by Yoko Tawada
To Amo women were phantoms, formless as mist, floating up without warning from the depths of memory to caress his skin, only to disappear without telling him their names. But then one day, a woman who was all too real appeared before him. She was the eldest daughter of a noble family said to be related to the Russian aristocracy; they were introduced at a ball held at the Duke of Braunschweig’s residence. When Amo saw her eyes, carved like diamonds, the air withdrew from his lungs. Those were the eyes of the women in the illustrated Bible stories he had learned his letters from as a child. The lady acted extremely reserved, for when spoken to she would only nod ever so slightly, or cover her mouth with her hand. Realizing that Amo was watching her, she looked his way from time to time with the hint of a smile on her lips. She’s the embodiment of those Bible pictures, Amo repeated to himself. The folds in her evening gown seemed to express themselves far more delicately than the folds in other women’s dresses, though even when her body moved, they remained perfectly still. The folds were trying to tell him something. Breathless, Amo clasped his hands over his ears.
Later that night, Amo had a bout of diarrhea and a fever. The next day he felt no better. He stayed in his room, and if he opened his books it wasn’t to read but to pound them again and again with his fists, or caress the pages with sweaty hands, sighing all the while. He lost his appetite, and even the fat goose that Marguerite had used all her feminine wiles to persuade from the farmer was left untouched. Some days later, still dizzy from lack of sleep, Amo was on his way to his lecture when a carriage suddenly appeared, barreling straight for him. He managed to stumble over to the side of the road; the driver raised his whip, showering him with curses. A face peered out at the fracas. It soon retreated, though not before he saw that it belonged to the Russian lady. For one brief moment, she stared straight at him.
His fever turned from bad to worse. The entrance to his stomach closed, and he couldn’t eat a thing. When someone spoke to him he tried to listen but a different voice flitted around his face like a fly, and though he could feel the other person staring at him in disbelief, he simply couldn’t continue the conversation. To Marguerite’s worried inquiries he could only answer that he thought something must be wrong with his stomach. If this obsession continued he would be trapped in an emotional cul-de-sac, and there was no telling what might happen next. Amo decided to write her a letter. The late Professor Ludwig had praised his handwriting, so he had nothing to worry about in this respect. He was confident in his literary style as well. After all, he wrote poetry. When he dipped his pen in the inkwell, a calm passed over him. After the first word he wrote, “Dear…” he thought he saw his alter ego in both the shaky lines and the bold sweeps of the pen, and his heart beat faster. “Dear…” “Dear…” He wrote the word over and over again but he could go no further. Even though he knew the lady’s name, he was afraid to write it down. Once he did, he felt his secret would be known to the entire world. When her name was finally on the paper, he was faced with the problem of the opening line. “In meditative wisdom the totally awakened mind tirelessly seeks the foundations of knowledge, and nobly…,” he wrote, and then realized that this was not a love letter. It was the soul he must write about, not the mind. Surely the young lady must have a soul, too, he thought, but this intensified his worries. For what if her soul left her body at night to fly around town, and was captured by bad dreams?
“I constantly pray that your soul stays with you, day and night,” Amo wrote. Unable to think of anything else to say, he signed his name and put the letter in an envelope. Though Marguerite delivered most of his messages, he could hardly entrust her with this one. There were no friends he felt he could rely on, either. He decided to sneak into her mansion late at night and hand it to her himself. If they were the only ones in the room, it would remain their secret. A chill crawled up the back of Amo’s neck. He could see quite well in the dark. He never fell down and skinned his nose after a late night drinking in a tavern the way his colleagues did. There was a garden behind the lady’s house with a wall around it that looked easy enough to scale. Thinking only of the moment when he’d be standing before her, he wore his best trousers, and unable to spread his legs far enough apart, he nearly fell from the top of the wall. The letter was safe in his breast pocket. He patted it twice for good luck before sneaking across the garden. A candle flickered in the second-story window. If he stood atop the railing at the back door, he would be able to reach the balcony. Then he’d only have to pull himself up. He peered into the kitchen through a tiny window around back, but it was pitch-black and he couldn’t see anything. Balancing himself on top of the railing, he was cautiously reaching for the balcony when he heard the sound of a wild beast running through the grass behind him. Instinctively, he twisted around and was about to jump down when a club struck him hard below the knees. With a high-pitched scream, Amo fell to the ground. Since he had rounded his back, he felt no pain when he rolled onto the grass, but before he could get up, a man stood over him, hitting him with a club. A kick in the belly brought a bitter-tasting liquid up his throat, a blow to the nose started the blood flowing, and a punch in the jaw pushed his face into the mud as his spine was beaten like a washing board.
If that had been all, Amo might have recovered fully after a long rest. But when he heard from Marguerite that the whole town was talking about how he had tried to attack the young lady in her bedroom, he took to his bed. The lady herself was wailing that the incident had cast a blemish on her life from which she would never recover. Amo felt that his soul was about to set out on a long journey away from the land of the Bad Spirits.
A year after Amo left for the African continent, his love story was being performed as a wildly popular puppet drama. A shadowy character named Hans was turning real-life incidents into outrageous spectacles that drew huge crowds. In Hans’s version, Amo was a lion who escaped from the jungle, and drooling profusely as he tried to seduce the young lady, she ran away shrieking. A huge tongue drooped wantonly from the lion’s mouth like a banana. The sight of the tongue made the audience laugh until they choked. Fortunately, Amo was no longer there. Marguerite saw him off, and the following day returned to the village of her birth. The young lady spent some time in bed with a fever. Upon her recovery, she set out for the home of distant relatives in Russia.
IN FRONT OF TRANG TIEN BRIDGE
One day a letter with a strangely alluring stamp the color of a cock’s comb was delivered to Minamiyama Kazuko. The paper inside, folded into a tight square, crackled like radio static when she forced it open. The letters on the page were finely etched, faded as a fresco on a wall long exposed to the elements, and as she struggled to make each one out Kazuko grew more curious about who had written them than what they said. The harder she looked the dimmer the handwriting became until finally she noticed the return address.
It was a mesmerizing word slashed out in bold strokes with a magic marker onto a crude handmade sign that was propped precariously in a corner on the college campus. More than a country’s name, it was rage itself in graphic design, and because Kazuko feared politics like a disease, a curtain lowered in her mind whenever she saw it. She would veer off to one side to avoid the word, but it would always be too late. A student in a polo shirt the color of withered grass would jump out from behind the sign with a wide-open mouth. The girl who started expounding on “the kousei hanminh of mailan” would be a boy by the time the part about “we must konsen the meiroku of hantaku” came around. Whenever hordes of students with narrow hips, trembling fingers, vacant eyes, and androgynous flat shoes were hounding Kazuko with Chinese characters, the enigmatic word, Vietnam, would always appear on a sign nearby.
There was no reason why Kazuko should be receiving a letter from Vietnam. A friend from college used to teach Japanese at a university in Hué, but she was back in Tokyo now. And besides, her name was not Hisayama Mika. Since Kazuko didn’t know anyone by that name, it was Vietnam that filled her mind and drove her heart farther
and farther south across its border. The name Champa had once slipped out of the pages of a World History textbook and tumbled straight into her pocket. But she no longer owned the book and couldn’t even remember which Chinese characters formed the word. Chanting Champa, Champa… brought back the delicious feeling of release she felt when she passed her entrance exams and threw her old textbooks away, though the college she had studied so hard to get into she dropped out of long ago.
There was nothing to do but read Hisayama Mika’s letter. “I was so happy to get your postcard. I think it’s wonderful that you’re making a name for yourself as a journalist in Europe—a continent so near and yet so far. I, myself, found nothing in Paris. I ended up traveling all the way to Hué with a Vietnamese friend. Please come visit me if you like.”
Kazuko remembered a red curtain, a dark dusty corner behind the curtain, the stench of old running shoes, so worn they were about to fall apart. The place was suddenly so close she could have been there yesterday. In Paris, covering an international dance festival, an Asian girl crying backstage. The girl was in her mid-twenties, had squarish eyes, and though her jeans looked brand-new, there hardly seemed to be legs or hips inside them. They talked during the half hour it took to set up the lighting for the rehearsal, and ended up exchanging addresses. So that was Hisayama Mika, Kazuko thought, and at the same moment the name Cambodia materialized in her mind. Once, in a dream, a person with a megaphone for a mouth repeatedly screamed this country’s name at her, nailing her to the spot where she stood in front of a train station. Instead of a stomach, the figure had a box with a slot for coins. Crying for help, Kazuko yelled Champa! Champa! over and over again. She often had similar dreams, like trying in vain to catch a train on the Yamanote line. If I can’t get on here I’ll get on at the next station, she’d think to herself but when she arrived she’d see a sign for Laos. It was a name she had never heard before.
“If you ever go back to Japan, why not stop in Hué on the way? It’s only an hour by plane from Ho Chi Minh City. If you do come, there’s someone I want you to meet. She’s majoring in physics at the university, and she looks exactly like you, Kazuko. If I said you two were identical twins, I’m sure everyone would believe me,” Hisayama Mika wrote.
Kazuko had no memory of bumping into another lump of flesh in the womb. Here in Berlin, however, there seemed to be twins everywhere she looked. She saw twins asleep in double baby carriages, and Vietnamese twins holding the left and right hands of their German foster mother. Kazuko couldn’t imagine herself as one of such a pair. She retrieved the enormous world atlas from the shelf and opened it on her desk. China filled the whole left side of the Asian page, while the color of the sea covered most of the right. The fluorescent light reflected off the shiny surface of the map, making it impossible to read any of the countries’ names. The day before, she interviewed a Mr. Ohsawa, a former music student, in the sushi bar he recently opened. Showing her an inside-out roll, he said, “See? Rice doesn’t need to be wrapped in seaweed; the grains stick together just fine even when on the outside. The nori stays curled up inside.” She slipped a copy of Writing on the Wall Without the Wall, the complementary newspaper piled up on the counter, into her bag. Apparently, the newspaper was published by the Japanese community in Berlin, though Kazuko had never heard of it before. Here, too, she found the word Vietnam. “Recently neo-Nazi and other right-wing groups have been brutally attacking the Vietnamese. To avoid cases of mistaken identity, we Japanese must always wear glasses and neckties. Women should put on as much jewelry as possible, and be sure to carry a brand-name handbag. And let’s all be careful never to use the subway or other forms of public transportation.”
The inside-out roll does not let the teeth penetrate the paper-like texture of nori first before chomping into plump, sticky rice. Hard enamel quickly sinks through the soft white grains to encounter a chewy wad of seaweed so tough it seems like a will that can never be broken.
Kazuko thought of going to Vietnam two years earlier, but her passion for travel wasn’t strong enough at the time. Wandering through a luggage sale in a department store she was more likely to picture herself sitting with one butt cheek resting on a suitcase in a corner of her room as she stared into space, than actually carrying one. Though she might have traveled somewhere to cover a story at the instigation of her editor, she wouldn’t have simply set out on a whim. Now her travel fever was a serious infection. It made her buy airline tickets with money she couldn’t spare, emptying her savings account, and the long-forgotten name Ho Chi Minh reverberated in her ears. Kazuko’s fingers seemed too long and too thin to her, so as she put her hands on her desk she instinctively curled them under. Perturbed by the smallness of her feet, she always wore pointed shoes.
“The German lit. people are getting together for yosenabe next Friday. You want to come?” a foreign student named Kaneda asked Kazuko over the phone. Bristles of beard sprouted in the breaks between his words. Kazuko answered automatically, “I can’t. I’ll be traveling,” but realizing that the word “traveling” sounded so affected it was almost funny, she quickly added, “Sightseeing.” “Exactly where are you going?” he inquired confidently. “To Southeast Asia.” To be more specific and say, “Vietnam,” would have been embarrassing, like letting him in on a secret. “What? And when did you decide that?” Kaneda asked heatedly, as if he couldn’t forgive Kazuko for having made up her mind without consulting him. You’d think we were married, she mused with a wry smile. They were neither lovers nor even close friends.
I’m a member of the tourist race, thought Kazuko. Tourists will go anywhere without being asked. They can get interested in anything and forget everything as soon as their trip is over; they’ll skip meals to buy train tickets, return home whining that they’re so tired they’ll never take another trip ever again, and the following day have their maps spread out, wondering where to go next.
While shopping in Wilmersdorfer Strasse the following day, Kazuko stopped at a travel agency to reserve a seat on a flight to Ho Chi Minh City. A big-breasted woman, planted firmly in front of the flower shop next door, brandished a bunch of green stems at her. Kazuko felt an itch between her fingernails and the flesh underneath. She had to get to Vietnam. When she asked, “Can you get me a visa?” the travel agent adjusted his glasses and inquired cautiously, “Do you need one?” He’s mistaken me for a Vietnamese going home for a visit, Kazuko thought, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to say, “Yes, because I’m Japanese.” How could she claim to be Japanese when she wasn’t wearing a single piece of jewelry or even carrying a brand-name handbag? she asked herself, nearly cracking up. If there was a Vietnamese woman called Ms. A returning home, it would have been easier to imagine herself being Ms. A. “I don’t have Vietnamese citizenship so I need a visa,” she explained. “Are you a German citizen?” Perhaps the man thought she was a war orphan some German couple had adopted, on her way to see her native country for the first time. “So, you have German citizenship, do you?” the travel agent queried again. “No, I do not have German citizenship. I also do not have Vietnamese citizenship. I need visa.” Say there was a Japanese woman called Ms. B whose grammar crawled out the window whenever she got mad. That woman might very well be Kazuko.
Kazuko couldn’t say for sure whether or not she dreamed in color. She didn’t think dreams had smells. Nevertheless, she recently had a very smelly dream. Some part of her body—she couldn’t tell exactly which—was spread out like a loaf of Turkish flatbread. The tail, eyes, and guts of a fish were buried in this flesh-bread. The whole thing looked rotten, and even if it wasn’t, it was repulsive: the carcass of a fish torn to pieces, then stuffed into a lump of human meat. She could neither believe that the bread belonged to her, nor give it a name.
“I’ve decided to go to Vietnam. I’ll be away for about three weeks, so could you look after my cat while I’m gone?” Kazuko asked her friend Marianne. Though she didn’t mind taking care of the animal, Marianne had no idea what to d
o with Vietnam, this new country Kazuko had suddenly thrust upon her. “You’ll be going to Japan, too, won’t you?” Marianne asked somewhat resentfully. After finally making Japan sound like a real place, Kazuko had no right to confuse her this way by bringing up a different name altogether. “Why go to Japan? It’s 3,000 kilometers away from Vietnam, you know.” Like a thief stomping boldly around her room, knowing her stolen antiques are safely hidden in the basement below, Kazuko added hotly, “Do you how far that is? If you started in Berlin, you’d wind up in the middle of Africa.” This had as much effect on Marianne as a swat on the cheek from a child’s balloon. Why talk about thousands of kilometers when Asia was all in the same place? Marianne asked another question, one Kazuko was sick of hearing: “But don’t you get homesick?” “Not for Japan I don’t. It’s the Pacific Ocean I miss,” she replied, and immediately a chill of disgust ran down her spine. Pacific—this word that popped out of her mouth without thought—sounded terribly pathetic. Willfully crying its eyes out, the Pathetic Ocean crossed border after border on its journey southward.
