The Journey Prize Stories 21

by Various

  Lost and then found. I could scarcely believe my eyes.

  We were eating dinner in front of the television when I felt my throat stiffen. “I knew her,” I whispered hoarsely ten minutes into what promised to be lengthy coverage of the startling discoveries.

  “Who?” my husband, Masayuki, asked.

  “One of the abductees they’re talking about. One of the girls who was taken to North Korea. Sayuri Yamazaki. We went to high school together.”

  “You’re kidding.” Sayuri’s photograph appeared on the screen again. “You never told me anything so dramatic happened at your school.”

  “At the time we didn’t know things like that went on. It was like she vanished into the air.”

  “Well, the whole thing is unbelievable.” Masayuki stabbed his chopsticks in the air. “If she was kidnapped while walking on the beach, like they say, you’d think someone would have noticed something. A young girl being dragged away like that.”

  “We didn’t know. Everyone thought she ran away.”

  “I wonder why they picked her?”

  “I don’t know.” I shivered.

  “Poor girl was in the wrong place at the wrong time, I guess.” Masayuki answered his own question. “Good thing you weren’t walking on the beach then. That could have been you.”

  My husband turned toward our son and suddenly made a silly swooping movement with his arms like a large crow flapping its wings. “Snatched by the North Koreans. What do you think of that, Tatsuo? That could have been your mother.”

  My teenage son’s head was bent over his food and his long bangs covered half his face. “So when was all that?” he mumbled without looking up.

  “Many years before you were born,” I said. “All that time we never knew what had happened to her.”

  For a long time after Sayuri vanished, I would go after school to my secret spot, a hidden cove almost a kilometre up the coast from the main harbour. Sometimes I would stay for over an hour just staring out at the sea. At the thick waves slicing up and down, at the thin grey line where water met sky at a distant horizon. What drew me to do this was an utter mystery. Back then, none of us in our wildest dreams could have imagined that Sayuri had been taken across the Sea of Japan, spirited away like in a spy novel. To think about it now gave me a queasy feeling: what if I had been looking in the precise direction where she stood on a distant shore? What if she too had been staring back across the same expanse of sea? Would she, I wanted to know, have been looking for me?

  At the time, though, I was only fifteen, and if you had asked me then why I came to this spot, why I stood for hours looking at the sea, I could not have told you. And I would not have been lying or pretending. All I knew was that something about the dark swells of water made my insides tighten in a way that was both strange and pleasurable. Sometimes I thought I saw Sayuri’s face rise in the curling water. Floating face up, her eyes closed, the trace of a smile on her lips. Could she have fallen in, I would wonder, or might she have jumped? I thought of how fish and other creatures would swim so close they could press their smooth oily bodies against her.

  We saw a lot of each other that year, the year she disappeared. Not only were we in the same class, we both played on the school’s junior volleyball team. Our new gym teacher, Suzuki sensei, who doubled as our volleyball coach, was young and pretty and full of great hopes for us. We really weren’t that good, but Suzuki sensei wanted us to aim for the regional volleyball championships, and her enthusiasm was so infectious and our desire to please her so strong that we thought nothing of practising every day after school and even on weekends. We were always in motion, our running shoes squeaking high-pitched on the dark wood floors, always rushing past each other in a blur. Then Sayuri vanished and a new stillness took over me. Even as I bounced on the court amid all the shouts and noise, I felt on the verge of a great mute void. Just ahead a cliff to plunge over, a waterfall frozen mid-fall.

  When Sayuri disappeared, there were lots of stories. One rumour circulating through our school was that she had run away with an older man she’d met in a bar. He’d forced her to go with him to Tokyo where he made her work as a sex slave in his Shinjuku nightclubs.

  Another rumour was that Sayuri had a secret boyfriend and they’d run off together. We pictured her boyfriend as handsome and tough, the type who wouldn’t take no for an answer. He would ride a motorcycle bare-headed, the wind driving more wildness down into his skull, the wind pummelling Sayuri’s shoulders and whipping her hair and skirt into a passionate frenzy. We imagined her living a new grown-up life somewhere else, somewhere far away. It sounded good, and Hiroko and Emi said they wished they could live like that. If they had the chance, they said, they’d like to get out of this dull town. They’d run away, too.

  We came up with these stories, I suppose, because we couldn’t – refused to – imagine her dead.

  The police asked to interview each of us on the volleyball team. First they talked to us as a group and explained the importance of even the most insignificant detail about Sayuri. Anything at all might serve as a clue. Then they called us one by one for questioning. I was the last. I was taken down a long corridor and ushered into a small, beige, windowless room. But before I reached the chair I was to sit in, my knees suddenly buckled, my head spun blackness, and I sank to the floor. When I opened my eyes there were two sturdy police officers, one male and one female, hovering over me.

  “She’s all right.” The man’s voice sounded relieved. “She’s all right,” he repeated. “Get her some water.”

  They began their questioning, but I had nothing to tell them. The last time I had seen Sayuri was at the volleyball game. No, she hadn’t seemed any different. No, I didn’t know if she had a boyfriend. No, I’d never seen her with a boy.

  “Come on, now.” The policeman leaned forward across the table and smiled slyly. His front teeth were yellow and one was badly chipped. “I bet you and Sayuri talked about boys. All girls do. Which ones you like, which ones you don’t.”

  I shook my head and stared at the tabletop. His breath smelled of stale cigarettes and peppermint.

  How could a girl just disappear without a trace? A girl with homework to do, volleyball practice, piano lessons. The stories my classmates came up with to explain Sayuri’s vanishing got wilder and more absurd. Someone started a rumour that she had been pregnant with the music teacher Mr. Yamada’s baby.

  If you’d seen Mr. Yamada you would realize how ridiculous this idea was. He looked like a frog, short and bald, with long dangly arms and a squashed-in kind of face.

  The families of the abductees were on television almost every day. Sayuri’s parents appeared with the mothers and fathers of the other missing young people. They said they had never given up hope that Sayuri would be found, they had always known she hadn’t run away on her own. They joined the other parents’ pleas to the North Korean government: Give our daughter back. Give Sayuri her freedom, and let her come home.

  I could barely recognize Sayuri’s father. His once thick hair had receded to reveal a high, bony forehead, and a nimbus of grey tufts rose behind his ears like fine bonito shavings. Sayuri’s mother, on the other hand, wore her hair in exactly the same style as I remembered from back then. It was as black as ever but much thinner, so thin that as she sat with her head bent forward, I could see patches of pale scalp between the stiff curls.

  On an interview program, Sayuri’s mother burst into tears after she was asked what she would do if it turned out that her daughter was no longer alive. The camera pushed closer, hovering over the top of her head, then swinging down to her lap to show the shredded ball of tissue clutched in her hands. Understandable, Mrs. Yamazaki, such terrible stress, dredging up powerful emotions, the talk show host’s lilting voice rose over the hiccupping of sobs.

  Sayuri’s mother looked so familiar and yet so different. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first and then I realized that it wasn’t simply that she had aged – somehow she had shrun
k, too. She reminded me of a dry leaf that has begun to curl up at the edges, pulling tighter and tighter into itself.

  She wasn’t like this when I was young. Unlike my mother and the mothers of all my friends who wore baggy pants and cheap polyester tops, Sayuri’s mother dressed in tailored skirts and crisply ironed blouses. Her hair was always set just so. Sayuri and her family had moved to our town less than a year before she disappeared. Shortly after their arrival, my mother pronounced Mrs. Yamazaki a snob. Sayuri’s father, who had been transferred here to manage the local bank, wore a navy suit and white shirt, his hands were smooth and clean. My father was a fisherman. I worried that the odour of dead fish filled the very air I breathed at home, and that Sayuri’s mother could smell it on me. Sometimes I could swear that she wrinkled her nose when I came too close.

  Sayuri was the opposite of her small-boned, compact mother. She was tall for a Japanese girl, and she had a loose-limbed gawkiness that I now recognize was the result of a sudden growth spurt. It was as if her body hadn’t quite caught up with her. People who saw her from a distance always assumed she was much older than she was because of her height, and it was only when you got up close that you could see she was just a teenage girl with thick unplucked eyebrows and a little gap between her front teeth. In class I sat one row over and two seats behind Sayuri, a good vantage point for observing her. She had a big dimple on her left cheek and I used to watch the flesh of her smooth skin fold and dip every time she smiled or sucked on the end of her pencil. Sometimes she giggled with Hiroko or Keiko, who sat on either side of her. Sometimes she leaned forward and whispered into Yoshiko’s ear. Occasionally she turned around to look at me. Usually it’s hard to be the new student at school, but Sayuri never had any problem. Everyone wanted to be her friend.

  When Sayuri tried out for the volleyball team, there was no question she would be accepted. At first she looked a bit clumsy to me, but she quickly gained confidence and her long arms and legs gave her a clear advantage on the court. Suzuki sensei’s delight in her newest recruit was unmistakable. This year, for sure, we can aim for the regionals, Suzuki sensei kept repeating.

  It was Tatsuo who made me look for my high-school yearbook. At first I tried to ignore him, but he was so persistent I finally gave in and dug out the boxes I kept in storage. The yearbook was at the bottom of the last box, wrapped in tissue paper to protect its white leather cover. I could feel my heart tapping lightly under my ribcage as I turned the pages until I came to the picture of our volleyball team.

  “Well,” Tatsuo paused.

  “Can you find me?”

  After a moment he wrinkled his brow and shook his head.

  “No? I’m this one,” I said, pointing to my broad, serious-looking face. We were wearing gym shorts and school T-shirts. Our exposed white thighs gleamed like smooth rice cakes.

  “Which one is the spy?” Tatsuo asked.

  “What do you mean spy? Sayuri?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s not a spy,” I said sharply. “She was kidnapped.”

  Tatsuo shrugged. “Whatever you say. But don’t you think the whole thing sounds like it’s made up? Like a movie.”

  I didn’t say anything even though I agreed. It was like a movie, a bad, stupid movie.

  “This is Sayuri,” I said tapping my index finger on the page. “She’s here.” Sayuri was in the middle of the back row, the tallest girl on the team. The light of the camera flash had struck her forehead at a funny angle, casting a luminous glow over her face and throwing the girls next to her into shadow. Suzuki sensei stood behind our team, her head peering over Sayuri’s shoulder, close enough to rest her chin on Sayuri’s collar. I’d forgotten how young our teacher had been, how young all of us were then.

  Tatsuo and I looked at the photograph in silence.

  “If I suddenly disappeared, what would you do?” he said.

  “What are you talking about? I’d look for you. I’d search high and low till I found you.”

  “No, I mean, if I disappeared for good. Like her.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Tatsuo flipped back and forth through the yearbook, stopping every so often to examine a photo or caption. Finally he handed it back to me. “How come you never looked for her?”

  “I did. We all did.” A burning sensation rose in my chest, like a lump of something hot was struggling to get out. “We looked all over but we couldn’t find her.”

  The day before Sayuri disappeared, we played against Nishiwaki High. It was just an ordinary intercollegiate game, but lately whenever we played any other team, Suzuki sensei would get quite worked up. She made me nervous with all her exhortations. “Remember, girls, we’re going for the regionals!” Her cheeks and forehead would glow and her short, wiry hair would stick up like it was charged with electricity. That day was no exception.

  Our opponents arrived by bus before noon. In the previous season, Nishiwaki High had been ranked in the bottom quarter of the league, so we weren’t expecting too much; and in fact they looked like typical farm girls, short and stocky with broad shoulders, sunburned necks, and thick bowed legs. Suzuki sensei greeted them politely, but as soon as they were out of sight she turned around, gave us a big grin, and made a complicated hand signal as if to say we had this game in the bag. I remembered how Sayuri smiled back at her.

  The Nishiwaki girls, however, were by no means as clumsy as they looked. They moved with remarkable speed and co-ordination like one large, nimble spider. It was as if they had spread an invisible net on their side of the court that prevented every ball that came their way from touching the ground. We began making mistakes, and I could feel my arms ache with each volley. Then Sayuri fell. She stumbled as she ran to make a save, and for a few seconds she lay face down on the floor. Suzuki sensei rushed to her side, but Sayuri got up by herself and waved her away. “Enough,” I heard Sayuri mutter under her breath. Suzuki sensei’s face turned as dark as red bean paste, but she didn’t say anything.

  Needless to say, we didn’t win, and in the locker room afterwards, hardly anyone said a word. Suzuki sensei came in briefly and said the usual. How we’d done our best, how it was just a game.

  We showered quickly and changed in silence. “Good try!” Tomoko shouted with fake cheeriness when she left. The other girls didn’t say anything, though, not even goodbye. I had almost finished changing when I realized that I hadn’t seen Sayuri. I paused and heard the sound of falling water; someone was still in the shower. To save money, our school had very small hot water tanks, so by now I was sure there was no warm water left at all.

  I went back into the shower area and found Sayuri in the last stall, crouched on her haunches in the corner. Her head was between her knees, her thin shoulders shaking. Whether she was shivering or crying, I wasn’t sure. I reached over and turned off the water. It was cold as ice.

  “Hey,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  Sayuri didn’t look up. She made a faint squeaking sound like a mouse.

  “You’re not thinking about the game, are you?” She continued looking down.

  “It was just a stupid game. It doesn’t even count for that much.” I tried again. “It’s not Suzuki sensei, is it?” She shook her head violently.

  “Honest?” I looked at Sayuri’s spine, its small pointy knobs, a delicate track from her neck down to her bum.

  “You’d better get up,” I finally said. I moved directly in front of her and reached down to grab her left arm. It felt soft and slippery. That was when I noticed the blood. There was a thin pink trickle that slithered down her thigh, across her feet and into the drain. At first I thought it was her period, then I realized that the blood was coming from her hand – she had torn the nail right off her middle finger. The spongy tissue at the tip looked like a squashed tomato.

  “You should go to a doctor,” I said. “Does it hurt much? Did you show Suzuki sensei?”

  “It’s my punishment,” she mumbled, “my shame.”


  “Get up,” I said. “You’re going to make yourself sick.”

  I put my hands in her armpits and pulled. Sayuri was as limp as a wet noodle and it took quite a bit of work to get her to her feet. As soon as I did, she refused to stand up straight and toppled toward me.

  “Whoa, stand up, would you.”

  Sayuri was a full head and a half taller, so when she flopped against me it was all I could do to keep from falling backwards. We stood in this awkward embrace for a couple of minutes, and I held my hand on her back to steady her. I could feel her soft, wet, barely-risen breasts through my blouse. Her shoulder was against my face and I could see little goosebumps on her pale flesh.

  “I’ll help you,” I murmured, “I’ll bandage your finger.” To my own surprise, I then pressed my lips against her shoulder and flicked the tip of my tongue over her skin. She tasted of soap.

  Sayuri pulled back. She looked me straight in the eye, a dark searching stare that might have been asking if I was making fun of her. Then she scrunched her eyes shut, bent forward, and pushed her lips against mine. I think I was supposed to shut my eyes, too, but I didn’t have time to react. Her lips were very cold and a bit rubbery.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Sayuri said abruptly. “I’m freezing.”

  Before she turned her face away, I thought I saw a faint smile on her lips. It pleased me, but it also confused me.

  I wanted to explain to Sayuri that what I’d done to her was not a kiss. Not a real kiss, not like the way people were supposed to kiss. What had happened between us was too fast, too haphazard to count. But I didn’t say a word. By the time we’d finished dressing, I even began to think that maybe I’d imagined the whole incident.

  Sayuri put on her clothes and I wrapped a clean handkerchief around her finger and tied the corners tightly so it wouldn’t fall off. I changed my blouse because it had become so wet. As I didn’t have a spare set of clothing, I ended up putting my gym top back on. My skirt was damp, too, but I figured it would dry in the air on the way home.