East is East

But it was wonderful. A whole circus passing before his eyes as he lay there, birds with feet bigger than their wings springing from lily pad to lily pad, the holy crane gangling overhead, frogs swelling and deflating all round him. He turned his cheek on its pillow of ooze and there was a frog right beside him, crouched big-bellied over its coiled legs. And then it inflated its hara magically and gave out with a booming eructation that startled all the other frogs for the briefest instant till they could inflate themselves in turn and belch back a response. It was funny. Hilarious. Better than a cartoon. He laughed till he felt the sword in his gut and then he sat up and struggled with his pants.

If the day was high comedy, the night was tragic. It closed in on him like a shroud and it was haunted and deadly. The cold settled in and the swamp rang with shrieks of protest while Hiro shivered in his wet T-shirt and his wet cutoffs. The insects feasted on him and he slapped at them now, but he was a pincushion, a blood bank, his skin swollen in its hills and valleys till it felt like a text in braille. Late, very late, when the moon was a frozen speck in the sky, a reptile, thick around as his ankle, nosed in beside him for warmth. He felt it there, nosing at his armpit, his crotch, poking its bald face at his nostrils for the heat of his breath.

In the morning, he was worse. He shivered in his bed of muck till the sun rose to redeem him and then he lay there like a coldblooded thing, like an alligator hauled out on the bank, and the blood boiled in his veins. This time the fever took him back to Kyoto and he was a small boy clutching at his obāsan’s hand as they made their way through the festive Friday night crowd on Kawaramachi Street. There was a parade of neon, the smells of gyoza, soba, sweet broiled eel, people everywhere. His obāsan

was taking him to meet Grandfather for a night out in celebration of his birthday—his sixth. They were going to have udon and tempura at Auntie Okubo’s and then they were going to the coffee shop round the corner to have American sweets, chocolate fudge sundae and banana split. His free hand, the left, was thrust snugly into the grip of a new fielder’s mitt with Reggie Jackson’s name etched into the leather in flowing American characters. A pachinko parlor: “Obāsan, please, let me play, just one game,” and he tugged her arm and he was off balance and staggered into a passing woman, an old woman, dressed not in western-style clothes like everyone else but in kimono and

obi. She looked at him hard. “Sumimasen,” he said, bowing deeply, “excuse me, please.” Obāsan

elaborated on the apology, but the old woman pinned him with her black hard eyes. “Gaijin,” she hissed finally and turned to go, but Hiro lost his head, the insult stinging like vinegar on an open wound, and he snatched at the wide flowing sleeve of her gown. “Amerikajin desu,” he said, “I’m an American.”

But he wasn’t. And he isn’t. He’d seen the hate in their eyes. He pushed himself up from the mudbank, the sweat burning at his temples, and thought of the orange soda the Jeffcoats had left him. And where was it? Crushed beneath the mute unthinking weight of the thing on the platform, the beast, the dinosaur that was America. He saw it then, orange fluid leaking from beneath the wattled belly like urine, like pale diluted blood. But it wasn’t blood, it was orange soda, and he longed for it now. The sweat stung his eyes and the fever blasted his throat: he could hardly breathe for thirst. He stood dazedly and saw the water all around him, an ocean, a planet of water. And then he bent to it, knowing he shouldn’t, knowing it would only make matters worse, bent to it and drank till he could feel it coming up.

Sometime during the course of the afternoon the clouds began to bunch up in the west, bare knuckles of white shading to gray and blue-gray and black. The sky receded, the sun melted away. The wind came up then, moderate but steady and with a taste of the Gulf Coast on it. Aching in every joint, blistered and burned till he wondered if they’d mistake him for a Negro, Hiro lay there on his mudbank, and the mud accommodated him, molding itself to the cup of his head, the spoon of his shoulders and the ceaselessly working jackknife of his shrunken buttocks and wasted thighs. Rain was coming and another night of cold and wet, of shivers and fever and the sword in the gut, but Hiro didn’t have the energy to move. And what would he do anyway? Put up his watertight tent and slip into a down bag? Fire up his hibachi and cook himself a cheeseburger—medium rare, hold the onion—over the glowing white coals of his charcoal briquettes? A dream, nothing but a dream. He watched the clouds bunch and spread and bunch again, and then he let his eyes fall shut.