East is East

The truth is, he didn’t know where he was or where he was going. All he knew was that he was starving and that the gaijin

authorities would be after him and that if they caught him he’d be imprisoned and sent home in disgrace. He wandered aimlessly, his feet battered and bleeding, mosquitoes and ticks and chiggers and gnats drawing yet more blood, venomous reptiles lying in wait for him. He was a city kid, an urban dweller, raised by his grandmother in the serried flats of Yokohama. Of the forests and mountains of Japan he knew little, and he knew even less about the wilderness of America. He knew only that it was vast and untamed and seething with bear, lion, wolf and crocodile. Unseen wings beat round his head in the darkness. Shrill voices screeched through the hollows of the night. Something bellowed in the swamp.

On the third day—or was it the fourth?; he’d lost count—he staggered out of the woods in a swirl of mosquitoes, the too-tight shirt and overalls tattered and stiff with dried mud, and found himself on a blacktop road. It was a miracle. Pavement. The smell of it alone reassured him. If he followed it, he reasoned, the road would lead him to civilization, to some tidy little farmhouse where he could risk showing himself and beg for food in exchange for doing odd jobs, maybe sleep in the barn like in those black-and-white movies with the clanking jalopies and the smiling long-nosed old ladies in bonnets and dresses that hung to the floor. Or he could find a diner or a McDonald’s like the ones in Tokyo—he thought of the little green bills he’d tucked away in Jōchō’s book, buried deep now in the deep pocket of the Negro’s overalls—and he could purchase a meal, fries and a Big Mac, Chicken McNuggets and a shake. But he couldn’t just stroll on down the road as if he were shopping for shoes in the Ginza. They’d catch him in a minute, the Negroes, the police, and how could he explain what had happened in that shack and what the smell of those oysters could do to a desperate man?

The sun arced over the road before him. He looked to his left, expecting barns and silos, rowhouses, streetlights, taxicabs, and there was nothing but blacktop and trees; he looked to his right and saw more blacktop and more trees. For a long moment he stood there, rooted to the spot with indecision. And then he flipped an imaginary coin and began working his way up the road to the right, not daring to walk along the blacktop itself, but tearing through the brambles and kudzu in the ditch that paralleled it. He had no plan, really, had never had one, not since he’d run afoul of Chiba and Unagi, anyway. He thought vaguely of heading inland, to New York or Miami or San Francisco, where he could lose himself among the mobs of gaijin

mutts, where he could be, for the first time in his life, like anyone else. But geography—the geography of the West, at any rate—was not one of his strong suits. He did know that the Port of Savannah was in Georgia and that Georgia was in the South where the Negroes harvested cotton and the hakujin

made them use separate toilets and drinking fountains, but he had no idea where he was in relation to Beantown or the Windy City, and he didn’t have even a clue that he was stranded on an island and that the only way off it was via Ray Manzanar’s ferry and that Ray Manzanar was related to half the people on the island and knew the other half as well as he knew his own kith and kin. Mercifully oblivious, faint with hunger and too weak even to lift a hand to brush away the horde of mosquitoes that settled on him like a second skin, Hiro forged on.

After a time, the thicket ahead began to brighten with sun, and the tangle of branches became noticeably thinner. He paused, up to his ankles in the standing water of the ditch, and peered through a chink in the wall of vegetation. There was something unnatural, something red, just ahead of him and to the left, something bright and comforting and familiar. He moved closer. What he saw made his heart leap up. There, in the window of a freshly painted clapboard building just off the road, a bewitching and seductive red neon sign spoke to him in a universal tongue: COCA-COLA, it announced, COCA-COLA, and he went faint with gastric epiphany.