Audrey shuffles over to the other side of the bed. “Don’t be sad, Margaret-chan.” Pats my forehead gently. “Remember your heartful life.”
When they tell me I can leave the hospital, I get a room at a business hotel tucked in behind the glare of a suburban entertainment district. The sound of the pachinko parlors—the frenzied electronic music, the piercing chime of the machines—becomes like white noise: when it stops, I can’t sleep. I just lie there and listen to the banter of the staff as they spill out into the alley. Calling out to one another. “O tsukaresama deshita!” You must be a very exhausted person! Yes, I whimper. I am.
The scar is shaping up well. Soon the wound will heal over. Turn into a raised red worm along my midriff. I run my hand along it. Imagine the stories I’ll tell. An emergency appendectomy in a dirty backwater hospital. A religious fanatic with a broken wine bottle. Or maybe I’ll just stay quiet, enigmatic, brood in silence about lost love.
The police ask me if I can remember my name yet. If I can remember anything at all. I lie to them. No, nothing at all. They ask me if I like Japanese food. I think so, yes. But the stabbing is never mentioned. They tell me I must stay in Tokyo. The foreigner liaison officer, a humorlessly efficient middle-aged man, clutches his briefcase over his crotch and tells me, “In your personal belongings there was found a large sum of Japanese yen. We police will hold this money until that time when your identity is determined.” “May I have an allowance please?” I ask him. His face goes red. He reluctantly places his briefcase on the floor and hands me an envelope with both hands. “A receipt and twenty thousand yen for your daily needs.” I can’t get out of the country on twenty thousand yen. They know that.
When I walk in, Jiro squeals like a girl. “Marge-san! So happy. Please sit. Onegaishimasu.” Using a chopstick, he pops the top off a beer bottle, pours some into two squat glasses. We clink cheers, and Jiro says, “Adam-chan in jail.”
“Jail?”
Jiro searches his pockets and takes out a piece of paper. Hands it to me.
Dear Jiro,
I’m stuck at the Kansai Immigration Detention Center. Bloody Japs (no offense, mate) will let me go as soon as I come up with the money for a plane ticket. Start a collection for me, will you? The food here is shite.
Adam
Jiro produces a teapot from under the bar. Shakes it like a piggie bank. “Already six thousand yen. Adam-chan has many lover-girls.”
I laugh. “How about Ines? Have you seen her?”
“Ah!” He produces an envelope from under the bar. Smacks it down in front of me excitedly. Before I can look, he says, “Inside your passport.”
I open up the envelope and pull out the passport. Tucked in like a bookmark is a faded business card. Shanti Lodge. Ubud, Bali. “Tasty food. Good swimming. Clean sleepings.”
“Ines,” Jiro says, tapping his forehead. “Smart girl. Never worry.”
Clean sleepings.
“Yes,” I say.
In the space between two sips of beer, I make my plan.
I stand in front of Hotel Diskrete, my tiny bag of belongings slung over my shoulder, looking at the windowless exterior for half an hour before I make my way to the lobby. Once inside, I pause again. Wait for the sensation of being watched. Wait for it like a lonely girl waits for the phone to ring. But it never comes, so I pad over to the room console. The Outer Space Room is taken—the light behind the photo of the space pod bed darkened. I find the Merry-Go-Round and push the button. Follow the trail of lights on the floor.
Once I am inside, a wave of fear and loneliness rolls over me like nausea. I fumble with the vending fridge, flop down on the bed, and slurp from a can of beer. I put my feet up on the unicorn, feel around his belly with my toes. “You have something for me?” I ask. He stares at me with a tight smile. I down the rest of the beer and crawl over to the beast, reach my hand up and feel around. The documents and money are still there, in a little hollow near his neck. I breathe. Turn on the mobile phone to listen to Frank. But the message is gone. It takes me a moment to register. It’s gone. I give the unicorn a pat on the nose and lie down Think about sleep. It seems like, another planet.
When the alarm clock flashes four A.M. and my TV choices are reduced to lounge singers and porn, I wedge a shoe in the door and venture out into the hallway. Every now and then, I hear a squeal or a moan from one of the rooms. The elevators won’t take me anywhere. But I stand in one anyway. Going nowhere. I’m left to make a semicircle around the first floor. I start speaking out loud. Meet me in Kyoto. Meet me in Kyoto. On my third lap, a tiny man in a threadbare gray suit appears out of what looks like a broom closet. He tiptoes toward me, stops at a distance, and in a stage whisper calls, “Gaijin-san! Go back! Now is sleeping time.” I stand there for a moment. The little man nods at me and shoos me away with a nervous smile. I head back to the room. Sleeping time.
The bullet train robs me of the sensation of speed. It glides over the continuously welded track so smoothly it doesn’t feel like we’re moving at all. I buy two cans of beer from the refreshment trolley even though it’s seven in the morning—maybe because it’s seven in the morning. There’s an old woman sitting next to me. She must be a hundred. Shriveled lemon for a head. Collection of bones under a fan-print dress. Jaunty pink sun hat sitting in her lap. If I were her mother, I’d tell her not to stare. She’s fixated on me like a child at the zoo.
I give her the bug eyes. She sniffs at me. Puts her sun hat in the seat pocket. Pulls out a fancy bento box. The kind with vegetables cut into delicate flowers. The kind with ingredients I can’t identify. Seaweedy, flowery, undersea-creaturey things.
I feel the need to be genteel. Take the beer can away from my face and pour some into the plastic cup. I find my pinky finger rising in the air as I sip. Some deeply recessive prissy gene popping up. The old lady gives me a smile when I tuck the digit under the other fingers. She reaches in her straw bag. Brings out another pair of chopsticks and hands them to me. “Hai! Dozo—” Go ahead, she tells me. I poke at a wiggly white-and-pink thing in the bento box. Pop it in my mouth and nod thank-you. Pass the cup of beer to her. Color comes to her face. She takes a nice gulp. I eat more seaweedy stuff.
After we polish off the second can of beer. After Michikosan shows me a photo of her dead husband. A photo of her dead mother. Her dead brother. A photo of her standing next to Placido Domingo. After she joins me in the smoking car for a ciggie and green tea from her thermos. And tells me she had an omiae—an arranged marriage. That she never had a lover. That she thinks African-American men are handsome. Especially Denzel Washington. After all of that, I sleep deeply. Slumped against the window. I sleep until Michiko nudges me. “Fuji-san! Fuji-san!” I open my eyes as we pass the perfect symmetry of Mount Fuji. Symbol of Japan. Clouds hanging in reverence around its peak.
Kyoto Station is not a dark archipelago. There’s no hiding here. It’s all soaring ceilings, glass, and light.
While her grandchildren look on in shock, Michiko and I hug good-bye on the platform. For an old thing, she has a good grip on her. I imagine my stitches popping open. My innards spilling out onto the platform. Troops of upcountry Japanese forever thinking this is what foreigners do at train stations. Spill their guts.
I find a dilapidated old guesthouse. Sleep in a long tatami-mat room with four other women. A group of middle-aged Australian women who buy beer from the vending machine and sit in the kitchen late into the night talking about temples and camera shops. Their twangy animated voices soothe me. I can’t tell them apart, with their weathered tan faces and bodies like potatoes with toothpick legs. They share also an earthy goodness. “You look like you’ve been through the wars,” one of the ladies says to me. I get drunk with them and tell them a short version of my story. It is disjointed and messy. “I need to write it down,” I say. They hand me another can of beer and tell me I need to get pissed.
“You’re a brave one,” one of them says.
I say no. “I’m just go
od at running.” It’s in my genes.
A month before I left for Japan, I was in the food court of the Eaton Centre in Toronto. And I saw my father. He looked pretty much the same. A bit jowlier. A little less Bryl cream in his hair. He had two kids in tow. Girls about six and ten. And a blond woman with thin legs in white jeans. They seemed in a rush. The woman holding her mobile phone between her ear and shoulder and rushing on ahead. My father leaning down on one knee and wiping the corner of the younger girl’s mouth. The girl grimacing. The blond woman turning around and barking something. The four of them disappearing down an escalator. The whole thing took thirty seconds, but I sat there with my paper plate of shrimp fried rice in front of me for a good hour. Thinking happy thoughts. Of something sharp to cut away memory. A rewind button. A clean slate.
“You can start over,” I say to no one in particular.
After one night, the ladies take off for Mount Fuji and I’m left alone in the huge room. I pull my futon out of the closet and roll it out next to the window. The panes of frosted glass are cracked and mended with sealing tape gone yellow with age. The whole wooden structure creaks and shudders when someone walks in another room, a reminder that I’m not alone. In the morning, I can hear birds. A breeze blows the branches of a cherry tree against the window. A light rapping telling me to get up. The kitchen is littered with empty beer cans. But I feel sober.
I’m sitting in a suicide-inspiring waiting room at Kansai Immigration Detention Center. A few animated Filipino women seem to be conducting three conversations among themselves and another three on mobile phones. Everything in the room—the curtains, the calendar on the wall, the magazines—looks like it’s been left out in the sun too long. Washed out and brittle. I imagine all the multitudes of people passing through this room. What’s happened to them, happened to me—all the waiting, all the endless disquiet—it’s made us like energy vampires. Sucking the life out of the room.
I look up, and Adam’s standing there. His hair hangs down in a mop in his face. His clothes are looser. He makes a show of putting on a pair of sunglasses. He reminds me of the drummer from The Muppet Show.
He takes the glasses off again. Looks serious for a moment. “Fucking hell. What happened to you?”
I’m not sure if he’s talking about my hair, my scrawny frame, or the expression on my face. It’s one of those times when you have so much to say you can’t say anything at all. I kind of pucker my lips up and shrug. The tears come fast. When Adam leans over to give me an awkward hug, I jerk and shudder into him.
“Hey, hey. We’re going to Bali. You should be chuffed.”
“I’m not going to Bali,” I tell him.
“Why not? Leave me alone with Ines? She might get me into trouble.”
“I’m going home.” Home. I suck in air. Five liters or so in one huge sniff. “I have a brother there.”
They tell me you can get all types of good-luck charms at temples in Kyoto. That you can buy fortunes. If your fortune is bad, you simply tie the strip of paper to a tree and buy another. That you can grope along a dark labyrinth to a chamber lit from above, where the Buddha’s belly lies. You can touch it. A blessing. That everything will be clear.
I walk up the narrow street leading to the temple grounds. I’m wearing the jeans I was stabbed in. The hospital washed them clean somehow. In the pocket, I find a small note card. In Nurse Audrey’s careful cursive: Dear Margaret. I want to be your long lost friend for always. Audrey. And then in block letters: NOSTALGIA. FROM THE GREEK WORDS NOSTOS FOR HOME AND ALGOS FOR PAIN. A BITTERSWEET LONGING FOR THE PAST. In parenthesis, (Margaret-chan, we Japanese say natsukashii.)
The pain of home.
Everything will be clear.
I believe it.
It’s morning, and the hordes of tourists haven’t arrived. Mist shrouds the temples. The quiet is slithery. I open a map. Trace with my finger the route to the Buddha’s belly.
When I look up again, they are there. The children. An army of them. Kitted out in their blue-and-white uniforms, yellow caps, stiff leather book bags strapped to their backs. They wear shorts. Soft little legs. White socks. The bobbing mass of yellow hats moves toward me. Behind them, I glimpse a beleaguered teacher, megaphone held to his face, barking commands. Ignored. He drops the megaphone to his side, hangs his head, and collapses into a bench.
The yellow hats move in.
The smell of them makes me swoon—dried saliva and scalp, a sweet, fetid whiff of childhood. I think of Frank. Why is sanity so hard?
Watch the monkey scare the children. But they’re not scared. I am. Watching them come at me. Cherry-cheeked. Swaths of black hair across foreheads. High ponytails like antennae. Tiny teeth crowded together, flashing like an animal’s threat. There’s silence for a moment as they encircle me. One boy, his chest heaving with excitement, pulls his arm back, raises one knee like a pitcher, and throws a handful of little pellets at me. Seeds. The rest of them follow suit, screaming and hitting one another as they wind up. They’re chanting something rhythmical, like a nursery rhyme. The beans hit my map with a satisfying “Ping!” and I stand there until the gentle patter ends, until the yelps and laughter and chanting fade into a honeyed gasping for breath.
The children are herded away by the teacher. Apologies are made. The yellow hats disappear into a cluster of cherry trees. I stand like a planet, the constellation of seeds radiating from me, spilling from my pockets. I see, as if for the first time, the quality of the air. Bluish light filtered through it. The sun, like a yolk hanging languorously behind the trees. The air with its giddy bite of anticipation. I breathe it in like anesthesia, but it doesn’t put me to sleep. It wakes me up.
The day before I leave Canada, I go to see Frank at the group home. It’s an ugly duplex on a street of ugly duplexes. A toothless middle-aged woman in a tube-top follows me from the street. “Can you buy me a coffee?” she whines.
“I’m in a hurry,” I tell her.
The woman’s expression barely passes to disappointed. A split second of the normal human condition. Then, like a skipping record, she asks me again, with the same hope and confidence, “Can you buy me a coffee?”
The past doesn’t scar her.
I press a dollar into her palm. “Lucky bitch,” I say.
Frank’s room is neat. Books on the shelf. Towels on the racks. Cupboard doors shut. It scares me. Above his desk are two of his pen-and-ink drawings. One of Toronto City Hall. The other of a giant alien insect shooting a laser beam at a barn. Frank is sitting there at the desk. Just sitting there.
“Hey Frankie.”
He turns and watches me. Then, finally, he says hello.
“I’ve come to say good-bye.”
“Good-bye?”
“I’m going to Asia on Saturday. Don’t know how long for.”
“Acidophilus,” he tells me.
“Thailand. India. Japan. What did you say?”
“To replace intestinal flora?”
“Oh. Like for Delhi Belly. Okay.” Acidophilus. Fuck. “Frank are you doing okay?”
“I talk to someone every day.”
“Like a doctor?” I ask.
He turns back to his desk. There’s nothing on it. Not a pencil or a blotter.
“I have cable,” he answers.
“Frank?” His face looks like a mask to me. “How do the drugs make you feel?” It’s what I want to know.
“They don’t make me feel,” he tells me.
There’s a parcel waiting for me at the guesthouse. A tiny box wrapped in paper and brown string. The sight of it startles me. No one knows where I am. I turn it in my hands. “Who left this?” I ask the girl. She leans in, stifles a giggle. “Handsome man. No hair. Five minutes before.” I turn and run outside. Squint into the shadows. Suddenly the city is deserted. Just me and the cherry trees and their pink arms. My feet are bare. I grip the pavement with my toes. Rooted.
Frank with his wild mind. Dad with his shiny new family. Mom with her soft new lov
ers. And me. Me with the sweet pain of home.
The wind comes up. Cherry blossom petals rain down on me.
I tell myself, there is no happy ending. All the pieces do not fit together perfectly. Things are ragged and messy. We are torn apart by events. Put back together differently by others. And somehow everything is beautiful.
I undo the string. Take the top off the box and pull out a cloud of tissue. Nestled on a bed of satin is Kazu’s finger. Unsullied by blood. A compass showing me the way. Out of the basin of Kyoto, off this beautiful island, back to the beginning. Home.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…
About the author
Meet Catherine Hanrahan
About the book
Writing a “Love Letter to Japan”
Read on
“Miss Foreigner! Go back. It’s sleeping time”: Catherine Hanrahan on Japan’s Love Hotels
About the author
Meet Catherine Hanrahan
CATHERINE HANRAHAN was born in Montreal and raised in Halifax and Toronto. A self-described bookworm, early she vacillated between a desire to write and a desire to become a ballerina. “My parents gave me a typewriter and a copy of How to Get Happily Published for Christmas when I was ten,” she says. “All literary ambitions were put on the back burner at age fourteen when I discovered boys.”
Her father is a professor of finance, her mother a former laboratory instructor at the local university.
“My parents gave me a typewriter and a copy of How to Get Happily Published for Christmas when I was ten.”
Young Catherine’s reading interests ranged far and wide, from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden to Graham Greene’s Dr. Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party. It was The Secret Garden, she says, which “more than anything made me want to become a writer.” Graham Greene, on the other hand, became an influence courtesy of her mother, “a G.G. fanatic.”
Lost Girls and Love Hotels Page 13
