Country of Origin

by Don Lee

  “Why?”

  “What?”

  “Why do you want to go out with me?”

  He laughed helplessly. “Well, I think you’re pretty. I think you’re interesting.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m a blank page. You said so yourself. You said I don’t know who I am. You said I’m lost, and I’m sad. By deduction, the only reason you’d want to go out with me is out of pity or exploitation.”

  “I don’t think that’s what I said. That’s not what I meant, in any case. Is it because I’m black?”

  Lisa was taken aback. “I’m part black,” she said, depressed he couldn’t tell.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d never have guessed.”

  “My mother was Japanese.”

  “I’d never have guessed that, either.”

  “Now you’re the one who sounds disappointed,” she said.

  “No, of course not.”

  “I need to get back to Tokyo,” she told him.

  The conversation left her quite sad. She was never black enough, or Oriental enough, or white enough, and everyone always felt deceived if she didn’t announce her ethnic taxonomy immediately upon meeting them, as if not doing so were a calculated sin of omission, as if she were trying to pass. But just as often, when she did claim racial solidarity with a group, people didn’t believe her, suspecting she was merely trying to appropriate the radical-chic color of the month.

  For a while on the Berkeley campus, some biracial student activists had campaigned for miscegenation as the country’s only hope and, with great merriment, had handed out leaflets that crooned “Cross-Fuck for a Better World!” They could joke, because they were blessed. They at least looked like they were mixed. They were identifiable as something. They could seek membership in a tribe. Multiple tribes. Lisa—appearing absent of color—was excluded from even applying.

  SEIJI WARU called Lisa into his office. Her Certificate of Eligibility had finally been processed, and she could go to Pusan anytime to obtain her work visa, but they had had to make a few small, last-minute changes to her employment contract.

  “This is very difficult for me to admit,” he told her, “but the school is in a little money trouble. A temporary situation, I’m hoping, but it was necessary to cut some corners.”

  Lisa read the amended one-year contract. Waru had simply stapled the original last page with their signatures to two revised pages, but all three pages had now been stamped by the Immigration Bureau and therefore were unalterable. The number of hours per week she was guaranteed and her hourly wage had been reduced, and she was prohibited from taking on private students or any other part-time teaching work.

  “Are you joking?” Lisa said.

  “I hope you will appreciate the delicacy of the—”

  “You can’t get away with this.”

  “We really had no choice in the matter.”

  “I quit,” Lisa said. “Effective immediately.”

  “Oh, I don’t think you want to do that,” Waru said. “The hiring season is over. All the schools have already started. It would be very difficult to find another position, you see.”

  He was probably right, which infuriated her even more. She desperately needed money. “I want to get paid for the classes I taught.”

  “Unfortunately you just missed the monthly pay cycle. If you continue, you’ll be fully compensated with the next pay cycle.”

  “I’ll go to the authorities.”

  “No, you won’t. You’ve been working without a visa. You’ll be deported. And if you think the authorities will side with you over me, you don’t know Japan at all.”

  Lisa knew he was right about this, too, but she couldn’t accept this, being trapped, manipulated, oh, the humiliation, and she said, “Fuck”—she held up the Certificate of Eligibility and tore it in half—“you”—and then she ripped the employment contract in half. It was the wrong thing to do, and it was irrevocable, but if nothing else, she could always be counted on, at every given opportunity, to do exactly the wrong thing.

  SHE WANTED to go out. She wanted to get drunk. She saw Tony Somers at the gaijin house, and asked if he wanted to accompany her.

  “You’ll have to twist my arm,” he said.

  He took her to Henry Africa’s, across the street from the Roi Building in Roppongi. It was a fern bar with a brass rail and a toy train that revolved on tracks near the ceiling, and it was filled with gaijin, excepting the odd pairs of Japanese girls.

  “Gaijin groupies,” Tony said.

  “What?”

  “It’s a status symbol for Japanese girls to fuck a gaijin. You can be a complete wanker at home, but here, as long as you’re a gaijin, you’re a god.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You know this for a fact?”

  “Bloody right. I’m a fucking god.”

  “I’m going to need more drinks,” Lisa said.

  After several more rounds, he convinced her to go to a disco nearby called Fou-Fou, a little hothouse painted all black with flashing strobes and a pumping bass, and she actually had fun there, dancing with Tony, high on the booze, the beat, momentarily released from her panic over how she would make enough money to stay in Japan, which led with some sort of far-fetched logic to lying in her room in the gaijin house with Tony on top of her, his mouth in a slobbering suction lock over hers, his hands jammed up the back of her shirt, furiously trying to unclasp her bra.

  “Need some help there?” Lisa asked.

  Grunting from the effort, he kept tugging and pulling.

  “Are you sure you’ve done this before?” she laughed.

  He gave up on undressing her and began undressing himself.

  “So serious,” she said. “Talk to me. Say something sweet.”

  “Shut up,” he told her.

  “ ‘Shut up’?”

  He dropped his pants and yanked down his underwear, and the sight made her gasp. “Oh, my,” she said. “What is that?” It was the strangest-looking erection she had ever seen, about eight inches long but only the width of a finger, sloped like a fillet knife, and pink, preternaturally smooth, nary a wrinkle or hair. “Is that human?” Lisa asked. “Did you get that in a transplant?”

  Immediately his erection wilted. “Fucking slag,” he said, slipping his pants back on.

  “Oh, come on, I’m sorry,” she said. “That was mean of me. I apologize. Come here. Just be sure to turn off the lights,” she giggled.

  “You’re part wog or Paki, aren’t you? Fucking wog,” he said. “You piece of shit. You goddamn Paki tom.”

  “Hey,” she said.

  With difficulty, he stood up, brushed back his hair, and then spat at her, spray and spittle landing on her comforter and clothes and a little on her right chin.

  “Hey!” she said.

  He stumbled out into the hallway, bumped into the walls, and slammed shut the door to his room.

  She had to get out of here. Find somewhere else to live. She went into the bathroom and washed her face. What was she going to do? she wondered. Where was she going to live? How would she find another job? What would she do for money? In the mirror she saw Tony’s bottle of conditioner with its taped label: “TS.” She took the conditioner downstairs to the kitchen and poured some cooking oil in it. She got a staple and bent it straight and in the bathroom tamped it down deep into his deodorant stick, and then borrowed his shaving cream and cologne and put them in her backpack with a sack of flour and a handful of large manila envelopes.

  Tipsy, she walked across town to Shimbashi, losing her way several times but finally arriving outside of Rocket America. She pulled out one of the envelopes, filled it halfway with flour, slid the open flap underneath the front door, and stomped on the envelope with her foot, poofing a fine, powdery, messy mist into the office, covering the desks, the floor, the walls, the shelves. Beautiful. Like virgin snow. Then she took another envelope and sprayed shaving cream into it,
flavored it with a dash of the awful cologne, slid it beneath the door, and stomped. Oh, it was like the backwoods of Vermont! So pretty! Shaving cream drooped and blooped over everything. She kept going, switching between the flour and the shaving cream, thinking about Seiji Waru opening the door in the morning, about Tony in the coming weeks, wondering why his hair was so lank, so flat, so greasy, why his armpits were itching and burning—pranks she had learned from her sister, Susan, who had inflicted them upon Lisa with gleeful malice, the bitch. She stomped, and stomped some more. This was terribly immature of her, she knew, but it made her feel better. It did.

  FIVE

  CAFÉ NOUS was a kissaten, a coffeehouse, one of over ten thousand in Tokyo where you were welcome to linger the entire day over a single cup of coffee. This kissaten in Shinjuku was famed for the five hundred cup-and-saucer sets they displayed in illuminated cases on the wall, elegantly numbered and labeled with discreet signage. Royal Copenhagen, Meisen, Spode. You chose a number, and your coffee—Blue Mountain from Jamaica was the prized blend—was then served in the selected cup and saucer with pomp and precision.

  What Tom needed, though, was a drink, not coffee. He was still shaking from the drive over. Julia Tinsley had an Alfa Romeo Spider, a zippy little green convertible, and she didn’t seem to be familiar with the concepts of lanes and turn signals, whipping between cars at will, racing through intersections, scaring the bejesus out of him.

  “They don’t serve alcohol here?” he asked.

  “Sorry.” She shook out her hair, which had been in a ponytail. There was a light evening drizzle outside, another dreary, coolish night, but she had kept the convertible top down. Her cheeks were pinkened from the wind, and her skin was dewed. She looked quite lovely. She had her own clean, classical sense of fashion, wearing a sleeveless sage shirt and a tight gray skirt and black pumps, allowing Tom a peek at her legs, which were trim, muscular, and tan.

  “Do you always drive like that?” he asked.

  “Like what?”

  An old joke. They sat back and watched their waitress serve their coffees. Julia asked her for two glasses of water, and then she and Tom settled in at the table, stirring cream and sugar into their cups.

  “How long have you been in Tokyo?” he asked her. He was nervous, a familiar state of agitation he’d become adept at hiding.

  “Two years,” she said. “Before this, we were in Paris for five.” She dropped sugar cubes into her coffee with the tiny silver tongs—by the time Tom thought to begin counting, she had put in at least four. The front door opened, and he caught a draft of Julia’s perfume, the same perfume she had worn at the reception, and his head momentarily swirled. He breathed in to smell it again, but it had already disappeared.

  “Je t’envie,” he said to her. “Vôtre francais doit être très bien maintainent.”

  She nodded, impressed by his fluency. “Je le parlais couramment avant que jáille là bas. Le vôtre n’est pas mal.”

  “Je le peux truquer s’il faut,” he said. “I was a language major in college.”

  “What else do you speak?” she asked, lighting a cigarette.

  “Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, a little German. No Asian languages, which is why, of course, in their infinite wisdom, they transferred me here. I was supposed to have gone to Europe. Was it difficult to learn Japanese?”

  “Oh, I don’t know Japanese.”

  “But you were talking to the waitress.”

  “I just start everything with excuse me—sumimasen—and close with please—kudasai—and in the middle I transliterate English words. You just have to remember a few basic rules: turn your l’s to r’s and stick a vowel after each consonant. So glass becomes gurasu, and blacklist becomes—are you ready?—burakku-risuto.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “The numbers always throw me off, though. I said gurasu futatsu to the waitress, but I think I should have said nisatsu or nihai.”

  They talked for a while about Tokyo, Julia giving him pointers on what to see and do, and then the conversation wended to a variety of subjects: the seasons, parks, Paris, architecture, swimming. She had been Ivy League champ in the 200 free at Princeton, where she had met Vincent Kitamura her senior year.

  “He’s always been CIA?” Tom asked.

  “What do you mean? He’s an Economic Officer,” she said, then smiled. “He takes the whole thing very seriously—his oath of secrecy, his cover. People will call in the middle of the night, and whatever nisei name they ask for—Peter Okada, Bob Sasaki, David Saito—I have to say, ‘Just a minute, please,’ and get Vincent. He goes out in disguise sometimes. He has a wig and makeup. He’s out three or four nights a week. I only get to see him on Sundays.”

  “What does he do when he goes out?”

  “A lot of drinking, from what I gather. Only Peter Okada never gets drunk. Peter Okada will pretend to be as looped as you are, and he’ll get you to talk, but he’ll be stone-sober and remember everything you say. Not that Vincent’s ever told me a thing about what he actually does. I’ve had to piece together everything for myself.”

  “Do tell,” Tom said, although, like everyone in the Foreign Service, he was already well versed with the CIA, no longer perplexed by the nonchalance—even boastfulness—with which spooks divulged their modi operandi.

  “First of all,” Julia said, “you know, don’t you, they’re called case officers, not agents? Agents are the people they recruit, who can be anyone, not just communists and politicians, but also business executives and journalists, even entertainers. They cast an indiscriminate net, get as many people in their pockets as they can, and hope a few of them will pay off. There’s no master plan. The CIA’s not particularly organized, you know.” She cited Vincent’s cover as an example. He was supposed to be an Economic FSO, yet they lived in a private apartment in Omotesando, not in the Grew House, and they had white civilian license plates on their cars instead of blue diplomatic ones. The covers were a joke, Julia said. If anyone really wanted to figure out who the spooks in the embassy were, all they had to do was check the embassy telephone directory. All these supposed FSOs had extensions with a prefix that didn’t belong to the Economic or Political sections, wired as they were into the locked, unmarked doors on the sixth and seventh floors, where cameras were bolted overhead and you had to be buzzed in to gain entry.

  “What do they do to recruit the agents?” Tom asked.

  “They prey on people’s vulnerabilities. They figure out where you’re weak and what you covet. They flatter and cajole, they do little favors for you and give you gifts, maybe money. Once they gain your trust, once you’re dependent on them, they begin asking for a little favor in return, or information, or a document. Not unlike a pimp or a drug dealer. It’s very much a seduction.”

  “It must be hard to live a lie all the time. Betray people,” Tom said.

  “He’s gotten very good at it,” Julia said. “He’s one of the most charming men I’ve ever met.”

  It was peculiar, the way she spoke of her husband, with both pride and resentment. Tom couldn’t read her clearly, but there was an undeniable intensity of emotion there, and in his experience, that sort of attitude wasn’t conducive to an inconsequential affair. Indifference was what he had been looking for.

  He asked about her photography, and he quickly gathered that she was quite the star, not another embassy housewife indulging in a cute hobby. She taught at the ISA, the International School of the Arts, in Takadanobaba. She had gotten her master’s of fine arts degree at the Rhode Island School of Design while Vincent had been at Harvard for grad school. In Paris, she had apprenticed with Jeannot Magritte, and she’d had two solo exhibitions there and one in Tokyo already, with another in the works for October.

  Tom had little to say about his career in turn. After graduating from UCLA, he told her, he had taught high school French in the San Fernando Valley for three years before joining the Foreign Service, then had spent his first tour in São Paulo.
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br />   “How was that?” Julia asked.

  “Terrible. Terrible. Did I mention terrible?”

  But he loved Tokyo. Everything in Japan was so clean, modern, the people so polite. If anything, the country was too orderly and safe, Amcits—American citizens—rarely getting into real trouble. His biggest case thus far was turning out to be Lisa Countryman, and he told Julia a bit about it, although there hadn’t been any recent developments. Hong Kong had ended up to be a dead end. Her sister, Susan, kept calling, and Tom kept apologizing to her, saying there wasn’t much more he could do, it wasn’t within his power, wasn’t his job, to be an investigator. Whose was it? Susan Countryman had asked. Tom had given her Kenzo Ota’s phone number.

  Tom’s supervisor in ACS, Kimball Reeves, didn’t want him to waste any more time on the case. Initially, he had asked, “Is her family well-to-do?” Tom had said he didn’t know, and Reeves had said, “Countryman—that’s a German name. Or maybe Pennsylvania Dutch. Probably not well-to-do,” and then had instructed Tom to contact the police, but only as a formality.

  Reeves would be deciding Tom’s tenure in the Foreign Service in eighteen months, which was somewhat problematic, since he had been disinclined toward Tom from the start, skeptical about his fast-track transfer from São Paulo, how he had been able to breeze through two weeks of cursory ACS training in Roslyn, exempt from Japanese language classes. Reeves made no bones about his belief that Tom was benefiting from some sort of affirmative-action largesse. His response had been to ordain Tom as his personal minion, giving him all his work while he sequestered himself in his office all day long, chain-smoking and doing crossword puzzles. When things got slow, he liked to saddle Tom with one laborious task after another, making him compile statistical reports and procedural manuals that no one would ever open, much less read.

  Tom revealed none of this to Julia in the coffeehouse, of course, just the barest facts about Lisa Countryman, so he was surprised when she showed interest in the case, asking, “You really don’t have any leads?”