by Yoko Tawada
She couldn’t forget the sight of the young boy steering his bicycle with one hand, an open book in the other. “Can you write all the letters in the Vietnamese alphabet?” If there was a certain Ms. G who insisted she had seen Ho Chi Minh on television asking a group of children this question, then Kazuko was Ms. G, and the sight of Vietnamese kids poring over their books brought tears to her eyes. Reading was a natural part of their lives. And they never doubted that the Roman alphabet was their own. The letters lined up on the pages might be the same as those used in the West, but the images these children spun from them were unique, beyond imitation. This wasn’t simply a borrowed alphabet with a few extra flourishes—hair, perhaps, or horns—it was a complete metamorphosis. The letters were transformed like a dancer performing an entirely new dance. Ho Chi Minh saw his country’s future strength not in mechanical engineering, capital, or underground resources, but in the literacy of the people, and so he was always asking the children, “Can you write your letters?” Ms. G would say, impassioned. The fact that a mere twelve percent of the Vietnamese population was illiterate made her so proud she felt a lump in her throat. Some mistakenly believed that a low GNP meant a high rate of illiteracy, ignoramuses subsequently sprouting up everywhere like bamboo shoots. “I hear over thirty-six percent of Americans can’t read,” Kazuko said, shooing away a fly with her left hand as she slowly lifted a glass of papaya juice to her lips with her right. The glass was lukewarm, and there were bubbles on the surface of the juice. “I am not American,” James replied. They were in a makeshift teahouse, wooden tables and benches arranged on a dusty street corner. Face to face didn’t feel right so they sat side by side, gazing at the road to avoid looking at each other.
The next morning, Kazuko found herself at a railway station that resembled the back of a storehouse. Three barefoot children spotted her and ran over, ropes in their hands. They mimed tying her bag up, nice and tight. Over to one side was a row of stalls. Each stall sold three different drinks, which were displayed in the same way in a line. She saw James standing with his back to her, a tall rucksack propped up beside him. From behind, his hair looked thinner than it did the day before, his hips as soft and round as a woman’s. When Kazuko called, “Let’s get going,” he cringed as though he’d been scolded, then hesitantly turned around and smiled. “So you really came,” he said with a surprised look, as if she hadn’t agreed to go to Nha Trang with him. Perhaps it was unusual for tourists to keep their word. “Big Sis, promise on your finger.”
Sucked in by the power of the passing trains, the tiny houses that lined both sides of the tracks seemed to be leaning inward. They looked close enough for you to reach through a window and grab a scrub brush from a kitchen. How long would it take them to get out of this alley? James left his seat and disappeared into the men’s room just as a conductor in uniform entered the car to check tickets. In the seat ahead two plump, rosy-cheeked women in their mid-forties sat side by side, both wearing silk ao dai. When the conductor spoke to Kazuko in Vietnamese they clapped their hands over their mouths and giggled like high-school girls. They were probably thinking. She certainly isn’t one of us. The conductor sneered and tried again, this time in English. “Ticket please.” But what if a different person were sitting here at this very moment, her face identical to Kazuko’s? The woman might indeed be Vietnamese, bound in eternal love to the American G.I. with whom she shared her life, Kazuko thought dreamily, and then James returned. Finding his faraway look rather pleasing, Kazuko gazed up at his profile and was about to speak when suddenly the skin around his eyes darkened, twitching violently for several seconds while his cheeks and lips loosened, his eyelids closed, and his neck dropped to one side causing his head to land squarely on her shoulder. Unsettled by the sudden weight but unable to say anything, Kazuko straightened her back and sat perfectly still, afraid that the slightest movement would send James’s head crashing to the floor. Has he fainted? Kazuko asked herself, for there was no longer anyone else around to listen. Shouldn’t I call a doctor? What if he just stays like this…? she wondered, then closed her eyes, deciding not to worry. I’ll go to sleep, too, that way they won’t know who’s ill and who’s not. Maybe James was so exhausted that once a day his blood wandered down to the underworld. Perhaps fatigue drove certain tourists to travel in the first place. If she took slow, deep breaths, imagining waves breaking then flowing back to sea, counting them, taking care not to open her eyes, then she wouldn’t have to think. But even behind her eyelids, the psychedelic aroma of food forced its way in and swirled through her body. The conductor was pushing a cart through the car, distributing meals in plastic containers like the in-flight meals on a plane. He handed her a box lunch of rice and boiled beans. The surface of the sticky rice was as smooth as paper. She didn’t know when James had removed his head from her shoulder and returned to his own seat. Steam rose from a huge kettle. The conductor poured soup with leafy greens into the cup embedded in her plastic tray. The soup tasted of shellfish. “So you’re with us again,” Kazuko said in the casual tone she would have used with a roommate who had awakened from an afternoon nap. The greens swimming so elegantly in the hot broth died crisply between her teeth. Squinting into the sunlight, James blinked several times and appeared to be smiling. He picked up each bean one by one as if he had used chopsticks his entire life. “How come you speak Japanese?” The words were out before she could stop them. She had more interesting questions in mind for him, but out of fear or just plain laziness, this is the one she ended up asking. “Because I’m Japanese,” he answered gravely. “And how did that happen?” she countered, a bit put out, but James, sipping his shellfish soup, calmly threw the query back at her. “What about you? How did you become Japanese?”
If you cut off ears of rice and throw them away, would you get an earache? And why shouldn’t bread have ears, too? People say dizzy spells are caused by a breakdown in the balancing mechanism deep within the inner ear. The Japanese are prejudiced against foreign rice, so why don’t they complain about foreign bread? The train raced through open fields, leaving the alley far behind. Rather than towering majestically, the mountains humbly bowed. The ground was so wet you couldn’t tell whether it was land or water. Kazuko replied, “As the train sank into the swamp, blue sky welled up from beneath her feet.”
Kazuko and James pressed their ears together, listening. “This is an ear-kiss,” James said. When his jaw moved, bristles of beard he had missed shaving scratched the tender skin below Kazuko’s earlobe. They sat caressing each other’s kneecaps, moving their fingers around and around. An electric current ran from their knees through their thighs to deep within their bladders. At 10 p.m. the train finally arrived at Nha Trang. They walked out of the station leaning against each other to find twenty cyclos waiting. It was so troubling trying to decide whether to stay in the same room with James that Kazuko started chanting the name of a hotel from her guidebook like a mantra that would show her a way out of this dilemma. Two cyclo drivers took off like kidnappers with Kazuko and James. Was she sure that hotel was the one she wanted? the driver asked pointedly, puzzling Kazuko. Tourists never know their true desires. Did she really want to go there, was that really what she wanted to do? Kazuko silently egged her cyclo on, “Faster, faster,” as it raced along the shore. Not that she was in a hurry; the Pacific Ocean was blacker than the night. She turned around several times to see if James’s cyclo was following behind. Each time she turned, he lifted a hand toward his chest while sitting like a Buddhist statue, his palm shining white in the light of the street lamps. When the cyclos finally stopped under a mountain of darkness, the shadowy skeleton of a five-story building loomed before them. Long ago a conch shell the size of a dinosaur washed onto the shore. The shell’s still there, only now it’s called a construction site. The hotel’s name, at least, was clearly written on a sign that resembled a cornerstone. They must be rebuilding the hotel, she thought, but here in the middle of the night with no one around, it was hard to imagin
e these metallic bones ever taking on flesh again. The sound of the waves bathed the portals of her ears. The cyclo drivers were gone, and James’s face was growing pale. This was where she had told them to bring her, so she couldn’t really complain. James twisted around to get closer to the steel skeleton, then plunked down on the ground. “Looks like this hotel is where we’re going to stay,” sighed Kazuko. Because the empty shell didn’t have walls or floors or ceilings, there were no rooms, and thus she needn’t worry about the sleeping arrangements. James was leaning against a pillar with his eyes closed, sweat beading out on his forehead. “Please wet a towel for me,” he said, and this time Kazuko rushed to retrieve one from his rucksack and searched in vain for a pipe or spigot, anything that might yield water. “Please wet a towel for me” is a set phrase he’s reserved for me, she thought, forcing her shaky legs to carry her down to the beach. In the darkness something rose up from the bottom of the sea and thrust out its horns only to fall headfirst, shattering into the sand. She wasn’t able to tell how close she could get to the water and still be safe. Figuring that the ocean would start where the darkness was deepest, she stood still, straining to see, feeling patches of chilly air. The night looked diaphanous in some places and muddy in others, though nothing revealed where the water began. This is the PACIFIC OCEAN, she thought, and the moment the name flashed into her mind, she saw the sea. Running over as if to pounce on it, she squatted down and dipped the towel in. An instant later the low roar she heard turned into an avalanche that assaulted her, drenching her hips, stomach, and chest with a load of salt water. Gasping for breath she managed to escape to higher ground, but sensing neither the humiliation that would make her want to weep nor the wellspring from which tears might come, she returned to the construction site. James had fallen over onto his side, his hips and knees at perfect right angles. The weight of the towel, cold and slightly sticky, covered his pulsating forehead. Kazuko peeled off her wet clothes and hung them on the scaffolding to dry. It was a warm, windless night. After she changed into dry clothes, she lay down with her back pressed up against James’s and closed her eyes. Staring hard into the unfamiliar darkness had made her eyes heavy.
James’s body rolled as the earth rotated so when the sun rose beyond the sea, he was sleeping with his chest pressed against Kazuko’s back. They awoke at nearly the same time to the rumbling of trucks and scattered laughter from passing bicycles, and after hurriedly getting their things together, headed for the main street. James’s lips were cherry red again, and the towel, still damp, smelled faintly moldy. They didn’t walk far before they found a pension where a man with a face like a child wearing spectacles with metal frames informed them that rooms were available. He also told them where they could find a doctor, and they set off immediately. Although employed by the state-run hospital, the doctor examined patients at his home when he was free in the evenings, and on weekends and holidays, for a slightly higher fee. Many doctors kept the same work schedule, but this doctor had an especially good reputation, the man at the pension explained with a smile. The doctor repeated his stock diagnoses and symptoms, varying them slightly as he examined James. James caught a cold, he had been working too hard, he wasn’t getting proper nourishment. His nasal membranes were slightly swollen, his eyes were a little red, the surface of his tongue was rough, his voice was hoarse, his skin was dry and scaly, and was his urine perhaps darker than usual? Did he have diarrhea? Nausea? James looked healthy enough now, but in fifteen minutes he might turn pale and faint again, Kazuko thought without saying anything. For all she knew, James was inhaling pockets of deadly gas that were waiting for him, lurking in the air, the poison spreading through his entire system. “Can you do a test for AIDS here?” he asked out of the blue, causing the doctor to freeze for several seconds before replying, “Of course,” in a casual tone as he took some black-and-white pamphlets from a drawer. “I’d like to be tested, too,” said Kazuko, as though she were completely removed from the situation.
She never imagined she’d be getting an AIDS test in Vietnam. And she certainly didn’t expect to stay this long in Nha Trang, a town she hadn’t even heard of before. James seemed to be feeling better. He didn’t know the results yet, but at least the test was over, or maybe the fish god of the Po Nagar Cham Tower cheered him up. When they first saw it they both burst out laughing like a windstorm whipping sand from a dune. The fish god was the strangest-looking stone figure ever, with the plum-shaped eyes of an Asuka Buddha, the features of a sea bream, a mammoth’s ears, and what appeared to be a ski cap on its head. The ears gave it a mousy look. Wavy grooves crossed its cheeks. It sat in the lotus position, a winsome pout on its face. “Let’s start a new religion, just the two of us—this can be our god,” said Kazuko, clasping her hands in prayer, but then turned to find James frowning. “I can’t. I’m a Christian.” Upset by the hardness of his words, Kazuko rushed out of the tower in silence. An old woman, bent with age, was sweeping the grounds with a tiny broom. A white cat perched atop a broken brick followed her every move with swollen eyes. The cat departed when James emerged from the tower. “What makes you claim to be Japanese, or Christian?” asked Kazuko, still out of breath. “Once something’s been destroyed it can never be restored. Champa culture will never come back,” James replied. “You mean it’s beyond all hope? I’m not so sure about that.” Perhaps because she was a tourist, Kazuko found his pessimism unconvincing. The Pacific Ocean crashed on the shore at the feet of tourists, but the waves always returned to their original form. “Seems I came all the way to Vietnam only to get sick. Even as a kid I was a weakling, my head ached all the time, and I’ve never been to war.” Two puppies at play came rolling out of a bamboo hut onto the beach. “There’re a lot of ruined buildings in Vietnam, but can’t they be rebuilt? I don’t believe that what’s been broken can’t be put back together.” “But what about Champa? Champa will never return.”