by Ruth Ozeki
This was my habit, but a week after Mom found my scars and bruises, I went to the garden and found a barricade blocking the pathway. They were doing construction work on the temple grounds, and so that day I arrived at school early.
Immediately, I knew that something was different. No one looked up when I approached or even seemed to notice me. I loitered just outside the school gates for a while and then slunk in, but no one was waiting for me, or watching for me, or circling. I listened, but I didn’t hear my name being sweetly chanted by kids with glittering eyes. They all just ignored me and continued talking to each other like I wasn’t even there.
I felt nervous at first, tingling with something like relief or even excitement, but then I thought, No, wait a minute, maybe they’re planning something truly evil. Don’t be stupid, Nao! Be cautious. Stay alert! So I kept my eyes open and I waited. The morning classes droned on and on—Japanese history, math, moral education—but still nobody bothered me. Nobody pinched me or spat or poked me with the point of their pen. Nobody held their nose or threatened to rape me or pretended to throw up as they passed by my desk. The boy sitting behind me didn’t pull my hair out even once, and by the afternoon, I was beginning to believe that the nightmare was finally over. During lunch hour I was left completely alone at my desk with my lunchbox, and nobody knocked it to the floor or stepped on my rice ball. At recess I stood by myself with my back to the schoolyard fence and watched the other kids laughing and talking. When the bell rang and classes let out for the day, I walked through the crowded hallway like I was invisible, a ghost or a spirit of the dead.
4.
I don’t know if it was Mom’s visit to school that made them stop torturing me physically. I kind of doubt it. Probably they were getting bored and were in the process of stopping anyway, and Mom’s complaint just shifted them into this new phase. I don’t know who she talked to, but it probably wasn’t my new ninth-grade homeroom teacher, Ugawa Sensei, who was just a substitute for the regular teacher, who was on maternity leave. I think Mom must have gone further up, maybe to the vice principal or even the principal himself, and the reason I think that is because Ugawa Sensei was going along with my classmates, ignoring me and pretending he couldn’t see me or hear me, either. At first I didn’t notice. He’d always ignored me and never called on me, and since I never put my hand up in class to answer questions, you could say the feeling was mutual. But then he started this new thing during roll call in the morning. He would read my name, “Yasutani!” and I would answer, “Hai!” but instead of marking me present, he’d call out again, “Transfer Student Yasutani!” like he hadn’t even heard me. Again I’d answer, “HAI!!!” in the loudest voice I could, but he would frown and shake his head and mark me absent. This went on for a couple of days, until I happened to notice some of the boys snickering, and I started to catch on. My voice stopped working then. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t force any sound to come out. It was like the muscles in my throat had turned into a murderer’s hands, strangling my voice as it tried to rise. Sometimes one of the kids would answer for me, calling out helpfully, “Yasutani-kun wa rusu desu yo,”48 until after a while I just sat there when my name was called, staring at the worn-out surface of my desk with my lips pressed tightly together, because I knew they were all in on it, laughing silently.
It was oddly peaceful. I didn’t mind the silent laughter so much, because at least it didn’t leave scars on my body, and I could almost feel happy to see Ugawa Sensei scoring points and getting in good with the popular kids in our class. Substitute teachers are even lower than transfer students, and Ugawa Sensei was such a loser, even more than me, and so I felt sorry for him. His head was the shape and color of an enoki,49 and he had bad teeth and thinning hair, and he used to wear polyester turtleneck sweaters with flakes of dandruff, like spores, on the shoulders. He smelled bad, too, really nasty BO.
I’m telling you all this not to be mean, but so you’ll understand exactly what a stretch it was that a loser like Ugawa Sensei would ever become popular with the powerful students in his class, but thanks to me, he was actually achieving this. I could see the excitement in his face when he called out my name and pretended to wait. I could see it in the way he looked at me, and then looked through me, so convincingly I could almost believe I wasn’t there. When he marked me absent, it was with a triumphant flourish of the pencil in his hand, like he’d really accomplished something great.
I hope you understand that I don’t think he was a bad man. I just think he was very insecure and could convince himself of anything, the way insecure people can. Like my dad, for example, who can convince himself that his suicide will not harm me or my mom because actually we’ll be better off without him, and at some point in the not-so-distant future we’ll realize this and thank him for killing himself. Same with Ugawa Sensei, who probably figured that I, too, would be happier just not being there, and he was actually right about that. In a way, he was just helping me to achieve my goal, and as a result, I could almost feel grateful.
I slipped through my school days like a wisp of cloud, like a drifting patch of humidity, barely there, and after school I walked back to our apartment, usually more or less alone, which was a whole lot better than being chased and tripped and shoved against vending machines or into bicycle racks filled with bicycles. I knew I wasn’t completely out of danger yet because sometimes my classmates would follow me, but they always stayed across the street or half a block behind me, and even if they made comments in loud voices about my slummy ghetto neighborhood, at least they never attempted to talk to me or touch me.
Once I got home, my dad usually made me a snack, and I sat with him and did my homework or just surfed around on the Internet, killing time or texting with my best friend in Sunnyvale, Kayla, who still liked me enough to hang out with me online. But even that was kind of stressful, to tell you the truth, because she kept wanting to know what my school was like, and I wasn’t going to tell her about the ijime, because then she’d know what a total loser I’d become, so instead I just tried to explain all the funny odd things about Japan to her. Japanese culture is pretty popular among young people in the United States, so mostly we just chatted about manga and J-pop and anime and fashion trends and stuff.
“You seem so far away,” Kayla wrote. “It’s kind of unreal.”
It was true. I was unreal and my life was unreal, and Sunnyvale, which was real, was a jillion miles away in time and space, like the beautiful Earth from outer space, and me and Dad were astronauts, living in a spaceship, orbiting in the cold blackness.
5.
I said that my dad had withdrawn from the world and become a hikikomori, but I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. My dad loved me and wanted me to be safe. He wasn’t going to flip out and stick both our heads in the oven or anything. And while most hikikomori guys stay indoors all day and night reading porno manga and visiting hentai fetish websites, thank god my dad wasn’t that pathetic. He was differently pathetic. He had pretty much quit going online at all, and instead he spent his time reading books on Western philosophy and making insects out of origami, which, as you probably remember from your childhood, is the Japanese art of folding paper.
The whole philosophy thing started because Mom’s company used to publish this series of books called The Great Minds of Western Philosophy. As you can probably guess, The Great Minds of Western Philosophy wasn’t such a hot seller, so she brought home a remaindered set for Dad, thinking it might help him find the meaning of life, and besides, she got them for free. He started with Socrates and did approximately a philosopher per week. I don’t think it was helping him find the meaning of life, but at least it gave him a concrete goal, which counts for something. I believe it doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you can find something concrete to keep you busy while you are living your meaningless life.
And whatever you think you know about origami, you can forget about it, because the stuff Dad was folding wasn’t your typical cra
nes and boats and party hats and candy dishes. The stuff he folded was origami on steroids, totally wack and beautiful. Actually, he liked to fold the pages from The Great Minds of Western Philosophy, and after he finished reading them he would cut them out of the book with a box cutter and a steel-edged ruler. As you probably know, there are a lot of great minds in Western philosophy, and the books were printed on superthin paper so they could cram more minds into the series. Dad says thin paper is easier to fold, especially if you’re making something complicated like a Trypoxylus dichotomus, which is a Japanese rhinoceros beetle, or a Mantis religiosa, which is a praying mantis. He only used the minds he didn’t like for folding, so we ended up with lots of insects made from Nietzsche and Hobbes.
Dad used to sit on the floor at the kotatsu50 for hours, reading and folding, and folding and reading, and I’d sit with him and do my homework as long as he promised not to smoke too much. He used to have these fake plastic mint-flavored cigarettes to help with his nicotine craving, and sometimes I’d ask him for one, and we’d sit across from each other, hunched over our books, with our elbows propped on the table, sucking and chewing on our fake cigarettes together. It was kind of sweet, because after a while, he would start getting excited, and when he got excited, he would start to nod. He would nod and nod, and when he really got into it, he’d hold on to the frames of his glasses with both hands like they were binoculars and he was trying to penetrate the pages and see even further into the words to get more meaning out of them. It was hard to concentrate with him across from me, nodding and bobbing his head, especially when he’d start to talk. He’d mutter, “So, so, soooo . . . ,” or suddenly burst out, “Sore! Yes! Sore da yo!”51 and sometimes he’d interrupt me and say, “Nao-chan, listen to this!” and then he’d read a page or two out loud from Heidegger.
Like I was going to understand, right? But I didn’t care. It was a lot more interesting than the stupid homework I had to do for school. We were doing direct proportions in math, and every time I saw a question like, If a train that travels 3 kilometers per minute goes y kilometers in x minutes, then . . . etc., my mind would go numb and all I could think about was how a body would look at the moment of impact, and the distance a head might be thrown on the tracks, and how far the blood would splatter. Dad’s philosophy was a lot drier and not as grotesque as my math, and who knows, even though I didn’t understand it all, maybe some of it stuck. Personally, I preferred it that Dad wasn’t spending all his time at some stupid job, or polishing his résumé in order to look for some stupid job, or sitting on a park bench in Ueno pretending to be at some stupid job and feeding the crows instead. I liked it that he’d pretty much given up on the idea of jobs altogether, and so he had free time to spend with me, even if I suspected that he would rather be dead.
6.
Speaking about free time, do you know about furiitaa?52 In Japan there’s a kind of person called furiitaa, which is someone who works part-time jobs and has a lot of free time because he doesn’t have a proper career or full-time position at a company. The reason I thought of it just now is because I’m back at Fifi’s Lonely Apron, and I happened to look up and notice that I’m surrounded by all these otaku guys who are probably all furiitaa, which is why they have the free time to sit here in between their part-time jobs, before they go home to their bedrooms in their parents’ houses. And the French maids are definitely furiitaa and just working here for the time being, until they find better jobs or sugar daddies. And the waiters and guys in the kitchen are all furiitaa, unless they are immigrants or workers from other countries. You would never call immigrants or workers from other countries furiitaa, because they never had any hope of getting real jobs in Japanese companies in the first place.
But you might be thinking, Who would want a real job in a Japanese company anyway? You’ve probably heard horror stories about Japanese corporate culture and the long working hours and salarymen who never have time to hang out with their families or hug their children and who drop dead from working too hard, which is a whole other concept.53 Compared with that, furiitaa probably sounds pretty great, but it isn’t. Japan isn’t a great place to be a free anything, because free just means all alone and out of it.
Sometimes people spell it “freeter” when they write it in English, which looks a lot like fritter, as in the expression to fritter your life away, which is what me and Dad are doing, if you ask me. I’m still young, so it’s not quite so pathetic, but I worry about my dad a lot.
Okay. Now, where was I?
Ruth
1.
A freeter, Ruth thought. That’s us. Frittering our lives away.
She closed the diary and let it rest on her stomach. Oliver was sleeping beside her. She’d been reading aloud to him when he’d fallen asleep, and rather than wake him, she continued to read silently. She knew that the hikikomori story made him uneasy. It unsettled her, too.
Their move to the island was a withdrawal. The first New Year’s Eve, they’d spent on the couch, with her mother tucked under a blanket between them, drinking cheap sparkling wine and watching the world turn 2000. The BBC was covering the millennial celebrations, tracking the time zones and slowly working its way westward around the planet. Every time a new burst of fireworks lit up the television screen, her mother would lean forward.
“My, isn’t that pretty! What are we celebrating?”
“It’s the New Year, Mom.”
“Really? What year is it?”
“It’s the year 2000. It’s the new millennium.”
“No!” her mother would exclaim, slapping her knees and falling back against the couch. “My goodness. Imagine that.” And then she would close her eyes and doze off again until the next burst of fireworks woke her, and she would sit up and lean forward.
“My, isn’t that pretty! What are we celebrating?”
By the time the new millennium finally reached their time zone, the rest of the planet had gone to bed, and Ruth had a pounding headache. We’re celebrating the End Times, Mom. The collapse of the power grid and the world banking system. The Rapture and the end of the world . . .
My goodness. Imagine that.
It wasn’t all the silly Y2K prognostications that worried her. The anxieties that fueled her withdrawal were more diffuse and unnameable, and by the end of that first year, as she sat in front of the television and watched the presidential elections grind to a close, she felt sure something horrible was about to happen. Like a small boat adrift in the fog, she caught glimpses during patches when the mist cleared of a world far away, in which everything was changing.
It was late. She put the diary aside and turned off the light. Next to her, she could hear Oliver’s breathing. A light rain pattered on the roof. When she closed her eyes, she could see the image of a bright red Hello Kitty lunch-box bobbing on the dull grey waves.
2.
In the morning, armed with a large mug of coffee, she approached her memoir with a renewed sense of resolve. A rapprochement was what was needed. An unfinished book, left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will, and ruthless determination to tame it again. She kicked the cat off her chair, cleared her desktop, and centered the stack of manuscript pages in front of her.
The cat, annoyed, jumped back onto her desk, but she swept him up in her hand, dropped him onto the floor, and then gave him a shove in the direction of the corridor.
“Go visit Oliver, Pest. He’s the one you love.”
The cat turned his back and stalked out of the room, tail in the air, as if leaving had been his intention in the first place.
Sometimes when she was having trouble focusing it helped to do timed sprints, setting short-term achievable goals for herself. Ever since Oliver had gotten the antique watch working, she’d been wearing it every day, and now she unbuckled it and slipped it off her wrist. It was just before nine. Thirty minutes of work, followed by a ten-minute break. She saw that the second hand was moving smoothly around its orbit, but she held
the watch up to her ear just to make sure. She found the ticking reassuring. It was a handsome watch, late art deco, with its black face, bold numerals, and luminous dial. The steel backing was pocked with age, but she could make out the kanji numerals—a serial number, or something else? Above the numbers were two other Japanese characters. She recognized the first one. It was the kanji , for sky. The second kanji, , looked familiar, too, but she couldn’t recognize it in the context. She opened up her character dictionary and counted the strokes. Seven. She scanned the long list of seven-stroke kanji until she found it. Hei, she read, meaning soldier.
Sky soldier?
She woke up her computer and googled sky soldier Japanese watch. Hundreds of hits came back for websites where she could watch an anime series called Sky Soldier. Not useful.
She tried antique watch, and then vintage watch, and then vintage military watch. Bingo. There was an entire world of vintage military watch collectors.
Now, making another guess, she added WWII and sky soldier, but then on a hunch, she changed the latter to kamikaze and hit RETURN. The search engine spun, and within moments she was on a community forum for military timepiece enthusiasts, reading about the provenance of the watch that she was holding in her hand, examining pictures of similar watches, learning that they were manufactured by the Seiko Company during World War II, and were favored by the kamikaze troops. For obvious reasons, although they were manufactured in large numbers, only a few survived. The watches were rare and avidly sought after by collectors. The numbers engraved on the back were indeed a serial number, not of the watch, but of the soldier who wore it.
