Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  A police officer was addressing the press. They weren’t like Stateside reporters; there was a pecking order—the Yomiuri and Asahi Shimbun people got the best places, the tabloids hunched down low in the back and spoke only when spoken to—gravely, taking turns, scribbling solemnly in notebooks. They all wore dark suits.

  I’d had Japanese at Berkeley, but I couldn’t follow much, so I just stood there staring at the corpse. There wasn’t a strand of that stringy blonde hair that was out of place. It was the work of an artist.

  It was the hair that jolted me into remembering who she was. So this wasn’t just another newspaper story after all.

  The snow was beginning to obliterate the artist’s handiwork—powdering down her hair, whitening away her freckles. She’d been laughing all the way from San Francisco to Narita Airport. I still had her card in my purse.

  I snapped a picture. When the flash went off they all froze and turned towards me all at once, like a many-headed monster. It’s uncanny the way they can do that. Then they all smiled that strained, belittling smile that I’d been experiencing ever since I’d arrived in Japan a week before.

  “Look,” I said at last, “I’m with the Oakland Tribune.” Suddenly I realized that there wasn’t a single woman among those ranked reporters. In fact, there were no other women there at all. It didn’t matter that what I was wearing stood out against the black-white-and-grey like a peacock in a hen coop. I was a woman; I was a gaijin; I wasn’t there.

  Presently the police officer murmured something. They all laughed in unison and turned back to their note-taking. One reporter, perhaps taking pity on me, said, “American consulate will be here soon. You talk to them.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. I wasn’t in the mood for bullshit. “Listen, folks, I know this woman. I can i-den-ti-fy her, wakarimashita?”

  The many-headed monster swivelled around again. There was consternation behind the soldered-on smiles. I had the distinct impression they didn’t feel it was my place to say anything at all.

  At that moment, the people from the consulate arrived. There was a self-important bald man with a briefcase, and a slender black woman. A few flashbulbs went off. The woman, like me, hadn’t planned on a visit to the Mayuzumi estate on a snowy afternoon. She was dressed to the gills, probably about to hit one of those diplomatic receptions.

  “I’m Esmeralda O’Neil,” she said to the police officer. “I understand that an American citizen’s been—” She stopped when she saw the corpse.

  The policeman spoke directly to the bald man. The bald man deferred to the black woman. The policeman couldn’t seem to grasp that Esmeralda O’Neil was the bald man’s boss.

  “Look here—” I said. “I can tell you who she is.”

  This time I got more attention. More flashes went off. Esmeralda turned to me. “You’re Marie, aren’t you? Marie Wounded Bird. They told us you were coming, and to take care of you,” she said. “I was hoping to meet you at the reception tonight.”

  “I didn’t get invited,” I said testily.

  “Who is she?” she said. She was a woman who recovered quickly—a real diplomat, I decided.

  “Her name’s Molly Danzig. She’s a dancer. She sat next to me on the flight from San Francisco. She works—worked—at a karaoke bar here in Sapporo— the rooftop lounge at the Otani Prince Towers…”

  “You know anything else about her, darlin’?”

  “Not really.”

  She looked at the corpse again. “Jesus fucking Christ.” She turned to the police officer and began talking to him in rapid Japanese. Then she turned back to me. “Look, hon,” she said, “All hell’s gonna break loose in no time flat; CNN’s already on their way. Why don’t you come to the reception with us?” Then, taking me by the arm so that her aide couldn’t hear her, she added, “You don’t know what it’s like here, hon. Machismo up the wazoo. I’d give anything for an hour of plain old down home girl talk. So—reception?”

  “I’m not sure … I’d feel a bit like trespassing …”

  “Why darlin’, you’ve already gone and done that! This is the Mayuzumi estate we’re standing in now … and the reception is Dr. Mayuzumi’s bash to welcome the foreign dignitaries to the Snow Festival …” I had heard of this Mayuzumi vaguely. Textiles, beer, personal computers. Finger in every pie.

  The Japanese reporters were already starting to leave. They filed out in rows, starting with the upscale newspapers and ending with the tabloids. It was only then that I noticed the man with the sketchpad.

  At first I thought he must be an American. Even from the other side of the rock garden I could see that he had the most piercing blue eyes. He was kneeling by the railing of the cloister. In spite of the cold he was just wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He had long black hair and a thick beard. He was hairy … bear-like, almost … Asians are hardly ever hairy.

  The policeman barked an order at him. He backed off. But there was something in his body language, something simultaneously deferential and defiant, something that identified him as a member of a conquered people, a kind of hopelessness. It was so achingly familiar it made me lose my cool and just gape at him. That was how my mother always behaved when the social worker came around. Or the priest from the St. Francis Mission. Or whenever they’d come around to haul my dad off to jail for the weekend because he’d guzzled down too much mniwakan and made himself a nuisance. All my aunts and uncles acted that way towards white people. The only one who never did was Grandpa Mahtowashté. And that was because he was too busy communicating with the bears to pay any attention to the real world.

  My grandfather had taken me to my first communion. Nobody else came. He knelt beside me and shouted out loud: “These damned priests don’t know what this ritual really means.” They made him wait outside the church.

  God, I hated my childhood. I hated South Dakota.

  The man stared back at me with naked interest. I hadn’t seen that here before either. People never looked you in the eye here. I had become an invisible woman. It occurred to me then that we were invisible together, he and I.

  I stopped listening to Esmeralda, who was babbling on about the social life of the city of Sapporo—explaining that it wasn’t all beer, that the shiny-modern office buildings and squeaky-clean avenues were no more than a veneer—and just stared at the man. Although he was looking straight at me, he never stopped sketching.

  “Anyway, hon, I’ll give you my card … and … here’s where the reception’s going to be … the Otani Prince Towers … rooftop, with a mind-boggling view of the snow sculptures being finished up.” Esmeralda made to leave, and I said something perfunctory about seeing her again soon.

  Then I added, “Do you know who that man is?”

  “That’s Ishii, the snow sculptor. Aren’t you here to interview him?”

  It showed how confused I’d become after seeing my fellow traveller lying dead in the snow. Aki Ishii was one of the Grandmasters on my list of people to see; I had his photograph in my files. It had been black and white, though. I couldn’t have expected those eyes.

  And he was already walking towards me, taking the long way around the cloister.

  He said to me: “Transience and beauty …” He was a soft-spoken man. “Transience and beauty are the cornerstones of my art. It was Goethe, I think, who said that all transient things are only metaphors … should we seize this moment, Miss Wounded Bird? Or is the time not yet ripe for an interview?”

  “You know me?” I said. I had suddenly, unaccountably, become afraid. Perhaps it was because there were only the two of us now … even the corpse had been carried off, and the Americans had tramped away down the cloister.

  The temperature fell even more. At last I started to shiver.

  “I know you, Miss Wounded Bird—perhaps you will let me call you Marie— because the Tribune was kind enough to send me a letter. I knew who you were at once. Something about your body language, your sense of displacement; you were that way even with your fellow cou
ntrymen. I understand that, you see, because I am Ainu.”

  The Ainu … it began to make sense. The Ainu were the aboriginal inhabitants of this island—blue-eyed neolithic nomads pushed into the cold by the manifest destiny of the Japanese conquerors. There were only 15,000 pureblooded Ainu left. They were like the Lakota—like my people. We were both strangers in our own land.

  It occurred to me that I was on the trail of a great story, an important story. Oh, covering the Festival would have been interesting enough—there’s nothing quite like the Sapporo Snow Festival in all the world, acres and acres of snow being built up into vast edifices that dissolve at the first thaw. It’s all some Zenlike affirmation of beauty and transience, I had been told … and now I was hearing the Grandmaster himself utter those words over the site of a sex murder … hearing them applied with equal aptness to both art and reality.

  “Perhaps I could escort you to the reception, Marie?” he said. Behind his Japanese accent there was a hint of some other language, perhaps German. I seemed to remember from his dossier that he had, in his youth, studied in Heidelberg under a scholarship from the Goethe-Institut. It was quaint but kind of attractive. I started to like him.

  We left the rock garden together. He had an American car—a Mustang— parked by the gate. “I know the steering wheel is on the wrong side,” he said apologetically, “but I’ll drive carefully, I promise.”

  He didn’t. The thirty kilometres back into downtown Sapporo were terrifying. We lurched, we hydroplaned, we skidded, past tiny temples enveloped in snow, past ugly postmodernist apartments, past rowhouses with walls of rice paper crammed along alleyways. Snow bent the branches of the trees to breaking. The sunset glittered on roofs of glossy tile, orange-green or cobalt blue. I was glad he was driving with such abandon. It made me think less of Molly Danzig, laughing over how she’d been fleecing the rubes at the karaoke bar, trading raunchy stories about men she had known, wolfing down airline food between giggles … Molly Danzig, who in death had become part of an ordered elegance she had never evinced in the twelve hours I had sat beside her on the plane from San Francisco.

  The reception was, of course, a massive spectacle. These people really knew how to lay on a spread. The top floor of the hotel had been converted into a styrofoam and plastic replica of the winter wonderland outside. Three chefs worked like maniacs behind an eighty-foot sushi bar. Elsewhere, cooks in silly pseudo-French uniforms sliced patisserie, carved roasts and ladled soup out of swan-shaped tureens. Chandeliers sparkled. Plastic snowflakes rained down from a device in the ceiling. You could have financed a feature film by hocking the clothes on these people’s backs—Guccis, Armanis, Diors—a few of those $5,000 kimonos. Although Aki had thrown on a stylish black leather duster, I found myself hopelessly underdressed for this shindig. It didn’t help that everyone was studiously ignoring us. Aki and I seemed to be walking around in a private bubble of indifference.

  One wall was all glass. You could see down into Odori Park, on the other side of Sapporo’s three-hundred-foot-wide main drag. The snow sculptures were taking shape. Once the Festival started they would be floodlit. Now they were ghostly hulks haunching up towards the moon. This year’s theme was Ancient Times; there was a half-formed Parthenon at one end of the park, a Colosseum in the foreground, an Egyptian temple complete with Sphinx, a Babylonian ziggurat … all snow.

  A huge proscenium filled one end of the lounge and on it stood a corpulent man who was crooning drunkenly into a microphone. The song appeared to be a disco version of “Strangers in the Night.” There was no band.

  “Jesus!” I said. “They should shoot the singer.”

  “That would hardly be wise,” Aki said. “That man is Dr. Mayuzumi himself.”

  “Karaoke?” I said. There’s only one karaoke bar in Oakland and I’d never been to it. This fit the description all right. As Dr. Mayuzumi left the stage to desultory applause, someone else was pushed up on to the stage amid gales of laughter. It turned out to be Esmeralda O’Neil. She began singing a Japanese pop song, complete with ersatz Motown gestures and dance steps.

  “Oh,” Aki said, “but this is the club where your … friend … used to work. Miss … Danzig.” He pronounced her name Danjigu.

  “Let’s get a stiff drink,” I said at last.

  We went and sat at the sushi bar. We had some hot saké, and then Aki ordered food. The chef pulled a pair of live jumbo shrimp out of a tank, made a few lightning passes with his knife and placed two headless shrimp on the plate. Their tails wiggled.

  “It’s called odori,” Aki said, “dancing shrimp … hard to find in the States.”

  I watched the shrimp tails pulsing. Surely they could not feel pain. Surely it was just a reflex. A lizard’s tail goes on jerking after you pull it off the lizard.

  Aki murmured something.

  “What did you say?”

  “I’m apologizing to the shrimp for taking its life,” he said. He looked around shiftily as he said it. “It’s an Ainu thing. The Japs wouldn’t understand.” It was the kind of thing my grandfather did.

  “Eat it,” Aki said. His eyes sparkled. He was irresistible.

  I picked up one of them with my chopsticks, swished it through the soy sauce dish, popped it in my mouth.

  “What do you feel?” he said.

  “It’s hard to describe.” It had squirmed as it went down my throat. But the way all the tastes exploded at once, the soy sauce, the horseradish, the undead shrimp with its toothpaste-like texture and its exquisite flavour … there’d been something almost synaesthetic about it … something joyous … something obscene.

  “It’s a peculiarly Japanese thing,” said the Ainu snow sculptor, “this almost erotic need to suck out a creature’s life force … I have been studying it, Marie. Not being Japanese, I cannot intuit it; I can only listen in the shadows, pick up their leavings as I slink past them with downcast eyes. But you, Marie, you I can look full in the face.”

  And he did. The way he said my name held the promise of dark intimacy. I couldn’t look away. Once again this man’s body language evoked something out of my childhood. It was my father, reaching for me in the winter night, in the bedroom with the broken window, with his liquor breath hanging in the moonlit air. And me with my eyes squeezed tight, calling on the Great Mystery. Jesus, I hated my father. Although I hadn’t thought of him in ten years, he was the only man in my life. I felt resentful, vulnerable and violated, all at once. And still I couldn’t look away. Then Esmeralda breezed over and came to my rescue.

  “You never stop working for a moment, do you, hon?” she said, and ordered a couple of odori for herself.

  I said, “What about Molly Danzig? Any word about—”

  “Darlin”, that girl’s just vanished from the universe as far as anyone can see. The press aren’t talking. Nothing on TV. Even CNN’s been put on hold for a few days. Total blackout … even the consulate’s being asked to wait on informing the next of kin … it’s that Festival, you know. It’s a question of face.”

  “Doesn’t it make you mad?”

  “Hell no! I’m a career diplomat, darlin’; this girl doesn’t rock any boats.” She bit down on the wriggling crustacean with relish. “Mm-mm, good.” No squeamishness, no regret.

  I looked around. The partygoers were still giving us a wide berth, but now and then I thought I could see stares and hear titters. Was I paranoid? “Everyone knows about it, don’t they?” I said.

  “It?” said Esmeralda ingenuously.

  “It! The murder that no one can talk about! That’s why they’re all avoiding me like yesterday’s fish; they know that I knew her. I stink of that girl’s death.”

  “It’s nothing, hon.” She took a slug of saké.

  Aki tugged at my elbow. “I can see you’re getting uncomfortable here,” he whispered. “Would you care to blow this joint, I believe that’s how you Americans call it?”

  I could see where this was leading. I was attracted to him. I was afraid of him
. I had a story to write and I knew that a good story sometimes demands a piece of your soul. How big a piece? I didn’t want to give in yet, so I said, “I’d love to see the snow sculptures. Now, when the park’s deserted, in the middle of the night.”

  “Your wish is my command,” he said, but somehow I felt that it was I who had been commanded. Like a vampire, Aki had to be invited before he could strike.

  In the moonlight, we walked past the Clock Tower, the only Russian building left on Hokkaido, towards the TV tower which dominated the east end of Odori-Koen. The park was long and narrow. Mountains of snow were piled along the walkways.

  They had brought in extra snow by the truckload. There were a few men working overtime shovelling paths and patting down banks of snow. A man on a ladder was shaping the entablature of a Corinthian column with his hands. Fog roiled and tendrilled about our feet. I didn’t ask Aki why the park and the zombie shrimp had the same name; I had a feeling the answer would unnerve me too much.

  We walked slowly up the mile-long park towards the tableau that was Aki’s personal creation—I knew from my notes that this was to be the centrepiece of the Festival, a classical representation of the Judgment of Paris.

  “What do you think of Sapporo?” Aki asked me abruptly.

  “It’s—”

  “You don’t have to tell me. It’s an ugly town. It’s all clean and shopping-mall-ridden and polished till it shines, but still it’s a brand-new city desperately looking for something to call a soul.”

  “Well, the Snow Festival—”

  “Founded in 1950. Instant ancient culture. A Disneyland of the Japanese sensibility.”

  It was not what I’d come to hear. I’d had the article half written before I’d even boarded the plane. I’d wanted to talk about tradition, the old reflected in the new. We walked on.

  People go to bed early in Japan. You could hardly hear any traffic. A long line of trucks piled high with snow stretched the length of the park and turned north at the Sosei River end. It took three hundred truckloads of snow for the average snow sculpture. The snow came from the mountains.