Under ideal conditions it will grow a foot a day. You can measure its growth in miles per hour, say embittered farmers. Drop it and run. Mothers threaten to toss their naughty children into the kudzu patch, where they’ll strangle and drown. Its economic and practical uses have been forgotten. Mostly, nowadays, its only use is metaphoric, to describe the inroads of Japanese industry into the nonunionized South.
“We’re real glad y’all came,” said Vern. “And not just because of the kudzu, either.” He shook Suzuki’s hand.
Grace put her arm around me and walked me to the van. “Y’all come back now anytime, you hear?”
AKIKO
Bobby Joe Creely was singing “Poke Salad Annie.” Akiko sat by the window on the express train to the city and scrutinized the lyric sheet that came with the CD. She liked the song. It felt like Bobby Joe was telling her a story and if only she could understand the words she would be able to identify with it perfectly. Unfortunately, there was no Japanese translation on the lyric sheet. It was a song about a girl who liked salads, she was sure of that. Akiko liked salads too, far more than meats. But there was also something in the song about alligators and chain gangs. She didn’t know what a chain gang was. It was a phrase she had never looked up in her dictionary.
She’d heard the song on the My American Wife! program about the Korean children in Louisiana. It was a good show, and she had given it a 9 in Authenticity. She’d especially liked the music. She’d written down the names of Bobby Joe and also Rockin’ Dopsie at the bottom of the paper where she copied the week’s recipe. The next day she took the bullet train to town and found the CDs at Tower Records in Shibuya. It took her most of the day, but it was worth the trip. When she got home to her apartment she put on the Rockin’ Dopsie CD and cooked the Cajun-style Baby Back Ribs. They had turned out exceptionally well and she gave them a 9 in Deliciousness, but even this hadn’t made “John” happy, although he ate them with gusto.
“How stupid can she be?” he muttered darkly as he tore the sticky meat from the bone with his teeth.
“Who?” Akiko asked, trying hard to be conversational.
“That stupid American coordinator. She goes and shoots the husband cooking! Husbands aren’t supposed to cook. The show is called My American Wife!”
“Well, it is nice for a change ... ,” Akiko started, then thought better of it. “But of course you’re right, it makes no sense.”
“And she has been instructed to make programs about beef, but no.” He sucked the bone, then added it to the growing pile on his plate and grabbed another. “She goes and chooses pork, clearly a second-class meat. I mean, really! A pig-roasting festival! Not to mention all those Korean children ...”
He shook his head. “John” had a way of changing the mood of any room he entered.
But before he had come home, while Akiko was still cooking, the small apartment was filled with the sweet, fragrant steam of the stewing meat and the happy, humid music of the bayou. “Hot Tamale Baby.” All that was missing was the children. Lots of them, clambering over each other like puppies. They looked just like Japanese children, but in their forthright manner and their solemn sense of responsibility they were so unlike the kids in the danchi, who tended to be withdrawn and self-conscious. It would be nice to raise a child in a rough ‘n’ tumble family. Maybe she and “John” could adopt, if this problem of hers didn’t work itself out.
Akiko removed the earphones. The pressurized silence on the train, eerie at such a high speed, filled her ears like wads of Kleenex. Replacing the phones, she jacked up the volume on her portable CD player. She liked Bobby Joe’s voice, the way he grunted between verses. She thought she would be a little scared if she met him in person, but his songs made her feel reckless and even a little dangerous. Basically, she thought he was just a down-to-earth man. The notes from his guitar shimmered like heat rising off a hard-packed country road. She’d never seen heat rising before, or met a woman like the one in the song, who carried a straight razor. Akiko didn’t know what a straight razor was, but suddenly she wished she could have one too. She wondered if this music was what the Deep South felt like. “Lord have mercy ...”
She looked out the thick window at the terraced paddies, flooded now and scored with neat green rows of young rice. The songs had a driving beat that went well with the rhythm of the speeding train, but the scenery was all wrong. Rice grew wild in Louisiana swamps, she thought, but this was different. The Japanese rice fields had no funk.
In under an hour, the train pulled into Tokyo Station. Akiko eased herself into the flow of people that eddied toward the subway lines. She took the Marunouchi Line to the Ginza, and when she had climbed to street level, she consulted the piece of paper where “John” had written the address of the specialist for her. The office was on the eleventh floor of a building near the Mitsukoshi Department Store.
There were three women ahead of her in the waiting room. One, visibly pregnant, gave Akiko a smile and a nod when she entered. The other two, reed thin and hollow as Akiko herself, ducked their heads and looked away as though they’d done something terribly wrong. One by one they were called in to the examination room. The pregnant one rose slowly when summoned, arching her back with an apologetic smile. The thin ones kept their eyes to the ground and scurried, crablike, out of sight.
When Akiko’s turn came, the nurse told her to undress and handed her a paper gown to put on. She sat on the edge of the table in the examination room and waited. Finally the specialist arrived and told her to lie down on the examining table and put her feet into the metal stirrups. He tossed a sheet across her knees, snapped on a pair of latex gloves, and stood at the foot of the table. He was wearing a white coat and the bottom half of his face was covered with a white gauze mask, held on by elastic that looped over his ears. The thick black rectangular frames of his glasses appeared to perch along the top edge of the mask, giving his face a boxlike symmetry. His hair was oiled into place, and as he examined her, dipping up and down over the limp horizon of sheet, Akiko noticed that the crown of his head was dusty and speckled with large, embedded particles of dandruff.
The examination hurt, and when he had finished, he peeled the gloves from his hands and gravely told her to get dressed and come into his office. She obeyed. She knocked timidly on his door and found him seated behind a large desk. He waited until she sat down across from him. Without the surgical mask, his face looked childlike, with plump, bow-shaped lips that formed a little pout of disapproval.
“Mrs. Ueno, quite frankly, I think I am the wrong doctor for you to be consulting. I told your husband this, but he insisted. Physically, there is nothing wrong with you that a few extra pounds wouldn’t take care of. You are severely malnourished and that is why your menstruation has ceased, but apparently you already know this? Of course, the odd thing is that your husband tells me you get plenty to eat. In fact, you have quite a robust appetite, he says.”
Akiko nodded mutely, keeping her eyes fixed on her hands, which were folded in her lap. The doctor watched her carefully from behind his glasses, then he leaned forward.
“I’m not a psychiatrist. I’m used to looking for real illnesses, with real symptoms and causes, but if I were to hazard a guess, I’d say that you were doing something. Am I right? That you are doing something to yourself on purpose, to keep your menstruations from coming back?”
Akiko watched her knuckles whiten.
“Very well.” He sat back and shook his head. Akiko tried to relax her shoulders.
“I must say I have no patience with stubborn wives like you. There are so many young women who are desperate to have a baby, who would cut off an arm or a leg in order to conceive and are honestly incapable of doing so. But you, you are not honest. You lack fortitude. Simply put, you have a bad attitude. This is my diagnosis, which I will give to your husband. I hope, for both your sakes, that he will be able to help you correct your problem.”
In the public rest room of the Mitsukoshi Departme
nt Store, Akiko felt the meat start to rise inside her, although she had eaten nothing all day. She flushed the toilet, leaned over and heaved, but nothing came out. When the spasms settled, she reached up and flushed again. The smell of the rushing water refreshed her. She stood and leaned against the side of the stall, rubbing her empty stomach with her hands, and she thought about cutting off her arm to trade for a baby. Stupid. At the sink, she dampened her handkerchief and patted her face with it, then straightened out her blouse and plugged the earphones back into her ears. The gravelly voice of Bobby Joe made her heart jump. She moved to the syncopated beat, out the washroom door, across the department store, through scarves, perfumes, and cosmetics, and into the accessory department. Her arm brushed against a display shelf. She glanced quickly up and down the aisle. No one was watching. As Bobby Joe groaned, “Oh, Lord,” she reached toward a pearl-studded barrette, fingered it, then slipped it into her pocket. Bobby Joe’s voice shook with his muted pain, then broke free and soared.
It was all Akiko could do to keep from singing along with him.
GRACE
Grace yawned and stretched her toes, squeezing the last bits of physical pleasure from her afternoon nap. It was warm, but there was a breeze blowing, and the room was filled with a soft dappled light that filtered through the leaf-covered window. Something in the moment, some fleeting conjunction of the senses, of light and air, of warm and cool, of smell and sound and memory, made her shiver with the irrepressible life of it all. It was like a sexual feeling, only self-contained, immaculate.
She could hear Vern in the kitchen with some of the kids. That was nice too. Elvis was there for sure, she could hear his booming voice, and since he was there, so was Chelsea. If they were cooking, Page would be helping also, with Duncan, and if there were scraps to eat, then Joey would be begging for them. Emily May would be reading on the porch. Vernon Junior was away at college. Newton was at football practice. Cici was at cheerleading. Jake was at band. Was that everyone? No, Joy. Joy would not be in the kitchen. Joy would be in Alison’s cottage, lurking by the baby.
A few days after the baby was born, Alison had found Joy next to the crib in the middle of the night. It frightened her, and she had complained to Grace the next day—she didn’t want her child to imprint on this image of Joy’s pierced face looming over his horizon like a cloudy harvest moon. Grace told her to relax. The kids had all been older when they were adopted, so newborns were a bit of a novelty, and Joy was at that age when it was natural to find infants fascinating. But privately Grace worried. Maybe it was Alison’s choice of words, comparing Joy to the moon like that, but it reminded Grace of all the trouble they’d had.
This was the problem with trying to prolong naps, she thought. You let in one single thought, even a pleasant one, and the rest all tumbled in afterward, and soon they started crashing into each other and worrying you and it was hard to recover your napping composure. Sometimes, though, you could get it back if you thought about something pleasant, something completely different....
The TV shoot had been fun and unexpectedly constructive. It suddenly occurred to Grace that the kids had probably never spent time with an Asian adult since coming to Askew. Certainly there weren’t any Asians among her or Vern’s friends. They knew lots of African-Americans, but of course that wasn’t the same. She had never thought about race when she was growing up, and now she saw that she’d been blind to it. The colors had been all around her, endlessly complex, with shades as variegated as the genetic spectrum could permit. Joy told her that Elvis was hanging out with the black kids at school, lobbying to have the Civil War memorial on Cherry taken down. That was good. Change was good, and Elvis had a peer group, and his stability was rubbing off on Chelsea. Alison was settling in nicely, and despite Grace’s reservations, she had to admit it was nice to have an infant around. No, it was Joy she was worried about. It always came back to Joy.
The fragrant smell of fried chicken wafted up the stairs from the kitchen. Vern was experimenting again. Grace smiled. Ever since the shoot, Vern had been obsessed, researching the various uses for kudzu and perfecting recipes for food and herbal remedies. He had taken to loading all the kids into the minivan on the weekends and setting them loose in the countryside to harvest kudzu roots. They would come back at the end of the day, dirty and exhausted, with their back-packs full, and process the roots into starch. The kids were happy because Vern was paying them an hourly wage. He had high hopes of winning at the state fair with his kudzu-based crispy chicken batter.
“They’ll never believe it, Gracie,” he crowed. “When I win and then tell them my secret ingredient, they’ll just never believe it!”
With a little ingenuity and a few pointers from the Orient, Vern was certain he could find a way to turn this old weed into a solid cash crop. It just goes to show, Gracie thought, sitting up in bed. Sometimes you had to look at things from another angle.
5.
The Rice-Sprouting Month
SHŌNAGON
Times When One Should Be on One’s Guard
The sea is a frightening thing at the best of times. How much more terrifying must it be for those poor women divers who have to plunge into its depths for their livelihood! One wonders what would happen to them if the cord round their waist were to break. I can imagine men doing this sort of work, but for a woman it must take remarkable courage. After the woman has been lowered into the water, the men sit comfortably in their boats, heartily singing songs as they keep an eye on the mulberry-bark cord that floats on the surface. It is an amazing sight, for they do not show the slightest concern about the risks the woman is taking. When finally she wants to come up, she gives a tug on her cord and the men haul her out of the water with a speed that I can well understand. Soon she is clinging to the side of the boat, her breath coming in painful gasps. The sight is enough to make even an outsider feel the brine dripping. I can hardly imagine this is a job that anyone would covet.
JANE
SUPERMARKETS TO INTRODUCE VENDING MACHINES FOR MEAT
The modern Japanese housewife finds the human interaction necessary to purchase meat distasteful.
This is the conclusion of a market survey conducted by the Super Marushin Grocery chain, which claims that Japanese housewives between the ages of 20 and 65 find it embarrassing to say the names of meat cuts out loud. The wives also complain that too much conversation is needed to conclude a purchase, and that the human contact at the butcher shop is too personal.
The majority of housewives say they would prefer to buy meat from vending machines, where they would not be called upon to make conversation about the weather or answer questions like “How are you today?”
“The modern Japanese housewife, living a hermetic existence, increasingly cut off from contact with the world, is literally losing her voice. Is it any wonder she prefers to interact with a machine?” asks Dr. Yoko Horii, of Tokyo University. Dr. Horii studies eating disorders, depression, substance abuse, suicide, and other dysfunctional behaviors among Japanese housewives.
These new findings may be a cause of concern to sociologists
like Dr. Horii, but the challenge for meat marketers is
clearly how to “de-humanize” meat.
—Asahi Gazetteer (English translation)
I read this article in a Tokyo newspaper and found the market trend toward dehumanized meat quite interesting. After my year, I have my own thoughts on the matter.
A sixteen-year-old high school exchange student from Japan named Yoshihiro Hattori was shot to death in Louisiana. Rodney Dwayne Peairs, the man who shot him, worked at a Winn Dixie supermarket as a meat packer. Hattori had rung Peairs’s bell to ask for directions, and Peairs shot the boy in the chest with his .44 magnum. He had yelled “Freeze” before he fired. The case went to court, and Peairs was acquitted by the jury of manslaughter, on the grounds that he had acted in a reasonable way to defend his home.
Japan was shocked at the verdict. It was murder, or at the ver
y least it was an act of wanton and reckless manslaughter, and the Japanese media went into overdrive, trying to explain what was so clearly a miscarriage of justice. On TV talk shows, professors from Tokyo University who were experts on U.S. culture discussed the profound feelings Americans have for their guns. Japanese news crews brought cameras into gas stations and 7-Elevens to show viewers the vast array of magazines on guns, ammo, and hunting for sale. They filmed bars with firearms displayed in glass cases like works of art, next to the stuffed heads of the animals they had killed. One crew even visited Wal-Mart to show how easy it is to buy a gun over the counter. A newspaper article attempted to analyze the profound feeling Americans have for guns by comparing it to the Japanese attachment to rice, and a TV show offered lessons in idiomatic English, explaining that freeze was not just something that was done to meat.
“Do all Americans carry guns?” was a question my Japanese friends used to ask me. “What kind do you have? Where do you carry it?” I became a documentarian partly in order to correct cultural misunderstandings like this one, and it made me crazy to see them so effectively reinforced.
Hattori was killed because Peairs had a gun, and because Hattori looked different. Peairs had a gun because here in America we fancy that ours is still a frontier culture, where our homes must be defended by deadly force from people who look different. And while I’m not saying that Peairs pulled the trigger because he was a butcher, his occupation didn’t surprise me. Guns, race, meat, and Manifest Destiny all collided in a single explosion of violent, dehumanized activity. In the subsequent civil trial, evidence that had been suppressed during the criminal trial was introduced, including Peairs’s affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan. The civil court found him guilty.
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