by Ruth Ozeki
Judging by their brilliance, these two dudes were really inspired even though they were also really short. One of them was old and the other one was young, and I could see that under their hats they were both bald. Their pajamas looked like the kind that the monks wore at the temple on the way to school, so I figured they were Buddhists who had come here begging for money, and if that was the case, boy, were they at the wrong apartment.
They bowed deeply. I kind of nodded back at them. I’m not very polite in the Japanese sense.
“Ojama itashimasu. Tadaima otōsan wa irasshaimasuka?” the young one asked, which means something like “Please pardon this intrusion. Would your honorable father happen to be present at this moment in time?”
“Yo, Dad!” I yelled back into the room, in English. “There’s two bald midgets in pajamas here to see you.”
I used to get into this thing where I refused to speak Japanese to my mom and dad. I did it a lot when we were at home, and sometimes when we were out shopping or at the sento. Japanese people are pretty lame when it comes to understanding spoken English, so you can make snarky remarks and they usually don’t know what you’re saying. It used to drive my mom crazy when I did this. I wasn’t being really mean, just a little mean, and my dad usually thought it was funny. I liked to make him laugh.
Anyway, this time, the younger monk started to giggle, and I was like, Oh shit, I’m so busted, so I turned around to take another look, and just as it was occurring to me these monks were actually females, the old one slipped by me, taking off her zori78 and hat and crossing the living room, and the next instant she was out on the balcony next to my dad, who by that time was leaning over the edge, looking down at the sidewalk below like he was going to jump. The old monk lady climbed up on the bucket and leaned way over the railing beside him like a little kid about to do a flip on a jungle gym. She was as small as a kid, too, and maybe that’s why Dad reacted the way he did, flinging his arm out to block her from falling. It was an instinctive daddy reflex, the same move that had probably saved me from breaking my neck or hurtling to my death a hundred times, only I’d never seen it in action from this angle before, and I was amazed at its speed and precision. Too bad he didn’t have an arm like that he could use to save himself.
The old monk lady said something then. I don’t know what it was, but Dad turned and stared at her, and then he stepped back from the railing and sat down on the bucket and put his face in his hands. I could feel myself starting to panic. I don’t know if your dad cries a lot, but in my opinion, it’s a pretty gruesome thing to have to watch, and I’d sat through it once after the Chuo Rapid Express Incident and I didn’t particularly want to repeat the experience, especially in front of strangers. The old lady didn’t seem to notice, though, or maybe she was just giving him some space. She continued to look out over the street below, and when she’d seen enough, she turned and straightened her pajamas and started patting my dad on the head in the slightly absentminded way you pat a little kid when he’s fallen and hurt himself but not too badly. As she patted him, she looked carefully around with her slow, cloudy eyes, moving over all the surfaces of the apartment, the overflowing ashtray and stacks of clothes and computer parts and manga and dishes in the sink, until finally they came to rest on me.
“Nao-chan desu ne?”79 she said. “Ohisashiburi.”80
I looked away, not wanting to give it up too quick that I was Naoko.
“Ookiku natta ne,”81 she said.
I really hate it when people point out how big I am, and this old lady was a midget, so what did she know, and besides, who did she think she was, anyway, barging into people’s apartments and making personal remarks?
And just as I was thinking this, Dad shifted on his bucket and raised his head and sighed, Obaachama . . . ,82 and I was like, Duh! because of course she was his dear old granny. He was staring up at her, and now I saw that he wasn’t crying exactly, but his cheeks were all flushed, the way they got sometimes when he drank, although I happened to know that there hadn’t been any booze in the apartment since the Chuo Rapid Express Incident, so you had to figure it was embarrassment or shame. And honestly, I felt ashamed, too, looking at his blotchy face and his reddened eyes with the crusty bits stuck to the lashes, and the big pieces of dandruff lodged in his greasy hair. He was wearing a sleeveless undershirt that was stained and yellowed around the armpits, and when he stood up, I noticed for the first time how his spine had taken on the shape of an S curve, with his belly slumped out, and his chest caved in, and his shoulders humped all over.
I heard a noise behind me.
“Shitsurei itashimasu . . .”83 It was the younger one. I’d forgotten all about her, but now I turned around and looked at her more carefully and saw that she was not as young as I first thought. It’s hard to tell with bald ladies. The only other bald lady I’d ever seen close up was Kayla’s mom in Sunnyvale, who had breast cancer, and all her hair fell out, even her eyebrows, but her face wasn’t shiny bright like these two. It was dry and dull like construction paper.
They each had a small rolling suitcase, which the younger one was trying to drag into the genkan, but all the floor space was taken up with our shoes and slippers, so she had to roll the bags on top. Then she slipped off her sandals and stepped into the apartment next to me and bowed.
“Please, come in?” she asked, in careful English, as though I was the guest arriving from America. I just nodded, because honestly I felt like a foreigner living in that stupid Tokyo apartment with these strange people who said they were my parents but I barely even knew anymore.
In Sunnyvale, I used to think I was adopted. Some of my friends there were Chinese girls adopted by ordinary California parents, but I felt like the opposite, like an ordinary California girl adopted by Japanese parents, who were strange and different, but tolerable, because in Sunnyvale it was kind of special to be Japanese. The other moms would ask my mom to teach them how to make sushi and flower arrangements, and the dads treated my dad like a small pet that they could take for a run on the golf course and teach new tricks. He was always coming home with brand-new high-end appliances, like Weber grills and composting bins, that my mom didn’t know how to use, but it was cool. We had a lifestyle. Here we were barely managing a life.
4.
Here’s a thought: If I were a Christian, you would be my God.
Don’t you see? Because the way I talk to you is the way I think some Christian people talk to God. I don’t mean praying exactly, because when you pray you usually want something, or at least that’s what Kayla said. She used to pray for stuff and then tell her parents exactly what she’d prayed for, and usually she got what she wanted. They were probably trying to make her believe in God, but I happen to know it wasn’t working.
Anyway, I don’t really think you’re God or expect you to grant me wishes or anything. I just appreciate it that I can talk to you and you’re willing to listen. But I better hurry up or I’ll never catch up to where I’m supposed to be.
Jiko and my dad were still talking out on the balcony, and the younger one, whose name was Muji, helped me make tea, and then we all made polite Japanese-style conversation about nothing until Mom came home, and I could tell by how surprised she pretended to be to find two Buddhist nuns in her living room that she’d arranged the whole thing, plus she’d gone shopping and gotten take-out sushi for five people, and a big bottle of beer, too, which she never would have done for just me and Dad.
After we ate I escaped into the bedroom and went online to check the stats for “The Tragic and Untimely Death of Transfer Student Nao Yasutani,” but the number of hits hadn’t increased at all since the last time I’d checked, which was depressing, considering that I’d only been dead for less than two weeks and was already being forgotten. There’s nothing sadder than cyberspace . . . but I’ve already said this.
In the living room I could hear them talking about Jiko’s temple needing repairs, and how the danka84 couldn’t pay for the work because
all the young people were moving to the cities, and the old people left behind didn’t have a lot of money. And then the conversation drifted and their voices dropped, and I heard the words ijime and homushiku85 and nyuugakushiken,86 so I put on my headphones so I wouldn’t have to listen. The only thing lonelier than cyberspace is being a teenage kid, sitting in the bedroom you have to share with your loser parents because they’re too poor to rent a big-enough apartment so you can have a room of your own, and then listening to them discussing your so-called problems. I turned up the volume and played a few tracks of some old Nick Drake that Dad had given me, which I was really getting into. “Time Has Told Me.” “Day Is Done.” Nick Drake’s songs are so sad. He committed suicide, too. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore, so I gave up and went out to the living room.
They were still sitting around the table where we’d eaten, only now in place of the sushi there was a small plate of fluorescent green mochi87 covered with some kind of paste, and a bag of green wasabi peas, and they were drinking beer from little glasses in front of them, all except Mom, who was having tea, and Dad, who had taken his beer out on the balcony so he could smoke.
“Where’d that come from?” I asked in English, pointing at the mochi. I don’t particularly care for sweet rice balls, but I like to be asked, you know?
Mom frowned and shook her head, which meant I wasn’t supposed to point, and I wasn’t supposed to talk in English. “Chotto, osuwari . . . ,” she said, patting the cushion, which meant I was supposed to sit down next to her like her trained chihuahua. Her eyes were rimmed with red, as though she’d been crying.
I backed away. “I’m going to bed,” I told her, still in English. “I was studying. I’m tired.”
They were all watching me, Dad from the balcony, Jiko through half-closed eyes from across the table, and Muji, kneeling at my feet, her face bright red from the beer and even shinier now, if that was possible. She picked up the plate of green rice balls and held it toward me.
“Please! This one is Zunda-mochi. It is some special soybean foods from Sendai regional place.”
I nodded politely like I understood what she was talking about, which I didn’t. She waited, but when I didn’t take her up on the offer, she put down the plate and picked up the bottle of beer, pouring the last of it into old Jiko’s glass. She was really into serving.
“Jiko Sensei is enjoy very much,” she said. “Sensei is strong for drinking o-saké, but I am very weak.” She giggled and burped, and then put her hand over her mouth. Her eyes grew round, and her eyeballs rolled like roasted chestnuts in their sockets. I dropped down onto the cushion next to her. She was kind of wacky, and I was beginning to like her. Across the table, Jiko had fallen asleep.
“Nao-chan,” Mom said. She was speaking in Japanese, and her voice was bright and phony. “Your great-granny Jiko had a wonderful idea. She has kindly invited you to spend your whole summer vacation at her temple in Miyagi . . .”88
Unbelievable! It was a total setup. They were all watching me carefully now, my mom, Muji and Jiko, who I sensed could see me through her closed eyelids, and my dad, who was still on the balcony, pretending to be all nonchalant and casual. I hate it when grown-ups watch you like that. Makes you feel like a malfunctioning cyborg. Not quite human.
“It’s so exciting, don’t you think?” Mom chirped on. “It’s very beautiful on the coastline, and so much cooler than the city. And the ocean is right there for swimming, too. Won’t that be fun? I told her you’d love to go . . .”
Sometimes when grown-ups are talking to you, and you stare back at them, they start to look like they’re inside one of those old-fashioned TV sets, the kind with the thick dark glass, and you can see their mouths moving, only the exact words get drowned out in a lot of staticky white noise so you can barely understand them, which didn’t matter because I wasn’t listening anyway. Mom was talking on and on like a breakfast TV show host, and Muji was burping and trilling like a drunken sparrow, and Jiko was pretending to sleep, and Dad was exhaling clouds of cigarette smoke into my clean underpants that were still hanging on the laundry line because in all the excitement I’d forgotten to take them down, but none of this mattered because I was deep inside my mind, which is where I go when things get too intense. It was just a matter of waiting them out, and I’m good at waiting, since I get so much practice at school. One trick when you’re waiting is to pretend you’re underwater, or better yet, frozen in an iceberg, and if you really focus hard on it, you can even see the way your face would look if it was frozen under ice, all blue and dim and ripply.
Dad came back into the room from the balcony and sat down across from me.
I still couldn’t hear his voice through the static, but I could read his lips. You. Should. Go.
This was not what I wanted. I made my pulse slow. I refrained from breathing. I stopped moving completely.
Jiko opened her eyes then. I don’t know how I knew this, because I wasn’t even looking at her, but I could feel a kind of energy coming from her side of the table, and so when she leaned forward and placed her old hand on top of mine, I wasn’t surprised. Her hand was so light, like a tickle of warm breath, and my skin began to tingle. She kept watching me, and even though I couldn’t see her, I could feel her melting the ice, pulling my mind toward hers through the coldness. I could feel my pulse returning and my blood beginning to flow again. I blinked. Dad was still talking.
“It’s just for a little while,” he was saying. “Your mom’s got it all set up. They have special doctors who can teach me to cope with my problems. By the time you get back, I’ll be all better. Really. I promise. You believe me, don’t you?”
Now that I could hear him and see how tired and sad he looked, the rest of me melted.
“But . . . ,” I said, trying to find my voice. Of course I didn’t believe him, but what could I say? So I just nodded, and that was that.
Ruth
1.
Miyagi prefecture is located in the Tohoku region, in the northeastern part of Japan. This area was one of the last pieces of tribal land to be taken from the indigenous Emishi, descendants of the Jōmon people, who had lived there from prehistoric times until they were defeated by the Japanese Imperial Army in the eighth century. The Miyagi coastline was also one of the areas hardest hit by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Old Jiko’s temple was located somewhere along this stretch of coastline.
Fukushima prefecture, located just south of Miyagi, was also part of the ancestral lands of the Emishi. Now Fukushima is the prefectural home to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. The name Fukushima means “Happy Island.” Before the tsunami caused the catastrophic meltdown of the nuclear power station, people believed Fukushima to be a happy place, and the banners stretched across the main streets of the nearby towns reflected this sense of optimism.
Nuclear power is energy for a brighter future!
The correct understanding of nuclear power leads to a better life!
2.
The island where Ruth and Oliver lived was named for a famous Spanish conquistador, who overthrew the Aztec empire. Although he never made it up as far north as his eponymous isle, his men did, which is why the inlets and sounds of coastal British Columbia are scattered with the names of famous Spanish mass murderers. But in spite of its sanguinary name, theirs was a relatively benign and happy little isle. For two months out of the year, it was a gemlike paradise, overflowing with carefree summer people with yachts and vacation homes, and happy hippie farmers raising organic veggies and bare-bottomed babies. There were yoga teachers, body workers, and healers in every modality, drummers and shamans and gurus galore. For two months out of the year, the sun shone.
But when the tourists and the summer people left, the blue skies clouded over and the island bared its teeth, revealing its churlish side. The days grew short and the nights grew long, and for the next ten months, it rained. The locals who lived there year-round liked it this way.
Their island
had a nickname, too, a shadow name that was rarely spoken: the Island of the Dead. Some said the name referred to the bloody intertribal wars, or the smallpox epidemic of 1862 that killed off most of the indigenous Coast Salish population. Other people said no, that the island had always been a tribal burial ground, laced with hidden caves known only to the elders, where they entombed their dead. Still others insisted that the nickname had nothing to do with native lore at all, pointing instead to the aging population of retired white people, who’d come to spend their twilight years on the island, turning it into a kind of gated community, like Boca Raton only with lousy weather and no amenities.
Ruth liked the nickname. It had a certain gravitas, and she’d brought her own mother here to die, after all. Her father’s ashes, too, she’d brought with her in a box, and after her mother’s cremation, she had interred both parents’ remains in the tiny Whaletown Cemetery, in a plot with ample room for her and Oliver, too. When she mentioned this to her New York friends, they told her that rural island living was making her tedious and morbid, but she disagreed. It was true that compared with Manhattan, there wasn’t a lot of excitement on their island, but how much excitement did you need if you were dead?
3.
The Whaletown Post Office was a tiny wooden shack, clinging to a rocky outcrop on the edge of Whaletown Bay. The mail came over by ferry three times a week, and so three times a week, a representative from each of the households in Whaletown got into a car or a truck or an SUV and drove to the post office to pick up the mail. This reckless squandering of fossil fuel drove Oliver crazy.
“Why can’t we have a mailperson?” he would rant. “One person, one vehicle, cuts carbon, delivers all the mail. How hard is that?”