East is East

He was back in Kyoto, eleven years old—a man, his ojisan said. His grandmother was at work, and he and Grandfather were watching TV, an American show in which a collie dog with hora saves a straw-haired boy from the dangers of ten lifetimes, week after week, in a neat half-hour format. “Grandfather,” Hiro asked, “tell me about my mother.” Grandfather’s legs were thin as fence posts beneath the folds of his yukata. They were sitting side by side on the

tatami floor. Dressers crammed with clothing, soap, thread, mirrors and combs and all the other odds and ends of a household mounted the walls, one atop the other. “Nothing to tell.” His grandfather shrugged.

“She died,” Hiro said.

Grandfather studied him. On the TV, a long snaking line of bare-chested Aryan men stood on a beach, lifting mugs of Kirin draft to their lips in perfect synchronization. “She died,” he agreed. And then, because Hiro was a man now and because of the moving shadows the TV cast on the wall and because he was old and he needed to, Grandfather told him the story, and he spared nothing.

Sakurako was a failure. Some demon seed had got into her and she gave up her studies, the possibility of a decent marriage and family, the love and respect of her parents, for foreign music—and finally, a foreign husband. A hippie. An American. When he deserted her, as Grandfather knew he would, she sank into a shame worse than miscegenation, worse than the murder of her family. She became a bar hostess, “mama-san” to a hundred men. When she wheeled her bicycle through the old streets of Kyoto, her half-breed infant strapped to her back, people stopped to stare. She was doomed and she knew it. Worse: her child was doomed too. He was a happa,

a gaijin, forever an outcast. Her only recourse was to go to America, to find Doggo and live there among the American hippies in a degradation that knew no hope or bottom. She had no money, no passport, no hope or knowledge of her hippie husband. She tried to come home. Grandfather barred the door.

Eleven years old, his hair cropped close and his eyes like two tortoiseshell beads, Hiro sat riveted. The television spoke to him but he didn’t hear. He was that happa. He was doomed.

“And then,” ojisan said, “and then one night she did what she had to do.” Hiro knew in that moment what it was, the knowledge sinking into his blood like a stone in a pond, at once and forever engulfing the flimsy edifice of his grandmother’s lies. His mother hadn’t succumbed to some vague disease—always vague, never a name for it. No. She died by her own hand. But the shock of that sudden knowledge was a ripple compared with the rest of it: she’d tried to take Hiro with her, tried to commit

oyako-sbinjü, parent-child suicide, and she’d failed even at that. He knew the gardens at the Heian shrine, didn’t he? his grandfather asked.

Hiro knew them well—his obāsan took him there to feed the koi in the pools and sit and contemplate the sculptured perfection of nature. The mouths—his grandfather spoke and he saw the mouths of the koi

gaping at the surface.

And the bridge?

Hiro nodded.

One night, late—she was racked with an insomnia that fed on her shame—she came back drunk from her barroom and strapped the infant to her back. The gates to the shrine were closed, the shaven-headed monks long asleep. She propped her bicycle against the wall and hoisted herself over. In the dark she made her way to the low covered bridge and she lifted the infant from her back. Frantic, scolding herself in a nagging broken whisper, her breath coming in gasps, she fought her way back to the path and dislodged a rock, an ornamental boulder, tearing at it with her nails till the rocks beside it were painted with her blood. She pushed at the rock, strained against it, rolled and shoved and beat at it. Finally she worked it across the planks of the bridge to where the infant, where Hiro, lay sleeping. In a final mad superhuman effort she lifted the stone to the rail, forced it into the breast of her bargirl’s kimono, pinned the child to her and gave herself up to the inexorable pull of gravity and the black transfiguration of the water below.

Water. Hiro woke to it, rain on his face. His mother was dead, but he was alive, flung from her arm as she hit the water and caught up in the muck, the muck in which he was mired now, hopeless, screaming, and the bald-headed monks came running. He struggled to sit up. Lightning tore at the sky. The rain seethed across the water, leaden pellets of it, beating the surface to a froth, hammering at his cushion of mud. Monks, he thought, where were they when you needed them? And he began to laugh, wheezing, delirious, sick and starved and hunted, he laughed like a boy at a Saturday matinee.