by S. J. Parks
Her reaction surprised him in its vehemence.
‘Teach? Teach English? I can’t teach. Do you even know me? I read extremely slowly and can barely spell. What are you thinking of? I would have a class empty of students in under a week and all my spare time would be spent reading up for the next lesson. Not that I would mind the time. What are you thinking of? It would be humiliating.’
‘Something else will turn up.’
‘Yes. Yes, there are lots of jobs for hostesses in the classifieds. Over your dead body.’
‘Well, they’re only glorified drinks waitresses paid to talk to clients.’
‘You are suggesting I take a job as a hostess? Great career move.’
‘No … I am just correcting you. And as I say, you don’t need the money.’
‘Josh, I am useless here. And I should never have come. I am nobody here.’
He turned in exasperation and then came full circle to wrap his arms around her. She found them consolatory but without passion and she felt sure he had begun to find her a burden.
‘I need you here with me,’ he cajoled. ‘And you don’t want for anything.’
Money had never intrinsically interested her but she wanted to tell him how uncomfortable she felt that she was in his keep. Silently she worked the wooden spoon around the wok pan. The shiitake mushrooms were soft and brown in chilli-flavoured sesame oil. She tossed colourful vegetables onto a pile of buckwheat noodles and topped them with scented herbs.
‘Did you call the Miho girl?’ he asked, ‘She could be good company.’
‘Not yet. Tomorrow. I need to …’
He waited expectantly.
‘It’s July and so I’m going to make strawberry jam.’
Strawberries weren’t impossible to source though they cost a fortune and he might think she had set herself an underwhelming task; he would be baffled at her choice in this displacement activity. She knew he sometimes found her skittish but it was something she needed to do.
He inhaled patiently. He might be perplexed, He might find it endearing.
‘Is jam-making the English equivalent of Zen?’
And she smiled at his broad understanding and believed she had his sympathies though at times she recognized they survived only on misunderstandings.
Two days ago he had returned claiming he had come for his newspaper to find her dozing under the thin sheet of their kingsize bed, and she knew he had turned back to check on her. While she could view his concern as positive they had both begun pretending to one another.
‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’ he had asked with more distress in his voice, closer in tone to panic than she would have expected. His face was suddenly ugly. She thought not but lately she had found her body so greedy for a sleep that it demanded compound interest and she wondered where would she find energy for a job.
A few days later, Josh had already left that morning when Naomi woke to the sound of an air con that had developed Tourette’s. And it was with annoyance that Mr Kami, the rental agent, entered her first waking thoughts before the realization that today she had an interview in Aoyama Dori. It was to be at eleven. And she would have to call Kami to get it fixed before then.
The silence in the kitchen was so unlike home – no music, no acerbic comment on the latest erosion in the political grit of welfare, no early-morning collisions or casualty counts, nor the white noise of racing results or the interminable predictions of unpredictable English weather. The hum of the downtown expressway was barely audible. She was not a morning person; dawning intentions came round slowly and she began the day as a sleepwalker. Their experiments with rice and seaweed for breakfast were now over and she would boil an egg and cut toast in an act of self-cosseting that might stoke her and bring her a bit of luck. Why had she gambled with life to live the experiment where her only constant was Josh.
She had found the job, lost among the listings for English teachers, for a publishing firm. They produced world classics in translation, and, although she was totally unsuited for the role, she could not stand that her options seemed to narrow daily. She had applied. Josh was so unacceptably pleased she had secured an interview it was hard to take: hard because she might fail and if she failed she had next to no money to buy a ticket home and while she didn’t want to leave him she could not stay on much longer and hold onto any self-respect.
As she bit into the finger of toast the thought of disappointing Josh stirred a terror that they might ask her to proofread, a task for which she was unqualified in any language on the planet.
Chapter 23
On a dusty side of town she walked the streets towards her interview and, though the pavements were busy, they were as good as empty to her. Not belonging had become a chronic problem. She was an outsider and with each face she passed it became more obvious to her that she was other. While they could see her, no one recognized her and no one cared. Walking towards the construction hoardings, she started at the noise of an unseen machine and she stopped a little beyond the site to calm herself, annoyed that the mundane should make her so jumpy.
With the help of the biro asterisk beside the newspaper ad and the trusted friend, ‘The Detailed Map of Tokyo for Business Man and Tourist’, she arrived at the publishers with twenty minutes to spare. She looked up at Kobayashi Press, at the new curving façade, four-storeys high, above a line of fast-food chains.
She scanned the windows expectantly – perhaps for guidance. She didn’t know what she was searching for. An enlightenment? An augur of birds flying in formation? Stuck on the inside of the first-floor window was a simple poster advertising the latest publication. A possible conversational opening? But she had never read Ibsen; it would be no help. In arriving so early she had given herself longer to contend with the wheedling little suggestion that she should not go in at all.
Drifting into the nearest fast-food chain she ordered an American filter coffee; though foul in appearance and foul to the taste it did offer the guaranteed of a kick and this just might displace her nerves and bring some clarity.
A boy came over and she watched him coax a grimy rag across the Formica; again she had to recognize she was not where she wanted to be. Her lips buckled at the first sip and she felt for another paper finger of sugar from a plastic white cat holder. Her lucky cats were black. The stimulants took her heart several notches above resting pulse.
She envisaged a world of unfamiliar horror titles; masterpieces by unpronounceable authors and a lexicon of knowledge in which she held no currency. If she knew how to communicate it was in the language of the shapes and lines of her drawings, and what if they did ask her to proofread? She was only halfway through the acrid coffee when she decided she would not go into the interview. Failing to turn up when she had committed was not a habit with her. Would she be letting herself down? Josh would be disappointed. Disappointed for her? She was so tired. She began digging around in her bag for coins. Holding an imaginary phone to her ear, she motioned the greasy boy in the bellboy cap for the phone. It was inevitably, hard to make herself understood, and he did not register at first. Eventually she found a pink payphone at the back of the café.
She dialled the number on the neat white card, given to her by the girl from Shibuya Station.
‘Hi, yes, Miho. It’s Naomi.’
‘Yes, yes, I know. You too. We had so much to do settling in. How about that coffee?’
‘No. Not today, Okay. No. Well …’
The flex was coiled the around her hand in a full bandage by the time she heard Miho say she would meet her for lunch.
‘See you there.’ And she left her future with the classics publisher before she had begun.
As Naomi waited outside the station, by the statue of the dog Hachikō, the girl came loping towards her. Was it Miho? Large crepe soles suggested a teenage boy. She wore pale citrus-yellow, slashed at the neck and belted in what looked like handcuffs. She couldn’t be sure it was her until she was close enough for her smile in recognitio
n to trigger her own.
They walked the labyrinth of zebra crossings where Miho had first guided her and took an escalator down to the basement of a department store to a subterranean market, where, amid the hawkers, they chose from a bar of freshly prepared fish and fried tempura. Miho listened patiently as Hana explained she’d blown out of an interview.
In the silence that followed the confession Miho laughed that she should find it so grave.
‘Okay, if you don’t wanna teach, then take Japanese classes.’
The girl had an edgy ease, Hana thought. She feared it would be awkward if Miho wanted a language exchange and she was keen to see off any such generous offer before it was made. Since she had given up her course in London, a guilt had settled on her that she had to silence and pay off. Earning her keep meant she was determined not to join another class.
‘I can’t be a student again,’ she said conclusively.
She had picked up some words in Japanese, trawling for items for the house, but her world was not made up of conceptual bricks. She carried only small change in the currency of getting around but it was enough for her to manage right now. She lifted the bamboo handle of the teapot. ‘Where are you living?’ she asked Miho and poured more for them both.
Miho told her that she lived in a photographic dark room. ‘I went out with my boss a while back,’ she continued, ‘but nobody right now. He let me stay and I still sleep in the studio where we work.’
Naomi looked sceptical .
‘It’s great. At weekends he’s in the country and I get the run of the whole place. My wardrobe is the stationary cupboard on the floor below. Deal is I don’t bring friends back.’
Piped music played over their conversation and every time a customer arrived a competing welcome of irrashaimase went up. They sat beside the chipped ice and bunches of pale radish, spinach and unfamiliar species of seafood. Surely inedible, Naomi felt. They ate sushi and miso soup, and talked of Miho’s lovers.
Naomi felt she could trust Miho with her confidence and though she felt uncomfortable, she blurted, ‘Miho, do you know where I can get a pregnancy test?’
‘It’s not so easy to get the pill here, huh.’
Chapter 24
‘O mio babbino caro’
−Puccini, Madama Butterfly
Miho smiled warmly. A pregnancy test; her new friend was in a place she had been many times before. Contraceptive pills weren’t that easy to come by.
‘Sure, like a test pack? You want me to help you with that?’ She left her basket on her chair and called to the waiter, telling him they would be back.
‘Come.’
‘I told him to hold our table,’ she told Naomi. ‘It won’t take a minute’
They found a pharmacy at the station end of the store, bought the test, then Miho marched them up to the ladies.
‘Go,’ she commanded. ‘Hand it to me and I will tell you the truth. You want no or yes?’
‘No. I need to hear NO.’
Miho knew how she felt. This was a big issue. She bounced around, teasingly shrieking yes and no outside the cubicle and, when Naomi finally handed it to her, she walked off as if to hide the truth and tease her further. After a few moments she read the results.
‘Okay, okay. You want to hear it?’ Miho read the colour code. ‘Yes …’
Naomi lost a beat and Miho responded only just in time before she panicked.
‘Yes, you got what you wanted.’ Miho held Naomi’s shoulders. ‘Not pregnant.’
‘Don’t tell me yes!’ Naomi chastised, and laughed with relief. It was as if she had been given a new lease of life – a life of her own – and she would do something with it.
They returned to their table. The set-menu pudding arrived and Miho pushed hers aside.
‘You want that? I can’t eat that. Worst thing for cystitis.’ Miho dismissed the sugary fruit jelly. Naomi found she had few conversational filters but balanced this by hiding her private side in a dress sense intended to ward people off. Naomi accepted the vibrant the orange jelly. She needed the sugar just now.
‘You save me from an attack. You ate seaweed jelly before?’
Naomi’s eyebrows floated. ‘Sometimes I just don’t know what I’m getting here.’
‘Good for the hair,’ Miho offered consolation to her new thin-haired friend.
Naomi liked her already . She pictured her in an enormous photographer’s studio, wandering across curls of giant backdrop paper. ‘You have family in Tokyo?’
‘I am an outsider,’ Miho said proudly, as if not belonging was a badge of identity. ‘From a village outside Osaka,’
Naomi thought her forebears might have been from such a place but she was not from a village outside Osaka. She looked so urban and cosmopolitan and, as she toyed with a soft packet of American cigarettes, her open face led Naomi to feel there were no conversational lines unguarded. Knowing there was nothing like a convert to the city, and aware of her own tendency to cynicism, Naomi reserved judgment. On this side of the world the signifiers were as unhelpful as ethnic window dressing.
‘I am Etahin,’ Miho added.
Naomi supposed it was a rural district but then again it might have some connection with Japanese puppetry. The blank that it elicited prompted Miho to continue.
‘I am from a low caste. Hisabetsu Buraku.’
Naomi’s concept of living in twentieth-century Japan did not include a caste system, and she assumed Miho’s vocabulary had dried up before the chapter in the primer on social anthropology.
‘Like an Indian caste?’
Miho shrugged. ‘I guess. It means I am an outsider.’
‘Well, me too.’ Naomi patted her city map. ‘And this is my best friend.’ Naomi guessed she would remember her as they first met, shrouded in billowing paper.
‘Now me.’ Miho smiled. ‘Me and your useless map.’
Chapter 25
Shimokitazawa, 2012
When Hana returned to the homestay from the Municipal Registration Office it was past lunchtime and Noru was trimming the overgrown kiwi-fruit vine that, without Ukai, had run riot and crept inside the ground-floor windows. Hana inclined her head in silent greeting with respect for Noru’s period of mourning.
Hana ran up to the room to find Jess sitting on her bed, casually eating a bento box from the convenience store; a small, compartmentalized lunch, but irresistible to an empty stomach.
It was such a relief to see her but as Hana came over Jess dug her chopsticks into a slick morsel of chicken. Her mouthful necessitated a convenient lull that Hana was obliged to break first.
‘We agreed we wouldn’t do that.’
Through the mouthful it sounded like, ‘So what?’, and then Jess swallowed.
‘You went without me this morning.’ Hana became grand with indignation though hated arguing as a rule. ‘Really … reprehensible.’
‘What’s this olde English?’ Jess complained. ‘I went without you? You weren’t here.’
The relief at seeing Jess worked in confusion with the injustice Hana felt, until her relief won and she backed down.
‘So tell me about it.’
Jess was clearly hungry. ‘Later,’ she said, pulling at a wing, redeeming what little meat there was. ‘Nice guy,’ she mumbled, and flashed a cheeky look then smiled.
It was all very well. It had worked out okay but Hana had to exact a promise from her never to break their code again.
‘Let’s picnic.’ Jess rifled through her carrier bag; she had bought her a peace offering. A lunch box.
Hana sat on the faded pink bedcover as Jess unwrapped the cellophane from its lid and released the chopsticks. Taking a cherry-blossom morsel from its compartment, she brought it towards Hana’s hairline as if to tuck it above her ear as a gift. Teased as she drew back from the chicken-greased flower, Hana lightened up as she popped it into her mouth.
‘Sorry,’ finally came.
Jess was not ready to talk about her evening so Hana began on the
grey men from the municipal office who would win no awards for keeping fish.
‘I give up,’ she concluded. It was closer to frustration than a statement of intent.
‘What? When you English are so keen on your heritage?’
‘Yes, Jessica Junior the third. I give up.’ She flounced.
‘Well, thank God.’
It was so outrageous in its lack of sympathy that Hana took it to be nothing more that the usual flippancy. ‘Thank you.’ She was no heavyweight support anyhow.
Jess frowned. ‘You don’t give up now.’ She popped an edamame bean from its pod and ate the single bean carefully as she thought through. ‘So Miho sent you there and gave you a name?’ She was in earnest.
‘She had some relative called Tachi who was sure to help. There were only two guys and they both looked like the same person and neither had a clue. I’m wasting my time.’
‘I’ve never heard of Tachi.’ Jess focused on her hands, chewing hard. It was as if delaying any more revelations.
And she watched a curious expression creeping over Jess’s face. Did Jess regard her as ungrateful towards Miho?
‘I know she meant well but it was useless.’
‘Interesting,’ Jess concluded as if they were now on different teams. ‘I’ll maybe talk to Miho.’
Hana climbed down. ‘I guess she was just keen to suggest something, anything at all that might have given me a lead.’
‘Let’s just call it Tachi’s day off,’ Jess said sanguinely, and they laughed as they had not done for a while. Jess grabbed Hana’s hand as if she had just remembered. ‘I have to tell you. Coming home I saw Tako.’
Tiresome though this might be it was not news. Hana waited for the punchline.
‘He was at the back of the house, standing on a beer crate, peeking through the air vent in the bathroom like a peeping Tom.’
Hana grimaced. Some time back her instincts had told her to move.
‘Oh God.’
‘Let’s have a day out?’
Hana, as if she were exhausted by it all, nodded.