East is East

He sprang, taking his adversary by surprise. But there was no need for the karate he’d mastered through assiduous study of the diagrams in the back of a martial arts magazine, no need to grapple, kick or gouge—the bōifurendo had fallen back in horror, his eyes hard as nuggets, a look of impotence and constipation pressed into his features. Good. Good, good, good. Hiro came up out of his offensive crouch and darted a glance round him to get his bearings. And then, with the shock of a slap in the face, came his second big surprise: as far as he could see there was nothing but water, muck, creeper and vine, the damnable unending fetid stinking wilderness of America. But no, it couldn’t be. Was it all swamp, the whole hopeless country? Where were the shopping malls, the condos, the tattoo parlors and supermarkets? Where the purple mountains and the open range? Why couldn’t the butter-stinker have popped open the trunk at the convenience store, at Burger King or Saks Fifth Avenue? Why this? Why these trees and these lily pads and this festering gaijin cesspool? Was it some kind of bad joke?

No one moved. Hiro stood there poised on the brink of capture and escape, the bōifurendo

immobilized, his accomplice up to his knees in the murk and gaping up at him in bewilderment. He could have darted past the bōifurendo, dodging round him on the narrow spit of dry land, but there were more butter-stinkers behind him, a whole legion of them with fish poles and pickup trucks and boat trailers, the hate and loathing and contempt already settling in their eyes. There was no choice: hesitate and you are dead. Three strides, a running leap, and he was in his element, in the water, in the water yet again, born to it, inured to it, as quick and nimble and streamlined as a dolphin.

Déjà vu.

But this time the water wasn’t salt—it was bathwater, turgid, foul, the swill they flushed down the drain after the whole village has bathed for a week. He slashed at the duckweed and surface scum, powering for the far side of the lagoon before the astonished fishermen behind him could drop their tackle boxes and fire up the engines of their leaping blunt-nosed hakujin

swamp boats. He reached the far shore—but it wasn’t land, actually, it was something else, something that rocked beneath his feet like the taut skin of a trampoline—while the familiar shouts rose behind him and the outboard engines sprang to life with the growl of the hunting beast. No matter: he was already gone.

Yes, but now what? If he’d thought the island was bad, if he’d had his fill of bogs and mosquitoes and clothes that never dried, then this mainrand was hell itself. He fought his way through the bush, away from the voices and the scream of the outboards, clawing his way through the tangle, but there was no rest, no surcease, no place to set his feet down or pull himself from the muck. The water was knee-deep, waist-high, two feet over his head, and beneath it was the mud that sucked at him, sank him to the hips, pulled him inexorably down. With each desperate flailing stroke he was sinking deeper. Such an ignominious death, he thought, invoking Jōchō, inflating his hara, but going down all the same. Finally, his limbs numb with fatigue, gasping for air and choking on the gnats and mosquitoes that blackened the air around him, he managed to heave himself out of the muck and up onto the slick bony knees of a tree that rose up before him like a pillar of granite.

He lay there panting, too sapped even to brush the insects away from his face, the gloom of the big moss-hung trees darkening the morning till it might have been night. A swamp! Another swamp! A swamp so massive it could have swallowed up Ruth’s cabin, Ambly Wooster’s subdivision, the big house and all the piddling bogs and mud puddles on Tupelo Island without a trace. Shit, he gasped. Backayard.

Son of a bitch. He felt like a mountaineer who’s dragged himself up the face of a sheer cliff, inch by agonizing inch, only to find a second cliff, twice as high, rearing above it. What had happened to him? How had he gotten here? Doggo, his obōsan, Chiba, Unagi: they were faces he could barely recall. But Ruth: he saw her clearly, in sharp focus, saw her in all her permutations: the slim white-legged secretary, the seductress, the lover, his protector and jailer. She’d shared her food with him and her bed, shared her tongue and her legs, and she was going to smuggle him to the mainrand —not this mainrand,

not the mainrand of rot and stink and demented nature, but to the mainrand of cities and streets and shops where happas and wholes walked hand in hand.