All I Have is a Photograph.

I lived in Japan in the 90s for more than a few years.

A wonderful experience, and a wonderful memory. And yet quite surreal in many ways.

Sometimes I feel as though I slipped sideways into a version of the country that barely exists anymore. Not the neon one in travel blogs, not the tourist one with noh masks, nor the pop culture one with cosplay, rock and roll dancers in Yoyogi kōen, and bosozoku revving through late night intersections.

I experienced all that, of course, but when I think of Japan, I think of the quieter one, the hidden one. The Japan behind the façades and the polite masks, where old timber creaked in the night and even the dust seemed to belong.

I lived as part of a Japanese family in a traditional wooden house. Dark beams, paper sliding doors, tatami floors that whispered gently when you walked across them. It wasn’t musty, exactly, but it had that old Japan smell; a kind of gentle stillness baked into the timber. My father‑in‑law was a woodcarver who sat cross‑legged downstairs and created objects, decorations, and statues for temples. Real temples and shrines. It felt like living inside history, and I felt honoured, as though I was trusted with something sacred.

Next door was a tiny karaoke bar. The sort of place where the mama‑san fussed over the patrons while pouring brandies, where last trains were missed and salarymen sang enka with more emotion than melody. Younger people sang pop songs, trying to sound like their idols. Occasionally someone would take a run at an English song. The bar only had five in total; I know this because I sang only four of them. There was no way I was going to stand on a stage and sing the fifth, Happy Birthday to You.

The whole neighbourhood was like that. A little worn, a little out of time, and full of stories that didn’t need telling because everyone already knew them. It was home. I knew my neighbours and they knew me. I walked those streets and, for a few years, felt like I belonged.

I looked it up on the internet recently. I felt saddened to see that much of it has gone. The house, the bar, most of the block. New high‑rise apartments stand where those memories resided. Memories that now live on only through those of us who belonged.

But beyond the memories, there’s something else that survived because I took it with me.

One night in the karaoke bar, I went to the men’s room. High up on the old-fashioned cistern, far higher than anyone would naturally put anything, I noticed the tiniest corner of something white. I reached up, stretched, and managed to get hold of it.

A small, laminated photograph. Black and white. About four centimetres across.

On the back, a rubber stamp of a figure; some kanji and other characters within. No date. Nothing else.

The image itself was strange. A person in darkness, just the arms and part of the chest visible beneath, a burst of light obliterating their entire shoulders and head. It's as if someone had taken the photo just as their flash went off. Or a self-portrait with an instamatic. No other clues. Just a frozen moment with the context missing.

I remember standing there for a long moment, wondering what it was. Why it was there. Who had put it up so high. Whether it had been hidden or forgotten. Whether it was meant to be found. Whether I should leave it where it was.

For reasons I still don’t understand, I kept it.

A few weird things happened around me in the weeks that followed, and I briefly wondered if I’d pocketed something I shouldn’t have; a charm, a curse, a joke, a ritual object misplaced by accident or design. Or was it something else. Maybe the owner came back for it and wondered where it had gone. Or, in some weird kind of way, was it left there, intended for me.

I’ll never know.

Life moved on, the curse faded, I left Japan, and thirty‑five years passed. I haven’t thought about the photo for a long time. Four or five years, at least. But this morning, out of nowhere, it surfaced in my mind, clear as it ever was. Quietly. As if it had returned to that karaoke bar waiting for me to once more notice its corner, patient and unchanged, just biding its time in the shadows.

I still have it, that small, laminated square. One of the last surviving fragments from a life that now feels dreamlike, slightly unreal, as though I lived it in someone else’s memory, or passed through a room I was never meant to enter.

I do wonder if the photo remembers more than I do. If that captured burst of light held something I was too far outside the culture to understand at the time. If the event it froze now exists only inside that tiny frame, sealed away. If even the players and the photographer have long forgotten the moment it came from, vanishing into the years and leaving the photograph, and me, as the final interpreter of an undeciphered moment no longer anchored to anything or anywhere.

It’s strange, the things that choose not to stay with us. And stranger still, the things that do.

The Rule of Three?

For many, three is a lucky number.

In some religions, it's seen as the perfect number. Certainly I've seen Christians use 333 to counteract the devil's 666. It represents many things - past, present and future, for example. Or harmony, wisdom and understanding.

And sometimes it seems the rule of three applies. Good things happen in threes? We've all heard that, haven't we? But do they?

Many years ago I was a member of an astronomical society. Over the summer, we would head out to public land with our telescopes, once a week, and offer astronomy for the people. Any one could attend and we would show them the wonders of the universe. People would ask some great questions - about all manner of things. Some questions were about constellations, and would occasionally veer into astrological territory. We were politic and polite, and explained that the stars in a constellation may be very different distances from us, and weren't on a flat plane as they appeared. It was also a matter of people creating those shapes from bright stars. Our brains love patterns, and so we try to make sense of randomnity.

On one of those occasions, when talking about constellations, I recall someone asking one of my friends why all the stars made triangle shapes. I remember we had a chuckle about that one, later on of course. But that was simply someone looking for shapes and, so to speak, joining the dots.

As for the rule of three with good things happening to us? It's the same. Good things happen to people all the time, but I suppose if you're looking for three good things then it's easy to find them.

But for me, in the past two weeks, I have now had four good things happen to me. Four really good things that are occurring effortlessly, and making my life comfortable and happy in these weird times.

And while a couple of these fell into the "it was meant to be" category, simply because of the ease in which they occurred and the manner in which I am benefited, they are just good things which coincidentally occurred around the same time.

Oh, and I am anticipating one more good thing to occur shortly.  Perhaps yet another will occur around that time, and I'll be able to claim two groups of three.

So Where Does Luck Come Into It?

In the past week I've been on the fringes of two online discussions regarding self-publishing, gaining audiences and rejection. Both are on different venues with different participants. Both dialogues evolved from quite different starting points. Both conversations have a number of similarities.

I thought I'd look at some of the points I've noticed.

There can be a feeling among newer writers that their work is not selected for publication simply because they're unknown. This is common, and I believe it is often due to an inexperienced writer not seeing the problems with their own work. The automatic reaction, and I confess to having passed through this phase myself, is that the editor obviously missed the whole point of the story. This seems to be accompanied by a feeling of  'what's wrong with the story, and I'll change that.'  The writer seems to look for the simple fix. Did I use too many commas? Should I change the character's name? Did I use the wrong font? If the fix was that simple, the editor would have asked for a simple rewrite. No, it's often more complex than that.

At this point the consolation from other writers often kicks in. "I'm sure your writing is fine. It's simply the wrong market." Even though I concede that this can be true, this approach generally annoys me as too much false praise can be harmful. If a story has received several form rejections, then perhaps you need to consider the possibility that the problem is in the writing.

Shortly after gathering a heap of rejections, some writers decide that since editors are all too stupid to see the value in their work, they will self-publish, unleashing their masterpiece on the world. And so Smashwords and Amazon are filled with stories, novellas and novels for bargain prices. As I've pointed out before, I have concerns about publishing work that a number of editors have elected not to publish. Surely there's a message in that. Oh, and please stop pointing out the two or three self-published successes that continue to be the poster-children. They are exceptions, and extremely rare ones at that. However, I realise self-publishing has its place. The best piece of advice I received from my mentor was not to stampede towards publishing your own work or your first collection.

Accompanying this is the current trend to refer to all self-publishing as 'indie publishing.' Sure, I recognise that there is a certain amount of independence in self-publishing, but I feel it detracts from the true independent publishers, the small presses that strive to build reputations, and differentiate themselves from the major houses.

Then there is the spam I receive on these venues from a number of self-published authors promoting their latest work - often three or four times. The argument raised in their defence is that it's hard to break free from the millions of other self-published stories. Yeah? Well spamming me has simply ensured that I will never buy your work. And if your work has been rejected by a number of editors, what makes you think it will stand out anyway?

Then, of course, comes the old argument about how difficult it is to get your work published. How difficult it is to even get your work seen by an editor. How all those other successes were simply lucky. It may surprise some people, but editors want to find good stories, want to publish stories and novels that sell well and win awards. And agents, they want to have authors on their books that will make them money. "JK Rowling was rejected 17 times. All those editors got it wrong. They don't know what they're doing." Actually 17 rejections isn't that many. Many writers have had far more than that. Those editors obviously couldn't see how the book would fit into their imprint. There was no precedent for the success of that tale. The publisher who did pick it up, Bloomsbury, was a minor player, who only did a small print run. They weren't even sure if they were going to take the second book. It was only because Scholastic picked it up for U.S. schools and kids' word of mouth that caused it to go nuts. Yes, editors can get it wrong sometimes, but they're more often right and good work will be picked up eventually.

"Oh, but it's all luck," I hear. So many of those authors made it because they knew someone, or were in the right place at the right time. I actually take offence to that comment. I know that I have minimal experience and successes, but I've had to work hard to achieve those sales. I studied, learned, wrote, rewrote, submitted and resubmitted for all those sales.

Yes, luck can come into the story. But ultimately its about the quality of the work.