East is East

A shadow flew across the screen door, there was the dull glint of a lunch bucket, and she cried out. He stopped then and she saw him as he was that night on Peagler Sound, his face splotched with welts and scratches, the red clay of his wet hair, his eyes startled and rinsed out. He saw her. Their eyes met. And then he started back, the lunch bucket cradled in his arms, as slick and wet and glistening as a newborn baby.

Hog Hammock

On day after he’d jumped ship and contemplated the small matter of his own extinction on the breast of the black heaving Atlantic, Hiro Tanaka awoke in a matted tangle of marsh grass. The sun was high, and while he’d slept, exhausted, it had burned his face and hands and the soles of his feet. He was lying on his back in several inches of salt water, suspended above the muck by a pale white tapestry of roots. These were the roots of the marsh grass, Spartina alterniflora. If he had cut through them with the penknife he’d thought to shove back in his pocket prior to taking the plunge from the wingdeck of the Tokachi-maru,

he would have found himself up to his neck in the ooze. But he wasn’t thinking about the roots or the ooze or the penknife or the myriad thin seamless cuts the razor-edged blades of the grass had inflicted on him as he staggered ashore in the night. His thoughts, after the initial surprise of waking to birdsong and mudstink instead of rolling decks and Bunker C fumes, focused solely on his alimentary needs.

First off, he was thirsty. Or not merely thirsty, but maddened with the kind of implacable thirst that shrivels Joshua trees and lays waste to whole villages in Africa. He hadn’t had so much as a sip of sweet water since old Kuroda had brought him the tin cup and his balls of rice two days earlier. Salt clung to the hairs of his nostrils and eyelashes, encrusted his tonsils and adenoids, choked off his throat like a pair of strangling hands. He felt as if he were gagging, choking to death, and a wave of panic broke over him. Suddenly he was on his hands and knees, the water cool on his wrists, the sun burning, and he was bringing up stomach acid and bile. The taste of it, astringent and sour, set his throat afire, and though he knew he shouldn’t do it—he’d seen the movies, seen Lifeboat and Mutiny on the Bounty, knew that sea water made you go stark raving mad and was a prelude to cannibalism and auto-phagia and worse—he bent to the water and drank, drank till he felt bloated and sick. Then he flopped over on his back and lay flat and volitionless on his bed of roots, as the stirrings of his second vital need began to gnaw at him.

He’d been in the brig a week, and in that time he’d lost twenty pounds or more. The turtleneck swam on him, his wrists were like the knucklebones of a pig, his eyes had sunk into his head and his jowls had evaporated. Two balls of rice a day. It was inhuman, medieval, barbaric. And it had been, what—two days?—since he’d got even that. Lying there in the stinking grass beneath the alien sun of a wild and alien country, wet and exhausted and starving, he felt his consciousness pull apart like a piece of taffy, till he was thinking with his brain and his stomach both. While his brain took note of the vacancy of the sky and squared off the boundaries of his distress, his stomach spoke to him in the terms of sharpest denunciation. Cavernous and hollow, rumbling, gurgling and raging, it accused him with each futile contraction. He was a fool, an idiot, a shit-for-brains. Why, even at that moment he could be tucking in his napkin on the Japan Air flight to Narita, asking the flight attendant for a bit more rice, another morsel of Norwegian salmon, just a drop more sake, courtesy of the Japanese embassy. Of course, they’d be waiting for him at the airport with a set of handcuffs, half a dozen charges ranging from assault and battery to dereliction of duty, and a humiliation that knew no bounds—but could it be worse than this? His stomach spoke to him: What joy in dignity, in life even, without food?

Like most Japanese, Hiro regarded his stomach—his hara —as the center of his being, the source of all his physical and spiritual strength. If a westerner were to talk of people who are kindhearted or coldhearted, of heartbreak or heartease, a Japanese would modify the conceit to feature the stomach—in his eyes, a far more vital organ. A heart-to-heart talk would be conducted stomach to stomach, hara o awaseru,

while a blackhearted cad would be blackstomached, a hara ga Kuroi hito. Two inches beneath the navel lies the kikai tanden, the spiritual center of one’s body. To release the ki or spirit in the act of hara-kiri is to release it from the belly, the guts, the only organ that counts.