If You Follow Me

by Malena Watrous

  I tie the sash around my yukata and walk back home, rummaging through the storage area and finding the box with my mom’s handwriting on the label. Then I return to the sea and walk straight into the water, up to my knees in the lapping waves, not caring if my yukata gets wet or if a jellyfish brushes against me as I turn the baggie upside down. The ashes fall like mist, melting in the humidity, clinging to my fingers, dispersing across the water, and salting the blue forms. The jellyfish have no mouths that I can see, no faces at all. They are halfway between liquid and solid, earth and sea, above and below.

  As I scatter the ashes in the waves, I don’t say good-bye. Even if the barrier separating the dead from the living has lifted and he can hear me, I don’t want to say a word that suggests separation or worse—closure. It’s bad luck. Besides, this grief isn’t over. It has barely begun. I squat and hold the baggie in the sea, watching it expand and fill with water like a little lung, watching the water clean the last dust from its clear plastic sides until it is empty. I wade into the water still wearing my yukata, float on my back and look up at the big gray sky, waiting to be stung. But all I can feel is the wet cotton billowing around me, holding me up when it should be pulling me down, maybe even protecting me.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank my writing teachers, beginning with my mother; Bob Bumstead; the incomparable Timea Szell; and Michael Cunningham. At Iowa, it was an honor to learn from Marilynne Robinson and Frank Conroy. Thanks to the wonderful John l’Heureux, Tobias Wolff, Elizabeth Tallent, Eavan Boland, and Mary Popek, for countless forms of support. A huge debt of gratitude to the Truman Capote fellowship and the James Michener/Copernicus award. Thank you to Meghan Quinn for more than I can list, and to Hiroshi Nishita and Chikako Ishida, who shared so much about Japan.

  Thank you to readers and friends Sarah Braunstein, Robin Ekiss, Matthew Irbarne, Kaui Hart-Hemmings, Chelsey Johnson, Thisbe Nissen, Cathy Park-Hong, Eric Puchner, Curtis Sittenfeld, Nick Syrett, and Shannon Welch. A very big thanks for the special help from Sara Michas-Martin, Katharine Noel, Glori Simmons, Stephanie Reents, and Ghita Schwarz. And to Jeff O’Keefe, for the title.

  Thank you to my amazing agent, Lisa Bankoff, and to the editor of my dreams, Jeanette Perez, who helped me to envision and create a better book.

  Thanks to my family for your love, guidance, and enthusiasm: Merrill and Willis Watrous, Barbara and Ellen Watrous, Mary Ann and George Kalb, Deborah Johnson, Ward Schumaker, and Vivienne Flesher. And a big thanks to the littlest member, Max Watrous-Schumaker, already a creative force and inspiration.

  And finally to Matt Schumaker, my best reader, my best friend, my love.

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…

  About the author

  A Conversation with Malena Watrous

  About the book

  Malena Watrous: Alien Encounters of the Closest Kind

  Read on

  Author’s Picks: Favorite Books Set in Japan (plus one movie)

  About the author

  A Conversation with Malena Watrous

  Let’s start simple—where are you from?

  I was born in San Francisco, and my family moved to Eugene, Oregon, when I was in eighth grade. I went to college at Barnard, in New York, and to the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I returned to San Francisco six years ago.

  When did you start writing?

  In elementary school, my friend and I coauthored a fifty-page “novel” about her father’s childhood exodus on foot from Ethiopia to Kenya. It involved a lot of wild animal encounters, illustrated in color. I also tried to write about my great-grandmother’s childhood. She emigrated from Norway to Minnesota. When her father slipped under a horse’s hooves and died, she ended up an indentured servant. I was drawn to tragic stories of orphans.

  “This was the first love story that got under my skin, and it still does.”

  “I’m like a magpie. I collect bits and pieces from my present and past and tuck them into fiction.”

  Do you remember the first book you fell in love with and why it affected you so strongly?

  It was definitely Jane Eyre. Another tragic orphan story. Jane has such a strong and honest voice. She’s lonely and passionate, self-aware and bookish, prickly but sympathetic. And I like the brooding Rochester too, stuck with his crazy wife in the attic. He sees and loves Jane for who she is, and vice versa. This was the first love story that got under my skin, and it still does.

  Who are some of your writing influences?

  I get inspired by what I’m reading all the time, but I try not to stick to any particular influence, for fear of being imitative.

  When you’re writing, do you have an audience in mind? Are you writing for someone in particular?

  Not exactly, although sometimes when I am having trouble figuring out how to tell a story, or if my voice feels muffled, I will imagine my friend Nick reading it. We’ve known each other since college, and not only is he a total laugh slut—he laughs so easily, it’s wonderful—we also have overlapping taste in fiction. If I can write something that he would want to read, then I’m happy.

  How much does your background, whether it be the city you grew up in, your family, your experiences, make its way into your writing?

  I’m like a magpie. I collect bits and pieces from my present and past and tuck them into fiction. When I’m writing steadily, I feel like my powers of perception are heightened. That said, the stories are invented. Real life—mine, at least—doesn’t have much plot.

  You teach creative writing to students of all ages. Are there any lessons you think are essential for up-and-coming authors?

  The best piece of writing advice I ever got was to try and write the book that you want to read, the one you wish was on your bookshelf. It sounds simple but it’s hard. I also think that there is always room for fiction writers to break new ground by trying to describe the present—always changing—moment. My favorite authors, from Edith Wharton to Flannery O’Connor, all wrote from their particular place and time. You get to define the moment you’re living in, and it’s always changing so there’s always new ground to cover.

  After spending some time in Japan, did the language difference, or Japanese in general, affect your writing at all?

  Definitely. I love the playfulness of Japanese, in particular katakana, the special alphabet used to colonize foreign words, and the ways that Japanese English borrows and misuses certain terms like, “Let’s…” Let’s English! Let’s donut! More generally, as I wrote this novel, I both enjoyed and was frustrated by the limitations the characters faced in communicating. This is something I also experienced when I lived in Japan. How do you communicate deeply, sincerely, with humor or passion, when you have a limited number of overlapping words?

  Do you feel there are differences in the way the Japanese regard novelists versus Americans?

  I was surprised that the Japanese novels that I read in translation didn’t seem as popular there. Not that many people that I spoke with had heard of Haruki Murakami, for instance. I was surprised by how many adults read manga, a lot of which is really graphic. Businessmen in suits would seem utterly unabashed to be reading pornographic comic books on the subway.

  “The best piece of writing advice I ever got was to try and write the book that you want to read, the one you wish was on your bookshelf.”

  About the book

  Malena Watrous Alien Encounters of the Closest Kind

  THE DAY I RECEIVED my placement letter from the Japanese Ministry of Education, I looked up Shika in a guidebook. I was twenty-two years old, at loose ends working a string of odd jobs in New York, so I’d decided to apply to the JET program, which sends five thousand foreigners per year to teach English in every corner of Japan. Unfortunately, Shika was unlisted, and my guidebook dismissed the Noto Peninsula as one of the most remote regions of mainland Japan, a place with no sights of real interest and not worth visiting by tourists.

  This did not turn out to be tru
e. There is a lot to see and do in the area, especially for those with a taste for unusual entertainment. Sure you can go to Kyoto and do the textbook temple tour, followed by a prepackaged performance of Noh, Kabuki, and Bunraku theater, all condensed to an hour to fit the Western attention span. But if you want to see something different, but equally Japanese, here is my list of the best, you’ve-got-to-see-it-to-believe-it tourist destinations in and around the Noto Peninsula, none of which made my guidebook’s cut.

  It’s generally accepted that truth is stranger than fiction, and in rural Japan this is certainly the case. Japan, a nation known for its uniformity, is also a mecca of weirdness, proof that the pressure to conform breeds eccentrics. Some like to contain their eccentricities within museums. Lucky for you, this means that for a nominal fee, you can gawk at your leisure. And since Japan is the size of California, you can get to the Noto Peninsula from Tokyo on an overnight bus, waking up by the Sea of Japan as an attendant hands you a moist towelette.

  “It’s generally accepted that truth is stranger than fiction, and in rural Japan this is certainly the case. Japan, a nation known for its uniformity, is also a mecca of weirdness, proof that the pressure to conform breeds eccentrics.”

  Arisu-kan

  When I asked my new supervisor about the music that kept waking me up every morning, he told me that it was broadcast from Town Hall to test the emergency evacuation system at the power plant. The privilege of choosing the morning tune rotated among the bureaucrats, whose taste ranged from baroque classical to saccharine Japanese pop music. After a few months teaching weekly adult English classes at Town Hall, I could usually guess who had chosen that morning’s tune. Shika’s treasurer was a big fan of The Carpenters’ “Top of the World.”

  I arrived in Japan in July. The high school was technically on summer break, but teachers had to come to work every day in case students dropped by. None did. I was told that I was very lucky because I only had to sit at my desk from eight to two (instead of four) every day. The other teachers spent their time in the sweltering faculty room smoking cigarettes, playing a board game called Go, and commenting on how hot it was. I’d brought a stack of novels with me from the States, which I finished all too quickly. One day, the history teacher who sat beside me observed, “You are like International Man of Mystery, Austin Powers,” he explained, “because you read so much.” Apparently reading was mysterious. Then he informed me that Shika’s library had an excellent selection of English classics.

  I saved my trip to the library for the last Friday before the new semester, looking forward to sinking into a fat classic. Unfortunately, the “excellent selection” consisted of three slim volumes: Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Bridges of Madison County, and Alice in Wonderland. I was standing there, crestfallen, when someone tapped me on the shoulder. A silver-haired man in a business suit and rubber sandals introduced himself as Kamono-sensei. He told me that he was a retired teacher and offered to give me a tour of Shika. In New York, I would never have gotten into a car with some strange guy who picked me up at the public library. But this was rural Japan and he seemed harmless enough.

  “After we left the museum, [my guide] took me out for kare raisu—white rice drowned in silky yellow curry, topped with thin cutlets of breaded pork…. Then he drove me home and I never saw him again, just like the white rabbit who vanished down the hole.”

  He drove me to Arisu-kan, Shika’s Alice in Wonderland–themed museum of nuclear power. A 1/25 scale model of the plant functioned as a playground for toddlers, who could crawl around in a cross-section of the reactor pressure vessel. In the Garden of Radiation, kids learned “what happens to the uranium in the case of an earthquake.” An English sign read, “Furthermore, don’t miss the exhibitions on nuclear power station simulations, ECCS, reactor scrimmages, and others.” On a map of Shika, blinking Cheshire cats showed local radiation measuring points. I had no idea what was normal or dangerously high. My guide seemed uneasy when I asked whether there had been any problems at the plant. “A few,” he admitted. After we left the museum, he took me out for kare raisu—white rice drowned in silky yellow curry, topped with thin cutlets of breaded pork. He insisted on treating. Then he drove me home and I never saw him again, just like the white rabbit who vanished down the hole.

  Cosmo Isle

  In the summer months, the Noto Peninsula was blisteringly hot. I spent most of my free time at the beach, swimming in the sea and dozing on the second-longest bench in the world, where there was always plenty of space. One day at school, my supervisor took me aside and told me to be sure not to fall asleep while sunbathing, lest I get abducted by aliens. He was a savvy, cosmopolitan guy, a pillar of the community. This was my first indication that he might also be nuts. “North Koreans,” he specified, voice dropping as if there might be some in the vicinity, just waiting to chloroform us and smuggle us back to their desolate motherland, which he swore was how they did it.

  The line between fact, fiction, and science fiction turns out to be blurry.

  “My supervisor took me aside and told me to be sure not to fall asleep while sunbathing, lest I get abducted by aliens…. ‘North Koreans,’ he specified, voice dropping as if there might be some in the vicinity, just waiting to chloroform us and smuggle us back to their desolate motherland, which he swore was how they did it.”

  North Korea is on the other side of the Sea of Japan, and there have been reports of Japanese people abducted from the Noto and brainwashed by their North Korean captors. In addition, the Noto’s shores have been used as a dumping ground by human traffickers from China. So the possibility of bumping into an “alien” on those wind-battered beaches was indeed real, even before a woman from Hakui swore under oath that a UFO had beamed up her two missing children one summer afternoon while the family swam in the sea. Most of the people I spoke with expressed doubt over her testimony, followed by, “But you never know…it is Hakui.”

  Hakui, a town ten miles south of Shika, has a reputation as UFO central—Japan’s own Roswell, New Mexico—and local businesses capitalize upon the town’s reputation. It boasts a love hotel with pods in lieu of beds, a bathhouse with UFO-shaped tubs, a ramen restaurant where each object in the bowl of noodle soup is supposed to replicate part of the alien abduction experience, and a museum called Cosmo Isle, complete with a landing strip for alien spacecrafts.

  Cosmo Isle contains a few legitimate exhibits on outer space. NASA provided a lunar module and a real spacesuit. Also displayed is the spacesuit that Tom Hanks wore in Apollo 13. But most people come to see documentation of human encounters with extraterrestrials. “Photographs” of almond-eyed aliens cover the walls, as well as shots of mysteriously dented crops, and of the survivors of alien abductions—the folks left behind after their loved ones were beamed up by UFOs.

  I never ran into any aliens on the beaches of the Noto—not the spectral variety in any case. But I made a trip to Hakui’s annual sand castle competition (the towering medieval edifices would have been more impressive had cement not been allowed in their construction), that also featured a beauty contest, where another foreign English teacher—a big-breasted blonde in a bikini—was crowned that year’s queen, her satin banner decorated with UFOs.

  Hanibe Gankutsuin

  The title for weirdest museum in the prefecture has got to go to Hanibe Gankutsuin, the Museum of Hell, located outside Komatsu, at the foot of the peninsula. A sculptor-turned-priest (and leader of a sect that suggests there might be such a thing as a “fundamentalist Buddhist”) molded the exhibits from the local red clay, beginning with the giant Buddha head that towers over the parking lot. Apparently the body will follow, though the priest hasn’t made much progress since he started filling the caves with dioramas of demons tormenting sinners, the statues built slightly larger-than-life but otherwise as realistic as mannequins.

  I was first brought to Hanibe Gankutsuin by my friend Chikako, a junior high school secretary who would shout, “Huge size!” whenever I enter
ed the faculty room. This might have been offensive, but she always followed it with, “Same size!” She was probably five-ten at the most, about the same height as me, but when we walked down the hall side by side, both students and teachers would stop and exclaim, “Takai!” or “So big!” in awed tones, as if witnessing a real-life freak show. Chikako brought me to a store that carried “our size” clothes, baggy pastel tracksuits and voluminous T-shirts that said “blackface” and “bling-a-ling.” After our shopping expedition, she made a surprise stop at the Museum of Hell. “You won’t believe,” she said as we climbed down a flight of stairs into the flickering caves.

  “[Chikako] was probably five-ten at the most, about the same height as me, but when we walked down the hall side by side, both students and teachers would stop and exclaim, ‘Takai!’ or ‘So big!’ in awed tones, as if witnessing a real-life freak show.”

  Taking in the hellacious exhibits, I often couldn’t tell what the sinner’s crime was, or how the punishment fit it. A man with a penis as big as a log sat with his tiny hands pressed to either side of it, looking dopey. Was he guilty of excessive masturbation? Was his huge cock a punishment? A gray-haired sarariiman (salaryman) chased a girl in a junior high school sailor uniform, his tongue dangling halfway down his necktie. I assumed he was the pervert, only to find her featured in the next cave, stuffed into a giant mortar, a demon pulverizing her tantalizing (and now bloody) legs.