Country of Origin

by Don Lee

  “A client brought me,” he said, motioning toward a table and wobbling in the process, betraying how much he’d been drinking. He was with Haruki Kimura.

  Lisa remembered Kimura was a computer manufacturer, Tony a programmer. “I thought you were lying when you said your services were in such high demand,” she told him.

  “You’ve never given me the credit I deserve.”

  “Still living in the gaijin house?”

  “Home sweet home.”

  “Why do you stay there if you can afford an apartment of your own?”

  “I like the company. Although it has its disadvantages, like when people fuck with your toiletries. What did you put in my shampoo, anyway?”

  “Your shampoo? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, you are clever. And you’re looking quite brilliant with your fancy dress and makeup and hair. How much for your services?”

  Not this again, Lisa thought. Not in front of Midori, not in front of David Saito. “You need to behave here,” she told Tony.

  “How much?” he asked again. “How much for that doggy in the window?”

  Without seeing him approach, Lisa suddenly noticed David Saito at Tony’s side, looking friendly and remarkably nonthreatening. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but we could use your help at the table.”

  Tony glowered down at him. He had a couple of inches and a good twenty pounds on David. “What are you? Her pimp?”

  “I did interrupt something, didn’t I? I apologize.”

  “All right, fun’s over,” Lisa said, and hopped off the barstool.

  “Did I say I was finished with you?” Tony said.

  “Cheerio.”

  “Excuse us,” David said.

  “Come back here.” He grabbed hold of Lisa’s bicep and yanked her arm, whirling her back around, but then David did something—his hand reaching in a blur, twisting Tony’s fingers off her bicep—somehow making the movement look effortless and gentle. Tony stumbled back, then lurched forward with a punch. David calmly did something else—the result of which put Tony on his back on the floor—but once again with the utmost tenderness, as if he were laying a child to sleep.

  The tencho and a waiter hurried over to them, but David was already helping Tony up onto his feet and brushing his jacket. “Daijobu, daijobu. Tsumazuita-dake,” he said. Everything was all right. He had just tripped. “Isn’t that right, you old sod?” he said to Tony. “You just tripped.”

  SHE ONLY accepted because David would be there. Otherwise it could have been considered a dohan, and she didn’t want to mislead Mojo, who had become a bit more aggressive about asking her out in recent days.

  She met David—dapper as usual in a beige linen suit—in the lobby of the Hotel Sky Asakusa, and together they waded through the crowds and stationed themselves on a street bordering the Sensoji temple. Mojo was in a ujiko club that would be bearing a portable Shinto shrine, a mikoshi, through the streets that afternoon. Some of the mikoshi weighed close to a ton and required a hundred men to keep them aloft on wooden beams. The purpose of the procession was to bring luck and prosperity to the neighborhoods from which the mikoshi originated, and the more raucous and calamitous the ride, the more generous the deities would be. Mojo had invited Lisa and David to watch, as well as to come to the ujiko club celebration afterward. At the last minute, he threw in a special dinner, the details of which he would not reveal, only telling them to bring dress clothes. They could change after the festival at the hotel, in which he had reserved a suite.

  It was a wild scene. Lisa realized that most of the mikoshi bearers were completely drunk, tossing back sake and beer all day long. The yakuza, as expected, were the raunchiest, most boisterous crew, stripped down to their loincloths, thrusting their pelvises and clambering up on top of the beams and palanquins, the police futilely pleading through loudspeakers, “Standing on the shrine is not allowed. Do not get overexcited. The parade must proceed.”

  At last they saw Mojo’s gold and black lacquer mikoshi. The club members wore matching outfits fashioned after old-time craftsmen: short blue jackets that resembled happi coats, headbands, and leggings. They moved slowly in rhythm, bucking the shrine up and down, jostling it backward, then pitching it forward, chanting, “Washoi! Washoi!” while a group of musicians followed behind, banging out a discordant cadence with wooden clappers, whistles, flutes, gongs, and drums. There in the middle of it all, underneath one of the beams, were Mojo and his friend Curly, smiling and shouting at them. The procession kept going down the street to circle the neighborhood.

  While they waited for Mojo and Curly to reappear, Lisa and David ate yakitori and drank beer at a street stall. Lisa remarked how much fun she was having. This was proving to be her most authentically Japanese experience since arriving in the country.

  “You know I speak Japanese, don’t you?” she asked David.

  “So I gathered.”

  “I was thinking about what Mojo said to you. Do you ever find it a conflict, being in Japan and being Japanese-American?”

  “No.”

  “Not at all?”

  “My grandparents made a choice for themselves and their progeny when they immigrated. Once you make that choice, I don’t think you can be ambivalent about it.”

  “Don’t you feel a visceral connection to the people, the land?”

  “I can’t really say I do.”

  “That’s hard to believe. You must have relatives here.”

  “I don’t see them much.”

  “Why not?”

  He raised his palm. “Modern life,” he pronounced. “Do you feel ambivalent, with a Japanese mother?”

  “How did you know that?”

  He shrugged.

  “No one can usually tell,” Lisa said, staring at him, astonished.

  She admitted to David that she had gained little sense of kinship or community in Japan thus far. Quite the opposite. She had made no friends, she hadn’t gotten to know any of her neighbors. She was regarded as a gaijin, through and through. People sometimes changed seats on the subway when she sat next to them.

  “Your situation’s both different and the same as mine, isn’t it?” Lisa said. “Everyone assumes you’re Japanese-Japanese.”

  “Even people in the embassy.”

  “Do you run into a lot of racism in the State Department?”

  “Certainly,” he said prosaically.

  “Doesn’t it bother you?”

  “Yes, of course. But in comparison, I don’t find Japanese society, or any other country, nearly as tolerant as the US. Do you?”

  “Well, at least if the embassy’s ever taken over,” Lisa said, “you’ll be released.”

  “Hm?”

  “Those thirteen hostages in Iran who were let go, back in November—they were all women or black. It goes to show you, doesn’t it, what this is all about?”

  She was being playful, and he picked up on her whimsical mood and invited her to run with it. “I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

  “It’s a classic incarnation of Saidian Orientalism, the depiction of Arabs as aliens and fanatics. I mean, come on, all this outrage, the yellow ribbons, the nightly updates—let’s get real,” she said teasingly. “We’re only talking about a measly fifty-two people here. Insignificant, really, in the larger scheme of things.”

  “I should have known,” David said, rolling his eyes. “You’re from Berkeley.”

  She loved that she could banter with him like this. She didn’t have to explain herself to him. He got her. “Wouldn’t you be pissed if you were Iranian,” she asked, leaking a giggle, “after twenty years of the US supporting the Shah, especially when it’s all been about oil?”

  “Here we go,” David said.

  “Power to the people!” Lisa said.

  “Do you know who you’re talking to?”

  “The only solution—revolution!” she laughed.

  They left the stall and rejoined the
parade, standing alongside the street. Mojo and Curly’s ujiko club came around again. The men were now in various states of undress, and some were bruised and bleeding, such was the weight of the beams digging into their shoulders. Mojo and Curly were sweating and huffing, their faces flushed. They looked apoplectic, about to drop dead. “Should they still be doing this?” Lisa asked David worriedly. Down the block, Mojo and Curly staggered out of line, exhausted, and their places underneath the shrine were immediately taken up by waiting substitutes. After a short break, Mojo and Curly dove back into the mob. Lisa didn’t know where they found the stamina, and the whole undertaking seemed more than a little dangerous to her, an apprehension that was not unfounded, as it turned out, for Mojo walked up to them later and told them that Curly had had a small heart attack.

  “He’ll be fine,” he said to David, “but I must go to the hospital. Could you accompany Lisa to the restaurant? Do you mind? Eiji will take you. It’d be a shame to waste the reservation since it was so hard to come by, and I cannot disappoint the two of you after my promise of a surprise.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Don’t worry about the bill.” He took Lisa’s hand in both of his. He looked crestfallen. “I am sorry. I am sad to miss with you dinner, but please enjoy. It is very special dinner.”

  Indeed, it was special. After they changed at the hotel, Eiji, Mojo’s driver, a thick-chested man with a handlebar mustache, took them through the cobblestone streets of Kagurazaka and stopped in front of a wooden door embedded in a high stucco wall. It was a quiet residential area, and the door had no sign, no number, just a buzzer and an intercom. After they identified themselves, a woman in a kimono opened the door. She led them down a stone path through a garden, holding a lantern out in front of them to light the way. Except it was a very unique lantern—a cage made of bamboo and glass, filled with fireflies.

  They had entered the exquisite, rarefied world of kaiseki, the most exclusive dining experience in Japan. This particular restaurant was aptly named Gokuraku. Bliss. Their guest policy was more stringent than Rendezvous’s, requiring referrals and reservations months in advance—at least usually. Mojo must have pulled quite a few strings to get them in on such short notice, especially considering the restaurant’s obsession with punctuality, each party’s arrival timed so they wouldn’t encounter any other guests. Privacy was paramount here, the illusion given that no one else was on the grounds except for the staff. They catered to the upper echelons of business and politics, and there was rumored to be an underground tunnel for those needing extreme secrecy. Each party had their own little teahouse with tatami floors, and the houses were situated so they could not see anything but the garden, could not hear anything but leaves, and wind, and water running from bamboo.

  “It’s really a shame Mojo couldn’t come,” David said. “He wanted very badly to impress you.”

  Lisa was thinking exactly the opposite: the day couldn’t have turned out any better. She had been happy enough at the festival with David, but this dinner was beyond anything she could have conjured. It was a date, a splendid date.

  The maids in kimonos brought in the food on trays and delicately positioned the dishes on the low table. Kaiseki, David told Lisa, had developed as a light meal served in conjunction with tea ceremonies. The name supposedly came from the practice of Buddhist priests in training. As they fasted, they kept warm stones (seki) in their robe pockets (kai) to stave off hunger pangs. Accordingly, the portions of temple food were small, but there were eleven courses of everything from fresh roots to ginkgo nuts, smoked octopus, pressed mullet roe, and monkfish liver. The meal cost five hundred dollars a person.

  While they ate, Lisa and David talked pleasantly, trading polite summations of their lives. He told her he had grown up in Everett, Washington, just outside of Seattle. He’d gone to Princeton and Harvard, joined the Foreign Service straight out of graduate school, and had been posted to Rome and Paris before Tokyo.

  “Does your wife work in the embassy?” Lisa asked.

  “No, she’s a financial consultant,” he said.

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Five years. I met her in Paris.”

  “She’s French?”

  “Yes,” he told her.

  “Any children?”

  He shook his head.

  “Your father isn’t harassing you for progeny?”

  “He died before I was born,” David said.

  His parents—originally from Modesto, California—had been interned at Manzanar, and his father had enlisted in the famous 442nd Regimental Combat Team, made up of Japanese-American volunteers, which became the most decorated unit in US history. Before David’s mother had learned she was pregnant, he had shipped off to France, where he was killed in Bruyères, during the rescue of the Lost Battalion. After the internment camp closed, David’s mother and her family returned to Modesto and found their stationery store looted and vandalized, “No Japs Wanted” painted on the wall. Seeking a new start, they moved to Seattle, but David’s mother fell into a deep depression and never recovered. She had a breakdown, and throughout his youth, she was in and out of institutions, where she still remained. David had been raised by his grandparents.

  “That’s so tragic,” Lisa said, overwhelmed. It was such a sad story. As sad a story as her own. Yet something confused her. She did a little math in her head. “But that would make you at least thirty-six, wouldn’t it? How old are you?”

  “Thirty-seven.”

  She had thought he was in his early thirties. “You look so young,” she said.

  Two geishas came into the teahouse and sang and danced for them. After the twenty-minute performance, they were left alone again, and David asked Lisa about her dissertation.

  “I doubt I’ll ever start it,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t really think I’m qualified. Maybe they made a mistake letting me into the program,” she said. “I never had my heart in it, anyway.”

  “You’re here, aren’t you?”

  “It wasn’t something I was planning. I was running away.”

  “From what?”

  “Bad luck. I have awful luck.” She gave him the short version. She was dating a fellow graduate student, and she found out he was two-timing her with another girl. He left town for a week-long conference, and she decided to exact her revenge by going to his apartment and dialing the number for the correct time—in London—and leaving the phone off the hook. But the gods were not with her. She took her clothes from his apartment and threw them into the trunk of her car, and as she drove away, one of the wires to her taillight dislodged. She looked in her rearview mirror, and her trunk was on fire. She stopped the car and watched it burn to a husk on Ashby Avenue.

  “You do have bad luck,” David said.

  “There’s more, much, much more,” she said. “People hate me. You know what I’m supposed to look like?” she asked. “I’m supposed to have a kinky fro and slanty eyes. I’m supposed to have a fat nose and chipmunk cheeks. I’m supposed to be covered with freckles and patchy orange skin. It’s some sort of genetic joke, the way I look,” she said. “I should look ethnic. I should be ugly. I’m a freak. I’ve been a freak all my life,” she blurted, intending to joke but speaking in genuine anguish, giving in for a moment to pathetic, schoolgirl, banal, self-pitying thoughts, thoughts that were beneath her, that she had worked so hard to keep at bay, thoughts that she was bad, that she was worthless, that she was unlovable.

  He looked at her with raised eyebrows, thinking—she was certain—she was crazy. She had disclosed too much of herself, and she was sure he was now revolted by her.

  “It’s a shame you’re so arrogant,” he said.

  It took her a second to pick up on his tone—gently mocking, sweetly ironic. “I know, my inflated ego,” she said gratefully. “It’s always been my downfall.”

  “You really need to acquire some humility.”

  “Get knock
ed down a peg or two, huh?”

  “At the very least.”

  He made her laugh.

  In the car, Lisa felt happier than she could recall being in years. “That was a lovely evening,” she said to David. “That was a lovely day and evening. Thank you.” She wanted to lay her head on his shoulder, to have him put his arm around her.

  “It’s Mojo you should thank,” he said. “He’s very fond of you.”

  “He’s a nice man.”

  “He talks about you all the time,” he said. “He’s always saying how talented and beautiful you are.”

  “That’s . . .” She was going to say “nice” again. “I wanted to ask you. What was that you did to Tony at the club? Was that karate?”

  “Aikido.”

  “Are you always so sure of yourself? How do you get to that state?”

  As they passed through Kudanshita, near the Imperial Palace, Mojo’s driver, Eiji, slowed down, then halted. The cars in front of them weren’t moving. Eiji shifted into neutral. Like almost all chauffeurs and cabbies, he wore white cotton gloves.

  “Nan desu ka?” Lisa asked him.

  “Jiko,” Eiji said. Accident.

  After a few minutes, he put the car back into gear, and finally they began moving again, slowly edging past the accident. From the back seat, Lisa could see a motorcycle lying on its side, its gasoline tank completely dislodged—ripped off its frame. What had separated the tank from the motorcycle was the rider’s leg. The bosozoku was on the ground, wearing full leathers, not moving. He looked peacefully asleep, not a mark on him, except his right thigh was gone. The femur—fully exposed—was broken and splintered, the meat of his entire thigh torn off. He lay on a shimmering sheet of blood. There was a car, its left front headlight smashed. Either the bosozoku or the car had crossed the center line, and they had hit with such force, the motorcyclist’s leg had pried off the gas tank.

  Lisa began to cry.

  “What’s wrong?” David asked. “Do you know him?”

  She shook her head.

  “What is it, then?” When she didn’t respond, he put his arm around her and said, “Don’t look.”

  Uniformed patrolmen were talking to witnesses, but no one was tending to the motorcyclist on the ground. “Why aren’t they doing anything?” she asked David, sobbing.