A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

  “Me and my mom enjoy soaking in the hot tub at the public bath.”

  “Today at school I had a hilarious time playing kakurembo with my new friends. Kakurembo is like hide-and-seek, and I got to be It!”

  “My dad applied for a new job as a track inspector on the Chuo Rapid Express Line.”

  I kept it up for a while, making these cheerful, chirpy postings to The Future Is Nao! but I felt like a total fraud. And then one day, a couple of months after I got back, I happened to check my statistics, and I realized that the whole time since I started my blog, only twelve people had ever visited it, for about a minute each, and I hadn’t had a single hit in weeks, so that’s when I stopped. There’s nothing sadder than cyberspace when you’re floating around out there, all alone, talking to yourself.

  Anyway, it didn’t take Kayla long to figure out that maybe I was becoming a pathetic loser and it wasn’t cool to be my friend anymore. I swear, even on the Internet people can give off a virtual smell that other people pick up on, although I don’t see how that’s possible. It’s not like a real smell, with molecules and pheromone receptors and so on, but it’s just as obvious as the stink of fear in your armpits or the vibe you give off when you’re poor and don’t have any confidence or nice stuff. Maybe it’s something in the way your pixels start behaving, but I was definitely starting to have it, and Kayla was sniffing it out from the opposite side of the ocean.

  Kayla is totally the opposite of me. She is superconfident and has lots of money and isn’t afraid of anything. Even though we haven’t corresponded for a while, and I don’t even know what high school she’s at, I’m 100 percent sure she is the most popular girl there, because she is the type who will always be the most popular girl wherever she is. Being number two isn’t even a possibility for Kayla, and that was the case even in second grade, when she picked me out and allowed me to sit next to her at lunch. Now that I think about it, it was a miracle she was ever my friend.

  Things started to go seriously wrong after I emailed her a picture of me in my new school uniform, and she texted me back this superironic email, which went something like, “OMG i luv yr uni4m! its soo manga! u gotta snd me 1 so i cn go as a jap skoolgrl 4 haloween!”

  To her, my new life was just cosplay,73 but to me it was totally real. We had nothing in common anymore. We couldn’t talk about fashion, or the kids at school, or who was a loser, or what teachers we liked or hated. Our chats and emails went nowhere, and then she started taking longer and longer to write me back, and after a while she just kind of disappeared. When I tried to find her online and she was always off even when I knew she had to be on, I realized she had blocked me from her buddy list.

  I still wrote her emails sometimes, but she almost never answered. After my funeral, I tried to share my feelings honestly about how much I hated my school and being in Japan, and how much I missed Sunnyvale, but I still couldn’t tell her about the ijime or my dad or our whole situation, so to be perfectly fair, she didn’t have a whole lot to go on. I can’t blame her for not understanding. When she finally wrote me back, it was this tight, bright, cheerful little email that made it clear that she really wasn’t interested in me if I was going to be a whiner.

  After that, I forwarded her the “Tragic and Untimely Death of Transfer Student Yasutani” link to my funeral. Mostly it was to shock her, but like I said, I was kind of proud of my stats too. I waited and waited for an email to show up from her, but it never did. Maybe this is what it’s like when you die. Your inbox stays empty. At first, you just think nobody’s answering, so you check your SENT box to make sure your outgoing mail is okay, and then you check your ISP to make sure your account is still active, and eventually you have to conclude that you’re dead.

  So, you can see why I was feeling like a ghost. Ghosts in Japan are pretty intense. They’re not the kind you get in America that go around dressed in sheets. In Japan, they wear white kimonos, and they have long black hair hanging in their faces, and also they have no feet. Usually they’re women who are righteously pissed off because someone has done something horrible to them. Sometimes, if a person has been treated really badly, she can even become an ikisudama,74 and her soul leaves her sleeping body and wanders around the city at night doing tatari75 and wreaking vengeance on all her shitty classmates who have tortured her by sitting on their chests. That was my goal for the summer vacation. To become a living ghost.

  It wasn’t so crazy as it sounds, because haunting runs in our family, although I was only beginning to understand this. My dad had started acting even weirder. He stayed in the house during the daylight hours, but every night, after me and Mom were asleep, he would go out walking. Why was he sneaking out at night? Was he haunting someone, too? Was he turning into a vampire or a werewolf? Was he having an affair?

  I used to lie awake in bed, metal-bound and unable to move, picturing him in his scuffed plastic slippers, shuffling along the dark and winding shitamachi76 streets, through the wards of Arakawa and Senju and the old neighborhoods of Asakusa and Sumida, where the working-class people live, which are empty at that time of night because everybody’s sleeping. After a couple of hours, he’d end up at a small park on the banks of the Sumida River, where a low concrete wall keeps the kids from falling into the water, and I could imagine him leaning against the wall, watching the garbage drift by. Sometimes I could even hear him talking to the feral cats, who slunk in and out of the garbage and the shadows. Sometimes he’d sit on a swing, smoking the last of his Short Hopes, trying to figure out how to make a living body sink. When he ran out of cigarettes, he would walk back again and sneak into the apartment. I always heard the clank of the bolt on the front door, because I waited for it. The bolt in the latch broke the spell. I couldn’t move until I heard it.

  2.

  One night, maybe a week after my funeral, I had this crazy cosmic dream about one of my classmates, the sukeban named Reiko. I think I told you about her earlier. She was supersmart and popular, like a Japanese Kayla. She never bullied me directly, and what I mean by that is she never pinched me or pushed me or poked me with her scissors. She didn’t have to, because all the other kids were lining up to do it for her. All she had to do was look at me with this expression, like she’d just caught sight of something loathsome or half-dead, and her friends would jump in to do the job. Most of the time she didn’t even bother to watch, but sometimes I caught her eye as she turned unhurriedly away, and her eye was the cruelest and most empty thing in the whole world.

  And that’s what was in my dream, her cruel eye, only it was gigantic, as big as the sky. I don’t know how to explain it. It was nighttime, and I was in the schoolyard, metal-bound and lying on my back in a box, but maybe it was a coffin. My classmates were looking down at me, and their eyes were glittering like those of animals in a dark forest. Then they started blinking, and one by one they disappeared, until all that was left was Reiko’s eye, staring down at me and emitting this laser beam of light, only it was the opposite of light, because it was cold and black and empty. It grew bigger and bigger, pressing down, enveloping me and the whole world and everything in it, and the only way I could save the world was to plunge my little kitchen knife right into the pupil, and so I did. I closed my eyes and stuck the knife into the dark hole, over and over again, until I felt something tear. A thick liquid as cold as nitrogen started oozing slowly from the rip in the membrane. I knew I had to move but I couldn’t, and then the sac burst, and the icy liquid came pouring out, and it was too late, but even though I knew I would die from the cold, the world would be safe from Reiko’s horrible eye, thanks to me.

  The clank of the bolt in the door woke me up. It was Dad, returning from his nighttime walk, and I realized I had been dreaming. It was July, and hot and humid even at night, but I was shivering so hard my teeth chattered. I hugged myself tightly, pretending to be asleep until I heard my dad come into the bedroom and crawl into his futon. I waited, listening until I could hear the sound of him sleeping. Mom sle
pt silently, but Dad always made little pu-pu-pu noises with his lips as the air went in and out. When I was sure he was asleep, I got up and stood by his side and watched him for a while. The LEDs from the computer in the corner emitted just enough light for me to see the little opening between his lips, and I wondered what would happen if I pressed my thumb against the hole, but I didn’t. I tiptoed into the living room instead.

  His jacket was hanging on a hook in the hallway, so I slipped it on over my shoulders. It was a jacket he’d gotten from his company in Sunnyvale, a cool, high-quality jacket like they give you on film shoots, made of Gore-Tex with the IT company logo on the back, and he used to wear it with a hoodie underneath, in the days when he was cool and high-quality, too, before the polyester suits. The smooth, silky lining was still warm from his body, but against my bare skin it made me shiver even more. I hugged it around me until I felt warm again.

  I went over to the doors that led onto the tiny balcony and pressed my forehead against the glass. There wasn’t a great view from the balcony. The neighborhood we lived in wasn’t like the image most people have of Tokyo, all slick and modern like Shinjuku or Shibuya, with skyscrapers made of concrete and glass. This neighborhood was more like a slum, old and crowded, with small, ugly apartment buildings made of water-stained cement all crammed together on this crooked street. From our balcony, all I could see was walls and roofs and old roof tiles, meeting at weird angles. It looked like a jagged patchwork of disconnected planes and surfaces, strung together by phone lines and electrical cables that hung down everywhere in loops.

  During the day you could see patches of sky, but at night it was all dark except for the pools of light from the streetlamps, and the headlights from taxis slicing up the buildings, and the wobbling beams from bicycles tickling the walls. It was quiet, too. You could hear rats scrabbling in the garbage, and the shrill laughter of the hostesses stumbling home from the bars with their dates. And I remember that everything was especially dark and still that night, as though the entire city had felt the horror of my dream and was metal-bound. Nothing moved, not even the shadow of a cat.

  My dream was so real. Maybe the next day I would hear news that Reiko had hanged herself or was murdered in the night. Would it be my fault? And that’s when it occurred to me that maybe I had become an ikisudama, and if I hadn’t, maybe I could. It would take practice, but summer vacation had just started, and what else did I have to do with my free time? The more I thought about this idea, the more excited I got, and all the next day and the following days, I listened for news of Reiko. I even cornered Daisuke to find out if he’d seen her. Daisuke and Reiko went to the same cram school during summer break. Most of my classmates went to a cram school in order to get ready for the high school entrance exams that you take in the second half of ninth grade. Basically, if you’re a Japanese kid, these exams decide your whole future, and the rest of your life, and even your afterlife. What I mean is:

  where you go to high school decides where you’ll go to university,

  which decides what company you’ll work for,

  which decides how much money you’ll make,

  which decides who you’ll marry,

  which decides what kind of kids you’ll have and how you’ll raise them,

  and where you’ll live and where you’ll die,

  and whether your kids will have enough money to give you a classy funeral with high-quality Buddhist priests to perform the proper funeral rites to ensure that you make it into the Pure Land,

  and if not, whether you’ll become a hungry vengeful ghost, fated to haunt the living on account of all your unsatisfied desires,

  which all started because you flunked your entrance exams and didn’t get into a good high school.

  So you can see why, if you care about your life, cram school is pretty important. Most of my classmates and their families took it very seriously, but my parents couldn’t afford the extra tuition, and I didn’t care, either. I mean, I was already a vengeful ghost, haunting the living, so it didn’t really matter if I lived or died, and anyway, I grew up in Sunnyvale, so I have a different attitude about these kinds of things. In my heart, I’m American, and I believe I have a free will and can take charge of my own destiny.

  But to get back to Daisuke, I cornered him by the soft drink machines again and pushed him around a little, and then I asked him about Reiko, if anything had happened to her or if she’d been absent, but he told me she was okay and that she’d been in school every day.

  I questioned him harder. Perhaps she’d caught a summer cold, I suggested, pinching his arm, or developed an allergy? A runny nose? Watery eyes?

  Yes, he told me, now that I mentioned it, she had come to class wearing an eyepatch a couple of days earlier.

  My heart pretty much stopped and I released him. When? I demanded, and he counted back on his fingers.

  Monday, he said. She wore the patch to school on Monday. I caught my breath. I’d had the dream on Sunday night.

  I pinned him up against the soft drink machine and made him tell me the whole story. He said that at first everyone thought she had a sty, which was gross, and one boy even dared to call her a baikin. But Reiko just laughed gorgeously and told him it was cosplay, and she was being Jubei-chan the Samurai Girl in The Secret of the Lovely Eyepatch. And it was true, Daisuke told me, that her eyepatch was pink and shaped like a heart, just like Jubei-chan’s lovely eyepatch, so when Reiko turned on the boy who’d called her a bacteria and actually beat the crap out of him herself, everyone just figured that the eyepatch had given her the magical and awesome fighting powers of the Samurai Girl. It was the first time anyone had actually seen her fight, so it really was kind of supernatural, Daisuke said.

  He told me all this in a whispered rush of words in the alley.

  “And you believed her?” I said. “You’re so stupid!”

  He shrugged his thin shoulders. He wasn’t wearing his school uniform, and under the T-shirt, his bones stuck out, making him appear even more insectlike. He truly was pathetic.

  “She looks like Jubei-chan,” he mumbled. “She’s got a nice shape.”

  It was true that Reiko had a well-developed figure for her age, and this made me mad, plus the fact that Daisuke was saying it gave me the total creeps. It meant that even an insect like him was capable of noticing things like breasts and legs, and so I knocked him down and pinched him a little harder than I needed to, which just goes to show that you don’t need a Lovely Eyepatch to have the power to make somebody cry. But when I finished and let him go and was walking back to our apartment, I thought back on what Daisuke had said and felt suddenly overwhelmed by what I’d done. I mean, what do you think was under the eyepatch? At least a sty and possibly even a real injury, which meant that I’d actually accomplished my goal. While I was asleep and dreaming, my spirit had actually escaped from my body to wreak revenge upon my enemy. I was a living ghost, and this realization filled me with an awesome sense of power.

  3.

  A week after I became a living ghost, old Jiko showed up at our apartment. I was in the living room reading manga, and Dad was on the balcony, sitting on a pail next to the washing machine and smoking cigarettes, when the doorbell rang. We usually just ignored the doorbell, since we didn’t have any friends and it was usually bill collectors or someone from the neighborhood association, but then it rang a second time and then a third time. I looked out at Dad on the balcony to see what he wanted me to do. He was standing there with a panicky look in his eye, his head half hidden in the wet laundry, with the socks and underpants dangling down around his ears like a wig.

  Ever since he had gotten arrested for falling on the train tracks, he was getting more and more paranoid, which is pretty typical of hikikomori people. Like I said, except for the midnight walking, the only place he would go was to the public bath, and that was only after dark and only when he was starting to smell bad and Mom threatened to make him sleep on the balcony if he didn’t. He probably wou
ld have preferred that.

  He liked the balcony because he could smoke, and it was the only fresh air he got during the daylight. He sat there on an upturned bucket and read the old manga that I found in the recycling bins, and when he finished smoking, he came inside and read his Great Minds of Western Philosophy and folded his paper insects. He almost never worked on his computer or surfed the Internet anymore, which was totally weird, because that’s all he used to do in Sunnyvale. Now he hardly ever went online, except sometimes to send an email to one of his former Sunnyvale friends. I was starting to think he might be an ikisudama, too, or he might have been possessed by a monster, maybe a suiko, a giant kappa77 from the dark waters of the Sumida River, who had sucked out his blood and returned his empty body to shore. That’s what it seemed like.

  Anyway, after the doorbell rang four or five times, I got up to answer. I thought it was probably the landlord’s wife or the gas man or the census taker or a pair of shiny-faced Mormons on a mission. Why is it that Mormons on missions always look like identical twins, even when they’re different heights or races? That’s what I was wondering, which is why I wasn’t particularly surprised when I opened the door and saw these two dudes wearing identical light grey pajamas and straw sun hats. They weren’t Mormons, but they looked enough like clones and their faces were shiny bright, so I figured they were from some other brand of religion that traveled in pairs. Why is it that religious types all have shiny bright faces? Maybe not all of them, but the inspired ones, like the light of God is just leaking through their pores.