I bought a bicycle at a junk shop for eight thousand yen. It was grey, heavy, and identical to hundreds of others parked around town. Some days, instead of going to the library, I biked through mazelike streets lined with small houses until I reached the factories by the highway. One day I biked past a middle school marching band in bright red uniforms playing to an audience of senior citizens and mothers with strollers in the town square. I pulled over and watched them, recognizing one song as an arrangement of a J-pop smash hit that seemed to be playing on the stereo of every convenience store I walked into.
But whether I tried to distract myself with library books or bike rides to the edge of town, my thoughts would eventually return to my own stupid predicament. I had travelled ten thousand kilometres to a foreign country to be with a girlfriend who dumped me the night I arrived.
This was my real life: I was alone, adrift, and a fool. Sometimes, to delay going home in the evenings, I rode to a nearby bridge crossing a river whose name I didn’t know. At the middle of its span the bridge widened to support a large sculpture of twisting glass columns. Beside it was a bench where I sat in the dark moping, smelling buckwheat and burnt tires on the night breeze.
Every night, no matter how long I managed to stay away, I eventually returned to the four-room apartment that the local school board had provided for my ex. It was nice enough, but everything that happened there was tinged with a kind of absurd misery and dark humour usually reserved for European art films. We talked and ate dinners consisting of fried vegetables covered in apple curry, a disgustingly sweet instant gravy that seemed a staple of inexpensive Japanese home cooking, and was regularly advertised on television. We watched Hollywood movies rented from the video store a few blocks away, and sometimes made out awkwardly in the narrow bed we were forced to share.
This life was a shadow of the plans we’d hatched in Ottawa before her departure. We had decided then that if I saved up for six months and got a work visa, our life together could be seamlessly transported from the orderly streets and redbrick houses of Ottawa to this industrial suburb of Tokyo. Bad idea.
I cried through that first night when she broke up with me, and the next morning my tears fell onto the thin pancakes served in the fourth-floor restaurant of the nearby department store. They were saturated with corn syrup, not Canadian maple syrup, several small bottles of which I had packed as gifts for any Japanese person who might befriend me or do me a kindness. It was December, and Christmas carols rang over the store’s public address system even though Christmas is not a holiday in Japan. A garland of plastic pine boughs was strung along the walls of the cafeteria. I couldn’t help thinking it resembled the restaurant in the Zellers on Merivale Road, near where I grew up.
“Kurisumasu kyaroru,” my now ex-girlfriend said, trying to distract me. “That’s what Christmas carols are called here. It sounds like English, but not.”
“Kurisumasu kyaroru,” she repeated.
I met Masako at a Christmas party in the small apartment of an English teacher. There were a handful of Anglophones teaching English in town—some Aussies, an Englishwoman, and a former alternative rocker from San Francisco. None were particularly interested in making friends with other foreigners. Everyone seemed to be counting down the days until their departure. I tried to look both nonchalant and engaged while avoiding actually talking to anyone at the party.
I was leaning against a counter in the crowded kitchen, nodding in the direction of an Australian guy telling jokes to a few young Japanese women, when Masako appeared beside me. She shook my hand and made an effort not to bow to a foreigner, but ultimately surrendered to habit. She was slim, and her tidy black bob swayed as she nodded. My ex had already told me of Masako’s kindness. With the aid of her small electronic translator and rudimentary conversational English, this middle-aged housewife had taken it upon herself to guide the town’s English teachers through banks, hospitals, municipal offices, and other houses of bureaucracy.
I had my answers ready. I had to reply to three questions before a Japanese person could be sure that my experience of their country was authentic: Do you like Japan? Can you eat with chopsticks? Have you tried Natto? Three yesses. My affirmative to the last question, about a fermented soy paste wrapped in nori that tasted like regurgitated cabbage, always got a laugh, the universal snicker arising from a visitor eating the local delicacy.
Where are you from? What is it like? Is it cold there? Do you like it? Have you travelled before? Do you have any brothers or sisters? What do your parents do? Where are they from? After I answered each question Masako had another one ready. I responded, but was wary of divulging too much. Since the failure of my romantic air-drop, my plan was to lie low, waiting out the two months required before activating my open ticket and flying home. Until then I only wanted to read and float around town, like a ghost on a clunky bicycle.
But when Masako broached my interests, I told her, with no small amount of pride, that I enjoyed the novels of Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto, remembering to exchange their first and last names as I spoke them.
“Modern authors,” she said, her interrogation finally stalled. She recognized the names, but they meant nothing to her.
“Modern authors,” I replied, blushing. She wasn’t interested in books. Not long after, she excused herself to go to the bathroom, and I snuck out without saying goodbye.
Weeks passed before I saw Masako again. One day I came home from the library and found a message on the answering machine. “Mr. Jeffrey, you are leaving Japan soon and we must meet. Please call Masako,” was followed by the digits of a telephone number.
I let the message sit for a day or two. I was sure I wouldn’t reply, but didn’t know why.
In Japan, shyness gripped the most unlikely candidates. At home, my ex was an extrovert, but here she was silenced by an unfamiliar language and a national obsession with etiquette. She rode her bike to work through the rainy season rather than humiliate herself by inquiring about bus routes, and then nursed a cold for months instead of navigating the local hospital in her second language.
Before my arrival it had been hard for me to understand the weird feeling of alienation she described to me on the phone. But now I felt it, too. Masako’s curiosity about me, not visitors to Japan from the West, or North Americans generally, but me—a Canadian, born 1979 in Ottawa, the country’s capital, to a father in the civil service and mother from the rural north of the province—was somehow unbearable.
She persisted.
Our first outing was to the Kikkoman soy sauce factory in adjacent Chiba Prefecture. It was a warm January day, and the sun hung at an angle that seemed far too bright for the time of year. The factory’s exposed metal tubes and cisterns gleamed. Inside, we were led into a large empty auditorium. House lights dimmed, and the Kikkoman story began, narrated in English as Masako had requested. The rise of the noble family firm into a multinational food industry giant was professionally told. The film ended with an uninspiring aerial shot of the company’s Wisconsin plant, a long, flat, rectangular building.
A Japanese-speaking tour guide led us down wide hallways, insisting we peer through windows revealing the stages of production. Masako tapped at her portable translator, trying to find words in English to adequately describe the fermentation of soy beans. I smiled at everything she said. It was exhausting.
Two weeks later, I waited in front of my ex’s apartment building, watching my white breath rise in the cool February air. At exactly 10:30, Masako’s car pulled up next to the sidewalk. Sitting on the passenger side, Miyuki was taller than Masako, and her English more accomplished and casual. I shook her hand through the rolled-down window, noticing that she didn’t bow. Getting in the back seat behind her, I saw patches of white in her short black hair.
They took me to a traditional craft shop. The quiet room was filled with ordered rows of exquisite objects: earthenware mugs, handmade papers, ceramic bowls, chopsticks made of delicate wood. The shelves
near the door were lined with white porcelain cats of various sizes wearing inscrutable expressions and holding up their left paws. I chose a gold and red greeting card embossed with a drawing of one of these waving cats to send to my grandmother. It was the fanciest thing I could find under a thousand yen.
“Maneki Neko,” the cashier said.
“Kawaii, ne?” I managed. Cute.
We sped to lunch through the narrow streets of a nearby village. On the threshold of a small home, Masako and Miyuki introduced me to their friends, the Tamakis. They bowed at us from the step above as we slipped out of our shoes. For lunch they served miso soup, rice balls, and, surprisingly, dainty cucumber sandwiches.
The Tamakis told me they had travelled the world, and although they had never visited the city I grew up in, they had certainly heard of it. After the food was cleared away by his wife, Mr. Tamaki produced the photo albums documenting their trips to Indonesia, Thailand, Italy, Hawai‘i. At every destination a picture had been taken of Mrs. Tamaki wearing a floppy hat and standing next to a tour bus.
Now that they were too old to travel, they enjoyed the company of foreigners, he explained, producing a photo album lined with snapshots of pale young men and a few women. As I flipped the pages, they named the nationalities of their former guests: American, Australian, New Zealander, and even an Englishman. Some of the subjects looked surprised, but most smiled broadly and made the hand symbol that I understood as “peace,” but in Japan means simply, “I am posing for a photograph.” Shortly thereafter, when Mr. Tamaki took my photograph, I smiled and said, “Chizu.”
When the flash went off, I wondered, not for the first time, what I was doing here. Not just in Japan or in the Tamaki’s bright kitchen, but in my strange friendship with Masako, two decades my senior. Where were Masako and Miyuki’s husbands, and why did these women want to spend time with me instead of with their families? It must have been simple kindness, as natural as anything else, but I still didn’t understand it. In conversation with Masako, Miyuki, and the Tamakis, I found myself drifting, losing touch with myself and generalizing my life as I discussed it. I told them I worked at an art gallery, which was true enough, although my position at the city art facility was actually at the front desk, unlocking and locking the gallery door. I had never thought of myself as a model Canadian specimen, but here I was, dutifully answering questions about my country, the wilderness, the Rocky Mountains, Prince Edward Island, Toronto. Explaining that Niagara Falls was a little too far from Vancouver for a daytrip.
Masako hadn’t known where to take me when I suggested that the next stop on our itinerary should be to nature. A park or a forest, I explained. After a quick discussion with Miyuki in Japanese, she backed the car out of the Tamakis’ driveway.
I heard distant bird songs when I opened the car door. The nature preserve was an acre of trees behind a cemetery, across the street from a cowboy-themed convenience store. As we walked the rough gravel trail looping through sickly conifers, Masako admitted that she had never been here before, but that it was very pretty. The sun was now dimming in the west while yellow and red birds flitted by. I asked her their names. Masako pulled out her handheld translator, but I waved it away and asked her to say their names in Japanese. I repeated Masako’s words as Miyuki politely corrected her identification of the red one. The day’s strong sun had loosened the grip of the winter frost so that I could almost smell the soil beneath.
On the drive to the park, Miyuki had turned and spoken to me through the space between the two front seats. She told me she had lived for a time in Illinois, near Lake Michigan, and knew about the joys of nature. There wasn’t much of it left in Japan, she said. Now, walking beside me down the gravel path, Miyuki turned to me and asked if I had a favourite bird.
“The loon,” I answered.
“Loon?” she asked.
“A black and white water bird that sings strangely,” I said. “With red eyes.”
I raised my voice, screeching “Ha-oo-oo!” in a poor imitation of its call.
Masako’s and Miyuki’s eyes widened. Then, after a long pause, they began to laugh.
I explained that the song of a real loon lifted high above my limited range, before howling again.
As we neared the parking lot, I told them about the loon family in the lake near my family’s cottage, and how, as a child, I was convinced that the same loons returned each year, just like we did.
“Maybe so,” Masako said.
“Maybe,” I said, and tried my call for the last time.
After driving five minutes into the darkening evening on narrow roads empty of traffic, Miyuki sat up straight in her seat. “I know that bird,” she said. “The…loon?” I nodded as she explained how she once saw one in a film.
“It is a very beautiful bird,” she said, and began explaining it to Masako in Japanese.
Crosswalk
JENNIFER HOULE
It’s not a busy city. Our sidewalks are capacious, we’ve got room.
You could go a lifetime without bumping heads. Without
being required to circumvent. There are no hidden triangles, no isometric gaffes.
Nothing is oblique, here. Nothing is acute. I saw you on Main Street,
and I turned. Whatever happened to revolving doors? Our banks
are vulgar, they just squat there, vestibular vultures, slotted, rounding corners.
Your face was not expressionless. I thought I saw a question
form and deliquesce, like: if we loitered on a sinkhole would we plummet
to the burrows that connect us, underground, or could we dangle
from the girders long enough to be discovered, snarled in cobwebs,
as it were? The way is open, much too open. What’s happened
to porticoes, and what’s become of fire escapes? In 1906,
this city burned. And it was swamp, once. I saw you on Main Street
and I turned, abandoned a trajectory I thought was absolute.
Watching My Lover
LORNA CROZIER
I watch him hold his mother
as she vomits into a bowl.
After, he washes her face
with a wet cloth and we try
to remove her soiled gown
tied in the back with strings.
Unable to lift her
I pull the green cotton
from under the blankets, afraid
I’ll tear her skin.
He removes the paper diaper.
No one has taught us
how to do this, what to say.
Everything’s so fragile here
a breath could break you.
She covers her breasts with hands
bruised from tubes and needles,
turns her face away.
It’s okay, Mom, he says.
Don’t feel shy. I’ve undressed
dozens of women in my time.
In this room where my lover
bares his mother, we three laugh.
Later, I curl naked beside him
in our bed, listen to his sleeping,
breath by breath. So worn out
he burns with fever—the fires
his flesh lights to keep him
from the cold.
Though he has washed
I smell her on his skin
as if she has licked him
from head to toe
with her old woman’s tongue
so everyone who lies with him
will know he’s still
his mother’s son.
Other People’s Agony
BEN GELINAS
AN OLD MAN HAD A HEART ATTACK as he drove down a quiet stretch of highway a few years back. Dying behind the wheel, he launched his truck through a fence, deep into a farmer’s field, where it settled in a spot not quite visible from the road. Strapped to the car seat in the back was his grandson. The little boy died of heatstroke before police found the truck.
Another time, so
meone backed over a two-year-old girl while she played, unattended, in an apartment parking lot. The driver took off, leaving her parents to find her body. It happened during a yard sale. Her parents only lost sight of her for a minute.
How I made a living interviewing the families of these poor kids I’ll never know.
When I was in university, just starting journalism school, I had a nervous breakdown just facing my classmates.
We were a small group at the University of Regina’s Journalism School—only about twenty-eight of us. We’d competed for a chance to study there, clearing a combination of tests and interviews with the department professors. I felt pretty lucky to get in, and immediately decided I didn’t deserve it. I assumed my classmates were all bound for foreign bureaus and national newscasts, and that I was a seventh-round pick, reluctantly selected because ten more-qualified applicants got into superior schools like Carleton and Ryerson.
One of the only people I recognized in the class was a twenty-something political science grad named Adam Hunter. I knew him through his girlfriend, who worked with me at a local Italian restaurant. I didn’t really get along with Adam back then. I think it had something to do with his assuming I was trying to steal his girlfriend away from him.
Also, I was trying to steal his girlfriend away from him.
By the time we both entered journalism school, they had broken up. And for all that we both scoffed at her for insisting we would “get along,” it turned out we actually did.
Adam, the kind of booming personality destined for TV, sat next to me, and we paired up for our first assignment: interview one of our peers and present the findings to the rest of the class.
The professor told us to start broad and focus on whatever interesting angle we dug up.
Adam asked me a bunch of questions about my background: where I went to high school, what I did for fun. Then he zeroed in on my life growing up with divorced parents. This was fine. I liked to joke about how my family was broken, how being the only child of four parents, with all its negatives, at least meant twice as many toys come Christmas.
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