春
The commute was subtly unpleasant, although there was no basis for complaint. The passengers more than behaved themselves, refraining from talking into their cell phones or, for that matter, to each other. Queuing and boarding was a thing of beauty. For all the emphasis on surfaces here, the vulnerability left for everyone to see in public spaces, sleeping on trains, on doorsteps, or in a cafe, could be viewed not as embarrassments of defeat, but celebrations of trust. Still, there was a weariness. One time he found himself sitting across from a young couple who were leaning into each other and giggling. Clearly they had been at it all morning. It was nothing outrageous, just a reminder that hardly anybody ever even smiled on the train.
He learned to keep his feelings to himself as well. Sometimes he had his head buried in a book, using a jacket cover so as not to alert his fellow riders as to what he was reading, since it was not in Japanese and might draw attention and disturb them, but later on he learned the utility of just closing his eyes. So long as he did not open his mouth to speak, particularly when he was wearing a suit, he was one of them. This ability, if that was what it was, came into play here with more complex rules of engagement than he encountered back home. People even pegged him for Japanese in Taiwan, where he thought they should have seen through him without hearing his accent. Was he, somehow, Japanese? The atmosphere soaked into you. It became a part of you.
It was not a long ride. He could make it door-to-door in fifty minutes. The precision of the trains made it possible to calculate his arrival time exactly. It took seven minutes to walk from the subway platform to his “mansion.” Coming home, it was up a gradual slope.
The kanji on the sign, which he could understand but not at first pronounce, read, “fishing basket hill.” There was no river evident nearby, but in premodern times, before Tokyo Bay was filled, the waves of Shinagawa might have reached this far. Across from the subway station were a ramen shop, a French bakery, and a mom-and-pop home electronics store. It was a gray, quiet neighborhood with a profusion of temples. One of them had its gate guarded by a trio of red-bibbed jizo statues. Behind him, as he walked up the hill, was the very different, science-fictional spectacle of Mori Tower. The Japanese seemed to refer to it simply as “Roppongi Hills.” And although he could not perceive it directly, if he looked into the upper story windows of certain apartment buildings when the sun was shining, he saw the reflection of Tokyo Tower.
Only seven minutes. But it felt long going uphill, encumbered by his dress shoes and handbag. It was the same, deliberate march of the other men he saw making their way up and down the slope.
The lobby, which had a spiral staircase descending into the middle of it, was too dark and unadorned to convey the luxury that, he imagined, was intended. It was immaculate. At the security desk was one of a staff of senior men, who had a broad and open range of responsibilities. The old man recognized Horace by now and activated the automatic doors by pressing a button. He went by the spiral stairs up a level, crossed the outdoor courtyard, with its raked stones and plum trees in full blossom, and took the tower elevator to the fifth floor. The blossoms, hence the entire courtyard, smelled of—he tried to think of it—Kool-Aid.
The apartment was on a dimly lit landing shared with only one other unit. The door required a bit of a shove. The sound of the television. Cartoon voices. He dropped his bag on the ground, took off his shoes, and loosened his tie. The apartment was spacious for Tokyo. One of the rooms had a tatami floor. The rest of the apartment was Western in style. Still, it was smaller than their two-bedroom in Los Angeles. It had taken a while for his kids to get used to it here.
From the living room, through a sliding glass door, was a balcony where they hung the laundry, looking out toward the high rises of Shinagawa and the bay. Phoebe was in the kitchen. A little more than a year ago, she was on maternity leave. After the baby was born, she went back to work for three months, then got laid off, that most American of experiences. That presented the opportunity for them to go. In less than six months, she had gone from being a career woman, to pregnant, to laid off, to being a housewife in Japan.
The two boys were in front of the television set. They were excited to see him, as always. The excitement seemed to be waning lately, though, as it was sinking in they were going to be here for a while. And the oldest boy, for good reason, was anxious. Horace took off his tie and jacket and went into the kitchen.
Phoebe pointed to three opened liter milk cartons on the counter. They were long and thin in shape, the biggest carton size they could find. Given the amounts the boys drank, it was not unusual for them to go through two cartons a day.
The kitchen was narrow too, where they felt the biggest squeeze. Back home, there was plenty of counter space. But here, there was barely enough to put down the cutting board, and the two of them, not large, could not pass each other without one of them backing up. But at least everything was in arm’s reach.
He picked up a pair of scissors and started cutting. The sensation of pressing through the spongy cardboard with the dull scissors, and the cramp he felt in his hand, would become one of his most vivid memories of Japan. Maybe because he did it every fucking day. When Phoebe found out it was apartment regulations to rinse used milk cartons, cut them apart, and lay them flat before discarding them, she said, “You do it. There’s no way I’m cutting up milk cartons every day.”
He took the elevator down. There were a lot of waste recycling and disposal rules. When he had first looked at the manual, piecing it together from his limited Japanese, the kanji and the katakana, he did not believe people really peeled the labels off water bottles, washed them, and separately disposed of the label, plastic cap, and PET bottle. When he first walked into the tidy recycling area, arranged in eight bins, he felt he had arrived at Tokyo’s heart of darkness. But of course it was only a gateway.
It would be their first time to Kamakura. He had read Thousand Cranes. They were going to catch the end of the cherry blossoms. Every weekend they went somewhere new, and Tokyo in its infinity was big enough to allow for that. It was as if they were on an overseas vacation, if only on weekends. In between was the tedium, for him, of work, and for her, staying at home with the baby. As for big brother, it was waiting out the hours and the minutes at the school where he did not understand a word being said.
Coming after central Tokyo for two months, Kita Kamakura was a shock. It resembled those rural train stops in Taiwan between Taipei and Keelung or in Nan-tou. Maybe a little neater. You exited onto a little platform, came down, and crossed the track. A mass of people came out of the train too, but soon dissolved into the hills. There were a lot of leaves on the trees. He was afraid they had missed the blossoms. The air was gentle. There was a hint of California and he was reminded they were just on the other side of the same sea.
He could not remember where he had heard it before, the idea of one side of the Pacific as dream, the other reality. But which was reality and which dream? Or were you always the butterfly in the dream, dreaming of reality? Nothing applied here. All of that had been expected, though. What had not was that they were, the four of them, in it together. Apart from one another, but somehow together. Although who knew what baby was thinking. His next meal, probably. It would have been one thing if he had come alone. It probably would not have been much different from the two years he had spent in Taipei after college, when, now that he thought about it, he had met Phoebe. It made it many times harder to go through this with her and the kids. You observed your own reactions. You observed your wife and children go through the same.
She was having a hard time. They did not have a clothes dryer. It was a culture of watching the weather and hanging your laundry out on the balcony.
They walked on the path to central Kamakura. They popped into some of the larger, famous temples. Engakuji was the one in the Kawabata novel, right? It was a really long trek, through winding hills and some pretty narrow sidewalks that barely accommodated the American-sized stroller.
The trees around Hachimangu were shedding their blossoms. It was fubuki, the snowstorm. The path was lined with pink petals, as if they had been arranged.
They got unagi for lunch then headed over to the shrine. Baby got excited and ran wild on the open grounds. He and his brother chased the falling blossoms, grabbing piles of them and throwing them into the air. They were so happy they looked like they were other people. People watched them out of the corner of their eyes. A deep tiredness seemed to come over his wife, under the eaves.
梅 雨
There was a woman, Uehara, whom the reorganization had transferred off the team. No one knew where she had been placed. Was she working as an assistant for the department chief? One rumor had it she was moving to Atlanta, where her husband was studying.
Whatever, that night, the team took her out to dinner as a sendoff. Horace joined, although he did not know her well. The eight of them took her to an izakaya, where everyone got pretty sauced over beer and shochu. From there, the night went on, over a deep selection of awamori. Ookawa, who was built like a lightweight sumo wrestler, seemed completely unfazed as the night went on.
For weekday team bonding, it was a tame evening and ended early. Still, the awamori came down like a hammer. Uehara was draped over Horace by night’s end. The others elected him to carry her into a cab. Nakahira went with her to make sure she got home in one piece.
Ookawa bought everybody little bottles of ukon from the 7-11. It was an herbal hangover cure you drank before you went to sleep. Horace doubted anything could be done about it, he did not put much stock into folk remedies, but he thanked his boss and got an explanation on how to use it.
The group dispersed on the street corner in the abrupt Tokyo manner. They figured out who was going where, and those heading in the same direction cleaved off by bowing and melting into the city. Horace was left on his own. Through the closing window of his drunkenness, he tried to figure out what part of town he was in and which train line to take.
He had been through worse. There was the night, coming back from Shinjuku from his “initiation,” when he had somehow made it home via multiple transfers without remembering any of it.
The long, pristine, and evacuated midtown blocks. One aspect of Tokyo’s beauty was the celerity of its population’s movements. Suddenly you were in a teeming mass of humanity, crowds unlike anywhere else in the world. Then the same would be as deserted and as sterile as a suburban office park, with everyone gone off to fill the interiors of those charmless high rises. Life, in its unpredictability, took place inside those structures. In vertical space. The streets, the train stops, the trains themselves were nothing but theatrical stages.
On the train the woman sitting next to him attempted to take off her jacket, probably responding to the humidity in the car, made worse by the dripping umbrellas, shoes, and coats. Because the jacket was also slick with rain, she tried not to get him wet with any sudden activity, which painfully drew out her movements. She withdrew her arm from its sleeve. He could only see suggestions in the corner of his peripheral vision. He felt more coherently her motion, erotic in that homely way that struck him as a distinct Japanese taste.
At home, having fought his way up the slope in the strengthening rain, he was met at his front door with a note, probably from the concierge, in language that went beyond polite, requesting the next time he bring his wet umbrella indoors to dry off, instead of leaving it on the landing.
Phoebe was still up, waiting for the laundry to dry. For some reason, it had been hard to sleep since they arrived in Japan. In California they went to bed early as couples with young children do, but here they stayed up all hours. Was it the crowds and pollution? The otherwise unheard hum of the city? Magnetic fields or the position on the earth?
The rain fell, unceasingly, against the window. Most of the high rises around them had their lights off. She kicked her feet up on the chair. Horace came in, at the opposite end of the long corridor, steps heavy against spongy hardwood. The kids were asleep. It was the quietest time of day.
He took off his rain-spattered jacket and loosened his tie and sat at the adjacent corner of the dining table, where they always had their conversations now.
“I thought today it’d be a good idea to pack him a carton of milk with his lunch. But when lunch started, the teacher took the milk away, didn’t give it back, and said he should drink tea like the other kids. Tea! He told the teacher he didn’t drink tea, so she gave him warm water instead.”
“It’s probably one of those Japanese conformity things. If someone starts drinking milk, then someone else might want to bring milk to school too, then what’s the world coming to?”
“Another thing. I’ve been packing him sandwiches but today he said he wants bento boxes for lunch. I know he likes sandwiches. But he said the other kids think it’s funny he’s eating sandwiches instead of from a bento box. We don’t want him any more singled out than he already feels. Maybe I should start making him a bento box. But it’s easier to make a sandwich than a bento box. And I’m not even talking about the whole ‘competitive bento box’ thing.”
“Look, these kids need to open their eyes and learn a little about diversity. We come from a foreign culture. What if he gets used to eating bento boxes? Then he’s going to go back to America and not want to eat sandwiches anymore and eat bento boxes. He’ll be a laughingstock. I’ve already made up my mind.”
“We can try again tomorrow, but if he’s still uncomfortable with it, I think we should switch.”
“It’ll be a good experience for him to assert his will against the herd.”
She looked up out the wet glass. A sock was floating in a pool of water. She got up and came back with their laptop computer.
“Before you forget, show me how to check the weather. It’s impossible to do laundry in this country without a good weather forecast. I need one that goes by the hour. The English sites are useless.”
“You’re right. The Japanese sites are a hundred percent. I don’t know how they do it.”
“This fucking season. I put a load of laundry out this afternoon and everything got drenched. It’s depressing. Doesn’t anyone use a dryer in this country? Is it because every woman’s expected to hang laundry? When I was bringing in the wet clothes, there was a woman over at the building next door looking at me like I was an idiot. Show me how to use the site.”
“Can this wait? Japanese sites are hard to navigate. They have a different design aesthetic. Everything’s a brain teaser. I’ll show you tomorrow.”
“I’ve got laundry to do every day. I need to know the few hours it clears out tomorrow, otherwise we’re going to have soaked clothes piling up around the house for days.”
“Where’s the laundry now?”
“In the bathroom. It’s so damp in there, it doesn’t help.”
“I need to take a shower.”
“Take the clothes out and put them back when you’re done.” She peered outside. The moonlight was refracted through hundreds of gemlike raindrops. “No point hanging them outside now.”
“Look, I just need to sleep a little at least. I’ve got a three a.m. and another ten a.m. call.”
“You can’t tell them to leave you alone? What’s the point of sending you out here if you’re on the phone with them every night?”
“Look, it can’t be helped.”
“I know. They think we’re here on some kind of sabbatical. A family vacation. It’s anything but. If this keeps up … I don’t know how much longer I can hold out. Every day I remember why I wanted to get out of Asia.”
“I’m on assignment. It’s not like I can roll it back on my own, after all the trouble the company took getting us here.”
“Tell them I’m fed up. We’re making sacrifices here to make things work, so you can experience working in Japan. It’s not just me. Your children! They don’t see you anymore at night. You’re always coming home late … They hate you. Just like a salaryman. Tell them that’s okay. That’s what we signed up for. But these phone calls ... It’s got to stop. You’ve got to sleep at least. And if they can’t cut it out, then I’m going to tell them myself we’re going home.”
Phoebe was right, of course. It would be a relief to get the troubles in Los Angeles off his mind, even if it meant abandoning his colleagues to their fate. What was his obligation to them? They were just his co-workers.
“I’ve already said I’d take this call tonight, but this will be the last one. I’ll send Ryo an email first thing in the morning.”
“Good. Now show me how to use this weather site.”
In the end, Phoebe decided not to make their son a sandwich. She did not have time to prepare a bento box, though. She told Horace to stop by the onigiri shop, which was advantageously positioned at the end of the alley, at the intersection with the main road facing the school. It was barely a window, run by an old couple. The wife, wearing an apron and rag on her head, took the order while her husband made rice balls by hand. It was the last resort employed by other parents. The onigiri was discreetly packaged in unmarked wrapping, so it did not look like you had bought it at a convenience store.
He asked his kid if he knew how to eat one.
Yes, he said, he traded his sandwich for one yesterday.
夏
Every day he either ate at his desk or went out with his co-workers for lunch. The conversations kept coming back to the same questions, about was he getting used to Japan yet. Now that the rain had finally stopped, though, he wanted to take a look outside, alone. It had suddenly turned hot. The rain turned into steam. He kept to the back alleys because they were in the shade and also because it was easy to get lost in there. Not that he could not find his way back, although he figured the mazes were deep enough it would take him weeks, with these short breaks, to really get to know them. But he wanted to get lost in the other sense, of himself being the thing lost, of becoming anonymous, which was different than being invisible. Invisibility was something imposed upon you. Anonymity had to be worked at.
Each shop contained no more than two aisles. The shelves ran out along exterior walls, so people were browsing on the sidewalk and in the alleys. The goal did not seem so much to sell, since the appeal was limited to only a few obsessives anyway, as to organize with nostalgia in mind: with space so limited, each shelf was impeccably curated. The importance of the books lay not so much in what was in them as in what had happened around them, in the lives of their former owners. He came across a collection of Katue Kitasono’s, Pound’s old buddy. So apparently he actually existed. Shiro no arubumu. Is that where the White Album came from? Did Yoko know about it? He found Malevich and Picabia monographs next to maps of old Edo. He made his way up the wooden stairs, posters on either side of him, to what was more of a gallery than a bookstore, with framed prints for sale. In one corner, in a glass case that was like looking into a diorama, he saw some black and white photos that seemed to be film stills. Next to them was a letter, in English, on ruled paper written in pretty cursive like a young girl’s. To the recipient, who lived in Colorado, it said, “I have also enclosed some photographs of an authentic harakiri ceremony, which I hope you find interesting.” Signed, Yukio Mishima.
Now he was in a café with high-end speakers on either side of the bar. Behind the counter were shelves lined with spine-out LPs and bottles of gin and whiskey. The bass line hit like blocks of concrete. Too loud to talk, but that was not the point. He had come in for iced coffee, but everyone else, all of them lone men in their fifties, was sitting facing the speakers. What was the tune? He was not a head, like them. The LP was thoughtfully displayed face out: Stanley Turrentine’s Up at ‘Minton’s’. He was now some four months into this experiment. Words to explain were hard to find. Anxieties clustered in the start-and-stop of tightening and release. Why did even he feel the tentacles of Tokyo society? He had to be careful not to let the seemingly unresolvable frustrations of the job (the one in California, not the one here) color his perception of Japan or the Japanese, or let that bleed over to his co-workers. Otherwise you stopped seeing them as human beings, as in a war. Which would be unprofessional.
Once they heard he had never been to a matsuri, his co-workers were determined to take him.
There would be some “ero-grotesque” surprises in store, they promised. At Yasukuni Shrine, as it turned out. He knew what was there, just did not know it was so close by. So were they talking about the kamikaze stuff? No. His co-workers did not seem to think anything about that. To them there was nothing to the place other than that it was where to go this time of year for Mitama. The only hint of controversy, as they ascended the mild grade past Budokan, was a lone protestor squatting at the base of a tree, decrying former Taiwanese president Lee Teng-hui’s brother for being inside, which, as Horace thought of it, was less of a shot at Japanese militarism than an attempt to discredit Taiwanese autonomy.
The long walking path past the first torii gate had been lined with thousands of yellow lanterns, bobbing in the pleasant summer night. The lanterns and booths, whose gaudiness contrasted with the gray politeness of the office, created a disorienting effect and obscured almost completely the shrine itself. It came through in hints, looming behind the festival glow in the shadows of eaves and old pines. The sound of the crowd, interwoven with the stylized patter of the booth hawkers, felt as if it were emanating from the grounds themselves. He ate skewered ayu and yakisoba from a flimsy paper plate. Somewhat against his will, he played the game with the paper scooper where you got a goldfish in a plastic bag. He walked around with the fish the rest of the night. Past the second gate and the Shinmon, the festival turned into a cloud of colors and smoke. In front of the main hall, as somewhat of a prank put on him by his co-workers, he joined the bon odori in the plaza, clapping his hands and moving in a halting rhythm with other dancers, welcoming back the dead to the world of the living.
They went to the freak tent. A scruffy-looking girl (or child-sized woman) in a yukata stood on a box jabbering musically at the hypnotized crowd while her colleagues extracted bills from them. From the painted images, it was obvious the Snake Woman was the main attraction, although several other curiosities were advertised. At one point, from a balcony above the entrance, the Snake Woman, in white robe, hair long and straight, face pale and lips blood red, made a teasing appearance with one of her pets held outstretched between her fingers. Then she vanished.
They waited for the room to clear out the exit on the other side before being let into the tent. He could not pick a spot. The crowd simply pushed him around until it stopped. The ground was sloped, so he could see above the heads in front of him. It was hard to breathe. At some point, when the room was sufficiently packed, the doors closed, and the stage became a tumbling series of skits involving fire and off-color jokes before the Snake Woman, waiting until the situation had just about become intolerable, emerged. Her snakes, black and rubbery, moved in and out of her fingers, and mouth, before, with somewhat less ritual than he had been expecting, she bit into one, ripping it in half and spraying blood into the crowd. She swallowed its parts. The closing image of the night, as they were shuffled out to make way for the next group, was the lower portion of her face, drenched in blood.
There were expat markets in Hiroo and Azabu. They told themselves it was for the kids, having even made it out to Disneyland twice just for the buffet, when in fact the boys were taking to a Japanese diet faster than they did. By midsummer they had stopped going to family restaurants. Instead: fish, rice, tea, the muted palette from which the entire Japanese world was born. No surprise the traditional seasonal ingredients, squid and eggplant in summer, were the best bets to add some variation. That purity was elementary once you grasped it, but seemed like a great revelation; the diet rooted you to the soil.
She ventured further out. It was hot, but a relief to be able to explore with no rain. She was still pushing the stroller, but now she did not have to put that awkward plastic covering on to keep baby dry. He could breathe. One of the tricks she learned was taking the side alleys through which she could maneuver the bulky stroller. Along the larger avenues, although they were easier to navigate, she was always dodging, or running into, pedestrians and bicycles on the narrow sidewalks, and she had to stay wary of the car traffic speeding by only a few inches off the curb. But the side alleys were quiet, especially by midmorning. She could walk in the middle of the street and her mind could wander.
She had been taking Meiji-dori under the expressway to Hiroo, which took about an hour one-way. But now she had found another route, deep off the main intersection, through a street of old shops, one of those hidden behind layers of development, layers that did not sprawl outward, but, like much of Tokyo, spiraled inward. In doing so she stumbled across a lost continent. There seemed to be only locals, meaning the immediate neighborhood, who frequented it. Someone had come up with the idea of playing oldies from loudspeakers strung up on street lamps. The effect was to lend the old shops even more melancholy than they already had.
Hiroo by contrast was stylish. It was popular with expats and Japanese used to life abroad, which, even in Tokyo, connoted something luxurious. In other words, it was the neighborhood where you could buy bread, cheese, steak, and wine. Even though looking around there was not much that looked especially “Western,” it went beyond wealth. The more traditionally well off neighborhoods she had been to. You felt a deep reserve there. Here were convertibles. She had taken to coming here the first few months when she was feeling homesick, or just needed some relief from the confinement of the apartment, but lately she had been going less.
Instead of north and west toward Hiroo and Roppongi, she began to check out the neighborhood at the bottom of the grade that headed northeast. Eventually it merged with Sakurada-dori. Over this wide thoroughfare, due north, stood Tokyo Tower. Because the street ended at its base, it was the most unobstructed view of the tower in the city. She never walked that far, though. The furthest she got with the baby was the entrance to Keio University and the alleys populated by students around it. Most of the time she browsed the drugstore, teaching herself Japanese cosmetics.
Baby and stroller became a voyager, pulling her instead of the other way around. The spongy grip on the handle, training muscles in the wrists and hands. The wheels hugging Tokyo’s uneven pavement. The stilling of momentum when she threw on the brake. Keeping her ears out for baby’s gurgling messages. Once she started taking the subway, worlds awaited, although she was still limited to lines and stations that provided convenient enough elevator access. That was because she was not allowed by regulation to take the stroller on the escalator, and there was no way she was going to carry it up and down stairs.
July provided the excuse to go to Harajuku, for the semiannual clearance sales. Getting there required two transfers, but the stations were relatively easy to get around in, and there was a new and spacious elevator at Omotesando. She never bought much clothes in America, but here they were made for her body. She knew fabrics. Part of her mother’s side of the family was in the textile business, and she had spent a few summers working for them. Now in the sale racks she developed an appreciation for the typically fine Japanese attention to line and cut in even the cheapest clothes. She had been losing weight since arriving in Japan, a combination of diet and lack of sleep.
Charcoal cleansers, collagen masks, and BB whiteners brightened the tone and sheen of her face. Her hair blackened from eating black sesame seeds. Her clothes began to fit. For the first time since college, she wore dresses. She blossomed. With her newfound feminine air, she finally began to blend in with the women around her.
By two she made it back to pick up her other son from school. It had not occurred to her before, for some reason, but she thought she had better take some pictures of her children. They posed in the schoolyard, in the small dirt-lot playground on the walk home, in front of one of the temple gates, and in their own apartment, where they were most free. She dressed them up in summer yukata. When she took them out, the other parents thought it was so charming, maybe because they would not send out their own kids in public that way.
Her oldest son had gone silent for the first month or so after going to school. She knew, because the teacher had told Horace. He did not talk in class. Well, how could he? But he did not talk much when he came home, either. Just shrugged when she asked him how was his day. He had always been an outgoing kid, so she was afraid she was traumatizing him. But around the beginning of summer, he changed. Not just talking, but streams of Japanese. At first it was to his friends only, with whom he had been speaking until then in that universal kids’ language. But then it was to adults too, and he spoke it naturally with no accent. At home he even started watching NHK and sentai shows. He put on puppet shows in Japanese for his brother.
So she was the only one still having a tough time, even though she was, she thought, making the best of it. She continued to keep her distance from the other mothers. You could guess what kind of scene that was. There was a woman who had spent some years in Australia and a Filipino woman who could speak English. She avoided them.
It was more important, somehow, first to understand the messages being sent to her in shops, on websites, in advertising in subway cars and stations, and on television. That is, to be a consumer. This included not only what was being said but what was behind it. Somehow it made her feel more human. Of course it helped she could read kanji. Although she could not speak, they did not regard her as a total foreigner for this.
What would happen to them when they returned? Neither she nor Horace thought about it. In his case, it was a little clearer. In hers, the entire trajectory of her working life over the past ten years had been truncated. She was still collecting unemployment.
Everything she did not like about Taiwan was somehow worse here. There was the smallness of minds, the pretension, the insufferableness of the men, the pettiness of the women. Being the mother of a small child and a housewife was a peculiar and devious kind of death sentence here. Her health was probably suffering. Just as she had growing up, she had odd pains here and there, and she never got a good night’s sleep. It may have also been ghosts, the kind that belonged to East Asia, especially during the summer.
Yet she could not say she disliked it. She found herself thinking of her father and the time he spent as a college student in Japan. She stalked his spirit and sentimentally felt closer to him for it. She was reminded she should visit her sister in Osaka. It was assumed she would, when the timing worked out, but she realized now it was no small matter to get to Kansai. Somehow in Tokyo you never thought of it. It was only on the subway, where the travel agencies and local tourism boards beckoned with this or that escape. Mount Takao. Kawagoe. Nikko. Miura. Matsumoto. Kumamoto. Okinawa. In her darker moods, especially those first few months, she had thought of bringing the kids with her to live with her mother in Taiwan, or with her sister in Kansai. At least now she could say she did not think about that anymore.
秋
One morning, with the decorum and alacrity with which everything was done here, it was autumn. Beyond the sudden snap to the air, the store displays, as if pulling a curtain, moved on to themes of colored leaves and seasonal produce and fish. For Horace, there was an element of nostalgia, in the underlying smoke in the air that reminded him of New England.
For the first time he could remember, they were battling neither cold nor rain nor heat on the morning walks to school. Maybe because of that, the boy walked with more bounce, chatting about his friends and teachers, whom he never talked about before. Maybe it was just because he was getting better at Japanese, and they were treating him like one of them finally.
They took shortcuts now, instead of going along the main street. They cut into a side alley, by a post office, and through an old shrine gate from Edo. The remains of a greater gate, painted vermillion, with a tiled roof, rested in a field amid the modern mansions and narrow family houses.
He let the boy walk at his own pace, while he stayed behind. What struck him, but of course this would be the case, was that the boy did not march off to school in a straight line, but wound around, taking his sweet time. He would get distracted by a weed or a bug or a song.
They were brought up to the school entrance foyer to the step where the boy took off his shoes and changed into his white sneakers. He had traded in his summer straw boater for a felt bowler. It was getting just cold enough in the mornings that Horace thought about putting a coat over the boy’s uniform jacket. Now the boy did not hang around anymore. He ran straight off to class without saying goodbye.
The principal caught him. He gave a deep bow. As far as he could tell, he was the only adult man around. He took off his shoes and left them at the step, pointed toward the door, and put on a pair of slippers. She went to her desk. His son had been given a role in the school play. A prominent role, some kind of animal, which meant he did not have speaking lines. But she meant the boy was coming along well. She also said in a couple of weeks there was going to be a Sunday family event, a curry cookoff, and both mothers and fathers should come. She placed some emphasis on this last point. Then she handed him a flier.
In the hall he could hear the teacher playing a stirring piano tune and singing along with the children with real gusto. It struck him what they asked these kindergarten teachers to do. They were all young women, every one with a certain something to them. Big-sisterly was the best he could put it. Piano and carrying a tune on a long list of requirements, in addition to arts and crafts and keeping order among the children, which they seemed preternaturally adept at doing.
Maybe because he no longer felt as if he were leaving the boy to a potentially cruel fate, he went off to work more lighthearted too, moving through the residential back alleys that saw the least traffic.
Baby was getting longer. At first he thought it was just he was getting thinner. Unlike the older boy, he had not taken to the diet of fish and rice. He ate—just enough. Nonetheless, clearly he was growing. There were the clothes, hand-me-downs, that were just right for him now. His arms and legs were getting firmer. Horace told Phoebe to stop taking the stroller. Make him walk.
Without the stroller, their habits touring the city changed. No longer confined only to those places that afforded them a wide berth, parks or malls or places otherwise underpopulated, they could go more or less where other people went. Certain train lines became newly accessible. It was a revelation, for instance, how close Ginza was. They had taken a roundabout path before, because they could not use stations that only had stairs. But now baby was not only navigating steps pretty well, but hills too. Where they would have only gone to Ginza on Sunday, when they closed Chuo-dori to traffic, now they could have an early dinner on a weekday, if he got home early enough, something he was doing more frequently, and take off for an evening stroll among Tokyo’s most storied shopping blocks and still make it back in time for bath and bedtime. It seemed like a great luxury, and they suddenly felt like civilized people, living in this, the world’s most civilized city.
Even where the leaves had not changed were signs of the season, such as the sugidama, cedar balls, hanging outside saké shops; bound and tied (plastic) Shanghai crab in the windows of Chinese restaurants; plastic leaves tied to streetlights; and people wearing fall fashions still too warm for the weather. There were natural signs too, such as the one the older boy found so exciting, the dried husk of a cicada on the sidewalk. This is what they looked like? Like robot armor? And its negative complement: the silence in the trees. All conspired in a way that did not feel so much like coercion, towards purchases or production, as instruction. For the behavior asked for was strangely useless. It was an awareness of the breaking of the rhythm of everyday pursuits, that is, of time passing. Remembrances of what one was doing this time last year. Allowing a breath to be taken. In this sense it was even more insidious than mere advertising, not so much about control than propriety, not one must, but one should. “In order to gain a better appreciation …”
They were in Yoyogi Park on the weekend. Horace had brought the boys here, with Phoebe taking her time at Harajuku Crossing. She joined them later, not long after they found their way past the rockabilly greasers. The boys zigzagged on the grass. The dull thud of a trance festival came over the row of trees to their left. It was almost dusk. It had been mild, a perfect day, days which only came in the short window of this time of year, but with the sun going down, the air took on a chill, and he was afraid they were not dressed for it.
Sunlight cut through the trees. A desert glow. Cold. Crows hopped out of the trees in ominously larger and larger congregations. Then he began to notice people laying blankets on the grass as they put on scarves and warmer clothes. Some of them broke out bottles of beer. Was the festival moving here for the night? But the people on the grass were older men and women, some with children.
A crow was going through somebody’s backpack.
“Look up.”
The full moon was bright and clear.
He had forgotten it was the Mid-Autumn Festival. He did not know they celebrated it in Japan too, or how.
“Too bad we don’t have any moon cakes,” Phoebe said. The Chinese custom was to sit out on a clear autumn night and take in the moonlight. Eat cakes and recite poetry.
“We could go to Yokohama. They sell them there year round.” It was a kind of joke between them they did that.
酉 の 市
“Shinjuku 3-chome, in front of Isetan.”
It was Ryo. Horace did not know he was in town.
No further explanation, so Horace told Phoebe his boss was calling to meet him on a street corner in Shinjuku at ten o’clock on a weeknight. At least the kids were already put to bed.
When he got there, by subway, Ryo was already on the corner, alone. The department store’s doors were closed, although its Gothic lamps were still on. The older man was wearing a scarf and overcoat. Instead of motioning Horace to follow him somewhere, he stood his ground. He explained they would wait here for a few more people to show up.
A minute later, a tall and very pretty woman, wearing a leather jacket and boots, walked up to their spot on the corner. She had had her hair waved and was wearing it loose. Dark complexion. Looked maybe to be in her twenties. Ryo only introduced her by name, Misa. They seemed to regard each other coldly and kept their distance from each other while both of them smoked.
Apparently Ryo was somewhat buzzed and slurred, “When the others get here and ask you who she is, just tell them she’s my cousin, from Nagoya.”
No need for outright deception, Horace thought. Everyone would see right through it anyway, so maybe it was more of a case of politeness? Who knew about these things?
Ryo placed a call on his cell. About five minutes later, three men arrived, one older, two younger. The older one, with metal glasses and a few strands of hair on top of his head, was Shimamura. He was already fairly blasted. Red in the face, stumbling over his steps. The younger men, in suits like him, had to hold him up. They were junior financial directors who reported to him. Horace had been told Shimamura was the only one who had a full picture, and for that matter, any concrete understanding, of the situation of the overseas branch. For that reason, he was the only one in the organization who had any real authority to decide on their standing. It was a vital relationship for Ryo. On the other hand, it was just one of several he juggled and, to some likely extent, played against one another.
Shimamura, who seemed to recognize Horace in his daze, came right at him, ignoring Ryo and his guest, and almost fell on top of him. Long-limbed, built like a basketball player, he put all his weight onto Horace’s right shoulder. Then a stream of gibberish filled one ear, which Horace, despite his improving language, could only guess was Japanese.
The group moved north. Nobody asked about Misa. Yasukuni-dori was lit up. The finance executive attached himself to Horace and kept on babbling.
They crossed at the intersection with Meiji-dori. It was crowded with matsuri booths and pushcarts. Tucked half a block down Meiji-dori was the entrance to Hanazono Shrine, mobbed by people both trying to leave and enter under a massive gate of paper lanterns. Squads of taxis parked out front waited to cart off drunks.
They made their way past the tightly arranged booths with men and women in yukata selling traditional crafts. Ryo told Horace he would explain later what they were. There were also ones featuring games like the goldfish one he had played in the summer. They moved to the cordoned food area and found a table that would seat all six of them. It was a cold night, so that meant oden. Shimamura ordered three bottles of saké. Horace tried making some conversation with Misa.
“You’re from Nagoya?”
“Yeah.”
“You live in Tokyo now?”
“Yeah. I just moved here, for school. My first year in school, though, I lived in Nagoya.”
“You took the train every day?”
“Once a week. It was a pain.”
“How do you like Tokyo?”
“Compared to Nagoya?”
“Yeah.”
“A lot better.”
The oden and the saké warmed them up thoroughly. Then they all went off to see the freak show. It was the same show Horace had seen in the summer, culminating with the Snake Woman. Same woman. Horace had to admit the effect was largely lost the second time around. Ryo and the others seemed to feel the same way, as it was probably old hat to them. There was no expression or comment from any of them as they shuffled out of the tent.
Shimamura took his team for another round of drinks, while Ryo pulled Horace and Misa aside. He led them down one of the wide aisles selling what appeared to be gaudily decorated bouquets or wreaths, wrapped in clear plastic. Ryo stared contemplatively at each booth’s offerings. Misa kept her head down, hands in pockets. On closer look, it seemed to Horace they were not wreaths but decorated rakes.
In fact that was what they were. Kumade, or “bear claws,” for clawing, or raking, in money. Most of the people buying them were businessmen, like themselves. Every year you bought one for success. More than that, if your sales were going to grow at all that year, you bought one bigger than the year before. That was why they came in all sizes. If it was your first time, you started small, so you did not end up buying too big of one too soon and maxing out. Ryo had gotten one every year except last year, because he could not make it back to Japan in time. It was this, more than anything, to which he attributed the disastrous financial results they had just posted.
That was why, Ryo explained, Horace was being recalled to the States.
Once he settled on something he liked, Misa became a lot more animated, chatting and laughing with the vendor, using a completely different way of speaking and looking suddenly a lot more at ease. Probably a dialect she used with a fellow Nagoyite. The kumade was massive. Its pieces, which included rice stalks and an otafuku mask, were stapled and glued to a thick bamboo culm. It stood as tall as Horace’s shoulders. Ryo explained he was going to have the vendor deliver it to Horace’s office. From here, it was Horace’s task to figure out how to get it back to Los Angeles.
“That’s your job now. It’s a very important one.”
Horace could not think of a solution for the moment, except to buy an airplane seat for the thing.
The four of them, including the vendor, stood in a circle in front of the booth, made a rapid chant, wishing for good business next year, and clapped in time between chants. They all bowed.
Just as all three of them turned around, Shimamura and his two cronies came shambling back up to them. Shimamura tripped over a rock and one of the junior directors reached out to grab him before he crashed to the ground.
Ryo gave the junior director a look, as if to ask, “Is he all right?” The younger man returned the look and shook his head.
“Here.” Ryo pointed at Horace’s back.
They dragged the executive over. Horace slung him over his shoulders like a jacket. “Put him in a taxi. Gogami-san will tell the driver where to go. See you next time.” With that, he walked off with Misa, into the lights and noise of the festival.
Horace dragged Shimamura to the gate, which was twice as mobbed as it had been when they arrived. Nobody gave them a second glance. They managed to hail a taxi, and he dropped Shimamura inside, who was still gone to the world. Horace adjusted the glasses on his face, but could not quite get them right. Gogami shouted some directions at the driver. The door shut of its own accord. Gogami gave a curt goodbye, leaving Horace alone in the night. It was too late to catch a train.
新 年
Phoebe had been sick since new year’s day, but she seemed to get over her illness after they boarded the bullet train at Shinagawa. She stopped coughing as soon as they got past Mount Fuji. It was the first time any of them had ever seen it. It is little understood how hard it is to get a glimpse of Mount Fuji from central Tokyo if not spending a lot of time in the upper floors of skyscrapers. It probably should not have come as a surprise that she recovered instantly. Whatever had been plaguing her in Tokyo had not followed her out of it. While they were concerned when they headed back, she did not suffer a relapse. The spirit did not return.
Back in Tokyo, temple roofs were white with snow. Tokyo Tower was half obscured in freezing rain.
Plum blossoms were starting to break. In Chinese aesthetics, they were the more prized flower over cherry blossoms, for blooming in the wastes of early spring. There was a stark beauty to them, in the courtyard, the parks, buds on branches reaching over compound walls. The best place to see them near their mansion was a public playground two blocks away. It was interesting to Horace for its bizarre displays explaining the prehistory of the district. There was even a lifesize diorama of a neolithic hut, with mannequins. The plum garden was in bloom, very precisely, as if by design. Each blossom the same proportion. After the rain, their sugary-sweet smell drifted out the park into the street.
Last night.
They had shipped off everything that could be shipped and moved out of their apartment.
They had to stay in a hotel. The plan was to get brunch in the morning and head out from the station for Narita by noon.
They opened a bottle of pink champagne. It seemed a very Tokyo drink, somehow. The kids were watching, and to some degree comprehending, a food show on TV.
It was warm enough to stand out on the balcony. Earlier that day they had taken a stroll through the hotel gardens. Camellias were in bloom, and there was the very first hint of cherry buds.
From the balcony, Tokyo stretched before them. Red warning beacons marked off the heights of that incomparable skyline. The moving lights of trains and planes. To their left were the towers of Shinjuku. Right in front of them, the core. Mori Tower. Tokyo Tower in orange hues. A dark sea in the middle that was the Imperial Palace. On their right, the Rainbow Bridge and the lights of Shiodome, Odaiba and, closer in, Shinagawa.
Of all things, it was the ending of Père Goriot that came to him. Maybe it was the champagne. Rastignac standing on that hill in Père-Lachaise, looking over Paris. It occurred to him, he did not know what lay ahead, but probably he would be back before long. But that would be for meetings and presentations, as a business traveler. It would not be anything like this.