by Ruth Ozeki
Basically, it went on like that all day. They would walk by my desk and pretend to gag or sniff the air and say Iyada! Gaijin kusai!36 or Bimbo kusai!37 Sometimes they practiced their idiomatic English on me, repeating stuff they learned from American rap lyrics: Yo, big fat-ass ho, puleezu show me some juicy coochie, ain’t you a slutto, you even take it in the butto, come lick on my nutto, oh hell yeah. Etc. You get the idea. My strategy was basically just to ignore them or play dead or pretend I didn’t exist. I thought that maybe if I just pretended hard enough it would actually come true, and I would either die or disappear. Or at least it would come true enough for my classmates to believe it and stop tormenting me, but they didn’t. They didn’t stop until they’d chased me home to our apartment, and I ran up the stairs and locked the door behind me, panting and bleeding from lots of little places like under my arms or between my legs where the cuts wouldn’t show.
Mom was almost never at home at the time. She was into her jellyfish phase, and she used to spend all day at the invertebrate tank in the city aquarium, where she would sit, clutching her old Gucci handbag, watching kurage38 through the glass. I know this because she took me there once. It was the only thing that relaxed her. She had read somewhere that watching kurage was beneficial to your health because it reduces stress levels, only the problem was that a lot of other housewives had read the same article, so it was always crowded in front of the tank, and the aquarium had to set out folding chairs, and you had to get there really early in order to get a good spot, all of which was very stressful. Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure she was having a nervous breakdown at the time, but I remember how pale and beautiful she looked with her delicate profile against the watery blue tank, and her bloodshot eyes following the drift of the pink and yellow jellyfish as they floated by like pulsing pastel-colored moons, trailing their long tentacles behind them.
5.
This was our life right after Sunnyvale, and it seemed to go on forever, although actually it was only a couple of months. And then one evening, Dad came home and announced he’d been hired at this new start-up that was developing a line of empathic productivity software, and he was going to be their chief programmer, and even though his salary was a tiny fraction of what he’d made in Silicon Valley, at least it was a job. It was a miracle! I remember Mom was so happy, she started to cry, and Dad got all shy and gruff and took us out to eat sweet grilled eel on top of rice, which is my favorite dish in the whole world.
After that, Dad would still leave with me in the morning and come home late at night, and even though I was still getting bullied at school, and we still didn’t seem to have any money, it was okay because we were all feeling optimistic about our family’s future again. Mom stopped going to the aquarium and started fixing up our two-room apartment. She cleaned the tatami and organized our bookshelves and she even confronted the bar hostesses, ambushing them in the corridor on their way to the clubs to yell at them about the recycling and the noise they made.
“I’ve got a teenage daughter!” I heard her say, which made me feel embarrassed—like, hello, I was almost fifteen and I knew what sex was—but also proud that she considered me a daughter worth fighting for.
That year was my first Christmas and New Year’s in Japan that I could remember, and my mom and dad were trying to believe that everything was fine and this whole disaster of our life was just one big adventure, and I went along with them because I was just a kid, and what did I know? We gave each other Christmas presents, and Mom made osechi,39 and we sat around in front of the television eating candied shrimp and tiny dried fishes and salted roe and pickled lotus roots and sweet beans while Dad drank saké, and during the commercial breaks he told us stories about the line of productivity software he was developing, and how computers were going to experience empathy and anticipate our needs and feelings even better than other human beings, and how soon human beings wouldn’t need each other in the same way anymore. Given what was going on at school, I thought this all sounded very promising.
I can’t imagine what Dad was thinking. I can’t believe he thought he was going to get away with it. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he didn’t think at all, or maybe he was already so crazy he really believed his own stories. Or maybe he just got tired of feeling like a loser, so he invented this job to give himself a break and make us all feel happy, at least for a little while. And it worked. For a little while. But soon, he and my mom started arguing at night, first gently, and then more and more intensely.
It was always about money. Mom wanted him to hand over his weekly pay to her so she could manage it. That’s the way it’s done in Japan. The husband gives the wife all the money, and she gives him an allowance that he can spend on beer and pachinko or whatever he wants, while she hangs on to the rest of it to keep it safe. And Mom had a good reason for wanting to do it the Japanese way. When they went to America, Dad insisted on doing it the American way, where the Man of the House makes all the Big Financial Decisions, but as it turned out, what with the business of the stock options, the manly American way turned into a disaster. Mom wasn’t about to let anything like that happen again, so she was insisting he turn over his pay, and he was insisting that he’d deposited it all into a high-yield blah blah account. Occasionally he’d hand her a stack of ten-thousand-yen bills, but that was it. And they would have gone on like this for longer, only Dad got careless, and a couple of days before my fifteenth birthday, Mom found the stubs from the OTB in his pocket and confronted him, and instead of confessing he’d been lying, he went out and sat in a park, getting smashed on vending machine saké, and then he went to the train station and bought a platform ticket and jumped in front of the 12:37 Shinjuku-bound Chuo Rapid Express.
Luckily for him, the train had already started slowing down as it approached the station, and the conductor saw him wobbling on the edge of the platform and was able to slam on the emergency brakes in time. It just missed him. It ran over that stupid briefcase of his. The station police came and hauled Dad up off the tracks and arrested him for causing a disturbance and interfering with the timely operations of the transit system, but since it was unclear if he jumped or if he was just drunk and stumbled, instead of putting him in jail, they released him into Mom’s custody.
Mom went to pick him up at the police station, brought him home in a cab, and put him into the bathtub, and when he came out, damp and a little bit more sober, he said he was ready to confess everything. Mom told me to go into the bedroom, but Dad said I was old enough to know what kind of man my father was. He sat in front of us at the kitchen table, with his fingers white and clenched together, and admitted that he had made the whole thing up. Instead of going to work as a chief programmer, he had been spending his days on a bench in Ueno Park, studying the racing form and feeding the crows. He had sold his old computer peripherals to raise some cash, which he used to bet on the horses. Occasionally he would win, and he would hold back some of the cash to bet again, and the rest he brought home to Mom, but recently he had been losing more than winning, until finally his cash was all gone. There was no high-yield blah blah account. There was no empathic productivity software. There was no start-up at all. There was only the five-million-yen fine from the transit company that they make you pay for causing a “human incident,” which is a nice way of saying when you try to use one of their trains to kill yourself. He bowed until his forehead almost touched the kitchen table and said he was sorry he had no money to buy me a present for my birthday. I’m pretty sure he was crying.
The Chuo Rapid Express Incident was the first time and he was drunk, so you could almost believe it was an accident. In the end, that’s what Mom decided to do, and Dad went along with her, even though his eyes told me that it wasn’t true.
6.
My old Jiko says that everything happens because of your karma, which is a kind of subtle energy that you cause by the stuff you do or say or even just think, which means you have to watch yourself and not think too many perverted
thoughts or they’ll come back and bite you. And not just in this lifetime, either, but in all your lifetimes going way back in your past and into your future. So maybe it’s just my dad’s karma to end up on a park bench feeding crows in this lifetime, and really you can’t blame him for causing a human incident and wanting to move along to the next lifetime pretty quick. Anyway, Jiko says that as long as you keep trying to be a good person and making an effort to change, then finally one day all the good stuff you do will cancel out all the bad stuff that you’ve done, and you can become enlightened and hop on that elevator and never come back—unless, as I said, you’re like Jiko and you’ve taken a vow not to ride on the elevator until everyone else gets on first. That’s the great thing about my great granny. You can really count on her. She might be a hundred and four and say some pretty wack things, but my old Jiko is totally dependable.
Ruth
1.
“Interesting, about the crows,” Oliver said, tentatively.
Ruth closed the diary and looked over at her husband. He lay on his back in bed, head propped up against the pillow, staring down at his toes. She studied his clean, chiseled profile and marveled. After everything she’d just read—about Nao’s life, the girl’s father, her situation at school—that his mind would alight upon the crows! There were so many other more pressing things she would have preferred to discuss, and she was about to say so, when the slight hesitation in his words made her pause; he was aware that his responses were often irregular, and she knew this worried him. He wasn’t trying to annoy her, quite the opposite. She took a deep breath.
“Crows,” she repeated. “Yes. What about them?”
“Well,” he said, sounding relieved. “It’s just funny that she should mention them, because I’ve been doing some reading about Japanese crows. The native species there is Corvus japonensis, which is a subspecies of Corvus macrorhynchos, the Large-billed or Jungle Crow. It’s quite different from the American Crow—”
“This is Canada,” she said, interrupting him even as her mind drifted elsewhere. “We should have Canadian crows.” She was imagining Nao’s father, sitting on his bench. Every morning he woke, got dressed in his cheap blue suit, ate his breakfast, walked his daughter to school. Maybe he’d fish a copy of the morning newspaper out of the recycling on his way to the park, to read on the bench.
“Well, yes,” Oliver said. “As I was about to say, the crow native to these parts is Corvus caurinus, the Northwestern Crow. Almost identical to the American Crow, only smaller.”
“Figures,” she said. Did he have a special bench he liked more than others? He’d sit down and read the paper and study the racing form. Maybe in the afternoon he’d feed the crows crumbs from his sandwich or grains of rice from his rice ball before taking a nap, stretched out on his bench with the newspaper covering his face. Did he really think he could get away with it?
Oliver had fallen silent.
“I didn’t know we had crows at all,” she said, quickly, to show she was still listening. “I thought we just had ravens.”
“We do,” he said. “We have both crows and ravens. Same genus. Different birds. And that’s the weird part of it.”
He sat up in bed and waited until he had her full attention before continuing. “The other day, when you came back with the freezer bag? I was out in the garden and I heard the ravens talking. They were up in a fir, making a lot of noise, flapping around, all excited. I looked up and saw that they were harassing a smaller bird. The smaller bird kept trying to approach them, but they kept picking on it, until finally it flew over to the fence near where I was working. It looked like a crow, only it was bigger than Corvus caurinus, with a hump on its forehead and a big thick curved beak.”
“So it wasn’t a crow, then?”
“No, it was. I think it was a Jungle Crow. It sat there for a long time, studying me, so I got a really good look at it, too. I could swear it was Corvus japonensis. But what’s it doing here?”
He was leaning forward now, his pale blue eyes fixed intently on the bedcovers, as though he were trying to locate in the sheets an answer to the mystery of this geographical displacement. “The only thing I can think of is that it rode over on the flotsam. That it’s part of the drift.”
“Is that possible?”
He ran his hands across the blanket, smoothing out the mountains and valleys. “Anything’s possible. People made it here in hollowed-out logs. Why not crows? They can ride on the drift, plus they have the advantage of being able to fly. It’s not impossible. It’s an anomaly, is all.”
2.
He was an anomaly, a sport, a deviation from the mean. “Fries his fish in a different pan” was the way people sometimes described him on the island. But Ruth had always been fascinated by the meandering currents of his mind, and even though she often grew impatient, trying to follow its flow, in the end, she was glad she did. His observations, like those concerning the crow, were often the most interesting.
They’d met in the early 1990s at an artists’ colony in the Canadian Rockies, where he was leading a thematic residency called End of the Nation-State. She had been invited to the colony to do postproduction on a film she was making at the time, and he was a passionate devotee of midcentury Japanese cinema, so they soon became friends. He used to visit her in the editing room with a six-pack, and they would drink beer, and he would talk about montage and assemblage and borders and time while she carefully pieced together the frames of her movie. He was an environmental artist, doing public installations (botanical interventions into urban landscapes, he called them) on the fringes of the art establishment, and she was drawn to the unbridled and fertile anarchy of his thinking. In the flickering darkness of the editing room, she listened to him talk, and soon she had moved into his room in the dormitory.
After the residency ended, they parted ways and went in opposite directions: she, back to New York City, and he, to the island farm in British Columbia, where he taught permaculture. Had they met even a year earlier, their affair would probably have ended then and there, but these were the early days of the Internet, and they both had dial-up email accounts, which allowed them to keep the immediacy of their friendship alive. He shared a party line with three other island households, but he would wait until the middle of the night, when no one else was using the telephone, to send daily dispatches with the subject line missives from the mossy margins. In the summer, as the heavy moths beat their powdery wings against his window screen, he wrote to her about the island, describing how the berry bushes were laden with fruit, and where the most succulent oysters could be found, and the way the bioluminescence lit the lapping waves and filled the ocean with twinkling planktonic forms that mirrored the stars in the sky. He translated the vast, wild, Pacific Rim ecosystem into poetry and pixels, transmitting them all the way to her small monitor in Manhattan, where she waited, leaning into the screen, eagerly reading each word with her heart in her throat, because by then she was deeply in love.
That winter, they tried living together in New York, but by spring, she had again yielded to the tug and tide of his mind, allowing its currents to carry her back across the continent and wash them up on the remote shores of his evergreen island, surrounded by the fjords and snowcapped peaks of Desolation Sound—the tug of his mind and of the Canadian health care system, because he’d been stricken with a mysterious flulike illness, and they were broke and in need of affordable health insurance.
And if she was perfectly honest, she would have to acknowledge the role she played in their drift. She wanted what was best for him, wanted him to be happy and safe, but she was searching for a refugium for herself and for her mother, too. At the time, her mother was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. She had been diagnosed just a few months before Ruth’s father had died, and on his deathbed, Ruth had promised him that she would care for her mother after he was gone, but then her first novel was published, and she embarked on a book tour that took her around the world twice. Caring for a d
emented mother in Connecticut and a chronically ill husband in Canada was clearly impossible. The only option was to consolidate her remaining family and move her mother to the island.
It seemed like a good plan, so when moving day came, Ruth was content to exchange the tiny one-bedroom apartment that had been her home in lower Manhattan for twenty acres of rain forest and two houses in Whaletown. “I’m just trading one island for another,” she told her New York friends. “How different could it be?”
3.
It could, she learned, be very different. Whaletown was not really a town, per se, but rather a “locality,” defined by the province of British Columbia as “a named place or area, generally with a scattered population of 50 or less.” Even so, it was the second-largest population center on the island.
It had once been a whaling station, from whence it derived its name, although whales were rarely seen in nearby waters anymore. Most of them had been hunted out back in 1869, when a Scotsman named James Dawson and his American partner, Abel Douglass, established the Whaletown station and started killing whales with a new and extremely efficient weapon called a bomb lance. The bomb lance was a heavyweight shoulder rifle that fired a special harpoon, fitted with a bomb and time-delay fuse, which exploded inside the whale just seconds after penetrating its skin. By mid-September of that year, Dawson and Douglass had shipped more than 450 barrels of oil, 20,000 gallons, south to the United States.