If You Follow Me (22 page)

ayashii:
(
ADJ
.)
suspicious; strange; perverted; charming; bewitching

T
here is a hundred yen coin in my favorite bathroom stall in the fourth floor girls' room. This coin sits on top of the device bolted to the inside of the stall door, a device that mimics the sound of a toilet flushing, to prevent girls from flushing the toilet over and over—wasting water and money—to drown out the humiliating sounds of bodily voiding. Over the last eight months, this coin has not moved a millimeter, even though other girls must have noticed it too, bringing their fingers within an inch of it every time they push the button to activate that flushing sound.

In other words, nothing just vanishes around here.

Today I don't have to push the button to activate the flushing sound as I pee, since Nakajima's cell phone keeps ringing from my pocket.
I heard he sang a sweet song…

Nakajima is not hard to find. I don't even have to leave the safety of the girls' room. I can see him from the bathroom window, squatting on the grass. As usual he's almost naked, dressed only in a
mawashi
, the sumo wrestler's trademark loincloth. I watch as he knocks shoulders with Kobayashi-sensei. Since the start of spring quarter, the second-grade teacher has been coming to the high school every
afternoon to coach sumo practice. He pushes Nakajima to the edge of the circle of dirt, but the boy ducks and the big man loses his balance, stepping out of the ring. Nakajima pumps a victorious brown fist and Kobayashi-sensei clips his ear. Grinning sheepishly, the boy bows to his sensei.

Every day after sumo practice, Kobayashi-sensei stops by the faculty room to smoke a cigarette with the other male teachers. I try not to be there. I spend a lot of time in this bathroom stall. I haven't seen Koji or Kim since he saved their lives. I want to know how the two children are doing, but I'm afraid to ask. I'm afraid he suspects that I had something to do with their jump, that he blames me, that he should.

“Do you enjoy watching a man?”

I whirl around, feeling like a voyeur, to find Noriko. As the librarian's wedding date nears, she has traded her tomboy clothes for matronly ones that bag around her skinny body, making her look like a little girl playing dress-up in her mother's closet. Today she's wearing a belted dress covered in cabbage roses and a velvet headband.

“I've never watched sumo before,” I say.

“Not sumo,” she says. “The rice farmers are here.”

 

Outside the high school, girls are throwing rice at the two tractors moving slow as tanks down the road. Hanging from strings trailing behind the tractors, Sapporo cans skim and bounce across flooded potholes, spitting water at the girls' bare legs. Their wet hands are coated in pearly grains of rice, so from a distance it looks like they're wearing prim white gloves. It also looks like they're aiming not for the tractors but at the men driving them, the two farmers descending the peninsula in search of brides.

According to a recent newspaper article, these farmers grow
the finest and most expensive rice in all of Japan, in a town called Monzen at the tip of the peninsula. But the young people in Monzen are all taking off for bigger cities down south, leaving the farmers with few prospects. On this odyssey, they hope to meet two young women willing to return home with them and settle down. They also hope that when the Japanese people see how lonely they are, how much they sacrifice to farm that land, they will buy expensive Japanese rice instead of the cheaper California import. It seems unlikely that these guys will find brides, but I like the fairy-tale aspect to this quest. I like imagining the happy ending where the farmer hoists the girl into his John Deere and they roll off into the sunset together.

Ritsuko Ueno is the only girl who isn't throwing rice at the farmers. Instead she hangs back under the overhang of the school roof, shivering in her red pea coat, its hood drawn. I ask why she's not with her friends and she shrugs.

“I don't want some old husband,” she says in Japanese. “I want to get out of here.” I glance at Noriko, whose wedding invitation I just received. Sakura, Ritsuko's mother, made the match between the librarian and the dentist, the one who performed my root canal, who made me say “Howdy” when he banged my teeth. I imagine him and Noriko cuddling on a couch, watching Western movies on TV together.

“You're leaving in a month,” Noriko says. Ritsuko is going to be the first Shika High School student to do a homestay in Eureka. “Are you excited?”

“I can't wait,” Ritsuko says, but she sounds almost angry. “I want to escape Shika.”

“Won't you miss Nakajima?” the librarian asks her.

“Not really,” says Ritsuko with a shrug.

I have seen the two of them riding one bicycle, Nakajima pump
ing the pedals while Ritsuko sat with her arms around his waist, her cheek to his back. I've seen them hanging out at the grocery store, ducking into the photo booth to avoid me. He looks embarrassed to be caught happy, while she looks embarrassed to be caught with him.

“Is he your boyfriend?” I ask.

“I want to escape this too,” she says.

“Good idea,” I say.

Miyoshi-sensei has come outside to join us. He shakes his head as the two farmers stand up in their tractors and bow at the girls. “It's kind of
ayashii
,” he says, meaning suspicious, perverted, “flirting with high school girls at their age.”

“How old are they?” I ask.

“Thirty-two,” he replies. “Same as me.”

“That's not that old,” I say.

“Thanks,” he says. “I'm glad you think so. But it's too old for a high school girl.”

I ask why the girls are throwing rice at the farmers, and he explains that the farmers planned this as a PR stunt, shipping bags of rice to every town through which they were going to pass for just this purpose, to guarantee an audience. “Also,” he says, “they want to show that they are fun, globalized guys. For instance, they know international custom like throwing rice for a wedding.”

“Usually rice gets thrown after a wedding,” I point out.

“Well,” he says, “they are optimistic.”

A white news van pulls up behind the two tractors and a cluster of men spills out. One holds a clear umbrella over the head of another, who has a video camera perched on his shoulder, but it's the third that catches my eye with his pink and black pinstriped suit, pink cowboy boots, and bleached hair styled in Statue of Liberty spikes.

“Who is that?” I ask.

“You don't know Lone Wolf?” Ritsuko says, sounding incredulous.

“He is famous comedian,” Noriko manages, one hand clasped over her mouth.

“Very
famous,” Ritsuko adds. “Number one success of Shika.”

“He hosts a kind of minor variety show,” Miyoshi-sensei says. “His program is on TV so late at night. Not prime time.” He falls silent as a sedan parks behind the news van and Mayor Miyoshi emerges. I say hello and the mayor nods. Even though I know that his silence is the product of surgery, it gives him a regal quality. He pulls a small notepad from his breast pocket and writes something down for Hiro to read out loud.

“Miss Marina, could you please explain about
supa singuru
night?”

“About what?” I ask.

“Supermarket singles night,” he enunciates more slowly. “Where your mother tried to find love, and instead bought so many groceries?”

Recently, the reporter who was writing an article about these farmers called to interview me about how people in the United States go about finding a wife or a husband. When I said that bars and parties were popular pickup spots, she said, “But how about an older woman who doesn't like bars? Or a man who is too shy to talk to strangers at a party?” So I shared a story that mom told me over the phone recently, about how she ended up at Safeway on Singles' Night, her first foray into the dating world since my dad's death.

She swore it was an accident, that she had no idea such a thing even existed. She said it was an unusually warm evening, she'd had a half day at school, and was feeling restless and lonely, so she decided to walk to the store to get some ice cream and a magazine. After seeing the banner hanging over the front doors declaring that it was
Singles' Night, she turned around and walked several blocks before stopping herself. “I don't know if I'm ready to date,” she said, “but I was
lonely
.” She stressed the word in a way that made me sad and uneasy. “I figured that I shouldn't be such a chicken, right? I should at least get the ice cream and the magazine that I came for, right?” Then, before I could answer, she told me that in the hour she spent at the supermarket, three different men made passes at her. When I asked why it took an hour to buy some ice cream and a magazine, she explained that she had to fill her cart. “I didn't want to look desperate,” she said. “Like the only reason I was there was to meet someone. Which wasn't even true! But I didn't have my grocery list, so I started shopping with the men in mind.”

“What men?” I asked, increasingly nervous.

“The ones who made passes at me,” she said.

She told me that the first guy looked like he'd just gone for a run, so she picked out Gatorade for him and a box of Powerbars, “the kind you used to like to eat after runs,” she added, and peanut butter and whole grain bread, energy foods. “But I'm not that athletic,” she said, “so it wouldn't have worked out, even though I was flattered by his attention.” The second man who made a pass at her was a dad with a little girl sitting in the top part of his grocery cart who was really too big to fit there. “He didn't have a ring,” she said, “and he seemed sad, so I assumed that he was divorced or maybe even a widower.” She paused, and I remembered how she had called me once and said, “I'm a widow now. I hate that word,” and I'd felt jealous that at least there was a word for what she was. She picked out applesauce and pickles for the little girl, and for the dad turkey sausages and couscous and a bottle of white wine. “Then I realized that I was buying the things I would've bought for you and your father,” she said. I had already realized this myself. The last guy who made a pass at her was an older gentleman wearing a suit and pushing a cart that contained
only a pint of ice cream and a magazine, a coincidence she noted. She imagined that he was recently retired and didn't know how to fill his time, that he still dressed like he had a job to go to. She was getting up the nerve to say something to him when she noticed that his head trembled slightly, like he had Parkinson's disease.

“I don't want to be a caretaker,” she said. “I just can't.”

“No,” I said, thinking that I didn't blame her, that she had already been one.

“Your birthday's coming up,” she reminded me, asking what I wanted her to send.

“More books would be nice,” I said, still unsettled.

“I could also send you those PowerBars,” she offered.

“You actually bought all that stuff?” I asked.

“I spent a long time filling my cart,” she said. “I couldn't just put it back.”

I had no idea that my story had ended up in the newspaper. Now Miyoshi-sensei tells me that when the manager of the local supermarket read the article, he decided to make a
supa singuru
night here in Shika, to help the rice farmers meet women.

“What's your
taipu
?” Lone Wolf asks, thrusting his microphone at me.

“My type?” I repeat, feigning ignorance to buy time.

“Do you like
hansamuboi
?
Romansugurei
?”

“Romance gray,” Miyoshi-sensei translates. “This means an older man.”

“I don't really have a type,” I say, but Lone Wolf shakes his head and presses on. “How about farmers? Or maybe you prefer teachers?” The camera pans to Miyoshi-sensei, who looks down at his Converse, a blush creeping up his neck. “Same old Hiro,” Lone Wolf laughs, punching him in the shoulder too hard to qualify as playful.

“Do you two know each other?” I ask.

“Lone Wolf went to school here too,” Miyoshi-sensei says.

“Were you friends?”

“Not exactly.”

The mayor scribbles something in his notebook, passing it to Miyoshi-sensei again. He clears his throat and then asks if I would like to throw some rice at the farmers, so that Lone Wolf's cameraman can capture it on film. Before I can answer, the mayor presents me with my own five-kilo burlap bag, which feels as heavy as a baby in my arms. Followed by the man with the camera, I walk into the street and take my place in the line of girls, sinking my hand into the cold grains. The rice farmers look older up close, their skin ruddy, hairlines receding. They look scared. Especially after they see me.

When the phone starts to ring in my pocket, I set the bag down and answer it so that the cameraman will finally walk away and leave me alone.

“Hello?” I say.

“Uh…sorry,” says a male voice with a British accent. “Must've misdialed.”

“Joe?” I guess, recognizing his voice. “Is that you? Where are you?”

“Right here at your local Mister Donuts, enjoying a curry old-fashioned. Very old-fashioned. Haven't had one of these classics in ages.” I laugh and ask whether he's here to teach with us, and he says that he's in town for the festival. “Hang on,” I say, as I catch sight of Nakajima trudging to school in his red power plant uniform. With his Afro-perm shrunken in the rain, he looks like a drenched cat: something that has lost its power. Joe says that he thought he was dialing Ritsuko Ueno. He usually stays with the Ueno family when he's in Shika, tutoring Ritsuko in English for room and board. I tell him that I'll be seeing her at the SMILE meeting this evening and offer to pass on a message.