by Ruth Ozeki
“What’s going on?” Oliver asked.
“Scavengers,” Muriel said. “Looking for stuff from Japan. On my turf.”
She was twirling the end of her long grey braid around her finger, a sure sign she was agitated. She’d gotten there early, but before long the others had started showing up.
“Amateurs,” she scoffed. “It’s all your fault, you know. Word got out about your freezer bag, and then someone at the post office started talking about all the money that washed up in Japan.”
Ruth remembered reading the story on the Japan Times website. Most of the tsunami victims had been old people, who’d kept their savings hidden at home, tucked into closets, or under the tatami floor. When their homes were swept away by the wave, their savings went with them and were sucked out to sea. A few months later, the sea started spitting its spoils back up again, and safes and strongboxes started washing up on the beaches. They were filled with cash and other valuables, but the authorities found it impossible to identify many of the owners, or even to determine if they were alive. Still, the people who found them continued to turn them in.
Ruth scanned the beach. The scavengers looked possessed, like zombies, the walking dead. It was ghoulish. “Has anyone found anything yet?”
“Not that I know of. Honestly, your freezer bag was a fluke, and my toothpaste tube, too. We’re too far inland. I keep telling them. The real pickings are on the open ocean, up and down the outer coast. We’re not going to see too much good stuff drifting this far back. But our friends here don’t seem to listen.”
“If they find money, they can’t just keep it,” Ruth said.
“Why not?”
“Because it belongs to the victims. It was their life savings. Most of them were old . . .”
“Just like here,” Muriel said.
“Except nobody here has safes,” Oliver said. “Never mind any money.”
Muriel laughed. “You’re right. The only thing that would wash up here is bags of pot.”
Ruth felt her face flush. “It’s not a joke,” she said. “You’re horrible. Both of you.”
Muriel raised her eyebrows. “Well, the rule of beachcombing is finders keepers. It’s a pretty ancient rule. Besides, I see you’re still wearing the watch . . .”
Ruth glared at her and shouldered her pitchfork. “I’m trying to find the owner,” she said. “I intend to keep trying until I do.” She turned to Oliver. “Are we going to get seaweed or what.”
She headed off toward the beach. From the corner of her eye, she saw Oliver shrug and give Muriel a sheepish smile, which annoyed her even more. She stopped and turned back to Muriel. “And this is not my fault. You didn’t have to tell the whole fucking island about my freezer bag.”
Muriel nodded. Strands of loose grey hair blew across her face, and she brushed them away. “I know. I’m sorry. Actually, I only told a couple of people, but you know how it is. I couldn’t help myself. It’s exciting. I live for garbage.”
Nao
1.
Old Jiko really loves my dad, in spite of all his problems, and he really loves her, too. She used to say he was her favorite grandson. Of course, he’s her only grandson, so she was just being amusing, and anyway I happen to know that nuns aren’t supposed to have favorites among sentient beings. Now that I think of it, maybe she loves him because all his problems give her so much to pray about, and when you’re as old as she is, and your body is like enough already, you need some pretty powerful reasons to stay alive.
She lives in a tiny temple on the side of a mountain near the coastline, but even though the temple is really small, it still has two names: Hiyuzan Jigenji.93 The little buildings cling to the steep mountainside and are surrounded by a forest of sugi94 and bamboo. You can’t believe how many steps you have to climb to get to it, and in the summer when it’s hot, you think you’re going to die of heatstroke or something. This is a place that truly could use an elevator, but Zen Buddhists aren’t big on modern conveniences. I swear, getting there is traveling backward about a thousand years in time.
My dad agreed to take me on the train to Sendai, which was a really big deal for him to leave our apartment during the daylight. I could tell it was stressing him out, and I wasn’t helping. I’d gotten this childish idea that we could make a little detour to Tokyo Disneyland so I could shake hands with Mickey-chan. I knew this was unrealistic because Tokyo Disneyland isn’t exactly on the way to Sendai, and besides my dad freaks out in crowds, but I really wanted to go. Mickey-chan is from California, and so am I, and I thought maybe he was homesick, too, so I begged and begged my dad, but of course he said no. In a normal family situation, I think my request would have been reasonable. I mean, a couple of hours hanging out with Mickey-chan isn’t such a huge price to pay for getting rid of your kid for the whole summer. But our family did not have a normal situation, and I knew Dad was not a Disneylandish kind of person. If I’d made the effort, I could have forgiven him for this, and we might have even enjoyed the train ride together, but instead I sulked and made him feel guilty and miserable the whole way, which honestly didn’t make me feel so great, either. In the end, he promised we could go to Disneyland when he came to pick me up and take me home, which cheered me up a little, knowing that at least he intended to survive my summer vacation.
He was really nervous at Tokyo Station, and we had to stand for about an hour underneath the departure board until he could figure out which bullet train we needed to take and what tickets we needed to buy, and then we went to the wrong platform and ended up on the Yamabiko Semi-Local, instead of the Komachi Express, but it didn’t matter to him if we stopped at every single station on the way, and actually it didn’t matter to me, either. So we rode through the suburbs of Tokyo, which go on and on forever, and then through some industrial areas, past factories with smokestacks and ugly clusters of apartment towers and shopping centers and parking lots, and the train doors kept opening and closing, and people kept getting on and off, and the train ladies in their little uniforms pushed their bento carts up and down the aisles, calling out, “Obento wa ikaga desu ka? Ocha wa ikaga desu ka?”95 Suddenly I was hungry for a sweet grilled-eel bento, but just as I was about to ask my dad I remembered that the last time we’d eaten sweet grilled eel was when we were celebrating his new “job,” and when I remembered his lie, my fondness for eel disappeared and I ordered an egg sandwich instead. I ate it, staring out the train window at my reflected face as it skimmed across the landscape like a ghost. Everything outside was dirty grey or cement-colored, but from time to time tiny green rice paddies shone like priceless emeralds, and as we got farther from Tokyo, the world became greener.
When we finally got to Sendai, we transferred to a local train that took us to the town nearest Jiko’s temple, and then we humped my wheelie bag onto an ancient bus filled with really old people to take us to her village. On the way out of town, we passed some minimarts and coffee shops and an elementary school, but honestly, there wasn’t much else: a fish processing plant, a pachinko parlor, a gas station, a 7-Eleven, an auto repair shop, a roadside shrine, a bunch of small fields. But then, as we drove, the buildings got farther and farther apart until finally I knew we were in the countryside because it was beautiful. It was like being in an anime movie, with our little bus chugging up and down, winding around the mountains and hugging the cliffs. Below, I could see the waves crashing up on these crazy rocks, and sometimes we would pass a small beach, like a sandy pocket tucked into the rock face.
I used to love going to the northern coast of California, to Marin or Sonoma or Humboldt, and this had a little of the same feeling, only here in Japan everything was greener with a lot more trees and none of the designer homes. Instead, there were these little fishing villages along the coastline, with clusters of boats and nets and oyster rafts bobbing on the waves, and racks of fish hung up to dry like laundry next to the houses. The bus made about a hundred thousand million stops that didn’t look like bus stops at all, with just
a bench on the side of the road, or a rusty round sign on a post, or sometimes a little hutlike thing that looked like where you’d keep the filtration unit for your hot tub if you lived in California. There were lots of steep hilly places in California, too, but I didn’t get the feeling that there were many hot tubs or pools or celebrity mansions around here where Jiko lived.
There weren’t many passengers left on the bus by then, just me and my dad and a couple of really ancient ladies with tenugui96 on their heads, and spines that were bent over at right angles. The driver was a skinny young guy with great posture. He wore a smart little cap and white cotton driving gloves, and every time he pulled over onto the shoulder of the road to stop, he bowed and touched the brim of his cap with his gloved fingers. Very kakkoi.97
The road was getting narrower and steeper, winding upward along the side of a deep gulch, when, once again, the driver stopped. I looked out the window at the mountainside, covered with trees, expecting to see at least a bench or a rusty signpost, but this time there was nothing, just the mountain on one side and the cliff dropping into the valley on the other. But then I looked toward the mountain again, and this time I saw an ancient stone gate, hidden in the trees and covered with dripping moss, and stone steps that led through the gate and disappeared into the darkness.
The bus door opened and the driver touched his cap. The old ladies looked at us expectantly.
“We have arrived, Naoko,” Dad said. “Let us disembark?” For some reason, he was speaking English. His English had never gotten real fluent, but when he spoke it, he sounded so polite and intellectual, you’d never think he was the kind of guy who’d lose all his money at the OTB and lie down on a train track.
“Here?” I squeaked. I thought he was kidding.
But he was already on his feet, and the old ladies were grinning and bobbing their heads and saying things to us like they already knew who we were, and my dad was bobbing back at them as I tried to maneuver my wheelie bag down the narrow aisle toward the steps. The driver was watching in the mirror, and when he saw me struggling, he jumped up to help, taking the handle of the bag from me. I climbed down and stood at the side of the road, looking over the gravelly edge of the sheer cliff that dropped into the valley and led to the sea. I could just catch a glimpse of the water, sparkling and shimmering like some kind of promise of salvation.
I turned away from the ocean and looked up at the mountainside. No building in sight. Stone gate. Moss. Dark steps leading up to nowhere. My dad had gotten off the bus and was standing next to me, and the driver was handing him my wheelie bag. I looked at the stone steps and started to put it together. I tugged on Dad’s sleeve.
“Dad . . . ?”
But the driver was bowing to my dad, and he was bowing back, and now the driver was climbing into his seat and closing the doors and putting the bus in gear, and the tires were crunching in the gravel, and soon me and Dad were alone on the side of the road, watching the taillights of the little bus twinkle and wink as it disappeared around a bend.
Suddenly everything was really quiet, and all we could hear was the wind in the bamboo, which sounded like ghosts. I looked at my wheelie bag in the dirt next to me. It was pink, with a picture of Hello Kitty on it. It looked very lonely and sad.
It hit me then. My dad was going to leave me here. First we were going to drag my wheelie bag up the mountain and then he was going to leave me up there with some really old nun who happened to be my great-grandmother who I barely knew, for my whole summer vacation.
“Okay!” Dad said, striding across the road toward the steep steps. “Come on! Let’s challenge!”
My throat got tight and the inside of my nose started to prickle. Out of habit, I clenched my teeth to make the tears stop like I did when the kids kicked me during kagome lynch at school, but then I thought, Screw it, I should cry. I should howl and scream and throw a huge tantrum, because maybe if I acted pathetic enough, my dad would feel sorry for me and take me home again. I sniffled a little and then looked to see if he’d noticed, but he wasn’t paying any attention to me at all. He was staring at the mountainside, and his face was all lit up like he was excited but didn’t want to show it. I hadn’t seen him look excited since we lived in Sunnyvale and one of his programmer buddies invited him to go fly-fishing. It was nice to see, so I followed him across the road, dragging my wheelie bag over to the first step and up with a bump behind me.
Ku . . . lunk.
The bag was heavy, filled with all the books I was supposed to study over the summer holiday. Ku . . . lunk. Ancient Japanese history. Ku . . . lunk. Japanese current affairs. Ku . . . lunk. Japanese morality and ethics. Ku . . . lunk. Ku . . . lunk. I was already sweating and about to give up, but Dad was ahead and waiting for me, staring eagerly up at the steps.
“When I was young boy, I could run all the way to the top,” he said. “Maybe I still can do . . .”
But instead he came over and took the handle of the suitcase from me, and this time I let him. He’d tried to help me with it on the subway, and then on the train, and again when we got onto the bus, but I’d told him to forget it. I mean, you can picture it—a middle-aged guy with greasy hair and bloodshot eyes and slumping shoulders, dragging a pink Hello Kitty wheelie bag behind him. Would you let your dad out in public like that? It’s just too pathetic. He would have looked like a total hentai, which he isn’t. He’s my dad. Maybe he is a hikikomori, but I love him. I couldn’t have stood it to see people staring at him.
Here, though, nobody was around to see.
“Come on, Nao-chan!” he said. “Let’s go!”
Hauling the bag behind him, he charged up the steps, and I followed, and together we climbed. The higher we went, the denser the forest got. Hotter, too. Sweat dripped from my armpits. The stone was slick, not with rain but with humidity that made everything feel slimy, even the air. It reminded me of the fog in San Francisco, only fog chills the air, and this felt hotter than Kayla’s mom’s sauna, even with the breeze. Moss crept over everything like a rash, oozing through the cracks in the stone. Dad kept climbing. One step. Another. Higher and higher. We were an army of two, him and me, marching up a mountain, but not to conquer it. We were in retreat, a defeated army on the run.
A shrill, high insect whine pierced the air like a vibrating wire, growing louder and louder. Me—, meee—, meeeeeee— I couldn’t remember when the sound had started. Maybe it had always been there, inside my head, only now someone had turned up the volume until my skull was throbbing like an amplifier, blasting the whine out into the world. I put my fingers in my ears to see if I could tell whether the noise was inside or out, and Dad saw me.
“Me-me-zemi,”98 he said. He stopped and took out his handkerchief and used it to wipe the sweat from his eyes, and then he ran it around his neck like he was toweling off at the gym, back when he used to go to a gym, in Sunnyvale. “It is only male ones who cry,” he said.
I wanted to ask him why, but I didn’t want to hear his answer. He tied the handkerchief around his neck and stood there, looking up into the forest canopy with a strange faraway expression on his face.
“I remember this sound from when I was little boy,” he said. “It’s natsu no oto.”99
He was standing a few steps above me, and he looked really tall, and as I watched him, I thought maybe I could understand his faraway expression. Maybe it was happiness. I think my dad was happy.
For me the happy sounds of summer were far away, too. They were the Good Humor truck and the lifeguard’s whistle and the automatic sprinkler, spitting in the twilight, and the sizzle of ribs on somebody’s Weber, and the clatter of lemonade and ice in tall frosted glasses. It was lawn mowers and weed whackers and kids playing Marco Polo in somebody’s pool. My throat clogged up like an old drain with these happy memories.
Ku . . . lunk. Ku . . . lunk. Dad was climbing again. I wiped my eyes and followed. What else could I do? I had to look on the bright side and try to make the best of things. At least Dad hadn�
��t hijacked the bus and driven it off the side of the mountain. At least he was still here with me, and maybe—maybe he wouldn’t leave. Maybe I could do something to make him stay. Because even though he’d promised to come back and pick me up at the end of my vacation and take me to Disneyland, what if he didn’t? What if the special doctors couldn’t fix him? Or what if, on the way home, the urge to die got too intense, and he suddenly had to hurl himself onto the tracks in front of the oncoming Disneyland Super Express? He didn’t really care about shaking hands with Mickey-chan after all. How much can you really trust the promise of a suicidal father?
2.
We climbed up and up, higher and higher, not saying much, each of us busy with our own thoughts. Dad was thinking about his boyhood, and I was thinking about Dad. Do all kids have to worry about their parents’ mental health? The way society is set up, parents are supposed to be the grown-up ones and look after the kids, but a lot of times it’s the other way around. Honestly, I haven’t met very many adults in my life who I could call really grown up, but maybe that’s because I lived in California, where all my friends’ parents seemed really immature. They were all in therapy, and always going to personal growth seminars and human potential retreats, and they’d come back with these crazy new theories and diets and vitamins and visualizations and rituals and relationship skills that they tried to inflict on their kids in order to build their self-esteem. Being Japanese, my parents didn’t really care about self-esteem, and they weren’t into all that psychological stuff, even if my dad’s friend was a psychology professor. He was nice enough, an old guy who got famous in the 1960s for doing drugs and getting high and calling it research, so you have to figure he was a bit of a flake and probably pretty immature, too. Not that I’m an expert. I’m just a teenager so I’m not supposed to know very much, but in my humble opinion, old Jiko is the only real grown-up I’ve ever met, and maybe it’s because she’s a nun, and maybe it’s because she’s been alive on earth for a really long time. Do you have to live to be a hundred to really grow up? I should ask her this.