Agashi

I lived in Pusan, South Korea, in 1995-1996, teaching English as a foreign language at a franchise language institute called David English House. Near the end of that year I spent about a week in Hong Kong and Macau. Years later, I wrote this story as a way to explore and recapture some of the sensory richness of those experiences. I think all the Hong Kong cinema I'd soaked up in the meantime bled into the story as well: intrigue, double-crosses, secret villains and unexpected heroes.

Early drafts of this story didn't work, because I kept trying to engineer an ending that satisfied the protagonist. A critique by Ian Hooper got me thinking about it in a new way: "What if Krasner is the real hero, and the protagonist is just a craven side-kick who gets shot at the end of the first act?" That struck me as a brilliant way to re-cast the roles. Not long after that, the first draft of the story got an honorable mention in Night Train's fiction contest, and the contest judge Steve Almond sent me an email with a very kind and valuable critique. He also noted a weakness in the ending, and suggested some ways to let the protagonist's faults catch up with him. Armed with these suggestions, I recast the ending to pull the rug out from under the protagonist's feet, and I think the result is a more satisfying and surprising story. If a chapter two existed, I don't think the protagonist would survive it--but Krasner surely would, and so would the agashi.

Agashi won first place in the Raymond Carver Short Story Award in 2007, and was published in Carve Magazine, as well as in their year-end anthology.

Here's a song I wrote later, circling around the same theme: Sad Agashi Song