by Ruth Ozeki
Before he got sick and they moved to the island, he used to get grants and the occasional land art commission, supplementing their income by teaching and giving talks. After they moved, he kept up his art practice, even when he was ill. He wrote papers, participated in arts events remotely, and started projects like the NeoEocene. He traveled down to Vancouver to create an urban forest called Means of Production, growing plants and trees for local artists to use: wood for instrument makers, willow for weavers, fiber for papermakers. Wherever they traveled, he collected seeds and cuttings: ghetto palms from Brooklyn; metasequoia from Massachusetts; ginkgos, a living Chinese fossil, from the sidewalks in the Bronx. In the Driftless before 9/11 he’d collected hawthorn root stock onto which he’d grafted a medlar.
“It’s my greatest triumph!” he said, and while she cooked, he sat on the stairs and told her all about the history of the medlar, about the applelike fruits, which were best eaten rotten, in spite of their nasty, unmistakable smell.
“Kind of like sugar-frosted baby shit.”
“Nice,” she said, stirring sage into her soup.
“They’re much maligned,” he said. “In Elizabethan times, the English used to call them open-arse fruit. The French called them cul de chien, or dog’s asshole. Shakespeare used them as a metaphor for prostitution and anal intercourse. Where’s your copy of Romeo and Juliet?”
She sent him upstairs to her office to fetch her Riverside Shakespeare, and a moment later he was back, with the heavy book on his lap, reading the passage out loud.
If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.
Now will he sit under a medlar tree,
And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit
As maids call medlars, when they laugh alone.
“It’s Mercutio, making fun of Romeo for not getting it on with Juliet,” he told her.
She turned the burner down and covered the soup. “Where do you find this stuff?”
He told her about the website he’d found for medlar enthusiasts, where he’d come across the Shakespearean references. The idea for the medlar-hawthorn graft he’d found while perusing Certaine Experiments Concerning Fish and Fruite, published in London in 1600, by John Taverner, Gentleman.
“It’s a book of that gentleman’s observations of fish ponds and fruit trees,” he said, wistfully. “I would like to publish a book like that.”
He was the least egotistical man she’d ever met, nor was he particularly ambitious. His land art projects, like the Means of Production, he deemed successful only when he himself had disappeared from them.
“I want viewers to forget about me.”
“Why?” she asked. “Don’t you want credit for your work?”
“That’s not the point. It’s not about any system of credit. It’s not about the art market. The work succeeds when all the cleverness and artifice have disappeared, after years of harvest and regrowth, when people begin to experience it as ambience. Any residual aura of me as artist or horticultural dramaturge will have faded. It will no longer matter. That’s when the work gets interesting . . .”
“Interesting, how?”
“It becomes more than ‘art.’ It becomes part of the optical subconscious. Change has occurred. It’s the new normal, just the way things are.”
By his own measure, then, his work was successful, but the more successful he became, the more difficult he found it to make a living.
“I’ll never be a captain of industry,” he said, ruefully, one night when they were looking over their finances and trying to figure out how they would pay their bills. “I feel like such a loser.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “If I’d wanted a captain of industry, I would have married one.”
He shook his head, sadly. “You picked a lemon in the garden of love.”
Nao
1.
Sometimes when I sit here at Fifi’s writing to you, I find myself wondering about you, what you look like, how tall you are, how old you are, and whether you’re a female or a male. I wonder if I would recognize you if I passed you on the street. For all I know, you could be sitting a couple of tables over from me right now, even though I doubt it. Sometimes I hope you’re a man, so you’ll like me because I’m cute, but sometimes I hope you’re a woman because then there’s a better chance you’ll understand me, even if you don’t like me as much. Mostly I’ve decided it doesn’t matter. It’s not such a big deal, anyway, male, female. As far as I’m concerned, sometimes I feel more like one, and sometimes I feel more like the other, and mostly I feel somewhere in-between, especially when my hair was first growing back after I’d shaved it.
Here’s a good story about in-between. The first date that Babette set me up on was with this guy who worked for a famous advertising agency that you’d probably recognize only I can’t mention the name of it because I don’t want to get sued. He had loads of cash and suits and watches that were to die for, all the best Armani and Hermes and stuff, and Babette said she thought we would really hit it off. We would be a perfect couple. It was my first time and Babette chose him, I’ll call him Ryu, for me because he was rich but also very polite and gentle. He asked me if I wanted to go out to dinner first, but I was so nervous I thought I might throw up, so I told him I just wanted to get it over with. He took me to a nice place on Love Hotel Hill in Shibuya, and he opened a bottle of champagne and took off all my clothes. We had a bath together and he got me pretty drunk. He kissed me a lot, until I started to get annoyed, and I told him, so he stopped. He washed me all over, and he was polite enough not to say anything about my little scars or to ask for a refund on account of them.
Afterward, he dried me off and took me to bed, and that’s when I kind of freaked out. I mean, it was my first time, and I was scared because I didn’t know what to do. Probably if he’d just been an asshole and held me down and gotten on with it, I would have just gone to my silent place inside the iceberg where I can freeze out the world, and probably I wouldn’t have even noticed what he was doing to me or felt anything at all.
But Ryu wasn’t an asshole. He was being really nice and gentle, but I was too tense, and it was like trying to push a breakfast sausage through a glass window—it just wouldn’t go. Every time he tried to put it in, I started trembling and couldn’t stop, and suddenly I was overcome with sadness that was like a wave washing over me. Maybe it was the champagne making me weepy, but it hit me that here was this really nice guy who I thought would be a total jerk but it turned out he wasn’t, and he’d paid all this money for a date with me, and now just when he was hoping to have some nice virgin sex, instead he had a hopelessly weeping schoolgirl with an impenetrable vagina on his hands. I felt like such a loser. It seemed like all I could do was cry these days, first over some stupid bug wars, and now this.
He was way too polite to force me when I was crying. He sat up in bed and watched me for a while, and then he went over to the chair where his suit was laid out and he got a beautiful pressed linen handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to me to blow my nose on. Then, because I was shivering, he brought his shirt over and draped it around my shoulders. It was so soft and silky feeling, and before I knew it, I had slipped my arms through the sleeves, so he buttoned it up. The next thing was his pink silk necktie, which he tied in a lovely Windsor knot for me. Then his pants, and then the suit jacket, and by the time I was dressed in his clothes, I had stopped crying, and he took my hand and led me over to the mirror and turned me around and around to admire my reflection.
I was beautiful in his suit. He was a little bit bigger and taller than me, but really we weren’t so different. I’d taken off my wig, and under it, my head still looked pretty buzzed, which he said he liked. He said I looked just like a bishonen,144 but actually I was cuter than any boy. Honest. I swear I could have fallen in love with myself. He was standing behind me, naked, and he reached around into my breast pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes. He shook out two, put them in his mouth, and then lit them
with a classy platinum lighter that was hardly bigger than a match. He put one of the cigarettes between my lips and then went back to the bed to smoke the other one and watch me. Luckily I’d had puffs from my dad’s cigarettes before, so I knew how. I cocked my head to one side and studied my reflection. I let the smoke trail from my pouting lips, which were red and puffy from all that kissing we’d done. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him in the mirror. He lay on the bed, smoking his cigarette, and I could see he was really turned on. I turned and poured myself another glass of champagne and drank it down, and then I stubbed out my cigarette and went over to the bed and climbed on top of him.
“Close your eyes,” I said. “Pretend you’re me.”
He closed his eyes and let me kiss him for a while, and then he reached up and undid the Windsor on his pink silk tie and unbuttoned his shirt. He unzipped the zipper on his fly. He pulled down his pants and I kicked them off, but I kept his shirt on while I straddled his hips, and he guided me down, and it hurt, but only for a while.
Afterward, we lay side by side, and he lit another cigarette, and he asked me if I wanted one. I told him no thank you. Then he asked if the sex had been okay for me, and I said sure, and thanks for asking. I mean, that’s nice, right? I bet a lot of guys wouldn’t even bother.
“Did it hurt?” he asked, and I told him a little, but I didn’t mind because I have a really high pain threshold. He smiled and told me I was funny.
“How old are you anyway?” he asked, and I was just about to say fifteen, when suddenly I remembered.
“Sixteen,” I said. “I’m sixteen.”
He laughed. “You sound surprised.”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s my birthday. I almost forgot.”
He said he was sorry he didn’t have a gift for me and then gave me his slick little lighter. We had a couple more dates after that, and we always did it the same way, with me wearing his suit. Once, I made him put on my school uniform, but he looked so ridiculous with his knobbly knees sticking out from under the pleats that I got angry and wanted to hit him, so I did. I was wearing his beautiful Armani, which is a cruel suit, and he stood passively in front of me, wearing my skirt and my sailor blouse, and kept his eyes fixed on the floor. His passive attitude made me even angrier, and the madder I got, the harder I wanted to hit him. I slapped him until I was almost hysterical, and when he raised his eyes, they were so full of sadness and pity for me, I thought maybe I would have to kill him. But the next time my hand came toward him, he caught my wrist.
“Enough,” he said. “You’re only hurting yourself.”
I was wearing Haruki #1’s sky soldier watch. The old metal buckle on the watchband cut into my wrist, where he was gripping it. The skin on his face looked red and angry. I put my other hand on his swollen cheek.
“I’m sorry,” I said, starting to cry.
He brought my stinging palm to his lips and kissed it.
“I forgive you,” he said.
He really liked Number One’s sky soldier watch, and once he asked me if I would trade it for his Rolex. The Rolex had real diamonds in it. I was tempted, but of course I said no.
2.
Sometimes, after we made love, Ryu just wanted to lie in bed and drink Rémy and watch porno on the television, so I would get dressed in his suit and leave him there and walk around. Sometimes I even left the hotel, making sure I walked by the side where our room was, so he could see me from the window if he happened to be looking. He liked that.
I kept to the shadows mostly, just slouching around, enjoying being a male. Sometimes I took a cigarette from his pocket and lit it with the platinum lighter. The lighter had a little diamond in it, too. Ryu was a really classy guy, with his slim diamond lighters and beautiful suits, but he smoked Mild Seven, which is not a classy brand of cigarettes. Honestly, they taste like shit. Next time I have to remember to find a boyfriend who smokes Dunhills, or at least Larks.
If it wasn’t too late at night, sometimes I texted old Jiko at the temple, but I felt a little weird about telling her what was going on. I’d pretty much stopped sitting zazen so we weren’t really on the same wavelength anymore, and we weren’t really on the same time schedule anymore, either, since she went to bed early, and I was dating, so I stayed up late. It’s funny how time can make all the difference in whether or not you feel close to somebody, like when I moved away to a different time zone, and Kayla and I couldn’t be friends anymore. I wondered what Kayla would say if she could see me now. Maybe she would think I was cute and come on to me. That’s what happened on the street sometimes, if I kept to the shadows. Girls would think I was a host from a host club145 and try to flirt with me, and I’d have to escape before they figured out that I was a girl and got mad and beat me up for making fools of them.
You couldn’t really call Ryu my boyfriend. It wasn’t like that. We dated for almost a month, but when my hair started getting longer, he vanished. I was really starting to love him, and I didn’t know any better, so when he stopped calling I thought my heart would break. I kept asking Babette if she’d heard from him, but she said no, which may or may not have been true. Babette did matchmaking for a lot of girls, and she just shrugged and said I must have done something wrong, but other than the time I hit him, which he forgave me for, I really don’t think I did.
After that I hung around Fifi’s, sulking and listening to Edith Pilaf and Barbara, refusing to go out on any more dates until Babette finally got fed up. She said I should stop being so selfish, and I should feel grateful to her for fixing me up with such a nice, kind guy for my first time. Then she told me to cheer up or get out, and threatened to give my table to a happier girl.
3.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t grateful to her. I really was. She was my only friend, and if I couldn’t hang out at Fifi’s Lonely Apron, where could I go? My home life was a disaster. Mom had gotten a promotion at the publishing company and was now an editor, which meant she was killing herself working overtime. Dad was entering a new phase as he prepared for his third and final suicide challenge. Before, when he went through his Pretending to Have a Job Phase, and then his Hikikomori Phase, and the Great Minds Phase, and the Insect Origami Phase, you could say that at least he was interested and engaged with his insanity. Even during the Night Walking Phase and Falling Man Phase, his craziness had a focus and he was holding it together. But this time it was different. He was depressed like I’ve never seen him before, like he’d finally and truly lost all interest in being alive. He avoided any contact with me and Mom, which is a trick in a small two-room apartment. He pretended we were invisible and stayed glued to the computer screen, but sometimes, if I happened to pass him in the narrow hallway and catch his eye, his face would twitch and start to crumple with the weight of his shame, and I had to turn my head away because I couldn’t bear to see it.
Dad and I were still sharing the computer, and one day when I was searching his browser cache, I happened to find his links to an online suicide club. He had made some friends, it seemed, and they were chatting and making plans.
How pathetic is that? You can’t do it alone, so you have to find a stranger to hold your hand? And what’s worse, one of his club mates was a high school student, and he had the nerve to be trying to talk her out of suicide. I found his chat stream and read it. I mean, is that hypocritical or what? He wants to kill himself but he’s telling her that she shouldn’t? That she has her whole life in front of her? That she has so much to live for?
The idea came to me then. Maybe I wouldn’t go to Jiko’s temple and become a nun after all. Maybe I would just kill myself, too, and be done with it.
Ruth
1.
Dear Ruth (if I may call you that),
I was delighted to find your email in my inbox, and I must apologize for taking so long to reply. I do, of course, remember you from your visit to Stanford. Prof. P-L in Comparative Literature is a good friend of mine, so you need no further introduction. Unfortunately I was ju
st leaving for sabbatical at the time of your residency and was unable to attend your talk, but I trust that I will have the pleasure of hearing you read from your next book soon.
Now, in regard to your urgent query, while I feel I must still exercise some discretion regarding information told to me in confidence, I think that I can be of some help.
First, I agree that it seems likely that the “Harry” who authored the testimonial on my website is the father of the Nao Yasutani whose diary has somehow come into your possession. Mr. Yasutani was a computer scientist, working at a large information technology company here in Silicon Valley back in the ’90s. I suppose you could say we were friends, and he did indeed have a young daughter named Naoko, who could not have been more than four or five years old at the time when I first met him.
I hasten to say that I am using the past tense not from any knowledge of their outcome or fate, but only because I am no longer in touch with Mr. Yasutani and so our relationship has, regrettably, receded into the past. As you may be aware, he moved back to Japan with his family shortly after the dot-com bubble burst. After that, we corresponded sporadically by email and by phone, but little by little we fell out of touch, and it has been several years since our last exchange.
Now, let me tell you something of our acquaintance. I met Mr. Yasutani at Stanford in 1991, about a year or so after he moved to Sunnyvale. He came to my office late one afternoon. There was a knock at the door. Office hours were over, and I remember being slightly annoyed at the interruption, but I called out “Come in” and then waited. The door remained shut. I called again, and still there was no response, so I got up and went to the door and opened it. A slight Asian man carrying a messenger bag was standing there. He was dressed somewhat casually in khaki pants, a sports jacket, and sandals with socks. I thought at first that he might be a bike courier, but instead of handing me a package, he bowed deeply. This startled me. It was such a formal gesture, at odds with his casual dress, and we are not accustomed to bowing to each other at Stanford University.
