Plum Rains

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  “Turn it off,” Angelica demanded. “Turn the whole thing off.”

  “It’s the third time he’s woken me. If I don’t go to him, it only gets louder.” Sayoko tempered her own complaint, negotiating. “He doesn’t need much.”

  Angelica pulled the lapels of her robe around her neck. “What did he want?”

  “Only to know where we are.”

  Angelica suppressed a laugh. “Your wheelchair knows that, Sayoko-san, and it’s ten years old.”

  Did she really not understand GPS and the ubiquity of chips and codes in the simplest objects? A third of the groceries Angelica bought came packaged in trackwrap so that the companies could improve their supply pacing, send reminders when staples ran low, or search for signs of lifestyle changes according to your purchases. One week when Itou-san had been recovering from periodontal surgery, eating lots of soft foods, they’d been assaulted with free baby product samples, all on the assumption that there was a new infant in the house. Itou was displeased. No trackwrap or any kind of reorder sensor in the house, please. They can be Trojan horses.

  But what was this robot, if not a Trojan horse? What might it bring into their lives, surreptitiously? What would it take away?

  “It understands maps,” Sayoko said, more annoyed with Angelica for interfering than with the robot for rousing her. “Haven’t you ever woken up in a new place and forgotten where you were?”

  Angelica considered this. How many times had she swung a leg over her thin futon, expecting her foot to drop several feet, as it had at home, only to feel her heel drop half the distance? How many times had she shuffled toward the bathroom half-asleep, expecting the sound of roosters and the smell of the ocean, before realizing there was only silence and sterile air? And then the realization: Japan. Now. Still.

  “Sayoko-san,” Angelica said, “Computers don’t need to be told things more than once. If they’re not broken, they don’t forget. And they don’t get upset.”

  Sayoko turned her back to Angelica. “This one does.”

  “I am responsible for you,” Angelica said. “I can’t keep going back to my room, knowing—”

  “My son’s room, you mean.”

  “Yes, of course. Your son’s room.” But Angelica felt the sting of Sayoko’s correction.

  “You are lucky to have it.”

  “I know that.”

  “Do you?”

  The robot had quieted now, only a sizzle of static on its screen. Angelica felt like the anxious crackle had moved into her stomach. Sayoko had never played these kinds of power games with her before.

  Angelica bowed her head. “It would be better if I removed your new gift from the room, just for now.”

  “You think I can’t manage a confused machine on my own?”

  When Angelica didn’t reply, Sayoko said, “I don’t need help. And you will take nothing away from me. Leave us alone please, and close the door behind you.”

  That “us” bothered Angelica even more than Sayoko’s frigid tone.

  4 Sayoko

  Sayoko thought of locking the door, to make intrusion less likely, but then she hesitated, remembering the time she’d fallen getting out of the furo, long before Anji had ever come to work for them, and how her son had not been able to get into the bathroom quickly and had been angry at her. She hadn’t even blocked the door intentionally. Her walker was simply in the way.

  No more hot baths.

  That’s ridiculous, she’d said to him. My son doesn’t get to tell me when I can bathe.

  But he did, and in the months that followed, everyone did. They told her when she could bathe, when she could eat or sleep, what medicine to ingest.

  A social worker had come to talk to her about the difficulties of this “new life stage.” The worker was half Sayoko’s age, and Korean, born around the time Sayoko’s husband had passed away—hard to believe. But it wasn’t just the culture or age difference that made communication impossible.

  It is normal to feel some dissatisfaction, the social worker had said. (They liked to use that word, instead of depression.)

  Your autonomy may be reduced, the social worker had said.

  Sayoko had wanted to laugh. Autonomy? Such fancy words they used nowadays.

  In the village where she’d grown up, ignored for most of her childhood, in the camp where she’d barely survived, in the freezing flat where she’d just managed to make ends meet, sewing other women’s clothes for fifteen years following the war, no one had ever used such a word. You hoped, perhaps, for a little rice, a little fish. You did not expect autonomy.

  The robot had started to make noise again, but then the whine eased. Had she been thinking aloud? She did that, sometimes, especially when she was irritated. She had a right to be irritated.

  “You did not expect autonomy,” Sayoko repeated. “You did not expect anything.”

  It liked to hear her voice. It even sensed her motion. As long as she sat at arm’s length and said a phrase here and there, and rocked back and forth or swayed, it let out occasional notes of distress or static but it did not explode into full volume.

  Sayoko tested the importance of her physical presence by scooting back her chair, but just as she suspected, the robot wouldn’t tolerate the change. It whined again, pitch rising. She scooted forward, even closer now, remembering those days a half-century ago when you had to hold the radio or TV antenna and keep moving it this way and that, trying to find the best position.

  But this was different, of course. Because the radio did not want to hear your voice, did not actually care that you were in the room. This machine did.

  “Frankly, no one expected much in those days,” she said aloud. It liked that. It quieted down to a low hum.

  “And people expected the least of this particular woman without any family. Without any impressive connections, without any documents. Without any talents for that matter. This Sayoko.”

  She thought back to all the times her first husband had instructed her on how to introduce herself: the short, self-effacing speech explaining her background and education (plenty of facts changed but no matter), socially acceptable hobbies, and so on. He had explained to her the importance of coming across well, but not too well, knowing that she hadn’t been raised properly enough to master such things on instinct alone.

  When she spoke of herself in the third person now, it was not for the sake of self-effacement or etiquette. She did not need to be cautious or coy with a machine, and the most honest way she could speak about herself as a younger woman was by thinking of herself as an altogether different person—or no, as several different persons, and none of them the old Tokyo lady of today.

  She had fallen into silent musing again, which it didn’t like. The soft whine started up again.

  “Stop that, or I won’t tell you anything more.”

  Before Anji’s intrusion, it had managed to say one recognizable word—where—or that’s what she had told Anji-chan, exaggerating perhaps the robot’s intelligence. Maybe it didn’t understand maps or didn’t need to know its present location. Maybe it didn’t understand anything.

  It was upset, though, and even a door banging in the wind needs to be closed.

  The robot’s first word had been only half-intelligible, but the next one was clearer. No question.

  It came out first as a musical drone, three notes not quite tuned to each other, until each corrected to a slightly different pitch and suddenly they all became one sound which burst out, in one controlled effort, like a puff of smoke, into a word:

  “Anata.” You.

  She smiled.

  “Yes, me. Sayoko. Sayoko-san.” It didn’t hurt to teach it some manners.

  “You.”

  “That’s right. Is that all you can say?”

  It mumbled something that sounded like “why,” but perhaps in her sl
eepy state she was thinking too much of babies, and how it had felt to stay up with a sick toddler, or an older child at the edge of her futon, hours after her husband had left for work, trying to rouse her when she only wanted to sleep, those middle years when sleep was her trusted escape, a warm burrow equally protected from thoughts of the past and thoughts of the future. She’d been a bad mother. Her own husband and mother-in-law had not minded telling her so.

  Why? Always a hand on the comforter, trying to pull her up and out, trying to ask her to make lunch, or come to the window, or put on boots for a walk to the park. When? Why? Why not?

  Which she did not answer then. Which she would not answer now, even if she understood what the machine was asking. She fell silent, it fell silent, and the satisfied hum began to gather tension at its edges, rising again in pitch.

  “All right,” she said firmly. “That’s enough.”

  She had to keep talking. But what else to say?

  “Well, this Sayoko did have a few talents. Sewing, a little. Weaving, she’d been a failure at that, but this was not a place where people valued weaving.”

  Not much of a story. She’d always been a listener more than a talker, and when she talked it was to imitate, but that was not without its purpose. “Mimicry. That was her talent, if she had one.”

  She had not spoken enough to her own son, Ryo, when he was small. She had not read him books. She had not known suitable children’s stories.

  Unsuitable ones, perhaps.

  It came back to her now, the time she’d told the story to the lonely old Chinese shopkeeper, what was his name? Lee Kuan Chien. Of course.

  How he’d demanded it, and how he’d gotten mad at the end, surprising her. His wrath had made her want to run, to leave his cold dark shop and follow the steep road back up to the village. But he had not cowed her, because she’d been invincible then. A different person.

  “Listen,” she said to the robot now, and it eased down into a satisfied hum again, deeper and more even, like a purring cat. “I will tell you a longer story, and then we’ll both get some sleep.”

  Three people were born out of a cracked stone.

  One crawled back inside, but the other two, a boy and a girl, remained.

  For some reason, the boy was shy with the girl. She left and found a dark stone with which to blacken her face.

  When she reappeared to him, looking different, he took her in, and together, with love, they made many children and peopled the world.

  She stopped. Was that all there was? Was that all there had ever been?

  There was good reason why Sayoko could never have told the story to her son, even if she’d been a warmer mother. It was not because of the allusion to sex, of “peopling the world,” but rather because it was a barbarian tale, and if someone asked where she’d heard it, she would not have felt safe to say.

  “It’s not a long story,” she continued now, to keep the robot satisfied. “I suppose Lee Kuan Chien interrupted a number of times, and that’s why it felt so much longer. And then, as I think I explained, he was so angry with me.”

  The robot said, “Angry.”

  “Yes.” And because the robot had said it quietly, and patiently, she felt the need to explain more. Perhaps this story was not the story. Perhaps she did have a longer story.

  It began this way.

  “First, in a place very far from here, there was a girl named Laqi.”

  “Anata,” the robot said. You.

  So it was clever. It noted patterns, at least, and what was life, except a series of patterns, some hopeful, some discouraging?

  But she was not going to say “I.” She would never be so self-serving, and besides, this Laqi was even less her than the young woman called Sayoko had been. Laqi belonged to another place and another time altogether.

  “We will call her Laqi, and that is not me today, and it was not even the name she was born with, but it was what Daisuke Oshima called her, and so she used that name for a while because she loved Daisuke, until the name—and the man—were taken away.”

  She remembered Daisuke as he had first appeared in the schoolyard, standing next to the headmaster: a tall elegant man in a white suit, his eyes hidden behind wire-rimmed glasses, his smile gentle.

  But she could not think of that lost moment, now. She could not speak of it. Maybe later. Maybe never.

  “The only thing you need to understand,” she said to the robot, “is that Daisuke and Laqi spoke different languages, and this fact both brought them together and kept them apart. If not for their differences, they wouldn’t have discovered their similarities.”

  It was too much to explain, now or perhaps ever. She continued, “Anyway, the name Laqi meant only child.”

  “Laqi-san,” the robot said.

  “Not san. Not in this situation.”

  “Laqi.”

  “That’s better.”

  In her earliest years, she walked with other children to Lee Kuan Chien’s lonely shop next to the handcart terminus far down the village road, hoping to catch a glimpse of the long thin braid that trailed down his back. Laqi had seen it only once and never again. Rumor was that Lee Kuan Chien had finally cut the braid off. The headmaster at school had explained that over in mainland China, the young emperor had cut off his own queue, freeing his most tenacious and tradition-bound followers to do the same.

  They’d asked the headmaster, too, about the wife who supposedly lived inside the tiny Chinese shop, unable to walk more than a few steps, hobbling on traditional bound feet. The children made up stories about her, a crippled woman-child who was never seen. But the headmaster corrected them: old Lee Kuan Chien no longer had a wife. Anyway, their teacher reassured them, all of those old vestiges of China—the queues, the foot-binding and the opium trade—were banned now by the Japanese, everywhere the empire had conquered, including here. Lee Kuan Chien might still sell goods to Japanese officials, and food staples and random baubles to the local villagers, but the old ways he’d brought to the mountains would no longer be tolerated.

  Lee Kuan Chien’s shop was dark, without a door—like all the village huts save the Japanese police substation building—but guarded by a small, staked dog who growled at anyone who passed. Laqi did not hear the dog now. Had he gone the way of Lee Kuan Chien’s wife? Silence clung to the hut like fog in the bamboo forest, blown in by circumstance, reluctant to leave.

  It occurred to Laqi, as she stood outside his little building next to the narrow handcart railway only policemen and government officials used, that Lee Kuan Chien might no longer be living. She hadn’t personally set eyes on him for many moons.

  After two failed attempts in which she’d walked all the way to his house without spotting him, she got up her nerve. One afternoon, after the smell of frying food convinced her there was life inside, she called into the shadows. She was about to turn away when she heard a wet cough and the sound of padding slippers. Without a word, the shopkeeper settled himself onto a stool in the barely lit entryway, the dark store behind him, his fat arm rested atop a table next to baskets of charcoal-black ink sticks, buttons and spools of thread, incense, hair combs, knife blades, and round bars of soap wrapped in colorful paper.

  “What do you want?” Lee Kuan Chien asked.

  She told him: she wanted more words. Translation help. For reasons that Lee Kuan Chien already understood.

  “The new visitor. The man who draws and studies the trees. Daisuke Oshima.”

  “Yes.”

  “You wish to speak with him.”

  “I am already speaking with him. Headmaster asked me to.”

  She swallowed, realizing she’d just let a secret slip.

  “Oh, did he?” Lee Kuan Chien laughed, but he understood. The Tayal headmaster, who was supposed to be fluent in Japanese, especially given that his job was to teach Japanese to the local aborigina
l children, was not as capable as he pretended.

  “And you can understand our visitor.”

  “Not always.”

  “You never will. He comes from a faraway place. He sees with different eyes.”

  “Aren’t your eyes different as well?” she dared to ask. “Yet I’m speaking with you.”

  He punished her insolence with a silent stare, but he did not chase her out of the shop.

  “Can you do it?” she persisted. She had the unfamiliar words and questions ready, as many as she could hold in her mind, and they were heavy as ripe gourds, fragile as eggs.

  Lee Kuan Chien had made his living traveling across China, Siam, the Malay Peninsula, and even farther, and it was said he could speak more tongues than any Japanese empire official. But Lee Kuan Chien was a man of trade. He gave nothing freely.

  Laqi brought out a long thin strip of woven cloth, patterned with dark red diamonds, suitable for attaching to a basket as a head strap.

  “That?” he laughed. “It looks like it was chewed by a pig.”

  The weave was loose, the diamond pattern uneven. Grandmother would have agreed with Lee Kuan Chien’s appraisal of Laqi’s terrible weaving skills. It was true.

  “Come back tomorrow. Bring me something I can sell or eat.”

  “Sweet potatoes?” she asked.

  On the next visit, she traded fire-shriveled potatoes for words. On the third visit, she traded millet wine stolen from her grandmother’s hut. But it was sour.

  Screwing up his face at the bad wine, Lee Kuan Chien said, “My wife lived with me here until she died, eight years ago. She made me promise when we married that she would be buried back home with her parents, in Fujian Province. I could not keep that promise. We had no children. I bought a cage and two songbirds, but instead of being happy to hear them sing, I only felt more lonely, reminded that they had each other, while I had no one.”

  “What did you do with the songbirds?” Laqi asked, peeking into the darkest corners of the narrow, silent shop.

  He cleared his throat. “Come sit closer to me, child.”