The Involuntary Sojourner

by S. P. Tenhoff

  Her husband made a decision: it was no longer safe to allow his aimless roaming through the house and garden. He was moved to a storage room with a window too small for him to escape through. One of the doors was nailed shut; a stick in the rail of the other prevented it being slid open from within. Occasionally the door would rattle; once there was a pounding and a muffled shout; but for the most part he seemed content enough inside. Everything had been made as comfortable as possible, his furniture and belongings arranged just as they had been in his former room. Chiyo noticed, though, that there were no puppets. During dinner one evening, she suggested that her father-in-law might like to have one.

  After a silence the brothers—first her husband and then her brother-in-law—resumed eating.

  “I can’t see the point in it,” her husband said eventually. “He has no use for any of that now.” (She had noticed how her husband chose the word “he” these days instead of “Father.”) “Besides, we have no puppets to spare.”

  They finished dinner without another word. Chiyo was getting up to clear the table when her husband, looking at no one in particular, said, “There’s probably a practice puppet somewhere we could do without.”

  Chiyo was surprised to find herself bowing deeply, as if she had been pleading on behalf of her own father.

  Later that evening her brother-in-law came to her in the kitchen. He held an elaborately decorated puppet box. “This used to be Father’s favorite,” he whispered. “We don’t do the play anymore; it won’t be missed.”

  Once alone she removed the lid. Master Kurobe’s favorite: she envisioned silk-draped nobility, or a warrior in splendid armor. Instead she discovered a meager figure in the humble clothes of an artisan, the plain face carved into an expression suggesting some sort of long-suffering endurance.

  She placed it in a corner of his room, the box open so he could see what was inside. When she returned the next day the puppet was still where she’d left it. Over time it grayed with dust there in its corner. He no longer appeared to have any interest in his art. At times, though, she would enter his room to find his fingers moving, a precise kind of twitching, as if he were operating invisible controls . . .

  Chiyo had always hated her father-in-law. No; that wasn’t quite true—before her marriage, she could hardly believe her luck: to wed the son of the great Kurobe! She had pictured, when the marriage was arranged, a life of even greater pleasures than she had enjoyed at home; Master Kurobe was certainly far wealthier than her own father, himself a renowned musician. She had grown up pampered; under the city’s finest masters, she had learned flower arranging, the tea ceremony, dance, and—her favorite of all—calligraphy. (Her calligraphy teacher once told her she was the most gifted student he’d ever taught.) At the time she’d taken it all as her due; but even if she had stopped to consider these indulgences, she would have said they were merely tokens of her parents’ love; it was only later that, looking back bitterly on her life before marriage, a life that seemed to have belonged to someone else, she began to suspect that it had all been grooming—bait to attract a respectable husband. After the ceremony, her new father-in-law, regal and handsome in his wedding kimono, stood before her parents with tears in his eyes, promising to welcome Chiyo into his home as his own daughter. How her parents had groveled then, weeping and bowing and thanking him again and again!

  She had imagined the Kurobe home as a temple to Beauty and Art, a place where her calligraphy, her dancing, her sense of aesthetics, everything she held true would be embraced, even applauded, by her new family. Instead the servant was let go and Chiyo given her chores. Her life before marriage had been filled with the joys of creating; the greatest creation of all, though, she realized later, had been the future she’d imagined for herself. Now her days were spent tending to three grown men and the enormous house they occupied. This alone she could perhaps have forgiven; but she couldn’t forget the tender look on Master Kurobe’s face as he made his promise to her parents. And since that day? He had never once treated her as even a daughter-in-law, let alone a daughter. From her first moment in the Kurobe home he was brusque, preoccupied, barely speaking except to give orders. She might have been nothing more than a new serving girl . . .

  Trembling, pulling strands of wet hair from her face, she detailed for her parents between sobs (and—mysteriously—hiccups) the injustices she was suffering. Her father appeared to examine a mat’s frayed edge. Her mother, finally, spoke: she should be grateful. She should be grateful to Master Kurobe. (For a moment Chiyo was so stunned the sobs and hiccups ceased.) Master Kurobe had done only what was proper: keeping the servant on would have been an insult not only to Chiyo but to her family as well, suggesting her incapable of fulfilling her new duties as wife and daughter-in-law. Did Chiyo understand those duties? Did she understand that she had another family now? It went on and on, Chiyo receiving instead of sympathy the first severe scolding of her life: her mother, who had never once made her lift a finger at home, now demanded that she do what was expected of her without complaint.

  Naturally, what was expected of her included, in due course, bearing a child. And she herself began to hope that motherhood might bring her acceptance into the Kurobe family. On the first night of each week, with perfect regularity, her new husband appeared at her bed; there followed a fruitless interlude which, in the beginning, embarrassed them both. Neither spoke of it. He persevered, stoical and resolute; and this became their weekly ritual of failure. When he did succeed, it was during rare illicit visits, visits which violated his own unstated rule to share a bed only at prescribed times. She would wake to find him slipping under her covers. She tried to remain still as he held her, his grip desperate and impersonal. He seemed to have been seized himself by some unbearable force; above her he struggled against invisible snares. She lay very still. Near the end he became—not cruel exactly; but there was an offhanded roughness in his actions that suggested revulsion. She didn’t know if he was disgusted with her, or with his own need of a body beneath him. When he was finished he averted his face, murmured an apology, and returned to his bed. She kept hoping that what she endured on these nights might be repaid with a child. She made a pilgrimage to Kasuga Shrine, laid an infant’s pillow before the giant stone phallus, and prayed with genuine ardor for the first time in her life. She wore a fertility charm wherever she went. Still there was no child; and as the years passed she could sense Master Kurobe’s indifference to her changing to something colder . . .

  She had therefore come to despise her father-in-law just as she felt herself despised by him. But now that she was entrusted with his care, a new feeling came over her which grew as his mind deteriorated. It was a long time before she identified this feeling as love. Not only love, but an increasingly possessive love that astounded her. He was hers, hers completely to keep and to care for, a man turned as helpless at times as a baby. She had never experienced such joy—or any joy at all, for that matter—in ministering to someone’s needs. She began to spoil him, going beyond the ordinary services she had always provided, although she knew he wouldn’t appreciate or even remember her kindnesses. At the same time, she started neglecting him in small ways: she would pretend occasionally not to hear when he called for tea; or carefully undercook his food; or leave in his soup the kind of mushroom she knew he disliked; or, in the later days of his illness, allow him to sit for a while in his own filth before changing his diapers; and these too seemed, no less than any kindness she might show, a secret way of expressing her love. She felt closer to the old man than ever when she could choose whether to reward or to punish, whether to tenderly watch over him or to disregard him completely.

  He called Chiyo by her name, and then he called her by his dead wife’s name, and then, finally, he called her nothing at all, but merely regarded her with a look of fixed concentration. He retained a faith in himself which was now misplaced, a stubborn certainty that, even in the face of his collapse, if
he concentrated hard enough he could recover his memories through force of will. His will! she thought. It was unquenched. It seemed, if anything, stronger than before, as if to make up for the other parts of himself that had fallen away. And once his will had finished searching the depleted honeycomb of his memories, buzzing desperately through the empty chambers, his rage was like nothing she’d ever seen. Only she witnessed it; his sons never came to him. It was as if they were afraid of their father, as if in his dotage he had grown in power rather than relinquishing it. (The old man, in any case, seemed to have forgotten them.) She witnessed his rage and despair alone, and suffered such unendurable pity that she felt herself wishing there were a way to spare him, even if it meant putting an end to what had become his life. Wasn’t that really the kindest thing anyone could do for him now?

  She began gradually, in fits and starts, to consider poisoning her father-in-law. Once she accepted that such a thing was possible the particulars seemed to unfold spontaneously like flowers into light. But then guilt would weaken her resolve, and she would question whether she would be acting to spare the old man or to spare herself, and she would refuse to think of poisoning him again until some fresh incident forced the idea back into her mind.

  The worst of these incidents began with the sound of a voice rising from his room. He rarely talked to himself, and so she approached his door, listening. At first she couldn’t catch his words. It was the tone of his voice: determined; authoritative. As if everything had come back to him. As if he’d been restored to his former self. And a growing impatience—the voice of a man who’s come to an important decision. The voice rose:

  “Oike!” he began shouting. “Where is Oike? Bring me my little man!”

  It continued for what seemed like hours. The voice grew frustrated; then incensed; then anguished and desolate, while she remained where she was on the other side of the door as it jolted and shook, unable to move for fear of being heard. She was perhaps never closer than at that moment to carrying out her plan to end his life; she felt sure she could never stand to hear those shouts again.

  But finally it stopped; and when, two days later, it began again, an idea came to her. A possible remedy; a way to silence his cries. It seemed monstrous; but those cries of his . . . She ran to his room and, trying it out, was astonished and even frightened to see how a few words from her could have such an effect. After that, when the voice began rising—for this had become a recurring event, sometimes happening nearly every day; other times weeks might go by before he started in again—she knew what to do. It was simple, really. And each time she did it, each time she succeeded in silencing him, the pity that had previously overwhelmed her diminished, becoming a little easier to bear.

  Over time her way of looking after her father-in-law changed, as if her remedy had initiated a new phase in her relationship with him. The weakening of her love was so gradual that she barely noticed its passing; love had, in any case, been merely an aberration in her life, and she returned to her previous existence with a kind of relief. She no longer spoiled the old man, nor did she neglect him; she never felt the thrill of being unable to decide whether to reward or to punish. Caring for him became, finally, nothing but another chore, although naturally she did what was proper until the very end, continuing to provide for his needs with all of the dedication owed to him as a father-in-law.

  And her remedy? The way to silence him? As stated above, it was a simple thing.

  When he started calling out—“Oike! Where is Oike?”—she rushed to his room. Unbarred the door. He would be sitting there in the screened half-light, watching alertly.

  “Oike is on his way, Father,” she said. “He’ll be here soon.”

  Hearing this, his face—stitched and seamed and bound together by its look of perpetual suspicion—seemed to spread open like a pouch being turned inside out. The face became radiant.

  It was safe to leave then. She could go back to her chores. He wouldn’t bother her anymore. He wouldn’t cry out. He would be in his room with that new face of his, waiting. And it was just a matter of time, of course, before he completely forgot once again what it was he’d been waiting for.

  The Involuntary Sojourner: A Case Study

  While much current research has centered on the challenges faced by international students, businesspeople, and military personnel traveling abroad, relatively little has been written about the plight of involuntary sojourners, more commonly known as “in-between people,” after the name given by Takahashi in his (1996) landmark study of the subject. Both Takahashi and the author of this article, along with a number of other researchers, have since attempted to better understand the phenomenon through an interdisciplinary approach drawing on various fields including intercultural psychology, anthropology, and communication theory; nevertheless, Involuntary Sojourning Syndrome (ISS) remains elusive and is perhaps best examined through the lens of some new, as yet nonexistent, field of study. This article will attempt to address deficiencies in existing research through an investigation into the case of a single “in-between person.”

  Takahashi has defined the involuntary sojourner as one who “finds him/herself abruptly and inexplicably abroad, without any prior intent to travel or knowledge regarding how s/he arrived in the host culture” (1996, 185). The first known occurrence of “in-betweenness” concerned a subject who came to be pseudonymously referred to as “Shin.” Shin’s case—that of a thirty-nine-year-old Japanese male discovered wandering “trancelike” in a repeating figure-eight pattern through the aisles of a Brittany souvenir shop specializing in reproductions of locally famous painted dishware—was widely reported by the media and caused a brief international stir as a result of the diplomatic row between Japan and France regarding his status (France asserting that Shin had violated the implied conditions of the tourist visa issued since he had not entered the country “by free and conscious choice”), but has since been eclipsed by the numerous other cases which have proliferated in the intervening years. Takahashi’s study ignored the sensational aspects of the case, focusing instead on the problems of culture shock and adaptation experienced by Shin in his new situation. Linguistic issues, often a concern for sojourners, were found not to be relevant in Shin’s case, since he reportedly possessed, at least for the duration of his stay in Brittany, native-like fluency in French despite having never studied the language (an assertion later corroborated by Delavergne & Arbogast, 1997). This study, in spite of its unavoidable limitations and remaining questions, constituted an important first step in the understanding of “in-between people.”

  (It is worth noting that Takahashi himself, in private correspondence with the author, has confided his dissatisfaction with the term “in-between,” considering it a poor translation of the Japanese word chuto-hanpa, which connotes an insufficiency, a sense of being stranded between poles, which is ultimately untranslatable, but perhaps better captured, according to Takahashi, by the colloquial English term “half-assed.” For understandable reasons, however, the term “half-assed people” has not been adopted by those pursuing this research. [The author will not address here the other issue regarding nomenclature, which involves the use of the term “involuntary” with respect to these sojourners (see Pflogg, 2007, for an amusingly misguided discussion of this question). Suffice to say that although, as Pflogg states sardonically, it is true that the involuntary sojourner “does not simply materialize in the host country: he purchases the tickets; he boards the plane; finding his seat, he makes himself comfortable and fastens his seat belt when instructed to do so; he from all reports avails himself of the snacks and meal included and in one case even requests an alcoholic beverage; he presumably selects from among the in-flight entertainment provided; he presents his passport to an immigration official upon arrival; and, leaving the airport, he even hails a taxi” (Pflogg, 2007, 41), this does not in any way constitute proof that those afflicted with “in-betweenness” are necessari
ly aware of what they are doing, or why. Thus “involuntary.” Unless one wishes to go so far as to dispute the amnesia or blocked memory itself as hoax, a position even Pflogg hesitates to take openly, though his article is rife with cunningly worded innuendo to this effect. (As an aside, Pflogg’s above litany of behavior “proving” volition conveniently omits one significant detail: in no case has a sojourner brought a single carry-on bag to stow in the overhead bin; neither has there ever been a single case of checked luggage or any other sign of the preparation one would reasonably expect if travel were in fact deliberately planned. The corpus amply demonstrates that the involuntary sojourner acts without choosing to act, behaves with intent but without conscious volition, in a manner superficially similar to but in fact distinct from psychotic compulsion [Takahashi & Kalvan, 2004; Kalvan, Beebe, Hardwick & Wendt-McCruthers, 2007; Kalvan & Nightingale, 2010].)])

  This study will examine a single subject using both objective evaluative measures and self-reported material in the form of a journal kept by the subject (hereafter “L”) concerning her experiences. L, a twenty-seven-year-old U.S. national, was discovered in the home appliance section of a department store in the commercial district of Vivasha, Gandarva’s largest city, her motion describing what has come to be known as a “Takahashi Loop,” i.e., the now familiar figure-eight pattern representing a closed loop interrupted only when the subject is addressed or physically restrained, usually by shop clerk or official, at which point the somnambulant sojourner, if we can use such a term (see Balbain, 2010, for an intriguing if speculative consideration of possible sleep-associated delta wave activity in ISS trance states), “wakes up,” becoming cognizant of his or her surroundings.