by Ruth Ozeki
I waited until I knew the last bell had rung, and then I jogged the rest of the way to school. There was no one in the playground. I slipped through the empty corridors as silent as a ghost until I reached my classroom. Since I still couldn’t walk through walls, I threw open the door instead. Sensei was in the middle of roll call, but I didn’t bother to apologize for interrupting or for being late. Some of Reiko’s gang started to snicker when they saw me, and I caught the words “auction” and “panties” and “bottom line.” I figured that everyone in the class had heard about the Panty Incident and had been following the bidding over the last few days. It was an all-class project.
But I ignored the whispering and marched to my seat. Maybe it was the hoodie under my blazer that signaled something was different, or maybe it was my erect posture, like a soldier marching to battle, or maybe the energy of my supapawa cast a spell over them and struck them dumb. One by one they fell silent. I reached my desk, but instead of sitting down on my chair, I climbed up on it and then onto my desk, and I stood there, tall and straight. Then, when everybody was looking, I flipped back my hoodie.
A gasp went around the room that sent shivers up my spine. The supapawa of my bald and shining head radiated through the classroom and out into the world, a bright bulb, a beacon, beaming light into every crack of darkness on the earth and blinding all my enemies. I put my fists on my hips and watched them tremble, holding up their arms to shield their eyes from my unbearable brightness. I opened my mouth and a piercing cry broke from my throat like an eagle, shaking the earth and penetrating into every corner of the universe. I watched my classmates press their hands over their ears, and saw the blood run through their fingers as their eardrums shattered.
And then I stopped. Why? Because I felt sorry for them. I climbed down from my desk and walked to the front of the classroom. I turned to face my teacher and I bowed, pressing my palms together, and then I turned to my classmates and bowed to them, too, nice and deep, and then I left the room. It was fine to leave then, and I even managed to feel a little sad, knowing I was never coming back.
3.
My dad had gotten so good at not looking at me that after I shaved my head and defeated my classmates with my awesome supapawa, I went home and waited for the rest of the day for him to notice that I had no hair, but he never did. Mom noticed right away, of course. The minute she walked in the door that night and saw me in my hoodie, she freaked out and demanded that I tell her what had happened. I skipped over the whole Panty Incident and instead just announced that I was dropping out of school and leaving home to become a nun. I was half serious. Part of me really wanted to do that, to go to old Jiko’s temple and sign up for a lifetime of zazen and cleaning and pickle-making.
No way, Mom said. I was too young to leave home, and I had to go to high school first. Big mistake. She should have let me, but instead we fought for three days, and in the end, I agreed to at least take the entrance exams, which were coming up. It didn’t matter to me, since I knew I’d never get in anywhere good, but I promised her I’d try, and at least it got her off my back.
That same week at the public baths, I saw the bar hostess I’d almost hit with The Great Minds of Western Philosophy, and even with no hair, she recognized me immediately. But instead of looking away like most people, she narrowed her eyes and inspected me, and finally she nodded.
“It’s cute,” she said. “Nice shape. You have a pretty head.”
We were sitting in the soaking tub, up to our necks. In the clouded mirror, I could see my smooth white skull, bobbing on the surface of the steaming water like a boiled egg.
“I don’t give a shit about pretty,” I informed her. “I’m a superhero. Super-heroes don’t need pretty.”
She shrugged. “Well, I don’t know about superheroes. But it couldn’t hurt, could it? To be a little pretty?”
I guessed not. “My mom is freaked out,” I told her. “She wants me to buy a wig.”
She nodded and stretched her pretty arm and watched the water drip from the tips of her graceful fingers. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll take you. I know a good place.”
Like I’d even asked.
She told me her name was Babette, which is not a typical Japanese name. Babette wasn’t always Babette. Before that, she was Kaori when she worked as a hostess in an Asakusa club, which was before she got fired for sleeping with the mama-san’s boyfriend. She was sick of the club life anyway, she said. The patrons were too sentimental and wet. She changed her name to Babette and got a job at Fifi’s Lovely Apron, which was a very cheerful and upbeat place to work when it was still lovely, before it got lonely.
Babette’s life passion is cosplay, and at Fifi’s she can wear her pretty little petticoats and pinafores and stockings and lace. When she’s all dressed up for work, she looks like a fancy cupcake decorated with marzipan flowers and sparkles and sugary hearts, so sweet and delicious you just want to gobble her right up, but don’t be fooled. There is nothing wet about Babette.
Since I wasn’t going to school anymore, I didn’t have much to do during the days, so we made a date and took a train to Akiba together.
“I like riding with you,” she said. “People look at us. We could get you some pretty fashions. You would look very shibui142 with a nice outfit and your adorable bald head. Maybe you could dress up like a nun. Or no, wait, a baby doll! Yes. With a lacy bonnet, you’ll look just like a pretty little bald baby doll. Oh, that’ll be totally sweet!”
“You’re supposed to be helping me get a wig,” I reminded her, but secretly I was pleased.
Akihabara means Field of Autumn Leaves, but the fields and leaves have all been replaced by electronics stores, and these days people call it Akiba or Electricity Town. I’d never really hung out there before. I thought it was where manga otaku and loser geeks like my dad went to sell their computer hardware when they ran out of money, but I was totally wrong. Akiba is wild and weirdly awesome. You walk through these narrow alleyways and shopping streets lined with stores and stalls spilling over with circuit boards and DVDs and transformers and gaming software and fetish props and manga models and inflatable sex dolls and bins filled with electronics and wigs and little maid costumes and schoolgirl bloomers. Everywhere you look, you can see bright anime posters and gigantic banners hanging from the tops of buildings, with pictures of towering moe143 girls with round sparkling eyes the size of kids’ swimming pools and humongous luscious tits busting out of their galactic superhero reformer costumes, and all you can hear is the crazy clang! clang! clang! of the game arcades, and the ping! ping! ping! of the pachinko parlors, and loudspeakers screaming limited-time offers from the storefronts, and the little French maids in the street crying out to otaku boys as they walk by. There are no fields or autumn leaves around here anywhere.
Babette steered me through the crowds, holding me by the arm so I wouldn’t get distracted or lost. I felt like a goofy tourist with my mouth hanging open like an American, which reminded me of Kayla. I hadn’t thought about her in a million years, and suddenly I wished I could somehow make Kayla materialize in the middle of Akiba Electricity Town, just to blow her little Silicon Valley mind. This was a side of Tokyo I could totally get into, and I couldn’t wait to find a wig—at that moment I was thinking long and superstraight and pink, like Anemone from Eureka Seven—and maybe some kind of cute costume so I would fit in with the scene, when we happened to pass the window of a DVD store stacked with rows of flat-screen TVs. Tinny fight music blared from the speakers. Fireworks exploded as the title burst onto the screens. INSECT GLADIATORS! Then the fight announcer screamed, Next up, Orthopteran Cricket versus Praying Mantis!
We stopped and watched as a monster cricket wrestled a pale green praying mantis into the corner of a glass terrarium. The image was repeated on every screen, and the video picked up every microscopic detail. Look at those powerful bolt-cutter jaws, crunching that mantis’s eye! Pulverizing her gossamer wings!
The fight ended when the c
ricket tore the mantis’s head off.
And the winner is . . . Orthopteran Cricket! Next up, Staghorn Beetle versus Yellow Scorpion!
The pale scorpion used its pincers to flip the staghorn beetle into the air. The beetle reared up and fell over on his back, exposing his underside. The scorpion’s segmented tail curled over to deliver its venomous sting. Sasu! Sasu! Yellow Scorpion stings! The staghorn beetle shuddered. In the small, bare terrarium, he had no place to hide. His spindly legs writhed and flailed in the air, until they didn’t anymore. It looks like Staghorn Beetle is the loser, yes, he’s dying, he’s dying, he’s . . . DEAD!
Neon-colored titles flashed across the screen. Yellow Scorpion Wins!
I started to cry.
I’m not kidding. Until then nothing could make me cry, not losing all our money, not moving from my wonderful life in Sunnyvale to a crappy dump in Japan, not my crazy mother, or my suicidal father, or my best friend dumping me, or even all those months and months of ijime. I never cried. But for some reason, the sight of these stupid bugs tearing each other apart was too much for me. It was horrible, but of course it wasn’t the insects. It was the human beings who thought this would be fun to watch.
I crouched down next to the building and hugged myself and cried. Babette stood guard over me, fiddling with the eyelet lace on the edge of her pinafore and lightly tapping my hairless scalp with the tips of her fingers like she was testing a melon or practicing scales. From the inside of my head, her fingertips felt like raindrops bouncing off my skull. After a while, she lit up a cigarette and smoked it, and by the time she stubbed it out under the six-inch heel of her platform boot, I was okay again.
“Sorry,” I said.
“No problem,” she said. She inspected my face, and then started digging in her handbag. “You crazy about bugs or something?”
“Not really. My dad is. He likes to fold them out of paper. It’s one of his hobbies.”
“Weird,” she said, pulling out a tissue and wiping something from my cheek. “What’s his other hobby?”
“Committing suicide.”
She handed me the tissue. “Hmm. Well, if he’s still alive, it sounds like he’s not very good at it.”
“He’s better at bugs.” I blew my nose and stuffed the tissue in my pocket. “He won third prize in the Great Origami Bug War for his flying staghorn beetle.”
“Awesome,” she said. “You must be proud of him.”
“Yeah,” I said, and for a moment I actually was.
“You okay to go shopping now?”
“Sure,” I said, following after her.
We bought a cute little knit cap for me, and a shoulder-length wig, and a lacy petticoat, and a pair of loose socks, then she took me to Fifi’s to meet the maids. Babette was only a couple of years older than me, but she knew just how to take care of me and make me feel better.
Ruth
1.
“That Babette seems pretty cool,” Oliver said.
“She seems like a nice friend for Nao to have . . . ,” he said.
“It’s good that she finally has somebody to talk to . . . ,” he said.
“I’d like to go to Akiba . . . ,” he said.
“It’s sad about the bugs.”
She closed the diary, took off her glasses, and placed both on the bedside table. Pushing the cat off her stomach, she switched off the light. “Good night, Oliver,” she said, turning her back to him.
“Good night,” he replied. The cat curled up in the gap between them and fell back to sleep. They lay there, side by side, in silence. A few thousand moments passed.
2.
“Did I say something wrong?” he asked into the darkness.
She could pretend she was asleep, or she could answer. “Yes,” she said.
She could almost hear him thinking. “What?” he asked, finally.
She spoke to the far wall, keeping her voice even. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I just don’t understand you. The girl is attacked, tied up and almost raped, her video gets put up on some fetish website, her underpants get auctioned off to some pervert, her pathetic father sees all this and instead of doing anything to help her he tries to kill himself in the bathroom, where she has to find him—after all that, the only thing you can say is Babette is cool? It’s sad about the bugs?”
“Oh.”
A few more hundred moments passed.
“I see your point,” he said. “But it’s good that she has a nice friend, isn’t it?”
“Oliver, Babette is a pimp! She’s not being nice to Nao, she’s recruiting her. She’s running a compensated-dating operation out of that awful maid café.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Really.”
3.
He sounded genuinely surprised. “Are all the maid cafés like that?”
“You mean are they all brothels? Probably not. But this one is.”
He thought about this for a while. “Well, I guess maybe I was wrong about Babette.”
“Yes. You were.”
“But it’s not true that Nao’s father didn’t try to help.”
She lost it then, sat up and switched on the light. “Are you fucking kidding me?” she said, bringing her fists down hard onto the puffy folds of the comforter. “He learns about the hentai site and so he takes pills and tries to kill himself? How exactly is that helpful?”
He didn’t look at her, or he would have seen she was even angrier than she sounded and he might have backed down. The cat knew. The minute Ruth started pounding on the covers, Pesto was off the bed and out of the room. They heard the sound of the cat door slam as he slipped out into the safety of the night.
Oliver stared up at the ceiling and defended his point. “He did try to help. He was bidding. He was trying to win the auction. It wasn’t his fault that he lost.”
“What?”
“Bidding.” He looked confused. “On her underpants. You didn’t realize that?”
“How do you know?”
“C.imperator? The guy who lost the auction? That was him. That was Nao’s father.”
She felt the heat rising to her face as she listened.
“Cyclommatus imperator,” he continued. “Don’t you remember?”
She didn’t.
“It’s the Latin name for the staghorn beetle,” he explained. “The one he folded out of paper? It was a flying Cyclommatus imperator. He won third place for it in the origami bug wars.”
Of course she remembered that. She just hadn’t recalled the Latin name, and she hated that he had. She hated that now he felt he needed to speak slowly and carefully and explain everything as if she were an imbecile or had Alzheimer’s. He used to use this tone of voice on her mother.
“Nao recognized the Latin name immediately,” he said. “That’s why she was so upset. As soon as she saw the suicide note, she knew. ‘I should only make myself ridiculous in the eyes of others if I clung to life and hugged it when I have no more to offer.’ Her father was referring to the bidding, and Nao figured it out, which was why she went to check her computer. That’s my theory.”
She hated that he had a theory and that he sounded so smug.
“He had no more to offer, you see? In the auction, which is why he lost. And he didn’t want to appear ridiculous in the eyes of—”
“I get it,” she said, cutting him off. “It’s disgusting. He was bidding on his daughter’s panties. What kind of sicko bids on his daughter’s underpants?”
Oliver looked surprised. “He was just trying to rescue them so no one else would get them. He didn’t want some hentai to buy them. It’s not like he was getting off on them himself.”
“How do you know?”
“Oh, wow. You’re crazy. If that’s what you think, you’re the sicko.”
“Thanks.”
“I mean, the guy may be a loser, but—”
“Well, I guess you should know.”
4.
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she
wanted to take them back.
“I didn’t mean that,” she said. “You called me crazy. You called me a sicko. I was angry.”
But it was too late. She watched his blue eyes veil over as the wall went up and he pulled his tender parts in behind it. When he spoke, his voice was distant, alien.
“He’s not a hentai. He just loves her is all.”
She turned off the light again. It was too late to fix things. She spoke into the dark. “If he loves her, then he should stop trying to kill himself. Or he should do a better job of it.”
“I’m sure he will,” Oliver answered, quietly.
5.
They didn’t fight often. Neither of them liked to argue, and there were certain places they were careful not to go. He knew better than to needle her about her memory. She knew better than to call him a loser.
He wasn’t. He was the most intelligent person she knew, an autodidact, with a mind that opened up the world for her, cracking it like a cosmic egg to reveal things she would never have noticed on her own. He’d been an artist for decades, but he called himself an amateur as a matter of principle. He had passionate botanical hobbies: growing things, grafting, and interspecies hacking. He would come in from the orchard, triumphant, crying “It’s a red-letter day!” after he’d succeeded in getting a rare tree to germinate or a whip graft to take. He grew cacti from seed on his windowsill, collecting specks of yellow dust from the males with a tiny sable paintbrush and transferring them gently to the female flowers. He made little mesh hats that looked like dunce caps for his Euphorbia obesa, which he placed on the females’ round heads to catch the fertilized seeds as they sprayed into the air.