The Navidad Incident

by Natsuki Ikezawa

  The next day around the same time, the bus reappeared.

  “More soda pop?” asked the shopkeeper.

  “No, come to return the empties,” said the bus, lining up the bottles on the counter.

  Again the shopkeeper took ages calculating the deposit before paying out a grand total of $2.45, whereupon the bus collected its refund and left.

  When Matías returned from Japan to Navidad at the age of twenty-eight, he spent the first half-year just looking around. A little cash went a long way in the islands, and with his modest savings he rented a hut cobbled together between three ma’a trees on the outskirts of Baltasár City. There was no hurry to find work, and anyway no employers in Navidad advertised openings in those days. Public administration attracted boring Guam University types, while the best jobs went to the brightest returnee graduates of the University of Hawaii or West Coast colleges. The few US-interest companies likewise hired returning American alumni. Local capital was scarce; island businesses were small and got by with a workforce of extended family relations. Never mind, he told himself, he’d take it easy and wait. If he returned to Melchor Island, all he could do was fish or tend banana groves or help out with simple carpentry. But he had his pride and enough money set by to wait for something better. He just had to find the right opportunity.

  Guili’s was one of many mom-and-pop general stores that sold everything from groceries to clothes. The only particular advantage this one store had was its location in the heart of Baltasár City, and Matías heard they were looking for help. Old man Guili was getting on in years and was disinclined to carry heavy goods from the stockroom or do strenuous deliveries. As luck would have it, this Micael Guili also had Melchor origins. It was a start.

  The wages were rock bottom. Matías expected as much; his visiting great-uncle from Melchor used to curse “that skinflint Guili.” Matías, however, was thinking ahead. All he needed was a base of operations for his Japanese-style start-up venture.

  Matías wrought great changes at the store. He got in Mr. and Mrs. Guili’s good books through a show of honest hard work, then began to restock the shelves his own way. He started rumors about “the newfangled goods at Guili’s,” relying on hearsay to entice consumers to try new things. Just modern marketing. When the calculating Mr. Guili and keen-eyed Mrs. Guili saw their sales soar, they too overcame their conservative instincts and learned to trust their worldly young employee implicitly.

  In January 1959 Matías took a month off to go to Japan. His sole aim was to find something major to market in Navidad. Ryuzoji, now an up-and-coming right-wing politician, paid for his passage in return for regular detailed reports on Navidad (Matías learned not to question Ryuzoji’s motives for wanting this intelligence). By now Matías himself was no mere overambitious employee; he saw Guili’s as his own enterprise, and his breakthrough came in the form of instant ramen noodles.

  American aid dollars gave the islanders as much buying power as they’d had during the Japanese era. But what new product would strike people’s spending fancy? Matías just knew it had to be some kind of food. The islanders already bought California rice, Campbell’s pork and beans, and luncheon meat from America, soy sauce and Geisha-brand canned mackerel from Japan. None of it daily fare. Compared to the island staples—taro, ma’a, bananas, and reef fish—these were purchases for special occasions. The idea of opening a can of mackerel, topping it with soy sauce, and serving it over steamed rice came as a revelation, but it wasn’t for every day.

  While in Japan, Matías bunked at the Shinheiwa employees’ dorm and bought packaged foods at a neighborhood shop to try out. Out of all the items he tested, instant ramen was clearly the most saleable. He could just see the islanders sitting down to packaged noodles once a week at village feasts. An instant offering to impress the kinfolk. Just put the noodles in a dish, add hot water, cover, and wait. Those magic three minutes of anticipation gave the illusion of participating in the cooking process, a tantalizing emotional hook that Matías recognized as a key sales point.

  The very next day, Matías located a wholesaler and borrowed enough from Ryuzoji to buy seven gross of ramen—a thousand single-serving packages—plus a hundred plastic bowls and fifty kettles. He himself did the export paperwork, then hired a small truck from Shinheiwa to transport the goods to a shipping agent’s warehouse. Matías knew he was onto a sure thing, and Ryuzoji took his young protégé at his word. Didn’t success stories always start like this? A jubilant Matías flew back to Navidad via Guam, while the noodles and paraphernalia followed behind like poor cousins.

  One link that he carried over from this time into later life was Itsuko, now his housekeeper; at the time, however, she was working at Shinheiwa. Three years earlier, a few months before his return to Navidad, Matías overheard Tsuneko complaining that her younger sister was out of work. She was also out of luck with men, but that was nothing new. Apparently, this Itsuko was forever chasing after lovers who subsequently ran off with her savings. The upshot was that Matías, taking Tsuneko’s word for it that the girl had a high school education and office skills, asked Ryuzoji to take her on at Shinheiwa.

  However slight the expectations of her unexpected employment, Itsuko turned over a new leaf and became a dedicated worker, not even eyeing her young male colleagues—or so Tsuneko reported in her letters to Matías. Of course, the real story wasn’t so cut and dried; Itsuko still had her share of men troubles until finally, unmarriageable and unmanageable, she put love behind her. When Matías met her again on a visit to Japan in 1985—Tsuneko had died several years earlier—Itsuko was no longer broke but simply “bored to tears,” so she accepted a job at the Navidad Presidential Villa, where she showed a surprising talent for housekeeping and cooking.

  But back to the instant noodles (they should be ready by now). Once the thousand packages had safely arrived, Matías took the unprecedented step of actively promoting his product. First, he invited a few steady customers to a show-and-tell ramen tasting. The next day these regulars came back to buy some for their families, and the word slowly spread. Stock began to dwindle, sales picked up pace. Soon they’d half sold out. Matías hurriedly wired Itsuko instructing her to ship five thousand more packages. The ramen rush had begun, and Guili’s held a monopoly. No one else knew where to source the product, but in those days before competitive merchandising, no laid-back island merchant would go out of his way to hunt down what sold well elsewhere. Whereas Matías went even further and introduced the first proof-of-purchase campaign: bring ten empty wrappers and get one package free! No one on the islands had ever seen anything like it.

  The ramen sensation stirred up every household in the nation. To the islanders’ uncomplicated way of thinking, ramen for Sunday luau became their idea of bliss. Navidad had entered the age of cash commercialism, and Matías was right at the center of it all. Just what Micael Guili thought of all this, he never said, though it’s not hard to imagine. Seeing the business take off so dramatically under Matías, he must have been of two minds: pleased as the proprietor, but probably also feeling left behind, a vestige of an aging social order. Dynamic changes were overtaking society, that much he could embrace. But given his mere supporting role, all the new hubbub generated by his business surely made him feel awkward. By the time Micael died at the age of fifty-seven in 1962, he was feeling lost and betrayed; the orphan he’d taken in had walked away with everything.

  Since ancient times, spoils to the victor have always included beautiful women. In the case of Matías, the beauty was María Guili—alas, at fifty-five, an older gem. The following year, after a regulation mourning period of seven months, the widow and Matías were wed. Romance wasn’t a deciding factor. For Matías at thirty-five, upper-class María was an ideal partner for his ambitions.

  The next task for Matías the entrepreneur was to transform Guili’s General Store into Guili’s Supermarket, the first ever in Navidad. The couple
had come across this new model of retail outlet on their honeymoon in Japan, and Matías was excited; he saw the future and convinced María that here was a real investment opportunity for all the ramen earnings. He envisioned a gleaming new premises stocked ceiling high with Japanese products, maybe eventually even branching out into automobile sales. Ryuzoji’s marketing and sales empire provided a ready example he could apply to his own country—all the more brilliantly for lack of any competitors. Yes, they would be riding the wave of commercialism that was sweeping the rest of the world.

  In a tiny island nation, change always comes from outside. After Japan pulled out, and people still had no idea what the American era would bring, there was another man who was willing to wager on overseas connections. Born the noble son of a Gaspar Island clan elder, Gmataram Hogihoki Saranalak Yala Tombe Hati’ik Krami—the honorific titles go on and on, though better known as Cornelius—was heading up a not-so-covert independence movement and stoking expectations for the nation to come. Naturally he was eager to meet the man behind Navidad’s new commercial mood swing. By then, Matías Guili the tycoon had expanded his supermarket into a chain, with four stores on Gaspar, three on Baltasár, and even one on Melchor.

  American rule lasted twenty years, until 1965. It was high time for independence, both Navidad and America agreed. Situated between Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines and a major US Air Force presence on Guam, Navidad didn’t need a military installation; indeed the absence of a base here made granting independence an easy choice. Why keep pouring money into a handful of useless rocks in the middle of the Pacific, when they could give the locals control and only minimal assistance? And while Navidad drew its share of criticism for not entering into a federation with Yap and Truk and Ponape, the population of seventy thousand decided to go their own way.

  As leader of the independence movement, Cornelius sought strategic leverage away from America. He needed some country big enough to lend support, with ties to the region, though of course not part of the communist bloc. That could only have meant Japan (neither Spain nor Germany were realistic options at this late date), just as Japanese connections could only mean the Supermarketeer. Independence was practically contingent on enlisting Matías to the cause. Soon Matías found himself flying to Japan to drum up support among Ryuzoji’s political and financial contacts.

  Ryuzoji was then sitting in for an incumbent from his hometown in northern Kyushu whose sudden death left a seat open in the Japanese National Diet. He may have been only a conservative junior MP from a minor breakaway faction, but a parliamentarian’s badge still carried clout. Ryuzoji introduced Matías to Japanese power brokers for secret talks. This is the life, Matías had to think, when things go right. Thanks to Matías, the Cornelius Doctrine succeeded in playing off America and Japan.

  So when Cornelius fell ill in the middle of his second term, who was voted in as the next president? Matías Guili, architect of the pro-Japan national policy! Matías Guili, symbol of Japanese aid! Of course, there was also a matter of secret campaign funds from various well-connected sources in Japan. Ryuzoji himself died the year before, after losing a fourth term in the Upper House, but by then Matías had already found a new fundraiser in one Jitsuzo Kurokawa. A Ryuzoji introduction even closer to the underbelly of Japan and, as crooked politicians went, much more skilled at making money, Kurokawa urged Matías to marshal a private guard in order to keep a lid on dissenting voices who might question his rewriting of the Cornelius Doctrine. Kurokawa had just the man for the job. Thus Island Security was born, with detective-turned-yakuza Katsumata heading up a hundred island boys. Decked out in green guayaberas, shorts, and army caps, they prowled the islands on surveillance and crime prevention duty, leaving the existing police to direct the next-to-nonexistent traffic.

  The first achievement of the new president was to get Japan and America to review their foreign aid packages to Navidad. Let America think the Japanese no longer entertained territorial ambitions in the South Pacific, while Japan picked up a greater share of the ninety-percent US-supported island budget. He padded negotiations with all sorts of extra conditions: Japanese trading concerns should please increase their investments in island industries. And while they were at it, there were many natural scenic spots around the lagoon that might do nicely to develop into tourist venues for divers. Navidad may have lost out to Taiwan on intensive shrimp farming, but scallop exports still held promise, should anyone care to bid. A banana plantation on Baltasár Island was already bringing in a sizeable income for a Japanese produce cartel, and one of these days there’d be Arenas Orchard oranges to sell.

  Most recently Matías had his Japanese think tank weighing the relative risks and merits of realigning the dollar-pegged Navidadian currency to Japanese yen. With so many Japanese business dealings, why bother with exchange fluctuations all the time? This was just one more concrete step in his pro-Japan policy. Of course, certain pointy-headed intellectuals would grumble about Navidad forfeiting its economic independence, warning that encroaching Japanese corporations would pollute with impunity, calling it a step backwards toward colonialism. But hey, he’s the President, what harm could there be in overlooking a few alarmist critics?

  Late at night in the Western-style living room of his private quarters, Matías sits talking to Améliana over tea. There’s something he wants to ask her. The aroma of Earl Grey fills the room.

  “That Japanese guy I met with this afternoon, Suzuki—what do you make of him?” asks the President.

  Dressed in the same white blouse and mousy gray skirt from the daytime, she says nothing at first as she watches the rising wisps of fragrant steam. “That person knows very little,” she confides to the teacups. “He says ten when he means three. A bad man, but only a messenger. Hides a lot behind his story but has nothing of his own to say.”

  “So he’s just an errand boy. He hardly said a word today, but usually he’s the type who likes to talk big.”

  Améliana says nothing, then concurs. “I can see that.”

  “And what about me?”

  “I can’t say.” A firm answer. “If you speak to him directly, he changes. I can see only half—it’s all misty, like the light between night and dawn.”

  “And what you showed me yesterday at Brun Reef?”

  “What I showed you when?”

  “I tell you, I saw it myself.”

  “Yes, but the future isn’t clear. As I told you at the time.”

  “Since when have you been able to see these things?”

  “Since I was a child, every now and then.” She pauses, then speaks again. “When I was three, my mother had a jar of jam. It was from America, very precious. Once a month she bought bread for us to eat with the jam. We ate tiny dabs of it, so it lasted and lasted. The jar was up on a shelf. I saw how dangerous it was, and I said it would fall. But my mother said not to worry, the jar was far back on the shelf. The next day the jar falls and breaks. From the back of the shelf, suddenly it just falls. What could we do? We ate the jam off the floor, careful not to cut ourselves on the glass. We all thought it was funny, but my mother was heartbroken. These things happened many, many times.”

  “Where were you born?”

  “In Ku’uda, on Melchor.”

  “Never been there, but I know what they say. That there are many people with special powers like yours from there.”

  “Yes. One time, I see a storm coming, so we all head for the hills. The storm comes, destroys all our houses, but no one was hurt.”

  “Were your parents pleased?”

  “No, they scolded me.”

  “Why’s that?” Matías asks, leaning forward.

  “They said things happen because you say they will. You make the jar fall, you make the storm come!”

  “Parents would think that, wouldn’t they. Then what?”

  “I tried to stop, but som
etimes I just had to speak. And each time, they scolded me. When I said a friend would get hurt and it really happened, they said I mustn’t play with my friends anymore, or the other parents would blame them. They called me a bad luck child.”

  “You never saw any good things?”

  “Never. Only bad things.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” mumbles the President, trying to imagine a life of constant calamities.

  “…but nothing about myself, so I was never afraid. Sometimes I hurt myself, but I never knew until it happened. Because if I changed what was coming, made everything come out happy, I’d become a different person.”

  “How would that change you?”

  “I’d lose my foresight. I’d become an ordinary girl.”

  “That quickly? Overnight?”

  “I don’t know, but soon enough.”

  “So you were told not to play with the other kids and you played all alone.”

  “I have three brothers and four boy cousins. I have girl cousins too, but I never played with them.”

  “Only with the boys?”

  “Yes. We went up in the hills. Or sometimes we went walking on the sea.”

  “You did what?”

  “Only when no one was watching. Sometimes we flew too, but that’s dangerous. Because if someone sees you from below, you fall. Once a boy on a cliff saw us out on the sea and we sank. We all swam back laughing. But the boy never told on us. We made him doubt his own eyes and think we were swimming all along.”

  “Can’t swim if you fall from the air, though.”