The Eater of Dreams

by Kat Cameron

  They stayed in the Sakura hostel for two days and wandered around Ueno Park where the homeless camped out in blue tents. In the Kappa Bashi district, stores sold plastic models of sushi and donburi for restaurant displays. One display showed pieces of orange and purple plastic sushi arranged to mimic Munch’s The Scream.

  “This isn’t the authentic Japan,” she told Brent. “When we get out in the countryside, that’s real.”

  “You sound like that woman we met at the JET reunion. Nadine. Raving on about how Kyushu was the only ‘authentic’ Japan, how she studied zazen with a Buddhist monk. What makes one experience more authentic than another?”

  On the third day, they took the train north to Mito, where she had taught at a senior high school for two years. Walking out of the echoing cave of the train station, they crossed the overpass into downtown. In the first two blocks she counted off the landmarks: the coffee shop where she’d been greeted with cries of urashai; the flower shop with its bucket of vivid yellow roses and crimson zinnias; the French restaurant and her favourite bar; the zoom and bustle of main street, all unchanged. Turning north, they strolled through a downtown park lined with chestnut trees, thick green leaves dappled with late-summer sunshine, two older women exercising their Akitas in the wide-open grassy bowl.

  After a left turn, they walked four blocks until they came to a high brick wall that stretched for half a block. The school. The iron gates stood open, leading into a circular drive in front of the three-storey school.

  The courtyard was gone. In its place, at right angles to the old wooden school, stood an annex of steel and concrete.

  “It’s gone. They’ve cut down all the trees.” Loss gripped her. The garden had sheltered the east side of the school. Up on the third floor, she felt like Rapunzel, locked in a tower. Maple trees and cedars, a patterned forest of red and emerald green, had shaded the winding paths. A secret garden with a brick wall, barely visible through the thick leaves. In October, the maple trees outside the window glowed, each leaf etched in crimson points of exquisite origami.

  Stopping at Daie’s grocery store on the way back, Maya bought a pre-packaged selection of sushi: barbequed eel, salmon draped in silvery pink strips over rice, kappa maki. She ate it on the street, scooping up pieces with her fingers, dipping the sushi in soy sauce, ignoring the frowns of disapproval from people walking by. She didn’t live here now. She didn’t have to follow their rules.

  That night they went to a festival at the Kasama Shrine to honour the beginning of the Fall Grand Sumo Tournament. Maya had seen the shrine once before, during the October chrysanthemum festival, when the area glowed with yellow, purple, and white mums in pots and samurai figures sculpted in blossoms with flat papier-mâché faces. They walked past rows of fox statues carved from grey stone, their red cloth bibs a flash of colour, making them look like children’s story animals about to sit down to a buffet.

  Twisted rope, thick as a weight-lifter’s arm, hung from one side of the entrance to the other. Lightning bolts of white paper zigzagged down the rope. Under the heavy curves of the roof, with corners cupped like hands held out for rain, the interior of the shrine loomed, an empty sacred presence. Before the shrine hung a large copper bell to summon the gods.

  “Ring the bell and then clap your hands three times,” Maya instructed Brent. “You can ask favour of the gods.” She demonstrated, swinging the wooden post against the bell, clapping her hands, and then bowing her head in prayer. But she could think of nothing to ask.

  Behind the shrine, hundreds of people jostled together, trying to get close to a wooden stage. It felt like a rock concert, the press of expectant bodies, the good-natured jostling, the reverential air. The wrestlers paraded out, dressed in formal black kimono, and were blessed by the priests. And then the wrestlers bent down over sacks, like darkly clad Santa Clauses, and began hurling things at the crowd. Items flew through the air. Instant cameras. Ichiban packages. Green tea. Bags of fish-shaped crackers. Triangles of onigiri, wrapped in clear plastic.

  She was hemmed in by bodies and it was raining Ichiban. Packages fell to either side of her, like unexploded bombs. People stretched their hands above her, like fans at a ball game waiting to catch the foul ball, the pop fly. The crowd pressed closer and closer to the stage. The hail of gifts spread in a net above her head.

  An Ichiban package struck Maya’s forehead above the left eye, just missing her glasses. Stars flashed. She put her hand up, too late to protect herself.

  Brent grabbed her shoulder. “Maya! Are you okay?”

  Maya took her hand away from her forehead. “I’m okay. It isn’t cut.” There was only a slight pulsing ache above her eye.

  “Let’s get out of here. These crowds are insane.”

  On the trip back to Mito in the brightly lit commuter train, she swayed back and forth, surrounded by salarymen red-faced with sake. She was woozy, as if she were seeing the landscape through only one eye, in two dimensions. A flat stage. Disconnected. Raising a hand to her forehead, she touched the small hard bump on the left side above her eye, still red and sore. In the novel The Makioka Sisters, the second sister, Yukiko, develops a brown patch above one eye, a sign of spinsterhood. Would the bump leave a scar? Had Japan reached out and tattooed her forehead?

  The next day, they travelled south. She was most comfortable in transit, on buses, planes, trains, shuttling between points. In constant motion, she didn’t have to solidify into one person. Looking out the train windows, she saw bright-green rice fields. The flat mirror of the window reflected her back. No sign of the fractures within. Past. Present. Her old self from ten years earlier, all those lost dreams.

  They stopped at Himeji Castle, Haruko-jo, the White Egret, built in 1580 by Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Crossing the moat into the castle, they followed one-way arrows through twisting stone mazes of defence. Inside, the maze became horizontal, stairs morphing into wooden ladders, higher and higher through the six levels, until they ascended through trap doors. Rooms shrank, the ceiling fell. Maya watched Brent’s muscular legs as she held onto the rope on either side of the wooden stairs.

  Climbing back down, Maya froze.

  “Maya? What’s the matter?”

  The rope bit into her palms. She couldn’t let go. A wave of dizziness spilled over her as the room spun in circles.

  “Nothing. Just stopped to catch my breath.” She closed her eyes. Her left foot hung in the air, suspended over nothingness. She breathed deeply and reached down. Her foot jarred against the rung, anchoring her in space.

  In the garden outside, she slumped on a stone bench, winded. Her head was still spinning. Brent smoked a cigarette and then flicked the stub into the water. Behind a veil of green willow branches, the moat gleamed red with fire as the sun set.

  The hill back to the train station was lined with restaurants and shops. They walked past open doors, each with the owner standing in the opening, calling Irrashai! Welcome. At a souvenir booth, she bought a gift. Inside a decorative box patterned with flying cranes was a mirror the size of her palm. On its back, painted on delicate cream paper, a plum tree with white blossoms. Like the decorated omiyage sweets, too beautifully wrapped to eat, her emotions were wrapped in paper, stored away like a kimono for the proper season. Was she feeling nostalgia or dread? She didn’t know.

  On the hill behind her, Himeji-jo was lit with white light, a white heron unfolding multiple wings in flight.

  At a love hotel, a façade of turrets and battlements, they chose a space age room with silver walls, silver shag carpet, a blue bedspread sprinkled with stars. They paid for the room through a vending machine in the tiny impersonal lobby: 4000 yen for three hours, 6,500 for the night.

  “God, I’m beat.” Brent threw himself down on the bedspread, his runners still on.

  “You should take off your shoes.

  “Maya, do you know how many stains are on this bedspread? My shoes aren’t going to hurt it.”

  “Take off your damned shoes. It’s disr
espectful.”

  Sighing heavily, Brent sat up, unlaced his runners, and then tossed them into a corner of the room. “Happy now?”

  She lay back against the bedspread. Glow-in-the-dark stars patterned the ceiling. The Big Dipper. Cassiopeia’s Chair. When she closed her eyes, she saw luminescent stars.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” she said. “I thought it would be the same as before. I feel like a stranger.”

  Brent said nothing.

  “I’m sorry about the shoes,” Maya said. “That was stupid. I just keep remembering all the rules. Don’t hold hands in public. Don’t pour your own drink. Don’t wear your shoes indoors. Don’t eat while walking. The rules shouldn’t apply to me now. I don’t live here. But they’re in my head.” She reached over and touched his hand in apology. She wanted to share her experience of Japan with him. But nothing was as she’d planned.

  “That’s okay. We climbed a lot of stairs today. You’re tired.” “Maybe.” She couldn’t tell him how she really felt. It was as if she wasn’t really there. As if everything was happening to someone else.

  “Hiroshima tomorrow. We should get some sleep.” Brent took off his T-shirt and shorts, dumping them by the sneakers. He crawled back into bed and stretched his arm behind her head. After a few moments, he was asleep.

  Maya lay still, listening to his deep breathing.

  She hadn’t travelled further than Himeji Castle the first time. Too expensive. Now with the JAL passes available only to foreigners, they boarded the shinkansen to Hiroshima. Insulated from the world outside, they arrived in less than three hours.

  Storing their knapsacks at the train station, they explored the gardens of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, snapping pictures of statues draped with rows of multi-coloured origami cranes. In her junior-high English class, Maya had taught the story of Sadako Sasaki, the girl of a thousand cranes. According to a Japanese legend, anyone who folded a thousand origami cranes would be granted a wish. Diagnosed with leukemia in 1954, nine years after the atomic bomb was dropped on her home, Sadako folded over a thousand cranes, some from medicine wrappers and gift paper. She died at the age of twelve.

  Tourists were everywhere, in pairs, in families, and in groups led by Japanese women in suits, carrying umbrellas. The buzz of many languages filled the air.

  Maya and Brent flowed with the crowds into the museum. In the main hall, a giant black sphere hung above a topographical map of Hiroshima. The time the bomb was dropped — 8:15 — flashed in red letters on the sphere.

  Upstairs, a claustrophobic brick hallway led into a room of glass cases filled with artifacts. Watches stopped at exactly 8:15. A finger joint. A mannequin dressed in the recovered school uniforms of three teenagers.

  In the corner of the room were the pink and grey stones of a wall and steps from a bank. She saw the shadows of the dead imprinted on the wall. Ghosts attached to time by the thinnest of threads.

  Vertigo spun her around. The room blurred. Maya grabbed Brent’s hand. “I have to go back outside.”

  In the sunlight of the Peace Garden, her dizziness passed. Maya sat down on a bench in front of a bed of orange and yellow chrysanthemums. “That black sphere looked like the Death Star,” she said, trying to grab control of her emotions. The wrong thing to say. Fortunately, only Brent was near her.

  On the way back to the train station, they stopped at a Starbucks for iced coffee. Sitting at a table, Maya looked out the glass windows at a modern city: hotels, apartment buildings, 7-11s, shops, divided main streets, all untouched. The fragments didn’t fit together. She was left with bits of memory. A few moments defined a life. A piece of clothing. A stopped watch.

  The Eater of Dreams

  1. Gai-jin Ghost

  It was O-Bon, the three days in mid-August when the dead return, when I noticed the draft.

  I was lying on my futon, wearing nothing but a tank top and underwear, feeling the steamy sauna heat stick to my skin. I couldn’t tell where the cold draft on my neck came from: the window was closed, and the air blowing from the fan was as hot and humid as the air in the rest of the room.

  Woke up at three in the morning and saw a grey shape in the corner of the bedroom. Grey mist. Drifted back to sleep, convinced I’m dreaming.

  Noise outside my window wakes me again. Opening the faded blue curtains, I see lines of telephone wires criss-crossing a hazy sky. Loudspeakers hang from a pole right outside the window — that’s where the music is coming from, if you can call it music. I’d call it other things: a cat being tortured, a record played at 78 rpm, the Chipmunks on a kazoo. Two stories down an elderly man on a bicycle careens down the claustrophobic street lined with grey concrete apartment blocks. Where are the shrines and temples, where are the cherry trees with their transient beauty, where are the geishas in brightly embroidered kimono, where are the shining neon signs of Ginza, where are the green rice fields and misty hills? Where is the Japan the writers promised me?

  The bedroom encloses me, a hot humid box. Tatami mats, yellow squares lined with leaf-green borders, smelling of stale straw and dust, cover the floor. In the corner is a tiny wooden table, only two feet off the ground, with two cushions piled under it. Sliding shoji screens, wooden frames with paper squares, separate the rooms: one white square has a jagged hole in it, the size of a fist. My first day here, I bashed my head on the screen’s frame, which is only five feet high. I feel like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians. Like Alice in Wonderland. Oversized and monstrous. Jefferson Airplane runs through my mind. I’ve gone down the rabbit’s hole, a nine-thousand-mile free fall to the other side of the world.

  Beside the futon is a pile of information books: language primers, The Lonely Planet Guide to Japan, the JET orientation book. I open one at random. Amaterasu O Mikami, the divine mythical ancestor of the Japanese imperial family, was the daughter of the creator gods, Izanagi and Izanami. Angered by her brother’s behaviour, she hid in a cave, plunging the earth into darkness. The Japanese people believe she came out of the cave when she saw her reflection in a mirror. What will I see?

  I peel myself off the sweaty futon, my back stiff and sore, and wander into the empty kitchen. Sean, the teacher before me, stole the dishes, pots, sheets, towels, furniture. I’m surprised he left the lightbulbs. He got a job at an English school in Tokyo after a year here. The school board is supposed to kick in ten thousand yen for supplies, but it will be a cold day in Ibaraki before I see that money.

  I pour myself some orange juice and sit down on my one remaining chair. At least I’m off the floor. My third morning here I woke up, bleary-eyed, pissed off at the Edelweiss song on the loudspeaker, stumbled into the kitchen barefoot and saw it. A cockroach. I grabbed a paper and started flailing madly away. Swat, swat, swat, the cockroach scurrying frantically for the edge of the room, swat, swat, I got it, but then the damned thing wouldn’t die. It kept crawling and I’m whacking away at it, whack, whack, yelling “Die, you sucker, die.” Finally, it was lying on the tatami, this shiny black blob, waving its legs because it still wasn’t dead, so I got my runner and hit it a few more times. I’ve found some cockroach killers in the cupboard, small cardboard boxes with a picture of a happy cockroach (probably drunk on sake) crawling in, then getting stuck in the sticky paper. Like me. I was drawn in by the sweet smell of yen. Now I’m stuck, waving my legs in the air.

  My supervisor picks me up at eight. She’s been driving me to school each day, until they can replace the bicycle that Sean stole. Kawabata-sensei reminds me of a prison warden with her stiff black suits and stiffer smile. I climb into the white Toyota, wondering what the hell we’ll talk about today. She has a topic already chosen.

  “In Japan,” she says, “we eat rice rather than potatoes. That is why our women are so slim.”

  I could say something about the porky teenagers I saw in Mr. Donut in Tokyo, but don’t, to prove I can be culturally sensitive. I could tell her why I don’t give a damn about my appearance right now. But my past is j
ust that: mine. So I smile, wanting to say, “So desu ne,” that ubiquitous phrase of agreement, and to nod brightly like the ultra-chirpy female TV announcers do every time a male announcer opens his mouth. It reminds me of a wooden bird bobbing up and down into a glass of water: “So desu ne,” in squeaky clean voices, over and over. I don’t say it. Kawabata isn’t stupid; she’d know I was yanking her chain.

  We fill the awkward silences with menu discussions. “What do you eat in America?” “We eat many things.” “Do you eat hot dogs? I had a hot dog once at Tokyo Disneyland.” She must think food is my favourite topic.

  After school, I coach Little Yasuko for her speech contest in September. Little Yasuko has short black braids, worn demurely above her shoulders, bangs to the eyebrows, round eyes, a wide smile. She is tiny, even for a sixteen-year-old girl, about four foot, ten inches, but she doesn’t appear delicate: she’s firmly rooted. Her pigtails and snub nose remind me of Anne of Green Gables, of whom she is passionately fond, along with the Chicago Bulls (Michael Jordan, especially) and the baby-faced actor from Dead Poets’ Society.

  “This is my dream,” Little Yasuko begins, and I’m reminded of the Martin Luther King speech, which is in the English textbook. She wants to travel overseas and study to be a doctor.

  She recites her speech and I tell her to focus on the audience, look the judges in the eye, and try to say “California” with diphthongs rather than all vowels pronounced. Then I ask if that really is her dream.

  “Yes,” she says, “but I think it is very difficult.” In Japan, as I’ve already learned, this means impossible, as in Kawabata telling me, “I’m sorry, Miss Elaine-san, but it is very difficult for you to take nenkyu this month for a holiday.” In other words, forget it.

  “Dreams have another meaning, you know,” I say, the schoolteacher in me rising up like koi, golden carp, surfacing for bread crumbs. “You dream at night. These dreams don’t have to come true.”