The Eater of Dreams

by Kat Cameron

  Or I could just let it slide. More and more, this is my inclination. Why be the nail that sticks up? I’m tired of being pounded down.

  Jules goes over to pick up our seafood pizza. When she comes back to the table, I ask, “So how is work?”

  Jules rolls her eyes. “Do you see what I’m wearing?”

  She’s in a knee-length dark skirt, white blouse, low heels. “What’s different about it?”

  “This is what I’ll be wearing for the next five months. Orders from above. We have to dress appropriately. No long skirts, no jewelry. Flesh-coloured hose. Make-up.”

  I realize what’s different about her. Her mouth is outlined in red lipstick. Her trademark gold hoops are missing.

  She folds a piece of pizza, takes a bite. “A couple of people have quit. Remember Matthew? In my language class? Dark hair to his shoulders. They told him to cut his hair and he told them to fuck themselves. I think he has a job lined up in Tokyo.”

  “Are you going to stick it out?” I cross my fingers under the table. Without Jules, no more Friday night bitching sessions. No more adult conversations.

  “I just smile, say ‘Wakarimasu’ to my boss, and think ‘Eat shit.’ I might leave a month early, do some travelling.”

  “If you can hold on until March, I could take two weeks’ nenkyu at the end of term.”

  “We could see Kyoto.” Neither of us has been farther than Tokyo and we start making plans. Kinkaku-ji and Ginkaku-ji: The Golden and Silver Pavilions. The raked rock garden at Ryon-ji. The nightingale floors at Himeji-jo, the old Imperial Palace. Kyoto in cherry blossom season is a dream to get us through the next two months.

  The next morning, packing for the conference, I realize I have a problem. When I flew to Japan, I was only allowed thirty pounds of luggage. The orientation book warned me that larger sizes of shoes wouldn’t be available, but it didn’t say anything about clothes. I’ve put on twenty pounds over the last two months, but I can’t buy new clothes since every woman in Japan is supposed to be a size six or smaller. So I’ve been wearing Indian print wrap-around skirts with turtleneck sweaters to cover the bulging waistbands.

  I stand in my white underwear, flipping through the hangers in my closet. My navy business suit doesn’t fit; neither do my black wool pants. My shirts gape, my sweaters stretch revealingly over my chest, accentuating the substantial breasts of a matron. I’ve morphed into my mother, even though I’m only thirty. A middle-aged woman with no physical presence. Invisible, yet too much there.

  Lafcadio appears in the corner. As usual, he is dressed in a man’s black and grey kimono. Age sits well on him, bestowing a Yoda-like guise of wisdom to his shrivelled body, his yellowish-white hair.

  “You didn’t have this problem, did you,” I accuse him.

  “What problem is that, Elaine?”

  “Nothing to wear.”

  “You have many Western clothes in your closet. Or you could wear Japanese kimono. I think nothing is more attractive than a graceful woman in a kimono.”

  “A graceful woman, yes. I’d look like a hippo in a muumuu.” Sitting on my futon, I survey the closet with despair. I’ve always been the big girl, never model-thin or even pleasingly curvy. No, the word for me is fat and I’ve carried that label, a layer around the true me, the acceptable me, the pretty me. Until I met Jeff. I don’t know why he could see past the extra pounds, but he could.

  I’m weeping again. These past ten months, that’s all it takes, one tiny setback and the tears flow. And no one to understand me but a gai-jin ghost, a hundred-year-old ghost, a ghost who loves Japan and everything it symbolizes. I haven’t told Jules about Jeff’s death. I’m afraid I’d start crying in the Drunken Duck and word would get around. Did you hear about Elaine? She broke down in the Duck for no reason. She must be suffering from culture shock. Some people just can’t handle life in Japan. The gai-jin community feasts on rumours and innuendo.

  “Elaine-san.” Lafcadio stands up, a tiny, bent, ethereal man. I can see the corner of the desk behind his kimono sleeve. “Don’t weep. I can see Jeff’s shadow, his ihai, protecting you. The beloved dead are always with us. It was so with my mother. It will be so with you.”

  But what does Lafcadio know of this despair? His is a nineteenth-century world, constructed on belief and fable. In Japan, he found a place that reflected his views, a place where you carry paper-white bon lanterns to light the way of the returning ghosts, a place where butsuma shrines draped with lotus blossoms and lit by incense honour the names of dead children, a place where love sometimes demands the ultimate sacrifice, joshi or mutual suicide.

  What have I found? Reprieve. I’m haunted here, but it is a friendly haunting with no memories. Lafcadio, an obliging ghost, trails no pain into my room. In San Francisco, every corner I turned, every building, was haunted by Jeff. I kept seeing him on the bus, in our favourite corner at the Daily Grind, at bookstores, in the back rows of movie theatres. I’d walk into the apartment and it would feel as if he’d just been there, a breath of time separating us.

  I miss air that tastes clean. I miss a world where I can read the signs around me. But I can’t go back. I can’t go forward. I’m stuck in one place, like those nightmares when I’m trying to run, and my feet won’t move, I can’t run, I can only wait for what slowly comes towards me. Lafcadio has told me the story of the Baku, the Japanese monster with the head of a lion, the body of a horse, and the feet of a tiger. It eats nightmares. I need the Baku to take away my fears.

  I catch the train in the afternoon and stand swaying as the train clatters past rice fields, 7-11s, and houses, rice fields, 7-11s and houses. Oh my! I’m not in Kansas anymore, Toto. People quote that to me, once they discover I grew up in Abilene, Kansas, home of Mamie and Ike, that idealized couple from the fifties. The fifties — that’s what Japan feels like to me. Salarymen in their sober business suits, housewives in their aprons. Polite children. Minimal violent crime.

  ‘Do you have a gun?’ ask my students, fed on the latest crime statistics in USA Today. The last time a boy asked me that, I went for an imaginary holster and he jumped a foot.

  Most of the students get off at Mito and I take a seat. The sprawl of houses diminishes so I’m finally in innaka, the country. Staring out, I try to see what fascinated Laffy. It’s so small, so flat. Of course, I have been dumped on the one flat plain of Japan, the great Kanto rice fields, stretching north and east from Tokyo. But there I go, comparing East and West again. As Laffy says, The East has its own incomparable mysteries. It’s a quote from one of his books.

  The station for Tochigi has a long line of concrete platforms flanking parallel sets of tracks, the green billboard strip with the station’s name written in hiragana and English below the triangular roof. Jumping up, I grab my knapsack, rush for the doors as they slide open, jostling by men in suits. The men commandeer the last taxi and I’m left to walk to the hotel in the dusk.

  Shouldering my pack, I trudge along the gravel edge of the road, dodging towards the ditch whenever a truck goes by, spraying me with dust. There’s no demarcation point between the small village and the country, only a repeating procession of houses, convenience stores, fields, and vending machines. I trudge up a hill and then turn into the parking lot of a modern hotel, blazing with shining glass and electric lights. Tucked behind it is the old ryokan, wooden, low-eaved, dark with age. The two are grafted together, shiny new branches on an old trunk, or a new cumbersome shell grown while the old one is discarded to the side. Lafcadio would love the ryokan, the old, intimate, closed Japan, with paper shoji screens that conceal while they reveal; I prefer the modern version, which hopefully has showers.

  I’m sharing a large tatami room with Kim and Maya. A framed ukiyo-e print hangs in the takanawa recess, above a stalk of white winter berries in a bamboo vase. The Hanging Bridge of Clouds. A wooden bridge reaches from the straw-roofed temple, tucked into the overhang of the cliffs on the far-right side, to a smaller temple set on a pillar of green, fea
thered with trees. Serpentine clouds billow, a second bridge arching back to the cliffs. A bridge of wood. A bridge of clouds. As we change for supper, Kim explains that the temple used to be in Tochigi.

  “Where is it now?” I ask. She doesn’t catch the joke.

  “It’s fallen into ruin, I imagine,” she muses. “I’d like to have seen it. It’s so ethereal.” Turning her back, she pulls off her sweater and wriggles into a skin-tight red jersey.

  I snort back a laugh. “Ethereal, my ass. I’ve heard temples and bridges weren’t the only things those guys drew for ukiyo-e prints. Wasn’t their other specialty women of the floating world? I bet the little temple on the left was for geisha.” Lafcadio would like that.

  “Actually, it was a tea house,” Kim says. She points out details with her forefinger. “See how it’s separated from the mainland. Look at the way the sweep of the cloud mirrors the movement of the bridge, joining the two sides. The tea house is part of nature, yet also separated. A retreat from the world, yet still part of it.”

  “All that trouble for tea. Now if it was sake, I could understand.” Knotting the tie on my skirt, I’m reminded of my mother, how all of her clothes have a crêpey, middle-aged look.

  When I return to the room after supper, the futons lie on the tatami like abandoned bodies. Kim and Maya have gone dancing. I stare at the tea house, wondering when I will feel part of the world again.

  Sunday morning, I give a lecture on “Grammar in the Classroom.” My colleagues listen attentively, though I’m sure none of them could identify a present participle. Most of them aren’t teachers; they’re language or business graduates who’ve come here to study Japanese or aikido or simply to take a year’s break before they start work. I’m the anomaly, not them.

  I corner Alain after the lecture. “I’ve heard some rumours are flying round.”

  “There are always rumours.” He’s a tall, craggy man with rumpled brown hair and an easy charm. Dressed in a navy suit, he looks like a Japanese salaryman, except for his confiding air. But he seems stiffer than usual, on guard.

  “These concern a certain 7-11.”

  “I’m aware of the problem.” He looks away and I wonder if anything will be done. Japan, land of evasions and half-answers. The conference doesn’t end until tomorrow night, but my lecture is done. I don’t have to stick around, pretending I’m having fun.

  On my way home, the train stops at Tomobe. I move away from the door so that a crowd of suits can get off. As they jostle by me, one of the suits grabs my left breast and squeezes, hard.

  I stand for a minute, shocked into immobility. Then yell, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” scrambling off the train after them as the doors close behind me with a whoosh. The men scuttle in a group for the exit, an anonymous shoal of blue backs.

  “Scabe. Perverts.” I scream after them. None of them turns around.

  I stand on the edge of the platform as crowds brush by me, through the ticket turnstiles, out into the town. The train leaves the station, the high-pitched announcement reminding us, “Kio tsukette. Abunai, dakara o-machi kudasai.” Please be careful. Danger.

  A group of junior high students peers curiously at me. “Gai-jin da, gai-jin da,” mutters one of the students under his breath.

  “You can just go fuck yourself!” I’m past the point of cultural détente. They stare at me with horror. The monster gai-jin come to life. I eat small children. I stumble through the shoji-screen rules of Japan, trampling the Japanese way of life beneath my clumsy, size-nine feet. I am the Outsider who destroys everything she touches.

  Back in my apartment, I pull off my sweater and unhook my bra. There is a reddening mark the size and colour of a squashed peach on the side and top of my breast. It will be a mottled purple and yellow by tomorrow. I bruise easily, the curse of fair skin.

  Laffy appears, averting his eyes from my unclothed body.

  “Elaine, you have been hurt.”

  A hand reaching out. The sharp pressure, like catching my finger in a car door. The brutal intimacy.

  I refasten my bra. My left side aches. “Some asshole grabbed my breast on the train. So much for Japanese politeness.”

  “Maybe he did not believe they were real.”

  “So he just reached out and grabbed!” I’m fed up with Laffy’s defence of this country, with his cherry blossom view of everything Japanese. “What do you know? You never faced real life in this country. You don’t know how they treat women. Is it okay to assault a teenager in a 7-11?” But that wasn’t a Japanese man.

  I dream that night of the Baku, the creature from Japanese mythology, with a horse’s body and black and orange striped legs. Instead of a lion’s head, it has a man’s red face, surrounded by a mane. The Baku chases me through concrete tunnels, its hot breath burning against my neck. I stumble and it strikes, teeth sinking into my breast.

  Waking, I breathe deeply until my heart stops pounding in my throat. I want Jeff’s arms around me. That is what I miss most, since he died. Being held. Cherished. Protected.

  5. Silence

  The last day of February I wake up at four in the morning to rock music turned up loud. I go downstairs, thump on my neighbour’s door, but he won’t open up, or else someone else beat me to it and killed him. Wish it had been me. That’s the third time in two weeks. Another complaint for Kawabata-sensei, not that she does anything. Last Tuesday, the gas cut off in the middle of the night and I woke up to no heat and no hot water.

  “Try having an ice-cold shower in a freezing apartment and then smiling for your class,” I tell Lafcadio. “It can’t be done.”

  “Try living in Kumamoto for a year,” he replies. “A horrible place, no heat at all and no showers.”

  “Yes, but you had Setsu to draw your bath every night.”

  There is no reply and he sulks in the corner. Sometimes I think Lafcadio came all the way to Japan to find a woman who would put up with him. Are the women more tolerant? Or do cultural differences mask the usual petty problems that destroy relationships? Jeff and I fought over words. He called me baby. “Come over here, baby.” I hated it. It made me feel about two feet tall. He complained that I didn’t use pet nicknames at all, not lover, or honey, or sweetie. I felt silly saying those words.

  “What did you call your wife?” I ask Laffy.

  “I called her Setsu,” he says. “Or oku-san.”

  “Oku-san?”

  “It means wife, Elaine-san. You should study your Japanese more carefully.”

  “I meant as a pet name.” I ignore the complaints about my lack of Japanese. Why would I need to know the word for wife?

  “A pet name. I do not understand. Do you mean like a dog or a cat?”

  “What did you call her when you felt affectionate towards her?” I’m tempted to say, “when you had sex,” but I don’t want the details of Laffy’s sex life.

  “Once our son was born, I called her haha.” Mother. Ha ha. Charming. He thinks he is being helpful. If wife and mother are the only terms of endearment in Japan, I pity the women. Baby now sounds wonderful. Cherished. I shouldn’t have complained. But I didn’t know, I didn’t know that things wouldn’t last. That they were temporary gifts.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, I cradle a cup of tea between my palms, the kotatsu quilt draped over my shoulders for warmth. I’ll be puffy-eyed and short-tempered in class again. Short-tempered. Why short? Why not small-tempered? One of those English conundrums that Kawabata-sensei likes to bring to my attention. “Elaine-san, why does the pot call the kettle black? What is the last straw?” I want to quiz her about why Japanese has so many counting numbers: hitotsu, futatsu for age; hitori, futari for people; ippon, ni-pon for long, thin items like pencils and beer bottles; ichi-mai, ni-mai for flat items like cards. Everything must be properly categorized, put in its place. Ichi-gai-jin, ni-gai-jin, san-gai-jin.

  I see the students who don’t fit in and wonder what happens to them. The boy with epilepsy, who had a spell a few w
eeks ago in my class. The overweight girls. The half child.

  Kawabata-sensei whispered the description to me one day as we were walking back to the staff room after class, asking if I’d noticed him. Of course I had, he’s tall with lovely cheekbones. His mother is Swedish. “He is half,” she said. I wonder where he fits in Japan. Nowhere. Not Nihon-jin. Not gai-jin. Nowhere-jin.

  In the staff room, I am nowhere-jin. It’s one big room, divided into three sections for first-year, second-year, and third-year homeroom teachers. The vice-principal sits at the front, chain-smoking furiously, running the show like vice-principals everywhere while the principal sits downstairs in his fancy office and drinks o-cha. Every morning we stand and bow, either to the vice-principal or the flag that hangs over his desk. I sit in a corner next to the filing cabinets, isolated from the bustle around me. My desk is bare, except for a row of teaching manuals and English videos, a stark contrast to the clutter of books and papers stacked high around me.

  At lunch, Kawabata-sensei strides over, drops a page of paper on my desk. “Please correct Miss Yasuko Tanazaki’s speech. She will be in a speech contest in Mito next month.” She marches away, her back stiff as a ramrod.

  A Letter from My Friend

  I owe what I am to my friends. I’d like to talk about what I learned through my friendship with a friend of my junior high school days.

  In October, we have a music festival. We want to win the contest at any cost as the last memory. However, our class would not unite in practicing. Some classmates weren’t serious about the practise. They sometimes wanted to go home right after school. I thought everyone in my class should cooperate each other. I made them stay in the classroom as a leader.