“What?”
“Who am I?”
After thinking about it for a moment, Sakurai answered, “You’re Zainichi.”
I turned around and after giving the pedestal of the bronze statue three good kicks, I faced Sakurai again and said, “I swear sometimes I want to just kill all you Japanese! How can you call us Zainichi without so much as a second thought? We were born in this country and raised in this country! Don’t call us that like we’re the same as the American military or Iranians that just stepped off the boat yesterday. Calling us Zainichi is the same as saying we’re foreigners who’ll eventually leave the country. Do you get that? Have you ever taken the time to think about that, even once?”
Sakurai swallowed and kept looking at me. I knelt down before her. “Who cares? If you people want to call me Zainichi, go ahead! You Japanese are scared of me. Can’t feel safe unless you categorize and label it, right? But you’re wrong. You know what—I’m a lion. A lion has no idea he’s a lion. It’s just a random name that you people gave him so you can feel like you know all about him. See what happens when you try to get closer, calling my name. I’ll pounce on your carotid artery and tear you to shreds. You understand? As long as you call me Zainichi, you’re always going to be my victim. I’m not Zainichi or South Korean or North Korean or Mongoloid. Quit forcing me into those narrow categories. I’m me! Wait, I don’t even want to be me anymore. I want to be free from having to be me. I’ll go anywhere to find whatever thing will let me forget who I am. And if that thing isn’t here, I’ll get out of this country, which is what you wanted anyway. You can’t do that, can you? No, you’ll all die, tied down by your ideas about country, land, titles, customs, tradition, and culture. Well, that’s too bad. I never had any of that stuff, so I’m free to go anywhere I please. Jealous? Say you’re jealous! Damn it, what am I saying? Damn it, damn it . . .”
Sakurai’s hands reached out and found my cheeks. Her hands felt warm.
“Those eyes . . . ,” she said, her voice trembling as she smiled faintly.
“Eyes?”
She nodded, smiling some more, and continued. “Last September, I got a horrible grade on my mock exams, and even though I knew how stupid it was to get all depressed about it, I was feeling depressed anyway. It was a rainy day after school, and I was thinking how I didn’t want to go home just yet when I went by the gym, and there was a basketball game going on. I don’t know anything about basketball, and I’m not the least bit interested, but for some reason, on that day I was drawn to the sound of the basketball hitting the court, so I just wandered in. At first I was kind of watching the game, but soon I couldn’t take my eyes off one of the boys in the game. His movements were so graceful, like he was performing a choreographed dance. I just kept watching him, wishing that I could move like that. Suddenly the boy threw the basketball at the face of the boy guarding him. The other boy must’ve given him a nasty foul or said something terrible to him. It happened so suddenly, I was in shock. The court went quiet for a second, and then one kid on the same team as the boy who’d been hit charged the boy who threw the basketball. Then the boy jumped up in the air really high and drop-kicked the kid charging at him. I’d only seen pro wrestlers on TV drop-kick anyone, so I got really excited seeing it live. And if that wasn’t enough, the boy dropped-kicked every one of the boys charging him, one after the next. The time he was in the air must’ve been longer than the time on solid ground. I was so mesmerized by this boy’s movements. The way he moved was so incredible. It was as if gravity didn’t exist around him, at all. Like he’d changed the laws of nature. And just like that, all the players on the opposing team were on the floor with their noses bleeding and stuff. The refs finally came over to try to restrain the boy, but he was so worked up that he started drop-kicking the refs! By this point, everything was so ridiculous that I was laughing and laughing. Then the boy’s coach turned to the players on the bench and said, ‘Somebody stop Sugihara! Go!’ In my heart I was screaming for you to run away, but it was no use. The moment you landed after drop-kicking a second ref, your teammates grabbed you. But you still fought back, shouting ‘Let me go! Let me go!’ Your teammates seemed reluctant, but after they managed to get you on the ground somehow, they piled on top of you. There were about four of them, I think, making like this mound on top of you. I was so devastated you’d been caught that I was stupidly almost in tears. But the tears stopped right away. The mound was heaving up and down. Up and down, even with four people piled on top of you. I just lost it and burst out laughing, rolling on the seats until my sides hurt. I was laughing so hard that that the tears started coming again.
“When I finally got ahold of myself and looked down, some of your senpai were smacking you across the face, and then your coach grabbed you by the back of the uniform and dragged you off the court to the locker room. It was hilarious. I mean, you looked like a naughty kitten being picked up by the scruff of the neck, about to be tossed outside. You and the coach walked over toward where I was sitting. I leaned out of my seat to follow you with my eyes. That’s when you glared at me with these really intense eyes. I had you all wrong. You weren’t a kitten, but a lion. And when you glared at me, I got shivers up and down my spine and felt weird inside, and then I realized I was wet . . . It was the first time that happened to me. I never got that way when I was kissed or touched by a boy before, but just you glaring at me got me wet. For a long time, I waited for you outside the school, but I guess you left from the back, so I couldn’t meet you then. From that day, I had your name and the name of your high school stamped in my brain.
“A couple of times I thought about going to your high school, but I couldn’t work up the courage because I’d never done something like that before. And when I talked to my friends about it, they warned me, saying, ‘Don’t get involved with anyone that goes to that stupid school.’ And they even said, ‘You’ll get raped if you go anywhere near that school.’ So in the end I couldn’t bring myself to go.
“But I always knew that I was going to meet you someday. I was sure of it. So in April when a boy who sits next to me in class showed me the ticket to a party he’d been forced to buy, and I saw the party was being organized by someone from your school and heard that lots of boys from the school were going to be there, I asked for the boy’s ticket because I knew I had to go. And when I went to the party, there you were, just like I’d known you’d be. I recognized you right away. Because you glared at me then, too. And then I got wet again.”
Cupping my cheeks, Sakurai’s hands seemed to tense. “I’m really excited right now. Do you want to feel?”
“Here?” I said, a bit off guard.
Sakurai nodded.
I wavered for a moment and answered, “Maybe this isn’t the place . . .”
Suddenly Sakurai drew my face into her chest. With her hands on the back of my head and neck, she held me tight. Ba-dump ba-dump. I could hear the sound of her heart beating. That familiar sound. That comforting sound.
Sakurai’s voice came from above. “I don’t care what you are, Sugihara. As long as you jump for me and look at me with those eyes once in a while, I don’t care if you don’t speak Japanese. There isn’t anyone, anywhere, who can jump and look at me like you do.”
“Really?” I asked, my face still buried in her chest.
“Yes. I know that now. Actually, I might have known it since the first time I saw you.”
Sakurai kissed the top of my head three times. Her arms relaxed around me, so I slowly raised my head from her chest. Sakurai looked at me and said, “Why are you crying?”
“No way,” I said. “I can’t cry when other people are around.”
Sakurai narrowed her eyes as though she were looking at something bright, put her palms against my cheeks again, and wiped the tears on my face with her thumbs.
“I’ve been dying to tell you,” she said, putting on a serious face. “That chipped tooth makes you look adorable.”
We looked at each other a
nd laughed. Letting go of my face, Sakurai stood up.
“The moon’s about to hide behind the clouds again. Let’s go somewhere before it begins to snow and ruins everything.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere. Somewhere warm first. We can think about where we’re going to stay tonight.”
“Are you sure?”
“Let’s work on not asking such tiresome questions.”
Sakurai moved past me and began skipping toward the main gate. Still kneeling on the ground, I chased after her with my eyes. Sakurai stopped and turned around. The most beautiful smile I’d ever seen spread across her face. Out of her mouth came a breath as white as snow and a warm voice: “Let’s go.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kazuki Kaneshiro graduated from Keio University and made his literary debut with Revolution No. 3 in 1998, winning the Shosetsu Gendai Prize for New Writers. In 2000, Kaneshiro won the Naoki Prize for GO, which tackles issues of ethnicity and discrimination in Japanese society. The novel’s film adaptation went on to win every major award in Japan in 2002. Many of his works have been made into films or manga, and Kaneshiro has been adept at working synergistically across multiple formats and genres, writing the original concepts and scripts for the TV series SP and CRISIS.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Takami Nieda was born in New York City and has degrees in English from Stanford University and Georgetown University. She has translated and edited more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction from Japanese into English and has received numerous grants in support of her translations. Her translations have also appeared in Words Without Borders, Asymptote, and PEN America. Nieda teaches writing and literature at Seattle Central College in Washington State. She would like to acknowledge the PEN/Heim Translation Fund and the Japanese Literature Publishing and Promotion Center; this translation would not have been possible without their generous support.
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