by Kat Cameron
No, not that memory. Replace it. The chocolate cake with rum icing she’d baked for his birthday, and he showed up two hours late, smelling of stale beer and cigarettes.
“Who were you with?”
“Just friends, okay. Just a few birthday drinks.”
“I’ve been waiting.” She hated the whine of fear and anger in her high-pitched voice.
“You said eight. It’s not that late. Jesus, don’t turn possessive on me.”
Bloodshot eyes, five o’clock shadow. See the flaws, see the flaws, but she couldn’t, the hooks too deep, and she softened, forgiving, just a few drinks with friends, what could that hurt, and no, he hadn’t been with that woman again, he’d promised, she would ignore the rumours whispered into her ear by poisonous tongues.
The dish smashes on the cracked linoleum of the kitchen floor. She will wrench herself free, move again, leaving behind yet another shallow pool of acquaintances, another closed circle of intrigue and gossip. Another circle of pain.
Different Endings
“Do you ever wish for a different ending? You look back and all you remember are the things you’ve done that you’re ashamed of.” He holds up his cup helplessly.
She thinks of her actions. A few carefully planted words and David is alone again. Victory tastes of burnt ashes and stale cold coffee, but there is nothing else left.
Homesick
SHE COULD HAVE MET ANYONE: a Buddhist, a sculptor, a yakuza.
Only flashes of her first few days remain. Tired, awed, anxious, she’d floated through the drive from the airport. The overwhelming impression was grey, interspersed with flashes of green. Wizard of Oz green. Flat paddy fields swirled into spaghetti highway ramps and multi-storey apartment buildings rising higher and higher as they drove into the multiple layers of Tokyo.
In the reception area of the Shinjuku Hyatt Hotel, the English teachers milled around the grand piano, their luggage in untidy piles on the marble floor. Maya stared up at glittering glass chandeliers shaped like floating jellyfish. The lobby was open to the fourth floor and voices rose and fell in a whirlpool of sound. Solitary emissaries from the government, laden with enormous red ribbons as if they’d been awarded Best in Show, swam through the shoals, dropping questions like bait.
“Nihon wa, doh desu ka?” What do you think of Japan?
“Kirei desu.” It’s beautiful.
She wakes to shoji screens rattling in their frames, china clattering on the shelves. The floor heaves, unstable as a fun house. Staggering across the room, Maya clutches the door frame.
The quake stops. Hands shaking, Maya picks up the phone, dials Kim’s number.
“Moshi, moshi. Kim speaking.”
“Kim, it’s Maya. Did you feel that?”
“What, the earthquake? It was just a baby. Maybe a 4.5. We’ve had quakes like that in Vancouver. It won’t even make the news. Don’t worry — it’s not the big one.”
Kim gets her laughing about the twins, Jack and Bill (Kim calls them Jack and Jill), and how they drank too much at a party in a Tsuchiura restaurant and recited Monty Python skits for an hour. Maya can’t believe she met Kim only two weeks ago.
Kim and Maya catch a ride to an English conference with one of the teachers from Kim’s school. Hukaya-sensei is shy, thirty-four, unmarried. His English is good but formal, a bit stilted. Kim speaks Japanese. Maya watches the countryside go by: weathered wooden houses with gargoyles guarding the corners of the tiled roofs; pachinko parlours, their enormous neon signs blinking pink and orange above the glass-fronted entrances. The roads are narrow with deep ditches. In the fields, golden-brown sheaves of rice hang over triangular wooden frames to dry, like books propped open on their spines.
Maya hears English being spoken and for a moment it’s a foreign language, low-pitched and liquid.
“We’re being rude,” Kim is saying. “Maya doesn’t speak Japanese.”
“No, I’m the typical Canadian gai-jin.” Maya tries to make a joke of it. “I didn’t even know how to pronounce Hajimemashite back in July when I arrived. My students corrected me.”
“Oh really,” he responds, the intonation exactly like that of her students, slightly disbelieving. As if he is too polite to contradict her.
The hotel is a modern, twelve-storey building, on the edge of the resort town. In their room, Elaine, an older woman, sprawls out on a futon, reading Wild Swans.
“Hi.” She waves a hand. “Welcome to Hotel Mashiko. Such a lovely place. Futons laid out with a corner folded back just so.”
As always, Maya notices how big Elaine is, how exuberant. How insignificant she makes her feel.
“I’m going to find the onsen.” Kim pulls a lime-green yukata out of her knapsack. “This hotel is famous for its underground pool. One of the three best in Tochigi,” she chirps, and Elaine and Maya laugh. It’s a standard phrase in Japan guidebooks. One of the three best waterfalls in Hokkaido, one of the three best parks in Tokyo. Kim calls her apartment, next to a train station, one of the three noisiest apartments in Japan.
The bath is segregated, men and women. In the antechamber, a small room with shelves of pink baskets, they undress.
“I hope it’s not crowded,” Elaine says. “I get so tired of everyone staring at the big fat gai-jin. God, I need to lose some weight.” She grabs a handful of the roll at her stomach.
The underground onsen circles a tiny island thick with ferns. Naked children splash at the edges of the grotto, watched over by mothers with their pubic hair modestly concealed by white washcloths. Elaine wades over to the far edge of the pool where they are partially shielded from the obaasans, the tiny grandmothers with grey hair and disapproving frowns. They sink down on the bench that rims the island, steaming water covering their shoulders.
“So how’s Mick,” Elaine asks Kim. Kim’s boyfriend, Mick, is staying with Japanese friends in Tokyo, looking for a job. Her school board asked him to leave when they found out he was living in Kim’s apartment.
“He hasn’t found a job yet. And forget apartments in Tokyo. Ten thousand yen a month and you have to pay the key fee on top of that. It’s so unfair,” Kim says bitterly. “I can think of three guys who have their girlfriends openly living with them. Plus, one of the math teachers is married to a former student. Yeah, that’s really appropriate.”
Maya leans back against the island, its concrete edge rasping her shoulders. Her legs are turning the soft pink of cooked shrimp. She closes her eyes and imagines herself at the Banff Hot Springs, hearing the high-pitched giggles from children, smelling sulphur and chlorine. Her shoulders and neck relax, the heat massaging out tension. Then she opens her eyes, and the illusion vanishes in the dimness of the grotto filled with naked women.
The next morning, at a lecture on English games, Maya sits down beside a tall man with curly brown hair and horn-rimmed glasses. In his dark-blue suit, white shirt, and sober tie in swirls of navy and emerald green, he seems to be the only Western adult in the room. Most of the other men (half-hatched between college and career) wear casual cotton slacks and polo shirts or shorts and sweatshirts. She and Eric compare schools afterwards.
“My school is awful,” he says. “They don’t care because they don’t have a chance in hell of getting into university. So they just piss around in class. A couple of weeks ago, these two Yankee boys, you know the ones with dyed orange hair, started fighting. And before Mr. Onuma, he’s the Japanese teacher, could get to them, the bigger kid pushed the other out the window. From the second floor.”
“Was the kid hurt?” Maya asks, shocked.
“No, just some bruises.”
She can’t reciprocate with her own horror stories. Her students are serious, hard-working, university bound. Another world.
They eat supper together in a large tatami room, up a step from the hallway littered with a tangle of abandoned sneakers and backless hotel slippers. Maya sits cross-legged on a cushion before a wooden tray, with Kim on one side and Eric on the other. Elderly wome
n in dark kimonos dish up rice from steaming iron cauldrons. Geometric patterns form on the trays: deep blue bowls filled with pale thick udon noodles; twisted pieces of pink rubbery octopus; layers of fried vegetable tempura on an octagon-shaped plate with a side platter of soy.
“I wish they’d serve something edible,” Elaine bitches, as she hands plate after plate across the table to Eric. “About the only thing I like is the rice.”
“Look, custard with a surprise,” Kim spoons out a piece of shrimp.
Eric asks, “So where are you from?”
“Calgary. I got my degree at the U of C,” she says. “I wanted to go to Toronto or Montreal, but my parents said I should get my first degree at home. I don’t know; it seems the Canadian way. Most people I talk to got their degree in their hometown.”
“Not like the Americans,” he agrees. “They get together and all they can talk about is which college is better-rated.”
“Where did you go to school?” Maya asks. She focuses on Eric, on his eyes, a light brown with a yellow edge around the pupil; the way his nose crooks a bit to the left side; his voice, pitched low and soft so she has to lean in a little to hear him.
“UBC, of course. In psych. Perfect training for living in Japan.”
They talk about watching the Canucks, spring skiing at Whistler, sushi in Vancouver restaurants, his summer job on a salmon boat, and all the time Maya hears her own longing for home twisting through his words like a silver ribbon.
After supper, they walk out into the dark streets of the resort town, a carefully preserved remnant of feudal Japan: cobblestone streets lined with closely set shops, a dark patina of age on their wooden exteriors; the crisp autumn air smelling of pine; stars shining overhead, a low yellow moon. When Kim and Elaine turn a corner, Eric pushes Maya up against a wooden wall and kisses her, his hands pulling hard on her hips. Splinters rasp through the rough weave of her sweater.
“Eric never shuts up, does he,” Kim says later that night, sprawled out on one of the four futons covering the floor.
“I think he’s just homesick.” Maya opens the French doors and goes outside. The balcony looks over a narrow ravine and she can see the hotels lining the other side, square blocks of golden light marking the lines of windows. A creek murmurs far below.
“Look, Kim, you can see the stars.” She hadn’t seen them since she’d arrived in Japan.
Eric phones Tuesday night after the conference and they agree to meet for coffee in Mito. He drives up from Yaita, an hour’s trip.
She can’t decide what to wear. Jeans seem too informal, but her navy business suit is too structured. She tries on a short black skirt paired with lacy black T-shirt and outlines her mouth in red lipstick, Cover Girl’s Perfect Passion. Staring into the mirror, she sees a pale child, white skin, dark hair, the lipstick a slash of colour. A wisp of fairy tale rhyme slips through her mind: skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood. Maya scrubs off the lipstick with a tissue, takes off her glasses and puts on blue mascara and her contact lens.
At the Mito clock, Maya sits down on a bench in front of a raised flower bed, the golden chrysanthemums looking bedraggled in the crisp chill of late fall. Around her, the crowds of salarymen in suits and schoolchildren in plaid uniforms surge in and out of the station’s glass doors, across the wide pedestrian bridge, and down the stairs onto the main street of the city.
A neatly dressed woman stops in front of her.
“Excuse me, do you speak English?” she asks.
“Yes,” says Maya. Another person wanting to practise English conversation with a foreigner. They always target her. She hopes Eric will arrive soon and rescue her. But rather than the usual questions about where she is from and what are her hobbies, the woman asks, “May I pray over you?”
“Umm.” What kind of weird request is this? The actions of the sarin cult flash into Maya’s mind. Had they prayed over people?
“Just for a moment,” the woman insists. She looks respectable in her straight blue skirt and white blouse. In fact, she could be a clone of the two girls, also in white blouses and straight short skirts, calling out “Dozo, dozo” as they hand out packets of tissues with the name of an English conversation school on the plastic wrapping. Maya looks around. There are enough people passing by that she should be safe.
“Okay,” she says, taking a tighter hold of her knapsack. “Only for a minute.”
“Just a minute,” the woman agrees. “Please to close your eyes.”
Maya closes her eyes. She expects chanting, but there is silence. Then a tingling starts in her scalp, as if the woman is holding her hands just a few inches from Maya’s hair. It feels like having her hair brushed by her mother when she was little. Maya feels the gentleness of her mother’s hands as she slowly pulls the brush through the long black hair, carefully untangling the tats. The tingling passes down into her shoulders, relaxing tension in the muscles, the walls she has erected deep in her body. Then the hands lift and there is an empty space at the top of her head. Maya opens her eyes.
“Domo arigato gozaimasu.” The woman bows deeply, turns, and walks back towards the train station.
When Eric arrives, she takes him to her second-favourite coffee shop, rather than her “number one” place where the owner, a mid-thirties man with a penchant for printed polyester shirts, frequently gives her free coffee.
“Irrashaimasu,” call the men behind the counter as they walk in. A group of schoolgirls in the navy pleated skirts and jackets of Mito Nikko, her high school, look over and giggle, covering their mouths with their hands. Maya smiles and waves. She’ll be pestered with questions about her boyfriend all next week.
Maya orders two kohi kreamus. “It’s the closest thing you’ll get to a latte outside of Tokyo,” she tells him as they sit down at a table in the back corner of the shop.
“I’ve only been to the Mr. Donut here. The one on the other side of the street.”
“Where they play American radio all day?”
“This is Casey Cassum, coming at you with another golden oldie.” Eric sings Elvis’s “Hound Dog” in a deep baritone. The students in the corner turn. Eric waves at them and they blush and look away.
She meets him the next night. They spend the weekend together at her apartment.
“I love your shoulders,” she says, stroking her hands over the soft skin, the outlined muscles. They sit on cushions on her living room floor, CD cases scattered over the tatami, half-empty mugs of tea resting on pieces of newspaper so they won’t leave rings on the floor.
“I love your hands,” holding one of his big hands between hers, biting the fingers gently, running her tongue down the creases between the fingers. How can she explain the sudden pull that flares between them, rising out of nowhere, the have to see him urgency?
They drive to a party at Kim’s house. Eric has drunk a couple of beers and she has to drive. Road signs flash by them, beautiful sharp lines of kanji looking like chicken wire, tangled and incomprehensible, as they follow winding narrow roads down the coast. At an intersection, Maya doesn’t know whether to go left or right. White sedans flow steadily in both directions.
“I think it’s a right here,” Eric says, consulting the crudely drawn map. Maya swears. Right means a turn across traffic into the far lane.
“Pull out a little. You’ll never get turned.”
Maya ignores him.
“You should have gone.” A brief gap appears, and then fills quickly.
She can feel his impatience and the frustration of the drivers behind her like a pile of wet cement in her chest. She switches the blinker to the left and pulls out too fast, with a squeal of tires, behind an ancient truck piled high with vegetables.
“You’re going the wrong way.”
“Just shut up and let me drive,” Maya spits back, breathless with anger.
He shuts up. She turns off the main road at a pear orchard, the trees dark and bare behind their blue netting, takes the next right and finds a secondar
y road that looks familiar. After another twenty minutes of sulky silence, in which Eric refuses to give any directions at all, they arrive. He spends the evening flirting with two Japanese women in mini-skirts and thigh-high stockings.
They fight the same fights, when she is tired and hungry, less willing to be accommodating. Fights that they resolve with her hand on his arm, tentative, asking. His lips against hers, the scratchiness of five o’clock stubble rasping her skin, scrubbing away uncertainties.
She becomes hypersensitive about touch. Her students giggle when she demonstrates how to shake hands; a girl bursts into tears when Maya tries to make her shake hands with a boy. With adults, Maya bows quickly and waits to see if they bow back or want to shake hands. Yet there are hostess bars cluttering the blocks around the train station; salarymen on the train openly read pornographic comics about schoolgirls.
She breaks up with Eric by telephone. Broken up, broken apart. Those few weeks together fall like shattered glass on the tatami, lodge under her fingers like blisters.
“Did you see the problems?” she asks Kim. She wants Kim’s answer to comfort her. Kim never liked Eric.
“Look, Maya, what does it matter?” Kim finally says. “Six months from now you’ll be gone and you’ll never have to see him again. It was just a fling, right?”
That thought haunts her even more.
Fractures
THEY FLEW TO TOKYO FROM Vancouver, but nothing was the same. “Last time, I flew business class on JAL,” Maya told Brent. “We had free movies, free kiwi juice or champagne, California rolls for lunch, udon in clear broth, tuna sashimi.”
This time her TV didn’t work. She’d given Brent the window seat, but he fell asleep after the first meal and didn’t wake until they landed in Narita. The airport was obscured by clouds.
When she was a child, her mother had told her stories about Urashima the Fisherman, trapped below the waves. When he returned home, one hundred years had passed, his family had died, and life was strange to him. She was returning to Japan ten years later, expecting everything to be the same.
