East is East

Chiba leaned into him, his monkey face twisted with hatred, flecks of spittle on his upper lip. “Gaijin” he spat. “Long-nose. Ketō. Bata-kusai.”

And then he unfolded his clenched fist, studied the palm of his hand for an instant, and without warning struck a savage blow to the bridge of Hiro’s nose. Then he turned to the pans of nishiki tamago. Raging, in a mad flurry of skinny wrists and snapping elbows, he overturned them on the floor, one after another. “Offal!” he shouted. “Dog shit! Fit for pigs!” Through it all, Unagi regarded Hiro through half-closed eyes, grinning.

This is the point at which Hiro lost control. Or rather, he didn’t lose control exactly, but attacked his tormentor in what Mishima would call “an explosion of pure action.” The nishiki tamago

was on the floor, the twenty-gallon kettle rattling its lid, Unagi grinning and Chiba spouting invective, the moment suspended as the tintinnabulation of the last pan hung in the air, and then the First Cook was swimming in chopped egg and Hiro’s fingers were locked on his throat. Chiba gasped, the turkey flesh of his neck turning red under Hiro’s white, white fingers. Unagi screamed: “Murder! Murder! Murder!” And all the while Hiro hung on, ignoring the jeers, the scalding soup, Chiba’s hot foul breath and the face that swelled beneath him like a blood blister, oblivious to Wakabayashi and the Chief Engineer, fighting like a rabid dog against the pull of the eight men it took to separate him from his tormentor. He was beyond caring, beyond pain, the words of Jōchō pounding in his head: One cannot accomplish feats of greatness in a normal frame of mind. One must turn fanatic and develop a mania for dying.

But he didn’t die. He wound up instead in the makeshift brig, staring at the walls and breathing Bunker C fumes, awaiting the Port of Savannah and the Japan Air flight that would take him home in disgrace.

Gaijin. Long-nose. Butter-stinker. These were the epithets he’d endured all his life, crying to his grandmother on the playground, harassed in elementary school and transformed into a punching bag in junior high, singled out and bullied till he was driven from the merchant marine high school his grandmother had chosen for him. Foreigner, that’s what they called him. For while his mother was a Japanese—a firm-legged beauty with round eyes and a fetching buck-toothed smile—his father was not.

No. His father was an American. A hippie. A young man in a cracked and rubbed-soft photo, hair to his shoulders, the beard of a monk, eyes like a cat’s. Hiro didn’t even know his name. Obāsan,

he pestered his grandmother, what was he like, what was his name, how tall was he? “Doggu,” she said, but that wasn’t his real name, it was a nickname—Doggo—after a character in an American comic book. “Tall,” she said sometimes, “with little colored glasses and a long nose. Hairy and dirty.” Other times she said he was short, skinny, fat, broad-shouldered, or that his hair was white and he walked with a cane, or that he wore denims and an earring and was so dirty and hairy (he was always dirty and hairy, no matter the version) that he could have grown turnips behind his ears. Hiro didn’t know what to believe—his father was like a chimera out of a children’s tale, larger than life in the morning, smaller than a thimble in the evening. He might have asked his mother, but his mother was dead.

This much he knew: the American had come to Kyoto in his hippie rags, with his granny glasses and his rings, to devote himself to Zen and find someone to teach him to play the koto. Like all Americans, he was lazy, stoned and undisciplined, and he soon lost interest in the Zen regimen of prayer and contemplation, but still he haunted the streets of Kyoto, vaguely hoping to learn the rudiments of the koto and bring it back to America with him, as the Beatles had brought the sitar from India. He was in a band, of course—or at least he had been—and it was the oddness of the instrument that appealed to him. Five feet long, with thirteen strings and movable bridges, it was like nothing he’d ever heard, humming and strange, a zither the size of an alligator. He would electrify it, naturally, and lay it flat on a table like a pedal steel guitar and then he would rotate his shoulders and flail his unshorn head, plucking frenziedly at the strings and astonishing the audiences back home. But it was the devil to play, and he needed a teacher. And a job. He was out of work, out of money, and-his student visa was about to expire.

That was where Sakurako Tanaka came in.