Fortune Express Journal
Fortune Express
In a city that never seems to stop driving, Fortune Express gives its readers a place to pull over, rest ones feet, and have a slice of life.
In the late 1990’s. Japanese writers developed a genre called “Iyashikei.” Literally meaning “healing kind,” this genre slowed time down, contemplated, reveled in the significance of the small, even the mundane. Some think the genre responded to events like the Kobe earthquake, while others think it is simply a response to the Japanese culture of overwork. In any case, rather than plot, what drives iyashikei literature is feeling, experience, catharsis. While most short stories will focus on a conflict, the iyashikei might focus on the aftermath of the conflict, where the protagonist or antagonist might sit by a river with an ice cream cone, watch children play, and remember the name of a long-ago friend.
Fortune Express brings this style of story to Los Angeles. We also have a culture that experiences so much fear and uncertainty we often overlook the basic and familiar. Fortune Express itself is an old food truck that shows up in a different part of the city every night. There’s nothing fancy, but there is always something on the menu a character needs to eat, though they may not yet know it.
We will be asking different authors to write to write about a night outside the Fortune Express, a food that was ordered, the emotions they process, and the renewal they ultimately attain.