by Ruth Ozeki
He refused to drive and always rode his bicycle, and when it was Ruth’s turn to go, he insisted that she walk, even in the rain. Even when a storm was brewing. It was three miles.
“You need the exercise,” he told her.
The wind was beginning to pick up and the rain was coming down hard. Ruth was soaked when she got to the post office. She fished her soggy outgoing letters from her pocket and asked for stamps.
“Sou’easter,” Dora said, from behind her wicket. “Wind’s picking up. Hydro’ll be out by dinner. Good night for writing, eh?”
Dora was the postmistress, a small and deceptively mild-looking woman with a sharp tongue and a reputation for reducing her neighbors to tears for failing to pick up their mail in a timely fashion, or arriving too early before she’d finished the sorting, or simply addressing their envelopes in an illegible hand. She was a retired nurse and she wrote poetry, which she submitted in an orderly rotation to journals and literary magazines. She claimed not to like many people, especially newcomers, but she took an immediate shine to Ruth, and this was only in part due to Ruth’s subscription to The New Yorker, which, as Muriel had informed her one day when she was complaining about the magazine’s slow arrival, Dora was in the habit of siphoning off and taking home to read before delivering, belatedly, into Ruth’s mailbox. No, the real reason Dora liked Ruth was because Ruth was a fellow writer, a colleague, and whenever she came to the post office, Dora would give her an update on the status of her poetic submissions. Over the years Ruth had known her, Dora had had several poems accepted for publication in small magazines, but The New Yorker remained her holy grail, and she was steadfastly refusing to buy a subscription until they published one of her poems. This arrangement worked as long as Ruth kept her subscription current, and Dora didn’t seem to mind. She maintained that collecting rejection slips was a noble and necessary part of a poet’s practice, and she was proud of her collection. She was papering her outhouse with them, as she’d heard Charles Bukowski had done with his. Ruth admired her for admiring Bukowski.
Dora knew everything about everyone, and not only because she read people’s mail. She had an abiding and unapologetic interest in the business of others, and she was kind, too, in spite of her curmudgeonly affect. She used to dote on Ruth’s mother and brought her garish bouquets of variegated roses from her garden. She always asked after her neighbors’ health and had a stock of morphine left over from her nursing days which she would dispense when needed, when someone was injured, or dying, or needed to put down a favorite pet. She knitted layettes for the pregnant single moms on the island, and on Halloween she made cookies that looked like severed fingers for the children, with almonds for the fingernails and red icing for blood. The post office was like the village well. People lingered there, and it was where you went if you needed information.
Ruth had overcome her aversion to telephones twice that week, the first time to call Callie, and the second time to call Benoit LeBec. She had left a message, but when he didn’t call back, she figured Dora would know why.
“Oh, they’ve been away,” Dora said, hammering the stamps onto Ruth’s damp letters with the Whaletown postage canceler. She was very proud of this canceler. It was the oldest continuously used canceler in Canada, dating back to 1892, when Whaletown got its first post office.
“They’ve gone to Montreal for the niece’s wedding. They’ll be back tomorrow in time for the A meeting. What do you want with Benoit?”
Ruth took a step back from the wicket and pretended to fumble for change. She felt sure there were clues in the mysterious French composition book that would help her track down the Yasutanis, and she wanted to get it translated as soon as she could, but she wasn’t about to tell Dora this. If Muriel was bad about spreading gossip, Dora was worse. As the postmistress, she saw it as part of her job description, and Ruth was feeling oddly protective of Nao and her diary and didn’t want everyone to know. There were other people in the small mailroom, too, lingering in front of their postal boxes, pretending to read their mail—an oyster farmer named Blake, a retired schoolteacher from Moose Jaw named Chandini, a young hippie chick who used to be called Karen until she changed her name to Purity. No one was talking and everyone seemed to be waiting for her to answer.
“Oh,” Ruth said, handing Dora the money for the stamps. “Nothing, really. Just needed some help with a translation.”
“You mean that French notebook you found on the beach?” Dora asked.
Damn, Ruth thought. Muriel. There were no secrets on this goddamn island.
“A diary, too, eh?” Dora asked. “And some letters?”
There was no point in denying it. The others in the mailroom had moved closer to the wicket.
“Did it really drift over from Japan?” Blake, the oyster farmer, asked.
“Possibly,” Ruth said. “It’s hard to tell.”
“Don’t you think you should turn it in?” Chandini asked. She was a thin, nervous woman with stringy blond hair, who used to teach math.
“Why?” Ruth asked, squeezing past her and opening her postal box. “Turn it in to whom?”
“Fish and Wildlife?” Chandini said. “The RCMP? I don’t know about you, but if stuff’s washing up from Japan, I’m worrying about radiation.”
Purity’s eyes grew wide. “Oh wow,” she said. “Nuclear fallout. That would totally suck . . .”
“It’ll be a problem for the oysters,” Blake said.
“Salmon, too,” Chandini said. “All our food.”
“Totally,” Purity said, exhaling and drawing the word out long. “’Cause it’s in the air, too, and then it rains down and gets into the aquifer and like the whole, entire food chain, and then into our bodies and stuff.”
Dora gave her a look.
“What?” the girl said. “I don’t want to get cancer and have deformed babies . . .”
Blake stroked his beard and then shoved his hands into his front pockets. His eyes were bright. “Heard there was a watch, too,” he said. “A real kamikaze watch.”
Ruth flipped through her mail and tried to ignore him.
“I’m interested in that historical stuff,” he said. “You think I could see it sometime?”
It was hopeless. Ruth held out her arm, and Blake and Chandini crowded in to see, but Purity backed away.
“That could be contaminated, too, right?” she said.
“Probably,” Ruth said. “Now that you mention it, I’m sure it is.”
Dora leaned out through the wicket. “Let me see.”
Ruth unbuckled the sky soldier watch and handed it to her, dangling it by the strap. Outside, the wind was starting to howl. Dora took the watch and whistled.
“Neat,” she said, strapping it to her wrist.
“Aren’t you scared of getting poisoned?” the girl asked.
“Honey,” Dora said. “I survived breast cancer. A little more radiation isn’t going to hurt.” She admired the watch, then unbuckled it and handed it back to Ruth. “Here you go,” she said, and then she winked. “Good material, eh? How’s the new book coming?”
4.
Ruth got a lift back home with Blake in his truck, which smelled of oysters and the sea. He let her off at the foot of her road, and she ran up the long driveway to the house through the pounding rain. Gusts of wind lashed the tall firs, and the boughs of the maple trees groaned. Maple was a brittle wood. A few years back, another neighbor died when a large branch fell on his head in a storm. Widow-makers, they called them. She kept an eye out overhead as she ran. Where was the crow, she wondered.
The power had already flickered on and off, Oliver told her, so she ran upstairs to check her email. She was trying to be less ob-com about email, but more than forty-eight hours had passed since she’d written to Professor Leistiko and she was impatient for a reply. She quickly scanned her inbox. No word from the professor. What now?
She could hear Oliver in the basement, fiddling with the old gas generator, trying to fire it up
. They had a system for outages, which relied on a working generator to power several hundred meters of tangled extension cord that snaked up from the basement, delivering electricity to the freezer and refrigerator before coiling through the kitchen and up the stairs to their offices. The cords were hazardous. You could easily trip on a loop and fall down the stairs. If the generator didn’t work, they resorted to candles and flashlights and oil lamps. The generator was noisy. Without it, and without the ambient presence of appliances—the hum and whir of fans and pumps and transformers—the silence in the house was profound. Ruth liked the silence. The problem was you couldn’t power a computer or surf the Web with lamp oil.
The Internet was their primary portal onto the world, and a portal that was always slamming shut. Their access was supplied through a 3G cellular network, but the large telecommunications corporation that provided their so-called service was notorious for selling more bandwidth than it could provide. The closest tower was on the next island over, and their connection was achingly slow. In the summer, the problem was compounded by oversubscription and traffic. In the winter, it was the storms. The signal had to travel across miles of churning oceans, through densely saturated air, and then, once it reached their shores, thread its way through the tall, wind-lashed treetops.
But at least for now the Internet was working and she wanted to take advantage of it before the power went out. She consulted her growing list of keywords and clues. She typed in The Future Is Nao! The search engine returned a few unhelpful hits: some videos of an autonomous programmable humanoid French robot named NAO; a report by the National Audit Office about the importance of safeguarding the future health of the honeybee.
“Did you mean to search for: The Future Is Now?” the engine asked her, helpfully.
She did not. She knew once the power went out she might not be able to get back on for a few days, so she moved on to the next term on her list. She had already made several exhaustive searches for Jiko Yasutani, anarchist, feminist, novelist, Buddhist, Zen, nun, Taishō, and even Modern Woman, in various combinations. Now she added her new word, gleaned from her reading the night before. Miyagi. She sat back and waited.
The room had grown dark, and the glow of the computer screen on her face was the only source of illumination, a small square of light on an island in a storm. She felt small, too. She took off her glasses, closed her eyes and rubbed them.
Outside, the wind was really howling, whipping the rain in circles and making the whole house shudder and groan. Storms on the island were primeval, hurling everything backward in time. She thought of her second nun dream, recalled the old woman’s black sleeve as she beckoned, the way her thick-lensed glasses made a smear of the world. The storm did the same. And then that ghastly sensation of being cast back into nothingness, nonbeing, of reaching for her face and not finding it. The dream was so vivid, so horrifying, and yet after it was over she had slept so soundly, woken only by the nun’s light touch and the sound of a chuckle and a snap.
She opened her eyes and put her glasses back on. The wheel on her browser was still spinning, which was not a good sign. The signal wasn’t getting through, and with winds like this, it was just a matter of time before a tree fell across a power line. She was on the verge of refreshing the page and restarting the search when a bright flash lit up the monitor, or was it lightning in the sky outside? She couldn’t tell, but a moment later, the screen went black, plunging the room into darkness. So much for that.
She got to her feet and groped her way around the desk for the headlamp she kept on the shelf nearby, but just as she found it and was about to turn it on, the hard drive whirred and the screen flickered, and the blackness was illuminated by the glowing browser page with the results of the search she’d been running. Odd. She went back to the desk and glanced at the page.
It wasn’t much. One item, that was all, but it looked promising. Her heart beat faster as she read:
Results 1—1 of 1 for “Yasutani Jiko” and “Zen” and “nun” and “novelist” and “Taishō” and “Miyagi”
She sat back down, pulled her chair in closer, and quickly followed the link, which took her to the Web page of an online archive of scholarly journals. Access to the archive was restricted to academic libraries and other subscribing institutions. Without a subscription, only the article’s title, a short preview, and the publishing information were available. But it was a start.
The title of the article was “Japanese Shishōsetsu and the Instability of the Female ‘I.’ ” Ruth leaned in and read the preview, which started with a quote:
“Shōsetsu and Shishōsetsu—they are both very strange. You see, there is no God in the Japanese tradition, no monolithic ordering authority in narrative—and that makes all the difference.”
—Irokawa Budai
The term shishōsetsu, and the more formal watakushi shōsetsu, refer to a genre of Japanese autobiographical fiction, commonly translated into English as “I-novel.” Shishōsetsu flourished during the brief period of sociopolitical liberalization of the Taishō Democracy (1912–1926), and its strong resonances continue to influence literature in Japan today. Much has been said about the form, about its “confessional” style, its “transparency” of text, and the “sincerity” and “authenticity” of its authorial voice. Too, it has been cited in the blogosphere with reference to issues of truthfulness and fabrication, highlighting the tension between self-revelatory, self-concealing, and self-effacing acts.
It has often been noted that the pioneers of shishōsetsu were predominantly male. Early women writers of shishōsetsu have been largely ignored, perhaps because, in truth, there were far fewer published women writers then, as now, and perhaps because, as Edward Fowler, in his exemplary study of the genre, The Rhetoric of Confession, has written, “the energies of prominent female writers working in the 1910s and 1920s were devoted as much to feminist causes as they were to literary production.”89
This assertion, that a devotion to feminist causes has deleterious effects on literary production, is one I will address, arguing that at least one early woman author of shishōsetsu used the form in a way that was groundbreaking, energetic, and radical. For her, and for the women writers who came after, this literary praxis was nothing short of revolutionary.
This writer is unknown in the West. Born in Miyagi prefecture, she moved to Tokyo, where she became involved with radical left-wing politics. She worked with various feminist groups, including Seitosha90 and Sekirankai,91 and she wrote, in addition to political essays, articles, and poems, a single unusual and groundbreaking I-novel, entitled, simply, I-I.92
In 1945, after the death of her son, who was a student soldier and conscripted pilot in the tokkotai (the Japanese Special Forces, also known as the kamikaze), she took the tonsure and vows of a Zen Buddhist nun.
Her name is Yasutani Jiko, a woman pioneer of the “I-novel,” who has erased herself from . . .
There it was, the name, Yasutani Jiko, on the computer screen. Ruth hadn’t realized just how keenly she’d been waiting for this corroboration from the outside world that the nun of her dreams existed, and that Nao and her diary were real and therefore traceable.
She leaned forward, intent on delving into the deeper strata of information to which the preview was just the gate. She wanted to learn everything she could about Jiko Yasutani, and not just the scraps of information that surfaced so haphazardly in her great-granddaughter’s diary. She felt a keen and sudden sense of kinship with this woman from another time and place, engaged in self-revelatory, self-concealing, and self-effacing acts. She was hoping the article itself might contain a translation of at least parts of the I-novel, which she now very much wanted to read. It would be useful to get a taste of Jiko’s voice and the style of her writing.
She clicked the
. She hit the BACK button, but got the same results. The screen flickered. Quickly, she tried to navigate back and recover the original Web page, but before it could refresh, the screen went blank and the power went out, quietly this time, but definitively. She sat back in her chair. She wanted to weep. From deep in the basement she could hear Oliver cursing, as the smell of gas wafted up the stairs. The generator was broken again, and the engine flooded. Sometimes it took days for BC Hydro to fix the lines and restore service. Until then, they would remain in the dark.
5.
The next morning the power was still out, but the wind had died down and the rain had stopped. After breakfast, Oliver wanted to go collect seaweed for the garden. Seaweed made excellent fertilizer, and the beaches would be covered after a big southeaster. They loaded up the pickup with pitchforks and tarps and drove across the island. As they approached the turnoff to Jap Ranch, they started to see the cars, parked along the road.
“Lots of people with the same idea,” Oliver said.
It seemed odd, though. There were so many cars. More like a rave or a funeral than a few gardeners gathering seaweed after a storm. “I wonder if there’s something else going on,” Ruth said. “This sucks. We’re going to have to park and walk.”
They unloaded the truck and headed toward the beach. As they crested the embankment, they spotted Muriel. She was standing on the edge, looking out toward the shoreline. When she saw Ruth and Oliver approaching, she pointed. “Look,” she said.
The beach was dotted with people. This in itself was odd. Even in the summer, at the height of tourist season, the island’s beaches were never crowded and you could spend the whole day, swimming and picnicking and hunting for relics, and never see more than a handful of others doing the same.
Today, though, people were spread out at intervals all up and down the beach. Some had tarps and were collecting seaweed, but others were just walking, eyes fixed ahead, trudging mechanically back and forth. Ruth recognized a few of them. Others she’d never seen.
