The Journey Prize Stories 25

by Various

  “Your dad’s stupid. He shouldn’t keep saying bad things about war. He’s going to get in trouble. That’s what my dad says.”

  “My dad is not stupid.”

  “Yes, he is.” Sakina turns to look at the boy soldiers.

  “Can we play my game now?” Mayuko asks. A few days ago, she invented a game. She and Sakina would collect wildflowers and use them, with the shells and sand, to make ikebana on the beach. Mayuko has been thinking all week about the kinds of flowers she will use, how she will position them between the shells.

  “Your game’s not a real game. Real games have winners and losers.”

  Mayuko blinks away tears. “Race you to the big willow tree!” Sakina says. She leaps up and runs away, her foot crushing a small pink shell. Mayuko picks up the pieces and cradles them in her palm.

  That night, Mayuko dreams of storms. The snapping waves become giant green monsters, thumping onto the beach, swallowing everything in their circumference. Shells, branches, children. Thump. Thump. Thump. Mayuko is awake and the thumping is coming from inside the house. She slides open her bedroom screen and walks down the hallway, stopping at the living-room screen.

  Through the glow of a lamp, two figures are silhouetted against the screen. One is crouched on the floor like a rock. The other bends over the rock like a tree twisted by the wind.

  “You insult the emperor. Why do you speak against the Japanese way?” the tree demands. The voice is unfamiliar.

  The rock answers. The words are indecipherable, but the tone, low and measured, is her father’s.

  The tree raises a branch and strikes the rock. A shrill cry from across the room reveals a group of three figures, one struggling to free itself from the grasp of the others, like a sheep caught in a thicket. Her mother.

  Mayuko’s body trembles, but she knows she must remain still. Though she wants to burst through the screen, wielding a sword, and pierce the tree so that sap runs to the floor, she must stay here. If she does that, the men will leave and everything will be all right.

  “We know you studied at a university in Boston for three years. Are you a spy? Are you spying for the Americans?” Thump.

  The low voice, laced with panic Mayuko has never heard.

  “You will help the war effort. You will manufacture your lenses, and they will all be sold to the navy for radar. No more microscopes, no more cameras. Say that you will do this!”

  “I will do it.” Her father’s voice is like the edge of a stone chip, hard and jagged.

  The tree straightens and waves a branch. The sheep, freed, tumbles across the room to the rock. The screen is yanked open, and two soldiers stomp out the front door. The tree pauses to pull his khaki jacket taut over his waist, the gold buttons jiggling.

  Mayuko shrinks into the shadows, but he turns and sees her. She feels a circle being drawn around her body, feels the force of the wave in his eyes, black as forest pools. He snaps his head forward and stalks out.

  The Wednesday after the camellia petal, the foreign woman takes another pile of laundry out to the machine. Wednesday must be her day off, Mrs. Fujimoto thinks. Her eyes narrow as she peers over the top of her teacup. It seems she will no longer be alone in her contemplations. Yet this fledgling routine suggests a steadiness she would not have attributed to a foreigner.

  Sometime between one and four on Monday, the washing machine was connected. Mrs. Fujimoto cannot tell the exact time, because she was at her ikebana class all afternoon. She has been studying at the innovative Ichiyo School for twenty years. Long ago she passed the advanced course. The next step would be to take instructors’ training. But she cannot abide the thought of blandishing neophytes into crafting inferior arrangements. So she remains in the advanced class, creating original, sometimes wild, flower sculptures, to the amazement of the other students and muted respect of the headmaster.

  Namika cannot understand this interest. “Why fiddle around with a bunch of dead twigs?” she always says. She thinks her grandmother should undertake something zestier, like photography. “Photography! I don’t need to take photos. I prefer my memories,” Mrs. Fujimoto says. But then it’s hardly surprising that Namika does not appreciate the art. She prefers the flashy style of flowers popular with the Hollywood celebrities whose weddings she reads about. Roses, hydrangeas, carnations, with their shameless profusion of large red petals.

  Mrs. Fujimoto’s eyes follow the foreign woman. Yes, she will grant that certain physical similarities exist between this woman and Namika. The fine shoulder-length hair, the curve of the hips in tight-fitting jeans, the giddy way the foreign woman claps her hands when the washing machine finally starts to fill.

  The foreign woman begins to dance. A crazy dance like a woman in a cup ramen commercial. Heels kicking her behind, arms crossing over each other as she punches an imaginary target. Then she stops, makes a fist, and pulls her right arm back and forth, a victory salute.

  Mrs. Fujimoto glances around, wondering if anyone else is witnessing this display. That the foreign woman would dance by herself in a public place where anyone could see, all over a washing machine … Such imprudence. Such wantonness. Such joy.

  Mrs. Fujimoto sips her cold green tea.

  The sun sparks off the newsstand’s metallic sign. The date on the Yomiuri reads Wednesday, June 6, 1951. It is noon and Mayuko, along with two new friends, is strolling the main street of the city in that neighbouring prefecture. All three sport trendy polka-dot dresses with full skirts, but while the friends have opted for slim belts that cinch in their waists, Mayuko has wrapped a wide sash, obi-style, just under her breasts. The three swing handbags, coil hair behind ears, dash across the street to the record store.

  On the empty lot beside the store, two American soldiers slouch against a shrivelled willow tree. Whiffs of smoke drift from the cigarettes between their stubby fingers, and reckless laughs flee their throats. Mayuko’s friends whisper excitedly. She catches the words “Frank Sinatra.” But to Mayuko these men do not resemble Sinatra. One has the spotty yellow skin and bloated belly of a fugu, the poisonous blowfish. The other resembles a crab, with his sunburnt face and gangly limbs.

  Is it because of them that all this has happened, Mayuko wonders. That her father was beaten that night a decade ago? That, weary and dispirited, he recently sold his company to wealthy Mr. Hampton of Rhode Island? That her mother, weakened from post-war diphtheria, no longer has the strength to lift the big pitcher to water her irises?

  A third man joins the others. He is not like anyone Mayuko has ever seen. His skin is pale and luminous as that of a peach, his blond hair soft and wavy. His uniform hugs his slim, slightly muscular frame. From the tips of his long fingers dangles a three-inch wooden amulet. An amulet from a Buddhist temple. He speaks – his voice is low and sonorous as the murmur of the ocean in a seashell.

  Fugu grabs the amulet, hangs it from his nose, and waddles around the tree. Crab cracks up. The third man smiles but his eyes cloud over. He grabs the amulet and cups it in his hand. The others guffaw.

  She feels a poke in the ribs. “Go talk to them, Mayu.” Mayuko shakes her head.

  “Yes,” says the second friend. “Didn’t your father used to teach you English? Talk to them in English. Ask them their names.”

  “Ask them if they have girlfriends,” says the first. The two giggle.

  Mayuko looks down. “That was a long time ago. I don’t remember any English.”

  “Con-itchy-wall!” Fugu shouts. He and Crab beckon the girls. Mayuko’s friends titter, then scamper over. She follows, careful to remain behind them.

  Fugu and Crab make several embarrassing attempts at Japanese, to the tinkly delight of the friends. The third man gazes at the amulet. Then Fugu notices Mayuko. “Geisha!” he exclaims, pointing to her sash. He and Crab look past the other girls to Mayuko, their eyes moving over her body like snakes slithering up and down hills. She looks at the pavement.

  The other girls exchange looks. One fumbles in her handbag, p
ulling out a camera and gesturing to it. Fugu claps and shouts, and the girl shoves the camera into Mayuko’s hands. “Here, you take the picture.”

  Mayuko retreats several paces and when she looks up, a tableau is in place: Crab in the middle, beside the tree, one drooping branch looking as if it is sprouting from his ear. Fugu slouching on the right. The girls in front, faces stupid with shy giddiness. The third man to the left, a couple of paces away, his eyes like blue topaz. Mayuko holds the camera to her face. His gaze intensifies through the prism of the lens. She names him Romeo. Romeo from Massachusetts.

  Fugu shouts. Her friends exhort her to hurry up. She positions her finger on the button. At the last second, she shifts the camera so that Romeo is the focal point, cutting off her friends’ legs and slicing Fugu’s body in half. Click.

  Her friends are upon her, their boldness evaporated, and she is pulled toward the record store. Nails claw into her tingly skin, bubbly voices hammer at the shell encasing her ears.

  Two weeks later, the friend with the camera moves away. Mayuko never sees the picture.

  The last week in June, the husband is in Switzerland on business, so Mrs. Fujimoto invites Mrs. Okada and Mrs. Inoue over to drink tea, eat dinner, and watch the foreign woman. It will be a pleasure to linger over dinner, to not bother preparing a plate for the husband when he stumbles in from his after-work socializing.

  She chooses her jewellery carefully, selecting the platinum chain with the emerald crane pendant. She will pair the pendant with her green suit. The jacket’s scoop neck will allow the pendant to rest against her bare skin. As a young woman, she learned about the seven ages of women’s skin from a magazine: silk, satin, cotton, linen, wool, crepe, and leather. While most of her contemporaries have reached the crepe stage, she remains at the linen.

  Mrs. Okada and Mrs. Inoue arrive precisely at three. After so many years of friendship, they know better than to be early. They are not what their hostess would call cultured women, but they are docile and amiable, and at her age Mrs. Fujimoto cannot be bothered cultivating new friends. It takes too long to become accustomed to the rhythm of another’s existence, the unchanging complaints, the irritating habits.

  She shows the two women her latest arrangement, birds of paradise bent to resemble a bird taking flight, placed on a triangular plate. As usual, they ooh softly but ask no questions about the inspiration or technique. Mrs. Fujimoto presses her lips together and offers tea.

  On the balcony, Mrs. Okada talks about her new English school; she changes them faster than most people change chopsticks. Today she is raving about the handsome Londoner who teaches her, his Pierce Brosnan looks and alluring accent. But this is nothing new. She poured out dithyrambs about a vegan with celiac disease who taught spelling by having the students form their bodies into letters.

  Mrs. Fujimoto does not study English. As a child, she listened ravenously to the fairy tales her father read her. “Beauty and the Beast,” “Rapunzel,” “Cinderella.” But when the war came, her father returned late at night, thin, haggard, with no time for stories, no motivation to speak the enemy language. As a teenager, she learned a little English, through grammar workbooks at school and at the movies with friends, giggling over the dulcet tones of the latest Hollywood heartthrob.

  As an adult, forty years ago, she returned home after her father’s death from a heart attack, to help her mother pack up the house. Her mother was preparing to move in with a widowed sister in Kyushu. The bookshelves contained hundreds of books, many of them English. “Take them,” her mother urged. “He wanted you to have them.” But when Mayuko looked at the nicked leather, she saw only the khaki of the soldier’s jacket. She donated the books to a local library and never looked back.

  Today, Mrs. Okada and Mrs. Inoue are fascinated by the foreign woman. She turns on the tap and then, as if responding to a sudden sound, dashes into the apartment. The telephone, perhaps. As the three women watch, the tap continues to run until streams cascade down the sides of the machine. The foreign woman runs out, shuts the tap, and stomps in a puddle of water. Mrs. Okada and Mrs. Inoue tsk. Mrs. Fujimoto suppresses a sigh. It seems the foreign woman is not so steady after all.

  Mrs. Fujimoto recounts the time the husband did the laundry, when she was pregnant with their first. He hung the clothes outside overnight – in January. The result was predictable. His face was almost as frozen as the tie he cradled. He had an important meeting that morning. Following her suggestion, he held the tie over the kettle on the gas burner she was heating for the breakfast tea. The ice melted and the steam straightened the wrinkles. “He obtained a promotion that day,” Mrs. Fujimoto says with a conclusive smile.

  The two women nod perfunctorily, then look across the street. “Why leave her with one of those awful old things? Surely they could have found an automatic one,” says Mrs. Okada.

  Mrs. Fujimoto coughs. She has several coughs, which vary in volume from a leaf rustling to a branch snapping in two. This one is a twig being stepped on, cracking a little.

  Mrs. Okada’s eyes dip down briefly. “Has anyone been to the movies lately?”

  “Yes, I saw that new American film about Pearl Harbour. The lead actor, the one who plays the American general, is so handsome,” says Mrs. Inoue.

  Mrs. Fujimoto bristles. “Why do people continue to be interested in that? The war ended a long time ago.”

  The others study the painted twigs on their teacups. Mrs. Fujimoto inhales sharply. Why does she expect empathy from these women? What do they know about birds of paradise, nicked leather, frozen ties? She wants to slap them.

  “More tea?” she asks.

  ––

  “It is a good match for you, Mayu-chan. Just think about it.” Her father’s voice is worn, like a stone eroded by centuries of pounding surf. Her mother’s is that of someone who has tripped over the stone. “Put a little effort into your hair, Mayuko. Don’t you know how many young men were killed in the war and the tuberculosis epidemic? You might not get another opportunity like this.” These voices overlay Nat King Cole’s sensuous baritone, which emanates from the radio in the café opened last month.

  On this Wednesday night, Mayuko waits at the table as the young man with the earnest grin and fuzzy eyebrows stands at the counter ordering coffee. Across the street is the record store. It has been two years since the photo, and Romeo has surely departed with the rest of the soldiers. She imagines his long fingers buttoning his olive shirt, combing through the pale waves of his hair, the dark fields of hers, unbuttoning her blouse …

  A splat of coffee scalds her wrist. She swallows her irritation and smiles at the young man, who apologizes and sets the cups down on the table. That evening he came to the house with zinnias (a symbol of loyalty, her mother indiscreetly noted), a business degree fresh from the local university, and a junior position in a new electronics firm. Never mind that the zinnias are orange, her least favourite colour, or that spittle foams at the corners of his mouth when he talks about his favourite baseball team. He is a nice boy with prospects. She should be grateful.

  Mayuko and the young man sip their coffee, exchange pleasantries, and fall silent. His hands begin to shake, coffee staining the white tablecloth, his white shirt cuffs. His voice trips over itself, a series of compliments tumbling out, the most memorable of which is “You have very beautiful eyelashes.” Mayuko could smile or nod, but she does not. As he stutters, she looks at the willow tree, which has shrivelled further. She wonders how much more it can shrivel before it dies.

  She thinks of blond men from Massachusetts, a place where people surely have never needed to subsist on rationed gruel. A place of creature comforts beyond even nylons and lipstick. She sees a clapboard cottage, inhales the aroma of the purple irises outside the doorstep, hears the rumble of his laugh as he steps toward her.

  She looks across the table and sees a young man with fuzzy eyebrows and prospects, smells his blend of sweat and cologne. If she reaches her hand out only inches, she will fe
el his moist palm. The seconds pass with an almost audible click.

  “Yes. I will marry you,” she says.

  It is late July. A film of grey haze enshrouds the surrounding buildings. The air is broken only by the buzz of cicadas. The days melt into one another, and Mrs. Fujimoto imagines the black numbers and lines on the living-room calendar dissolving into the white.

  Mrs. Okada and Mrs. Inoue left to visit out-of-town daughters and will not return until September. Mrs. Fujimoto’s children, always busy with their own lives, are vacationing in Okinawa and Australia. The husband stays out later than usual after work. By the time he returns, Mrs. Fujimoto has withdrawn to her room, so they see little of one another. He is long past retirement age, but as a vice-president, he is indispensable to his company; this is what they tell each other. Even the foreign woman spends little time on her balcony. She has mastered the washing machine and emerges only briefly to drain the machine or change loads.

  Mrs. Fujimoto knows that, like other housewives, she should be preparing for the festival of Obon, which celebrates the return of the ancestral ghosts. But this year she is irritated by the niggling details of finding the best incense for the family altar, or airing out extra futons in preparation for her children and grandchildren’s visit.

  She thinks of Namika. Namika wants her grandmother to climb Mt. Fuji, to become a tourist astronaut, to do something huge that will disrupt her life, like a careless footprint on raked sand. Yet Namika is the only grandchild who notices her after the new year’s money has been doled out. The others are all too busy with soccer, hip hop lessons, manga. To Mrs. Fujimoto, Namika is a red poppy: sweet, bright, a little wild. She will attend university, Waseda hopefully.

  A horn sounds. On the street, a young Japanese man leans out the window of a white Honda. A Japanese woman is at the wheel, trying to manoeuvre the car into a parking spot. The foreign woman appears on the balcony, shouts to the couple, and disappears into the apartment. Two minutes later, she reappears in front of the building and hops into the back seat. The car speeds off.