by B. K. Fowler
“Ken!” At the sound of his name, he pulled his hand away from Yasuko’s as if scalded.
“Dad, what are you doing here?”
Mr. and Mrs. Watanabe rose from the bench and bowed deeply—too deeply, in Ken’s opinion, for a gaijin warehouse man. Paderson watched until the Japanese couple completed their bowing ritual, and then he extended his right hand.
Mr. Watanabe shook Paderson’s hand, again bowing.
“What a fortuitous coincidence. We were talking about meeting you,” Mr. Watanabe said. “What a pleasure it is meeting you. Please sit with us and drink tea.”
“You hate green tea,” Paderson said to Ken.
“No, Dad. You do.”
Ken was biting down swear words, trailing his father who chopped out long strides through the darkness, where ghosts of steam escaped fissures in the earth.
Captain Paderson barked, “Double time it, double time it, soldier.”
“You didn’t have to embarrass me like that. They were being extra nice to you.”
“You’re lucky I didn’t whip your butt on the spot, wise guy.”
“I thought you were in Nagasaki.”
“I thought you were with Abernathy. You lied to me.”
“You lied to me first. You said you were going to Nagasaki.”
“That was misinformation for Operation Valiant. Why did you lie?”
“Because I don’t want to have to beat you up.”
Paderson halted, lifted his shoulders by millimeters. Ken stopped too, poised on the balls of his feet a few paces behind his dad. A fertile, eternal silence. Then Paderson continued onward saying, “I forbid you to see that girl and her Jap family again.”
“She’s Issei. She doesn’t count as a real Japanese.”
“You have your orders.”
“How come it’s OK for you to be with a Japanese girl, but I can’t?” The question stung his tongue. He couldn’t fool himself that Wizard had been wrong. Although the Watanabes were being kind, civil, and the consummate hosts, they’d had no intention of allowing their daughter to become involved with him.
“I’m not with a Japanese girl,” Paderson countered.
“Yeah, you were. That night I went to the bonfire, there was a naked girl in your room.”
Paderson kept walking, throwing his words over his shoulder. “I paid her. I didn’t love her.”
“You don’t love anybody. That’s why Mom isn’t with us.”
Ken felt dizzy. His knees buckled. His dad lurched forward, waving his arms, trying to find handles in the air. The ground wrenched beneath them. Father and son splayed their legs, and watched each other as earth’s tectonic plates readjusted. Roof tiles clinked when they slipped free, broke and settled under the eaves of homes and shops. For a millisecond, other than the slapping of mineral water against the ofuro stonewalls, the night world was unnaturally noiseless. And then the dogs took up barking.
“Come on. The earthquake’s over.” Paderson’s heartbeat could be heard in his throbbing voice.
“I know.” Was the earth still moving or not, or was he moving? It was impossible to tell. His imagination never forgot the sensation of blood and fluids sloshing within his own skin, which was what tremors felt like.
“What the...?” Paderson exclaimed, pointing into the jungle brush to the right of them.
Ken turned to glimpse the cloud shape his father saw at the edge of the path. It tumbled in front of them, and climbed up a low bough.
“Albino macaque,” he told his father. And once again he wondered how it came to be that he knew so much more about this world than his father did.
Thanks to the earthquake-resistant shelving system, the warehouse sustained negligible damage during last night’s tremors. The doorframe had been knocked askew, and a ceramic hanging chopstick holder Wizard stored his silver-tipped chopsticks in had popped off the wall and shattered on the floor. Ken kicked green ceramic shards against the wall.
“Throw those away,” Wizard said distractedly.
Ken sighed, but gathered up the green shards nevertheless, and grabbed a length of twine from the trashcan. Neko twisted in the air, failing to snag the twine Ken whipped at her, always out of the cat’s reach. He made her run in circles and dive under the desk, and pounce this way and that way. Ken broke his concentration when Wizard emptied a drawer full of blank forms into a trash box. Neko sunk her front claws into Ken’s hand, biting him while rabbitting her back legs, instinctively trying to disembowel her victim.
“Ouch! Stupid cat.” He smacked her snout harder than he’d intended.
Neko slunk into a corner where she daintily licked her paw, feigning disinterest in her tormentor and his string.
Ken waited for Wizard to tell him he’d been asking for it and got exactly what he deserved from the cat, but instead Wizard said, “A wise man used to counsel me not to chew on what’s eating me.”
Ken ignored the invitation to unburden his mind.
Wizard continued throwing away unused forms, and reorganizing the contents of his file cabinet. Stacks of new material requisition and control forms, with fewer lines to fill out and only two, not multiple, copies attached, bound with the kind of twine Ken had been taunting the cat with lay on the desk.
“Put those in this drawer,” Wizard said. He pointed to the stacks on his desk.
“I ain’t your slave.”
“I’m not your babysitter. Be useful, be friendly, or be gone.”
“What’s got into you lately?” Ken carried one stack to the file cabinet and let it drop noisily into the empty drawer.
Wizard made a pitying smile.
“I sat all damn morning in the bamboo forest waiting for Sikung to show up, but he never did!” It burst out in a gush, and Ken felt immediate relief, relief and remorse, too, for acting like a prick toward Wizard. And his cat.
“Sikung Wu left yesterday morning for the Pan American Gerontology Congress in Brasília.”
“You mean the new city in Brazil?” he asked.
“That’s the one.”
A rag ball of questions jumbled up. Finally, Ken asked, “Does Sikung speak Spanish?”
“Yes, and Portuguese, the national language of Brazil.”
“What’s geron lodgie?”
Wizard explained the meaning of gerontology. He explained that Sikung Wu was a keynote speaker at the conference. He explained that gerontologists were interested in applying Western scientific tests to measure and document the effects of chi gung on the quality of life of elderly...
Sikung Wu’s words, nonsensical-seeming then, came back to Ken. During their last meeting in the bamboo grove, the master had said: Your body is a vessel of your history and a premonition of your future. Practice chi gung each day or you will lose yourself. Chi gung is yours. It is something you can take everywhere. It costs nothing. It weighs nothing. No one can steal chi gung from you. In light of Wizard’s news about the master’s journey to Brasília, the remembered lecture rang of finality.
“When’s Sikung coming back?”
“I haven’t the foggiest.” Wizard cleared a space on the desk and wiped the surface with a cloth. He divvied the contents of a bento onto two plates. “Practice what he’s taught you.”
“That’s boring. I want to learn how to flip somebody.” He flipped a chopstick into the air and caught it.
“That’s peculiar,” Wizard said thoughtfully. For a moment, he intently inspected a memory or a half-forgotten idea. Seated, he duck-walked his wheeled chair over to the door.
Takuya walked by the door with a baseball mitt in one hand and the mask of Shishiko swinging at his side.
There was nothing to be said that both Ken and Wizard didn’t already know.
Chapter Sixteen
~ Obon Festival with Yasuko ~
Ken studied the kanji on Yasuko’s note. It was the note she’d tucked into his hand when they were at the teahouse with her parents. He vaulted off the train and compared her handwriting with Japanese s
igns on shops and teahouses near the station. The narrow lanes were clogged with vendors selling lanterns, sweets, and dumplings to village folk and to relatives who’d turned out to give thanks to ancestors on this last day of the Obon festival.
He edged between two women wearing brightly colored matching kimonos, and waving fans above their heads. He entered an empty space in the otherwise crowded intersection. Accustomed to people staring at him while pretending they didn’t notice him, he rearranged his face into an expression of no expression, and strolled across the cobblestones. He recognized orderliness in the way the crowd hemmed in the edge of the cleared, circular area. Women holding fans stepped clockwise, then counterclockwise in unison. Shit! He was standing in the hub of dancers.
He strode, not ran, to the edge of the circle where a woman, without appearing to alter her dance steps, stepped aside to let him pass through. He followed a dirt road leading him away from the throng and his embarrassment. He showed Yasuko’s note to a persimmon vendor, who pointed to a teahouse down the street.
Tall potted lilies and hanging lanterns decorated the teahouse. He peered inside, and at first didn’t recognize Yasuko. It was the first time he’d seen her in a traditional kimono. Over cups of green tea she told him about past Obon festivals, as if her childhood occurred during a distant time.
“In my childhood, over the summer holidays, we cleaned up the house, set a special rack on the altar, and hung scroll paintings. Sometimes, on the first day, I carved a boat out of eggplant for the family altar. It meant I wished ancestor spirits could travel to the temple in the boat. We set lanterns on the pond.
“On the second day we went to the tombs to fetch ancestors’ spirits. I remember the gifts and offerings. There were many fruits, sweets and crackers. I ate secretly. It was found out and I was scolded.” As she described the days of Obon, he grinned. He imagined her sneaking food from the ancestor offerings the way he used to eat cookies and drink milk left out for Santa Claus.
“The day the festival ended, the sunlight became weaker and the shadows became longer. Summer would soon be over.” She cast her eyes down to the table.
“Don’t say it.” He squeezed her small hand. “Don’t say it.” He’d never told anyone about his dream. It was too weird and delicate to expose to the light, but some nights he dreamed of the albino monkey swinging in the branches above him and Yasuko in the ofuro. In that dream his mother and father sat fully clothed on the edge of the hot springs, smiling at each other. He’d awaken with a blissful, full feeling. When he was with Yasuko, he tried to recapture that dream feeling. It refused to surface.
They walked along the village lanes. They spoke of trivial things. They ate in a noodle shop and visited the carts of vendors touting candy, pet turtles and incense. He bought roasted chestnuts for her. They walked to the center of the village where men beat large drums, and that was when she began circling in on the one thing he didn’t want to hear.
“My father wants me to be American in my education, and for the opportunities. He wants me to be Japanese in my manners and respect for tradition. When I behave American, he scolds me for being brash. When I behave Japanese, he says I will not succeed in American go-go culture.”
He learned that she was eighteen years old and was studying for a political science degree at a West Coast university. He learned that she’d slipped away from her parents and relatives during prayers, and they’d be looking for her now. He learned that forbidden love was the safest love. With her, he couldn’t say or do anything wrong. All was good. He was good.
He asked her to wait right here while he stepped into a shop. When he returned, he gave her a geisha doll with a cute, hand-painted face.
“It is too much,” Yasuko protested. She tucked her hands up inside her kimono sleeves.
“It will make me happy if you take it.”
She bowed her head and held out her arms for the doll. “Please, come with me.” She led him by the hand, ignoring the stares. “We will do something.”
They walked down the narrow twisting lane. Past a cannery. A barbershop. A florist. They came to the lip of a pond where many people stood. Hundreds of illuminated lanterns and their reflections floated on the pond. She lit the candle in her lantern; he did the same.
“This is called the escorting of the spirits, so they do not lose their way. We honor ancestors for the quality of life we the living enjoy.”
“My grandparents died. Do they count as ancestors?”
“Hai.”
They set their lanterns afloat on the pond.
She might have been thinking of how life could be in another time, or she might have been listening to the wind. It was rising somewhere on the island, advancing with the night, ushered in by an eerie green tinge descending on the mountains.
“It is too soon for typhoon season,” she said.
“Or too late.”
They followed a footpath into the mountain.
Gusts, brutal gusts, one after the other, wrestled at their legs, making them walk as if on a listing ship. The gales played sad notes in the utility wires and palms. The wind rang temple bells, buzzed over volcanic rock, clunked bamboo trunks. Flying debris hit their bodies, grit scoured their skin. A sideways rain stung them. For protection, they ran into a niche previous winds and fire had sculpted into the black rock. They crouched beside one another in the nook, and watched the maelstrom gather strength.
He asked her, as the typhoon moaned, why her parents had chaperoned them at the movie, if they didn’t want her to be with him? Her answer impressed the part of him that appreciated the skills required to manipulate adults, and disappointed the part of him that wanted to preserve her in his heart as the ideal lotus flower, pure in thought and deed. Gently, she’d told him that her parents didn’t know that on their way to the cinema, they’d encounter a gaijin who believed he’d been invited into the fold.
Once the Watanabes understood that Ken believed he was their guest, their graciousness wouldn’t permit them to inform him of this mistaken idea, a reaction Yasuko had predicted accurately. The meeting at the teahouse was more transparent. She’d told them she would never mention his name for the remainder of her life, if they agreed to have a farewell tea party. Her father accused her of becoming too American, but had agreed to his daughter’s deal.
She spoke with her mouth against his ear, blocking the roaring wind. “At the American college co-ed dances, the boys are afraid of girls. They only have courage with girls who are bad. The boys go outside to drink and smoke pot. They come back inside to fight with each other. I cannot fit in there. In this country of my ancestors, I walk invisible because Japanese boys are taught not to see girls. I must respect my heritage, but how can I if I am nobody? You were not afraid to see me. You saw me and you did not make your eyes dance away when I saw you. When you look at me, I become alive. I wish to tell you what this feels like, but my words will sound indecent.”
Droplets of water stood on the geisha doll’s face. Its soiled kimono dripped dirty water onto the floor of the niche. The winds wailed.
“Ken, I want the emotions and touch between girlfriend and boyfriend.”
He placed one hand on the doll that was in her lap. His dirt-rimmed fingernails, thick fingers and freckled hand, streaked with welts where the cat had raked him, repelled him. She rested her pale hand upon his. She was of another species altogether, a fine-boned species of delicate, sensitive creatures, with tapered fingers and paper-thin skin.
His father had been right in forbidding him to be with her. Right for the wrong reasons. He felt duty-bound to protect her from himself and his swelling.
The storm blew itself out to the Sea of Japan. The sky was dark when they emerged from the niche and walked toward the village. Rainwater dripped off foliage, tapping on leaves as it found its way to the wet earth. Fallen branches crisscrossed the path. And she sang, her eyes distant, her little arched throat trembling in earnest like a songbird’s.
Walk with your c
hin up
So the tears won’t drop.
Walk with tears in your eyes.
A lonely night,
Remember a lonely autumn night.
Happiness is on top of the clouds.
Happiness is above the sky.
He swiped his sleeve across his eyes.
“It is a sad time,” she said. “Let us be happy together so our memories will be happy. Tell me a happy story.”
Happy stories fled his mind. “I don’t know any.”
“Tell me a story your mother used to tell you.”
Fact was, she didn’t tell stories, unless you counted talking in a brittle tone about officers’ wives’ poor taste in clothes and hairstyles a story. So he told her about Br’er Rabbit begging, Please, please, don’t throw me in the briar patch, which was where he actually wanted to be because his enemies couldn’t go in the thorny bushes.
Yasuko laughed. “A clever rabbit he was. I will try the same method. I’ll tell my father, Please, please, do not let me see that red-haired American again. I do not like him.” She stuck out her tongue and shook her head emphasizing her disgust.
Even her false disgust tore at him. She took his hand and ran her finger along one of the lines in his palm.
“This line is curving and twisted,” she told him.
“Is that bad?”
“It means you have an honest personality.”
He didn’t tell her the gazillion reasons why this wasn’t the case.
Chapter Seventeen
~ A Death ~
Ken picked up a flat stone and winged it across a muddy pond. The stone skipped to the opposite side. By the time morning sounds of birds and creaky well handles started up, Yasuko was his equal in the art of skipping stones. They were both pretty happy about that. They heard a vehicle approaching and, without consulting each other, ducked behind bushes.
The army jeep sped by, ground its gears, and reversed.
“Does your father know you are out this time of the night with a...?” Major Bellamy, in the driver’s seat, made a spitting noise. Kohanski’s flashlight beam stabbed Ken’s eyes.
