Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail (3 page)

“Well, when I grew it, I had to quit my job at the department store—the tail wouldn’t fit under the tight skirt they made us wear—and that’s when I took up puppetry.”

“Makes perfect sense. You know, I’ve got a tail of my own, so to speak.” He didn’t mind being steered away from his originally planned conversation. Keeping up with Saki like this made him feel young.

“Also, I wasn’t really a virgin.”

“Mm?” He waited to get the joke.

“When we met. I wouldn’t have sex with you because of the tail. I was embarrassed to let you see me naked. It was true that I was waiting for the right time... it’s just that that time was dependent on losing the tail, not attaining a certain level of comfort with you.”

“What’re you talking about? Are you still kidding with me?” A swirling sensation that started in his chest spun and tightened and made its way to his eyes; it was like a typhoon in his head.

“You weren’t a virgin?”

She lifted a spoonful of soup with her free hand, and slurped. “What’d you expect?”

“How many men have you been with, then?”

“Not too many,” she said.

“Less than five?”

“Maybe. Yeah. Less than five.”

“Less than three?” Maybe there had only been one other—a boyfriend in high school, someone so far gone she could hardly remember his name.

“I just told you I grew a
tail,
and you’re more concerned about how many men I’ve screwed?”

Masa massaged his neck. He decided to finish the conversation so that he could proceed with his original topic—one of real importance.

But she kept laughing, covering her face and repeating, “I tell you I grew a tail, and you’re more concerned...”

THAT NIGHT MASA DREAMED
he was a bird with huge, heavy wings, flying over a sea that covered the world. His muscles burned; he’d been flying for days. But there was nowhere to stop. He scoured the horizon for a sign of land—nothing. Drops of rain bit at his eyes. He was falling. He tried to open his wings against gravity and his own gathering speed, but could not. Just as he realized he was going to die, he made another realization, which was that he had been flying in circles.

When he hit the water, he awoke. He sat up in his futon. A drop of real sweat slipped down the side of his
nose. He looked over to ground himself in Saki’s presence and found her futon empty.

He stood at the window. Though he’d eaten little, he had no appetite. He hadn’t been able to further the discussion about children during dinner after all; Saki had decided she was full after the soup, and they had come back to their hotel.

There was no moon yet; the beach was a strip of blackness. Water lapped against piles of seaweed; after each wave came the sound of water trickling through the gnarled piles. At the far end of the beach, near the old shrine, he detected movement, a shape dark within the darkness. What if she was out there, in the middle of the night, hanging around that creepy old shrine? Her antics over dinner had soured more than just his stomach. For the first time, Masa allowed himself to consider that his mother may have been right.

For a moment it seemed the whole world was deserted, had taken off in ships from this very harbor while he was asleep. He put on his
yukata.

The stooped innkeeper was wiping down the bar.

“Excuse me,” Masa said. “The woman I was with—my wife—did you happen to see her just now?”

“Young Miss Saki? Yes, indeed. She was just down here using the restroom. I imagine she didn’t want to disturb you while you were sleeping by using yours. Women do it more often than you’d think.”

“Is that so?”

“The men? Never. They just flush away at two, three in the morning.”

“Did you happen to notice where she went after that?”

“Sorry, I was in and out of the kitchen.”

“I’ll take a quick stroll, then, get some air. I can’t seem to sleep,” Masa said.

“Watch your step out there,” said the innkeeper.

MASA FOUND HIS ADIDAS
in the entryway and slipped them on unlaced. The action made him feel free and powerful, master of small risks. His mother’s voice echoed in his head: “One of these days you’ll fall flat on your face!” He took pleasure in the sound of his shoelaces tapping on the concrete. When the sidewalk dead-ended onto the sand, he removed his shoes and set them side by side, pointing toward the hotel.

The area around the shrine appeared deserted. Relieved, he walked to the shore. The sand was cold and soft and filled the gaps between his toes. He stopped in front of the mound of seaweed where Saki had noticed the gull earlier. The bird was gone. An animal must have carried it away, he thought. Then he heard a guttural call, shrill and severe like a crow’s.

There she was, leaning out the window just the way he had minutes earlier. A tingling relief swept over him. Saki had never been out here at all; their paths must have crossed while she was in the bathroom. He blew a kiss. She mimed catching and eating it.

Chuckling, he knelt down and cupped his hands into the sand. Each grain is a day, he thought, watching the sand slip through his parting fingers. When it had gone, he brushed his hands on his thighs and looked out at the
water. The moon hung low on the horizon. Persimmon moon, his mother would have said. Quick to ripen, quick to rot.

MASA SLID THE DOOR SHUT
behind him and looked at Saki. Usually she slept flat on her back, her fingers curled over the blanket’s edge like a child’s, but tonight she was on her stomach. She was naked—Saki always slept na-ked—and Masa was struck by the beauty of her curves under the sheet. He whispered her name.

She shifted a little but did not respond. He remembered his nightmare and shuddered, and said a quick prayer that his wife would have nothing but pleasant dreams. Then he lifted the sheet from her back.

His eyes fell on the mole at the base of her spine. He tried to imagine a tail growing there, a soft, rainbow-hued appendage, full and bushy, like that of a cartoon character.

Marriage was about adjustment, and Saki was forcing him to lighten up—something he needed more than he’d realized. He slid into his futon and congratulated himself on following the crumbs of fate that had led him to his new wife, despite her rebelliousness and the opposition from his family.

Yet he couldn’t sleep. Despite the relief he’d felt on the beach, something still gnawed at him in that dark room. Her behavior tonight had made him doubt her, and he didn’t like doubt. Now when he looked at Saki, he saw two women: one good, the woman he’d married, the other manipulative and wicked.

It’s only the late hour, he thought. He pulled the sheet
back over Saki, pausing to peer at the mole. Just for a second, he thought he saw it twitch.

“CAN’T SLEEP MUCH THESE DAYS MYSELF,”
the innkeeper said. “Older you get, the longer the nights.”

“Sure seems that way.”

The innkeeper poured sake from a plain brown bottle and set two cups on the wooden bar. “You two married long?”

“This is our honeymoon.”

The man slapped the bar so hard their cups rattled. “In this dump? No offense intended. We drink together at this hour, we speak as friends.”

“My wife likes places like this. Out of the way, old, ‘with character,’ she says.”

“Plenty of that around.”

They drank. Masa finished his cup first. “Was the typhoon bad in this area?”

“Not as bad as other parts of the island. These big storms tend to miss us. Something with the currents.”

“That’s lucky.”

“Mm. I’ll tell you, though, we sure get the wreckage. You saw the beach.”

“A real mess,” Masa said, remembering the gull.

“That big typhoon last year? Hardly rained a drop here. Then two days later a car washes up on the beach.”

“No kidding!”

“Yup. Legendary. You see that carved stone up near the cliff?”

“We noticed it. Old lettering.” He added, “My wife could read it better than I could, and she’s only half Japanese.”

“That so?”

“Yeah. She’s bilingual, but she likes studying the old stuff.”

“Really? That’s odd.”

“What do you mean, odd?”

Instead of answering, the innkeeper filled their cups again. He seemed to focus very hard on pouring the liquid. Must be drunk already, Masa thought. He was feeling a little drunk himself.

“So what
is
the story with that stone? Part of some old shrine?”

The innkeeper raised his cup but made no toast. “They say it’s haunted by a demon.”

At the word
demon
, Masa shivered.

“There was a typhoon a few generations back. Story goes a woman washed ashore—a foreigner, who couldn’t communicate with anyone in the village.

“She was beautiful in a strange way, with eyes the color of the sea, and she could do things—heal sick children, weave kimonos that were warm as down yet light as a feather. People worshipped her. They built that shrine in the spot she washed up.

“But after a while folks began to distrust her. A child in the village died under her care. The townspeople began calling her the Blue Demon, because of her eyes, and arranged for her execution.”

Masa’s mouth was dry; he lifted his cup and found it
empty. He grabbed the bottle and tipped it to his glass. After a few seconds he realized that it, too, was empty. “So they killed her?” he asked.

“She got away. There was an old man in town, a hermit, who could understand her language. On the night of her planned execution, the two of them jumped into a boat and drifted away without oars. A storm came up that night, and they were never seen again.”

“Any truth to it?”

“One man’s truth is another’s illusion—isn’t that how the saying goes?”

Masa felt chilled, as if a fog had blown in silently off the water and made its way into the bar. It was all getting to be too much: Saki’s off hand “confession” about the men before him was confusing, and the ridiculous—simply ri-diculous—idea of her growing a tail had derailed his plan to discuss children. She always seemed to be a step ahead of him.

Then she was there, her voice sliding into the room like a snake, coiling up his leg toward his chest and clutching him there.

“Troubled always is the late-hour child,” she called, reciting a proverb.

The innkeeper pulled out another bottle, white wine, and set a third glass on the bar. “A miserable cat loves the company of mice,” he replied.

Saki sidled up next to Masa. She touched his arm, and with her grassy scent, the warmth returned to him. He did not look her in the eye. Her presence made him feel drunker.

“Lonely,” Saki corrected. “A lonely cat keeps company with mice.”

“That’s right,” the innkeeper said. They sat in silence and watched a drop of condensation slip down the side of the bottle and into a crevice in the wood.

The old man stood. “Pardon the rudeness, but my eyelids might be filled with sand.” He held out the wine to Masa. “A wedding gift. Likely to be a storm coming in tomorrow, and you two will need to pass the time somehow.”

Masa accepted the bottle with two hands as he rose from his stool. “A storm? But the papers called for—”

“Come, Masahiro,” Saki called, already up and walking away. Masa watched her tangled hair shimmy across her back. When he turned back to the bar, their host had departed, the door behind the bar swinging lightly with his exit.

OVER THE COURSE OF THAT
interminable weekend after Jun died, Asian lady beetles overtook our place in shadowy Totsuka-cho. Orange, winged bodies coated the ceiling and left yellow stains; carapaces crunched underfoot against the bathroom tile. The air smelled like rancid walnuts.

Ms. Morita, my next-door neighbor, offered to rent me her basement apartment, cheap. The place was bug-free: “sealed like a carton of fresh tofu,” she told me. She hadn’t even seen a cockroach in nine years. I said I’d take a look. My mind operated beneath a fog; I was dazed, in shock. Ms. Morita thought it was the beetles.

The apartment was loaded with knickknacks from travels with her husband, who had died suddenly the year before, and whose life’s work had been vacuum-cleaner design. “If you’ve ever used a Kanko Uzu-Jet,” Ms. Morita told me, “you’ve used Kazu’s tubes.” I felt close to her after hearing that. I signed a lease on the spot.

The main room housed vacuum cleaners in various states of disrepair. “Kazu used this room as a sort of lab,” she said as she showed me in. We kneeled on frayed tatami. “I haven’t had the heart to clean it out yet.”

I said I didn’t mind, but really, it creeped me out, these machines sitting around, waiting. One stood in the corner, the size of a big kid, with a puffed bag in place of a torso, a rectangular foot-group, and corrugated tubing lolling out of places limbs shouldn’t be. But Ms. Morita was very nice. She made tea and listened. I described for her the loneliness of mourning someone else’s husband. Six days prior to the beetles’ arrival, he’d promised a divorce. He even presented me with a jar, its lid stabbed full of holes, as a promise that we’d be together—openly— in time for the firefly festival. Our friends would see us there and know, he said. He was sad about the breakup of his marriage, but it had happened over a period of years and there was little left to grieve. He would be proud to be seen with me.

After Ms. Morita slippered out of the room, I looked around. Bristles, hoses, and gears surrounded me. Plastic panels of irregular shape lay scattered, like pieces of a shattered continent, the last arrangement of something lost.

I thought of our first night together: Tanabata, the festival of lovers banished to the heavens and forever separated by the Milky Way. Before kissing on the pebbled shore, we’d stopped for the man running the shell game:
To track the ball just use your eyes; find it now and claim your prize.
I quit early on, but Jun wouldn’t give up. After four tries we finally walked away, and he lamented in that dialect, the syllables like rain in a puddle, “I just can’t believe I lost.”

I picked up the end of a long red tube connected to the kid-sized vacuum, moved it up and down.
Hajimemashite
. Pleased to meet you, sir. I leaned against its bag-body, which crinkled in greeting, and closed my eyes. The lights of paper lanterns shimmered red-yellow in the summer night heat, smelling of fried squid and bean cakes, and a barker called out, his voice like a hook: