Missing Persons

From Tokyo to the Gold Coast they’d come. They were in the

papers, instant scoop, apologising, and on the box. In the

lunch break we talked about the old theory and clichés: why

the Japanese don't travel well, how foreign ways corrupt, why

they need special rations, what makes them special. Trade

restrictions?

For days he had puzzled over her disappearance – the clues,

the number she left, the message machine with no message.

He heard the sweettalk reply of an Uncle such-and-such. An

Aussie?

Now she won't look the camera in the eye. Her –ex looks an

embarrassed owl with large non-reflective spectacles. The

camera tracks his face, sunburned by the glare. Spotlit in TV’s

cage, fronting up in a thorny set of fading kitsch, they become

images of unprintable hurt: her tear-streaked face, haywired

by our terrible wildlife. She’d been in love with it: too cute before

they too would disappear, the koalas in their disappearing

trees.

She said sorry, in a disappearing Japanese way, for whatever

model she had been was lost like a marriage band on a littered

beach, her cheeks burning like peeling ricepaper screens. She

said sorry for abnormal buyer behaviour, magnetic anomalies,

jet-lag. Maybe the fish was off, or the brochures were wrong.

I wanted this, her inner tour-guide said.

He was sorry too, the owl, his grimace-smile crazed to angry

fragments as he watched his heart disappear in chrome and

plateglass malls. Having lost his bride of Shinjuku. Darling

Eve, lost in the mirrors. 

She said sorry she disappeared. She disappeared. 

The inspiration for this poem was the following news report:

Emiko Ogura, missing and feared kidnapped for four days, said last night that she had run out on her husband of a fortnight because she had second thoughts about the marriage...Detectives discovered the bride hiding in her Gold Coast motel room about 3 am yesterday... She... repeatedly apologised for her disappearance... Her husband Mr Fujieda said he called the press conference because he had been depicted as "a fool" by the Japanese media, which he said had also portrayed his wife as "an evil woman".

Sydney Morning Herald