Almost Japanese Read online

  The rest of the class wheeled back to their places and began to practise like little gazelles, safe now, while the glutted lion prowled amongst them.

  I retreated to my regular corner, under the ropes.

  The whole class knew I was the ultimate geek. I didn’t care. The moment this period was over, I was going home to get changed. To see Akira tonight. And afterwards I would probably go back to his house for tea. Or out for Chinese food. While these people watched TV. Or yakked on the phone with boys or washed their hair. I looked down at my hands. Magic hands! They’d touched Akira ! They’d been to his house.

  *

  Akira got sick. He complained of winds, of dampness inside. He wrapped a scarf around his belly to keep warm but left his shirt open. The hara, three fingers below the navel, was a magic place. The body’s furnace. Courage and balance were hidden there. The suicide spot.

  I walked to school along cracks, seams, the tops of walls, thinking, hara, hara. Breathing from the navel. I swear it was easy – for the first time, I balanced!

  *

  Moon Viewing

  I began reading prison books – in which the heroine escapes her captors by molding a dummy of herself out of bedclothes and soap slivers, is shipwrecked, rations a crust of bread over five days, wrings water out of a raw fish caught with an earring. Books about fugitives, castaways bobbing on the Pacific and punitive private schools changed the taste of soup and bread for me forever.

  Rationing the everyday things in life gave them magic. Japanese magic.

  I closed my book, leaned on my elbows and looked down at Akira’s house. The blizzard had almost covered the dark roof. Yellow light leaked out from his bedroom window onto the snowy balcony. His roof looked so close I could almost reach through the trees and snap off a piece like candy.

  *

  It looked like a medicine chest only deeper and it was mounted on the living-room wall. When Akira left the room to make a phone-call one day, I got my chance. One ear cocked, I cautiously pulled the double doors ajar. Was the box firmly attached? A bang, crash. Emma on the floor surrounded by box splinters. Akira’s look! I squinted into the back of the box. I could just make out the photograph of an old man. Akira’s father? There was an incense holder, a tiny scroll, some matches. I am peering into Akira’s secret heart.

  Akira was still on the phone. Beside the photo – a statue of the Buddha and a tiny plate with a sake cup and a tangerine on it. What prayers did Akira offer? I closed my eyes, breathed in the faintly jasmined air of the shrine box, visualizing Akira in mysterious, ceremonial clothes.

  Akira hung up. I closed up the box and raced back onto my cushion, heart pounding.

  He walked in. It’s snowing in Berlin, he said. Can you believe it, this time of year? Snow in Berlin!

  *

  Don’t let a policeman come, he said. I’ll just be a minute. He dashed out of the car and across the street to a Japanese grocery store. So this was where he bought his food. I made a mental note of the address. I’d have to come back and investigate. The minutes passed.

  I couldn’t help it. I punched open the glove compartment and the contents exploded onto the floor. Oh god. I began stuffing things back in, receipts for gas (his autograph on every one!) a package of Japanese candy, winter gloves, an electric shaver, a mini-bottle of whiskey, the kind you get on airplanes. I shook a candy into my hand and squashed the door shut on the rest of the stuff. I kept the wrapper for my archives and popped the candy into my mouth. It was gum! Instantly I reeked of an odd, unrecognisable fruit flavour. The whole car reeked. I looked up and it was too late to swallow – Akira was walking back, his arms full of groceries. I pushed the door open for him and the moment he sat down he sniffed and looked at me, the wrapper still in my hand. Ahhh, so you find my gum, he said, a little smile playing across his face.

  Unusual taste, I managed, once my blush had faded. And now I am a total joke to him. How long has he known ... about me?

  Spring arrived.

  I finished my tea and then Akira broke the news that he had accepted a new job, as conductor and music director of an orchestra in Europe. He was moving on.

  Last evening.

  We sat on the floor of his empty house and talked about the year ahead and toasted his European orchestra. I twisted my glass around on its napkin at the low table watching Akira tug cigarette smoke down into his throat then gracefully exhale it through his nose in a way I found so Japanese. He rolled his eyes up to me and tilted his head away.

  I stood at the door and he gathered me into his arms – I could feel our hearts through the cloth – I told him I loved him but he pressed us together – please no talking. And this moment – like all the others – was being pulled away from me, bead by bead.

  I was watching Akira mount the podium, he was ordering from the waiter. The car pulled away with his face in the window. I bowed goodbye and stepped backward. The audience rose with a roar as he bowed again. The phone rang. It was San Francisco. It was raining and we were running hand in hand for a taxi, his face came close as we stepped in and he apologised. He lifted the needle from the record and turned to refill our teacups. I repeated his name to the woman at the ticket window, shouting this time, and her eyebrows flew up. Applause was cutting into the first bars as I crawled across people’s knees. I was dashing across the street after his car. I was flying towards his dressing room. He was whispering into Manager’s ear with his eyes on me. I nodded formally, turning to catch a smile from him. The scowling soloist held out a hand. There was a rustle of tails as he passed. Akira was crooning the theme as he turned the pages of his score, asking me to stay while he studied. I passed him his cigarette. It was long distance again. He closed his eyes as he listened and rocked, cross-legged. I was lifted up with the crowd and swept through the foyer where I lost him. I spotted his hair, he waved me through and we ran backstage to his room. The baton clicked inside its case, he threw his tails across the back seat. Snowing again. His face wet. Someone handed him a towel. His baton clicked against the edge of the podium. Airplane tickets were splayed behind the mirror. His flight was delayed: we had two hours more. Flowers were pushed through the dressing room door. I read him the name aloud. His sweat flew in a spray off his hair which the camera lens picked up. I stood at the foot of the stairs. He looked down and grinned. We stood back-to-back. His animal-shaped eyes locked with mine, his golden hand closed over my own. His eyes clouded over with fatigue. He pushed his hair back. The applause faded.

  The last seconds ticked away until suddenly there was no more time between us. I counted my heart: Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

  Curtain call.

  I don’t care about anything I just want him back I don’t want to talk to anybody I don’t want to go to school no one understands I don’t want to get up I can’t lie down I can’t sleep AKIRA! I just want him back again. I can’t eat I want him to come back no one understands – they think – but if I could hear his voice again hear him talk hear that car coming around the corner again I’m a good person why did this no there’s no one I need to talk to please come back Akira please I’m dying please come back –

  Nothing will bring him back.

  It wasn’t premeditated – except for the bangs.

  I spread out newspapers under the chair by the bathroom mirror. Snip, snip and then I saw I should have wet my hair first. I’d taken the front off too high on the left. So I corrected that but then the sides looked really goofy. I was thinking about Akira and being obsessed by his empty house. He’d been gone a week now. Life went on like normal at school. I wasn’t a widow – I wasn’t Jackie Kennedy – what was I? My parents acted like, whew, thank heavens things can get back to normal around here. Stop yer mooning. Get outside and blow the stink off you. What I call their Ozark routine. I wasn’t on speaking terms with them. Maybe I was trying to get back at them. Anyway, I tried to correct what I’d done with the front and sides but every curl that popped up and got n
icked off with the nail scissors made it worse and, you can imagine, I started running out of hair. Both ears showed and I was getting bugged by the back - couldn’t get at it properly and then I thought, what the hell. I’ll just take the whole thing off and start again. Hair grows back. It’ll be a deadline for my mourning. I was thinking along those lines, honestly. At a half an inch or so a month, I’ll be back to normal in a year. Sort of. That’s when I thought of using the razor. I got my hair down to a stubble using the scissors and then I wet what was left and put on lather – at this point I was totally into the transformation; there was nowhere else to go, hair-wise. That first drag of the razor made me so nervous. So noisy too, close to the skull like that. I started cutting myself when the skin rolled – little tufts of hair with cuts in the furrows – until I figured out how to pull my scalp taut first. Amazing how puffy the skin is there, like a cushion. And so grey. I cut myself a few more times and then I remembered Dad’s styptic pencil. It stung like a wasp.

  I was starting in to shave the back when I heard my parents come in the front door. My schoolbag was sitting on the hall chair.

  They might come upstairs. They might not. I put the razor down in my lap and waited.

  Before skull and bones? You were this. You were the dust blowing around the corner.

  I came back but ... eggs under the skin had hatched into worms that stitched their way towards my heart. They had an appetite of their own. They fed on japonica.

  A hunter drops a ball of blubber every few yards, baited with a coiled spring of whalebone, harpoon-tipped. The bear follows, eating them. As the blubber dissolves, barb after barb springs open inside its belly.

  A wolf licks the frozen carcass carefully baited with razors. Frenzied by the taste of blood on its own slashed tongue, it licks faster and faster.

  Hyakumi – various delicacies offered to the dead.

  Tools of enlightenment

  A tile shatters against a tree.

  A dog throws itself against the gate.

  A drop lands on the newspaper with a pat.

  A photo flutters from a pocket. Sweat flies off in a spray.

  A voice gives a ha laugh.

  A baton clicks inside its case.

  A car slows to a crawl behind me.

  A handful of hair floats to the floor.

  Even a sardine’s head can become an object of worship if one has faith. - SHINRAN

  Marjorie riffled my stubble with her palm. Ooh. What a feeling. The ultimate easy-care cut. She bent over, giggled into my face. I’d never have the guts to do that. It IS growing back though. But when I heard, I was afraid maybe ...

  I’d be stuck bald forever?

  Well, no. Of course not. Do you feel okay now? I mean are you still obsessed with him? How are you going to explain this at school? Your face looks so round! She tugged my hair. Whispered into it, growgrowgrow.

  They’ll think I had an operation. They’ll be afraid to ask. Here’s my plan. I finish grade thirteen. I get a job. I save up and as soon as I’ve got two thousand dollars together, voom – Japan. Who knows? Akira’s there every year. Maybe I’ll look him up.

  And live happily ever after? Emma, are you for real?

  Ah come on, Marjorie. I just want to see the guy

  again. That’s all. Why are you looking at me like that?

  Maybe it’s the hair. You looked crazy there for a second.

  Girl talk.

  It was August.

  My parents came down from the cottage to get me. They’d bought me a present – a red canvas canoe with honey-coloured ribs, so light I could carry it myself. They wanted me to invite a school-friend up too but I was out of touch with everyone by now. So the three of us strapped the canoe to the roof of the car along with a month’s worth of baggage and food, and drove out of town.

  I couldn’t wait to take long solo paddles along the shores of the lake. One calm day I paddled all the way into town, pulled the canoe up on shore and went shopping, piled the groceries into the belly of the canoe and was back in time for lunch.

  There was outdoor work to do, which I liked. We tore the old boathouse down, pulled out deadheads and cut them up with the Swede saw, took garbage to the dump.

  My birthday, end of August, was a make-work project I would happily have skipped this year but my mother hated to break with tradition. It was an excuse to round up our fellow cottagers, most of whom had kids far too young for me, and have a party. My mother dreamed up themes every year. We had done animals, signs of the zodiac, heroes and villains, TV characters. This year, because so many of the kids were little, she chose vegetables.

  We crayoned onions and broccolis on the table napkins, made a vegetable-people table centre, a zucchini canoe with carrot ladies and pickle gentlemen who paddled across a shaving-mirror lake. My father made himself a lei of Brussels sprouts. My mother bustled around me with broccoli buds behind each ear, pinning Queen Anne’s Lace (a relative of the wild carrot) around my head. She was still unhappy about my hair of course, but by now the scalp was completely hidden. We all looked ridiculous today. The ritual, the repetitiveness of it, the notion of birthdays itself, of being given token presents by strangers, of having to laugh and act the centrepiece, of going through the motions of celebrating – I shuddered. Empty. Meaningless. But I’d put my parents through so much, I wanted to make amends if I could.

  Families began to arrive. Motorboats loaded to the gunwales zoomed up to the dock and swamped it with backwash, and then everybody jumped out, tipping the floating dock and kids screamed and fell in, their party clothes ballooning up under their life-jackets. The kids were rescued, presents retrieved, shoes wrung out, vegetable crowns retied and then it was up the hill to the barbecue where my father officiated, leering over his Brussels sprouts at the tiniest kids until they shrieked in fright and fell over. Hot-dogs covered in grit.

  I stumbled detachedly through the day like a sleepwalker, in spite of my efforts to partake. The expression current among my peers was: Unreal. And it was.

  Adults took me aside, stared into my hair, asked me again how old I was this year and, to a one, declared how lucky I was. Eighteen! The oyster of the world opening before my very eyes. My wonderful youth, etc. Everything before me. I felt a thousand years old, infinitely tired. A horrible logic inside told me that the best years of my life had just ended.

  Silence was yelled for. It was time to read my horoscope, another tradition. My father handed me the tiny pink drugstore scroll. I took a swallow of orange crush and began to read aloud:

  ‘Until the 29th, you will be very much preoccupied with personal and private issues. It is apparent that one partnership, involvement, or association has run its course and work is definitely your best therapy now. However a great deal depends on whether you are willing to forget what has overshadowed you in the past.’

  My throat constricted.

  ‘If attachment has to be terminated it should be without a feeling of despondency. Even though the sun is passing through Gemini at a decidedly adverse angle to Jupiter you appear to be entering a decisive period.’

  (A banging of knives and spoons.)

  ‘You are simply cutting out the dead wood in your life in preparation for a more constructive phase.’

  (My mother in a stage whisper: I can think of some dead wood around here that needs cutting ...)

  ‘Shhh, Mom.’ (Pause.) ‘You will be able to decide on the right course of action and see situations in their true perspective soon. The truth of these statements will be supported by developments around the time the Sun opposes Uranus, on the 30th. Be patient.’

  (A toast was proclaimed: To the new moon! To the new moon!)

  I rolled up the scroll and hid it in my shirt. The cake came and I made a wish, the usual, impossible wish I’d made every day since Akira left. But as I thought it and blew out the candles to another year I also hoped, for the first time, that this thing inside me would move on.

  I passed a florist’s shop when the
smell hit me – eucalyptus. Instantly, I was transported back to his room, to the low table, floor cushions, split in two colours of silk, the colours of Kabuki theatre, he told me once. The red tiles of his fireplace and the vase of branches in it. The oily smell released from a leaf crushed between his fingers as he talked.

  I walked into the store. Branches of eucalyptus lay heaped in baskets on the floor. I crushed a leaf and out came that smell. I bought a huge armful, transformed myself into a walking Sumi-e brush trailing an inky perfume through the shoppers, down into the subway, jostling the crowd every way I turned. The bundle crushed against me as I rode the train across town, the smell so strong now, it was medicinal. Bringing him back to me through a lens of oil – the details released, a few atoms at a time. Akira’s cushions, the thready silk, his hand reaching behind him for a branch, his flat nails, the fine gold chain around his neck – the train jerked me home, crushing him against me again and again.

  *

  In my dream, I am in a shoestore. There has been a sale and chairs and boxes are scattered about. Exhausted saleswomen doze against a stack of inventory.

  A pair of rubber boots sits on a chair, very tall and decorated across the toe with a curious red pattern I recognise as Japanese. Delighted, I grab it and instantly the red pattern slides off. It is only a ribbon which has drifted down from the ceiling. Still, I want a pair for myself amd begin rummaging around among the boxes looking for my size but the characters are all written in Japanese. I empty the boxes out onto the floor searching for a pair to fit me but each boot I pick up is smaller than the last. No bigger than the palm of my hand.