Tokyo Stirs: (Short Stories about Asia)

by Harmon Cooper

  ‘What’s with the stitches?’ Gana asked. He lifted one eye open with his thumb and pointer finger and spun his pupil around.

  ‘They haven’t been removed yet!’

  With her arms crossed and Gana’s comments stinging, Nanda burst into the bathroom and peered over the sink. Her eyes did look a little larger. Using a cotton swab, she cleaned the stitches, brushing a little hunk of excess scab away. She fell onto her bed, doing her best to tune out her father and his drunken friend in the living room.

  A few days later, she returned to the Korean doctor to have the stitches removed. He finished and gave her a hand mirror. She studied her face for a moment as the doctor retrieved a tiny digital camera.

  ‘They are very big now, like a model!’ he said with a jovial laugh.

  ‘Yes, they are,’ she said, turning her head left and right. Her eyes were larger than she anticipated, the white on the verge of escaping the safety of her eyelids. They were beautiful though, perfect and round, and she felt a confidence she’d never felt before. Nanda smiled as the doctor took a photo.

  ***

  ‘You have big eyes now too,’ the older homeless girl said, coming into Modern Nomads with her little sister later that night. The youngest girl coughed, hacking something yellow into her threadbare glove. She reached her hand out for the wooden horse sculpture near the souvenir mugs.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Nanda said, flattered by the compliment. ‘Don’t touch that,’ she said sharply to the youngest.

  ‘Do you have any food?’ the youngest asked, still petting the back of the wooden sculpture.

  ‘No, we don’t.’

  ‘Stop touching it,’ her older sister said as she yanked at her younger sister’s hand.

  ‘I think we may have something,’ Enkbat said, turning to the kitchen. The back of his shirt read: Meat for men, grass for animals.

  ‘I think you’re eyes are too big now,’ the youngest said as she sat down.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Nanda asked, her face morphing into a tight beak.

  ‘Be quiet,’ the oldest hissed.

  ‘No, it’s fine. Let her speak.’

  ‘Now your eyes are too big, like a Minion.’ The little girl laughed at her own comment.

  ‘Like a what?’ Nanda asked.

  ‘Like Shrek.’

  ‘Shrek!?’

  ‘Quiet!’ the oldest hissed.

  ‘No, like a frog or a cat!’ the little girl said, squealing. Her older sister slapped the back of her head.

  ‘Out! Get out!’ Nanda came around from the bar waving her hands. ‘Both of you!’

  Enkbat appeared behind her. ‘What’s happening?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing, just nothing. We need to stop giving them food. They come every night now.’

  ‘But it’s extra food…’ He looked down at the sagging plastic sack.

  ‘I don’t care. No more!’

  Enkbat walked around the counter and handed the bag to the oldest. She stood with her head bowed and her hand tight around her younger sister’s nape. ‘I will leave food outside every night,’ he whispered and with that, he walked the two girls to the door.

  ***

  Nanda woke with a pounding headache the following morning. The light in her room was nauseating and overpowering, her forehead hot and raw. She went to the bathroom to wash her face and examined her eyes in the mirror. Red veins had started to appear on the edges of her sclerae. Her pupils were smaller now, dwarfed by the whites of her eyes.

  Nanda blinked rapidly, thinking maybe she was just sleepy and her vision was blurred. She climbed up onto the sink and sat down onto her knees. Leaning in, she carefully traced her finger along the stitch line of her left eye. She shut her left eye and did the same to the right.

  In the living room, her father slept on the couch with a blanket up to his chin. A carpet stitched with a picture of Genghis Khan hung on the wall above him. She poured herself a glass of milk and began cooking breakfast for him – mutton soup with strips of flour. The smell eventually woke him.

  ‘Dad, do my eyes look strange to you?’ she asked as she stirred the soup.

  ‘They look about the same to me,’ he said without looking.

  Nanda brought him his bowl of soup and slid it onto the table. ‘Really, do they look different?’

  He studied them for a moment, massaging his lower jaw with his hand. ‘Maybe they are a little larger.’

  At work that evening, Nanda resorted to wearing sunglasses again.

  ‘Why the sunglasses?’ Zola asked. She was behind the bar filling salt and pepper shakers.

  ‘No reason,’ Nanda said.

  ‘It’s your eyes, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  Coming home that night, Nanda found her father and Gana drinking vodka in the living room. She kept her sunglasses on and went straight to her room. Around three, she woke up to find her pillow wet. Panicked, she ran to the restroom and flicked on the light.

  Her right eye had nearly fallen out of its lower lid. Both her irises were rimmed with red and her lacrimal caruncles were crimson and bulbous. Nanda clawed at her cheeks, pulling the flesh away from her face. She tried to pop her right eye back into its socket. Finally, she yelled for her father.

  The next day, she visited the Korean doctor as soon as humanly possible. The doctor came in with his hand mirror and set it on the table. He told her to take her sunglasses off and turn her head left and right. The doctor mumbled something in his mother tongue, scribbled a few notes onto a pad of paper.

  ‘There’s been a little swelling,’ he finally said, pressing his finger into the space between her cheek and her nasal bone. He ran the same finger from her temple and to her hairline, applying pressure. ‘Look.’

  He handed Nanda the mirror and she began studying her eyes. Aside from a little swelling, her eyes looked perfectly normal. Her left eye had somehow righted itself, strange because she’d checked it just as she’d gotten out of her father’s car.

  ‘If it swells again, I want you to apply pressure here,’ the doctor said as he applied pressure to her temples.

  ‘Ouch!’

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ the doctor assured her. ‘Beauty has a price.’

  Modern Nomads featured a half-rib soup that night, which translated into a surplus of customers just before closing. Nanda was tired from her sleeplessness the night before. Her feet hurt from scurrying up and down the stairs of the restaurant holding trays full of boiling soup. She kept her sunglasses in her apron, just in case her eyes started to swell again. She applied pressure periodically, just like the doctor had recommended.

  As Nanda pulled the wine glasses down from the glass rack, she noticed the two homeless sisters standing outside the window. The wind blew around them, beating their faces with a light snow, their eyes glittering in the darkness.

  At first she ignored them, continuing to buff the marble countertop as if they weren’t there. She windexed the register screen, added more business cards to the cardholder. Nanda looked up again to see them standing closer to the door.

  She waved her hands at them. ‘Go away,’ she mouthed.

  ‘I’m taking the trash out,’ Enkbat announced, appearing from behind the bar with a couple of black sacks.

  ***

  Nanda’s father was asleep by the time she got home. She draped a blanket over him and began cleaning up his dirty dishes. As she scrubbed, her head started beating against the front of her skull like an angry drunk. Plangent raw grate. A drop of blood fell onto the kitchen countertop.

  ‘No, no, no,’ Nanda whispered as she raced to the restroom.

  Both eyes had now swollen out of their sockets. The parts that weren’t covered in veins were sickly white. The parts covered in veins were coarse and almost blue. Her pupils were black and dilated, large as chestnuts.

  She opened her mouth to scream and her eyes grew larger. They were golf ball-sized now, throbbing and slimy. She applied pressure frantically; a blinding pain sprea
d from the back of her head to the front of her skull. It rippled against the bridge of her nose and sank down her throat like a plummeting lure. It surged through her chest, through her toes. She collapsed.

  Nanda awoke with her head pressed against the bathroom floor. A sticky sensation at the side of her face was the first thing she noticed. Nanda reached her hand up and slowly began peeling her pulsating left eye off the floor. She was crying now, holding her eyes in place with one hand. A veritable ache leafed through her body. She yelled for her father and he responded with a drunken snore.

  Holding her eyes with one hand, she began the painstaking process of slipping her winter clothes on. One arm through her jacket, the other arm through after switching her eye-holding hand. Her eyes were wet and gummy. Yellow-red discharge dribbled from her palm to her sleeve to the floor. The eyes grew in weight; she needed to get to the hospital.

  Nanda unlocked the front door and burst into the hallway. Her eyes shifted in size and a searing twinge rocketed up her spine. She leaned backwards and her expanding eyes yanked her forward like two wrecking balls. The two eyes propelled her down the stairs, passed a horrified mother and her infant son. Nanda tried to scream, but her eyes had swollen to a point that they now muffled her laments.

  Her monstrous eyes burst into the cold night air, jerking her body behind them. They rolled feverously forward, growing in size as the seconds past, dragging Nanda with them. They froze to the ground, paring themselves off the ice as they heaved her forward. The two eyes scaled over a few parked cars, over debris and clumps of oil-stained snow. Nanda’s body slapped against the hoods of the cars. She was whimpering now, aware that her eyes had complete control over her body.

  A passing man dove for her, dropping a sack full of ramen noodles to the street. The buckets of noodles bounced by as he latched onto Nanda’s legs. Her eyes bucked wildly and flung the man off. He twisted into the air, face-planted onto a snowdrift that doubled as a shabby flower garden in the short Mongolian summer.

  A driver in an approaching car slammed her fist onto the horn. She threw her vehicle into reverse, and slapped into the front bumper of the car behind her. Nanda’s eyes sprung onto the windshield, shattering the glass and filling the woman’s lap with snowflake sized shards.

  The monstrous eyes bounded from the first car to the second, landing in an awkward position on the roof rack. They were now the size of dump truck tires. Ravenous, seething. Big red and blue veins pulsed and pried the eyes from the roof rack. Nanda’s torso flailed in the air as her eyes continued their mad slither forward, through a pair of frozen-over potholes and past a screaming teenage girl shielding her younger brother’s face with the sleeve of her jacket.

  Barreling towards the main road, Nanda’s eyes hurled through a small food stand, clambering on top of an overflowing dumpster. Springboarding off the dumpster, they smacked into a wrought iron fence, quickly toppling it. The eyes plodded over a few more parked cars, past stumbling drunks and two homeless girls creeping into a sewer cover, past barking street dogs and vendor trucks screeching to a halt.

  Nanda’s surroundings spun all around her. They collided and sprayed past one another. They were heavy, and unimportant. Life didn’t mean the same thing that it used to. Nanda’s new eyes dragged her along, tearing over the streets, skidding over the snowdrifts. It was as close as she’d ever come to seeing the world from a new perspective.

  Tani House

  [5]In Kyoto, the Tani House feels like the inside of an old whale. Charm to it though, and the pungent incense which clings to your clothes isn’t half bad with a Sapporo or some Japanese beer flavored kiwi.

  Outside, crickets chirp and cicadas call to each other in long bursts of metallic utterances. A hungry cat slinks along the fence line, crouching down into its spine. All around the cat’s head, dragon flies beat their delicate wings against the impending dark. Kazuko, the owner of the Tani House, waits downstairs for her son to come home from a pachinko place called LUCKY.

  Her son enters forty-five minutes later, having gambled what little money he’s borrowed away. He’s wet from a light rain and a little caffeinated. A scowl forms on Kazuko’s face as soon he slides past her. The Tani House responds by tipping the coat rack, spearing his pudgy form with a collection of hanging umbrellas.

  Kazuko laughs as her son curses the house. A lump forms in the tatami mat and he trips forward, tumbling to his knees. Ashamed, her son runs into the adjacent room. The Tani House always did have a sense of humor.

  ‘Hello!’

  A Belgium backpacker enters with a sweat-stained hachimaki tied across his forehead. He kicks off his muddy hiking shoes; it doesn’t take long for a foul stink to curl from his socks into the foyer. The creeping cat outside sniffs the air and turns the other way.

  Kazuko slides open her private door and steps into the hallway. She looks the man over and smiles so big that the Tani House expands. After taking the Belgium man’s money, she begins thanking him. She follows him up the stairs thanking him. She slides open the shōji door to his room thanking him. She reminds him of his check-out time still thanking him. Satisfied he has been sufficiently thanked, Kazuko walks past the room with the two American brothers and listens in for a moment. They’re watching an anime and drinking sake. They’re loud and it’s frustrating, but they’ve paid for five days and five days they will stay.

  ‘Don’t worry about them,’ Kazuko says to the Tani House, as she hobbles down the flight of stairs. She runs her hand along the wall and the house purrs in response.

  In the hallways, silhouette blurs drip down the wall and pool into tip toe stains once they come into contact with the wooden floor. Renovation is an unreachable future; age a thing of the present; death an empty box of matches.

  ‘This place holds itself up,’ Kazuko tells the hotel inspector who comes around once a year. ‘It’s been here since the war.’ She always locks the upstairs bathroom when he visits, separating it from the rest of house by pushing a coffee table in front of the door. The huge sinkhole in there would get her into trouble.

  The bathroom sinkhole was the Tani House’s way of telling Kazuko the place needed some attention. It’s been there ever since a leak in the attic tore a hole in the ceiling after a torrential rain. The house responded by contracting just a little, hence the sinkhole, but not enough to actually bring the place to the ground.

  Down the hallway from the restroom in question, the Belgium man settles into a room next to the Americans. He presses a pair of grimy ear plugs in and begins unpacking an inflatable mat. From his backpack, he pulls out a small neck pillow. A germaphobe, the man always brings his own sleeping items when he travels.

  On the wall in his room, a calendar hides a carved portrait of a rose. It’s the Tani House’s only tattoo. The crude picture was etched in by a Kazuko’s son during his rebellious teenage years. The familial relation is the only reason the Tani House hasn’t let loose a floorboard from underneath him.

  After placing his toiletry bag on a crooked shelf, the Belgium man stretches his arms into the air and yawns. The Tani House drops a mothball at just the right moment, and it lands in the man’s mouth. He coughs, doubles over and hacks the mothball onto his sleeping mat in a sticky mess. He raises his fist to the ceiling. The house sways with laughter.

  Downstairs, Kazuko bangs against the wall with a long, plastic shoehorn. ‘Settle down!’ she shouts at the house.

  A late summer breeze huffs in and ruffles the hanging curtains shielding the window at the top of the stairs. The wind shifts loose a piece of yellowed paper that has been tucked under an old magazine. The paper floats down the staircase, twirls right at the bottom of the stairs, and lightly taps against the shōji door separating Kazuko’s room from the foyer. The Tani House slides the door open, and the letter drifts in.

  ‘Oh, a letter!’ Kazuko says, putting down one of her son’s old mangas. The letter has been folded several times to form a triangle. She can read English better than she can speak it,
and has no problem deciphering the message:

  Margo,

  I’ve decided not to come back. Sorry. I know sending you a letter isn’t the right way to end things. Please forgive me.

  I can no longer let my life be dictated by comfort. I came to this conclusion after nearly falling into a sinkhole in the bathroom of the guesthouse I’m staying at. I swear the toilet paper holder stretched forward and stopped me from cracking my head on the toilet tank. Crazy, I know, but seeing how some sort of divine intervention stopped the inevitable from happening, I spent the rest of the night thinking about what I should and shouldn’t do.

  I shouldn’t marry you. It’s not that you’re a bad person or anything. It’s just that I’m not ready for all this. I want to explore this strange world of ours, experience things others never get to experience. I can’t do this with you. You’re tied to your job, to your career, and you should be. You’re doing remarkable things at Biotech. I don’t want to get in your way.

  Most importantly, I don’t want your tethers. I’m sorry if this sounds harsh, but I want both of us to be happy in the future. Pain now may translate into fulfillment later.

  I’ll never forget you,

  Vince

  ‘Vince, Vince, Vince,’ Kazuko says, combing through her memory of guests. She closes her eyes and tries to remember his face. Impossible. Too many foreign guests over the last few decades. ‘Do you remember him?’ she asks, reaching back and touching the wall.

  In the foyer, the Tani House flips open the guest book and stops on a date from exactly four years ago. The house groans near the entry way, and when that doesn’t stir her, the house jiggles a door handle.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Kazuko calls out. She lifts herself from the sofa and enters the foyer to find the open guestbook. ‘Vince Kohl, 7717 Brushmore Avenue, Canton, Ohio, 44720.’

  She sits down on the futon covered in a faded zebra print cloth and reads the letter once more. ‘I guess it was never sent,’ Kazuko says. ‘Maybe Vince changed his mind.’