The Island Dwellers

by Jen Silverman

  “Rachel,” the wolf said. “If I promise not to kill anyone, either here or in Yokohama, can we discuss this on the train?”

  “Or later.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Here or in Yokohama or later.”

  This time the crooked grin was back full force. “Right. No killing. I got it.”

  The wolf bought his shinkansen ticket from the machine, then mine as well. I accepted it warily. “How much was it? I’ll pay you back.”

  “Just think of this as a date,” he said, and walked ahead of me through the gates, before I could protest.

  * * *

  —

  THE SHINKANSEN TO YOKOHAMA WAS almost empty. There were four other people in our car, sitting in the front, and although they glanced at us as we walked past, they didn’t seem interested.

  “You ever been on one of these before?” the wolf asked, as we pulled out of the station.

  “Yeah, a few times.”

  “How long have you been in Japan?”

  “Five years in September.”

  “Coming from…?”

  “LA.”

  “Why’d you leave?”

  “None of your business.”

  A beat. Then: “I bet you don’t eat raw fish.”

  “Sure I do.”

  “Sea cucumber?”

  “There’s nothing better.”

  “Octopus?”

  “Pull it out of the sea and I’ll eat it.”

  The wolf leaned back in his seat and studied me. I tried not to sound uneasy when I said, “Hey, can you take your sunglasses off?”

  “Why?”

  “They make me think you’re still gonna kill me.”

  He took his sunglasses off and continued to stare at me. There was something unnerving about his gaze, and I couldn’t figure out what it was at first—and then it struck me. His eyes were pale gray.

  “You aren’t Japanese,” I said out loud. I saw something tighten in his face, almost imperceptibly, and I regretted it immediately. “It’s none of my business.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s not.”

  “Look,” I said. “Can I ask you something, and then you can ask me something—anything, actually—and I’ll answer it?”

  After a minute, he shrugged. I took that as consent.

  “Are you with the yakuza?”

  Whatever he thought I’d been going to ask, that clearly wasn’t it. After a long moment that stretched out over several breaths, he shook his head no.

  “But—you have a tattoo.”

  The wolf reached out and curled his fingers gently around my throat, palm over my pulse. I froze, but before I could react, he’d retracted his hand. “If you’re scared of me, why do you keep asking questions?”

  “Who said I was scared of you? At the most I’m nervous.”

  He reached out again, his fingertips against the curve of my throat. “Nervous is like this,” he said, and his fingers beat a gentle ta-dum ta-dum rhythm against my skin. “Scared is this,” he added, and the rhythm sped up until it was matching my heartbeat.

  I blinked at the wolf, suddenly aware of how close he was. He dropped his hand.

  “There are many young people in Japan who have tattoos and aren’t yakuza,” he said reprovingly, as if we were just continuing our conversation.

  “But you know Yuki-chan.”

  “And you know Kryzstof. That doesn’t make you a dealer. Or does it?”

  “No,” I said, annoyed. “I don’t fuck around with that shit.”

  “I get to ask you a question now,” the wolf said. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  I blinked at him, half-startled and half-outraged. “That’s your one question?”

  “Yes.”

  “No,” I said icily. “I do not. And neither am I looking.”

  “Why not?”

  I was going to tell him that he’d already asked his question, but instead I said, “Because now I date women.”

  Both of his eyebrows went up this time. “You like women, or you date women?”

  Fine, if all bets were off: “Are you half-Japanese?”

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “What’s your other half?”

  “Why no girlfriend?”

  “Because I don’t like people.” I stared him down.

  The wolf smiled. It wasn’t the crooked smile, and it didn’t seem mocking. I hadn’t seen it before. He held out his hand, Western style.

  “They call me Oukami Yasuhara,” he said. “You know what that means?”

  “Yasuhara the wolf,” I translated.

  “My friends call me Paulo.” His mouth moved in something like a smile—a concession to my earlier question. “You can call me that.”

  “Are we friends?” I asked.

  Yasuhara the wolf kept his hand extended. “Just for today.”

  I took his hand. He held on for a beat longer than a handshake, and then released it. “Hajimemashite,” he said, with mock-formality. “I’m so pleased to meet you.”

  * * *

  —

  YASUHARA WAS MORE WILLING TO talk about Yuki-chan than about himself. Yuki-chan was low-level yakuza, drugs and girls mostly, took orders more than he gave them. He was reliable and he got the job done. The wolf said that a few times: He got the job done—which made me wonder if he was a hit man as well. People didn’t take him seriously at first, but by the end they always did. (That line convinced me that Yuki-chan was a hit man.) Yuki-chan could be cold but in general he liked to laugh. Things were funnier when he was around. For example, one night they were out drinking and they picked up two gaijin girls, German tourists, and managed to convince them that Yuki-chan was the guy who played R2-D2 in the original Star Wars. Shit like that, the wolf said. Funny.

  I asked how they met, and he told me that Yuki-chan had gotten him out of a bad situation ten years back, just after he’d finished high school—but he didn’t tell me what the situation was. He said that they never worked together, but they’d drink together and Yuki-chan would tell him jokes. “Jokes?” I asked, and the wolf nodded and smiled and patted the top of the suitcase.

  “Jokes,” he said, “he liked jokes.”

  Whenever I tried to steer the conversation back to him, he’d shut up, stare out the window. Finally I just gave up, and asked him why we were going to Yokohama. “Are we going to bury him there?”

  Oukami Yasuhara glanced at me as if I’d said the stupidest thing in the world. “Bury him? In Yokohama? Of course not.”

  “Then what are we going to do?”

  “We’re going to show him a good day, the best day of his life. And then I’ll take care of the body.”

  I must have looked like a cartoon version of bewilderment, because he laughed out loud. He reached across and touched my jaw, closing my mouth. His fingers were cool, but the touch burned, and he left his hand there.

  “Daijoubu,” he said, “your job is very simple. I’ll take care of the hard parts.”

  “What’s my job?” I asked against his fingertips.

  He retracted his hand too quickly, as if the feel of my lips moving had burned him as well. “Yuki-chan had bad luck with women,” he told me. “Women are shallow, they didn’t care if he was funny. All he wanted was one nice date, but girls just laughed when he asked them out. Tomorrow would have been his birthday, so today you’ll be his date.”

  Two thoughts occurred in my head simultaneously. The first was to jump up, run to the door, and fling myself off the bullet train. The second was that this was the first thing I’d seen in years that could honestly be called “sweet.” Oukami Yasuhara wanted to give his friend a nice date before he stuck him in the earth. I wondered if I knew anybody who’d do that for me. And yet…it made me think about those news
stories in which unwitting Indian wives got burned on their husbands’ funeral pyres. If I didn’t return, only Kryzstof would notice for at least a few days. And Kryzstof was useless.

  The wolf must have seen these warring impulses on my face because he said, with some disgust, “Unless you’re too good for him.”

  “Look,” I said, stung. “Ground rules: I’m down, but I’m not gonna kiss him. No offense, but he’s dead. Also, I get returned to Tokyo afterwards. No scrapes, no dents, nothing that’s gonna get me deported.”

  The wolf listened with that strange smile on his face, the one that wasn’t mockery. It came and went so fast that I couldn’t figure it out. “Anything else?” he asked politely.

  “Yeah. No more questions about boyfriends or girlfriends. I’m your friend’s date, not yours, get it?”

  The wolf’s gray eyes widened a little, and then he laughed out loud. “Got it,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  YOKOHAMA, CITY OF JAPANESE SOAP operas. The bay, the lights, the ships, the countless TV heroines who have been dying of leukemia and have leaned out over their hospital windowsills to see the Yokohama Ferris wheel sparkle and glow. We joined the summer crowds walking by the harbor; Japanese girls my age, some of them in summer yukata, clutched their boyfriends’ arms as they hobbled along on six-inch stiletto heels. When we stopped to buy sweet ice kaki-gori, I remarked to the wolf that I’d never understood the Japanese female addiction to S&M heels, and he looked at my scuffed black Chucks and shook his head a little.

  “Yuki-chan liked girlier girls,” he said.

  “Yuki-chan better appreciate what he’s got.”

  “Yuki-chan liked expensive girls,” the wolf said, turning away to pay the vendor. “You’re more my type.” When he turned back to hand me my sweet ice, his face was expressionless. I didn’t know whether I’d been insulted or not, so I just followed the wolf and Yuki-chan through the streets, eating my kaki-gori.

  And yet, it wasn’t a bad first date. A better one than most. We stopped in Yamashita Park, sat in the sun. We went to the Landmark Tower, walked around the observation deck watching Yokohama sprawl out beneath us. We wandered through Chinatown, ate street-vendor pork and sweet sesame balls. I didn’t worry about eating too much and looking like a pig, and for his part, Yuki-chan was a perfect gentleman. He was quietly appreciative from within his suitcase. He didn’t brag about himself, comment on my appearance, drink to excess, try to cop a feel. The wolf himself was a gentle facilitator, never once overstepping his bounds. He didn’t even talk to me much. After all, I was his friend’s date, not his.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS EARLY EVENING WHEN we ended up back by the harbor. The wolf bought us three cold teas from a nearby vending machine, and we sat on a bench, the red suitcase between us with a green tea tucked into its side pocket, and the wolf and I drank ours and watched the sky darken to frame the glow of the harbor lights. The silence was strangely companionable.

  When he’d finished his tea, the wolf sighed and patted the suitcase. He muttered something to Yuki-chan that I didn’t catch, and then to me, “Tobako katteku, iru?”

  I noticed that he’d spoken to me in casual Japanese—no mockery, just an easy invitation. But I shook my head—I didn’t smoke. He nodded, then stood and walked down the quay toward the cigarette vending machines. Left alone with Yuki-chan and the harbor lights, I panicked at first—what if a cop came and asked me to open my suitcase? But then I relaxed. There was no one in sight, just a few couples walking far up the quay. The breeze off the water was gentle, it smelled like salt, it smelled like faraway promises of faraway places.

  “Yuki-chan,” I said experimentally. I stopped. The silence was a listening one. I imagined him, curled up like a little fetus in the red suitcase, tattoos and track marks, waiting to be reborn. “What’s up?” I waited—still the listening silence. “Hey listen, man. I’m sorry you died on my friend’s floor. I mean maybe you don’t care. Maybe an overdose isn’t a bad way to go. You’re just chilling and then you’re floating and then you’re gone. I don’t know. But I hope you’ve been having a good day.”

  Yuki listened. Inside the suitcase, he shrugged a little. Tilted his head to the side. Waited for me to continue. So I did.

  “Look, you’ve been a gentleman. You should know that. And if I die—when I die—I’d like something like this. Lights and the ocean and a Ferris wheel. I’d really like that.” I hesitated. But only Yuki-chan was listening, so I plowed on. “I’ve been in Tokyo for five years, I don’t know anyone who’d do that for me. Anyway.” I took a deep breath. “That’s not your problem. I guess the point is, I would’ve dressed better if I’d known.”

  A sudden tightness in my throat surprised me. Inside the suitcase, Yuki shook his head a little: Don’t worry about it.

  He wanted to know if I was doing okay.

  “Yeah man, it’s been a good day. Better than most, actually.”

  He inquired gently if I was homesick. But I didn’t know how to explain it right then. If I’d had the words, I would have said that it wasn’t about missing another place, so much as no longer being able to extricate myself from this one. How your shape changes, here. How the language changes and the silence changes too, there’s so much more of it, and if both the words and the space around them are different, then after some time, you become different too. And after enough time has passed, you can’t remember a way back to your old life—and if you did, if you somehow did make it back, you wouldn’t even fit there anymore.

  But I didn’t have those words, in either his language or mine, so after a moment I said, “Gaijin lose it in Tokyo. We just…down the rabbit hole. Kryzstof, he’s gone. Goodbye Krzystof. He’ll never make it out alive. You know he tried to leave? Three times. Came back each time. Started dealing the last time. He just got lost. You know?”

  Yeah, Yuki-chan said. I know.

  And I thought: Of course you do, to die the way you did. But I didn’t say that. I didn’t want to be rude.

  We were sitting in thoughtful silence when the wolf returned, a packet of Larks sticking out of his hip pocket. He looked a little surprised to see me there, which made me wonder if he’d expected me to bolt the second his back was turned. He sat down on the bench, a little closer than before, lit a Lark, and took a long sweet drag.

  “Hey,” he said in English. “You wanna hear a joke?”

  “Sure.”

  “A murderer walks into a forest with a little girl. The little girl says, ‘It’s dark, I’m scared!’ The murderer says, ‘What are you scared of? I’m the one who’s going to be walking out of here alone.’ ”

  I blinked at him. “That was terrible.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed.

  “Did Yuki-chan laugh at that shit?”

  “I got it from him,” the wolf said, and grinned.

  I hadn’t seen him this relaxed until now, sprawled out easily over the bench, his whole body one long loose line. In the harbor light, he looked younger. I imagined him as one of the junior high boys riding the subway as I went to work, making faces at each other’s reflections in the windows. I imagined him playing baseball, riding his bike to the gas station, falling in love, doing something other than burying bodies.

  “What,” the wolf said, a little self-consciously, and I realized I’d been staring. I looked away fast.

  “Nothing.”

  He finished his cigarette, flipped it onto the pavement and crushed it with the toe of his boot. Took another cigarette, tucked it into the suitcase pocket next to the bottle of tea. I could almost see Yuki relax, shift, inhaling the sharp-sweet tobacco smell through the fabric of the suitcase. There were so many questions I wanted to ask right then. If the wolf died, was there someone who would put him in a suitcase and take him down to the harbor? And that made me wonder again—who would do it for me
? And I felt sad, a sort of sad I hadn’t felt in years. You go to work and you come home and you sleep and then you do it all again, and you forget how vast Tokyo is, how implacable. It sleeps its strange cold sleep and dreams its vast glass-and-neon dreams and there you are in its heart, tucked away with all the other dreamers, and each of you is alone.

  The wolf touched my wrist. I jumped—I hadn’t realized how close we were. I realized he was tracing the thin faded lines, a crisscross over a decade old, climbing up my inner arm. I looked at him. I didn’t say anything and he didn’t say anything, but I could see in his eyes the same double vision I’d had of him just moments before. He’d seen me one way, all day, and suddenly here was a glimpse of potential past lives spiraling out into infinity.

  His fingers reached the top of my inner arm. The faded lines went past that, up under the sleeve, but he didn’t chase them further. After a moment he started tracing them down again, and when his fingers reached the inner cup of my hand, he stopped. We sat, fingers tangled, not quite holding hands.

  It was thick night, now.

  I don’t know how much time passed. I thought about asking him any number of things. I didn’t. At last the wolf shifted, and I realized my body was stiff and cold, aching from however long we’d sat on that bench.

  “We should go back,” he said.

  “Back?”

  “Before it gets too late.”

  “Oh,” I said, like a dreamer waking up. “Back.”

  * * *

  —

  WE DIDN’T TALK ON THE shinkansen home. I fell asleep briefly, woke up a station before Shinjuku with my head on the wolf’s shoulder. I thought at first he’d fallen asleep as well, but then I saw that his eyes were open and he was staring out the window, his face expressionless. He didn’t wake me up or try to move me. When I sat up, he glanced at me as if he’d forgotten I was there. I don’t know why I said it then, I hadn’t said it the whole day. But: “I’m really sorry about your friend.”

  He stared at me for a moment, and then he said, “It would have happened. In Kryzstof’s place, or somewhere else.”