Sympathy

by Olivia Sudjic

  She shrugged. “Not really. Sometimes it helps to be an outsider. I can’t write in Tokyo like I can living here, because there feels too familiar. I know it too well. I don’t see it with a stranger’s eyes.” She looked at my face intently then, like she wanted something. “Tell me about England.”

  I didn’t want to talk about being adopted, as this part didn’t quite fit with Mizuko’s experience, so I left it out for the moment and went big on Susy’s rejection of me and the hurt and paralysis it had caused.

  “The last thing she said to me before I came here was to pack less. That was her advice—to live lightly.”

  I’d thrown the comment out, expecting Mizuko to sympathise. But she said my mother was right in advising me to live lightly in New York. I worried that I detected judgment in her tone, in her expression, which had been encouraging until now.

  “I left Tokyo to go to Yale at eighteen, and some people”—implicitly not her—“found it hard.”

  “The international students?”

  “Yes. And students who’d so far lived quiet lives in the Midwest.”

  “Okay.” I wanted to get her approval back in a quantifiable way and groped for information I had stored about her that might win her over again, but my mind was blank. Her interpretation of Susy’s comment had thrown me.

  “There is definitely this pressure to be everywhere, know everyone, to do and see everything all at once,” she confirmed, “and I guess in this city, more than anywhere else in the world, that’s almost possible.”

  “Yeah,” I said, as if this tangle of social lives and spaces were something that oppressed me too.

  “It’s relentless and exhausting,” she said, suddenly severe. “I get basically no writing done at all. I’m always slipping out to go do something else. I really need to get away. Go on a retreat of some kind.”

  “Yeah!” I said again, widening my eyes and nodding slowly but emphatically to show that she had seen into my own symmetrical soul.

  “And it can be oddly lonely here for some people.”

  I turned my expression into ambivalence, a facial shrug, to show that I imagined it could be so for some. I didn’t want to say yeah again, both because it seemed unimaginative and because then she might think I was a loser with no friends who had no business being in New York, let alone sitting with her in a bar, which I thought she probably already did think, because otherwise why was I taking tickets to talks I thought were about beef, not genocide, and then lingering on afterwards with someone I’d only just met, nine years older than me? I can’t have looked that busy. I wondered how to give her the impression I had somewhere else to be without going there. I took out my device and then quickly pocketed it again, realising that this would permit her to take out hers.

  “People are constantly moving in and out of New York. Dinner parties at home are very rare. No one has the space, and if they do, it’s seen as a very intimate thing to do, so it’s only done with close friends. I almost always meet my friends in public places.”

  She said this as though all her friends were potential murderers she’d met online, and I immediately applied it to us. She was telling me that we weren’t intimate, but I also heard that maybe I was being bracketed in with “most” people, and that therefore I might count as a nonintimate friend. Which, after only a few hours, was not bad.

  Mizuko grew up in Bunkyō, the area of Tokyo where Natsume Sōseki , the famous writer, once lived. The University of Tokyo, where Hiromi had worked for a while before setting up her own assistive technologies company, SEMPO, is there. So is the Big Egg, Tokyo’s dome-shaped baseball stadium. I had looked it all up on Google Earth.

  So far I’d managed to keep her away from her many instruments of tortuous communication with Rupert Hunter for about ten minutes. I knew she was running out of power and I denied having a charger in my bag. When she finally retrieved her phone, I heard the words I had been longing for: “Fuck. It’s dead.”

  I bit my lip to catch the smile.

  “Dead,” she said again, making sure.

  She began looking around. I was worried that Rupert Hunter would tell Mizuko embarrassing things about me when they saw each other after this, if he hadn’t already done so in a message sent beneath the table. There were things I had said to him I wanted to forget. Once, soon after we had seen each other again in my first year and argued over the tsunami in the media room, I had slipped a note under his bedroom door that read: Come to my room for bento if you like. Though I had listed my staircase and door number, Rupert had not come.

  But Mizuko did not seem desperate to leave or to go to him—it was possible she wanted to make him jealous—and now that her device had run out of power, there was no reason that I couldn’t have her to myself all evening if I managed to keep the conversation going.

  I was hungry for the first time in months. I was drunk-hungry. We decided to find food and ended up going to a restaurant Mizuko knew. I can’t remember getting there, but I remember sobering up a little inside because it was quiet and we had to talk in something like lovers’ tones. It was a miniature restaurant that could seat only seven people at a time on high stools at a long bar. The bar was also where the food was prepared, so we often had to make eye contact with the chef. I remember the feeling of discomfort, hers and mine, with the way I ate the food and the way my lumpy fingers got in the way of the chopsticks. I remember trying to reach one of my legs, hanging from the high stool, towards the floor to stop the room from spinning. The chef gave us hot rice, using a flannel to scoop it out of a wooden bowl, but except for the rice, I wasn’t really able to eat much of what he passed to us. I had not told Mizuko, who ordered for us both, about my shellfish allergy. It’s not serious, or it has never been serious enough to warrant medical attention, but I do puff up around my eyes and then, depending on how badly I react, down my face and neck. I guess it could, if it was really bad, cause me to asphyxiate.

  But I felt I could not tell her this. “It does not behoove,” as Dwight once put it, “a Japanophile to have a shellfish allergy.” I was craving cheese and tomato pizza and remember only two or three of the dozen or so finger-length courses that, in my inebriated, slightly nauseated state, were the hardest to consume. Aoyagi, something which curled up as if still alive and was slapped down on the chef’s hand like one of those snap bracelets, and awabi, the abalone or Venus ear. That one was miserable—impossible to eat, and the rubbery flesh had no taste. The dish is supposedly an aphrodisiac and, as it turned out when I insisted on paying for everything with Silvia’s credit card, very expensive. I ended up having to hold it in my mouth until I got to the bathroom, where I gagged and disposed of it in the toilet bowl.

  When I got back, Mizuko was whimpering.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, holding my stomach.

  She gestured to the remains of my abalone. “Reminds me of her. She was so good at finding them.”

  Her was Mizuko’s grandmother, Ume, who was an ama. Mizuko began to explain that this was not an acronym for “ask me anything,” but I had decided I needed to start showing off more. Impress upon her my knowledge so that she would feel it like I felt it.

  “Are you serious? Your grandmother was an ama? Don’t they go to insane depths without oxygen?” She looked impressed. “I read that some carry on diving—without a tank—well into their seventies.”

  She nodded, a small smile flickered, her eyes met mine; I knew I had her back.

  Ama are Japan’s famous women divers. They look for things like abalone, the gummy delicacy I had just spat out. They prise them off rocks with a little spatula. Ama also hold something of a mythological status in misogynistic Hollywood films, which is how I claimed to have heard about them, rather than from Mizuko’s own story. She told me that her grandmother had once auditioned (unsuccessfully) to be in a big Hollywood action movie, but that she had been cast in a few low-budget productions which featured ama divers. This had raised her up from lowly origins into the sophisticated wo
rld of Tokyo, where she married into the Himura family.

  I knew it all already. “Kizuna” moved back and forth between this period of Ume’s youth and the 2011 tsunami, ending with her grandmother’s foiled attempt at suicide. I’d decided that Silvia was to me what Ume was to Mizuko, just like I had decided that her mother, Hiromi, was my Susy; her absent father, whom I now knew to be Robin, was my Mark; and her relationship with Rupert was as devoid of real intimacy as mine with Dwight. To me, it was clear proof of the existence of supersymmetry, the idea that every particle has a partner. She was mine.

  “Were your family badly affected by the tsunami?” I guessed this was how police got suspects to talk, by feigning ignorance or beginning aslant, with polite, general questions.

  “I flew into Tokyo a few months after the disaster hit. I went for Ume but was also concerned for the domesticated animals left behind when their owners had been forced to evacuate.”

  The words were rehearsed, and we had both memorised many of them from the story itself.

  “Some were left leashed and starved to death. Since my grandfather died, Ume had been living back in Minamisōma, the place where she had grown up diving. But after the quake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown, she got evacuated to a school building, where she slept on the floor wrapped in blankets like tinfoil. When communication lines and power were finally restored, she was sent back to Tokyo to live with my mother in the tiny apartment she moved into after I left for Yale. It was really only big enough for one.”

  I took a sip of the green tea that had materialised on the wooden bar. I noted with growing anxiety that we were the only ones left in the restaurant and the owner was waiting to close.

  “When I got there, without my mom’s permission, I drove Ume back to Minamisōma. I’d seen on the news that it had become a ghost town within the nuclear exclusion zone. Ume insisted on it, despite the danger and police checkpoints, because her beloved dog, Kathleen, had been left behind. A black toy poodle, named after Kathleen Drew, the biologist who saved Japan by mistake through her research on edible seaweed when its people were starving.”

  The owner of the restaurant caught her eye, but I nodded vigorously to show that she had my undivided attention.

  “‘Kizuna’ begins with my account of driving Ume back.”

  So that she could write it up later, Mizuko had filmed the whole expedition with a GoPro camera mounted on her head, the one she used for cycling through Manhattan. Today, I rewatched the footage. Both women are swaddled in vast amounts of clothing to protect themselves from radiation, but over the course of the long journey, Ume gradually, sneakily, and despite Mizuko’s entreaties, peels it off, except for a bandanna with a five-point star on it around her head. (“Ama culture has loads of superstition,” Mizuko explained when I asked about the star. I looked them up: “The seiman is a kind of talisman design on their tools and things. It is written in a single stroke, starting and ending at the same point, to symbolise safe return to the surface.”)

  “She hasn’t said anything for a while—is she still here?” In the film, Ume is speaking, and the sound of an embodied voice seems to startle them both. After a pause, Mizuko realises that Ume is referring to their GPS, whose absence suggests she has abandoned the pair to their death wish.

  It is silent again. Given recent events, they cannot discuss the weather. There is no available small talk except for the immediate, physical discomforts of the journey. Ume, ninety-two, her knees just visible before a snub of car bonnet, is irritable and hot. Mizuko, rigid in the driving seat, with the air conditioner blowing directly onto her feet, is, despite her layers, numb with cold. I read the story as I watch the footage, because the pair speak in Japanese. The air con does nothing to settle Ume, who can be seen kicking off her shoes and socks and trying to strip down to her vest. Minutes later she bats away Mizuko’s hand as it darts toward the dial between them.

  Mizuko wonders if the GPS is still monitoring their progress. She has the distinct feeling of being watched by something in the darkness. This makes watching the footage and reading the story at the same time a strange experience, as if she can sense me, a menace from the future, following them along the dark road.

  For most of the journey there is no power to light the streetlamps or the traffic lights, and there are no other headlights on the road. Mizuko passes her grandmother a jar of iodine pills, which are meant to stop the thyroid gland from absorbing radiation. They leave the Jōban Expressway. They are approaching Odaka, Ume’s home town, where life has been halted. It is the only place to be hit by all three in the chain of disasters—earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown. Dawn breaks and you can see from the car windows where the wave hit—destruction visible below a tide line of debris, the radiation invisible above.

  When the restaurant owner politely forced us out, Mizuko was still in the midst of telling me the story, and so, since I neglected to tell her I had already read it multiple times, I ended up going back to her apartment so she could finish. She didn’t actually ask me back, she just kept talking as we got our bags and walked out onto the street, and I kept following her as she talked. When we got to her building, she said that if I liked “Kizuna,” which was a ghost story of sorts, then I should come to her annual event on Halloween, where people told ghost stories in her apartment because her apartment was haunted. Once her front door had jammed shut so she had had to climb down her fire escape. Another time a perfect circle of water that wouldn’t correspond to anything—not pitchers, not glasses, not anything in the whole apartment that might have left the mark—had formed on her dining table. Sometimes there was a sudden temperature drop when she was alone there. She said it wasn’t really a salon—that was what Rupert called it; it was more like a Kaidankai party. Attendees from their circle of friends at Columbia and assorted strays Rupert picked up at poetry readings brought a ghost story each, or an object—something uncanny and strange. Intellectual circle jerks, really.

  “You want to come up and see now?”

  I felt a sudden drop in my stomach. “Sure.”

  I followed her up the red steps and in through the glass doors, noting the carpet, the smells, the ordinariness of the interior. I’d expected something more grand.

  In the elevator she told me about the pilgrimage they made every Halloween before the party. “We walk to Harry Houdini’s former house in Harlem. It’s on this street. Before he died, he and his wife, Bess—they believed in spirits and stuff—decided on a code word they’d use when one of them died to see if they could communicate from beyond the grave. ‘Rosabelle, believe.’”

  “What?”

  “Believe. She used to have a seance for him every year on the day he died, which was Halloween. And after she died all these necromancers and people carried on doing it. They go to his house—it’s one of the beautiful old brownstones on the other side of Morningside Park.”

  “They think there’s a ghost?”

  “Well, not one that haunts all the time, maybe, but that he comes back to communicate on that night. Rupert says that if anyone could break free from death, it would be him.”

  I must have looked blank.

  “You know who Harry Houdini is, right?”

  “Sure.”

  She looked at me suspiciously. This appeared to be a tradition I had missed in her pictures. I dimly recalled a photograph of the brownstone and upbraided myself for not having researched it properly.

  “I mean, I do”—I had thought until this conversation that he was a footballer—“but remind me.”

  “Illusionist. Escapologist. Harry ‘Handcuff’ Houdini.”

  “Right, right. I remember now.”

  “He could escape from straitjackets underwater, or from inside sealed milk cans filled to the brim. Could hold his breath for insane lengths. My grandmother loved him. She could hold her breath pretty well too, obviously.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Peritonitis, appendicitis, something like that. He got punched
in the stomach when he was just lying on a sofa. Burst his colon. Bad way to go for someone who could survive being nailed into a crate wearing leg irons and thrown into the East River. He was locked in with lead weights and he found his way to the surface somehow.”

  “How?”

  “People thought he dematerialised. But often he did it in full view—getting out of all these chains and ropes and stuff.”

  “And what’s the house like? Spooky?”

  “You can’t go in. It’s just got a red plaque outside and a reddish brown exterior. We can go look if you want.”

  “Not now maybe, but yes, I’d like to.”

  When we got upstairs she got two beers out of the fridge and beckoned me towards her laptop. She wanted to show me the GoPro footage and other stuff—“found materials” that she promised me were not contaminated with radiation. Shoes and bottles, fragments of pottery. Children’s toys. Like me, Mizuko had become addicted to amateur footage of the wave. The clips that went viral while the survivors in Japan were cut off and knew far less than the rest of the world, watching their computer screens, about what had actually happened to them. The sheer scale of the devastation. She says in her story that even though much of the landscape is altered beyond recognition, being in the car, driving along the dark road, feels like entering something she knows by heart. Not because it is a place she remembers from actually having been there—she’d never actually been to Ume’s modest home in Minamisōma before—but from looking at it on TV from the safety of New York.

  All that is missing from the set as they drive is the black wave surging inland. We watched it together that night on repeat. I’d watched it on repeat in my college room. It rears up. The back catches up with the front. Sucking in water ahead of it so that the shoreline is revealed. When it hits, it stops looking like water. It becomes a solid mass, a crazy patchwork of people’s lives; household objects, cars, trees. The people capturing the footage zoom in on all the absurd juxtapositions. Fridges rehomed in trees.

  Mizuko spots a man’s body, or the hump of his bloated back. Ume tells her to slow down, but she doesn’t. His coat is beige or the mud and silt has turned it beige, and the creases are hardened. He lies facedown, spat out on the rim of the road. The headlights give the figure a hint of animation. Ume tells her to look straight ahead, but Mizuko’s camera is angled right at him.