The Earthquake Bird

by Susanna Jones

  “Good,” I said. “A new start. I hear you’re looking for somewhere to live.”

  “Yeah. The place I’m living now, it’s…”

  She appeared to run out of steam and sat staring at the table. I knew the kind of place it was and I knew its inhabitants. I’ve seen them. A run-down building with a bunch of Western men coming home nightly with their conquests. Men who would be nothing special in their home countries suddenly find themselves sought after by women because of their race. They get the pretty women they’ve never had before and they have moved up to the next link in the food chain. It goes to their heads. They live in splendid semen-saturated squalor. As many women as possible, as often as possible, and a fresh lie to each of them. And there are cockroaches too.

  “I’ve just got to get out. Can you help me? I don’t speak any Japanese and I really don’t know how to go about this. I only came to Japan because my friend knew about this job at a bar here. Excuse me, I must go to the loo.”

  She darted out of the room. I turned to Bob.

  “I’ve got nothing in common with her. I don’t want to get stuck with looking after her.”

  “Lucy, she’s new here.”

  “Tokyo’s full of foreigners who are new here. Every day more arrive. If I look after all of them, I’d never have a life of my own.”

  “All right, all right. I just got the impression that she’s lonely.”

  “Everybody’s lonely.”

  “Fine.”

  I thought of my first Japanese friend, Natsuko, and her smiling face welcoming me when I arrived, knowing nothing, in Tokyo.

  “Bob, I’ll help her find an apartment, but I’m not getting stuck with her.” I hissed. “I can’t stand East Yorkshire people.”

  “I didn’t know you were so prejudiced.” He laughed. “Besides, I thought Yorkshire was your part of the world.”

  “It is. That’s my point.”

  Lily returned.

  “I’ll take you to find an apartment. It’s not so hard but there are places that will rent to foreigners and ones that won’t. Also, money’s complicated. As well as a deposit and rent in advance, you’ll probably have to pay key money—like a deposit except that you’ll never see it again.”

  “I don’t care. I’ve brought my savings.”

  “You’ll care when you see how much it is. And you’ll have to have a Japanese guarantor.”

  “My boss’ll do that. He said so.”

  “That’s fine, then. I’ll translate for you, if you want.”

  “Thanks very much. It’s all a bit different from Hull.”

  “It certainly is.”

  Lily caught something in my voice. “Where are you from?”

  “Near Hull, the coast.”

  “What a coincidence! Me too. Fancy running into someone from home all the way out here. That’s made me feel a lot better, that has. It’s so good to have friends from home, don’t you think so?”

  “I haven’t lived there for a very long time.”

  “It’s your roots that count.”

  “Plants and trees have roots. People have legs.”

  We arranged to meet the following weekend. I thought that I would help her find her apartment and never see her again.

  That was the beginning of Lily, in my story. Clumsy and faltering. It was not so much of an entrance after all but then, as you will see, Lily was so much better at exits.

  I am not sharing this information with the policemen, not unless things get nasty. For the moment I am ignoring them quite successfully. Kameyama is still shouting at me. His voice fades in and out of my hearing. I catch fragments. He tells me that if I don’t cooperate they will keep me here all night, bring a colleague or two to ask more questions. He suggests we all sit quietly while I think about what happened, and what I can tell them. The consequences of my words and my silences will be severe. He doesn’t need to remind me that Japan maintains the use of the death penalty—hanging, in fact—for certain murders. He informs me, unnecessarily, that I am unlikely to get much sleep tonight.

  And silence falls in this small room with its table and three chairs. The room is a cliché but I want to believe my feelings are wholly original. For what Lucy desires now, more than anything in this world, is a bowl of noodles. Specifically she would like udon, big fat white worms of noodles, but she would settle for squiggly ramen, or even delicate skinny soba. She would like noodles in a big brown bowl, with a raw egg broken into the soup, and a pair of lacquer chopsticks with which to catch them and gobble them up. I bend my head toward my imaginary bowl, as if to inhale the flavor.

  The only way to eat noodles is, of course, to fish them out of the broth, partially, and suck them straight into your mouth, slurping continuously until the bowl has nothing left but soup and a few floating morsels. Most Westerners who come to Japan find it hard to do. If you have been brought up with the guilt of noisy mastication, it is impossible to slurp well. And if you can’t slurp, you can’t suck the noodles into your mouth so it becomes impossible to eat them efficiently. Most people give up halfway through the bowl or eat horribly slowly. I took to slurping immediately. When I discovered that Teiji worked in a noodle shop, I knew he was mine. Was it a coincidence that he worked in such a place?

  Yesterday, I went back to the noodle shop. I knew that I was moving farther away from Lily and Teiji with each hour that passed, and so I returned, ludicrously hoping that I would see Teiji. I wasn’t going to speak to him. I just wanted to catch a distant glimpse of his shoulder blades under his T-shirt, or his profile as he wiped the tables. But I knew perfectly well that the shop had changed hands and Teiji would have no reason to be there. I knew that but, as any good stalker will appreciate, it did not stop me looking.

  I could see from the outside that the shop had changed. It was cleaner, brighter, and there was a new name over the door. The grime had gone from the windows and the slanting doorstep had been leveled out.

  I went inside and sat nervously at a counter that ran along the back wall of the shop. A young, fresh waiter took my order for tamago udon. While I waited I mopped my forehead with my hand towel. I took a pair of wooden chopsticks and snapped them apart. The steaming bowl arrived and I began to eat. The noodles were delicious but, perhaps because of the nature of recent events, when I looked into the bowl I found myself thinking of a murder case I’d read about here a few years ago.

  The killer had a street stand selling noodles. He also had a dead body to dispose of. In order to avoid the fingerprint problem he had hacked off the corpse’s hands. He then proceeded to boil the outer layers of skin off the hands by dropping them into the hot noodle broth, on the street, under the unknowing eyes of his hungry customers. I don’t know how he was caught but I wondered about it. Did a passerby notice, out of the corner of his eye, a human hand floating to the surface of the delicious bubbling soup? Did a customer find that the noodles tasted a little gamier than they should?

  I thought of Lily and my noodles tasted sweeter for a few seconds. Then I sensed Teiji behind me, watching and frowning upon my act of metaphysical cannibalism. I dropped my chopsticks. One of them fell and hit the floor. I bent to reach it, feeling tears accumulating, and knocked the bowl off the counter. It smashed and the noodles and soup splashed across the tiles. I felt the eyes of everyone in the restaurant studiously avoiding my direction. Perhaps in Britain I would have had a round of applause. I tried to call for a waiter but my voice was taken up with quiet, deep sobs that sounded as if they were coming from someone else.

  A waiter rushed toward me with a dustpan, brush, and mop. He told me that there was no problem though I could see he hardly knew which implement to use first. Before I could say no thank you, another waiter had slipped a full bowl of noodles onto the counter in front of me, compliments of the shop. I had no choice but to start again. After a few minutes my childish crying came to a stop. I dried my eyes and nose with my hand towel and, feeling a little better, began to eat.

  By the t
ime the last inch of noodle was inside me, my eyes were only slightly sore. I felt as if I had been bandaged up. By whom? By the noodles, though I caught myself thinking of a kind nurse in my childhood, and then of the other nurse I knew, Lily. I left the shop feeling fed and satisfied.

  I will try to sustain myself now on the memory of the taste. My back is beginning to ache from sitting in this uncomfortable chair. I suppose I am allowed to stand for a moment and stretch. I move, and feel a little better. The policemen stare at me with identical expressions of weariness. I ignore them.

  As I have said, I agreed to meet Lily and help her find a home. So, though I had no interest in her at all, I waited for her at the station in Itabashi. She was ten minutes late and apologized about it for the next fifteen. She rabbited on about the awfulness of her current accommodation and expected me to listen. I paid attention to some of it but not all. I find it hard to concentrate for long in conversation and my mind wandered to other things. I started to think about the first time I tried to rent an apartment in Tokyo and was turned down by streetfuls of real-estate agents because I was foreign. It took weeks to find a place. In the end I settled for a poky room above a noisy garage because I was tired of hunting. I have come to love that room, though, and had hoped I would never have to move. These days it is easier for foreigners and easier still for Lily because she had me to help her.

  She rattled on.

  “Andy wanted to get married and I did too but I didn’t want to hurry and I thought we should wait till we had more money saved up. He thought that meant I was seeing someone else and I was just trying to put off the wedding so he got more and more jealous. I mean, jealous of a man who didn’t exist! It got to be embarrassing because he’d start to suspect people, you know like the milkman and that. He had a go at one of his friends once for saying hello to me in the street and that was too much so I left him and went to stay with a friend. Anyway, he guessed where I was so I moved to her sister’s and then another friend’s and finally someone told me I could get work here, and I did. Sorry, am I really boring you with all this?”

  “Not at all.” I was not answering to be polite but because it was true. I wasn’t bored because I wasn’t listening to much of it. I was somewhere in my own thoughts while her words covered the air around us like wallpaper. I paid just enough attention to have a grasp of the topic for future reference.

  “What about you?” She turned her head to me. “Have you got a boyfriend?”

  I couldn’t demean Teiji by referring to him with such a common and banal term. On the other hand, I supposed he was my boyfriend. We didn’t exactly date but I couldn’t say he wasn’t my boyfriend. Lover, perhaps. But what was I to him? I didn’t know and for some reason I didn’t feel comfortable thinking about it.

  “Mm,” I said quickly and changed the subject. “There are several real-estate agents along here.”

  I suggested Lily find an apartment near a station, on a high floor. Even in Japan a woman living alone can’t be too careful. But Lily wanted to be somewhere quiet, away from stations, and on the ground floor because it would feel more like a house and not an apartment.

  “It’ll be a bit cheaper then,” I conceded.

  One-room apartments in Tokyo are pretty much like each other. All the places we looked at had polished wooden floors, were six tatami mats in size. The kitchens were small but clean and new. They had narrow balconies and unit bathrooms, a big plastic bubble of a room where each facility is part of the mold. Some apartments were older than others, some noisier. I enjoyed looking. Lucy cannot visit a home, occupied or not, without imagining herself into it.

  One had a balcony that overlooked a crooked old house with flowerpots on the garage roof and several cats asleep among them. I thought it might be possible to climb down to the roof without the residents of the house noticing. It would be a good place to sit and read on a warm afternoon.

  The next apartment was so dark that even with all the lights on there was just an eerie yellow dinge. The balcony faced a dirty gray apartment building. When I looked down from the balcony I could see through the windows into the rooms. I spied on a kitchen.

  A middle-aged man was putting a pan on the stove. He lit the gas, stood and stared at it. A woman—his wife, I guessed—came and stood with her back to him, fiddled around in a cupboard. It looked as if neither knew the other was there but the room was so small they must have known. The woman left the kitchen and I went back into the apartment where Lily was now inspecting the bathroom. She had her tongue out in concentration, like a child painting a picture.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “The place is a goldfish bowl and there’s no natural light. Let’s go.”

  It was the right answer for Lily. Had it been my choice I would have taken it. Lucy could imagine crouching on her balcony at night, peering from behind a drying towel into the lives of her neighbors. From the windows of my own apartment that is impossible. The gas station beneath my balcony provides me with day-long entertainment, but at night it’s quiet. I would have liked to be able to see into a kitchen or living room.

  Finally Lily chose a place that had big wide windows and a small park outside. Its only drawback was that it was old and so more vulnerable in an earthquake.

  “Bob said there haven’t been any tremors for ages,” Lily said.

  “But that’s when you have to worry. When you have a series of small ones it means that everything’s OK. If there’s nothing for a long time then you know that the big one could hit.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  We went to the real-estate agent’s and I helped Lily sign documents. I was tired and ready to go home but Lily was intent on thanking me.

  “Let me at least buy a cuppa somewhere. Go on.”

  I didn’t want to be with her. I didn’t dislike her and yet I saw her as a representative of the place of my childhood. I couldn’t like her. I knew that if we spent more time together she would start to talk about Yorkshire again and its godforsaken beauties and comforts.

  “I really am tired. You go. One of the nice things about Japan is that it’s perfectly OK to be in a café or restaurant alone. No one will pester you or stare at you.”

  “I don’t even know how to order a cup of coffee. I don’t know any Japanese at all. Sure you won’t come with me?”

  Her blank eyes flickered suddenly with fear.

  “I’ll come, then. Just to show you how to order in a café.”

  We found a small, ferociously air-conditioned coffee shop. Lily sat and put her bag on the floor beside her. It was a refreshing sight. I had forgotten that people put bags on floors in Britain. In Japan the floor is considered too dirty. I rarely carry a bag. I like to stuff the things I need into my pockets, so it is not an issue that touches me. A handbag is part of a femininity I have never felt I had the right to aspire to. Still, I liked to see Lily put her bag on the floor.

  When the waitress came, Lily whispered to me that she wanted coffee. I told the waitress that we weren’t ready.

  “Lily, you’ve got to be able to order for yourself. It’s no good looking at me. How will you eat and drink if you can’t ask for anything?”

  “But I don’t know what to say. How can I speak Japanese? I don’t know anything at all.”

  I found her wimpishness irritating but at the same time felt a sisterly protectiveness. She was helpless.

  “I bet you do. There are some Japanese words that everyone knows. How about shogun?”

  “Oh, OK. Yes, I’ve heard of that. I don’t know what it is, though. Origami. I know that one. Or is that Chinese? No, it’s Japanese, isn’t it. Is it? I don’t know.”

  “It’s Japanese. Kamikaze?”

  “Yes. Those pilots in the war. Erm. Sumo. Karaoke. Futon.”

  “See. You do know some.”

  “Karate. Noodle.”

  “That’s not Japanese. There are lots of words for noodles. I’ll teach you some time. I want tea and you want coffee
, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So tea is kohcha and coffee is koohii.”

  “Kohcha. Koohii,” she repeated with a strong Yorkshire o.

  “Yes. Now, when you want to say ‘one’ you add hitotsu.”

  “Hitotsu kohcha—”

  “No. Kohcha o hitotsu. Koohii o hitotsu.”

  “So it goes backward. What’s ‘o’?”

  “It’s just a particle. It doesn’t really mean anything—”

  “So why do I need to say it?”

  “You just do. Are you ready?” I was never meant to be a teacher.

  “No, wait. Let me have a little practice first. Kohcha o hitotsu. Koohii o hitotsu. How do I say ‘please’?”

  “Just add kudasai on the end. OK, I’m calling the waitress.”

  Lily said her piece to the waitress who, fortunately, understood.

  “Wow. Me speaking Japanese. Wait till Andy finds out.”

  “I thought you weren’t in touch with him anymore.”

  “No, I’m not. He doesn’t know that I’m here. Hardly anyone knows. I don’t want to see him again but at the same time, I don’t believe I never will.”

  “How come?”

  “He was so possessive, as I said. I think he’ll either track me down and come after me or he’ll meet someone else and be obsessive about her instead.”

  “That would be better.”

  “Didn’t you say before that you had a boyfriend? What’s his name?”

  “Teiji.”

  “Is he a translator too?”

  “He’s a photographer. Well, he works in a noodle shop.”

  “But he wants to be a photographer. Brilliant. I love taking photographs but I’m not very good. I like pictures of views—you know, sunsets and that. I wish I had a camera here now. Does he sell his pictures or what?”