East is East

by Tom Coraghessan Boyle

  Though he was conscientious, well mannered and inoffensive, and so silent and circumspect as to be nearly invisible among his shipmates, Hiro found himself confined to this hateful steel room, his diet limited to two balls of white rice and one tin cup of water daily, because of an uncharacteristic act of defiance: he had disobeyed the direct order of an officer. The officer was Chief Mate Wakabayashi, a survivor of the Battle of Rarotonga who carried shrapnel in his lower back, legs, arms, feet and at the base of his skull, and whose temper consequently tended to be short. He had issued a direct order to Hiro to cease and desist constricting the windpipe of First Cook Hideo Chiba, who at the time lay thrashing on the galley floor beneath Hiro’s full and outraged weight. And that was a good deal of weight: at five foot ten, Hiro, who was inordinately fond of eating, weighed close to two hundred pounds. Chiba, who was inordinately fond of drinking, weighed less than a wet mop.

  The moment was chaotic. Second Cook Moronobu Unagi, who had once parboiled the face of an OS in a dispute over a bottle of Suntory, was screeching like a parrot: “He’s killing him! Murder, murder, murder!”; the Chief Engineer, an intense silent man in his seventies, with bad feet and ill-fitting dentures, tugged ineffectively at Hiro’s shoulders; and half a dozen deckhands stood around jeering. Chief Mate Wakabayashi, in his pristine white uniform, scurried up to where the combatants lay entangled on the galley floor, delivered his stentorian order, and was immediately flung into a pot of clear broth as the ship chose that moment to plunge into a trough. Soup—it was a twenty-gallon pot—cascaded onto the floor, searing Hiro’s back and permeating Chiba, who already stank enough for three men, with the essence of reduced fish. Through it all, Hiro held his grip.

  And what had driven so mild a man to so desperate a pass?

  The immediate cause was a pan of hard-cooked eggs. Hiro, who’d signed on the Tokachi-maru as Third Cook, beneath the drunken and foul-smelling Chiba and the drunken, leering and unctuous Unagi, was preparing a dish of nishiki tamago as an appetizer for the evening meal. The task consisted of shelling a hundred hard-boiled eggs, carefully separating the yolks from the whites, very finely chopping and seasoning each, and finally reuniting them—tenderly—in half-inch layers in a succession of stainless-steel pans. Hiro had learned the recipe from his grandmother—and he knew some thirty others by heart—and yet this was the first time in the six weeks since the ship had left Yokohama that he’d been allowed to prepare the dish himself. More usually, he acted as sous chef, errand boy and galley slave, scrubbing pans, polishing the gas ranges, cleaning mountains of defrosted squid, cuttlefish and bonito, chopping seaweed and peeling grapes till his fingers went numb. On this particular afternoon, however, Chiba and Unagi were indisposed. They had been drinking sake since breakfast in celebration of O-bon, the Buddhist festival of ancestral spirits, and Hiro had been left to himself while they strove to commune with the shades of the departed. He worked hard. Worked with pride and concentration. Eight trays lay before him, exquisitely prepared. As a finishing touch, he sprinkled the dishes with black sesame seed, just as his grandmother had taught him.

  It was a mistake. Because at that moment, just as he held the shaker inverted over the last tray, Chiba and Unagi staggered into the galley. “Idiot!” Chiba screeched, slapping the shaker from his hand. The shaker clattered off the gas range. Hiro averted his face and hung his head. Through his sandals, deep in the soles of his feet, he could feel the ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum of the screws churning through the sour green waves beneath them. “Never,” Chiba seethed, his sunken chest and fleshless arms trembling, “never use black sesame on nishiki tamago.” He turned to Unagi. “Did you ever hear of such a thing?”

  Unagi’s eyes were slits. He rubbed his hands together as if in anticipation of some rare treat, and he bowed his head with a quick snap. “Never,” he breathed, waiting, waiting, “except maybe among foreigners. Among gaijin.”

  Now Hiro looked up. The underlying cause of his explosion, the cause of all his torment in life, was about to surface.

  Chiba leaned into him, his monkey face twisted with hatred, flecks of spittle on his upper lip. “Gaijin” he spat. “Long-nose. Ketō. Bata-kusai.” And then he unfolded his clenched fist, studied the palm of his hand for an instant, and without warning struck a savage blow to the bridge of Hiro’s nose. Then he turned to the pans of nishiki tamago. Raging, in a mad flurry of skinny wrists and snapping elbows, he overturned them on the floor, one after another. “Offal!” he shouted. “Dog shit! Fit for pigs!” Through it all, Unagi regarded Hiro through half-closed eyes, grinning.

  This is the point at which Hiro lost control. Or rather, he didn’t lose control exactly, but attacked his tormentor in what Mishima would call “an explosion of pure action.” The nishiki tamago was on the floor, the twenty-gallon kettle rattling its lid, Unagi grinning and Chiba spouting invective, the moment suspended as the tintinnabulation of the last pan hung in the air, and then the First Cook was swimming in chopped egg and Hiro’s fingers were locked on his throat. Chiba gasped, the turkey flesh of his neck turning red under Hiro’s white, white fingers. Unagi screamed: “Murder! Murder! Murder!” And all the while Hiro hung on, ignoring the jeers, the scalding soup, Chiba’s hot foul breath and the face that swelled beneath him like a blood blister, oblivious to Wakabayashi and the Chief Engineer, fighting like a rabid dog against the pull of the eight men it took to separate him from his tormentor. He was beyond caring, beyond pain, the words of Jōchō pounding in his head: One cannot accomplish feats of greatness in a normal frame of mind. One must turn fanatic and develop a mania for dying.

  But he didn’t die. He wound up instead in the makeshift brig, staring at the walls and breathing Bunker C fumes, awaiting the Port of Savannah and the Japan Air flight that would take him home in disgrace.

  Gaijin. Long-nose. Butter-stinker. These were the epithets he’d endured all his life, crying to his grandmother on the playground, harassed in elementary school and transformed into a punching bag in junior high, singled out and bullied till he was driven from the merchant marine high school his grandmother had chosen for him. Foreigner, that’s what they called him. For while his mother was a Japanese—a firm-legged beauty with round eyes and a fetching buck-toothed smile—his father was not.

  No. His father was an American. A hippie. A young man in a cracked and rubbed-soft photo, hair to his shoulders, the beard of a monk, eyes like a cat’s. Hiro didn’t even know his name. Obāsan, he pestered his grandmother, what was he like, what was his name, how tall was he? “Doggu,” she said, but that wasn’t his real name, it was a nickname—Doggo—after a character in an American comic book. “Tall,” she said sometimes, “with little colored glasses and a long nose. Hairy and dirty.” Other times she said he was short, skinny, fat, broad-shouldered, or that his hair was white and he walked with a cane, or that he wore denims and an earring and was so dirty and hairy (he was always dirty and hairy, no matter the version) that he could have grown turnips behind his ears. Hiro didn’t know what to believe—his father was like a chimera out of a children’s tale, larger than life in the morning, smaller than a thimble in the evening. He might have asked his mother, but his mother was dead.

  This much he knew: the American had come to Kyoto in his hippie rags, with his granny glasses and his rings, to devote himself to Zen and find someone to teach him to play the koto. Like all Americans, he was lazy, stoned and undisciplined, and he soon lost interest in the Zen regimen of prayer and contemplation, but still he haunted the streets of Kyoto, vaguely hoping to learn the rudiments of the koto and bring it back to America with him, as the Beatles had brought the sitar from India. He was in a band, of course—or at least he had been—and it was the oddness of the instrument that appealed to him. Five feet long, with thirteen strings and movable bridges, it was like nothing he’d ever heard, humming and strange, a zither the size of an alligator. He would electrify it, naturally, and lay it flat on a table like a pedal steel guitar and then he would rotate his sho
ulders and flail his unshorn head, plucking frenziedly at the strings and astonishing the audiences back home. But it was the devil to play, and he needed a teacher. And a job. He was out of work, out of money, and-his student visa was about to expire.

  That was where Sakurako Tanaka came in.

  Hiro’s mother was bright, very bright, a high school graduate whose test scores were among the best in her class—a girl for whom even the august Tokyo University was not an impossibility—charming, pretty, ebullient and, at nineteen, a failure. She didn’t want Todai or Kyoto University or any of them. She didn’t want a career with Suzuki or Kubota or Mitsubishi and she most emphatically didn’t want to bury herself in the kitchen or the nursery. What she wanted, desperately, with an ache that ate at her like the gnawings of hunger, like the insomnia that hollowed out her nights and drained her mornings, was to play American rock and roll. Onstage. With her own band. “I want to play Buffalo Springfield, Doors, Grateful Dead and Iron Butterfly,” she told her mother. “I want to play Janis Joplin and Grace Slick.” Her mother, a housewife in a nation of housewives, was firmly opposed to it. The music was foreign, devil’s music, grating, sensual and impure, and the proper place for a young woman was in the home with her husband and children. Sakurako’s father, a salaryman who’d worked all his life for Kubota Tractor, who dined, golfed and vacationed with his colleagues and had a plot reserved in the company cemetery, exploded at the mere mention of rock and roll.

  The upshot was that Sakurako left home. She took her bleached jeans and her guitar and went to Tokyo, where she made the rounds of the clubs in the Shibuya, Roppongi and Shinjuku districts. It was 1969. Female guitarists in Japan were as rare as loquats in Siberia. Within a month she was back in Kyoto, working as a bar hostess. When Doggo stepped through the door, yenless, with his hair and beads and jeans, with his boots and tie-dyed shirt, his fingertips callused from the friction of the cold steel strings of his guitar, she was lost.

  He allowed her to feed him and buy him drinks, and he told her about L.A. and San Francisco, about the Sunset Strip and the Haight and Jim Morrison. She found him a sensei who taught shamisen and koto to the geisha of Pontochō, the ancient district of Kyoto, and in his gratitude he moved in with her. The apartment was small. They slept on a mat and smoked hippie drugs and made love while listening to scratchy records of hippie bands. Hiro had no illusions about it. His mother was a bar hostess—she knew a hundred men, coquetry was her business—and the picture of her life played like a grim documentary in his head. She became pregnant, the room shrank, rice suddenly tasted odd and the odor of cooking saturated the walls, and then one day Doggo was gone, leaving behind the cracked photo and a sound of plucked strings that chimed through the interstices of her solitude. Six months later, Hiro was born. Six months after that, his mother was dead.

  And so, Hiro was a half-breed, a happa, a high-nose and butter-stinker—and an orphan to boot—forever a foreigner in his own society. But if the Japanese were a pure race, intolerant of miscegenation to the point of fanaticism, the Americans, he knew, were a polyglot tribe, mutts and mulattoes and worse—or better, depending on your point of view. In America you could be one part Negro, two parts Serbo-Croatian and three parts Eskimo and walk down the street with your head held high. If his own society was closed, the American was wide open—he knew it, he’d seen the films, read the books, listened to the LPs—and anyone could do anything he pleased there. America was dangerous, yes. Seething with crime and degeneracy and individualism. But they’d driven him out of school in Japan—he was lower than the Burakumin, who collected the garbage; lower than the Koreans, who’d been brought over as slaves during the war.

  And so, Hiro went to sea on the Tokachi-maru, the most decrepit, rust-eaten hulk to fly the Japanese flag, went because the ship was bound for the U.S.A. and he could go ashore and see the place for himself, see the cowboys and hookers and wild Indians, maybe even discover his father in some gleaming, spacious ranch house and sit down to cheeseburgers with him. And so, Hiro became Third Cook rather than the officer he might have been had they let him finish merchant marine high school, suffering the abuse of Chiba and Unagi and all the rest—even here, even at sea he wasn’t free of it—and so, he consulted Mishima and Jōchō and struck down his enemies and wound up in the brig, humiliated, living with the groans and pleas of his attenuated gut and two balls of rice a day.

  In his extremity, he thought of food, day and night, dwelled on it, dreamed of it, apotheosized it. On the day of his escape, he dreamed of breakfast: miso soup with eggplant and bean curd, steamed white radishes, raw onions, mustard with rice. And lunch—not the western-style slop Chiba concocted to show off the fact that he’d once shipped on a freighter out of Tacoma, Washington—but the rice and egg dish—tamago meishi—his grandmother would make him when he came in from school, or the sweet bean and barley cakes she’d buy him at the confectioner’s or the delicate sōmen noodles she stirred in great swirling mounds in her iron kettle. He was dreaming of those noodles, staring morosely at the mops lining the walls, when he heard the heavy footfall of his warder on the companionway steps.

  They were approaching the Port of Savannah and Hiro knew he’d have to make his move soon. He’d read deeply in The Way of the Samurai for days, getting Mishima’s and Jōchō’s words by heart, and now he was ready. The book—in its plastic womb and with the odd little green bills and his father’s picture nestled safely between its leaves—clung to him with tentacles of black electrician’s tape, the tape his friend Ajioka-san had slipped him in the night. In his hands he held a stout oaken mop, its head soaked heavy with the water they’d given him for washing.

  The footsteps, the weary, dragging, footsore steps of Noboru Kuroda, the slug who mopped up the officers’ quarters and served them at table, halted outside the door. Hiro stood back, envisioning the slumped shoulders and concave chest, the hopeless hands and perpetually bewildered expression of old “Just-a-Minute” Kuroda, as they called him behind his back, and he waited breathlessly as the key turned in the lock. In a sort of fever he watched as the handle rotated and the door pulled back, and then he charged, the mop thrust before him like a lance. It was over in an instant. Kuroda’s tired old jowls seized with surprise, the wet mop speared him in the solar plexus and he went down on the worn linoleum, gasping and floundering like a yellowfin jerked from the somnolent depths. Hiro was briefly sorry for the loss of the rice balls, which were now mashed into Kuroda’s shirt, but this was no time for regrets. He stepped nimbly over the wheezing old man and darted up the companionway, his feet quick, liberty pounding in his veins.

  Below him, on the second deck, the crew was at lunch, puzzling over their plates and struggling to pluck the odd bit of sardine out of the mélange of hash, eggs and potatoes Chiba had inflicted on them. Above him was the superstructure, and its ascending decks: the ship’s office and main electrical and gyroscope rooms on the fourth deck; the radio room on the fifth; the captain’s cabin, where even now Captain Nishizawa lay in a sake-induced stupor, on the sixth; and, finally, the bridge. From the bridge, high-flown and airy, a pair of observation decks protruded, hanging out over the water on either side of the ship like extended wings. They were catwalks, actually, supported from beneath by steel struts, and from them you could see ten miles on a clear day. It was for these that Hiro was heading.

  He rattled up the steps past the ship’s office and on up past the radio room and the captain’s cabin, moving quickly but with resolution. He wasn’t fleeing blindly, not at all: he had a plan, as Mishima, in his gloss on Jōchō, had advised. One may choose a course of action, Mishima said, but one may not always choose the time. The moment of decision looms in the distance and then overtakes you. Then is to live not to prepare for that moment of decision? It was. And he was prepared.

  On up the steps he raced, past the chart room where Chief Mate Wakabayashi glared savagely at him and lurched out the door in pursuit, past the helm where Able Bodied Seaman Kuma stood fixed
at the wheel, and out onto the port wingdeck, where OS Dorai gaped at his advancing form as if he’d never before seen a man moving upright on his own two legs. And then, with Wakabayashi raging behind him and Dorai immobile before him, Hiro paused to draw his penknife. Thoughts of all those American movies with their tattooed gangs and the feints and thrusts of their knife fights must have shot through Dorai’s head, and he stepped back a pace or two, but the knife wasn’t a weapon at all. It was a tool. In two quick strokes Hiro slashed the cord binding the white life ring to the rail, and while Wakabayashi thundered along the deck and Dorai cringed, Hiro became airborne.

  It was a sixty-eight-foot drop from the bridge to the water, and from that height it seemed a hundred and sixty-eight. Hiro never hesitated. He fell into the empyrean like a skydiver running before the chute, like an eagle plunging from its aerie, but there was nothing to sustain him in that indifferent element, and the sea rushed up at him like a bed of concrete. He hit feet first, letting the life ring fly, and still the force of the concussion nearly ripped Jōchō from his body. By the time he bobbed to the surface, his lungs heaving for the sweet, sweet air, the Tokachi-maru had passed him by, sliding across the horizon like a liquid mountain.