East is East

He hadn’t gone a hundred yards when a second car appeared, this one hurtling out of the crotch of the horizon ahead of him. He watched his feet and the car came toward him. Dark and long, the teeth of the grille, the high wasteful whine of the Amerikajin engine, and then it too shot past him, the memory of the driver’s pale numb unblinking gaze already fading, already useless. But what the specter of that second car had done was to mask the presence of a third, and he realized with a sudden jolt that not only had another vehicle crept up behind him undetected, but that it was now braking alongside him, the huge demonic white thrust of its fender right there, right there in the corner of his eye. Be calm, he told himself, ignore it. The tires crunched gravel. The fender was undeniable, gleaming, ghostly, white, the long steel snout of the entire race, nosing at him. Every word of Jōchō shot through his head, but he couldn’t help himself. He looked up.

What he saw was a Cadillac, an old one, with fins and glittery molding, the kind of car TV personalities and rock stars maneuvered round the streets of Tokyo. In the driver’s seat, hunched so low she could barely see over the doorframe, was a wizened old hakujin lady with deeply tanned skin and hair the color of trampled snow. She slowed to nothing, a crawl, and her eyes searched his as if she knew him. Unnerved, he looked away and picked up his pace, but the car stayed with him, the big white fender floating there beside him as if magnetized. He was puzzled, tense, angry: What was she doing? Why didn’t she just go away and leave him alone? And then he heard the hum of the electric window and he looked up again. The old lady was smiling. “Seiji,” she said, and her voice was a jolt of cheer, strong and untethered, “Seiji—is that you?”

Astonished, Hiro stopped in his tracks. The car stopped with him. The old woman clung to the steering wheel, leaning toward him and gawking expectantly across the expanse of the passenger’s seat. He’d never laid eyes on this woman before, and he wasn’t Seiji, as far as he knew—though for the moment he couldn’t help wishing he were. He shot a quick glance up and down the road. Then he bent forward to peer in the window.

“It’s me, Seiji,” the old lady said, “Ambly Wooster. Don’t you remember? Four years ago—or was it five?—in Atlanta. You conducted beautifully. Ives, Copland and Barber.”

Hiro rubbed a hand over the hacked stubble of his hair.

“Oh, those choral voices,” she sighed. “And the shadings you brought to Billy the Kid! Sublime, simply sublime.”

Hiro studied her a moment—no more than a heartbeat, really—and then he smiled. “Yes, sure,” he said, “I remember.”

“You’re so clever, you japanese, what with your automobile factories and your Suzuki method and that exquisite Satsuma ware—busy as a hive of bees, aren’t you? You’ve even got whiskey now, so they tell me, and of course you’ve got your beers—your Kirin and your Suntory and your Sapporo—and they’re every bit as good anything our lackadaisical brewing giants have been able to produce, but sake, sake

I could never understand, how do you drink that odious stuff? And your educational system, why, it’s the wonder of the world, engineers and scientists and chemists and what have you, and all because you’re not afraid of work, back to the basics and all of that. You know, sometimes I almost wish you had won the war—I just think it would shake this spineless society up, muggings in the street, millions of homeless, AIDS, but of course you have no crime whatsoever, do you? I’ve walked the streets of Tokyo myself, at the witching hour and past it, well past it”—and here the old lady gave him an exaggerated wink—“helpless as I am, and nothing, nothing did I find but courtesy, courtesy, courtesy—manners, that’s what you people are all about. It’s manners that make a society. But you must think me terribly unpatriotic to say things like this, and yet still, as a Southerner, I think I can appreciate how you must feel, a defeated nation, after all. What did you’ say your name was?”