She led me along the seashore toward a stand of small restaurants. The wind had died down, and the beach was more crowded than it had been the day before. My line of vision was nearly overwhelmed by the red rental umbrellas, fully recovered from their previous day’s battle with the wind and now blanketing the sand in shade. A beach ball sailed over the umbrellas and landed at my feet. I kicked it—a soft push-pass—back to a running little boy. A small girl with a face covered in ice cream walked passed us. Couples strolled hand-in-hand, their wet swimming trunks soaking through the towels wrapped around their waists.
The maid pointed out a small pizza place. We each ordered a slice, which turned out to be one-quarter of a large pizza. We stood at the scratched and worn wooden counter. I tried to keep my weight off the wood and my arms free of the collected oil and tomato sauce and Tabasco that speckled the counter like modern art. A cloud of cigarette smoke hung in the shadows under the awning, and a surly waiter shuffled among the rickety tables. Tiny cockroaches skittered over the condiments.
I nibbled my slice and sipped my lemonade. The maid ordered a beer to go with her slice. She drank it all straight from the can—something I’d never seen a Japanese person do—and crushed the empty before turning to her pizza. She shouted, “Cerveza,” to the girl at the counter, then clarified her order in Japanese.
After polishing off a second slice and two more beers, the maid told me a story in her best Spanish. She said that she used to work at another hotel in town. She searched for the word in Spanish for the hotel, gave up, and called it the Sakura. I told her everyone knows what sakura means, regardless of the language. She said that the hotel owner’s daughter had had a masochistic affair with a local man who’d killed his wife. He’d been a translator, Russian-to-Japanese. When the affair was discovered, he took to the sea to escape censure. He tried to swim away. This, the maid made clear. “Nadó. Nadó,” she said. She’d born witness to it all. She’d even steamed open the envelopes and read the love letters the man sent the girl. They were filthy, she said.
The story she told was fresh in my mind, though some of the details were off. I asked the maid if the hotel hadn’t been named the Hotel Iris, as it had been when Ogawa-san wrote the novel of that name. The maid responded by spitting on the floor. She ran the bottom of her sandal across the puddle of spit, leaving what appeared to be the only clean streak on the restaurant tile. “Ogawa stole everything she wrote from me,” the maid said, in her first words of English.
Stephen and I sat in poolside chairs, watching Ogawasan swim laps. Stephen was dressed as impeccably as he’d been the day before. Though his white slacks bore the signs of being well-worn, they also boasted a wearer’s ability to chauffeur white through a gauntlet of food, mud, and inks and emerge unstained. My plaid shorts were frayed at the hems. My T-shirt was probably newer than his slacks and it was black, but a month-old bleach stain was hidden only by my apathy. We watched Ogawa-san swim laps. She doubled my previous night’s swimming performance. One hundred meters for each of the four major strokes.
By the time she reached the butterfly, tension had settled like a fog between Stephen and me. Stephen’s perpetual smile struggled to dissipate it. I wanted to tell him that a simple statement along the lines of, Don’t worry. She’ll come around to your interview before it’s time for you to fly back to California, would work a lot better than a smile. I turned my glance away from Stephen’s smile and Ogawa-san’s laps and watched another guest, a little girl with the pale skin of a city-dweller making her first voyage seaward, play with a toy robot. She wound up the robot. It took four paces before the spring ran out. The girl wound it up again. The robot walked a little farther. The girl did not smile. She looked at both of her parents. When it was clear that they were not watching, when she thought no one was watching, she quietly applauded the robot. Clap. Clap.
I looked closely at the robot. It was the very same type of robot I’d had as a small child. It was also identical to the robot I’d brought with me from California, the one that had been in my hotel room prior to the maid coming in to clean.
To fill the space between Stephen and I while Ogawasan swam her final four laps, I told him about the maid and my robot. Stephen said nothing while I talked. When I finished, he quietly stood, walked around the pool, and spoke to the parents. Their conversation was in Japanese. I couldn’t understand the words. I could understand the tenor of the discussion. Stephen accused. The parents defended. The volume of their voices escalated. The mother’s face flushed a tomato red. Stephen pounded his open palm with a closed fist. The father raised his hands above his head in a multi-lingual gesture of frustration. Stephen resolved matters by yanking the robot out of the little girl’s hand.
He turned and headed back around the pool. The parents remained seated. The little girl neither spoke nor cried. She simply glared at me.
Stephen handed me the toy robot. “Perhaps it would be better if we took this ukulele lesson up to my room. Ogawa-san can join us when she’s done swimming.”
I kept my eyes on the girl, my hands on the robot. I nodded in agreement.
To show off, I played a ukulele rendition of “Ode to Joy” for Ogawa-san. I was using my travel ukulele with its plastic fretboard and plywood soundboard. The image of the small, robot-less girl lingered in my memory. It blended with the forced joy of the song. The music sounded like the rust on the Picasso sculpture in front of the Cook County Courthouse. Ogawa-san sat primly on the corner of Stephen’s hotel-room bed. Her ukulele lay across her lap, strings down. Her folded hands rested on the back of her ukulele. Her eyes watched my fingers.
When I finished the song, Ogawa-san spoke to me in what I thought was Japanese. I looked to Stephen to translate. He said the same words. I told him I didn’t understand. They both made the request again, louder and slower. “Liszt,” they said. “The ‘Liebestraum.’” I didn’t know the piece at all, much less on the ukulele. I played a slow rendition of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” mixing melody with rhythm hopefully with enough emotion to mask my ignorance. Stephen and Ogawa-san sat patiently through it. Ogawa-san spoke to Stephen at the end. Stephen asked, “Do you know any traditional Hawaiian songs?”
Given a few minutes, I could have found “Aloha Oe” somewhere on the fretboard. The two had already humored my performance of “Crazy.” I wanted something more. I played “Papalina Lahilahi,” first in the upbeat tempo it was written in, and second sadly, slowly, like the song of a doomed island.
Afterward, the lesson began in earnest. I taught Ogawasan the key of G. It has the easiest chords for someone who already knows guitar. She impatiently hurried me through them, until I showed her how to find “Ode to Joy” within those basic G and D chords. She attacked the fretboard, plucking mistimed and mistaken notes, eventually finding fragments of the song that lingered within.
This seemed to be enough for her. She focused intensely, almost obsessively, on her search for the arrangement within the chords, pausing only to mutter something to Stephen. Stephen stood to usher me out of his room.
“Wait,” I said. “One more thing.”
Ogawa-san stopped her plucking and looked at me. To show her that I did, in fact, know her work, that I understood it somewhat, I showed her the diminished chord. Played on its own, it’s unimpressive. Played three times in succession, moved down one fret with each strum, it makes the sound that cartoons use to portend doom. BUM BUM BUM.
I struck the chords and smiled. Ogawa-san glared at me with the same face as the robot-less little girl.
Stephen said, “Ogawa-san will grant your interview tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. The day I was scheduled to leave the Japanese seashore.
The concierge recommended I visit the town’s aquarium. This gave me the idea of supplementing my possibly futile interview attempt with a travel piece about the Naoshima seashore. Something like, “The minute you arrive, you feel you’ve stepped into paradise. It’s like a Mediterranean village with a Japanese twist. The vi
llagers are warm. The service in the local establishments is impeccable. The beach is seconds away from everything, and the gentle surf of the cove is perfect for kids. As an added attraction, you can visit the village aquarium and watch the playful dalliance of seals, dolphins, and sea otters.”
In truth, the aquarium seal was anorexic. He lay flat on the concrete edge of the pool, barking softly and incessantly. The dolphin floated in the middle of the pool. He didn’t react in any way to the teenage boys who banged fifty-yen coins against the aquarium glass and screamed for him to swim. I bought a more-than-four-days-dead fish for a hundred yen and tossed it over the tank to the dolphin. He drifted to the surface of the water, pushed the fish with his nose, and gradually descended away. The dead fish floated on the surface.
As I left, the sea otter made eye contact with me. He rubbed his fingers and dove, swimming straight for me. He spun in the water and stared at me. If there had been a translator available, she may have clarified that the sea otter wanted me to take him back to California with me.
That night, Ogawa-san left her window as open as her curtains. She sat on her bed, playing ukulele. Her fingers danced through “Ode to Joy.” Not just the brief, two-minute chorus that I’d played, but all four movements. I watched the kiwis on the hill tremble in the wind and listened to Ogawa-san’s ukulele.
Like the night before, the maid emerged from the hotel’s back door with a saggy-bottomed produce box. She scuttled down the hill toward the sea. I raced out the door to follow her.
She darted through the kiwis, well ahead of me, whipped through town as if unseen by the tourists out for beer, karaoke, last-call love affairs. She hopped onto the foot of the jetty. I nearly caught up to her there. Once on the rocks, she was too quick. She bounced across them with the grace of a mountain goat. The rocks were slick. The soles of my shoes were slicker. The spinning white light at the end of the pier alternately lit my path and blinded me. By the time my eyes were able to readjust to the dark, the light slapped me again. Sea spray whipped up to my left. The cove to my right invited me to dive in, swim the calm waters back to shore. I continued to follow the maid.
She stopped at end of the pier, just below the spinning light. One by one, she tossed the contents of her box into the sea on the rugged side of the pier.
The box was half-empty by the time I met her. Below the spinning light, underneath its blinding beam, the moon was enough to cast a pallor on the scene. Her box was, indeed, full of food. Brown heads of lettuce dripped onto squishy tomatoes and spongy cucumbers. Gray scallops seeped out of the gaping mouths of their shells. Lobster heads looked alive with insects crawling among the congealed brains. Old strawberry shortcakes stained their cellophane wrappers, brown cream separated from the fat, strawberries dried and wrinkled like the heads of dead babies, sponge cake hardened and crumbling, mold wrapping around it all. The maid tossed all the rotten food into the same spot in the sea. A dolphin had come to meet her. He splashed and played in the food, smacking it with his tail, spinning around it, turning one spot of the water into a festering stew. The maid continued to toss the food to the dolphin.
“What are you doing?” I asked her. “¿Que pasa?”
“El pescado sabe,” she said. She explained that she and the fish had struck a deal. She mentioned something about translation—traducir—but I didn’t follow. She told me it all had to do with the Hotel Sakura—the Hotel Iris, as Ogawa-san had called it—and the missing man, the one who had tried to swim to safety. The maid said she would prove that Ogawa-san had been stealing her stories. She would show everyone. The fish would help her.
She continued to throw the rotten food into the sea. The dolphin seemed to tire of the sandbox. He swam away, or at least down. “Mire,” she told me.
So I watched. The wind skipped across the surface of the water. The rotted food bobbed and dissolved. The colors of the mush the dolphin had created swirled together in a moonlit silver and broke apart. The maid stared at the ocean.
Gradually, something began to creep to the surface. It looked like a corpse in a desiccated state similar to the food the maid had tossed. It was the torso of a man wearing a tattered gray suit. His round, bald head hung limply from a decomposing neck. The maid pointed and screamed, “¡El traductor! ¡El traductor!”
The next morning, my time and money had run too thin. I had to check out without, it seemed, a Yoko Ogawa interview. I spent the morning working on a story of my time at the seashore, hoping it would suffice. I wrote about the armada of red umbrellas, the slick rocks of the jetty, the anorexic seal, the immaculate sushi bar, Ogawa-san furiously typing across the courtyard, my wind-up robot pacing on a hotel desk, the maid, her thefts and claims of theft. When I finished, I packed my bag and headed out. I took no time to assess what items may have been left behind involuntarily.
“The maid. She was an elderly woman.” I imitated her slumped posture for the concierge. “She never stopped moving. Spoke Spanish.”
“I know of whom you speak. She lives in town. She used to be a maid here.”
“She doesn’t still work here?” I asked.
“We keep telling her that,” he said in his flawless English.
“And Ogawa-san?” I asked
“She checked out early this morning.”
I walked through all the hallways looking for the maid. I slumped under the weight of my backpack. Sweat formed where the straps of the pack rubbed against my chest. The maid was nowhere to be found. I went to the seashore for a final look. It was crowded as ever, umbrellas jostling one another, kids racing along the rocks of the jetties, couples staring into one another’s eyes. No sign of the maid or Ogawa-san.
A spotless American approached me, holding a handful of pages torn from a notebook. As he got closer, I recognized him as Stephen. “Ogawa-san left this for you,” he told me. “She wrote the interview herself. I translated.”
“Thank you,” I said. I shook his porcelain hand. He turned and walked away. I headed for the train that would take me off the island, to the Kōnan Airport.
As the train whipped through the lush hills, I stole my first glance at the notebook pages Stephen handed me. The letters swirled around the page as if spun from my own thoughts.
A crisp sun shone on the Naoshima seashore. The tide was out, and the jetty was half exposed, a jagged edge against the surface of the sea. Children ran across the slick rocks of the jetty and launched into the calm waters.
Ukes for the Little Guy
As a small child, Sean Carswell tried to turn everything into a ukulele. Broom handles, armadillo shells, the cardboard box his sister’s Barbie arrived in, the remains of a bat José Cruz broke in a spring training game. He’d even make miniature ukuleles out of beetle shells and toothpicks and give them to his sister, for her dolls. The small ones gathered dust in dollhouse corners. The human-sized ones usually crumbled under the tension of strings tightened to some facsimile of tuned.
When Sean Carswell butted heads with his second grade teacher, a woman who began the year as Miss Sunday and ended it as Mrs. Matthews, his mother tried to turn the obsessive uke building into a survival mechanism.
A beginning of the year Miss Sunday nurtured a classroom environment that was very friendly for the slowest students. No question was too stupid, no problem too simple to repeat infinitely. Sean Carswell would finish all the math problems in his textbook while Dave Gast struggled with the first one: 15 + 6 =, raising his hand repeatedly, summoning Miss Sunday first 15 times, then 6 times, for a total of, as he figured it, 156 times. Sean Carswell would read to the end of the class read-along while Caryn Paige stuttered across the word “knot” every time it reemerged: surprised anew with each occurrence, perpetually pronouncing the “k.” A silent letter was too much for Caryn’s developing brain. At this rate, she’d never learn to properly misspell her name.
Once finished with his math or reading, a seven-year-old Sean Carswell didn’t know what to do with himself. Sometimes, he’d fume. He suspe
cted his classmates knew better. Dave Gast may struggle over 15 + 6, but he damn sure knew that, when his Pee Wee football team had five field goals and added a touchdown to it, their score would become 21. At least until the extra point was converted. Caryn probably was a bad reader. Sean Carswell felt she would have been a better reader if every other boy in the class didn’t shower her every mistake in sighs and moon eyes. Sean Carswell supposed that none of his classmates were as dumb as they acted in Miss Sunday’s class. They just knew Miss Sunday would make them do less work if they acted stupid.
Sean Carswell was in agony. He sought wisdom from the stories overheard in his living room. His brother and sister watched television when the TV worked. Sean Carswell only watched when it was broken, when his father and a buddy and a six-pack of Stroh’s huddled in the living room corner, seeking a blown picture tube and telling stories. Old Ronnie Crilly told Sean Carswell’s father a story about trouble at work. Ronnie said, “I was going out of my skull, so fucking bored, when I finally decided that, if shit wasn’t going to go down, I was gonna start some.”
Sean Carswell learned more in this vocabulary lesson than he had in six weeks of Miss Sunday’s lists. He decided that he would start some shit the next time he was going out of his skull, so fucking bored. The opportunity emerged around Thanksgiving time. The class was expected to trace their hands and draw a turkey out of the tracings. Poor little Dan Shock could not figure it out. Should the head of the turkey go on the thumb or the pinkie? Obviously, for Dan, the pinkie was the answer. If Ronnie Crilly were commenting on the situation while the Stroh’s disappeared and the broken picture tubes multiplied, he’d say, “The kid couldn’t find the ass end of a turkey.” Sean Carswell knew better than to say this. But with his turkey drawn and his next day’s homework complete, with every book on the library’s second grade reading list read and reported on—even that damn Paddington bear, torturously dull but the last thing on the list—and all of his Scholastic points accumulated, with no beetle shells or toothpicks or cardboard boxes or broken bats handy, with Dan Shock still engaged in the turkey-head argument with Miss Sunday—an argument that would surely last until lunchtime—Sean Carswell felt he had no choice but to stand from his chair, walk across the room, and punch Dan Shock in the mouth.
The Metaphysical Ukulele Page 12
