Losing Kei Read online

  Losing Kei

  Suzanne Kamata

  A Novel

  Leapfrog Press

  Wellfleet, Massachusetts

  Losing Kei © 2007 by Suzanne Kamata

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

  Copyright Conventions

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a data base

  or other retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means,

  including mechanical, electronic, photocopy, recording or

  otherwise, without the prior written permission

  of the publisher.

  Published in 2008 in the United States by

  The Leapfrog Press

  P.O. Box 1495

  95 Commercial Street

  Wellfleet, MA 02667-1495, USA

  www.leapfrogpress.com

  Distributed in the United States by

  Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

  St. Paul, Minnesota 55114

  www.cbsd.com

  First Edition

  E-ISBN 978-1-935248-52-1

  for Jio

  I would like to thank the editors of New York Stories, Literary Mama and Her Circle Ezine, where some segments of this novel were originally published in slightly different form. Also a big domo arigatou gozaimasu to those who read and commented upon earlier drafts of this work, especially Pat Tanjo, Melinda Tsuchiya, Margaret Stawowy, Noemi Hiraishi, Diane Nagatomo, Colleen Sheils, Joan Itoh Burk, Helene Dunbar, Wendy Jones Nakanishi, Andy Couturier and Maretha Mino. Thanks to Louise Nakanishi-Lind for friendship and advice on surfing; Cynthia Kingsbury for inspiration; Tracy Slater for inviting me to read at Four Stories Japan; Caron Knauer for her patience, passion and persistence; and Yukiyoshi Kamata for indulgence. Further thanks goes to my parents, for never once suggesting I consider a fallback career; Michiyo Kamata and Yukiyo Maegawa for logistical support; and to Jio and Lilia Kamata, my most dependable muses, for just being you. This book wouldn’t exist if not for Ira Wood and the good people at Leapfrog Press; thank you for invaluable editorial suggestions and for publishing this novel. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to the readers of this book.

  Contents

  1997

  1989

  1997

  1989

  1997

  1987

  1997

  1989

  1990

  1997

  1990

  1991

  1997

  1995

  1997

  1996

  1997

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  1997

  I’m at the playground, sitting on a swing. There’s a temple next door and from time to time the suggestion of incense wafts over. The chains holding me squeak as I sway, rutting a groove in the dirt beneath me. With the heel of my sneakers I dig up a child’s barrette. My throat clogs.

  I’m sitting on a swing, recalling how he sat here, too. He soared high above the ground, shrieking.

  A little while ago an elderly woman was pulling weeds behind the slide.

  “Where are you from?” she asked me in Japanese.

  “America.” I said it with pride, in that don’t-you-wish-you-could-be-so-lucky tone.

  “Ah, so.” She nodded. The skin around her eyes crinkled, but her smile was stiff. She seemed to be reflecting, remembering, and she turned away.

  Maybe she’d heard about me.

  Now I’m alone, swinging, smoking a cigarette. A few years ago I would never have lit up in public. I kept up appearances. I hid my liquor bottles in the depths of the trash container. Actually, I didn’t drink much at all then. I intended to be beyond reproach.

  A crow lands on the telephone wire and looks down at me, caws. Even the birds are scolding me. More crows come, and they start jabbering with each other, and I am forgotten.

  Finally, the hour arrives. The hour of soldier-suited children lugging red satchels, kicking at rocks and cans as they go along. They pass in groups of three or four, sometimes bumping each other and laughing. Usually there is one serious older child leading the way. Sometimes a mother.

  I stub out my cigarette in the sand. I bury it deep, pat the dirt over it. I shade my eyes against the mid-afternoon glare, look down the lane.

  Even from a distance I know exactly which one is him. He is with two other boys, but he scuffles along, chin to chest, ignoring the others. His yellow hat is wadded into his jacket pocket. The brass buttons of his blazer catch the sun. He is coming this way.

  I rise from the swing, heart pounding. I walk to the edge of the playground. A quartet of pony-tailed girls crosses to the other side of the road when they see me. They giggle behind their little hands and when they are just beyond me, safe, they begin to recite all of the English phrases they know: “Hello,” “my name is…” (which they say as “mayonnaise,” the mispronunciation a popular joke among schoolchildren), “thank you very much.” San kyu berry muchi.

  I barely hear them. He is coming closer, but he hasn’t looked up yet. I see that his dark brown hair is longer than before, brushing over his ears. He is deeply tanned from outdoor play. An adhesive bandage is pasted over his left knee.

  One of his friends grabs the yellow hat from his pocket and tosses it into the air.

  “Oi,” he says, irritated. “Kaeshite.” Give it back. He swipes at the boy’s head.

  The other two boys toss the hat back and forth, but I can tell from their high, excited voices, from the way that they keep in line, that they are teasing him out of affection. They are not bullies, not the little monsters who steal lunch money and wield knives that you read about in the newspaper. They are only trying to pull him out of himself, to bring his attention to them.

  I am so caught up in watching them that I almost forget why I am here. Remembering, I raise my hand as far as my temple and call out, “Kei!”

  He looks up, searches for a moment, and finds me.

  From this close I can see the lush fringe of his lashes, the dimples in his cheeks. In his eyes, I detect yearning. Just for a moment. Because then, out of nowhere, his grandmother appears. She must have seen me. She must have noticed me even as I stood entranced by this boy. She runs to him and the others fall away.

  “Kei!” I shout again, but she won’t let him look at me.

  She holds his head firmly against her side and rushes him off down the street and I can do nothing but watch.

  I have lost him again. I have lost my son Kei.

  1989

  I came to Japan because a man had broken my heart. For years, I had been dreaming of Africa. My bookshelves were crammed with stories of the savanna, of women flying planes over herds of elephants, of Karen Blixen farming coffee on her plantation, of spinster schoolteachers getting it on with white hunters. I’d thought that I’d become a wildlife photographer for National Geographic, or maybe open a gallery of African art. Or maybe I’d write some stories myself. I’d been accepted into the Peace Corps. My posting was Cameroon. But Philip went to Africa before I did. Dakar, Senegal, to be exact. He’d already made his plans by the time I’d met him. When we broke up, I knew that going to Africa myself would fuel my hope. I would always be waiting, expecting to run into him, the way I’d once encountered a long-ago neighbor at the coat check of the Louvre. My eyes would follow every khaki-clad pair of legs up to the face that might be his. I’d be haunting ex-pat bars and embassy parties in search of him. And so when my brother suggested a fellowship for artists in Japan, I saw my chance to make a
clean break.

  • • • • •

  As soon as I knew I’d be going to Japan, I began to study the language. I picked up a few textbooks from the university bookstore, put up an ad (soon answered by a Junji Shimada) and set myself the task of learning one Chinese character a day. That is, after I’d spent a week mastering two phonetic alphabets—hiragana, for Japanese words, and katakana, for the lingo borrowed from abroad.

  “You don’t have to go all the way to Japan to forget about him,” my mother said when I first told her of my plans. “And besides he might come back to you. After Africa.”

  Strange words from the woman who’d walked out on her husband, my father, because he didn’t deserve her and who’d pretty much given up on men after that.

  But then again, she’d been Philip’s number one fan. Early on in our relationship, he’d invited himself to her house for Thanksgiving dinner. That year my brothers were going to hang out with our father and his new wife at a timeshare on the coast. They had already chartered a boat for deep sea fishing, something that didn’t interest me in the least. Besides, I wasn’t about to abandon our mother and her twenty-five pound turkey.

  Philip showed up with a bouquet of flowers (“Freesias! My favorite!”), a bottle of Beaujolais, and a Nina Simone album. I’d told him how my mother loved Nina Simone.

  That evening after he’d gone home, we had a few glasses of wine together and my mother said, “Not just any guy would be willing to come to your house for a major holiday a month into the relationship.”

  I nodded and sipped from my glass. “He also volunteered to be my date for Katie’s wedding.”

  Katie McGraw was my oldest friend and I was going to be the maid of honor. Philip would have to sit by himself during the ceremony.

  “Obviously he’s serious about you.” She gave me a pat on the knee and hauled herself off to bed.

  I appreciated that in spite of my dad and his infidelities she was still encouraging me to fall in love. She offered me the possibility of happily-ever-after and that was like a gift. At least that’s how I felt then.

  By the time I boarded the plane in Atlanta, leaving my mother at the gate, I was ready to forget all about falling in love. I wanted to lose myself in another language. After all that cramming, I was confident that I’d be able to order a bowl of noodles once I got to Narita. And I could probably make it clear to a cab driver that I wanted to go to the Keio Plaza in Shinjuku, where my room was reserved.

  I stashed my textbooks in the overhead bin and ordered a glass of wine.

  Soon I would be in a place where no one knew anything about me, where I would be free to reconstruct my life. Without Philip.

  I’d told the interview panel that I was following in the footsteps of Blondelle Malone, a woman painter who’d lived just a few blocks from the house where I grew up, albeit a hundred years earlier.

  When I was twelve, I’d checked her biography out of the public library and never returned it. Imagining her life and her lost paintings was enough to intrigue me. Although her biographer tended toward condescension, I thought that maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe Blondelle had been a victim of the times—a woman, when men held the power; an Impressionist, when the fashion was fauve. For all I knew, she had been a great, forgotten artist, in the same way that Frida Kahlo had been. Slagged, and then resurrected. But where were her paintings? I amused myself by thinking I’d solve this great mystery. And if I couldn’t find them, I’d just paint them again. I’d replace them, as it were.

  • • • • •

  In Tokyo, I lugged my bags to the curb and hailed a taxi. The yellow vehicle pulled up in front of me and the back passenger door opened as if by magic. The driver, a gnomish man with white-gloved hands, lifted my three suitcases with surprising ease and stashed them in the trunk. I slid onto the seat of the car and laid my head back against the lace antimacassar. A box of tissues encased in ruffled cloth sat under the back window like a bakery cake.

  “Okay,” the driver said, taking his place at the wheel. “Where you wanna go?”

  I impressed him with a stream of Japanese.

  He grunted with grudging respect, and then guided the car into traffic.

  I didn’t want to talk just then. I hoped he wouldn’t be one of those chatty drivers. He wasn’t. At the stoplights, he studied me via rearview mirror, a slight frown on his face. Otherwise, he seemed intent on the high school baseball game blaring from his car radio.

  The city outside my window was clean. Pure. Whitewashed buildings, devoid of graffiti. The streets were free of trash. The cars that traveled upon them seemed to be recent models, and washed that day. I didn’t see a single dent.

  The inside of the taxi smelled of pomade and faded tobacco. An air freshener was affixed to the dash. I spent a moment concentrating on these smells, wanting to save them. I tried to memorize the buildings (not sky high as in New York, for instance; there were earthquakes here), the billboards pushing Coca Cola and some drink called Pocari Sweat. The sight of Mt. Fuji, hazy in the distance.

  I loved the perfect manners of the hotel staff. The attendant bowed as he ushered me into the elevator. The other young man who pushed my suitcases on a trolley refused my offer of a tip and backed away, smiling.

  I loved the crisp white sheets of my bed, and the tea set laid out with rice crackers wrapped in paper that resembled kimono fabric.

  Exhaustion surged and threatened to pull me under, but I wanted to see, hear, touch, smell, taste, do more. I brewed a cup of green tea and crunched a cracker. Then I flicked on the television. A newscast was about to begin. The announcers bowed in unison before reading the news. My first day in Japan. My new life.

  • • • • •

  The next morning, over a bowl of room service miso soup, I cracked open a guidebook and plotted my day. I’d start out with a visit to the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno Park, then drop by the zoo to see the panda (I’d never seen one in person). After that I’d take the subway to Shinjuku and have lunch at one of the stand-up noodle bars I’d heard about. I expected the crowds and the neon and the video screens would wear me out, so as my last outing of the day, I’d visit a temple for a bit of serenity.

  At Ueno Zoo, I went straight for Ling Ling. A group of small children in uniform crowded in front of the display, pressing their noses against glass. “Panda-san!” they called. “Panda-san!” One little boy pounded the window with his fist, earning a mild reproach from a young woman who was probably his teacher.

  Over the yellow-capped heads, I could see Ling Ling crouched in a corner. The concrete floor was strewn with a few stalks of limp bamboo. The animal had no companions, and I wondered if she remembered China, her mother, others of her kind.

  A camera flashed nearby and I turned away.

  At the temple, I trailed a tour group—a bunch of sixtyish women in their holiday best, with a few men tagging along. They laughed loudly, slapping each other as they picked their way along the stone path. Off to my left, a group of junior high school students was stepping onto risers, preparing for a commemorative photo.

  I’d been stupid to expect peace. This was a major tourist attraction. If I wanted to meditate, I’d have to find some mountain monastery. I took to people-watching instead. I tried to guess who was from the city, and who was from the country. I didn’t expect to see any other foreigners, but then I did.

  It was a man. The exact size and shape of Philip. I thought I remembered those khaki trousers, that Hard Rock Café T-shirt. The light was in my eyes, so his face was obscured by a flash of brilliance.

  I pulled my jacket collar around my face and tried to retract my head like a turtle. I wanted to be seen, and I didn’t.

  He was coming toward me, a Japanese girl, a sprig of a woman, latched onto his arm. He lied to me, I thought. He didn’t go to Africa at all. He’s here in Japan. The fat noodles I’d consumed earlier
threatened to come back up. I felt so dizzy, I had to sit down right there on the walkway.

  “Are you alright?” Suddenly he was standing above me, concern filling his eyes. Not Philip’s eyes.

  I let him pull me to my feet. It wasn’t Philip. His hair was a little darker, I now saw. He was older by maybe a decade. His companion studied me with wide-open eyes.

  “I’m so embarrassed,” I said, brushing a leaf from the seat of my pants. “My head just started spinning all of a sudden. Must be jet lag.”

  “Are you pregnant?” the woman asked.

  The man shot her a look, but I just laughed. “No. No chance of that.”

  “Why don’t you join us for a cup of coffee or something?” the man said. “Maybe you need to sit down for awhile.”

  I followed them to a little tea house and let the woman order for me, although I could have done it myself. The man didn’t seem to speak Japanese.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked him.

  “Three years.” He ducked his head. “I know, I know. My Japanese should be better, but it’s so easy to get by without it. You’ve got English-language newspapers and magazines. TV’s bilingual. And there are so many foreigners here.”

  “Hmmm.” I stirred creamer into my individually brewed cup of coffee. “So is it like that everywhere?”

  He shrugged. “I went cycling in Tokushima—that’s in Shikoku—over the Bon holidays and nobody speaks English down there. I didn’t run into a single American.”

  “Is that so?”

  When I got back to my hotel room, I pulled out a map and a train schedule. In the morning, I would go to Tokushima.

  • • • • •

  I took one train and then another till I got to Tokushima City, and then I changed trains again and went all the way to the southern coast. I got off in a little seaside town that smelled of fish and kelp and asked for directions to the nearest hotel.