East is East

The society around him—the society into which he’d tried to fit himself all the years of his life—was corrupt, emasculated, obsessed with material things, with the pettiness of getting and taking, selling and buying—and where was the glory in that? Where was the glory in being a nation of salarymen in white shirts and western suits making VCRs for the rest of the world like a tribe of trained monkeys? Hiro saw it, saw it clearly: Fujima, Morita, Kawakami and all the rest of them, they were nothing, eunuchs, wimps, gutless and shameless, and they would grow up to chase after yen and dollars like all the other fools who made fun of him, who singled him out as the pariah. But he wasn’t the pariah, they were. To live by the code of Hagakure

made him more Japanese than they, made him purer, better. It was the ultimate code of fea purē—or no, it went beyond fea purē

and into another realm altogether, a realm of power and confidence—of purity—that transcended the material, the flesh, death itself. He’d been made to feel inferior all his life, and here was a way to conquer it—not only on the ballfield, but on the streets and in the restaurants and theaters and anywhere else he chose to go. He would fight back at Fujima and the rest of them with the oldest weapon in the Japanese arsenal. He would become a modern samurai.

But now, as he lay on the Amerikajiris cramped little couch, using Jōchō as his pillow, all that seemed an eternity away. To rely on Jōchō had become automatic with him, but now he was in America, where everyone was a gaijin

and no one cared, and he would have to find a new code, a new way to live. His tormentors were back in Yokohama and in Tokyo, they were sailing for New York aboard the Tokachi-maru, and he was free—or he would be, if only he could get to Beantown or the City of Brotherly Love. The thought soothed him—he envisioned a city like Tokyo, with skyscrapers and elevated trains and a raucous snarl of traffic, but every face was different—they were white and black and yellow and everything in between—and they all glowed with the rapture of brotherly love. He held that image as he might have sucked a piece of candy. And then he shut his eyes and let the night fall in on him.

He woke to a parliament of birds and the trembling watery light of dawn. This time there was no confusion: the moment his eyes snapped open he knew who he was and where and why. He sat up with a long grudging adhesive groan of his Band-Aid plastic strips and examined his shorts and T-shirt and the ventilated tennis shoes that seemed to leer at him from the floor. He could see at a glance that the shoes were at least two sizes too big, designed as they were for the flapping gargantuan feet of hakujin giants. And the shorts! They fit, sure, but they were atrocious, ridiculous, a moronic blaze of color that made him doubt the manufacturer’s sanity. What did she think he was—a clown or something? Was she trying to make fun of him? His gaze fell on the little table with its clutter of Sweet’n Low packets and the coffee jar he’d scraped clean in his greed, and he felt ashamed of himself. Deeply ashamed. She’d sacrificed her lunch for him, given him a couch to sleep on, gone out and found him clothes and shoes and Band-Aid plastic strips, and here he was complaining. He was an ingrate. A criminal. His face burned with shame.

Already he owed her a debt—an on—that he could never begin to repay, not even if he were back in Japan and working in a factory and he saved every yen he made for the next six years. The thought humiliated him, made him feel even lower than he had the night before when he’d come to her in rags. In Japan, any favor, any gratuitous kindness, however small or altruistic, saddles its receiver with a debt of honor that can only be redeemed by repaying the favor many times over. It has become so ritualized, so onerous, in fact, that no matter what their extremity, people are terrified of being helped. You could be run down in the street and insist on crawling to the hospital rather than have a stranger lend a hand—and the stranger would no doubt run the other way, out of respect for your pain and the impossible burden he’d be laying on your shoulders were he to help.