Made in Japan

by S. J. Parks

  Iwata-san had been dispatched to collect the western girl in the jeep.

  Naomi could not believe how far out of the city she had had to travel but it was against the tide of commuters at Shibuya. She had memorized the kanji alphabet for the small town to the south west. Chigasaki. The train timetable ran accurate to the second and nearing her destination she slipped her copy of Anna Karenina into the lurid, plastic basket that she had found in Harajuku. She recognized the station name in kanji letters. She would need two and a half thousand letters to read a newspaper and could devote an entire lifetime to writing them. And though she had at best a dozen letters she felt empowered, travelling out this far. Today the symbols did not wave at her sense of alienation like a reprimand. Looking up she caught a glimpse, through the urban sprawl of pachinko parlours and drive-through food chains, of Mount Fuji.

  Despite the absence of postcard blue-majesty, it struck like a talisman. Perhaps her journey might not be wasted.

  Naomi blinked, pulsing draughts of hot air circling her legs, as she came out of the station. The light bleached the urban grey of the pale, dusted metalled roads, empty of drivers and as quiet as a one-horse town. A car approached.

  Across the road Iwata hunched, gripping the steering wheel, his hands at twelve o’clock, he glanced down at his watch. And then he saw her, the lone gaijin. It wasn’t difficult to spot the alien in Chigasaki. As a rule there weren’t any. As he crossed the road towards her he began nodding in an obsequious greeting. He moved with an exaggerated, deprecating stoop, like a bird on the run, which, for all practical purposes, slowed him up.

  ‘Mochizuki-san’s office, Iwata-san,’ he said, introducing himself, courteously ushering her towards the jeep.

  Kusottarre, he thought, admonishing himself. What does she think she looks like? A woman from the fields? By degrees he dismantled what she had thought was fashionably poetic and reduced her to a Etahin. Mochizuki’s really not going to appreciate this one, he decided to himself, and looked forward with relish to his expression when he saw her. He reckoned she’d be a five. The boss should stop experimenting with these foreign imports; they drove the rest of the staff to distraction. Even when they had acclimatized they behaved like loose cannons. They never lasted very long and it was no secret that some of them entertained him outside hours and were a disruption in that.

  ‘Konnichiwa,’ she responded. ‘Hajimemashite, Naomi desu.’

  Iwata-san was unctuous, small and dark, like an oily starling. He wore a combat T-shirt underneath his regulation office shirt. They travelled the short distance to the offices in virtual silence, past signs on the low walls of suburban gardens proclaiming ‘May peace prevail on earth’ in English. Naomi found they served as a reminder that, of all the adversities these peoples had had to deal with, some of them had been man-made. Fifty years between earthquakes, she recalled Mr Kami telling her, and, between these, the odd world war. The signs became little scars on the road. Laced with power lines, the mess of utilities belied the Japanese organisational systems. Surface power lines, Kami had said, were easier to reconstruct after a quake.

  They stopped at the American-style traffic lights, their generous glare-catchers like eyelids in a manga comic, adding to the sky clutter. And, as they drove on, Naomi ran through her last college project for fluency. A Chelsea riverboat construction inspired by the forms of the Thames barrier.

  Beside the front door of the office were two large white cones of powder.

  ‘What’s this?’

  Iwata told her in broken English that the little mounds were salt and that he had been asked to put them out to cleanse the threshold and ward off evil spirits.

  ‘Not me? You can’t mean me.’ She laughed.

  ‘For all visitors today,’ he said pointedly.

  So, she was among other candidates for interview? Before she stepped across the threshold, she released her hairclip and shook out her pale hair, then entered.

  Mochizuki rose as she was shown into his office and shook her hand across his desk. When asked if he would see Naomi, he had felt obliged, not least since Sam’s bank had holdings in the Guam Venture. He knew enough about this sometime student of architecture that she could never work with him on the airport in Guam. It would be highly unprofessional to take such a risk, and they were already in the third stage of the designs. Quite what she could contribute he was at a loss to imagine. They had not reached the point of ‘restroom fittings’, and her one strength as an English speaker was lost on the wind when the developers were Japanese and other client with whom he communicated very well was someone he had known since they were at school. Giving his time to speak at the Imperial Hotel, should, he guessed have Sam indebted to him, but conversely he had called for yet another favour.

  He gestured she should sit down as he walked away to dispatch a cigarette, waving the last of his exhaled smoke. He returned, finally giving her what might pass as a smile. Naomi snagged her light cotton skirt as, releasing a tight hold on her basket, she placed it on the floor. She brushed down her skirts.

  Mochizuki read her nerves and sought to put her at her ease. ‘How have you been?’

  And she found the casual opening more difficult than intended. She could not respond with, ‘well, Josh and I spent the weekend eating brunch and drifting round Tokyo’ or ‘the city is exciting but I am spending too much time in my own company’ or ‘I might be about to regret the move here’. A shaft of sunlight was in her eyes. He drummed his fingers and looked at the unusually silent desk phone that he had had to reroute.

  After a pause she said, ‘Good, thanks. It was good to have the opportunity to hear you the other night.’

  Referring to the party reminded him of his first impression, where he overheard her allude to his work as imitating others. Today she seemed deferential and polite. He leaned back, crossing his leg so high on his thigh that his foot was almost on the desk.

  He paused, inadvertently stirring the anxiety that had begun in the morning as she snapped at Josh and which had intensified as she found she’d waited on the wrong platform in Shibuya. She recalled they were building a new island to house the airport at Kansai, but couldn’t make a conversational start.

  His preliminaries drew on the evening they met and after his obligatory enquiries after Sam he asked her where she was from. In answer she managed a tortured lead into the construction projects.

  ‘Since the recent opening of the M25 orbital road, the airports serving London at Stansted and Heathrow are due to expand,’ she told him, to a reception so hollow she felt lost in the space.

  Mochizuki brought his hands together, tracing a line between his teeth with his forefinger. He found the girl a delicacy, reminiscent of his wife at the same age but a pale version; her eyes were tight when she smiled, not so unlike his own, but her hair made her fade before his eyes as the morning sun created a halo around her temples. She had the appeal of pale, sweet, bean-paste mochi cakes. He would just then have liked to put his hand out to touch her upper arm to assure himself that it would not pass through her.

  Naomi was relieved when a woman whom he thanked as ‘Saito-san, our accountant’, broke the hiatus with two small coffees, delivered on a small floral tray. So the accountant served the coffee. The setup was not what she had expected of the renowned international practice.

  ‘So did you get some of the principles of traditional Japanese architecture I was trying to explain?’

  Sam had briefed her on the airport project but not on this. There was very little in English print that she had found on indigenous wooden structures, though she had made another visit to the ancient temple in Asakusa, focusing on the construction. The temple approach was a concrete walkway wide enough to land a plane, built to accommodate huge crowds, and had no relevance to what he had told them about laying a circuitous route to the entrance of a traditional building. She mentioned her trip to Asakusa anyway.

  ‘One of the few structures to survive the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1
923. In the Buddhist style.’

  They were headed towards a topic that was already beyond her. She may as well leave for home now. But she clutched at the work in the book Miho had bought for her. Nakashima’s furniture reminded her of the dated seventies shapes her parent hung on to.

  ‘I’m interested in the work of George Nakashima,’ she gambled. How much longer that interest for her would remain beyond the week wasn’t under discussion.

  His eyes lit up. ‘Such a master.’ He was energized. ‘An architect I most certainly admire. He worked with wood. A recycling tradition.’

  His enthusiasm shifted his whole frame towards her and, as he leant on his elbows across the desk, he described some of his beloved projects and a well of knowledge on the subject broke free.

  At the end of their talk he thanked her for coming and though she felt more comfortable it was unclear whether he had a role for her.

  After supper that night, Josh poured over travel magazines.

  ‘We have to get away.’ He turned another page.

  ‘But you’ve only just got back from the last business trip. We should take a weekend trip out to the countryside if you need a change of scene.’

  ‘Can’t imagine anything worse. I really do need a break. You wait. A couple of months at work and you will too.’

  ‘Josh, please don’t. It might not work out. That architectural practice is so shabby it doesn’t look as though they could afford more staff. ‘

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘I was hoping we could talk about it.’

  ‘Well, we are.’ He turned another page to reveal the turquoise-blue of the barrier reef. ‘How about Australia? If I can get the wind business in the roaring forties off the ground there’ll be lots of excuses to visit.’

  Her eyes rested on the TEPCO sign for strength. She began to clear the plates, looking to him for a little more interest.

  ‘Are you, in fact, going to even ask, Josh?’

  ‘I did ask. I’m asking. How did it go?’

  ‘He talked about his inspirations mostly.’

  ‘Sounds positive. Nothing committal?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We should get away before you start.’

  ‘Josh, if I don’t find work can you tell me how I am going to afford to stay here?’

  Josh had never asked her to contribute and did not see it as an issue. He had made promises to her before they left and yet again another conversation had been drawn round to the same subject. He threw down his magazine, moved over, and, on his knees, buried his head in her lap like a child. He entreated her as he looked up.

  ‘We will get married, hun, when you want.’

  She got up abruptly; to become another half she had to feel whole herself. It had become a permanent state though remained unspoken and it left her vulnerable.

  ‘Coffee?’

  His head stayed heavy as she rose.

  Chapter 39

  Kazuko gently moved aside the purple hats of aubergine ends and the lacework of carrot peelings from her chopping board.

  She placed her teeth against the ribbed grain of the pouch of seaweed and pulled at the resistant nick at the edge of the packet.

  Mochizuki called to her from his cushion on the wooden living room floor.

  ‘Shakira has called in his favour.’

  ‘Yes? The teahouse?’ she replied, as she beat the package and cast it aside for recycling.

  Her husband’s university friend had visited while she was away. He was one of those remarkable students who had lived so hard that by the age of twenty that he had seen it all and given up on the twentieth century and become a Buddhist monk. Given his urbane good sense and marked intelligence he had become, in a fairly short space of time, the abbot at the local temple.

  ‘Yup,’ Mochizuki drawled, scratching head as if erasing a folly.

  As the kettle boiled she covered the tricolour of dried seaweed to top the floury udon she had bought fresh from the noodle maker that had celebrated it’s hundredth year last fall.

  ‘The grant has just come through and it has to happen now. He’s trying to coerce me into helping with the rebuild,’ he moaned. Everyone wanted a piece of him.

  ‘Are you complaining? When this is all you ever wanted to do. So you don’t have the time. You’ll make time.’

  He came in to watch the progress of supper. The udon noodle maker had supplied them for so long, pulling strands of noodles from the press in the window of his store, like ribbons of time. If only it were that easy.

  ‘I don’t have the recipe.’

  ‘A recipe for time.’ She laughed.

  He went back to his makeshift work base on the floor, absent-mindedly folding a newspaper to form an origami structure, quickly losing concentration as he did when he needed to eat.

  ‘You ready?’ Kazuko asked.

  After plumping the noodles on to two plates and then draining the pale-pink white and green seaweed, she strode in with the evening meal. She paused and hovered over him.

  ‘The origami bus shelter?’ She loved to tease him.

  As they tucked in, she suggested getting more help.

  ‘Why not this foreigner? You have hired similar girls in the past? They were always amiable girls.’ She looked at him knowingly. She was aware of his habits and she knew when he was restless. He had often had an English speaker in the office to help coordinate with the Americans. Proofreading, taking calls, and more besides.

  He helped himself to more soy, drawing lines across his meal.

  Udon escaped from between her sharp lacquer chopsticks, and she pinched harder.

  ‘Why not that friend of Miho’s?’

  ‘Very cute,’ he said provocatively. ‘Sam asked. Miho has asked and now you?’ He looked at her in mock disbelief.

  ‘No use to me in the office.’ He raised his food from the plate and stopped.

  ‘Do I owe Sam?’ he objected. ‘Do I owe Miho a favour now?’

  ‘No, but she is a good friend of mine.’ Though they were closer in age, she was almost as a sister to her. ‘She is your sort and she helps me out, at the nursery. I know she’d like to get this girl settled. Sam is a good friend of theirs.’

  She, too, was trying to get him to hire this Naomi.

  ‘I don’t owe Miho.’ He stopped eating as a small red line appeared on the left side of her mouth. ‘You got a little snick on your lip.’

  He rose to see but she dabbed at it with one of the small paper napkins she always laid out, folded it carefully in four and tucked it into her sleeve.

  ‘Take more salad.’ Attending to him with a devotion that might be afforded a child. He helped himself.

  ‘Managing people takes up time. An unskilled assistant is more like a training session. Sometimes more trouble than it’s worth.’

  ‘It worked out before with the other foreigners,’ she encouraged. ‘Would you think of trying it for a short, fixed period? A limited role?’ She became gentler when he would not heed her advice, which was barely ever the case. ‘You don’t make it easy for yourself,’ she cooed

  ‘I’ll give it some thought.’ He slurped at the yuzu citrus juice left in the bowl as he resigned himself to her willful suggestion.

  When Mochizuki took Naomi on he had no idea what to do with her. It seemed that everybody but him thought it was a good idea. Sam, Miho and – because of his workload – Kazuko were all keen. This latest commission, though a small project, wouldn’t match what little of a skill set she had but he determined that she should serve a purpose if he had to hire her. She could work on the charity side of the business rather than large-scale projects; those projects he recalled he had heard her suggest that he had plagiarized. The nerve. Though it was closer to her experience he could not give her that satisfaction. She would have to prove her worth.

  Chapter 40

  On Naomi’s first day with the practice, Saito-san, the accountant cum coffee maker, introduced her to the players who had been absent during the
interview.

  ‘Hajimemashite.’ Her head bounced up and down along a short but incredibly formal line of introduction.

  When she got to Iwata he was surley and made so small an attempt at a bowed greeting it was a twitch.

  In the office there was only one dictator and Iwata was his right-hand man. It was Iwata who took her round, to hang over shoulders and take all it in. Questions were difficult to raise as barely anyone spoke English. Coffee came round at the break and she was served first as if a guest. Now so used to being an outsider, she intended to work on their reticence but hadn’t a clue where to start. The superstitious piles of salt she’d seen on her first visit had gone. As she had left that morning, and Josh had wished her luck, she recalled the moment he had met her on the college steps with all his promises. It had all changed. But then it was not in her nature to look back.

  During the first week Mochizuki drove her out to the temple. En route he outlined work needed on the teahouse. The car – a large saloon – was an old, brown banger and it smelt of stale cigarettes. His preoccupations, she assumed, focused on his larger project and she had some sense of the difficulty he might have in occuping a tongue-tied westerner in a Japanese-speaking office.

  Off the main road, up the hill, they turned onto the uneven track leading up to the temple; the wheels took the corner and stirred up huge clouds of dust in their wake.

  Making for a large red torii gate that straddled the road like some giant kanji letter in the Chinese alphabet, Naomi felt an irrational reluctance to pass beneath it. She was miles from anywhere recognizable and they seemed suddenly in the depths of a countryside she didn’t know.

  ‘You’ll see the teahouse,’ he said after a long silence, just as the dust from the track had begun to obscure the window and she had glimpsed the first of the white buildings.