Lord of All Things (10 page)

Hiroshi found the Roman alphabet to be much more logical. Asian writing was all about simplifying pictures down to their barest lines to stand for words, so that one picture might have nothing at all to do with the next, and they were so abstract that there was no hope of recognizing what they were supposed to be. By comparison, the Western method of building a word up from simple individual parts seemed a much better way of going about things.

He liked the way computers represented information even more. They could get by with just two states, which didn’t even require any particular symbols. It could be 1 and 0, or on and off, or high and low—it made no difference. Not only was it the most basic system imaginable, but it had also proven itself to be the most powerful, since it could be used to represent absolutely everything—not just words, but sounds, images, films, and so on.

Hiroshi gradually got to know the neighbors on their street. Dad practically burst with joy every time he got to introduce him, saying, “This is my son.” The funniest part was how hard he tried not to look as though he was bursting with joy—and how badly he failed.

One evening, as they were sitting there with their brushes, Hiroshi asked him why he had chosen this town in particular. What did Alexandria, Louisiana, have that other cities didn’t?

Dad nodded thoughtfully and set the brush carefully aside. He had to think for a while before he answered. “After my operation,” he began at last, “I wasn’t good for much of anything. My dad called me ‘the cauliflower’ and the doctors had pretty much given up on me.” He folded his hands in his lap and stared at a spot in the middle of the tabletop. “But there was one therapist who never gave up on me. She kept on coming. Day in, day out for a long, long time, until finally I began to show one or two signs of progress.”

Hiroshi looked at him, his brush hanging motionless in his hand. “What kind of progress?”

“Progress like being able to say a word so that people could understand it, like closing my fingers around an object if she put it into the palm of my hand. That kind of progress.”

“Oh,” Hiroshi said, shocked.

Dad gave a crooked grin. “Actually, I only know that because she told me later. It took a while for my memory to come back, but bit by bit I put my life back together, thanks to her help. And just when I thought maybe I could get back on my feet, she came along and told me she was getting married and moving away and that she was all kinds of sorry.”

“Oh,” Hiroshi said again. “And then what?”

“I said, ‘So where are you moving to?’ ‘Alexandria,’ she said. ‘That’s where my fiancé works.’ ‘Good,’ I said, ‘then I’m moving to Alexandria, too.’ ” He looked at Hiroshi and shrugged. “And that’s why I’m here.”

“But you must have been in pretty good shape if you could move to a new city like that,” Hiroshi said.

“Oh no. I still needed nursing during my first two years here, and then a housekeeper for the next two years after that before I could live like this.” He sighed, and it was a sound of deep contentment. “But it was the best thing I could have done. I’m so glad I got away from my family.”

Hiroshi nodded and shuddered at the same time. “My mother told me what happened back then. The way your father…” And then he stopped speaking. For the first time he realized that old man had been his other grandfather.

He really didn’t have much luck with grandparents.

“They’re still dreadful people, the ones who are left,” his father said. “I see them as little as I can. They think my brains aren’t right, but let me tell you: they’re the ones with no brains. My brothers and sisters have more money than they could ever spend in a lifetime, but whenever I’m visiting they spend the whole darn time complaining. There’s always some company trying to pull a fast one on them, taking away their market, chipping away at their share price or I don’t know what. The way they yell and holler and carry on, you’d think they were at war. But they’re billionaires, all of them. Even if they’ve never had a happy day in their lives.”

At that moment Hiroshi remembered his great idea. It was difficult to think of the people his dad was describing as his uncles and aunts—he’d never met them in his life—but from what he heard, his family sounded terribly afraid of losing their money someday.

Hiroshi spent a long time thinking about this. He finally came to the conclusion that they were afraid because there were so many poor people in the world. If everybody was rich, and if being rich was just the way things were, nobody would have any reason to worry about losing their wealth—they wouldn’t even be able to imagine what that might mean. Being rich would be like breathing. There’s enough air in the world for everybody to be able to breathe for a lifetime. Which is why most people never worry that there might not be enough air one day. If he managed to make everybody in the world rich, then all the fear and worry over money would vanish, along with all the unpleasant things that happened because of those fears.

Hiroshi understood English pretty well, in no small part because of all the time he had spent at the English-language movie theater and watching DVDs of American films. But his pronunciation was still awful. When his dad noticed Hiroshi hadn’t made any improvements after a month, he declared, “We’ve gotta do something about this.”

“I’ll learn,” Hiroshi objected. “Just give it time.”

“If we give it time,” his dad replied, “then your bad habits will just take root. I’m not going to let you go through life mangling every word you speak.”

And so he dragged Hiroshi along to see the therapist who had brought him back to the land of the living. Her name was Sylvie, and she didn’t look like half the miracle worker that his father had said she was. In fact, she was a fat little woman with washed-out brown hair and a great big hook nose. At first, she was just as flat-out against his father’s idea as Hiroshi was himself. That wasn’t her field of work, she said.

“Well, why don’t you just go for a change of pace, Sylvie?” his father said, suddenly charming in a way Hiroshi wasn’t used to.

So Hiroshi began to visit her four times a week and spent three-quarters of an hour—although it always seemed much, much longer than that—repeating nonsense syllables, letting her correct even the tiniest mispronunciation, singing English sentences out loud, coughing and gargling words in his throat, and shouting them at the top of his voice. It was astonishingly hard work, but he found the progress he made was just as astonishing. One day that summer he was at the city library and a librarian there said, “I bet you’re from Seattle or somewhere near there. I’ve got an ear for that kind of thing.”

“I’m from Seattle,” Sylvie declared with a grin when he told her about it. “I guess that means we can stop now.”

Dad wanted to know what he had told the librarian in reply.

“I almost said yes,” he admitted, “but then I couldn’t bring myself to say it.”

“That’s good,” said Dad. “You don’t need to deny your roots.”

When Hiroshi finally started high school, he saw his father had been right to insist on a clear accent. Americans seemed to be a colorful mix of every nation in the world—although nearly half of the kids at his school were white, there were just as many who were black or Asian so that Hiroshi didn’t stand out a bit. Because pretty nearly everybody looked different, the teasing and name-calling was instead based on the way they spoke. The ones who suffered most were the children from those Mexican immigrant families whose English was rudimentary.

The classes themselves weren’t particularly hard, and that was putting it mildly. In fact, Hiroshi would have had to make a conscious effort to get a
bad
grade. So, from the very start he ranked among the best students. The only subject where he was below average was sports. First, because he had never enjoyed sports, and second, because he was still smaller and weaker than most of the other boys. Sure, he was tough, but he wasn’t strong. He ran slower than the others, he was always the first to knock the bar off on the high jump, and he never even bothered to wonder whether he would be picked for the football team. None of that mattered, however, since Hiroshi Kato turned out to be the best baseball catcher Alexandria High School had ever had. He caught every single ball thrown by every single pitcher during the whole four years he was there, and he never dropped a catch.

Hiroshi had always had good reflexes, and of course his father had spent hours on end throwing him balls that summer. American dads did that sort of thing with their sons. But the balls his dad threw were really no challenge, and they certainly didn’t count as training. No, what nobody at school ever found out was that Hiroshi had cobbled together a computer-guided pitching machine that could throw him two hundred balls in a row at every conceivable curve and speed. He practiced and practiced with the machine until he could tell instantly how any ball would fly. By the end of the summer, he could run through the stock of balls five times in an evening and not let a single one through to the net behind him.

However, he never got to be any good at the moments of direct physical confrontation, such as when he had to block home plate. And he was always too slow to react when there was a rundown to tag. And when it was his turn to run, he couldn’t even make first base. So although the coach was full of praise for Hiroshi, he always tagged on a stern warning that it was no good harboring dreams of going professional. Hiroshi earnestly reassured him there was nothing he wanted to do less.

Though Hiroshi wasn’t unpopular at school—despite his outstandingly good grades—he didn’t make any close friends either and was only rarely invited to weekend parties. As for girlfriends, Hiroshi may well have been the one boy in school who was less interested in the girls than they were in him. He hardly looked at them.

Even before high school had begun, Hiroshi had felt less and less happy about his room at home. In the end, he asked his father’s permission to take a few things out.

“Do what you like,” Dad said right away. “It’s your room.”

So Hiroshi took down all the photos, put the sports gear, complete with the shelf, down into the cellar, and got to work scraping away the floral wallpaper. His father helped him, and then they repapered the whole room with a simple design and painted it over in white. His father asked him why he liked it better that way.

“I don’t know,” Hiroshi admitted, thinking it over. “I think I’m just not as American as the room was before.”

His father needed no further encouragement to teach him everything he knew about Japanese culture. Hiroshi was amazed to learn more about Japan from his American father than he ever had in all his years at school in Tokyo.

One day Hiroshi mentioned to his father that another student had teased him he would likely commit hara-kiri if he ever flunked a test, and his father replied that hara-kiri wasn’t even a word the Japanese traditionally used. It had been invented by the British, he explained, who had just translated the term “belly cut” and meant it as an insult. It was a way of disparaging the ritual suicide of a samurai.

“The correct word is seppuku,” he said. “A samurai who had lost face by neglecting his duties could restore his family honor by committing seppuku
correctly.”

He fetched down some books and catalogs from the shelves and showed Hiroshi what the
tantō
looked like, a slightly curved dagger with one sharp edge, about a foot long, and showed him how it was different from the
wakizashi
, a short sword about twice that length. That was the dagger that would have been used for the seppuku
ritual, he told his son. “The warrior would wear a white kimono as a sign of purity and would write a death poem before he carried out the ritual. They called a poem like that
jisei no ku
.”

Hiroshi was simultaneously fascinated and horrified as he listened to his father’s explanation. It was strange that his dad was the one to explain all this to him. Sure, he had heard something about it at school in Tokyo, but only ever as a subject for dumb jokes.

“Then he sits
seiza—
you know what that means, right?”

Hiroshi nodded. “Sure. It’s just the normal way of sitting on the floor.”

“Well yes. Normal in Japan. We Westerners think that sitting on a chair is normal.” They both sat down on the floor, the soles of their feet tucked underneath them, toes touching. “Then the man bares his torso. He takes up the knife and stabs it into what they called the scarlet field, the
tanden
. It’s about two inches under the navel and it’s supposed to be the center of the human body, the place where the soul resides. He cuts his belly left to right, with one final cut upward so that the organs tumble out. What generally happens is it cuts through a major blood vessel, the abdominal aorta, which causes his blood pressure to drop right away, and he loses consciousness pretty quick. That’s important, because the most important thing for correct seppuku
is that the samurai mustn’t flinch or groan, not even let the pain show on his face. He mustn’t show any fear either, of course. You mustn’t be able to see any sign of pain on the dead man or it doesn’t count as seppuku.”

Hiroshi pondered all this. “Sounds to me like a hell of a mess.”

His dad smiled at that. “You could certainly say that. If the seppuku
was performed inside a building—which didn’t usually happen—they used special tatami
mats with white braid. They had to be thrown away afterward, of course.”

They had agreed from the start that Hiroshi would fly back to Tokyo once a year to visit his mother, who had by this time taken the job in Inamoto’s office. She looked after the Australian side of his business, supplying Japanese groceries to the stores there. Inamoto didn’t curse quite so much as he once had—he was getting old, Mother declared—but he still paid her next to nothing. Hiroshi’s mother didn’t much care about that, since she didn’t need the money. By the look of it there was no new man in her life. She had women friends, though, and now and then they would all go on little trips together, and once a week they met to play cards or
renju
.