by Leo McKay
“No, he’s not,” Jackie said. “Who’s calling?”
“Is he at work, today?” the voice said.
“I’m not …” Jackie hesitated. “I’m not exactly sure, but I think he’s twelve to eight this morning. Who is this?”
There was a click, and the line went dead.
Meta had drunk her fill of Tokyo again. She took the secret key from its hook inside the cupboard, climbed into the elevator, and pressed the button for the twelfth floor. As the ancient lift creaked its way to the top, she prayed no one else would get on. She wanted a Japanese-free zone for herself, a small space around her with only her and her own cultural expectations in it. She had to be secretive on her way to the roof anyway, as she did not want anyone to see that she had a key. She was one of the only residents of the building to have one. Yuka, her neighbour from across the hall, was the building’s unofficial superintendent, and had surreptitiously copied her one from the storage box mounted on her kitchen wall.
When the door opened at the twelfth floor, she rushed down the hallway, through the door at the end, and up the two flights of stairs to the steel door that led to the roof. Once through the door, she instantly felt her insides loosen, relax a little. It was the perspective that did it. This was the only place she knew in Tokyo where you could stand back and look at something from a distance. The building was only twelve storeys tall, but it stood close to the crest of a hill in Shinjuku Ward. As she leaned on the chest-high concrete ledge, she could see in one direction all the way to the skyscrapers at Shinjuku Station, the few tops of blue-and-red neon signs that rose up in the foreground only a hint of the glitter of Kabuki-cho. In the other direction she could see clear to the Sunshine Plaza tower in Ikebukuro. Slightly north of the centre-point between the two gleamed the white roof of the Big Egg, Tokyo Dome, where the Yomiyuri Giants played their home games.
The air was crisp and, for Tokyo, wintry. The lower temperatures made the air, usually laden with pollen, cooking smells, auto exhaust, sewage, and industrial effluent, seem relatively brisk, odour-free, and refreshing. She sniffed some in and held it in her lungs a moment before exhaling. The NHK forecast she’d listened to on the radio had said kumori, tokidoki, yuki desu. Cloudy with the possibility of snow.
It would be good and cold at that moment in Nova Scotia, and Meta closed her eyes very briefly, pictured the big fields below the Red Row covered with snow all the way to the river.
There was no cure for culture shock, she knew. After a year and a half in this foreign environment, she’d learned that culture shock came and went in surges. Only time would make the fed-up feeling, the sadness, the mental fatigue, go away. And they would eventually return. But coming to the roof helped her clear her mind. Moving above and away from so many of the things that physically boxed her in was always a relief. Getting a broad view of the sky was a reminder that she still inhabited the same planet on which she’d been born.
This fresh wave of culture shock had come on in mid-afternoon Friday, two days ago now. Classes had been doing “how to” speeches, something most Japanese students were very good at. The culture was built around the kata, the series of programmed moves carried out in the martial arts. There was a prescribed and accepted way of doing almost everything, from greeting someone a certain number of years older, to arranging flowers in a vase, to wrapping a gift. For most of the morning and past the lunch hour, she’d sat through speech after boring speech. From “How to Smoke a Cigarette” to “How to Sharp a Pencil” to “How to Make a Maki Roll.”
Then, completely unexpectedly, a bright but usually silent and reserved student, in a class of students with mid-level English abilities, walked to the front of the room with an easel under her arm. The full attention of the class had transformed her from a shy and contained young woman to a broadly smiling, highly animated performer. She set up the easel, established eye contact with everyone in the room (the first item on Meta’s evaluation form), and peeled back the cover sheet of the easel to reveal the topic of her speech: “How to Curse Someone with Straw Doll.”
She had all the transitional words perfectly positioned. From “First, you must select your victim,” accompanied by a drawing on the easel that showed a large disembodied hand pointing an index finger at a frightened-looking asexual cartoon figure, to “Next, you obtain some hair or clothing” all the way through to the conclusion: “Please follow these steps carefully, and your victim will become sick,” here she bent over and mimed vomiting. “Or will surely die.” She lay her head gently on the podium and closed her eyes calmly in mock acceptance of her inevitable fate. The procedure described was a traditional Japanese form of voodoo called nenokoku mairi, practised at night, in secret, on the grounds of a shrine. Meta had read a reference to it a few months before in an article in the Tokyo Journal.
The students in the class were obviously familiar with the practice, too, for they were in stitches from beginning to end of the speech. Or was it the young woman’s changed demeanour they found comical? Meta knew that the closest she’d ever get to the meaning of any gesture on the part of Japanese people was a guess. Though she laughed through the speech along with the students, there was something vaguely disconcerting about it. The procedure described was something all the students knew how to do, how to put a death hex on someone. After that class had left her room, the memory of her own laughter began to make her feel queasy.
Meta had learned a way of coping with the kind of cultural alienation she was feeling at the moment. The best thing to do in this case was to share the voodoo story with a fellow foreigner and chuckle and shake your head at how nothing made sense away from home. But Meta did not dare make any remarks about Japan in her office that could even remotely be construed as negative. The man at the desk next to hers was practically psychotic with hatred for Japan and the Japanese. Greg Ulesso was an East-European Londoner, the son of Estonian parents who had emigrated to Britain. He’d come to Tokyo via Burma, where he’d taught English at Burmese National University for a small salary and a huge allowance of unearned respect. In Tokyo, he must have known he was facing a huge salary and no respect. Still, when he balanced Tokyo with Burma, he found Tokyo wanting. When Meta had first met Ulesso, he spent most of his time comparing Tokyo unfavourably to Burma. “These surly fucking Japanese gobshites! You walk down the street in Burma and everyone has a smile for you.”
Meta felt more sorrow than anger for Greg; she knew he was deeply unhappy and that he had probably had as many bad things to say about Burma when he lived there. But she cursed her bad luck at having been assigned a desk right beside his. Every other teacher on staff could leave, turn their back, or slink away when he entered the room.
So Meta stayed quiet and, instead, she started a letter to Ziv back in Canada. She wrote him instinctively at times like this, times of alienation and despair. She rarely sent him one of the letters she wrote. They were usually attempts at explaining the inexplicable, and he was the only person she felt would understand. Even when she did send a letter, he did not always reply. She kept the partially completed attempts in a plastic case file in a desk drawer in her bedroom. Together, the notes she made this way composed a half-formed journal of her experiences in Japan. Still, all the entries began as letters to Ziv. She was incapable of starting them any other way.
Dear Ziv, she began.
Today in class we had speeches. She stared at the sentence for several minutes. Without crossing this out, she started again. How to Curse Someone with Straw Doll, she wrote. First, … Her thoughts were still too jumbled and unformed. The task of describing what she’d just been through seemed enormous. She turned the sheet she’d been writing on face down and placed it in the top drawer of her desk, then silently began making notes for Monday’s lessons. At three thirty, the earliest she was allowed to leave the office, she hurried out the door to the bus stop.
She’d spent the weekend trying to avoid the feeling of detachment and succeeded only, she now realized, in maki
ng herself feel even more detached. She’d drifted alone on foot through the Shinjuku district, stopping in coffee shops, drinking coffee by herself. She’d spent more than five hours on Saturday on the English-language floor of Kinokuniya Books. At the end of that day, her eyes had ached from reading the titles of thousands of books sideways off the spines. She’d drifted through every section of the shop, luxuriating in the profusion of printed English. From Maps and Travel, to Science, to Sociology, to Philosophy, to Fiction, and back around again to the big rack full of magazines and newspapers from the U.S., Britain, Australia. Sunday she’d gone alone to mass at St. Ignatius Church on the campus of Sophia University, then walked down Shinjuku-dori to the Mr. Donut, where she’d spent hours at a table by the window, hunched over the copy of The Handmaid’s Tale she’d bought at Kinokuniya the day before.
It was now just after four thirty on Sunday afternoon. She had an English lesson at five with Yuka, the woman who lived across the hall. But at the end of such an empty weekend, facing a full day of teaching at the college the next day, she was not looking forward to the lesson. She stood on the roof of the building and looked out in the direction of Ikebukuro, out to where she knew the countryside was the closest. Tokyo was a tax on the imagination, a real place that had to be dreamt of to be believed. Everything about it was difficult to hold in the mind. It was difficult to look at the Chinese symbols for the names of the neighbourhoods and imagine that the crowded urban sprawl of Nakano had once been a central well. Who would draw water from that source today and drink it? The name of the area next to her own, Haramachi, meant field town. How could there once have been a field there, where there was not a square metre of earth to be found? But as difficult as it was to imagine Tokyo before it was Tokyo, it was equally difficult to imagine it as it now existed. She wondered if part of the reason she came to the rooftop so frequently was to confirm that there was actually such a place.
As she looked out over the city, she tried to go back in her mind and find her thirteen-year-old self, the person she’d been ten years before. She closed her eyes, mentally trying to shed the last ten years of experience, then opened her eyes, hoping to get an idea of what she would have thought of this place if she’d seen it back in 1978. Take that girl she’d been. That girl from Nova Scotia, from Pictou County, from Albion Mines, that girl who’d never seen Halifax, let alone any place bigger or more cosmopolitan, drop that girl here on this rooftop in Tokyo, show her this view, this jam-packed landscape: How would she react? What would she think? What words would she use to express what she was thinking? Most important, how would she be different afterward? This was a mental exercise Meta often put herself through. Why couldn’t I have known this before? she would think. My life may have turned out differently.
Above her, thick clouds rolled past beneath the overcast, oblivious to the city that strained and strove beneath them. Across the narrow street at the back of the building, the tiny family-run print shop hummed and buzzed and clicked. The sound carried up to the rooftop and blended with the smack … smack of two preteen boys playing catch with baseball and gloves on the street in front of the shop.
She couldn’t handle the English lesson with Yuka today. She would go downstairs now and cancel. She wanted to retreat into her apartment, lock the door. Maybe rent a video and pretend she couldn’t see the subtitles, make believe she was in a theatre in Canada. She walked the two flights, descended in the elevator, and noticed, after months of looking at the same marks with incomprehension, that she could now understand the single word of graffiti scratched into the grey paint on the back of the door. Kuso, it said. Shit.
The hallway outside Yuka’s and her own apartment was dark and silent and smelled of the mouldy red carpet on the floor and the miso soup that at various times in the day would be cooking in every apartment in the building. After pressing the buzzer several times, Meta turned her back on Yuka’s door. She had a hand on the knob of her own door when the one behind her opened.
It was Kazuhiro, Yuka’s seventeen-year-old son. Kazu looked much more relaxed and confident than he usually did. He was taking some time off school. This was his final year to prepare for university entrance. A solid A student for most of high school, he had brought back his report card in January with the news that he’d failed everything.
Yuka had called the school for an explanation, and discovered that Kazuhiro had done well all term, handed in assignments, listened attentively to lectures, and taken notes. He’d shown up for every exam at the end of the term and left every exam paper blank. He had not even put his name on the papers. Teachers had guessed which had been his through a process of elimination.
Kazuhiro’s father, Yuka’s late husband, had been a highly placed salaryman in a Japanese pharmaceutical company. He’d barely been in their apartment while the boy was awake, his own life had been so subsumed in the company, but he’d died several years ago from what the doctors at the time had called a heart attack, but everyone at his workplace had recognized as karoshi, death from overwork. The father had been a graduate of Todai, Tokyo University, perhaps the most distinguished, highly ranked university in the country. Kazuhiro idolized the memory of his father, and he so wanted to pass the Todai entrance exams himself that he had paralyzed himself with anxiety over his studies.
He was home now on the advice of the family doctor, who’d prescribed two weeks of rest for him, completely away from school. No books, no studies allowed.
Kazuhiro stood in the doorway, his eyes dark. His mother was having an affair with a gaijin, a Caucasian British man who, in his late twenties according to Yuka, must have been ten years younger than she. Meta had never met him, and Yuka had taken great care to keep the affair a secret from her son, who had been terribly affected by the death of his father. But people find things out that they’re not supposed to know, and in Kazuhiro’s blank gaze, Meta always felt accused, somehow partially responsible in a racial or genetic way for the frustration of all that remained unspoken in the apartment across the hall.
“Mama-san wa?” she said simply.
“Imasen.” No offer of explanation. No apology.
“Imasen desu ka?” a stupid repetition of what the boy had just said.
“Eh,” the boy replied. He closed the door.
It was too late now. She couldn’t cancel right at five o’clock when Yuka showed up on time. In her kitchen, she ran water into a kettle and sparked a gas burner to life beneath it. She sat at the table and looked out the window to the narrow street below. Behind the translucent glass of the little print shop across the way, she could see the computerized equipment flipping, waving, and jerking. The people who worked there flashed between and around the machines, adding paper, making adjustments, replacing small components. Seven days a week, sixteen or eighteen hours a day, they went at it back there.
The boys who’d been playing catch a short while ago had vacated the street, leaving it looking empty and cold.
At a little past five, the kettle whistled. It wasn’t like Yuka to be late. On the street below, the son of the old couple who owned the noodle shop at the corner went past on his motor scooter, a spring-mounted tray loaded with big bowls of soup swinging to and fro from a gooseneck hook at the back of the bike. Meta’s mouth watered. She should have eaten.
The electronic doorbell buzzed angrily. Meta looked at her watch. Twelve minutes after. When she opened the door, Yuka began apologizing from the corner of a swollen mouth.
“Oh, Yuka,” Meta said. She put a hand on Yuka’s shoulder. Yuka winced away from her touch.
“Sorry to be late,” she said.
Meta looked over Yuka’s shoulder to her apartment door. “You’d better come in here quickly,” she said. She moved out of the way, and Yuka slipped into her kitchen.
Yuka kept the materials for their weekly lesson in a heavy folder fastened with an elastic band. She sat at the kitchen table and began unpacking the folder in preparation for the lesson. Meta sat across from her and exa
mined Yuka’s face to more closely assess her injury. Her left cheek was only slightly discoloured, but it had ballooned to two or three times its regular size, pushing the straight hair back away from the side of her face. There was a trace of blood visible in the left corner of her mouth. Though she’d just applied fresh lipstick, little creases in her lips held unmistakable traces of both fresh and dried blood.
“I’m not sure my pronunciation,” Yuka said. She put a textbook called Side by Side on the table and ran her fingers over the swollen flesh of her face.
Meta shook her head. “We’re not having a lesson,” she said.
Yuka looked at her with astonishment. Meta thought she could see a tracing of broken blood vessels between Yuka’s left eye and her temple. “I’m sorry to be late,” Yuka said.
“It’s not because you’re late.”
“Why, then?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Meta said. “You think I want to teach a lesson to someone who’s pronouncing through a swollen mouth?”
“I’m sorry,” Yuka said.
Meta bit her own lip.
“I put ice on it at the hospital. And the … nandaro …” she pointed at her distended cheek.
“Swelling,” Meta said.
“Swelling got smaller,” Yuka said.
“You went to the hospital,” Meta said.
“Of course,” Yuka said. Meta’s breathing quickened.
“What did he do to you?” she said. “Tell me what he did to you. What did the doctor say?”
Yuka pushed her chair back from the table and stood up. She flattened her hands and pushed them under the elasticized waist of her skirt. She grasped the hem of her blouse and lifted it to reveal the bandages: They began just above her waist. As she moved her blouse higher, Meta saw that the bandages went so high Yuka had not been able to put her bra back on. Yuka pulled the blouse over her head to reveal two dark nipples, breasts so small they were almost non-existent. On the left side, the bandages half-covered one breast, squeezing it up at an odd angle.
