The Dead Are More Visible (3 page)

“Now we’re playing hide-and-seek, Sensei.”

I look over toward the play equipment. Silas is haunched down on Milk Shake’s chest, apparently trying to force a handful of gravel into his mouth. In the distance we hear the
mochi
-cake peddler in his megaphone truck, inching through the streets, playing a mournful, minor-key jingle, like the theme of a funeral home. Tasty, tasty,
mochi
-cakes! The sounds and customs of another time.

“I’ll join you,” I tell her, “as soon as George comes to.”

“We would be so honoured,” Yukon says, bowing.

People of the Clock

Along with the sometimes macabre lexicon and phrases in my primer, there were dialogues at the end of each lesson that the student was meant to convert into English. Mostly these were untainted by the professors’ growing fondness for corpse-filled houses,
moaning amputees, children cringing in bomb craters, executions at dawn.

Rather than translate them, I would flip straight to the appendix to read the English versions. Sometimes I would scribble dialogues of my own in the style of the book. It helped me kill hours on the congested, weirdly silent trains I rode back and forth to Eguchi’s school and to another school where I sometimes subbed. I read and studied, if with waning discipline, because there was little else to do but be ogled impersonally or doze off on those cars full of sleepers all nodding, twitching in eerie unison as we juddered along through the gloom of tunnels or the sodium glare of stations. Mornings I was the ghost alone among hurried, solid, purposeful burghers; on the night train back, I seemed the only living thing aboard a funeral train of wraiths.

I was aware of a tidal turn gathering somewhere within. For years I’d been in love with being an outsider. Japan, I thought, should have been my Eden, my eventual bride, and would have been, I think, had I been younger. A place I could feel I belonged forever by virtue of not belonging. Never belonging. Islands always rebuff belonging.

But I was falling out of love with distance, absence.

My favourite moment on the ride “home” to my
tatami
closet: as the train crossed under the river and climbed out of the tunnel and shot into the night, a line of huge neon billboards reared across the river
like false-front structures in a midway, luminous, festooned, a corporate phantasmagoria of imagery and Japanese characters and twisted English, all mirrored in the sluggish Ara. On a towering billboard, a wry
gaijin
—seemingly James Coburn—sipped whiskey above a slogan set in Gothic script, as if it were a plug for a prog rock band: OF YOU DREAM, BE HANDSOME CAD, FOR YOU PARTY LIFE AND NIGHTIES OF BACHELOR FUN.

DIALOGUE 7: SLEEPING, WAKING

“Who knocks at the door?”

“Open, it is I.”

“Please accept my greetings.”

“Are you still in bed?”

“Why, what time is it?”

“It has just struck eight. What time is it by your watch?”

“It has stopped. I forget to wind it up.”

“Come, my good man, get up!”

“Morning sleep is so sweet. Please go away.”

“I don’t know how you can lie so long abed!”

“I have nothing better to do; I shall slumber a few minutes longer.”

“But a man’s life is so brusque! Come now, up, up, up!”

“Never.”

“Then I shall strike you, hence, with my cane.”

“No!”

“Have at you, you fop!”

“You are worse than the repeating alarm clock.”

——

On the march, he felt fortunate to have come to no harm

Eguchi was training for the Tōkyō women’s marathon, coming in mid-November. Sunday mornings I would run with her in the bamboo grove next to the school. The grove was a twenty-acre square with a black asphalt path bisecting it diagonally, and a circular track, a kilometre long, fitting just inside the perimeter. To either side of the narrow paths the bamboo rose in high, hedge-like palisades, so at dusk it was already dark. By day the light was a dim and anaesthetic green, the air almost cool. Where the track came closest to the grove’s outer edges, traffic sounds from the bordering streets were loud, yet the streets remained invisible. Eguchi—who confessed that for years she hadn’t left the vicinity of her school for more than twenty-four hours at a stretch—would finish these runs by sprinting the diagonal path to Mori Dori and into the school-yard to check on the Sunday-morning class, taught by a gaunt, grim young Texan woman whose students were developing comic drawls, especially on words like
dog
and
house
.

“You are not looking your best this morning, Sensei.”

We were on our fourth slow lap. Slow, but detectably
accelerating. The leaf light didn’t do much for her complexion either, but at least her face showed no signs of strain. Mine must have. I was hungover. The day before, our weekly “meeting” at Brain Noodle had continued through late afternoon, evening, and on into the night.

In a snug salmon tracksuit with lightning-rod seams, Eguchi ran high on her toes with a silent, gliding gait, smooth but for the steam-house pumping of her arms. The lenses of her wraparound shades turned slowly toward me, seeming to monitor me as coldly as security cameras. Then they slipped down her nose, exposing liquid eyes glinting with irony. “In fact,” she said, “you resemble yellow.” She slid a finger up the bridge of her nose to push the glasses back into place. On our runs, her English gave up all its gains—the only sign of fatigue she ever showed.

“Look,” I panted.

“What?”

“I
look
yellow. You need to let me get more sleep.”

“And most of the aliens,” she said, “lose weight on the Japanese food.”

“It’s not the weight. It’s the smoking. Slowing me down.”

Eguchi smoked nearly as much as I did but it didn’t seem to affect her wind.

“Smoking only kills the germs,” she said. “In the lungs and chest. It’s good for us. Smoking expends the capacity of the lungs.”

“I’ve read that men gain weight. When they’re ready to settle.”

She laughed huskily, an astonishing sound effect, one that I heard only a handful of times over the ten months I knew her. I turned my head sharply. By the time I brought her face into focus, only the shade of a grin remained.

“What’s so funny?”

“Foreign teachers never stay.
Gaijin
never settle here.”

“I’ve seen some,” I said, my voice squeezed thin and small. Lap six. Silence but for the sounds of our mutual panting, close and loud in that narrow space. “I’ve seen some
married
. With a house. Kids.”

“Yet in their hearts, home is elsewhere.”

“I didn’t say
I
was ready to settle.”

“No, no. Of course not. Let us now do the wind sprint.”

Eguchi seemed to decree these sprints whenever we disagreed—on politics, say, or the way I was teaching for her, especially in the
juku
—or maybe she did it by mischievous instinct whenever I was tired. She surged ahead now, darting with the sleek, silent efficiency of a woodland huntress, me clomping along behind like a puffy old satyr. Her tracksuit was a flattering fit. At last she slowed to a trot. I caught up. While I was still gasping, she informed me that she’d decided I was a romantic in my view of the teaching. “Like that curious German,” she said. “
Dō iu hito deshō?
Steinman,
deshō ka?
”

“Steiner. Austrian, I think.”

“They are one race, Sensei.”

“We read him a bit. Teachers’ college. Thought kids shouldn’t be wakened too soon.”

“Awakened, Sensei—in the morning?”

“Metaphorically. Torn from a dream. Pulled into rationality too soon.”

“Childhood is not a sleep, Sensei—not now. There’s no time for that. Ah, time!” She brought the back of her wrist to her face and frowned as she read her Swatch. “Now we do a lap at eighty percent of utter speed. Begin!”

Lately I’d been smoking Peace cigarettes, a cheap local brand.

“Not that I’m
happy
about it,” she said, raising her voice over the bellows of my breathing. “When I was a child, we spend plenty of time hunting insects with the nets. The fireflies and the
semi
. What is it,
semi?
Not the cricket …”

“Cicada.”

Cheap and unfiltered.

“Your grasp is improving, Sensei … We used to bring them back from the fields and the forest and maintain them in the cage with net for walls. We used to name them and play with them like the pets. Summer nights I woke up and came outside after everyone was asleep. To sit and watch the fireflies fly in their cage.”

She would not be willing to speak this way, I thought, if we were face to face.

“It’s years before, Sensei. Now, it’s necessary to work harder. Everyone here. It’s just too bad, but so it must be.”

She smiled uncomfortably. The need to work hard was neurotically national; Eguchi’s need to maintain her school in the face of throttling competition and despite being a professional freak—a lone woman boss among a million male ones—was all her own. She would not slack or stint where her business, her baby, was concerned. “There’s no help for it—so it must be.” Her fallback phrase.
Shikata ga nai
. And though I could now see the wisdom of occasional unromantic acceptance, surrender, I could not impose such a rueful wisdom on my students. A child is a romantic or no longer a child.

“Faster, Sensei! Don’t stop.”

“I need to stop.”

“Walk a lap,” she instructed. “After, we can walk back to the flat. You can have a bath and a rest again.”

“A rest,” I said, grinning as I gasped. “Right.”

DIALOGUE 9: LOVE & THE ROMANCE

“I am in love with a young gal. I fell in love with her.”

“You didn’t. You got a fancy. You imagine that you are in love.”

“My affection is deep-seated. She has the countenance of an angel.”

“You are infatuated with her. Your mind is clouded.”

“What? How dare you!”

“You fell into the snare of love. Cupid has snared you.”

“Not at all! She has a fine figure, a lovely face, an alluring smile. She has so many personal charms. She walks like a duchess.”

“Is that all? Has she good sense, intelligence? Has she good education, good breeding? What of her social position? Has she any big brothers? What kind of man is her father?”

“I know only that I love her dearly. Do not trifle with my love. My life without her would be a life of misery. And what is life without love?”

“You are a shapeless romantic. She may reject you.”

“Yet for her, would I chance all.”

“Shame on you! Friend you speak non sense.”

——

He had come to behave toward the boss with a befitting respect

“Do you have another book of matches?”

“Here, Sensei, you can light it with mine.”

“You can call me Curtis, Ms. Eguchi. I mean, here we are.”

“I prefer to say Sensei, even so.”

“And you still prefer I call you Ms. Eguchi.”

“
Sō desu
. There, you see. So easy to light you up.”

Even after nine months of this, it was hard to say when she was joking. Her manner was deadpan. Her voice was even, low, and hoarse. Yet during the day, if the phone by the bed should ring and she grabbed it (and she always would, signalling me to be silent), her greeting voice was the standard public female voice of Japan: a breathless treble full of obliging little hiccups and bubbles, all service and subordination. Then she would hang up and, with no apparent self-consciousness, reassume the femme fatale baritone.

“I think maybe I should go back to my place,” I said. “I have to teach at the other school, a sub class, first thing.”

“Ah, cheating on the side. Is that the phrase?”

“Close.”

“You are welcome to stay, Sensei. Stay another hour. It’s early. Here.”

I laughed as if being tickled. “You again.”

“How is that?”

“Deeply unethical. Hang on a sec.”

“There’s none more in the pocket, I think. Don’t you worry.”

“Packet. You’re not worried?”

“Stay, just so. There.”

“But
gaijin
all have AIDS—that’s the rumour. And that we’re
fertile
.”

“But I am not, Sensei.”

“You mean, at this time of the …?”

“In my life. I did want them when I was young. Quite a bit. They never came.”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Eguchi.”

“Now, I could not have them even if I could. I’m a business. And a divorced one. Nobody marries such a woman. Nobody even takes her for the date.”

Except, I thought,
gaijin
. I wondered whom I had replaced and who would eventually replace me at the school.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Eguchi. I think they’re fools.”

“
O-seiji desu yo!
”

“No—I’m really not flattering you.”

“You’re improving, Curtis. Sensei.”

“This time I want you to look at me the whole time.”

I kissed her eyes and tasted kohl.

To describe one’s inner feeling

Genki
(GENG-KEE): n. or adj.: phonetically eloquent word for vigour, health, high-spirited energy. “How are you today, Curtis Sensei?” “
Genki da yo!
” I’m well. Excellent. Fit as a butcher’s dog. No English word quite substitutes and I know that for the rest of my life, whenever I feel the way I feel today,
genki
is how I’ll want to describe it. It’s that kind of day: autumn sky swabbed free of cloud, smog, or the faintest vapour, hardwood leaves in full ignition, the sun bestowing heat in a mood of mellow generosity, unlike summer’s violent
excess. As I walk, heels snapping, from station to school through the bamboo grove in this elating air, I recall similar days, years ago in my own abandoned country. Sounds carry in clear air and at dusk on fall Saturdays you would hear the caroming hollers of boys playing road hockey on distant streets in all directions compassing outward, while we—the kids of our street, at the navel of the known world—conducted our own passionate match. It seemed the whole universe was at play.