The Eater of Dreams

by Kat Cameron

  “What do you dream?” she asks. I frequently dream I’m back in high school to write a final exam, wandering the hallways of my old high school, a building similar to the one we’re in now: three stories of grey cement built around a dirt courtyard.

  “Too weird,” she exclaims. I taught her this expression. She dreams about exams too, not passing them.

  “I’ve had some weird dreams since I arrived in Japan. Must be the heat.” I tell her about my experience, making it sound like a dream. But she turns serious.

  “It is ghost. There are many ghosts in Japan. We are very old country, not like America. There are even gaikako-jin ghosts,” she says, using the polite expression for “outside person.” “We have ghost in Grandmother’s room.”

  “Did your grandmother die recently?” I ask, worried about emotional repercussions from this conversation.

  “Recently?”

  Once I explain recently, she says, “No, no. Not recently.” Little Yasuko likes to try out new words, taste them, roll them over on her tongue the way I’ll savour sweet potato cakes from the Mito omiyage shop. “She didn’t die recently. She live with us.”

  “Oh.” Long pause as I try not to smile. “Why is there a ghost in her room?”

  “It is yurei.”

  She explains that her grandmother is a widow, but before she was married she was in love with a young man whom Little Yasuko describes as “unsuitable.”

  “Her parents don’t approve him,” Little Yasuko says, her eyes shining, as if with unshed tears on her grandmother’s behalf. “So she must marry Ojii-san, Grandfather. And lover is very unhappy. He die young. Forty-nine days after Ojii-san die, he show up. Grandmother know he is there because room is cold.”

  “Why did the ghost come back forty-nine days after your grandfather died?” I ask.

  “Forty-nine days is when person goes to anoyo, other side,” she explains. “So when Ojii- san left, my grandmother’s lover returned.”

  “And was she happy to see him?” It’s a bizarre question, but no stranger than the story.

  “Yes, she is very happy. She miss him for long time. Now, she say, they like Heathcliff and Cathy. You know story?”

  “You mean Wuthering Heights?”

  “Yes, Wu-ther-ing Heights.” She tries the title a few times. “Wu-ther-ing Heights is Grandmother’s most favourite book. She say, is very Japanese book. I very much like.”

  “You’ve read Wuthering Heights?”

  “Yes. But only in Japanese. In English, I think is chotto muzukashi.” She tilts her head to one side and nods it forward as she says this, as if the expression must be softened and the phrase drawn out, a long stress on chotto.

  “Yes, it’s difficult. I read it in university. I thought Heathcliff was annoying.” I thought he was an asshole, but I don’t want to explain the word.

  “But he is very brave. He keep trying, even though life is difficult. In Japan, we say gambatte. You know gambatte?”

  “Persistent?” She looks puzzled, her brow furrowed beneath the bangs, so I search for synonyms. “To keep trying. He doesn’t give up.” I grab a pen and write persistent on a piece of paper, then wait for her to look it up in her dictionary.

  “Yes, per-sis-tent. He does his best. And he never stop loving Cathy. Very sad. Very Japanese. He goes back for her after she die. That is true love, I think. Like Grandmother.”

  “Are there many ghosts in Japan?”

  “Yes. Many, many people have died. And people who are unhappy in love, like Grandmother and her lover, they become ghosts. Maybe the ghost in your room was unhappy too.”

  Little Yasuko ends up convinced that there is a gai-jin ghost in my room. “It must be lonely,” she concludes. “The only foreign ghost here. So it stay with you.”

  Loneliness I can understand. Is Little Yasuko lonely too? She has her parents, her grandmother, a younger sister in junior high. So why does she spend so much time talking to the fat gai-jin English teacher?

  Saturday morning, I wake up and there’s something in the corner again, a thin mist wisping up to the ceiling. I get up, go out into the kitchen to make a coffee, come back into the room, and it’s still there. A vapour cloud in the corner, between the table and the futon cupboard.

  “Good morning,” I say, convinced that I am finally going mad, that loneliness is eating Swiss cheese holes in my brain. “Ohayo gozaimasu,” I add, just in case it’s Japanese. It doesn’t answer, thankfully. But it condenses. Instead of a misty-grey shape, all wavery around the edges, there’s a grey shape of a man, complete with supernatural chill.

  My ghost is dressed in a man’s old-fashioned kimono of black and white, sashed around the middle like a dressing gown. He huddles in the corner, sheltering the left side of his face from my view.

  “Who the hell are you?” I ask.

  “Setsu? Is that you?” He sounds querulous, like a child just woken from a nap.

  “Wrong number.” Maybe he’ll leave. I don’t need a gai-jin ghost taking refuge in my bedroom.

  “Setsu. Is my bath ready?”

  “There’s no Setsu here.” This is beginning to remind me of those late-night phone calls I’ve been getting since the school gave out my phone number.

  Me: “Moshi, moshi.”

  Student: “Har-ro (giggle).”

  Me: “Hello. Who’s this?”

  Student: “Do you li-ku sex-u? (Giggle, giggle).” Click.

  “Where am I?” the ghost asks. He sounds American, despite his Japanese attire. His hair is white and springs back from his forehead with a Mark Twain folksiness; he has sallow, wrinkled skin. If I had to attract a ghost, couldn’t he be thirty-something and look like Laurence Fishburne. But this reminds me of Jeff and I turn my back to hide the tears.

  “You are missing someone too,” the ghost says. “With me, it was my mother. She was sent away when I was four. All my life I searched for her. Missing her, even after she died. Then I came to Japan. Like you.” I turn around in time to see him vanish. I would say in a puff of smoke (the kind of expression I’d have to explain to Little Yasuko) but there is no smoke. He is just gone.

  2. Running Away

  My students excel at origami, the art of folding paper, gami, into shapes. During the lunch hour, they amuse themselves by creating intricate animals and designs. In English club, Little Yasuko tries to teach me how to fold a paper crane. The paper slips between my stubby fingers, while Yasuko effortlessly creates tiny birds in pink and gold.

  She tells me the story of the young girl stricken with leukemia who vowed to make a thousand cranes or tsuru. “A thousand folded origami cranes make a wish come true,” she says, her eyes wistful. “But girl dies at age of twelve. She only made 642 cranes.”

  At home, I sit cross-legged on the floor of my living room, labouriously folding squares of brightly patterned paper. Strings of origami cranes, in long folds of yellow, red, pink and green, dangle in the corner, a legacy of the last English teacher.

  My gai-jin ghost materializes under the cranes, his black and white kimono looking more than ever like crumpled newspaper, and stares intently at me.

  “What are you doing?” he asks.

  I feign indifference, as if an elderly ghost in my living room is a common occurrence. “Making paper cranes.”

  He nods and says, “So desu ne.” Even his expressions are Japanese. He tells me he was one of the first foreigners to come to Japan.

  “Like you, I am an American, although I was born in Greece to a Greek mother and a British father. My name is Lafcadio Hearn and I wrote many books about Japan.”

  “So desu yo,” I respond, mocking his serious tone.

  “When I was twenty, I sailed to America to make my fortune. I almost starved,” he muses. “I peddled mirrors door to door. In Japan, a mirror is known as the soul of a woman, but in America the mirrors reflected nothing but my own worthlessness. Later, I opened a restaurant called The Hard Times and fed the indigent.”

  “What made you
come to Japan?”

  “That,” he says, “is a long story.”

  “So tell me. I had a lousy day at school and there’s nothing on TV tonight.” Nothing but Japanese game shows and CNN.

  “Why does any foreigner come here?” he evades. “To get away. From home. From family. From failure. None of us are running to something. We are all running away.” Huddling in the corner, he turns his head away so the left side of his face, the side with the milky-white blind eye, is hidden.

  His bleak mood depresses me. I get up and leave the room. Slipping on my sandals, I grab my umbrella. I’ll catch the 5:12 train to Mito, get a coffee. In San Francisco, I’d walk three blocks to the Starbucks. Only in Japan would I travel half an hour for a coffee.

  On the train, I meet Kim and Maya, the sorority sisters. They’re young and pretty with that chirpy cheerfulness, like small birds, twittering on about how great Japan is.

  Kim isn’t so cheerful today. She’s complaining to Maya about her class. “So I’m in the classroom with Mishima-sensei, the Japanese teacher. The class stands up. She barks out rei and they bow in unison. Then she goes into this long-winded explanation, in Japanese, about the use of the passive. Can you believe it? These kids can’t even answer a simple question like, ‘What is your name?’ in English, but they’re learning the passive form.”

  “Well, they can be passive.”

  My joke goes right over Kim’s head. She’s ranting against her life: the long hours in the staff room of reading the paper, studying Japanese, breathing in second-hand smoke, and wondering what the hell she’s doing here.

  “Then we do this reading exercise, where I read the paragraph, but the kids repeat the words a half-beat off, so you get this ripple effect, like listening to three different music stations at the same freakin’ time. And if I make a mistake, Mishima-sensei says, ‘Kim-san, I think intonation is pronounced with stress on third syllable, yes?’ Stupid cow.”

  While we’re talking, a couple of my students sidle over to where we’re standing, their skirts hiked up past the knees so that the blue and green Scottish plaid becomes a mini-skirt. The girls in my English club demonstrated the process for me last Friday, folding the waistband of the skirt over and over, and then cinching it with a belt. It makes them look like Sailor Moon, the crime fighting anime character with huge eyes, cute ponytails, and a schoolgirl uniform.

  “Elaine-san. Konnichi-wa.”

  “Hi.” I don’t remember their names. I have over five-hundred students, all dressed in the same uniform. I miss the costumes of home: Goth girls in black, the preppies in low-rise jeans, the gansta boys in hip-hop baggy pants. I know I’m missing subtle clues, signs of rebellion. My students are forbidden to dye their hair, pierce their ears, have part-time jobs. They do all three. Last week, a girl came to school with her hair dyed light brown and her home-room teacher made her kneel in the hall and then sprayed her head with black paint.

  I introduce Kim and Maya, and Kim starts chatting in Japanese. The girls show wide-eyed astonishment at her proficiency. I’m sure I’ve acted just as surprised when someone from overseas speaks fluent English.

  The students get off at Tomobe with smiles and waves for us.

  “You’re so lucky to teach senior high,” Kim gushes. “The junior high kids are so young, you know. It’s hard to have a conversation about anything with them.”

  “Yeah.” Except for Little Yasuko, my longest conversations have been crank phone calls.

  Mito station teems with commuters. I climb the steep stairs, puffing a bit. No escalators. I guess the disabled stay home. I want to stop halfway up to catch my breath, but the crowds push up from behind, while a stream of people flows down. At the top, I pause by a Poki juice machine, wheezing like a hurdy-gurdy as I try to catch my breath. The high-ceilinged station, which echoes like a giant bright cave, stretches out in all directions.

  The sorority sisters invite me for a walk and Maya plays tour guide. “We’ll go over to Lake Semba or Semba-cho. It’s beautiful when the cherry blossoms are in bloom. The lake and the plum blossoms in Kairakuen Park are Mito’s two claims to fame.” She sounds like she’s quoting The Lonely Planet Guide to Japan.

  Kim adds her own bits of Japanese trivia. “Hiroshige Utagawa has some famous paintings of plum blossoms.”

  I have no clue who she is talking about. She adds, “He’s the ukiyo-e artist who influenced Van Gogh.” That, at least, is a name I recognize. The one who chopped off an ear.

  “What’s ukiyo-e?” I ask. I know they want to educate me, show me the beauty of Japan. I didn’t come for the culture. I came for the cash. But I can’t tell them that.

  “Ukiyo-e are scenes of contemporary life. The artists also painted pictures of the floating world, the courtesans. But I prefer the scenes of nature.” Kim is starting to sound Japanese. Next she’ll be telling me, Japan is the only country with four seasons, and then describe the appropriate actions for each season. Maple leaf viewing in fall, snow and ice sculptures in winter, cherry blossoms in spring. I haven’t figured out what we were supposed to do in summer. Melt, I guess.

  Semba-cho may be known for its cherry blossoms, but now there are only leaves, heavy and green, drooping with the heat. We pass a couple of old men fishing on the banks of path lined with weeping willows. A pair of black swans with red beaks floats placidly near the edge of the yellow-gold grass.

  Maya murmurs,

  A pair of black swans

  Mirrored in the flattened lake

  Summer floating by.

  “Is that a translation of a Japanese poet?” I ask. Maya, with her spiky hair and cat eye glasses, looks vaguely artsy.

  She claims the poem as her own. “I’ve been writing haiku in English with my students. I guess I’ve got in the habit.”

  “We could all compose one,” Kim suggests. “That’s how haiku was originally done, as an opening poem for a group composition.”

  “What did you do, Kim, study nothing but Japanese culture at college?”

  “University actually. UBC.” I must look blank because she explains, “The University of British Columbia. I took a special course in Japanese literature and language. I went to a ukiyo-e exhibit at the Tokyo National Gallery last week with Simon. He brought a student along.”

  Maya lifts an eyebrow. “He’s dating a student?”

  “It isn’t the big taboo it would be at home. The guys are in clover.”

  They start discussing the different English teachers they know, who’s sleeping with whom. Looking over the shining surface of the lake, I watch the red sun set behind the hazy skyline of concrete rectangles dominated by the huge circle on the Daie department sign.

  In San Francisco, it’s six hours later. Midnight. The witching hour. For the past seven months, I haven’t been able to sleep. I lie awake from midnight until two, reliving my life. I wonder if the girl who made the origami cranes did the same. Unable to sleep, she folded the tiny pieces of coloured paper, making the same wish with each precise fold. Let me live.

  I think of the haiku I could write.

  The sun slowly sets

  I am on the other side

  Yet nothing has changed

  Kim invites me to join them and a couple of friends for a drink at the Drunken Duck, a pub with a tipsy cartoon duck, holding a pint in one feathered hand, above the door. I introduce myself to Charlotte from somewhere in Alabama and Jules from Sydney, Australia. We’re all English teachers, but the other two women work with language schools. I wouldn’t be surprised if Charlotte is also a foreign missionary as she has that buttoned-up look. Jules is a thin woman with a strong Aussie accent who’s been here five months.

  “I came over in June and I thought I was gonna die. It rained for five weeks straight. Poured rain. You just can’t believe it. And then it stopped raining and there was this great outcry in the papers. The rain has stopped. The rice crop is doomed. No worries, I thought, at least it’s finally stopped raining.”

  Kim jumps
in with her own experiences of rainy season. She lived here for a year, during university, so she outranks the rest of us. Even the gai-jin view people as sempai or kohai; you’re ranked by number of months or years you’ve spent in Japan.

  “My main problem is the language,” I confess to Jules. “I don’t speak a word.”

  “Have you heard about the lessons in Mito?” she asks. “This group of Japanese ladies gives lessons to foreigners. Five hundred yen a week, and bikkies at tea. You should come.”

  Jules and I leave at ten, so I can catch the last train south. A faint drizzle of rain falls and I open my umbrella, the black fabric liberally sprinkled with English, French, and German sentences, such as however, is the people who make clothing manufacturing, conveyor belt industry sourced and les facteurs prinipaux consist dans ce qui fut un concours dipute.

  “Great umbrella,” Jules says. “A wonderful example of Japlish. You know, English mixed with Japanese. It’s like my ironing board. There’s fuck you and vagina next to these kawai pink and blue teddy bears.”

  “Kawai?”

  “Kawai means cute. The students, the girls at least, say it all the time. Kawai so!” She hits falsetto on the last word. Her sharp features already look familiar, like she’s an old friend.

  I ride the train home, surrounded by sake-soaked salarymen propped up on the seats. My ghost waits for me in the kitchen, an insubstantial grey form by the microwave.

  “Why did you come to Japan, Elaine?” he asks.

  “I was running away.” I had a life in San Francisco, an apartment, a job, a fiancé. Then Jeff died and it all vanished, like mist burning off the bay. I flew to the other side of the world to escape. If I stay busy, if my world is completely different from what it once was, I can forget what I had and what I’ve lost.

  “Why did you come to Japan?” I counter.

  “After my restaurant failed, I reported the Tan Yard murders for the Cincinnati Enquirer. Yet I could not escape my bad fortune. My mother went mad after my father stole her sons from her. I never forgave him.”