East is East

Hiro was seated at the massive mahogany table in Ambly Wooster’s great towering barn of a house at Tupelo Shores Estates. He’d finished the soup course, cream of something or other, and he was gazing out on the gray lapping waves of the sea, nodding agreeably and praying silently that the Negro maid would emerge from the kitchen with a plate of meat or rice, something substantial, something with which he could stuff his cheeks like a squirrel before someone discovered his imposture and ran him out the door. The old woman sat across from him, talking. She’d never stopped talking, even to catch her breath, from the moment he’d slid into the passenger’s seat of her car. But now, as he watched the gathering dusk and fought down the impulse to attack the maid in the kitchen if she didn’t hurry and bring him meat, rice, vegetables, the old lady was asking his name. He panicked. The blood rushed to his eyes. What was his name—Shigeru? Shinbei? Seiji?

But then she went on without waiting for an answer, nattering about flower arrangements, the tea ceremony, geisha and robots (“… so unfair really of these yellow journalists, and that’s what they are, no one would deny that, least of all themselves, so unfair and irresponsible to characterize such a thrifty and hardworking, no-nonsense, nose-to-the-grindstone race as yours as robots living in rabbit

hutches, shameful, simply shameful, and it just makes my blood boil …”), and Hiro relaxed. His function was to listen. Listen and eat. And at that moment, as if in confirmation of his thoughts, the kitchen doors flew open and the maid appeared, tray in hand, two intriguing wooden bowls perched atop it.

She was a big woman, the maid, big as a sumo wrestler, with nasty little red-flecked eyes and a wiry pelt of hair bound tight to her skull in rows that showed the naked black scalp beneath. Her nose was flattened to her face and she carried a sickening odor with her, the odor of the hakujin, the meat-eaters and butter-stinkers—only worse. From the moment he’d stepped in the door with his ragged shoes and dangling Band-Aids and thrown himself at the dish of nuts on the coffee table, she’d regarded him with loathing, as if he were vermin, as if he were something she’d squash beneath her foot if only he weren’t under the protection of her dotty old mistress. She saw through him. He knew it. And now, as she came through the doorway, she caught his eye with an incendiary look, a look that said his time was coming, and that when it did there would be no holds barred. Hiro dropped his eyes.

“There’s nothing more practical than a futon, that’s what I’ve always said, and I was just saying to Barton the other day—he’s my husband, Barton, he’s an invalid—oh, thank you, Verneda—I was just saying to Barton, ’You know, Barton, all this furniture, all these gloomy old antiques, they’re just such a clutter, so inefficient, I mean the Japanese don’t even have bedrooms—’ ” And then the old lady paused a moment, a look of bewilderment surprising her all but immobile features. “But then, where do

your sick and elderly lie up when they’re ailing? … I suppose in those excellent hospitals, best in the world, our medical profession certainly can’t touch them, what with the AMA and all their infighting, our own students having to attend medical school in Puerto Rico and Mexico and all those filthy, horrid, Third World places—”

With an angry snap of her wrist, the maid set the wooden bowl down before Hiro, and he wondered in that moment if he’d come far enough, if she recognized him, if she’d called the authorities and they were even then bearing down on him, but the thought flitted in and out of his head, all his attention focused on the insuperable bowl before him. Meat. Rice. He couldn’t hide his disappointment: the bowl was filled with salad greens.

Later, though, with time and patience and the bleary, head-nodding endurance of the conscripted, he was rewarded with yams, several dishes of pale green vegetables boiled beyond recognition, and meat—fresh succulent meat, ribs and all. It was the first hot meal he’d had since his dispute with Chiba aboard the Tokachi-maru, and he lashed into it like the indigent he was. The maid had set great heavy ceramic bowls of the stuff on the table, and his hostess, pausing in her monologue only to take a birdlike peck at a scrap of meat or mashed greens, urged him on like a solicitous mother (“Oh, do have a bite more of the okra, won’t you, Seiji? Heaven knows Barton and I could never—and the pork too, please, please—”). He filled his plate time and again, scraping the depths of the serving bowls and sucking methodically at the naked sticks of the bones that littered his plate, while the old lady rattled on about kimonos, cherry blossoms, public baths and the hairy Ainu. By the time the glowering maid brought coffee and peach cobbler, he was in a daze.