East is East

Plates rattled in the kitchen, Bob took Ina’s hand and sauntered out the door, Sandy yawned, stretched and stood up. Irving Thalamus leaned toward her, his eyes bright, his grin as sharp as a watchdog’s. “Jane Shine,” he said. “Jane Shine’s coming. Can you believe it?”

Fea Purē

I want to help you, she whispered as he stood there in the doorway, the lunch bucket clutched in his hand. They all wanted to help him. That’s why they blasted their shotguns at him and hunted him with their dogs, that’s why they played Donna Summer in the swamps and tried to run him down in their speedboats. It was this one’s lover, her bōifurendo, the beef-eater and butter-stinker, naked and hairy and with his big dog’s prick hanging down like a sausage, who’d run the boat at him when he was half drowned and chased him out of the store when he was starving. He’d wanted to help too.

Still, there was something about her—he couldn’t say what it was, couldn’t find the word for it in English or in Japanese either. She was sitting at her desk, her back to him, and when she turned he saw her silken legs, long and slim, American legs, and he saw the movement of her breasts and the weight of them. He remembered those breasts from his night in the water, though he was terrified and exhausted and fighting for his life at the time. He was drowning, he was dying, and there were her breasts, naked and appealing under the pale glaze of moon and stars. The whiteness, that’s what he remembered, the whiteness of her there and below, skin like milk in a porcelain bowl. He stepped through the door.

He was terrified, though he had Jōchō and Mishima to sustain him—he was sure she’d betray him, screech till her tonsils fell out, rouse up every sweating hakujin cowboy and kinky-haired Negro in the county—but then he caught the look in her eyes and saw that she was afraid of him. For a long moment he just stood there inside the door, watching her eyes. And then, when he saw them soften, when he watched the smile play across her lips and heard her laugh, he shuffled into the room and squatted in the corner. “Arigatō,”

he whispered, “sank you, sank you so much.” And then he opened up the lunch bucket and he ate.

She offered him more—apples, dates, crackers—and he took it, took it greedily, though he was humiliated. He crouched there like an animal, filthier than he’d ever been in his life, bleeding in a hundred places, stinking like a hog. And in rags. Stolen rags. Negro rags. Jōchō would have despised him; Mishima would have turned his back. He recalled the words of Jōchō on the importance of grooming and personal appearance—life was a dress rehearsal for death, and you always had to be prepared for it, right down to the smallest detail of your toilet, your underwear, your pedicure, your hands and teeth and the color in your cheeks—and he felt humiliated to the depths of his being. He was polluted. Degraded. Impure. Lower than a dog.

“I’ll get you clothes,” she said.

He was nothing. He stank. He loathed himself. “Dōmo arigatō,” he said, and though he was already squatting, he bowed from the waist.

Then she stood. Stood on those lovely slim ghostly white legs and crossed the room to him. She didn’t speak. She hovered over him, her eyes lush and consolatory, and held out her hand. “Here,” she said, the voice caught low in her throat, and when he took her hand she pulled him to his feet. “Come, lie down,” and she offered him the couch. He gave up then and let her lead him like a child, let her tuck the pillow beneath his head and whisper to him in her sacramental tones until his muscles went loose and he felt himself tumble through the wicker, the wood, the earth itself, and into a realm where nothing mattered, nothing at all.

His dream was of baseball—bēsubōru—the game that was his whole life until he discovered Jōchō. He was with his grandmother, his obāsan, and she was having a sake

and he a hotto dogu and the players on the field were swinging their bats and the pitcher was pounding the ball into the dark secret pocket of the catcher’s mitt. And then suddenly he was down there amongst them, standing at the plate and swinging … not a bat, but the hotto dogu, chili, mustard and all… swinging it till it began to swell and grow and he felt he could do anything, clout a homer with every swing, soar into the air like a bird or rocket. He turned to wave at his obāsan, but she was gone, replaced by a girl with a baby at her breast… but no, it wasn’t just a single girl, there were hundreds, thousands of them, and every one with a suckling infant and every one with breasts as pure and white as … breasts … an avalanche of breasts …