“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Getting out of Japan. Going to Norway.”
“What’s got into you all of a sudden?”
“I’m going to Norway and become Norwegian. I’ll learn to speak Norwegian and forget this ugly Japanese language. I’m done with this place. And I’m going to—”
“Calm down.”
“I’m going to marry a cute Norwegian girl and have a cute biracial daughter and build a happy family.”
“So you’ve given it some thought. But why Norway?”
“I’m getting as far away from Japan as I can.”
“The other side from Japan is South America.”
“I hate the heat.”
“You have given it some thought.”
My father reached for the pile of books I’d stacked on the floor and picked up Thus Spoke Zarathustra off the top.
“What do you know about Nietzsche?” he asked.
“I know some.”
“I heard he was a little funny in the head. Did you know that?”
“Better that than a womanizer with a saint complex.”
Suddenly I felt the old man’s menace in the air.
“Don’t talk bad about Marx,” he said. “He’s a good guy.”
I didn’t want to get hit, so I decided not to talk back. He watched me work. The menace was gone. Creeped out by the silence, I stopped what I was doing and looked at my father. He had a serious look on his face. Our eyes met.
“No soy coreano, ni japonés, soy un nómada desarraigado,” he muttered.
“Huh?”
“It’s Spanish. I always wanted to be a Spaniard.”
I didn’t reply.
“But it didn’t work out. Turns out, it wasn’t about speaking the language.”
“Language has everything to do with your identity—”
“In theory maybe,” he said, cutting me off. “But we live in circumstances that can’t always be explained away by logic. You’ll understand someday.”
I sat down at my desk. The old man got up from the bed and came closer. After looking through some of the papers spread out on the desk, he said, “Not a bad thing to know something about darkness. You can’t talk about light without some knowledge of darkness. Like your buddy Nietzsche said, ‘He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.’ Keep that in mind.”
He stared in the direction of the window behind me as he spoke. I turned around, expecting to find a crib sheet taped to the window. But there was nothing there. Only the dead of night.
When I turned back around, my father delivered a punch that glanced off my cheek as if to caress it.
“You’ve been acting testy lately. I’m not saying you need to get into trouble like you used to, but you should go out more. Like your buddy Nietzsche said, ‘Any man in his youth should apply himself to amusement to his heart’s content. Too long a time in a forest of words will leave him trapped and unable to escape.’”
“You made that up.”
My father let out a chuckle and tossed the papers back on the desk.
“Go to sleep.”
As he moved off, I asked, “What did you say in Spanish before?”
My father picked up the pen on the desk and wrote something down.
“Look it up yourself.”
Just as my father got to the door, I asked, “Why did you want to be Spanish?”
He turned around and answered with a straight face, “I heard there were lots of beautiful women in Spain.”
On his way out the door, he began to sing the Beach Boys’ “Hawaii.”
Jackass.
I gathered the books and papers off the desk and set them down on the floor. I decided to keep them there for now. Then I decided to think about Sakurai until I fell asleep.
4
I called Sakurai for the first time on Friday night, exactly a week after the night we met. As soon as she answered, she said, “Working women in America have something like a manual for how not to get played by men, and one hard-and-fast rule is to always turn down a date offer that comes later in the week.”
I hadn’t even asked her out yet. I was meaning to, of course. “Why’s that?”
“Because men are busy asking out their top choice earlier in the week. When they strike out, they go, ‘Hey, she’ll do’ and call the fallback girl later in the week. Women have to say no when that happens, or they’ll be seen as convenient. See?”
I didn’t reply.
“Not that I mind because I hate rules like that.”
Of course she minds. I’m sure of it. “Next time I’ll be more careful.”
“Don’t forget.”
I knew it.
Our date was set for Sunday.
Sunday.
I arrived at our meeting place at the east exit of Shinjuku Station exactly at one. Sakurai was nowhere in sight. I stood off to the side of the ticket entrance and waited.
Ten minutes passed. Anticipating a long wait, I bought a Newsweek at the kiosk and began to read. As I became absorbed in an interesting article about a former commando in the North Korean Special Operation Force who was a personal bodyguard to King Sihanouk of Cambodia, something slammed softly into me. The collision had a familiar sensation.
I looked up, and there was Sakurai’s unguarded smile.
“Sorry I’m late.”
“This hardly counts as late.”
Her smile grew wider, and she asked, “So what do you want to do?”
I realized after I’d hung up the phone the other night that we’d only agreed to meet and hadn’t discussed what we were going to do. All we wanted to do was to see each other. Before I could suggest seeing a movie, Sakurai spoke first.
“I don’t want to walk around Shibuya, which is always packed like a train, or get matching tattoos on our arms to commemorate our first date or go to a bad Italian restaurant whose only claim to fame is that it’s always crowded or sing karaoke inside a tiny doghouse of a box. Definitely not.”
I hastily shook my head. “I wasn’t thinking any of those things. Although I was thinking about going to a movie or something.”
“Is there a particular movie you’d like to see?”
“Not especially.”
“Then let’s do something else.”
“Okay, what?”
“Do you want to come with me?” she asked as though it were a challenge.
I nodded.
“Then let’s go,” Sakurai said and pointed to the ticket machines. We started walking in that direction. I rolled the Newsweek into a cylinder and held it in one hand. Sakurai said cheerfully, “Looks like a club. Are you going to protect me?”
I tossed the magazine at the trash bin some distance away. It went in.
“I don’t need a club to do that.”
Seemingly happy, Sakurai body-checked me with all her might. I staggered from the impact. Sakurai looked at me, her brows furrowed.
“Maybe we’ll need that club back.”
Sakurai and I took the train halfway around the Yamanote Line loop and got off at Yurakucho.
After exiting the station, Sakurai headed toward Hibiya. Dressed in a purple jacket and white skinny jeans with a pair of beige hiking boots, she breezed down the office-lined street. Wearing a black jacket, white T-shirt, regular jeans, and loafers, I silently trailed after her.
We wound up at a corporation-run art museum on the top floor of a building near Hibiya moat. Sakurai entered the building as if she’d been there many times and boarded the elevator. I had never been to an art museum before. But I liked looking at art books. Jeong-il lent them to me.
“Do you come here a lot?” I asked as soon as we got on the elevator.
She shook her head. “My first time. I’ve always wanted to come here but felt weird going in alone. Are you having second thoughts?”
I shook my head.
When t
he elevator opened at our floor, Sakurai walked straight up to the ticket booth and bought her own ticket. Before I had a chance to pay.
Featured in the exhibit were painters who’d made their name in the French art world. There were some pretty impressive names: Rouault, Braque, Chagall, Picasso, Dali.
“See anyone you like?” asked Sakurai upon entering the exhibit.
“Rouault and Chagall.”
“Who’re they?” She smiled playfully. “I don’t know the first thing about art.”
The way Sakurai and I looked at art was a contrast in styles. I stopped and studied each and every painting. Sakurai, seemingly knowing her likes and dislikes at first glance, stood rapt in front of paintings she liked and blew right past the ones she didn’t. It was all so clear-cut and refreshing. I decided to do the same.
I stopped only at Rouault’s The Old King and Chagall’s The Poet Reclining. Working my way through the exhibit in this way, I gradually closed the distance between me and Sakurai, who’d been quite a bit ahead of me.
She was standing before a Dali painting, smiling. The name of the work she was admiring was The Atavism of Dusk, a reimagination of Millet’s Angelus. It might’ve been called a reimagination, but to my eyes, it was just a hideous parody. The couple giving prayer to the dusk—the man had a skull for a head and the woman had something like a spear sticking out of her body. And the country landscape had been turned into desolate rocks.
“Isn’t it great?” Sakurai asked as she turned to me.
I gave her a vague nod. She frowned, dissatisfied by my reaction. She spent a lot of time in front of the Dali paintings. At times, she giggled as she leaned so far over the barrier that her nose nearly touched the paint; other times she let out a sigh. I stared at Sakurai the whole time. Watching her never grew old.
Sakurai stopped before the last of the Dali paintings and said, “It’s like the artist is picking a fight with me. Provoking me, like, ‘You think you understand this painting?’”
This last painting was of a human body made of a series of drawers. Some were opened, some closed.
“I don’t understand it at all, but what I do know is that the artist is trying to push my buttons, and my heart is pounding. See?”
Saying this, Sakurai grabbed my hand, pulled it closer, and pressed my palm to her chest. She wasn’t kidding. Her heart was racing. Then she put her palm against the middle of my chest.
“Yours is pounding too, Sugihara.”
Her heart beat even faster. Mine was beating even faster, but that was because people were beginning to gather around us and stare.
Sakura and I pulled back our hands almost simultaneously and retreated from the Dali painting. She was chuckling happily. I was so embarrassed that in an attempt to distract her, I said, “I read in the papers the other day that Dali is really popular with elementary school boys now.”
She said, “Oh yeah?” and was smiling until suddenly she wasn’t. She punched me lightly in the ribs.
“Excuse me for having the artistic taste of a school boy.”
I bought two programs at the booth near the exit and handed one to Sakurai. She thanked me and took the program. “That was fun,” she said.
I nodded earnestly.
We went to Hibiya Park and after walking around for a while, sat down on a bench and let time pass idly by. It was a pleasant spring evening.
“Can I ask you something?” asked Sakurai.
“Sure.”
“What’s your family like?”
“There’s three of us. My parents and me. What about you?”
“We’re four. My parents and an older sister. Where is your rural hometown?”
“I don’t have one. You?”
“My father’s family home is in Kansai, and my mother’s is in Kyushu. What does your father do?”
“He’s . . . just a humble independent businessman. What about your father?”
“Just a humble salaryman. How many girls have you gone out with?”
“One.”
“When was that?”
“My second year of junior high school. For a month.”
“Ooh, that’s short. Why did you break up? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want.”
“I don’t mind. I blew off a date and poof! That was it.”
“Why did you blow it off?”
“A buddy asked me to go on a trip. It was at the same time as my date, and I chose to go with my buddy.”
“Whatever,” she said in disgust. “Why would you do something like that?”
“That’s just the way guys are in junior high,” I said, lamely. “You have to choose your buddies over your girlfriend. Any guy who chooses his girlfriend over his friends will get himself branded as a traitor. He’ll be persecuted.”
“That’s so stupid.”
“You’re right.”
“Where did you go anyway?”
“Nagoya.”
“What for?”
“Sightseeing.”
“That’s weird.”
My friend and I rode the local train to Nagoya, having sworn to each other that we would conquer the parlors of Nagoya and return to Tokyo as pachinko kings. The trip was a blast. With our winnings, we stayed at a hotel, ate some fantastic miso udon noodles, and sat in the first-class car on the bullet train back to Tokyo. We went on a school day, of course. My father decked me when I got home.
“Your girlfriend must have been angry,” said Sakurai.
“After she ignored me for two weeks, she called me a loser.”
Sakurai said, “Well, of course,” and punched me in the shoulder. The conversation stalled. As I searched for something to talk about, Sakurai suddenly began to talk.
“I’ve been out with three boys. The first was when I was in fifth grade—a boy in the same class, with round eyes. He looked a little like Tom Cruise. I broke up with him because he didn’t give me anything for White Day. I was young then. The next one was in my second year of junior high school. It was a boy a year above me—he was captain of the swim team and class president. We broke up after he invited me to his house one Sunday and—with a straight face—handed me a red racing swimsuit and asked me to put it on. I slapped him really hard and stormed out of there. Thinking back on it now, I guess I could’ve worn the swimsuit for him. He’d probably become a little unbalanced from the pressure of being captain of the swim team and class president at the same time. He was such a serious student. He had a tiny bald spot behind one ear—from the stress, I guess. The third boy was when I was in the first year of high school. He was a college student at Keio University, the son of a lawyer. A really horrible guy, really stupid. He’d say stuff like ‘The people around me are such imbeciles.’”
“Why did you go out with a guy like that?” I said, asking the obvious.
“I had a weakness for confident men back then,” she said plainly. “Every girl goes through a phase at least once when she’s vulnerable to confident men.”
“Oh.”
“I broke up with him after two weeks,” she continued. “Because a foreigner stopped us on the street in Roppongi and tried to speak to us in English.”
“What do you mean?”
“The man was probably asking for directions. Anyway, he comes up to us and says ‘Excuse me’ in English. My boyfriend is all smiles and confident up until ‘Excuse me,’ but soon all these difficult words come flying out of the man’s mouth, and my boyfriend’s eyes start jumping everywhere. I half expected smoke to come out of his ears. He noticed me staring at him and somehow managed to regain his confidence and said to the foreign man—what do you think he said to him?”
“I can’t imagine,” I said.
“He said, ‘Ah-hah.’ Real confident. ‘Ah-hah.’ Like that. That’s when I realized. This guy was an idiot.”
She was giggling, saying this, but I couldn’t bring myself to laugh. I prayed never to be spoken to by a foreigner while I was with Sakurai.
“All he neede
d to say was, ‘I can’t speak English,’” she added, still smiling.
I made a mental note. A hint of mischief came into Sakurai’s eyes.
“Don’t you want to ask how far I went with these boys?”
After some wavering, I shook my head. “Knowing will only upset me.”
A tender smile came over her face. She said, “Don’t be stupid,” and punched me hard in the shoulder. As I was smarting from the pain, a dog appeared and trotted toward us. The mutt approached us, gently wagging its tail. Just as I was leaning down to pet its head, Sakurai let out a low growl. Grrr! The dog stopped in its tracks, and after flopping its ears forward, gave us a look like Sorry to have bothered you and trotted back disappointedly from where he came. I gave Sakurai a look. She said, “Keep all buttinskis at bay. That’s a hard-and-fast rule of dating,” and smiled sweetly.
After heading out of the park, we went to a CD shop. I recommended Sakurai buy Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love, an album I especially liked. The album Sakurai said I should buy was one by a jazz pianist named Horace Parlan called Us Three. I had never listened to jazz before.
“My father likes jazz, so I grew up listening to it,” explained Sakurai, holding up the CD. “This is really cool.”
We wandered around Ginza, stopped at a diner we spotted along the way, and had dinner there. Then we enjoyed an after-dinner stroll to Kachidoki Bridge. We smelled the sea air.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to go to the beach? And see the ocean?” said Sakurai.
I nodded. “We should go sometime, soon.”
We said goodbye at Yurakucho Station. Sakurai let out a quick “See you” and disappeared up the stairs to the train platform. I went up the stairs to the opposite platform with the same disappointed gait of that dog in the park. I stopped at a random spot on the platform and was looking down at nothing when I noticed a shadow above my vision moving frenetically on the opposite platform. I looked up.
Sakurai was standing on her tippy toes, hopping almost, and waving at me. The eyes of the passengers on both platforms were trained on me. As I stood there, frozen and unable to respond, I could sense the crowd’s irritation. The loudspeakers announced an arriving train, and I could hear people clicking their tongue at me. Fighting back my embarrassment, I raised a hand and waved to her. I felt the relief of the crowd. The train pulled into Sakurai’s side of the platform, putting her out of sight. I casually lowered my hand and hastily moved from where I’d been standing. People looked on as if they were watching a grandson taking his first steps.
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