The Dead Are More Visible

by Steven Heighton

  Upon meeting, the two conceived an inward affinity

  Principal Eguchi had hired me in January. She had asked me to meet her at a place called Brain Noodle. I’d wondered if, over the phone, she’d been mispronouncing “Brine Noodle” or something else, but no. When I entered, five minutes early, she rose from a stool at the sushi bar, her hands brushing her skirt as if bits of food might be clinging there, though at her place there was nothing but a glass of beer and an ashtray with a few butts of exactly even length and a fuming cigarette.

  “Welcome,” she said, splaying her hands, though not widely or ostentatiously, as if quietly indicating ownership of the restaurant as well as her school. “Please join me.”

  I was feeling buoyant. I had just arrived from tropical Singapore—where for a year I’d been teaching at an academy expressly tooled to generate dutiful, dream-free logicians—and I was finding the relative cold of Tōkyō reviving right to the marrow. And the rush-hour uproar, the near-slapstick tumult of the streets and subway: welcome changes after the embalmed order of Singapore. Energy is optimism and I was ready to start over, one more time. A fresh start might sedate the fear that my years of travel were bringing me no closer to that place where the heart of life beat strongest, and were instead stealing from me the chance of belonging anywhere. I was about to turn thirty and it struck me as old. Old, at least, to have no connections or home, no woman, no child or even niece or nephew—and young to have no parents. Mine had died in a traffic accident several years before, while I was teaching at an American school in the tea-fragrant foothills of Uttar Pradesh, near Dehradun. Paradise, I’d believed. The news had not found me for several weeks. My older brother and our relatives had not forgiven me, as far as I knew, for being so irresponsibly unreachable.

  She was tall for a Japanese woman, fit, smartly dressed. A charcoal skirt suit over a blindingly laundered white blouse. Hair back in a tight chignon. Black frame glasses of a style that would seem hip, youthful, a decade later, but at this point did not. In fact, they seemed chosen to make her look older. More formidably set apart. Her makeup was laid on thickly enough that it was hard to guess her age. Asian adults look about ten years younger than Caucasians of the same age; she looked a little over thirty. Her expression during our meeting and through the months that followed was a repeating slide show of purposeful impatience, contained anxiety, and an openness, kindness, that came in what seemed accidental leaks and which she was always quick to deal with, like something that shamed her—a tampon, a bottle of pills or other sign of carnal frailty—flipping from a purse onto a floor.

  Eguchi ordered beer for both of us without asking what I wanted. Hot sake was what I wanted but beer was fine. I was hungry and hoped we might order before discussing terms. She barged straight into them. Talking, she looked me over surreptitiously but steadily, as if interviewing not a potential English teacher but a sketch model or stunt double.

  “I have made the schedule for you. Here are your hours.”

  It should have worried me that she pronounced it “oars.” She handed me a neatly typed stack of sheets. Her fingernails were painted cerise, but clipped short.

  I scanned the top sheet.

  “So it’s true, what I’ve heard—we work Saturdays here.”

  “So it must be,” she said, “for everyone.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You will find it the same at each school. And the Saturday is a half day, with the smaller children. An easy day.”

  “Oh … are small children easy?” I was trying to be droll, to disguise my disappointment, but it sounded almost aggressive.

  “Here, yes. Especially if you are not the mother. You … don’t like children?”

  “It depends on the child,” I said frankly—an obvious mistake. Since I never settled in any place for long, I’d developed the habit of saying exactly what I thought. I’d come to expect not to know people for long. With her gaze on me narrowing, I made a recovery, as I had to—I had just a few hundred dollars to my name. “But mostly, yes, I like them. I’d even say I admire them, if that makes any sense. And like I said on the phone, I have lots of experience.”

  She made a close study of my mouth. “You have none?” she asked.

  “Pardon …? No, as I said, I have lots.”

  “Ah! And how many is lots, Sensei?”

  “Well … it depends what we’re talking about. Flights, money, continents …”I reached for a cigarette.

  “I mean children, of course.”

  “Six or seven would be lots.”

  “Six or seven! Very good, Sensei!”

  I studied her, trying to get a read. She turned to the waiter, frowned, and signalled for more beer. The brisk demeanour seemed certain to rule out any advances by Japanese men, though her air of professional competence and energy was, to a foreigner of my background, attractive.

  “I myself have none of them,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said, “no, I meant that I—”

  “But, so it goes, I do have hundreds, at the school. I think they are happy there. But we must work hard.”

  “Hai, dozo!” screamed the waiter, setting down two beers like live grenades and fleeing.

  “Is it six, then,” she asked me, “or seven?”

  I lit my cigarette and offered to light hers. “Well …”

  “Ah!” she said. “By the way, as tomorrow is the weekend, you’ll be starting.”

  Passive aggressive

  Around three months into my stay, lesson 4 introduced scads of more advanced vocabulary, including nouns such as belief, disappointment, delight, stamina, entrails, and lethality. In the next lesson, “Expressing the Tense-Future in Japanese,” I was asked to translate a number of sentences climaxing with Tomorrow at sunrise, they intend to shoot me. Lesson 5, around four months into my stay, helped me learn to manage the oft-used passive voice in phrases that built on the work of preceding lessons:

  Tomorrow it is quite possible that I shall be shot.

  Next week, perhaps, it is more likely that I shall be shot.

  By the end of next month, at the very latest, I am almost certain that I shall be shot.

  The lesson also contained some completely fresh material, like the sentence Kodomo-tachi made mo korosare-mashita: “Even the little children were slaughtered.”

  I was now sure that the authors, consciously or not, were trying to discourage their students from pursuing further study. Perhaps they hoped we would leave the country altogether. At one of my Saturday meetings with Eguchi, I did mention the book and its oddness, but in a subtle way, having learned enough about Japan that I figured specificities would embarrass her. Anyway, I couldn’t remember the authors’ names, and Eguchi was distracted by business matters, so we let it go.

  In the next lesson, toward the end of the rice-planting festival in June, casualties continued to mount and this flashcard narrative appeared: When the bombs began to fall, there was nowhere for my children to hide. Many children were left without mothers or fathers. All through the night, we searched.

  Ghost in the looking glass

  July in the schoolyard, sunlight searing through the breezy peaks of the bamboo to cast moving, ink-sketch shadows onto the asphalt. Yukon canters over and stops, dons a solemn face, takes my hand. A question is coming. In my years abroad I’ve developed into a decent linguist and my Japanese is now good enough for sustained dialogue.

  “Sensei, can gaijin have babies?”

  “Yes, they can!” I respond with enthusiasm. “That’s why there are so many of us.”

  “I don’t see many. Once I saw a black man. I was scared of him, but now I’m not.”

  “My parents had me, for instance.”

  “I never did see a gaijin with a baby. A real gaijin baby.”

  George is in my arms again, drooling against my neck; generally she requires a nap at some point during our now two-to three-hour recess.

  “Then you’ll have to go to Canada someday, to see. Maybe I’ll g
o back and you can visit me.”

  For a moment she’s pensive.

  “What are bears for, Sensei?”

  “For chasing and eating Canadian children. That’s why there are so few of us.”

  “I thought you said that there were so many?”

  “Well—I survived.”

  This Lewis Carroll logic seems acceptable to her.

  “I wouldn’t be discouraged by a bear,” she says.

  “Would anything scare you?”

  “I suppose an extremely bad dream might. Do you have bad dreams, Sensei?”

  “Yes. But I don’t remember them.”

  Silence for a moment.

  “Then how do you know you have them?”

  “I see their tracks in the morning.”

  “I dream more when Father is away,” she says, “but they’re not always bad. But he’s always away.”

  “That’s why I don’t have a baby. Because if I did, I’d be away, in Japan.”

  Through the looking glass again. She knots her brow. The frown releases in a wide, spirited grin that triggers an answering release somewhere in me. My students’ minds offer these brief, sweet truancies from my own.

  “Now we’re playing hide-and-seek, Sensei.”

  I look over toward the play equipment. Silas is haunched down on Milk Shake’s chest, apparently trying to force a handful of gravel into his mouth. In the distance we hear the mochi-cake peddler in his megaphone truck, inching through the streets, playing a mournful, minor-key jingle, like the theme of a funeral home. Tasty, tasty, mochi-cakes! The sounds and customs of another time.

  “I’ll join you,” I tell her, “as soon as George comes to.”

  “We would be so honoured,” Yukon says, bowing.

  People of the Clock

  Along with the sometimes macabre lexicon and phrases in my primer, there were dialogues at the end of each lesson that the student was meant to convert into English. Mostly these were untainted by the professors’ growing fondness for corpse-filled houses, moaning amputees, children cringing in bomb craters, executions at dawn.

  Rather than translate them, I would flip straight to the appendix to read the English versions. Sometimes I would scribble dialogues of my own in the style of the book. It helped me kill hours on the congested, weirdly silent trains I rode back and forth to Eguchi’s school and to another school where I sometimes subbed. I read and studied, if with waning discipline, because there was little else to do but be ogled impersonally or doze off on those cars full of sleepers all nodding, twitching in eerie unison as we juddered along through the gloom of tunnels or the sodium glare of stations. Mornings I was the ghost alone among hurried, solid, purposeful burghers; on the night train back, I seemed the only living thing aboard a funeral train of wraiths.

  I was aware of a tidal turn gathering somewhere within. For years I’d been in love with being an outsider. Japan, I thought, should have been my Eden, my eventual bride, and would have been, I think, had I been younger. A place I could feel I belonged forever by virtue of not belonging. Never belonging. Islands always rebuff belonging.

  But I was falling out of love with distance, absence.

  My favourite moment on the ride “home” to my tatami closet: as the train crossed under the river and climbed out of the tunnel and shot into the night, a line of huge neon billboards reared across the river like false-front structures in a midway, luminous, festooned, a corporate phantasmagoria of imagery and Japanese characters and twisted English, all mirrored in the sluggish Ara. On a towering billboard, a wry gaijin—seemingly James Coburn—sipped whiskey above a slogan set in Gothic script, as if it were a plug for a prog rock band: OF YOU DREAM, BE HANDSOME CAD, FOR YOU PARTY LIFE AND NIGHTIES OF BACHELOR FUN.

  DIALOGUE 7: SLEEPING, WAKING

  “Who knocks at the door?”

  “Open, it is I.”

  “Please accept my greetings.”

  “Are you still in bed?”

  “Why, what time is it?”

  “It has just struck eight. What time is it by your watch?”

  “It has stopped. I forget to wind it up.”

  “Come, my good man, get up!”

  “Morning sleep is so sweet. Please go away.”

  “I don’t know how you can lie so long abed!”

  “I have nothing better to do; I shall slumber a few minutes longer.”

  “But a man’s life is so brusque! Come now, up, up, up!”

  “Never.”

  “Then I shall strike you, hence, with my cane.”

  “No!”

  “Have at you, you fop!”

  “You are worse than the repeating alarm clock.”

  ——

  On the march, he felt fortunate to have come to no harm

  Eguchi was training for the Tōkyō women’s marathon, coming in mid-November. Sunday mornings I would run with her in the bamboo grove next to the school. The grove was a twenty-acre square with a black asphalt path bisecting it diagonally, and a circular track, a kilometre long, fitting just inside the perimeter. To either side of the narrow paths the bamboo rose in high, hedge-like palisades, so at dusk it was already dark. By day the light was a dim and anaesthetic green, the air almost cool. Where the track came closest to the grove’s outer edges, traffic sounds from the bordering streets were loud, yet the streets remained invisible. Eguchi—who confessed that for years she hadn’t left the vicinity of her school for more than twenty-four hours at a stretch—would finish these runs by sprinting the diagonal path to Mori Dori and into the schoolyard to check on the Sunday-morning class, taught by a gaunt, grim young Texan woman whose students were developing comic drawls, especially on words like dog and house.

  “You are not looking your best this morning, Sensei.”

  We were on our fourth slow lap. Slow, but detectably accelerating. The leaf light didn’t do much for her complexion either, but at least her face showed no signs of strain. Mine must have. I was hungover. The day before, our weekly “meeting” at Brain Noodle had continued through late afternoon, evening, and on into the night.

  In a snug salmon tracksuit with lightning-rod seams, Eguchi ran high on her toes with a silent, gliding gait, smooth but for the steam-house pumping of her arms. The lenses of her wraparound shades turned slowly toward me, seeming to monitor me as coldly as security cameras. Then they slipped down her nose, exposing liquid eyes glinting with irony. “In fact,” she said, “you resemble yellow.” She slid a finger up the bridge of her nose to push the glasses back into place. On our runs, her English gave up all its gains—the only sign of fatigue she ever showed.

  “Look,” I panted.

  “What?”

  “I look yellow. You need to let me get more sleep.”

  “And most of the aliens,” she said, “lose weight on the Japanese food.”

  “It’s not the weight. It’s the smoking. Slowing me down.”

  Eguchi smoked nearly as much as I did but it didn’t seem to affect her wind.

  “Smoking only kills the germs,” she said. “In the lungs and chest. It’s good for us. Smoking expends the capacity of the lungs.”

  “I’ve read that men gain weight. When they’re ready to settle.”

  She laughed huskily, an astonishing sound effect, one that I heard only a handful of times over the ten months I knew her. I turned my head sharply. By the time I brought her face into focus, only the shade of a grin remained.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Foreign teachers never stay. Gaijin never settle here.”

  “I’ve seen some,” I said, my voice squeezed thin and small. Lap six. Silence but for the sounds of our mutual panting, close and loud in that narrow space. “I’ve seen some married. With a house. Kids.”

  “Yet in their hearts, home is elsewhere.”

  “I didn’t say I was ready to settle.”

  “No, no. Of course not. Let us now do the wind sprint.”

  Eguchi seemed to decree these sprints whenever w
e disagreed—on politics, say, or the way I was teaching for her, especially in the juku—or maybe she did it by mischievous instinct whenever I was tired. She surged ahead now, darting with the sleek, silent efficiency of a woodland huntress, me clomping along behind like a puffy old satyr. Her tracksuit was a flattering fit. At last she slowed to a trot. I caught up. While I was still gasping, she informed me that she’d decided I was a romantic in my view of the teaching. “Like that curious German,” she said. “Dō iu hito deshō? Steinman, deshō ka?”

  “Steiner. Austrian, I think.”

  “They are one race, Sensei.”

  “We read him a bit. Teachers’ college. Thought kids shouldn’t be wakened too soon.”

  “Awakened, Sensei—in the morning?”

  “Metaphorically. Torn from a dream. Pulled into rationality too soon.”

  “Childhood is not a sleep, Sensei—not now. There’s no time for that. Ah, time!” She brought the back of her wrist to her face and frowned as she read her Swatch. “Now we do a lap at eighty percent of utter speed. Begin!”

  Lately I’d been smoking Peace cigarettes, a cheap local brand.

  “Not that I’m happy about it,” she said, raising her voice over the bellows of my breathing. “When I was a child, we spend plenty of time hunting insects with the nets. The fireflies and the semi. What is it, semi? Not the cricket …”

  “Cicada.”

  Cheap and unfiltered.

  “Your grasp is improving, Sensei … We used to bring them back from the fields and the forest and maintain them in the cage with net for walls. We used to name them and play with them like the pets. Summer nights I woke up and came outside after everyone was asleep. To sit and watch the fireflies fly in their cage.”

  She would not be willing to speak this way, I thought, if we were face to face.

  “It’s years before, Sensei. Now, it’s necessary to work harder. Everyone here. It’s just too bad, but so it must be.”

  She smiled uncomfortably. The need to work hard was neurotically national; Eguchi’s need to maintain her school in the face of throttling competition and despite being a professional freak—a lone woman boss among a million male ones—was all her own. She would not slack or stint where her business, her baby, was concerned. “There’s no help for it—so it must be.” Her fallback phrase. Shikata ga nai. And though I could now see the wisdom of occasional unromantic acceptance, surrender, I could not impose such a rueful wisdom on my students. A child is a romantic or no longer a child.