by Ruth Ozeki
“So desu ne,” she said, nodding, but keeping her back to me. “It’s true. You can’t do anything about those things.”
“So of course I feel angry,” I said, angrily. “What do you expect? It was a stupid thing to ask.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “It was a stupid thing to ask. I see that you’re angry. I don’t need to ask such a stupid thing to understand that.”
“So why did you ask?”
Slowly she turned herself around, pivoting on her knees, until finally she was facing me. “I asked for you,” she said.
“For me?”
“So you could hear the answer.”
Sometimes old Jiko talks in riddles, and maybe it’s because I spent so many years in Sunnyvale that I still have some trouble with the Japanese language, but this time, I think I got her meaning. After that, I started telling her little things about what was going on in school and stuff, even when she didn’t ask. And as I talked, she just listened and made her juzu beads go round and round the string, and I knew that every bead she moved was a prayer for me. It wasn’t much, but at least it was something.
<105>106
That’s what she just texted me. That’s how old she says you have to be before your mind really grows up, but since she’s a hundred and four, I’m pretty sure she’s joking.
Ruth
1.
The power was out for four days, which was relatively brief for a winter blackout. During these outages, they could keep their computers and some appliances running, but only if the generator was working, and only for as long as they had gas. When they ran out of gas, they could get more only if one of the two pumps on the island had its generator going, and if the roads had been cleared of the trees that had brought down the power lines in the first place.
When their generator stopped working, the well pump stopped, too, so they ran out of water. Indoor toilets, running hot water, baths, electric lights—after four days, these seemed like unimaginable luxuries from another age and planet.
“Welcome to the future,” Oliver said. “We’re on the cutting edge.”
Ruth moved through the house in a darkened, kerosene-scented dream, listening to the pounding of the rain and the groan of the wind. Inside, without the constant ambient humming of fans and compressors, the house was quiet and still. At first she found herself straining to hear the twin engines of the seaplane, bringing in the hydro crew, but after a day or two of not hearing, she gave up and surrendered to the silence. She sat in front of the woodstove with the cat and read by the light of an oil lamp. She was trying to read Proust. She was trying not to read ahead in Nao’s diary. Mostly she stared into the flames. Sometimes, at dusk, she stood in the doorway listening to the wolves as they moved through the mist-enshrouded forest. Their call started low, a singular uneasy moan that threaded through the trees and gathered, as one by one the pack joined in, their voices wild and raw, rising into a full-throated howl. She shivered. Oliver insisted on going running in spite of the rain, and she waited for him, worried. She’d seen cougar scratchings on trees behind their house, fresh scat on the path, wolf paw prints in the mud.
The wolf population was on the rise, and the packs had become bolder. They approached people’s houses, snatched cats, and lured dogs into the forest to eat. Back in the 1970s, when the wolves killed cattle and sheep, the islanders responded with a wolf cull, hunting them down, shooting as many as they could, and stacking their bleeding carcasses like firewood in the backs of their pickups. People still remembered this, and so did the wolves, and for a while they stayed away. But now they were back. Provincial wildlife officers had come to the island to teach people what to do. Haze them, the officers said. Shout at them. Throw things. Easier said than done. Once she had looked out her office window to see Oliver in his running shorts, brandishing a huge stick and bellowing as he chased a wolf up their driveway. Oliver was running full tilt. The wolf was barely loping, taking his time.
How had she become a woman who worried about wolves and cougars eating her husband? She had no answer. Her mind just hung there, in a strange kind of limbo.
When the power came on, the house slammed back into the twenty-first century: lights blazed, appliances hummed, aquarium pumps gurgled, the taps sighed, and Ruth jumped over the cat and scrambled through the tangle of extension cords on her way upstairs to check her email. The world was restored to its place in time, and her mind was back online.
She logged on. Nothing from the professor. It had been almost a week. Was he ignoring her, or was he having a power outage, too? Did they have power outages in Palo Alto?
She checked the meteorological service. Another storm was brewing. There was no time to waste. With so many loose ends and unanswered questions, she chose the issue she thought could most easily be resolved. She launched her browser and typed in Japanese Shishōsetsu and the Instability of the Female “I.” The Internet was fast for a change, as though it had come back refreshed from a much-needed vacation. Within seconds she had returned to the academic archives site, and there it was, the preview of the article she was reading just before the crash. She clicked the
The article you have requested has been removed from the database and is no longer available. We apologize for this inconvenience. Your order has been canceled, and your credit card will not be charged.
“NO!” she cried, so loudly that Oliver heard her from his office, even with his noise-canceling headphones on. He paused and waited for a moment to see what would happen next.
2.
Outside in the cedar tree by the woodpile, the Jungle Crow cocked its head, listening, too. A few moments passed, maybe a minute. The windows of the house were bright again—glowing squares that floated in the darkness of the forest. Another cry, longer this time, emerged from the window closest to the woodpile.
Silence followed, and then the window went dark. The crow lifted up its slick black shoulders and shuddered, which was the corvine equivalent of a shrug. It flapped its feathery wings once, twice, thrice, and then rose up from its perch, flying through the heavy cedar boughs. It circled the roof of the house. Down below, a ragged line of wolves ran silently, in single file, following a deer trail through the salal. The crow cawed out a warning, in case anyone was listening, and then flew higher, away from the little rooftop in the clearing, until finally it cleared the canopy of Douglas fir.
Soaring now above the treetops, it could see all the way to the Salish Sea and the pulp mill and the logging town of Campbell River. A cruise liner bound for Alaska was passing through the Strait of Georgia, all lit up like a birthday cake, covered with candles. Circling higher still, up and up, and the mountains of the Vancouver Island Range came into view, the Golden Hinde, the white glaciers glowing in the moonlight. On the far side stretched the open Pacific and beyond, but the crow could not fly high enough to see its way home.
Nao
1.
The vibe in the Apron is definitely weird today and I don’t know if I’m going to be able to write much. Babette just came over to ask me if I was interested in a date, which I’m not, but when I lied and told her I had my period, her smile froze and her face got cold and hard, and she whipped around and almost took out my eye with the lacy edge of her petticoat. I don’t think she knew I was lying, but I can tell that writing in this diary is becoming a problem,
and my antisocial behavior is starting to piss off Babette and the other maids. I hope they don’t try to make me pay the table charge, because it’s insanely expensive and I’ll have to find someplace else to write. I can see their point, though. I didn’t know this before, but I get it now that writers aren’t exactly the life of the party, and I’m not doing my part to help create an upbeat and cheerful atmosphere around here.
Today Fifi’s Lonely Apron feels even lonelier than usual.
Oh well. That’s what’s going on in my world. How about in yours? You doing okay?
2.
I don’t know why I keep asking you questions. It’s not like I expect you to answer, and even if you did answer, how would I know? But maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe when I ask you a question like “You doing okay?” you should just tell me, even if I can’t hear you, and then I’ll just sit here and imagine what you might say.
You might say, “Sure thing, Nao. I’m okay. I’m doin’ just fine.”
“Okay, awesome,” I would say to you, and then we would smile at each other across time like we were friends, because we are friends by now, aren’t we?
And because we’re friends, here’s something else I will share with you. It’s kind of personal, but it’s really helped me out a lot. It’s Jiko’s instructions on how to develop your superpower. I thought she was kidding when she said it. Sometimes it’s hard to tell when a really, really old person is kidding or not, especially if she’s a nun. We were in the temple kitchen, helping Muji with the pickle-making at the time. Jiko was washing these big white daikons, and I was cutting them up and salting them and putting them into plastic freezer bags. It was after old Jiko had found my scars, and I was telling her about my funeral and how my classmates had chanted the Heart Sutra for me, and how I became a living ghost and launched a tatari attack on Reiko and stabbed her in the eye. Jiko stood at the sink, scrubbing this big old daikon that was longer and fatter than her arm, and when I finished talking, she plunked the radish on top of a stack of other radishes that were piled next to her like firewood and said,
“Well, Nattchan, you don’t have to worry. You’re not really dead. Your funeral wasn’t real.”
I was like, Huh? I kinda already knew that.
“They chanted the wrong sutra,” she explained. “You do not chant Shingyo at a funeral. You must chant Dai Hi Shin.”107
Then, before I could say how relieved I was, she said, “Nattchan. I think it would be best for you to have some true power. I think it would be best for you to have a superpower.”
She was talking in Japanese, but she used the English word, superpower, only when she said it, it sounded like supah-pawah. Really fast. Supapawa. Or more like SUPAPAWA—!
“Like a superhero?” I asked, using the English word, too.
“Yes,” she said. “Like a SUPAHIRO—! With a SUPAPAWA—!” She squinted at me from behind her thick glasses. “Would you like that?”
It’s weird to hear a really, really old person talk about superheroes and superpowers. Superheroes and superpowers are for young people. Did they even have them back then when Jiko was a kid? I was under the impression that in the olden days, they only had ghosts and samurai and demons and oni. Not SUPAHIRO—! With SUPAPAWA—! But I just nodded.
“Good.” She slowly dried her hands and took off her apron and gave Muji some instructions about the pickles, and then she took me by the hand.
First we went to the foot-washing place, and we said a little foot-washing prayer, which goes like this:
When I wash my feet
May all sentient beings
Attain the power of supernatural feet
With no hindrance to their practice.
Of course I immediately started to think about the power of supernatural feet, and how I wanted some, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted all beings to have them, too, because then what’s the point? But that’s the difference between me and Jiko. I’m sure she wants all beings to have supernatural feet. Anyway, we washed our feet, and then she led me into the hondo.108
The hondo is a special room, very dark and still. There’s a big gold statue of Shaka-sama and a smaller one of Lord Monju, the Wisdom Lord,109 at the other end, and in front of each is a place with candles, where you can offer incense. Jiko and Muji spend a lot of time doing services, but not many danka come anymore, since most of the people in this village are either old or dead, and the young ones aren’t interested in religion and have moved away to the cities to get jobs and lead interesting lives. It’s like throwing a party that nobody shows up for, but Jiko doesn’t seem to mind.
There are lots of services you have to perform, even at a tiny temple like Jiko’s. Muji explained it to me once. There used to be more nuns living there, but now it’s just the two of them. From time to time, a couple of younger nuns come from the main temple headquarters to check up on things and help with the bigger ceremonies. They’re really nice. When old Jiko dies, one of them will probably move in to help Muji, unless the main temple decides to sell Jigenji to a real estate developer, who will probably tear down the old buildings to build a hot spring resort or a driving range. Old Jiko looks sad when they talk about this kind of thing. The little temple is falling apart and there’s no money to repair it, and Muji says she wonders what’s even holding it to the mountain. She worries about earthquakes and is afraid the buildings will just collapse and slide down into the gulch and wash out to sea.
Zazen usually happened insanely early, like five o’clock in the morning when I was still asleep, and also later in the evening, after dinner, when I was tired. Actually, the whole meditation thing made me a little nervous because I don’t really like sitting still, but I liked the feeling in the hondo, so when Jiko showed me how to offer incense to Lord Monju, touching the stick to my head before I stuck it into the bowl of ashes, I felt excited. She did three raihai110 bows and I did, too, just like she taught me, kneeling and touching my forehead and elbows to the floor and lifting my hands, palms up, toward the ceiling. Then when we were finished she led me to a zafu111 and told me to sit down, and that’s when she gave me the instructions.
Hmm. Wait a sec. I didn’t actually ask her if I could tell you this, and now that I think about it, maybe I should ask her first.
Okay, I texted her and asked her if I could tell my friend how to do zazen. It will probably take her a while to answer, but since the Apron’s totally dead and nobody’s bothering me right now, I might as well tell you about how old Jiko became a nun. She told me this story once and it’s pretty sad. It was right after the war. In Japan if you say “the war,” people know you mean World War II, because that was the last one that Japan fought in. In America it’s different. America is constantly fighting wars all over the place, so you have to be more specific. When I lived in Sunnyvale, if you said “the war” it meant the Gulf War, and a lot of my friends at school didn’t even know about World War II because it happened so long ago and there were so many other wars in between.
And here’s a funny thing. Americans always call it World War II, but a lot of Japanese call it the Greater East Asian War, and actually the two countries have totally different versions of who started it and what happened. Most Americans think it was all Japan’s fault, because Japan invaded China in order to steal their oil and natural resources, and America had to jump in and stop them. But a lot of Japanese believe that America started it by making all these unreasonable sanctions against Japan and cutting off oil and food, and like, ooooh, we’re just a poor little island country that needs to import stuff in order to survive, etc. This theory says that America forced Japan to go to war in self-defense, and all that stuff they did in China was none of America’s business to begin with. So Japan went and attacked Pearl Harbor, which a lot of Americans say was a 9/11 scenario, and then America got pissed off and declared war back. The fighting went on until America got fed up and dropped atom bombs on Japan and totally obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which most people agree was pretty harsh be
cause they were winning by then anyway.
Around that time, old Jiko’s only son, Haruki #1, was studying philosophy and French literature at Tokyo University, when he got drafted into the army. He was nineteen, just three years older than I am now. I’m sorry, but I would totally freak out if someone told me I had to go to war in three years. I’m just a kid!
Jiko said it freaked Haruki out, too, because he was a peaceful boy. Think about it. One day you’re sitting in your little boardinghouse room, warming your feet over a charcoal stove, sipping green tea and maybe reading a little À la recherche du temps perdu, and then a couple months later, you’re in the cockpit of a suicide bomber, trying to keep the nose of your plane pointed at the side of an American battleship, knowing that in a few moments you’re going to explode in a great big ball of fire and be totally annihilated. How awful is that? I can’t even imagine. I mean, talk about temps perdu! I know I keep saying that I’m going to exit time and end my life, but it’s a totally different thing, because it’s my own choice. Being annihilated in a great big ball of fire was not Haruki #1’s choice, and from what old Jiko said, besides being peaceful, he was also a cheerful, optimistic boy who actually liked being alive, which is not at all the situation with me or my dad.
And even though I said I can’t imagine how awful it was, maybe I can, just a little. If you take all the feelings I felt when we were packing up to leave Sunnyvale, and when Mom found my scars in the sento, and Dad fell onto the train tracks, and my classmates tortured me to death, and then you multiply those feelings by a hundred thousand million, maybe that’s a little of how my great-uncle Haruki #1 felt when he was drafted into the Special Forces and forced to become a kamikaze fighter pilot. It’s the cold fish dying in your stomach feeling. You try to forget about it, but as soon as you do, the fish starts flopping around under your heart and reminds you that something truly horrible is happening.