East is East

by Tom Coraghessan Boyle

Perhaps she had meant to help him after all. She said she was going to get him clothes. He couldn’t very well expect her to have a suit of men’s clothes in her cabin, could he? She didn’t live there, he knew that much. She came in the morning and left in the evening. He supposed she was a secretary of some sort and that the cabin was her office—and if that was the case, well then perhaps she had gone to get him clothes … and food, more food, the meat paste sandwiches and hard vegetables and fruit he’d discovered in the lunch pail, the little cheeses wrapped in foil and a wedge of frosted cake. His hara announced itself then and he rose itching from the muck, a lingering sour troubled taste in his mouth, and struggled back in the direction from which he’d come.

  It wasn’t easy. The shadows deepened; the trees stood in ranks, linked arm to arm, as alike as blades of grass; things swift and unseen whipped through the scrub at his feet. Twice he toppled headlong into the bushes, the dirty gauze of cobweb and spider silk caught in his mouth and nostrils, mosquitoes harassing him in all their legions. He’d almost given up hope when the tangle of trees released him to the brief remission of the yard.

  He froze. It was full dark now, the night clear and moonless. Not twenty feet away stood the cabin, an absence of definition, a shadow that drew in all the shadows around it. Nothing moved. He listened to the chirr of crickets, the hum of mosquitoes, the violent thump and wheeze of his own internal machinery as it went about the business of keeping him alive. What if they were waiting in there for him? What if they were watching him even now, their dogs at heel, guns drawn, fingers twitching over their searchlights?

  Step by tottering step, he approached the mass of shadow that was the cabin. Going to school, living with his obāsan, swabbing the galley of the Tokachi-maru, he’d almost forgotten his own physicality, and here he was, playing another children’s game: red light, green light. He took a step and then froze. Two steps. And then another. When he was close, when he could distinguish the horizontal bar of the porch railing from the clot of shadows behind it, he felt a surge of joy. The clothes: there they were! He reached out to the material, the white T-shirt palely glowing. She’d been true to him after all—she was his ally, his friend, his comfort and support, and she did play by the rules, she did, though he must have been as strange to her as she was to him. In that moment, he loved her.

  In the next, he was crestfallen. She’d brought him antiseptic and bandages, water and soap and clothing that smelled of scented detergent and the tumble-dryer—but she’d forgotten the most important thing, the thing that made his gut seize and cry out in peristaltic anguish: she’d forgotten food. The apples, dates and crackers, the box lunch, they were nothing, a distant memory, and a great howling inconquerable hunger took hold of him like rage. The bitch, the stupid bitch, she’d forgotten to bring him food!

  All right. But he had the clothes, the soap, he had clear clean potable water. Or at least he assumed it was clear, clean and potable—he could barely make out the basin in the black of the night. He bent his face tentatively to the basin and drank, and to his joy he found the water sweet and fresh, with no taint of the swamp—had water ever tasted so good? Then he stripped off his rags, fumbled for the washcloth and soap and began a long slow luxurious lathering which he interrupted only long enough to stave off the mosquitoes.

  When he’d finished, he stood and upended the basin over his head and then filled it again—at least she’d thought to leave the water jug on the porch, he muttered to himself, his gratitude drowned in outrage: no food—Band-Aid strips, but no food! He wet his hair, soaped and rinsed it and wet it again. Then he sat on the front steps, still naked, and cut the burrs and thistles and twigs out of it with his penknife. He didn’t have much of a beard—a few sparse hairs curling from his chin and darkening his upper lip—and these he tried to cut too, but with less success. Finally, he reached for the shorts and slipped into them with all the satisfaction of a half-grown boy slipping into his yukata after a long hot soak.

  He carried the T-shirt and the tennis shoes, Jōchō and his penknife into the dark cabin with him. For a moment he stood there in the darkness, smelling her, a sweetness of the flesh and a hint of western perfume that lingered like spice on the air. The cabin was deserted. He remembered the hot plate and the tin of crackers. She must have something here, he thought, anything. And then he took a risk: he fumbled round the place, lost in utter blackness, till he found her desk lamp and switched it on.

  The room sprang to life, a dazzle of color and dimension—a room, habitable space, four walls and a roof. He was inside. He’d spent his whole life inside, and now he was inside again. The windows glared at him, opaque with light, and he knew he was visible to anyone standing out there in the night… but he didn’t care. Not now. Not anymore. All he cared about now was food. And where was it? Where did she keep it? He scanned the room—the rows of books, the typewriter with its curling page, the fireplace, the chairs and loveseat—finally settling on the flimsy little table that held the hot plate. There were coffee things there: a mug, a spoon, a ceramic container with packets of Sweet’n Low and non-dairy creamer, a boldly labeled jar of decaf. And that was it. Nothing else. Nothing to eat.

  For the next half hour he sat there in a pool of golden light, treating his wounds and sipping decaffeinated coffee—one cup after another. There wasn’t much nutrition in it, he knew—some soya protein in the creamer, maybe—but he loaded his cup with the artificial sweetener and the packets of dry yellowish powder and told himself he was having a rich and satisfying meal. He dabbed gingerly at his torn flesh, examined his poor battered feet like a pensioner in his garret. He squeezed the pus and flecks of dirt from the infected cuts and abrasions that striped him from head to toe, treated them with stinging iodine and soothing peroxide, and applied the Band-Aids one atop the other till his legs and arms and chest were a pale wheeling collage of plastic strips. He took his time, and his heart beat like a clock, strong and steady. To be here, to be inside, in this space separated from the hard ground and naked sky, was a quiet miracle. That it was her space, that she was here during the gathering hours of the day, made it all the sweeter. He felt, at long last, that he’d been rescued.

  When he was done—when he’d used all the Band-Aids, drunk all the creamer and emptied all the packets of Sweet’n Low—he flicked off the lamp and stretched out on the wicker loveseat. He would spend the night—this one, at least—under a roof, instead of scrabbling around in the mud like an animal. God, how he hated nature. Hated the festering stink and the wet and the gnats in his eyes and ears and nostrils. The wicker was hard beneath him, but it didn’t matter. He closed his eyes and settled himself, the obscene drama of the night, with all its comings and goings, its little deaths and devourings, its spiders and snakes and chiggers, out there where it belonged.

  The problem was, he couldn’t sleep. He was exhausted, worn-out, as weary and heartsick as any human being on the planet, and he couldn’t sleep. He kept seeing her, the woman, the Amerikajin, rehearsing her face and her body over and over again: the moment she turned to him, the rustled silk of her voice. And then he was thinking of his obāsan and how when he was small and couldn’t sleep she would read to him in the glowing little circle of the tensor lamp beside his bed. She hadn’t liked Mishima, hadn’t liked it when he gave up baseball for Jōchō and his Hagakure. And then he remembered the nights he couldn’t sleep because of the clenching in his gut over the ijime—the bullying—they put him through in high school, and how Jōchō had been his hope and solace.

  Hiro was seventeen when he discovered Hagakure—or rather, Yukio Mishima’s appreciation of it, The Way of the Samurai. He was a boy in school, a bēsubōru player—there, on the field, he was the equal of anyone—and he’d never heard the name of Jōchō or of Mishima either. He played ball with savage devotion, the harsh unpronounceable names of the gaijin stars like an incantation on his lips: Jim Paciorek, Matt Keough, Ty Van Burkelo. They were his inspiration, his hope. You could be a mongrel, a half-bree
d, you could be anything, and all that mattered was that you got a hit when you stepped up to the plate. That was democracy. That was fea purē. That was revenge. Fujima, Morita, Kawakami, the very insects who’d blackened his eyes and broken his nose, the ones who hissed bata-kusai at his back as he made his way down the corridor, these were the ones he silenced with his bat. They squinted at him from the pitcher’s mound, from shortstop and centerfield, chanting their obscenities and waving their mitts to distract him, till his bat met the ball and their legs fell out from under them. Bēsubōru, that was his life.

  And then one day, walking home from school and attracting the usual stares on the street—everyone knew at a glance that he wasn’t Japanese, that he was something else, something alien, and their eyes flew to him and then dropped away as if he were dead, inanimate, a post, a tree, a smear on the sidewalk—he found himself gawking at a poster in a bookstore window. The poster—it was a blown-up photo, in black and white—showed a nearly naked man in the throes of death. He’d been lashed to a tree, his hands bound over his head, and three stark black arrows protruded from his flesh. One penetrated his lower abdomen, just above the folds of his crude breechcloth, another radiated from his side, while the third was thrust nearly to the hilt in the dark clot of hair beneath his arm. His eyes were half open, staring off toward the heavens in glazed rapture, and his mouth was a fierce dark slash of agony and release. He had the musculature of a hero.

  Too shy to go in, Hiro only gaped at the window that first day, fascinated, wondering if the photo was real—there was blood, after all, perfect black streaks of blood dribbling from the wounds like grisly brushstrokes. But then, maybe they were too perfect, maybe the whole thing had been staged—a still from a movie or a play—maybe they were brushstrokes. And where would anyone come by such a picture if it was real? People weren’t tortured to death these days, were they? And with arrows? He wondered if the man might not be an explorer, captured and executed by some big-lipped tribe in New Guinea or South America. If he was, and there was a book about it, Hiro wanted it.

  The next day, he steeled himself and went into the shop. It was a cramped and dark place, row upon row of books on metal shelves affixed to the walls, a smell of newsprint and mold and a fruity false air freshener. Fifteen or twenty customers browsed through the stacks of foreign newspapers or waddled up and down the aisles, arms laden with books. Aside from the rustle of lovingly turned pages, the place was as quiet as a shrine. Hiro approached the desk, where a big-shouldered man in smoked glasses with western-style frames sat behind a cash register. Hiro cleared his throat. The man, who’d been staring out the window at nothing, gave him an indifferent glance.

  “The poster in the window, sir,” Hiro said, so softly he could barely hear himself, “is that a book? I mean, is there a book about it?”

  The man looked at him a moment, as if deciding something. Finally, in a weary voice, he said: “That’s Mishima.”

  It was luck, it was fate, it was magic. Hiro stood bewildered before the rack the shop owner pointed him to—twenty, twenty-five, thirty Mishima titles in duplicate and triplicate and more taking a good slice out of the wall. It was as if his hand was guided: the first book he chose, the very first, was The Way of the Samurai. He slipped it off the shelf, pleased by its glossy cover and the drawing of dueling swordsmen that seemed to dance across it. He never even glanced inside: the cover was enough. That and the poster. He laid down his money for the laconic shopkeeper and ducked out the door with his treasure, one eye on the cruel photo of the martyred author.

  Like most Japanese boys, Hiro knew the mythos of the samurai as thoroughly as his American counterpart knew that of the gun-slinger, the dance-hall girl and the cattle rustler. The wandering samurai, like the lone man on the horse, was a mainstay of network TV, the movie theater, cheap adventure novels and lurid comics, not to mention classics like The Forty-Seven Ronin that were on every school reading list. But after a period when he was eight or nine and ran around all day with a wooden sword and a hachimaki looped round his head, he’d outgrown his fascination with the whole business of topknots and swords: samurai, he could take them or leave them. Still, when he opened Mishima’s book, it brought him back. He didn’t know then of Mishima’s right-wing politics, of his homosexuality and grandstanding, or even of his ritual suicide—all he knew was that he’d entered another world.

  The book puzzled him at first. It wasn’t a story. There were no swordfights, no hair-raising tales of samurai derring-do and acts of redemptive heroism. No. It was a study, a commentary actually, by this man, this Mishima with the arrows in his groin, on Jōchō Yamamoto’s ancient samurai code of ethics, Hagakure. Hiro didn’t know what to make of it. I discovered that the Way of the Samurai is death, he read. And: Human beings in this life are like marionettes … free will is an illusion. He read that it was acceptable for a samurai to apply rouge if he woke up with a hangover and that wetting the earlobes with spittle would control nervousness in any situation. It all felt faintly ridiculous.

  But he stuck with it, though it was like a textbook, a manual, like something he might read in a science or navigation class. He kept seeing the picture of the martyred author—only later did he realize it was a pose, Mishima’s masochistic homage to an Italian painting of a martyred saint—and he plowed through the book as if it were written in code, as if it were his personal initiation into the arcane rites and ancient secrets that would make their master the equal of anyone. It was a game, a puzzle, a conundrum. Hagakure—Hidden Among the Leaves—even its title was mysterious. In the following weeks he went back to the shop several times—the poster was gone, replaced by a life-size cutout of an old man with the face of a bird and a shock of white hair—to sample Mishima’s other books. They were novels, for the most part, and he enjoyed them, but none of them had the tug of the first. There was something there, and he didn’t know what it was. Over and over he read the cryptic passages, over and over. And then one day, in the way that the sun suddenly breaks through the clouds in the midst of a storm, he had it.

  They’d ganged up on him at the ballfield—six or seven of them—and they’d slapped him around and flung his Yomiuri Giants cap into the sewer. He was in a rage, but the rage gave way to despair. When would it end, he asked himself, and the answer was never. He barely spoke to his grandparents that night, and he was restless: he didn’t want to watch the game shows, didn’t want to listen to tapes on his Walkman, he didn’t want to study or read. Finally, out of boredom, he picked up his dog-eared copy of Hagakure, opened it at random and began to read. The passage was about modern society, about how corrupt and weak it had become, and all at once, as if a switch had been flipped inside his head, Mishima’s words made perfect sense. All at once he understood: the book was about glory, and nothing less.

  The society around him—the society into which he’d tried to fit himself all the years of his life—was corrupt, emasculated, obsessed with material things, with the pettiness of getting and taking, selling and buying—and where was the glory in that? Where was the glory in being a nation of salarymen in white shirts and western suits making VCRs for the rest of the world like a tribe of trained monkeys? Hiro saw it, saw it clearly: Fujima, Morita, Kawakami and all the rest of them, they were nothing, eunuchs, wimps, gutless and shameless, and they would grow up to chase after yen and dollars like all the other fools who made fun of him, who singled him out as the pariah. But he wasn’t the pariah, they were. To live by the code of Hagakure made him more Japanese than they, made him purer, better. It was the ultimate code of fea purē—or no, it went beyond fea purē and into another realm altogether, a realm of power and confidence—of purity—that transcended the material, the flesh, death itself. He’d been made to feel inferior all his life, and here was a way to conquer it—not only on the ballfield, but on the streets and in the restaurants and theaters and anywhere else he chose to go. He would fight back at Fujima and the rest of them with the oldest weapon in the Japanese arsenal.
He would become a modern samurai.

  But now, as he lay on the Amerikajiris cramped little couch, using Jōchō as his pillow, all that seemed an eternity away. To rely on Jōchō had become automatic with him, but now he was in America, where everyone was a gaijin and no one cared, and he would have to find a new code, a new way to live. His tormentors were back in Yokohama and in Tokyo, they were sailing for New York aboard the Tokachi-maru, and he was free—or he would be, if only he could get to Beantown or the City of Brotherly Love. The thought soothed him—he envisioned a city like Tokyo, with skyscrapers and elevated trains and a raucous snarl of traffic, but every face was different—they were white and black and yellow and everything in between—and they all glowed with the rapture of brotherly love. He held that image as he might have sucked a piece of candy. And then he shut his eyes and let the night fall in on him.

  * * *

  He woke to a parliament of birds and the trembling watery light of dawn. This time there was no confusion: the moment his eyes snapped open he knew who he was and where and why. He sat up with a long grudging adhesive groan of his Band-Aid plastic strips and examined his shorts and T-shirt and the ventilated tennis shoes that seemed to leer at him from the floor. He could see at a glance that the shoes were at least two sizes too big, designed as they were for the flapping gargantuan feet of hakujin giants. And the shorts! They fit, sure, but they were atrocious, ridiculous, a moronic blaze of color that made him doubt the manufacturer’s sanity. What did she think he was—a clown or something? Was she trying to make fun of him? His gaze fell on the little table with its clutter of Sweet’n Low packets and the coffee jar he’d scraped clean in his greed, and he felt ashamed of himself. Deeply ashamed. She’d sacrificed her lunch for him, given him a couch to sleep on, gone out and found him clothes and shoes and Band-Aid plastic strips, and here he was complaining. He was an ingrate. A criminal. His face burned with shame.