Country of Origin

by Don Lee

  The next Sunday, early in the morning, he climbed the stairs of the adjoining building and found a spot on a walkway where he had a vantage of No. 501. Foolishly he didn’t bring anything to read, or to eat, or to drink, and once in a while he needed to go to the bathroom, so there were times, as he went back and forth to his apartment, when his neighbors could have ducked out on him. He waited all day, a deadly boring stakeout, during which he had the opportunity to consider many things, including the fact that Yumiko had been his last lover, so, unbelievably, it had been fourteen years since he had had sex. Finally, at sunset, he saw who it was who was living above him, making all that noise, fucking and dancing. It was a woman—young, skinny, stylishly dressed, with puffed and layered chapatsu hair. It was Miss Saotome. That was why her phone number had been changed. She had moved into No. 501.

  He watched her take the elevator down just one floor to the fourth floor, his floor, and he could hear the elevator ding all the way from the adjoining building. He saw her slip something under an apartment door, his door. After she left, Kenzo ran down the stairs of the adjacent building and up the stairs of his apartment building. Under his door, he found a namecard: “Keiko Saotome,” it said. “Romance Consultant,” and underneath, in English, “Vital Energy Health Prana Renew.”

  A FEW evenings later, Kenzo stood outside on his apartment walkway with a bundle of dried reeds. It was Bon, the Buddhist Festival of the Dead, in Tokyo. By tradition, you were supposed to return to your hometown for Bon, pay your respects at the family grave, then go to the family house with your relatives and reunite with the spirits of your deceased ancestors. But Kenzo never went back to his hometown of Kobe anymore. Few of his relatives were still in the city, the family home had been sold, and the crowds on the trains and planes and roadways made the trip excruciating.

  Kenzo believed in traditions, however. As a small compensatory gesture, he lit his bundle of reeds on the walkway and let them burn for a few minutes—a mukaebi, a welcoming fire. Then he went inside his apartment and waited for the arrival of the souls of the dead.

  FOUR

  EVERYTHING WENT wrong from the beginning. The flight on March 13 from San Francisco to Tokyo had been interminable, fourteen hours, and then at Narita Airport, bleary-eyed and jet-lagged, Lisa Countryman said the wrong thing to the immigration official. He asked where she would be staying in Japan, and she forgot. She had been told that specifying a gaijin house was a dead giveaway she planned to work illegally in the country, and she had written the name of a modest hotel on the entry card, but she had forgotten its name.

  They took her to a side room, where two immigration officials kept asking her, “What purpose you come to Japan?” and she kept repeating, “Vacation. Tourist,” until at last she remembered the name of the hotel, and they let her go to baggage claim, where she waited forty-five minutes, only to glean that her two suitcases were missing.

  She caught a bus to Tokyo Station, and by then it was past two in the morning and the trains and subways had stopped. She had to flag down a taxi, and the driver got lost going to the Friendship Guest Home in Meguro. When they finally found it and she trudged inside, exhausted, just wanting to collapse into a bed and sleep, no one was there to greet her. Lisa didn’t know which room was hers. She tried to fall asleep on a frayed couch in the lounge, huddling underneath her coat, but people—drunk, cavorting—kept banging into the house into the wee hours, and then soon after daybreak another crew of residents awoke and began kicking around the kitchen.

  Lisa forced herself to get up—at least she could find out from the early birds where the house manager was—but by then it was too late. Everyone had already left for work. She went into one of the bathrooms, took a shower, using someone’s shampoo and soap, and then dried herself with someone’s towel, which reeked, and then, reluctantly, brushed her teeth with someone’s nubby toothbrush, and then dressed again in the same clothes she’d worn for twenty-nine straight hours.

  From the pay phone in the hallway, she called the airlines, who told her that her suitcases were presently in Minneapolis, but should be delivered within forty-eight hours.

  She took a walk around the neighborhood, strolling down winding, narrow back streets that could barely accommodate the widths of cars, and then ventured out to the main boulevards, which were not that different from avenues in any other big city, buildings and traffic and stores, all homogenized and sanitized and Americanized, with more Kentucky Fried Chickens and McDonald’s than she could count. Yet she was exhilarated. She could read the kanji and hiragana on signs. She could converse with shopkeepers. All the Japanese classes she had taken were no longer abstractions. It seemed a miracle, almost a transmigration. She was actually in Japan.

  Despite her excitement, jet lag overcame her, and she returned to the gaijin house and took a long nap on the couch, a deep, dreamless, black slumber. It was still daylight when she awoke, and a man was staring at her. He was sitting in a chair opposite the couch, eating a bowl of cereal. He was around thirty, she guessed, with a ruddy face and long brown hair parted in the middle.

  “Hello,” he said. British accent.

  “Hello.”

  “What’s your name?”

  She told him, and then asked, “Yours?”

  “Tony Somers,” he said.

  The possessive TS, she thought. In the bathroom, several ablutionary items had been labeled with pieces of paper and tape, marked “TS” or, more insistently, “Hands Off!—TS!” She had used TS’s shampoo and conditioner—nice, sweet-smelling, expensive stuff. He clearly had a thing for his hair, which she had to admit was in grand shape, lots of body and shine.

  “You’re American?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Native American?”

  “What?”

  “You got a little of that Rita Coolidge thing going for you. What are you? Part Cherokee?”

  “Sure,” Lisa said, irritated. Whatever floated his boat. It was easier not to argue. “Do you know where the house manager is?”

  “Quit. Had a bit of a nervous breakdown. Come on, I’ll show you what’s free.”

  He had her follow him upstairs, and he slid open the doors to two empty rooms, telling her to take her pick. The owner, Takagi, would probably be by later that night to collect her rent. In the meantime, was she hungry? Did she want to join him for a bite?

  He took her to a restaurant called Tonki’s near Meguro Station, a cheap, popular tonkatsu place with a line of customers waiting on the staircase, from which they could watch cooks in the open kitchen, dipping the pork cutlets in batter and flour. The tonkatsu came with shredded cabbage and rice and miso, all for nine hundred yen, and it was delicious. Lisa was tempted to have another plate, but Tony Somers was filling her up with beer, ordering bottle after bottle.

  He was trying hard to chat her up. He told her he was from Leeds, and he was in Tokyo freelancing as a computer programmer for buckets of yen, and also, he said, picking up occasional jobs as a model, which Lisa found difficult to swallow, since he was not exactly good-looking. And he had a nasty smell—what was that?—and then she remembered a bottle of cologne—no, it had been a can, an aerosol can—in the bathroom labeled “TS.” How could someone so particular about his hair be so cheap with his cologne? Really, though, she was too tired and unattracted to him to care. She nodded and smiled while he chattered away, and after they paid the check, she asked to go back to the gaijin house.

  Once there, they ran into Teiji Takagi, the owner, who was jovial and enterprising. For a small deposit and a monthly service fee, he lent her a towel and freshly laundered sheets and a comforter for her futon. When he noticed she didn’t have any bags, he unlocked a closet and let her select a few items of clothing from the stacks of neatly folded garments on the shelves—discards from previous tenants, evidently—selling them to Lisa at bargain-basement prices. His own little thrift shop.

  She washed up in the bathroom—at least she had been able to buy a toothbru
sh and paste and shampoo during her morning walk—and although it was early still, not yet nine o’clock, she went to her room and laid out her bedding. The tatami room was ridiculously small, but she was happy to be settled finally, thinking that maybe things would work out for her in Japan, maybe she would find what she came for, and she slept soundly for the next fifteen hours.

  THE STOREFRONT for Rocket America was plastered with posters of young Japanese tourists at famous US landmarks: Waikiki Beach, the Golden Gate Bridge, Mount Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty. It looked very much like a travel agency, which was not accidental, Lisa soon discovered.

  On the Monday after her arrival, she reported to the school director, Seiji Waru, who openly appraised her body, staring at her breasts and legs. “You’ll do very well here, I think,” he said. “You’ll be very popular.”

  She gave him a copy of her passport, her college diploma, her transcripts, and two passport-size photos—all the things the recruiter in California had told her to bring. Seiji Waru would take the documents to the Immigration Bureau and sponsor her application for a work visa. In about three weeks, Waru told Lisa, her Certificate of Eligibility would be approved, and then she could take the weekend ferry from Fukuoka to Pusan, South Korea. This was the process, as silly as it seemed. Companies didn’t want to go through the visa application procedure until potential employees were actually in the country, but once foreign workers were in Japan on a tourist visa, they had to leave to a Japanese consulate in a third country to get a work visa issued.

  They each signed two copies of her employment contract, and then Waru told her she would start teaching the next morning.

  “But I don’t have my visa,” she said.

  “Oh, that’s just a formality,” he said. “We do it all the time. We just call it training. You’re training. No one will be the wiser. Tell me, though, do you have any shorter skirts?”

  She got the gist of Rocket America’s rinky-dink operations soon enough. The school was a scam. Whenever anyone wandered into Rocket America, usually to inquire about round-trip airfares and package deals, the poor sap was seated at one of the two front desks and subjected to a hard-core two-hour sales pitch from Seiji Waru or his assistant. They tried to get people to buy as many lesson tickets in advance as possible, and one of their tactics was to offer an introductory course at a discount. Lisa and another gaijin girl, a leggy American blonde named Harper Boyd, taught these introductory lessons, which amounted to nothing more than following a series of exercises from an expensive textbook, practicing tourist scenarios at airports, hotels, stores, and restaurants. Harper Boyd was some sort of ringer, brought in before the real term began. She was indifferent toward Lisa, not saying a word, really, other than suggesting that she tone down her Japanese. Lisa began to understand that her Japanese wasn’t as good as she had believed, that it sounded peculiar—an amalgam of stiff college Japanese and baby talk from when she was four, the last time she was in Japan. Owing to politeness, no one thus far had corrected her. Anyway, Harper Boyd said, Lisa didn’t want the students to think she was a non-native English speaker, to whom they would be unwittingly reassigned once the introductory period was completed, once they had bought six months of lesson tickets. At that point, they would likely be given a Malaysian, Filipino, or Hindi teacher, someone who should have been enrolled in concomitant ESL courses. The old bait and switch. If students quit at that point, it was fine with Seiji Waru. He wanted people to quit. The lesson tickets were nonrefundable.

  For three weeks, Lisa played along, teaching her classes. As unnecessary as any experience proved to be, she was actually a good instructor, having run several discussion sections of her own as a TA at Berkeley, where she was a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology. She was in Tokyo—at least this was what she told people—to do research for her dissertation, which didn’t quite have a topic yet, something or another about Japan as a patriarchal society and the subjugation of women, the dismissal of individual worth over the cohesion and homogeneity of the group, the sad, brutal reign of conformity.

  She didn’t make any friends at Rocket America, and she stuck to herself at the gaijin house, where she remained one of the few women. She had to get out of there soon. Teiji Takagi had yet to hire another house manager, and the place was getting dirtier and more chaotic by the minute. Plus, Tony Somers had not been so paranoid after all with his little labels. People were always pilfering her toiletries in the bathroom and her food in the kitchen.

  Walking around Tokyo was her only recreation, trying to become familiar with the city and its rhythms, taking photographs of what she found odd and exceptional. Ironically, what ended up drawing her eye were phrases of English—or approximations of English, hilariously mangled snatches of near-English, which gaijin called Engrish. They were everywhere. On billboards, clothing, vending machines. Slogans with wonderfully incoherent syntax, garbled spellings, and inadvertent double entendres. Lisa began a photo collection: Spanking by the Sea (a pencil case). Snot House (a T-shirt). Hide with Spread Beaver (a band name). Boneractive Wear (a store name). Once in a while, Lisa found not just phrases but whole paragraphs that were strangely profound: Frais Espece. Formidable the rising ear. Be indignant. Perplexity. Be amazed (a denim jacket). As you, who has everyday vivify like a new air of a new epock. On your evertime of rest, let’s stay by you (a bakery wrapper). Floated on the water. This form visited at the time of sleep, with one drop of a sweet tear, one day decaying into the soil (a postcard).

  She was often moved by these poetic pronouncements. Lately she had become perplexingly maudlin, given to sudden soil-decaying tears, reduced to the snot house, and as the cherry trees bloomed, the news showing maps of the blossoms approaching from the south like foliage, she succumbed to the Japanese proclivity for melancholia—Join Melon Collie (a pet store)—as they both celebrated and mourned the fragility of the flowers, their temporality. The Japanese believed in mono no aware, the essential sadness of things—that was how they defined their national character—and it made Lisa even more lonely. But she told herself she was used to loneliness. Besides, she wasn’t in Japan to have a good time. She had work to do.

  SHE CAUGHT the Keihin-Tohoku Line at Shinagawa and rode the train southwest to Yokohama. From the station, she took a taxi to the main gate of the Navy base, where she was met by the Public Affairs officer, a balding black man in his thirties. He asked her to fill out several visitor forms, and then put her in his car and drove her to North Pier.

  “I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed,” he told her. “All the port operations were handed over to the Army in 1978.”

  Lisa’s father, Richard Countryman, had worked for the Navy’s MSTS, the Military Sea Transportation Service. While stationed in Yokohama, he had been a logistics supply management specialist, responsible for the flow of cargo, troops, and equipment through the port. North Pier had been a key hub for supplies to Korea and then later to Vietnam.

  They didn’t bother getting out of the car at North Pier. The officer—his name was Omar Johnson—drove slowly through the installation, passing cargo ships, loading docks, cranes, petroleum tanks, warehouses, stacks of containers. Not much to see. Then he swung the car around and took them on a tour of the Navy base. “Everything’s really at Yokosuka now,” Omar said. “The Yokohama detachment’s just housing. You remember where you used to live?”

  She looked at him blankly.

  “Negishi? Area Two? Bayside Courts?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How old were you when you left?”

  “I’d just turned four.”

  “This is your first time back to Japan?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So nothing looks familiar.”

  “Not really.”

  They rode by houses and barracks, the base exchange, commissary, and cafeteria. They rode by the chapel, golf course, and baseball field, the bowling alley, library, and garage. Omar kept up a running patter on the landmarks: Lou Gehrig Sta
dium, the Bluffs, Bayview, Fire Engine Hill, Byrd Elementary. Nothing rang a bell. They were just names to Lisa—meaningless, a blur.

  “You look sad,” Omar said. “Don’t be sad. I see this all the time. You’re feeling a little lost these days. You were hoping, since you were born here, that visiting would give you a little insight, the whole Roots, Kunta Kinte thing. But the problem is you’re a Navy brat, a Third Culture Kid. Every base was exactly like the last one. Like I said, I see it a lot. It’s a common syndrome.”

  She stared at him. “What you’re saying, then, is I’m a cliché.”

  “I’m sorry,” Omar said, smiling. “I didn’t mean to be presumptuous. Have you eaten lunch yet? There’s actually a fantastic Chinatown here. My treat.”

  Lisa looked him over. He was average height, average weight, his only distinctive feature a regal ridge, like the top of a pitched roof, running down the middle of his bald head. She did find him presumptuous. He knew nothing about her, why she had come to Japan, why she was in Yokohama.

  “Are you married?” she asked. She hadn’t had any boyfriends in high school, and her relationships at university had been short and intermittent. Only recently, venturing outside academe, had she begun to attract the attention of older men, and she wasn’t accustomed to it yet, suspicious of their intentions. It made her nervous and self-conscious, wary—as she had been all her life—of betrayal.

  Omar kept smiling. “No,” he said, “I’m not married.”

  “Oh.”

  “You almost sound disappointed.”

  “Are you just being friendly, or are you asking me out?”

  “I guess I’m asking you out.”