graduate with honors.

Has anybody been there before? Well, you can still say my English is bad and it is probably still horrible but I still keep on writing. If you ever happen to be that ESL kid, don’t give up. Somebody is definitely watching your efforts and struggles. And, if you are a native speaker of English and know those kids, try to look for best in their ability beyond grammars and typos. I believe the same can be applied to any other languages.

I just thought writing this article could mean something to you and people around you. And I am happy if it could.

© 2015 Kiara Belle * To subscribe on your Kindle, please click HERE!!!

The Thoughts on a Rainy Day
Mindful Living

The Thoughts on a Rainy Day

MikiLeave a comment

It is raining here in the west part of Germany today. I don’t like the way that the sun seems to be loosing its strength to uplift my mind, and I wonder what it feels like if I ever lived in England. Will I always be like this? I doubt not.

Coming from Japan, the European stone-paved streets provide me the sense of newness, reflecting the history and the culture I was not familiar with. And, I find them particularly stunning when they are covered with rain. The way they shine invites some kind of sorrow and sadness that I see beauty within, which is like some songs by Lana Del Rey.

And, I love the way a majority of Europeans seldom use umbrellas unless it rains badly. Japanese people usually tend to be quite vulnerable when it comes to rain and we easily rely on umbrellas even when it just sprinkles. But, I learned how good it actually felt to be slightly soaked in a rain here. After all, a rainy day is probably not as bad as it seems.

© 2015 Kiara Belle * To subscribe on your Kindle, please click HERE!!!

What is Poetry?
Mindful Living

What is Poetry?

Miki3 Comments

Thanks for reading my old poems that I posted within these few days and your positive reactions to my works certainly meant a lot to me. And that made me want to think and write about what poetry is for me. What is it for you, my dear fellow writers and readers? How do YOU see poetry in your life?

Containing the mysterious strong power, leaving unfamiliar new scent, messing up with my heart and always running away from me, poetry goes beyond all of my knowledge and intelligence. Like a beautiful butterfly that can never be captured in my hands, poetry is what is not mine, yet. However, it ironically keeps on making me attracted. Until the day poetry is finally captured in my hands, I would rather let poetry be undefined, for the combination of obscure thoughts never deserves to define poetry.

Unlike novels or short stories whose plots and characters have almost the dominant significance rather than the meaning that each word has, the importance that each word carries in a poem is quite enormous. In other words, if one cannot decode almost every word in a poem, he/she fails to understand it. This fact widens my ignorance and foreignness to English language and ends up revealing how unsophisticated my English really is. To be honest, poetry written in English and writing poems in English are threads to my English ability.

However, the reason why I am never ashamed of my poetry in English is because it is the consequence of following my heart. Namely, poetry is one tool to face who I am whether directly or indirectly. Like the case of the ancient Greek poet, Sappho, even though her works are discovered as fragments, as long as there is the strong power in the words in the poems, regardless of the languages of translations, the words shine by reflecting the pieces of the author. That idea perhaps might be what poetry to me is.

© 2015 Miki Martinez

The Power of a Cup of Coffee
Mindful Living

The Power of a Cup of Coffee

Miki3 Comments

How many of you start your day by turning on the switch of your coffee maker at home or at work? You prepare your favorite big mug and wait for the few minutes until the coffee is made. And you finally get to taste your first sip. This is the very moment I feel that I am so happy. It literally makes my day. I wonder if anyone agrees with this or knows the exact feeling?

When I lived in Japan or the States, I was not really a coffee drinker. What changed me was the European life. When I traveled to Paris for the first time at the age of twenty, I was fascinated by the fact that a cup of espresso could be that delicious and a cup of coffee had the great significance to the lives of the locals there. I ended up living there afterwards and then in Portugal and now in Germany and I completely inherited that culture as a part of my daily routine with the growing love for coffee. What is your story with coffee? Why do you love it so much?

As I write this, I am sipping my black coffee that is in the gigantic pink Le Creuset mug, and once again, I think to myself how happy I am.