Mismatch

by Lensey Namioka

  Andy, who had helped himself to the most samples, agreed. He suddenly pointed. “Hey, there’s a Starbucks over there!”

  Sue felt a sudden stab of nostalgia but fought it down. They had not come to Tokyo to have coffee at Starbucks. “Aren’t there Japanese coffee shops, too?” she asked Haruko.

  “Of course there are!” snapped Haruko. “We had coffee shops long before you had Starbucks.”

  They followed Haruko to the next block, where they found a café with dishes of food displayed in the window: spaghetti, hamburgers with French fries, a plate of yellow rice with little bits of stuff embedded, and tiny sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Haruko told them the display was made of plastic, but the food looked very realistic.

  They sat down at a corner table and ordered some drinks. Andy ordered a cup of coffee, while Sue ordered one of the bubble teas, a tall, milky drink containing little balls of tapioca. She looked around at the walls, which had posters of comic book characters. “I recognize some of these manga characters.”

  “Do you have manga in America?” asked Haruko.

  “Of course we do!” said Sue. “Comics started in America.”

  “Actually, comics started in Japan,” said Andy. “According to my dad, a Japanese artist painted a series of comic episodes, which he titled ‘Animal Frolics.’ The artist was a twelfth-century monk living in Kyoto.”

  Sue’s astonishment was nothing compared to Haruko’s. The Japanese girl’s jaw dropped, and she stared at Andy as if seeing him for the first time. “Your father knows Japanese paintings?” she asked Andy.

  “Sure!” said Andy. “He likes black-and-white ink paintings the best.” He smiled at Sue as he added, “Like your mother’s paintings.”

  As Haruko thoughtfully sipped her drink, Sue studied the menu posted above the counter. She suddenly realized something. “Hey! Most of the items are in English!”

  Before coming to Japan, Andy had taught Sue to read katakana. It was one of the two Japanese phonetic writing systems, the one used to write all foreign expressions. The katakana system has only forty-six symbols to learn. Sue was able to learn them and sound out words after only a couple of days.

  Now, looking at the menu, Sue began to pronounce the words. “Aisu kurimu,” she read. “It means ice cream!” she cried triumphantly.

  Andy studied the menu. “You’re right! Kohi must be coffee, so kohi miruku must be coffee milk, or latte!”

  It was fun. Sue immediately got hamu sandoichi, ham sandwich, but she had trouble with omuraisu. Andy laughed and pointed to the next table, where a woman was eating some rice covered with egg. “It’s omelet rice,” he said.

  But kare raisu baffled even Andy, until Haruko explained that it meant curry rice. Sue realized that it must have been that plate of yellow rice she had seen in the window.

  Sue and Andy had great fun translating the rest of the menu, but Haruko was not amused. “You make fun of Japanese because we use foreign words. But you do, too. Isn’t latte Italian?”

  Andy raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. We’re all guilty.” He looked around the coffee shop. “You know, I’m getting a little tired of modern Tokyo. I don’t really feel that this”—he pointed at the espresso machine, the ham sandwiches, the plates of spaghetti, the Anglicized menu—“is where my people originally came from. Where’s the real Japan?”

  “What do you mean by the real Japan?” demanded Haruko. “You mean you want to see scenes from a samurai movie? If that’s what you want, we’d better go to the Toho movie studio. They have tours, you know.”

  “I just want to see what’s typically Japanese,” muttered Andy.

  “Then tell me what’s typically American,” said Haruko. “Cowboys and Indians?”

  Somewhat to her surprise, Sue found herself siding with Haruko. “Some tourists going to China think that old women with bound feet sitting around playing mahjongg is typical.”

  “Maybe what I really want is to see the things my father likes to talk about,” said Andy.

  “All right,” said Haruko, sounding a little calmer. “What sort of Japanese things does your father talk about?”

  Andy was silent as he thought. He added more sugar to his coffee and stirred. “The more traditional things, I guess.”

  Sue suddenly remembered a picture she had seen in a travel magazine. She turned to Haruko. “There’s this Buddhist temple with a huge paper lantern. I thought it looked amazing. Do you know the one I mean?”

  “I think you mean Asakusa Temple,” said Haruko. “But it’s in an old-fashioned part of town.”

  “An old-fashioned part of town is exactly what I want to see,” Andy said quickly.

  “Oh, all right,” sighed Haruko. She didn’t seem at all enthusiastic. “We’ll have to take the subway. Let’s go.”

  12

  Andy found the Tokyo subway system really easy to use. There were diagrams at all the stations, with the name of each stop as well as the names of the previous stop and the next stop. Haruko nudged them to get out at the Asakusa station.

  The minute they hit the street, Andy felt a different vibe. Here, the streets were narrower and more crooked, and were lined with smaller shops. Instead of big, modern multistory buildings with huge glass windows, the buildings here were mostly one or two stories. It was as crowded as the modern area, but here the crowd seemed to move more slowly. Another difference was that most of the people were either old or very young.

  “I guess teenagers don’t hang out here much?” asked Andy.

  Haruko sniffed. “Too many country people here.”

  Andy frowned. I guess a sophisticated city girl like you wouldn’t want to be caught dead in a neighborhood full of country people.

  Haruko led them to a long pedestrian walk lined with stalls on either side. “This is Nakamise,” she said. “It leads to Asakusa Temple.”

  The stalls were selling a multitude of objects, some familiar, some unfamiliar. There were paper fans, spinning tops, pencil cases, wooden swords . . .

  Andy grinned when he saw a stall selling goldfish from a tank, and a little kid trying to catch one with a scoop made of paper. “Hey, I remember my dad telling me about this!”

  “How can that kid possibly catch a goldfish that way?” asked Sue. “The paper will break up in the water.”

  Andy watched the unsuccessful efforts of the little kid. “You have to be really good to catch the fish before the paper breaks.”

  He decided to try for a goldfish. It was harder than he thought, but on his third try, he did it! The man at the stall handed him his goldfish in a little plastic bag full of water.

  “How are you going to get that fish past security at the airport?” asked Sue. “They’ll think it’s some sort of new weapon.”

  Andy laughed. He presented his prize to the little boy who hadn’t been able to catch a fish. He could have spent all day browsing along the Nakamise. It was a lot more fun than looking at dresses in a department store.

  He heard a gasp from Sue. “Look at that gate!”

  In front of them was the main gate of the Asakusa Temple. They stared, stunned by the sheer size of the gate and the paper lantern. Andy, who was taller than average in Japan, now felt like a midget.

  Sue broke the silence. “It’s way more impressive in real life.”

  Andy took his camera out of his backpack. “Can you stand over there, under the lantern?” he said to Sue and Haruko.

  He snapped several pictures of the two girls by the gate, then took several of them in front of the main hall of the temple, and a few more next to the pagoda. Haruko began to object. “I didn’t know you even had a camera. Why didn’t you take pictures earlier?”

  “I didn’t need pictures of stores and arcades and coffee shops,” said Andy, who thought the answer was obvious. “I want to bring home pictures of . . . of . . .”

  “Pictures of the real Japan,” said Haruko, sneering. “Pictures of what you heard your father talk about. Just like tourists
in America want pictures of cowboys and Indians.”

  Here we go again. But Andy was too interested in the neighborhood to waste time fighting with Haruko. “Come on, let’s explore.”

  As they wandered through the narrow streets, Andy saw an old woman wearing a plain blue and white cotton kimono. The kimono was nothing like the brightly colored silk ones they had seen in the department store. The old woman wore white cotton socks, and her feet were thrust into zori, thong sandals. She walked in small steps, with her feet pointing slightly inward. Andy couldn’t resist taking a picture of someone who looked like, well, his great-grandmother—or what he imagined his great-grandmother to be.

  A teenage boy hurried up to the old woman and handed her a small wrapped package. “Here you are, Grandma,” he said. At least that was what Andy thought it sounded like. Then the boy opened up a parasol and held it over his grandmother’s head as they walked.

  “Did you see that?” Andy whispered to Sue, pointing at the two figures. He couldn’t picture himself going out on a Sunday afternoon with his grandmother. But he could picture Sue walking with her grandmother, holding a parasol over her head. I’ve got to figure out a way to deal with Sue’s grandma.

  “Soup!” Sue suddenly yelled.

  Andy turned and saw that she was pointing at two wooden doors with big Chinese characters painted on them.

  “Why are there separate doors for men and women, if they’re going in there to have soup?” asked Sue.

  Haruko broke into giggles. Andy peered at the characters and tried to remember the lessons he had taken years earlier. Suddenly he understood, and started laughing, too. “This is yu, the character for hot water, not soup,” he told Sue. “So we’re looking at a public bath-house, not a soup kitchen.”

  “Oh,” said Sue in a small voice. “Well, this is the character I learned in my Chinese class for ‘soup.’ I guess the characters changed meaning when they were exported to Japan.”

  “Or they could have changed meaning in China, and stayed the same in Japan,” said Andy. “Hey, want to try this public bath?”

  Sue grinned. “But there are separate baths for men and women. That’s no fun!”

  Haruko spoke up. “These public baths are used by mostly neighborhood people, and not by many strangers.”

  The way Haruko emphasized the word “neighborhood” reminded Andy of something his mother had told him: in feudal days, Tokyo was divided into two parts. The Upper Town was occupied by the shogun, lords, and samurai. The Lower Town was occupied by shop-keepers and workers. Since the Satos were descended from a samurai family, Andy suspected that Haruko was reluctant to visit this neighborhood not only because it was old-fashioned, but also because it was in the Lower Town. As they turned a corner, Andy smelled something like burnt sugar. It came from a little cart pushed by a skinny old man. Andy suddenly realized that he was hungry. It had been a long time since they had eaten the samples in the department store. “What is he selling?” he asked, pointing to the cart.

  “Roasted yams,” said Haruko, wrinkling her nose. “I haven’t had them for years.”

  Andy associated roasted yams with Thanksgiving dinners. Although the smell was tantalizing, he was too hungry for yams. “Let’s look for someplace to have lunch.”

  A couple of blocks down, they came to a street lined with cafés, mostly tiny places serving a dozen people, tops. There were plastic displays in the windows, but Andy could see that the dishes were different from the ones in the trendy Shibuya café. Instead of dainty sandwiches, spaghetti, and hamburgers and French fries, the displays here were mostly noodle soup, fried noodles, or rice dishes.

  In one of the eateries, Andy saw the yellow kare raisu, curry rice. He wanted to give it a try. “Let’s go in here,” he said to Sue.

  Haruko made a face but followed them in. It was a tiny place, with barely enough room to maneuver in. They inserted themselves into some seats and gave their orders.

  The two girls ordered soup noodles. “I want to try some ramen that isn’t instant,” said Sue.

  Sue’s bowl of noodles turned out to look so good that Andy was sorry he had ordered the curry rice, especially when he discovered that the little brown chunks in his rice turned out not to be meat but something rubbery. Sue and Haruko busily slurped their noodles. Andy knew that if Sue had been eating spaghetti in Hero’s, she wouldn’t be slurping. But here in Tokyo, it felt right— especially when a really loud slurp reached his ears from the table behind him.

  “Do the Chinese slurp when they eat noodles?” he asked Sue, before he could stop himself.

  Sue looked up from her bowl and grinned at him. “Of course! We invented the slurp.”

  “Sure, sure,” said Andy, “just like you invented everything else.”

  “Paper, printing, gunpowder . . . you name it,” said Sue. From her bowl she picked up a small slice of something striped in pink and white. “What’s this? Whatever it is, it tastes good.”

  “It’s made of fish paste,” said Haruko, whose soup noodles contained slices of barbecued pork. “I don’t like it very much.”

  “Because it’s traditional, right?” said Andy. It bugged him how Haruko automatically put down anything traditionally Japanese.

  Haruko threw down her chopsticks with a clatter. “Look, I know you were hoping to see the Japan your father described. But we can’t stay the same forever, you know. America has changed, so why can’t Japan change, too?”

  Andy poked at his plate of curry rice. He struggled to put his thoughts into words. “Look, I’m not saying that I expect Japan to be like a museum,” he said finally. “You have new things, cell phones, video game arcades, shopping malls, and stuff. I’m okay with that. But what I don’t like is the way you want to throw away all the old stuff. Don’t you care about your cultural heritage at all?”

  The minute he used the phrase “cultural heritage,” Andy realized that he sounded like his social studies teacher. From the smile on Sue’s face, he saw that she realized it, too.

  Haruko picked up her chopsticks again and fished around in her bowl for stray bits of pork. After a moment she looked up at Andy. She seemed genuinely puzzled. “You mean you want to think about your Japanese heritage, even when you’re living in America?” she asked.

  “Yes, I do,” said Andy. When he returned home, he wanted to bring with him memories of the Satos’ Japanese-style garden, the calm face of the Buddha at Kamakura, and the huge lantern at the Asakusa Temple.

  “I think about my Chinese heritage a lot,” said Sue. “We eat Chinese food at home, mostly. My mother insists that I learn some Chinese writing, too. In fact, knowing Chinese characters has been pretty useful here in Japan.”

  “Except when you’re wondering why there are separate soups for men and women,” said Andy. He and Sue grinned at each other.

  Haruko suddenly broke in. “I think the reason we don’t talk about our cultural heritage is because we’re surrounded by it! But you keep thinking about your Asian cultural heritage because you’re a Japanese American, surrounded by real Americans.”

  Andy had to bite his lip to keep from saying something nasty. Real Americans? How many more times am I going to have to hear that? Haruko had obviously been hoping to get a white kid from Lakeview, instead of a Japanese American like himself. To her, he was only a second-rate American, and she felt cheated. “Haruko, Americans—real Americans—come in all sizes and colors!” he snapped.

  Haruko just looked at him blankly over her soup. Andy could see that he hadn’t convinced her. To her, he wasn’t a real American, and he wasn’t a satisfactory Japanese, either. He wore his toilet slippers into the rest of the house and put the wrong side of his kimono on top. He was a complete loser, as far as she was concerned.

  They ate in silence for a few minutes. Sue turned to look at a table next to theirs, occupied by four teenagers. They were all frantically typing into their cell phones with their thumbs, instead of talking to one another. “Do you send messages to your
friends, too?” she asked Haruko.

  “Of course! Don’t you?” said Haruko.

  “Well, I talk to them on my cell phone sometimes,” replied Sue, “but typing messages is too much work.”

  “That’s because you have old-fashioned machine. My cell phone is much better,” said Haruko triumphantly. She pulled her machine out and showed it to Sue and Andy. He noticed that it had a full keyboard, instead of a number pad that you had to punch several times to get the right letter.

  “In some areas we’re ahead of you,” said Haruko. “See, we don’t always copy other countries!”

  “Well, I still don’t see what’s so great about typing messages to my friends when I can just talk to them on the phone,” said Sue. “Don’t you talk to your friends?”

  “Sure, at school. But all my friends type messages,” said Haruko.

  “What happens when someone wants to be different?” asked Andy.

  Haruko frowned. “There is old saying in Japan: the nail that sticks up is the one that gets pounded down,” she said.

  “Well, in America, I guess it’s okay to be different, to stick out,” said Andy. “In Japan, you’re all descended from the same ancestors, so everyone looks the same. But in America, we’re all immigrants.”

  Haruko shook her head. “You are an immigrant, of course, but the white people, the real Americans, are not immigrants!”

  Andy felt his face burn with anger. “For your information, Haruko, everybody in America is an immigrant, except for the Native Americans. Even they came from Asia across the Bering Strait, according to my mother.”

  His lecture made no impression on Haruko, who continued to look scornful. Andy jerked his thumb at the next table, where three of the four kids had dyed hair. “Why do so many of you dye your hair red, blond, or brown? Is it because you want to look Caucasian? I think it’s pathetic!”

  Haruko bristled, and even Sue looked embarrassed. “Dyeing our hair is just a fashion,” snapped Haruko. “Fashions come and go. Don’t you have fads in America, too? I hear that some American kids even have tattoos!”

  “You know, I haven’t seen any kids with tattoos here,” said Sue. “Don’t you have them?”