Mouth-on with Pokemon Kids Best Wishes! Pochama Version with ramune-flavored candy disc!

In Japan, companies have to pay a certain amount of money, a small tax, to sell toys. For some reason, if their toy includes a kind of candy item, the item is classified as a candy instead of a toy, and the tax is either reduced or negated. It is for Precisely This Reason that the shelves of many Japanese grocery stores and supermarkets, despite lacking exotic items like "crackers," canned vegetables, and cereal, have rows and rows of their meager available space devoted to cheap plastic trinkets packaged with pathetic bits of candy and branded with attractive, sexy characters. I am weak against their charms, and stuff handfuls of them into my shopping basket every time I make one of my routine trips to the store for pickled cat ears and fish farts, only glancing cursorily at the prices or actual contents.

Popping the Pokemon Kids Best Wishes! Pochama Version's tiny candy disc into my mouth reminds me of my earlier years as a ruined idiot child, desperate to eat the vitamin C supplements my parents would buy en masse, as many as I could. The thin, compacted-powder slab emits a gently sweet flavor, like kissing a fresh baby deep in the mouth. I want to let it linger and seep, but can't help myself and take a small piece off the edge with my back teeth. The flavor changes to one with hints of tartness, notes of the ramune soda, like bubblegum and cream. It has already begun, now, and I let my equipment run wild. My rear finger nibblers defeat what's left of it, pulping the rest of the disintegrating disc into loose elixir which ripples through my hole, coating it, filling into the spaces. I flick my tongue over the roof of my mouth, just to remember the moment, this slickness, this mellifluous film. But as soon as it arrives it is over, and I am empty.

Luckily, another treat lies in wait.


The tiny Pikachu sleeps at the bottom of the box. He glances over my way coyly, enticingly. A gentle breeze pushes through my room, and even working with the mere two hours of sleep I got the night before I find myself comforted, relaxed. Deep in his inkpool eyes I look for something I've never seen before, a message, a meaning, hope. They are like small olives. I stick my finger up his butt. He is a finger puppet. Now.

He has deigns on another. He accosts my robot, and they make their plans. When I come back to the living room after my breakfast of butt toothpaste on uncooked rice I notice them sneaking away, inching their way out onto the balcony.

"I've heard about what's past them," the robot says.
"Yeah?"
"Can't all be concrete and glass, I guess."
"Don't leave me."


I try to stop them, I tell them all I ever wanted was just to be happy. But we all have purposes, they tell me, they all are drawn to something larger, the pursuit of the unknown. I run my fingernail over the edge of the screen door, feeling its weathered grit scrape off.

I'll never forget you, Pikachu finger puppet and robot. I raise my fist, and bring it down. Again and again.