East is East

Hiro had been inculcated with the subtleties and minute gradations of this system all his life, his grandmother the most rigorous on appraiser in all Japan—she could instantly translate any gift or favor into the precise material worth of its return, and she had nothing but contempt for anyone who fell short by even a yen. Help an old woman across the street and you got a hand-knitted sweater, a box of cherry chocolates and an invitation to tea. Accept the invitation and you owed the old woman a two-week vacation in Saipan, where she would sift for the bone fragments of her unburied sons; refuse it, and commit a crime second only to mass murder. The whole society was one vast web of obligation. Fail, break a strand of the web, and you’ve lost face, 120 million tongues clucking

tsk-tsk-tsk.

Suddenly, he wanted to hide himself. She’d be coming any minute now, bobbing up the path on her long white legs. What would he say to her? And what if she wanted a cup of coffee? What then? Mortified, his ears stinging, he cleaned up the mess and left her his rags, neatly folded, in humble acknowledgment of what she’d done for him, and then he dashed out the door to hide himself in the bushes.

He was squatting over the battered sneakers in a dapple of sun, feeling every one of his hundred and seven oozing cuts, scratches and infected insect bites and thinking nothing, nothing at all—just existing—when she came up the path. Her hair was drawn back in a ponytail that bounced behind her as if it were alive, and she looked waif like in a pair of baggy white shorts and an oversized T-shirt. The T-shirt featured the silhouette of a racing scull, oars in motion, and the baffling legend CREW THANATOPSIS. Hiro held his breath, though she could have passed within a foot of him and never noticed, so thick was the vegetation along the path. As she approached the cabin, she slowed her pace, stealthy suddenly, as if she were stalking something. He watched her mount the steps on tiptoe, ease back the screen door and hold it open just a moment too long, and then glance shrewdly round the clearing before stepping inside. The door slammed behind her like a slap in the face.

All that day, Hiro crouched there in the undergrowth, drowsing, swatting mosquitoes, fighting down the importunities of his hara and listening to the tap-tap-tap, tapata-tapata, tap-tap

of her typewriter. When the sun was directly overhead, he was briefly aroused by the sudden appearance of a deeply tanned hakujin who noiselessly separated himself from the trees and crept across the clearing, step by silent step. For one joyous instant Hiro thought he’d discovered a means to repay his debt and then some—the man was a rapist, a mutilator of women, an escaped maniac, and he, Hiro Tanaka, would fly into action and give his benefactress the great good gift of her life—when to his disappointment and gratification both, he noticed the familiar glittering treasure of the lunch bucket tucked under the man’s arm. The man was lithe and trim beneath the plane of his towering high flattop, and he sneaked up the steps and silently hung the lunch bucket on the hook beside the door. Then he stole away like a thief.

For most of the afternoon, Hiro contemplated that lunch bucket with mixed emotions—he couldn’t take it, no, he owed her too much already; but then she’d offered it to him, hadn’t she? At least she had yesterday. But who could speak for today? Maybe she was hungry, maybe she felt she had a right to her own lunch—or a cup of decaffeinated coffee with artificial sweetener and nondairy creamer. He couldn’t take that lunch away from her, couldn’t face her: what would she think of him? As it turned out, she never went near the lunch herself, but more times than he could count she got up from her desk to cross the room and peer through the mesh of the screen to see if it was still there. He felt terrible. He felt like a baited animal, a squirrel or fox lured to the trap. But most of all, he felt hungry.

When she left for the day—when he was sure she’d gone and had forced himself to count backward from a thousand just in case—he stole out of the bushes, snatched the bucket on the run and careened back to his hiding place, the fish-paste sandwich—was that tuna?—already in his mouth. After he’d eaten it, after he’d licked clean the wrapping paper and probed the crevices of the box for the last hidden crumbs, he felt tainted and polluted, like the alcoholic who succumbs to the temptation to take that first forbidden drink. Still, he was starving, getting along on a fraction of what he normally consumed, and though he fought it, the scenario repeated itself the following day. And that was when he reached his moment of crisis.