Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail (10 page)

Anything to be out of here, I thought as I signed my name.

“It must be your writing,” the interpreter said loudly, pulling the page from under my pen to reveal a second, blank sheet.

“But this is in Japanese,” I said.

“You copy what it says.”

I stared at the paper, my head on fire. I began copying.

WHEN I GOT OUT,
Monte dragged our seventy-three-year-old English-speaking neighbor, Eiko, to a bicycle shop, bought three new bikes, and had her confirm they were properly registered. Alex had an inexhaustible list of questions about jail, and I managed to keep him entertained while glossing over the worst of it. What kind of food did they have in jail? Did I wear stripes? Did they chain a ball to my ankle? At Sports Day he had once again won the hundred-meter dash and also set a record in long jump. He told me about the brick campaign—the volcanic ash was apparently useful for making concrete bricks; everyone was collecting ash. At school they’d handed out rolls of heavy-duty, pale blue plastic bags. Part of the city hall is made of ash, he said proudly, as if he’d built it himself.

People at Monte’s lab had heard about my... what—my imprisonment? My arrest? My jail time? The phrases all
sounded overdramatic. Monte’s ex-pat colleagues showed up at the apartment to get the scoop. People I’d said hello to once brought up cavity searches and my menstrual cycle. I went over the story again and again. They’d listen for a while; shake their heads. It would always come back to:
but how could you confess to a crime you didn’t commit?
I couldn’t do it, they’d say, sitting straighter. No way I’d let them force me; put me in jail, I don’t care, I’d call my lawyer in Boston. This Japanese system is bullshit. You can’t do that to people, they’d say, unaware of their arrogance, of how lucky they were to be born where they had been, unaware anyone else might ever see things differently, or have the right to.

I stopped seeing people altogether. I started a journal and found excuses to stay in the apartment. I walked to the grocery store, though Monte had attached an extra-large basket to the front of my new bike. I stopped taking walks around the castle ruins in the park and stopped taking pictures of interesting things to show friends back home. When I did go out, I couldn’t shake the sensation of being caged. I felt like everyone was watching me. Strangely, this made me bolder. At the grocery store, before checkout, I held open my purse to demonstrate that I had not stolen a single carrot, not one bag of soba noodles. When a flock of children outside a convenience store chattered excitedly at the sight of a
gaijin
— a word even I knew was slang for foreigner—I stopped, dropped my jaw, and spun around asking where the foreigner was.
“Gaijin?! Gaijin wa doko?”
I screamed, mockterror on my face. The children ran.

I began to draw pictures of the jail, of the people there; Monte called them caricatures, but they seemed real enough to me. I dreamed I was hiding in a room with no windows because of something awful I’d done but couldn’t recall; a policeman found me, and I pretended to be insane, but he didn’t believe it, and when he slammed the door, it disappeared, and I was sealed inside, waiting for him to return, to punish me as I surely deserved.

After ten days of this, Monte started coming home earlier; he suggested dinner and trips to the karaoke parlor; he washed the dishes too roughly and broke glasses; he bought an expensive food processor that stayed in the box. I knew he blamed himself for what had happened. Japan had been a career move for him, a sacrifice for me. He’d finally finished his PhD in chemical engineering and a post-doc invitation like this, at one of the world’s most cutting-edge research labs, would give his résumé the boost it needed to secure a good job back home. I, on the other hand, had had to take a year’s hiatus from investigative journalism in an election year. It was a sacrifice I’d made my peace with, or so I thought.

After two weeks of my refusals to go out, Monte took up kendo. He’d never expressed any interest in martial arts, but one day he came home with a black mask and a plastic sword. He went to classes every day after work. Sometimes he wore the mask in the house, along with a skirt made out of what looked like ceiling fan blades. Alex thought it was cool; I thought it looked ridiculous.

One night before we turned out the light, he touched my scabbed-over belly button with his sword and said, “I
should’ve stopped it. I should not have uprooted my family to come here.” “No,” I told him, saying what I was supposed to, “we made this decision as a family.” How easy it was to say the right thing, regardless of what was true.

He turned out the light and pulled me to his chest, kissing me harder than usual, kissing with purpose. We hadn’t had sex since I’d been released nearly a month ago. His penis remained soft against my stomach, and we died down, and eventually I heard the low wheeze that meant he was asleep. The window was still coated thinly with ash, and I stared at it, scarcely breathing, loneliness on me like a glove.

THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON
I ran into Eiko on the way to the market; she was sweeping ash into a blue bag alongside three other ladies. We had chatted on a few occasions; she’d lived in London and Connecticut before her husband died. She liked to use her English. She asked me to join them, and I couldn’t think of a way to say no, so I picked up a broom. The first rain since the ash had fallen was forecast for that night, and people in town were taking the brick campaign very seriously.

After ten minutes the street was nearly spotless, and I wondered why we were still sweeping. We collected so little ash in our pans it hardly seemed worth the time, yet still they swept, these grandmothers and greatgrandmothers with their crumbling voices and hunched backs. The huge trash bags with so little inside looked sad.

Afterward, Eiko invited me up for tea. I went. Anything
was better than sitting in the apartment, filling notebooks. She didn’t ask how I was doing; instead, she talked about growing up in different cities—her father was a salesman for Sony—and the friends she’d lost touch with.

“After my father died, I worked my way through college as a bar hostess,” she said. “It was one of the classier clubs. I’d go home with men sometimes if I liked them.” I sat on the overstuffed couch and listened. She stroked her long braids, so gray they looked blue. Somewhere nearby, a police siren wailed. I jumped.

Eiko said, “There’s a lot that’s unexplainable. When you feel alone, many things become possible. Sometimes they would bring me home to their wives. I liked that. It was like getting membership to an exclusive club.”

“You’ll be fine,” Eiko went on. She leaned forward and kissed my mouth. I closed my eyes. I am in control, I thought. Yes, I can do anything, even things I don’t want to do. When I felt her tongue on mine, I opened my eyes.

She said, “Not too bad. But you kiss like a man.” Then we were both laughing, so hard I could hardly breathe. Then I was crying, for the first time since my arrest, sobbing into her shoulder; she petted my head and whispered some strange, beautiful syllables over and over, rocking me until the tears ran out and I fell asleep.

THE NEXT DAY I RODE TO SCHOOL
with Alex for Open House.

“He seems a bit distracted lately,” his teacher said. “Nothing I can put my finger on. I wasn’t even sure I should mention it.”

“I see.”

“He’s a wonderful child. You’re very lucky.”

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

On the way home we rode past a policeman standing on a corner. His thin mustache reminded me of one of the officers who’d questioned me at the police station. My heart raced. I avoided his eyes and prayed, Please, please don’t notice me. I’m not here.

As we approached, he yelled. I closed my eyes, prepared for the barrage.

Then I heard him: “I AM FINE THANK YOU AND YOU?” It was probably the only English phrase he knew, and when I looked up, he was grinning, waving. I did what I always do when I’m waved to—I waved back.

THAT EVENING AS MONTE WAS
putting on his kendo getup, I told him I wanted to go to the karaoke place. He looked at me strangely, then shimmied back into his work clothes, probably afraid that if he took time to choose a new outfit, I would change my mind. The three of us rode our bikes across town, Alex darting among pedestrians and leading the way to the gleaming seven-story building of private soundproof rooms.

Alex sang “Twist and Shout,” and we pushed the tables aside so we could dance. I couldn’t resist “I Fought the Law.” Monte, in his voice only a deaf man could love, bellowed “Steppin’ Out with My Baby,” then “At Last,” the first dance at our wedding. He held my hand as Alex took over, singing song after song after song, dancing like a maniac.

The next day was a Saturday. Monte skipped his kendo class, and after Alex left for a friend’s house, we got back into bed.

That afternoon I packed all of my journals in a box, the five full notebooks and the one I had just started on the day of the open house. I sent the box to my mother’s house in Portland. Alex begged to go back to the karaoke place, so we did. It had been five weeks since the ash had fallen, and the only evidence it had been there at all were the blue bags that neatly lined the sidewalk, ready to be picked up and the ash transformed.

WE RETURNED TO BOSTON
later that year, and I fell back into my job, and the year after that, Monte was offered a job leading a CE lab at Northeastern. Alex grew up. He had friends, played soccer; he wanted to be a rock guitarist, a DEA officer, a marine biologist. We talked about Japan less and less, and in time my prison story became nothing more than a tale for dinner parties, evidence that my life had been somehow extraordinary. As for Alex, if he remembered anything, it was probably that one year when he was little we lived in Japan, and once yellow ash had buried the city, and then things were kind of strange, and then they were OK again.

BY NOW, EVERYONE’S GOT A VERSION
of the story, telling tall tales of their own run-ins with Room 17, even claiming to be part of our circle that year. But when it comes down to it, no one was there that last day—no one but Nozomi. I like to think that since I knew her well and was part of that short-lived group, my account is the most true, but really, I’m just piecing together what I know with what I imagine. Like working a jigsaw puzzle in the dark.

Nozomi was a wallflower, which is probably why I liked her. To this day I tend to date women who don’t
stand out, whose accomplishments are the adult equivalent of hers in high school: co-secretary of the English club, runner-up for the science fair—or was it the mile run on Sports Day? In any case, Nozomi was reasonably good at being seventeen. I’d had an on-and-off crush on her since kindergarten, but until that final year of high school, we’d never hung out much. We only got close because I was dating Miho—her best friend.

It was easier that way, though I wonder had I been a little braver, gone for it with Nozomi, if things might have turned out differently.

EVERY DAY AFTER SCHOOL
the three of us—Miho, Nozomi, and I—would stock up on candy at Sunkus, maybe buy a vending machine beer to split among us, and ride our bikes out to the edge of town. It was there that the neon of Karaoke Live! rose up between two rice paddies. We always asked for Room 17, and it was usually available to us.

The machine in Room 17 was different, it was made somewhere else; a curled, unrecognizable script ran down the side panel, spelling out instructions, perhaps, or warnings we couldn’t read. Not that it mattered: we came to sing, and that particular machine had the best selection of songs. In fact, it seemed to have different songs every time, and was known for oddball old favorites, like Ray Sakamoto’s “Dragon Curry” or Kari Kari’s “Love Me for the Forever.” Nozomi once claimed that it had any song you wanted, if you looked through the book enough times.

The karaoke system had a built-in game that scored your pitch and timing. After each song a cartoon island appeared in the distance. “Cram Island,” it was called. The idea was that you were lost at sea and swimming toward land—the better you sang, the closer you got. Sometimes the game would comment on your performance, little animated coconuts yelling “WAAA!” or “HEEE!” or, if you were doing badly, maybe caught up in conversation instead of singing, they’d shout, “BUUU!” There were a couple theories behind the name “Cram Island”: I joked that it was a horrible place full of kanji practice sheets and crabby, second-rate teachers so bad they were exiled from regular cram school. Miho was certain it was a misspelling of the English word “clam,” though we never did see any shellfish in the game.

Aside from that machine, though, number 17 was like any other room in the place: yellow walls, plastic couches, the stink of fresh cigarettes and stale potpourri in the air. A low table piled with songbooks, mics, and remotes, and a wicker basket that held tambourines and maracas, though we never used those—they were for the old ladies who came in with their masks and kerchiefs to sing
enka
.

We liked that Karaoke Live! was out of the way, that the bike path snaked between those rice paddies. It felt like we’d earned something simply by arriving. On warm nights you could hear the paddy frogs singing, and if you got a room facing east, you couldn’t even open the window for all the noise. I remember walking out some nights, my voice hoarse after three or four hours of singing and chatting, and those frogs would still be humming
along like an engine. The three of us would get on our bikes and pedal away from the neon into the darkness.

MIHO WAS A CYNIC,
which made me one too; she insisted Cram Island wasn’t even reachable, that the manufacturer had just added the feature to keep customers coming back. Nozomi, though, wasn’t so sure. One day her schoolbag fell off the couch, and I spotted the black and silver strap of her bathing suit. (I’d memorized that strap, of course, during our PE swimming unit earlier in the year.) To tease her, I asked if she was really planning to swim to Cram Island. She blushed and joked she didn’t need to worry about getting anywhere close when
I
was around.