Gaijin

by Sarah Z Sleeper

  It had been twenty-four hours at least since I’d eaten, and my tired legs and growling stomach propelled me into the first takeout restaurant I found. It had plastic menus in English, along with a photo of each dish. The small dark woman behind the counter pointed to “taco rice” and indicated I should order it. “Eat?” she said and shot me a dismissive smirk when I ordered salmon sushi instead. Did the hair-netted cook shoot a scowl at me from the kitchen? The restaurant sold half-size bottles of wine, so I bought two of those, then hurried back toward my hotel. Already, Okinawa was too much to take in.

  A splashing commotion caught my attention and a crowd gathered near the seawall. A black dog bobbed in the water, fighting to climb onto a pylon. The tide sucked him out, then threw him against the concrete. Two men hung off separate pylons and grabbed for the flailing dog. One guy finally got ahold of the dog’s collar, yanked him up and carried him over to the boardwalk. He set the dog down; the dog shook himself off and trotted away. The man stood dripping in front of me, an American flag tattoo across the breadth of his bare chest. I asked if that was his dog.

  “That’s Gogan. He’s the neighborhood dog.” I was incredulous. “Everyone takes care of him. He’s the Sunabe Seawall dog.” I pressed my lips together, didn’t respond. “Don’t look so worried, he knows how to get along.” The man had a kind tone and warm eyes. He extended a wet hand, introduced himself as Nathan.

  “Lucy.”

  “Military?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, nice to meet you, Lucy. And nice to meet someone not in the military. Not many of you around. Do you live on the Sunabe Seawall?”

  “I don’t live anywhere, I guess. I’m staying in a hotel until I get a place.” I could see where the conversation was heading and didn’t have the energy to make small talk. “Good job saving Gogan,” I said, and started to walk away.

  “The word gogan means seawall, by the way. Um, want to grab lunch?” I stopped walking, uneasy, and he spoke before I could answer. He promised he wasn’t trying to hit on me but was happy to meet an American on Okinawa who wasn’t in the military. He had a familiar Midwestern accent with flattened vowels and polite manner. Still, I declined, and told him I needed to focus on my new job.

  “Oh, okay. Where do you work?” he pressed, unwilling to let me leave. He stood in a wide stance with his hands on his hips. Water dripped down his muscular legs. He was attractive, but no match for my resolve. I’d been sexually reticent since I was a teenager, “non-loosy-Lucy,” Rose called me.

  Right when I told him I was to start at Okinawa Week soon, it dawned on me that it might not be the smartest thing to tell a stranger where I worked. But he seemed harmless enough.

  “I’ll look for your byline,” he said, and I turned away. “Lucy, Okinawa is nicknamed ‘Divorce Rock.’ Did you know that?” I turned back, curious.

  “No, I hadn’t heard that.”

  “Are you married?”

  “Nope. Why’s it called Divorce Rock?”

  Nathan smiled a bright white surfer smile and raised a sun-bleached eyebrow. “Because about fifty percent of the Americans who live here end up being divorced,” he said. “It’s a true fact.” The legend, he said, was that because of America’s bloody attacks on Okinawa during World War II and the many locals who killed themselves to avoid becoming prisoners of war, the spirit of the island absorbed the pain and anger of those who died here. The constant hot winds blew off the East China Sea and inflamed the hearts of the Americans who should’ve been happy, the young, married military folks, and they ended up divorced. “Broken by Divorce Rock,” he said.

  “My goodness.”

  “Good story, huh? Anyway, maybe if I email you at work, you’ll let me take you to lunch one day.” Nathan jogged down the boardwalk, jumped on a scooter, waved goodbye and zipped off.

  I watched him go then turned toward the sparkling, glinting water. Divorce Rock. Suicide Forest. None of this had been in any history book I’d read. A wave crashed on the cement and sea water splashed on my face. I leaned into the strong ocean breeze and walked on, my thoughts muddled. I’d only been in Japan for twenty-four hours and every moment had been radically different from what I expected. In my imagination I hadn’t pictured other Americans. I’d only placed myself in the picture, just me with Owen and a sea of Japanese people. Of course, that was ridiculous and of course many non-Japanese lived in Japan. But aside from my minor interactions at the hotel and with the lady in the take-out place, I’d mainly seen American faces. The Japanese I’d interacted with had either frowned at me or yanked my hair. No one and nothing, so far, reminded me of Owen or Owen’s Japan.

  Back in my room I ate the sushi, chugged wine, and checked email and texts. I emailed my mom to say I was fine and would call in a few days. I texted Rose. “So far it’s like California,” to which she responded, “Huh? Send photos.” I took a shot of the glowing red and orange sunset out my window and sent it to her.

  I sat at the desk and stared out at the horizon. “Disappearing men,” was the designation I’d assigned to my dad and to Owen. They’d been ripped from my life like leaves ripped off a shrub in a storm, stunning in their sudden absence, the limbs bare where they had been plush. I’d given little thought to those I left behind in Illinois, Rose and my mom, probably because their existence in my life felt inevitable, non-malleable. I hadn’t made other lasting ties during college or at the Sun Times. Maybe after my dad’s death and Owen’s departure, I knew I’d leave, and so I never locked on to anyone permanent.

  Already, I’d had two teachers, senseis, in Japan, Amista and Nathan, who’d given me curious insights about the country that I couldn’t have imagined. Owen had been my sensei too, my first true teacher after my parents, opening my mind and heart to a culture across the world.

  In my semi-dark room, I read an email from Ashimine-san, the publisher of Okinawa Week, my “boss,” to whom Amista had referred earlier. “Welcome, Ms. Tosch! Welcome to Okinawa.”

  “Thank you for this excellent opportunity,” I emailed him back. “I’ve always wanted to live in Japan.”

  He responded with a joke. “Okinawa is only a little bit Japanese.” He’d typed in a sideways winking smiley face, presumably so I’d know he was kidding. “See you soon,” he wrote. “Amista will bring you.”

  I was to start at Okinawa Week in the morning and despite a head that felt waterlogged from heat and exhaustion, I plunked around online, through photos of the Sunabe Seawall, maps with the distance to my new office, and the locations of the many military bases up and down the island, which took up big swaths of land.

  Without deciding to do so, I plugged Aokigahara into the search engine, Suicide Forest. I didn’t want to admit to myself that I needed to see it, to understand what it was. Gruesome images popped up—skulls and leg bones on a thick forest floor, holey boots and clothes in a jumble, a lone Buddha statue amidst a tangle of branches. Photos showed overgrown trees, tangled into claustrophobic canopies and almost impassible pathways. I’d seen plenty of wooded areas in Illinois, but nothing as dark, as if no sunlight could sneak in at all.

  By far the majority of photos I found online were of hangings, half-decomposed men, or the clothed bones of men, slung from tree branches or scattered on the dirt and leaves below. I flipped through four or five shots then flicked off the computer, rubbed the tears out of my eyes. It seemed impossible that such a place was real and yet here it was, fully documented online, as if “Suicide Forest,” was just one of the many types of places one could go in Japan: grocery store, office, airport, restaurant, seawall, Suicide Forest. It also seemed impossible that my Owen, the man who radiated light like a bright star, could have walked into such an abyss, thrown a rope onto a tree, put it around his neck, and attempted to end his life. Two months before he’d done that, we’d been back at Northwestern, writing poetry, making out, sharing Japanese tea, falling in love.

  I closed my eyes and forced myself to think about the next day wh
en I would start my new job. I knew there would be differences in the way they handled things here, and Amista had warned me about the pecking order. In the best-case scenario, I’d immerse myself in interesting stories and perhaps find respite, a way to thwart my nagging thoughts about Owen. I’d been plagued by questions about what had happened to him after he got back to Tokyo, why he wanted to die. Why he’d do something so drastic as try to hang himself.

  After a half-bottle of wine, I found myself scribbling, and wrote a few lines about the seawall, gogan, outside.

  Gogan, breakwater, dam, bullwork, embankment,

  smashed to sand, drowned and reformed,

  prior shape as irrelevant as a wall of rocks,

  sand again in no time at all

  I felt like the seawall I wrote about, my former self, the one that existed before Owen Ota, irrelevant. My previous identity had been smashed to bits by the love of Owen and the enlightenment he’d shared about his home country. Now I was someone else entirely. I wasn’t that girl who remained cocooned by small-town safety, I was now a woman who chased her dreams across the globe. I was braver than I’d been in the past, but perhaps more reckless too.

  I curled up in bed. The ocean roiled beyond my window. I tried a different song on my phone, something sad about the death of a lighthouse keeper by Nickel Creek, but I soon switched it off and listened to the waves outside, to my blood course through my temples. I’d decided to move to Japan, and I was in the least Japanese of all Japanese places, on an island Owen probably never visited. My loneliness was deep and dark as the East China Sea, and it was stained with anger. How dare he dazzle me, woo me, invite me to his country and then desert me? What kind of wicked trickster had he been and how naïve had I been to trust him, to love him so blindly, and yearn so deeply to be in Japan? When I would finally tell Rose all of this, I could see her laugh first, at my stupidity, then realize how pathetic I was and put her arms around me in sympathy.

  The wine disrupted my sleep and I tossed in bed and worried about the next day. What am I really doing here? Doubts flooded my mind, and after a few hours, I made a midnight decision. I’d go to my new workplace tomorrow and tell Ashimine-san I’d made a terrible mistake, apologize for wasting his time, promise to pay him back for the airline tickets and hotel. I’d book the first flight back to Chicago. I was certainly the most naïve woman in all of Illinois, to think that my life would change for the better by following Owen and his hollow promises all the way across the world. I stared into the night, hopeless, until the black waves shifted to shimmering grey under the rising sun and it was time for me to get up and quit my job.

  Chapter Two

  When my alarm rang at six a.m. I hadn’t slept. It was going to be a horrible day, turning in my resignation at Okinawa Week, disappointing the cheerful boss, Ashimine-san, with whom I’d emailed. I could only imagine Amista’s frown as she realized what a flake I was. It would be a few hours before she’d pick me up.

  I didn’t turn on any lights but flicked on my computer. I was about to look up Aokigahara again, but local news exploded on my screen and I was sucked into an awful blast of information.

  “Teenager Alleges Rape by U.S. Serviceman,” the website, Ryukyuchat, said, “Assault on Manza Beach.” A photo showed a white luxury hotel next to a sandy beach and aqua bay, captioned, “Scene of the crime.” There was a black-and-white photo of a man in uniform, the accused, “Airman Reginald Stone,” the caption said. There was also a soft-lighted color photo of the alleged victim, fifteen-year-old Midori Ishikori. She had thick black bangs and looked perfect and pure in a white blouse with powder-blue private school insignia on one tiny breast.

  I was queasy; Stone’s photo showed him to be a big man, and a black man. Midori Ishikori was so little, more like a pre-teen than a teenager. The idea of a two-hundred-pound man violating a ninety-five-pound fifteen-year-old gave the story a lurid, tabloid quality.

  Along with the photos of accused and accuser, there were images from last night, when street protests had broken out spontaneously. I must have been in my room before the news hit because I hadn’t seen or heard anything. As word about the rape accusation spread, the locals erupted with fury.

  Snapshots showed fishermen, farmers, housewives and shopkeepers gathered in small groups of twenty or thirty in front of the locked and heavily guarded military base gates, illuminated by strobe lights and waving signs that said, “Americans Get Out!” and “Vanquish the American Menace.” I was stunned by the images on my computer screen, so many locals out in force, no non-Japanese in any photo.

  Now it was eight a.m., almost time for Amista to pick me up. A text dinged my phone. It was from her. “I can’t drive you. Hotel will. Streets are jammed. Be careful.”

  I dressed quickly, slapped on some makeup. Since entering the workforce last year, I’d become skilled at feigning more confidence than I felt. A bit of tawny blush and eyeliner shielded me, acted as a barrier from those who would otherwise stare at my ghost-pale face. No one described me as beautiful, but with the right makeup, I was acceptable. And on that day in Japan, I’d especially need my makeup protection.

  When I went downstairs the hotel car and driver were waiting for me. He got us out onto the main street easily enough but when he tried to make a quick right into a side street it was blocked. Construction workers were digging a hole in the middle of the asphalt. Signs directed us to a detour and as we turned the next corner, my breath hitched. Up ahead one short block, the street was packed. People spilled out of doorways and crowded on sidewalks with placards held aloft. A small line of cars had built up and we were boxed in. The only choice was to keep moving forward and drive past the throng. We arrived at a traffic light as it turned red. The crowd was across the street, their backs toward us, rows of white and red t-shirts. Please don’t turn around.

  The car behind us honked. A few protestors turned then quickly turned back. Except one, a teenager who turned all the way around, stood squarely on two black-booted feet and glared at me through the car window. He held a rock in one hand, and he didn’t take his eyes off me as we turned through the intersection. He was reflected in the rearview mirror and watched our car as we drove away. When he turned back to the protest group, he raised his closed fist in the air and clenched the rock.

  My hands were unsteady, and I grasped my cell phone as though it was a gun. I asked the driver to stop in the parking lot of a convenience store so I could calm down and call Amista. I told her about the rock wielding teen. She told me not to panic.

  “Protests like this flare up every few years. It’s as if the Okinawans want to remind us that we’re trespassers,” she said.

  “Us? But we aren’t the military. We’re reporters, not soldiers. Do they know that?” I cringed at my use of the word “they,” as if Okinawan rape protestors were in one category and Amista and I were in some vastly different one, them and us. I closed my eyes and sat back into my seat. Stone’s face invaded my mind’s eye or was it the face of the teen with the rock? Somehow, they melded together, and I couldn’t quite picture either one. A creeping fear prickled my skin. Did I imagine hatred in the convenience store clerk’s eyes? Did he glare out the window at me? I patted at my hair and ignored him.

  I would probably be late to work on my first day because of the traffic, but what did it matter? My first day would also be my last. I asked the driver to continue on. We drove past a bright yellow breakfast diner, a placed called Pancake House that could have been plucked from Anytown U.S.A. I was glad for a few more minutes in the car to gather myself before I faced Amista and Ashimine-san and delivered my news.

  As we snailed along, I read more news on my phone. Local gossip sites Ryukyuchat and MoshiNaha had published the first details about the accusation. Their reports provided snippets of conversations, glimpses of the accuser and the suspect reported by hotel staff and tourists just hours after the alleged crime, before officials made public statements and before charges were filed.

 
; The dove-white sweet-faced girl and her parents weren’t from Okinawa; they were well-to-do Tokyo people, visiting the subtropical island for vacation. Midori had come back to their Manza Beach Resort hotel suite damp and disheveled, her bubble-gum-pink swimsuit cover-up ripped and soiled, her face bruised and tear-smeared. She’d told her parents she’d met an American on the beach, Airman Reginald Stone, who seemed nice at first, bringing her a can of the soft drink, Pocari Sweat, and flirting with her in half-Japanese. But he’d turned vicious and when no one was looking, he’d dragged her behind the hotel, next to a shallow ocean stream, and there he’d beaten and raped her, threatened to kill her if she told a soul.

  As I read the reports, I was rapt, amazed at the audacity of the journalists to assert such details before an official statement of any kind. It seemed incredible to me that the reporters could access such specifics so quickly, but here it all was in tabloid-type write ups.

  One reporter wrote:

  “Midori sobbed when she admitted to her parents that she’d flirted with him too, as if what happened were her fault because of her unladylike behavior. Before the attack she had waved at him and smiled, so he came over to where she rested under her sun umbrella. After the assault, her outraged red-faced father bellowed at hotel security, who called the Okinawa city police and they’d apprehended the enlisted man on the spot. Stone had acted shocked when he was picked up from where he sat, on a towel on the white sand beach, as if he had nothing to fear and nothing to hide. He immediately claimed he wasn’t guilty and said that Midori had consensual sex with him, said that she was probably ashamed and therefore crying wolf.”