by Carlos Hernandez

I looked Mr. Oono dead in the eye as I shook his hand. But I won’t lie: it took every ounce of professionalism in me to do so. Like most people, I just wanted to gawk like an idiot at his prosthetic arm.

Purely in the interest of good reportage, I squeezed his hand with all my might. He didn’t flinch, didn’t even seem to notice--perhaps because its rubbery faux-skin gave only a little until I reach the solid steel underneath. A thrill of panic ran through me as I realized how easily my hand could be crushed in its grip. And it wasn’t a silent prosthetic: it emitted a living electric buzz that invaded me, coursing slowly up my arm like a creeping neuropathy. The human, fight-or-flight part of me wanted to yank my hand free, but the reporter in me--or maybe it was the rude child--wanted to stare at and study this powerful, alien arm. But I did neither. I made sure to look him straight in the retina as I said: “Mr. Oono? Thanks for agreeing to this interview; it’s an honor to meet you. Craig Warbing, InterGlobe News.”

He cupped his other, real hand over mine as we shook, bowing repeatedly as he did. “Hel-lo,” he said, pausing between syllables. From the way he said that one word I instantly knew his English was probably just slightly better than my Aramaic. “I am please to meeta you. My name is Oono Yuuto. Will you come on?”

He bowed as I walked into the apartment complex, but then hurried to get in front of me to lead me to his apartment. His complex was one of the newer danchi that had been springing up lately in Kyoto, the kind of place that almost everyone would agree is at best an eyesore and at worse a threat to the culture and heritage of this historic city, but that nevertheless fills up almost instantly with eager occupants. His apartment was on the fourth floor; when we got there he opened the door and urged me to enter. I took a second to get a good look at his arm--it looked too muscular for his body, and too young, even though they had gone to the trouble of weaving in fake gray arm-hair--took off my shoes, and padded inside.

Mr. Oono’s apartment was so devoid of clutter that it seemed uninhabited, like the show apartment the manager keeps for prospective clients. It was completely devoid of odor. All of its partitions were open, making the place feel, paradoxically, smaller, cat-carrier claustrophobic. The floor was covered with tatami mats, and his tan, middle-aged shikibuton lay unmade and crumpled to the left, facing a wall-mounted television so tiny it must have been forty years old. It was maybe the size of a three-course TV-dinner, the microwaveable kind with slots devoted to flavor-drained succotash and superheated brownies. They simply don’t make TVs that modest anymore.

He didn’t so much have a kitchen as a wall that was devoted to food preparation, with a painfully metallic, ovenless stove occupying most of that space, and a squat refrigerator to its right: again, another antique. On top of the fridge sat the microwave, and it was indeed large enough to fit his TV-dinner-sized TV, though it, like everything else, was smaller than the developed world made appliances anymore. Entering Mr. Oono’s apartment was a little like walking inside a retro dollhouse, except that there was not much in the way of pretty or feminine about his place: if you had given a petulant teenaged Japanese boy a school assignment of creating a diorama of an old man’s danchi apartment, this is the type of place he would resentfully create.

The only item of any luxury I could see was his kotatsu table of dark-stained wood. It was solemn, with the quiet dignity of an antique, but gouged and imperfect and, like a Tolstoy heroine, more beautiful for its imperfections. It stood in the middle of the apartment, ruling over the three mismatched zaisu chairs that dutifully orbited it.

Straight ahead of me, through glass doors, I saw his completely repaired, almost innocent-looking balcony. The balcony. A sudden surge of weakness looped through my back and legs, like a pair of slot cars zooming around the track, and the pressure of unexpected tears began building behind my eyes. You see, from the balcony, as Mr. Oono’s right arm was being crushed, irrevocably destroyed, and death seemed a more likely outcome than survival, he had an overwhelmingly beautiful view of the Higashiyama mountains.