The Emissary

by Yoko Tawada

  Food from farms on each of Okinawa’s islands was carried to local ports by “horse and wagon,” where it was loaded onto ships owned by a transportation company in Kyushu, and then brought to the major port of Shin-makurazaki. Despite the nomenclature “horse and wagon,” there were no horses to pull wagons. Satirical cartoons in the newspaper showed dogs, foxes, and wild boars pulling wagons full of fruit, which may have been reality rather than satire.

  A number of transit companies in Kyushu had cargo ships covered with solar panels that looked like huge mushrooms, the largest being Risshin Marine Transport, whose ships carried most of the Okinawan produce to areas all over Japan. Well, not quite all over — most of the expensive fruit was bound for Tohoku and Hokkaido, in the north, while hardly any of it reached Tokyo. In exchange, tons of rice and salmon were shipped from the north to Okinawa. In this age when paper money, stocks, and interest had lost their luster, people who could barter had top priority. Salmon had been thought extinct for a time, until a strange new breed with stars all over its body was discovered. It was said that eating it could damage the liver, but even so, people loved that old-style salmon flavor.

  Unlike the twenty-three wards of central Tokyo, which were virtually deserted, the Tama area in the surrounding mountains was still heavily populated, though with no industry of its own, it was growing poorer by the day. Yoshiro was old enough to remember the funeral of the last living politician to be driven from his post for saying things like, “If Tokyo fails the whole country will go down with it. We must save Tokyo even if it means sacrificing all the outlying prefectures!” While he certainly didn’t approve of the egotism of Edo — now called Edonism — just saying “Tokyo” aloud still excited him somehow, bringing back an enthusiasm for the city he couldn’t let go of, making the thought of Tokyo disappearing altogether so unbearable he thought he’d just as soon vanish along with it.

  There were plans to revitalize Tokyo by developing products peculiar to the city. When he read in the newspaper about a project to resurrect Tokyo’s preindustrial charm by selling new products with the brand name “Edo,” he thought he’d like to take part.

  Soybeans and buckwheat were still grown in the “Far West” of Tokyo, along with a new strain of wheat, but not enough was produced to export to other regions, and besides, these were crops that could be grown elsewhere. Long ago, the words “something new from Tokyo” brought to mind a plug attached to a long tail called a cord, but things like that didn’t sell anymore. Electrical appliances had met with disapproval ever since electric current was discovered to cause nervous disorders, numbness in the extremities, and insomnia — a condition generally known as bzzt-bzzt syndrome. Newspapers carried reports of chronic insomniacs who slept soundly at camping grounds in the mountains where there was no electricity. A popular writer published an essay on how the sound of a vacuum cleaner drove all thoughts of the novel he was writing out of his mind. Though this essay probably wasn’t the only cause, around the time it was published, resentment against vacuum cleaners began to spread throughout society. To Yoshiro, who had always thought that the vacuum cleaner’s metallic groan must come through a tunnel from the depths of hell, this was a welcome trend. As temporary prefab houses had been specially built so that they could easily be kept clean with a broom and mop-up rags, their inhabitants were the first to stop using vacuum cleaners. Washing machines disappeared as well. Residents of temporary housing blocks were also the first to start washing cotton underwear by hand and hanging it out to dry. The cleaners came for the rest of their clothes, which they washed and brought back (cleaning being a foreign word, dry cleaners had almost gone extinct until someone got the idea of writing it in Chinese characters meaning “chestnut-person-tool”). Cleaners were popular not only because paying them was cheaper than buying a new washing machine every three years, but also because of an odd new theory that had taken a curious hold on people’s imaginations: Listening to clothes slosh around in a washing machine makes your thoughts dry up. There was even an elementary school that claimed to have conducted an experiment proving that if all electrical appliances were turned off while children were doing their homework, their grades improved dramatically.

  Just the sound of the washing machine had been enough to depress Yoshiro when he was young; at least he didn’t have that to worry about anymore. Since watching television led to weight gain, many dieters threw theirs away. Air conditioners had gone out of fashion more than a generation ago. The only appliance left was the refrigerator, though the ones now in use didn’t have cords. The most popular model, the “Arctic Star,” ran on solar energy.

  The entire country looked up to the inhabitants of Tokyo’s temporary housing blocks, the very first to give up their electrical appliances, as a model of the most advanced lifestyle. But “nonuse of existing machines” was difficult to market as a new product. To make “revitalization” a success, you really needed something people could see.

  How to get back Tokyo’s thunder? Could “thunder crackers” be the answer? After all, they were a traditional Edo specialty, named after the Thunder Gate of a temple in the oldest part of the city. Unfortunately, thunder produces electricity. Ironically, the search for something to revitalize Tokyo in the old Edo culture, before electricity was even invented, led straight back to electricity.

  A vegetable that could only be grown in Tokyo would certainly be a Tokyo specialty, but no such plant seemed to exist. They’d have to use their heads, or rather, since no other body part seemed likely to find an answer, they hoped their heads were up to the job. How about capitalizing on some crop that could be grown in other areas but that no one had paid much attention to? A love of novelty was said to be the essence of the Edo spirit, but now that they couldn’t market new things imported from abroad, some people suggested a turn toward old, forgotten things that could be brought back to life in the present age.

  It was this trend that brought a man who came to be known as Dr. Myoga into the spotlight for a time. He hit on a passage from a novel written in the late 1920s: “Myoga grows well behind the outhouse.” Huge public outhouses were something one often saw in Tokyo but only rarely in outlying prefectures. Dr. Myoga bought up the dark, wet patches of land behind every public outhouse he could find, and on each one set up a glass box over six feet high, partitioned off inside with shelves about a foot wide where, using artificial dirt mixed with minerals, he grew the herb called myoga. Dr. Myoga never told anyone why this herb grew so well behind outhouses. Instead, he often spoke of how Buddhist priests in training for a life of asceticism expressly avoided it — this in itself, he claimed, was evidence of how stimulating it was, even though it didn’t look very nutritious. Although people had always believed that children wouldn’t care for the taste, if you gave it to kids nowadays they would gobble it up like ice cream. This, asserted Dr. Myoga, was because it was full of a certain nutrient, unknown until now, that revitalized children from within.

  Yoshiro once bought some myoga at the market to give to Mumei. When he smelled it his eyes narrowed in a dreamy smile — it clearly agreed with him. Yet that was the only time Yoshiro saw myoga at the market, and before long the name “Dr. Myoga” was overgrown with forget-me-knotweeds.

  Another Tokyo vegetable that gained popularity for a time was nettles. Due to a longstanding prejudice created by the proverb “Some prefer nettles,” not even the most eccentric farmers in other prefectures wanted to grow them. Capitalizing on this lack of popularity, a certain company got the idea of marketing nettles as a Tokyo specialty. They even put up posters showing the mayor of Tokyo happily munching away at nettle salad, though it was whispered in some quarters that this may have actually hurt the vegetable’s reputation. A new tongue twister, “How many nettles were netted in Nettie’s knitted net?” did manage to twist a number of tongues, but unfortunately, the nettles themselves rarely made it as far as anyone’s tongue. One day, while Yoshiro was standing in front of a vegeta
ble stand, unable to take his eyes off of a bunch of some deep green vegetable he had never seen before, the shop owner, seizing on this opportunity, spoke to him.

  “Those are the nettles everyone’s talking about. Why not buy a bunch, to cheer Tokyo on?”

  Yoshiro should have been suspicious when this shop owner, whose usual pitch was “This tastes really good” suddenly asked him to “cheer Tokyo on,” as if they were at a baseball tournament. He ended up buying a bunch, which he pounded in an earthenware mortar, then mixed with vinegar. Nettles are supposed to go well with sweetfish, but as he didn’t want to give Mumei any kind of fish, which were all said to be highly contaminated, he tried boiling the nettles along with some tofu.

  “Gee, I’m sorry. This tastes awful.” Unable to bear the itch of regret, he scratched his head as he apologized to Mumei, but the boy gazed up at him with a puzzled look and said, “Whether food tastes good or not doesn’t really bother me.”

  The boy had shown him his own shallowness when he had least expected it, making Yoshiro so ashamed he could hardly breathe. Criticism from young people tends to upset the elderly, but Yoshiro wasn’t the slightest bit angry with Mumei. What really pained him was the way his generation was always hurting young people without realizing it. Adults arrogantly talked about whether food tasted good or not, as if a gourmet sensibility put you in a superior class of people, forgetting that everyone was already sunk to the waist in a swamp of problems — how must they look to these children? Poison often had no taste at all, so no matter how finely honed your palate, your taste buds weren’t going to save your life.

  People in Okinawa probably would have laughed at the efforts of Tokyoites to grow myoga or nettles and market them as high-class produce, had they known about them. Yoshiro wrote his daughter Amana a postcard, telling her all about the nettles project, including his own embarrassment at having fallen for it, but she never responded. Perhaps she had never even heard of nettles.

  The character for “nettles,” 蓼 with all its diagonal slashes, brought the sheer joy of writing back to Yoshiro. He always wrote it slowly, like a young cat scratching the bark of a tree diagonally with its claws.

  Yoshiro liked writing picture postcards. Though it seemed strange to be sending postcards to a family member when he wasn’t traveling, a page of stationary had so much more space than he had news that whenever he tried writing a letter he ended up not writing anything at all. There was so little space on a postcard that from the first stroke of his pen he could already imagine the period at the end. Being able to see the end of anything gave him a tremendous sense of relief. As a child he had assumed the goal of medicine was to keep bodies alive forever; he had never considered the pain of not being able to die.

  Though oranges were sold at a fixed price, postage stamps were not. In fact, costs varied wildly, from the very expensive snow grouse stamp to the one with a photo of the National Diet Building, so cheap it was almost free. Occasionally the post office sold stamps in bulk, one thousand at a bargain price, though Yoshiro never bought them as these sales brought home to him the painful reality that even after writing a thousand more postcards he wouldn’t die.

  “Perfect postcard weather,” he thought, making up his mind to stop in at the postcard shop on his way home from shopping to buy his usual ten. Now that anyone could go into business anytime to sell anything they liked, there were lots of stores that looked like the dinky little stalls students used to set up at school festivals. This postcard shop was no exception; the owner hadn’t even bothered to straighten the crooked handmade sign above the entrance. Thinking her homemade postcards weren’t quite enough to make a go of it, perhaps, she also stocked a small supply of unusual umbrellas and stationery goods. That day, Yoshiro bought an umbrella that blocked the sunlight despite being transparent. There were also pencils that chirped like birds, origami paper that crinkled into the shape of a pair of mandarin ducks when sprinkled with water, and erasers the size of real lemons, all of which Mumei would probably find irresistible, which was why Yoshiro usually came here by himself.

  Pressed flowers had been the proprietor’s hobby ever since she’d been at junior high school with Amana. She could form friendships with violets, wave to Chinese plantain grass as she walked by, bow in greeting to shepherd’s purse, and write love letters to cosmos, yet still spend every Sunday pulling plants up by the root, then squashing them into the two-dimensional version of nature she sold on her postcards. Most of the plants she used were common weeds, though perhaps weed wasn’t the right word for plants she went to the trouble of cultivating in her garden, using artificial dirt. When Yoshiro asked why she bothered to plant weeds, she replied, “Because we need more of them. They’re about to go extinct, you know. So are mixed-breed dogs, for that matter.”

  Now that she mentioned it, all the dogs at the Rent-a-Dog store were purebred, and you didn’t see dogs anywhere else.

  Whenever he came to buy postcards, Yoshiro looked forward to leaning against the pillar by the checkout counter, talking to this woman about his daughter.

  “How is Amana-chan getting along? Is she well?”

  “I haven’t heard anything about her being ill.”

  “Growing oranges is hard work, isn’t it?”

  “She seems to be strong enough for it.”

  “She got plenty of exercise in high school, in the Portable Shrine Club.”

  “You did track and field, didn’t you?”

  “Sprinting doesn’t do me any good now. No use going hunting, either, when there’re no animals out in the fields,” she said, brandishing her pencil like a spear, then lifting one knee all the way up to her chest. This pressed-flower artist was young elderly, still in her seventies, girlish enough to burst into giggles at the slightest thing.

  “What did Amana-chan have to say in her last letter?”

  “Something about seeing a new kind of red pineapple for the first time.”

  “I envy them down there in Okinawa,” she sighed as she handed him his ten postcards, packed neatly into a small envelope made of plant fiber. Hoping to continue the conversation about his daughter, Yoshiro casually added a bit of information he thought might interest her.

  “Seems the people in Okinawa call it Ryukyu now.”

  “Ryukyu? That’s a nice name. But they aren’t starting an independence movement or anything, are they?”

  “I don’t think so. If Okinawa became a foreign country they wouldn’t be able to export fruit to Japan, or take in immigrant laborers either, because of the isolation policy.”

  “That’s a relief. It would be awful if we could never see Amana-chan again.”

  Yoshiro remembered that Hildegard had a Japanese friend named Tsuyukusa. Though he had never met her, Hildegard had told him so much about her that Yoshiro felt as if Tsuyukusa had once been a close friend, sometime long ago. She had gone to the German city of Krefeld, where she still lived, as a young woman, to study the violin. There she had married an Iranian man she met at a concert, and Yoshiro remembered hearing about how after their twins were born, they would come back to Japan to see her parents, Tsuyukusa and her husband each holding one child on their laps in the plane. They used to fly to Japan every year around New Years — how long had it been since they couldn’t do that anymore? How must Tsuyukusa feel, knowing she would never be able to return to Japan?

  Though far away, Okinawa was still part of Japan, so he could go there if he made the effort. Yet as the thought of actually making the trip left him feeling dull and tired, he always ended up deciding to save all his strength for Mumei.

  As a student, he had been friends with a cool young guy who traveled all around South America and Africa with only an uncool sports bag for luggage. When he asked him why he hadn’t bought a backpack, his friend had told him that backpacks screamed “Traveler!” so loud it was embarrassing. How cool it would be to set off abroad with just an ordinar
y sports bag, in old tennis shoes worn down at the heel, as if you were on your way home from the gym. Without announcing “Headed for Foreign Parts.” That way you might be inconspicuous enough to slip away without getting arrested.

  “A lot of the postcards Amana sends me are written in invisible ink,” said Yoshiro as if grasping at a cotton bud that happened to float by, to revive the conversation.

  “That’s really neat. Okinawans are so lucky to have enough spare fruit to be able to use it for things like that. Does she use lemon juice?”

  “Not sure, but I’ll ask her. I can still remember discovering invisible ink, how much fun we kids used to have. We formed a secret society — used to bring home top secret documents we got from the others to read. We’d hold them up to the fire on the stove when nobody was looking.”

  “We used to do that, too. One time my parents scolded me for lighting a candle. What if there’s an earthquake, they said.”

  “How does invisible ink work, exactly?”

  “Well, when paper absorbs something sour, like lemon juice, it burns more easily, so when you hold it up to the fire, the letters written in lemon juice turn brown first.”

  “I see. The juice seeps into the paper like a watercolor, so there’s lots of different shades. Some parts are yellow, others brown. Pretty, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, the blotches look kind of like a landscape.”

  “All the postcards Amana sends look like water scenes at first, but if you look carefully you can see the water’s burning — there are still tiny flames on it. Kind of scary.”

  “Water that burns?”

  “If enough oil flows into the ocean, it’ll burn, won’t it?”

  “Don’t scare me! Amana has a pretty easy life down there, doesn’t she?”