East is East

It was nearly seven when she got back to the cabin. The sun was sinking. A breeze drifted in off the ocean. Everything was still. Hiro wouldn’t be expecting her till morning, and as she approached the clearing, she wondered how to announce her presence without startling him. She thought of calling out to him from a safe distance—“Hiro, I’m back!” or “It’s me, Ruth!”—but if anyone were within earshot, the consequences could be fatal. On the other hand, if she didn’t warn him somehow, the minute her foot touched the steps he’d shoot through the roof like a Saturn rocket. She was halfway across the clearing when she hit on a solution—she would start singing, burst into song, and if anyone heard her they would think she was drunk or jubilant or crazed—it was all the same to her. And so, cradling the newspaper and the thermal containers to her chest, she strode across the clearing, singing in a high pure glee-club soprano, belting out the first thing that came into her head: “Oh, where have you been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy? / Oh, where have you been, charming Billy? / I have been to seek a wife, / She’s the—”

She caught herself in midphrase—Hiro’s head had sprung up in the window like a jack-in-the-box. His face was a mask of pure terror, the face of a man awakening to aerial bombardment, tracers, the mushroom-headed thing itself. But then she caught his eye and saw that he recognized her, and it was all right.

“I brought food,” she said, hoping to pacify him with the noun as she pushed through the door, “and this.” She set down the silver canisters and held up the newspaper.

Hiro stared numbly at the newsprint stretched taut as a sheet before him. She watched as his eyes fastened on the headline.

“You read English?” she asked.

He did. Of course he did. And he was proud of the accomplishment. Americans, with their big feet and blustering condescension to the rest of the world, knew no language but their own. But the Japanese, the most literate people on earth, learned to read English in their schools, from the elementary grades on. Of course, since there were few native speakers in Japan, and since the Japanese system relied on rote learning, the comprehensive skills of the average Japanese were far more highly developed than the conversational.

Hiro looked up from the newspaper. “We learn in school,” he said simply.

Ruth folded the paper and handed it to him. He bowed his head and gave her a hangdog look. “They’re really after you now,” she said. “What on earth did you do to them down there?”

He shrugged. “Nothing, Rusu. Eat food. Listen old lady talk, talk, talk. She never shut up.”

He tried a smile on her, the smile of a schoolboy caught out at some prank. There was more to the Tupelo Shores incident than he was letting on—of that she was certain. “Speaking of food,” she said, “I hope you like fish.”

Over dinner—they sat together at her desk after she pushed aside the typewriter and the clutter of scrawled-over pages that were about to jell into her first novella—he gave her the whole story. He told her of Ambly Wooster’s confusion and how she insisted on his spending the night, told her of his joy at having a shower, clean sheets and three meals a day, and of his shock and horror at Olmstead White’s unprovoked attack. “No warning, Rusu, nussing—and he has a sword, a kendō sword, I sink. He wants to cut me, Rusu, make me bleed.”

Olmstead White was dead, and Ruth wondered about the legal ramifications of that. “You didn’t touch him, did you?”

Hiro looked away. His face flushed. “I run,” he said.

Ruth poured the wine and they drank and talked till the cabin fell into shadow and all the familiar objects of the place—her typewriter, the hot plate and coffee things, her pitcher plants and the Hockney poster she’d tacked up on the wall to brighten the place up—began to lose definition in the deepening gloom of evening. She told Hiro of her girlhood in Santa Monica—Were there Japanese there? he wanted to know; were there Negroes? Mexicans?—and he told her of his American hippie father, his mother’s disgrace, the epithets that had trailed him since he was old enough to walk. She leaned toward him as he spoke: so that was it. His hair, his eyes, the size of him—he was half an American.

Later, she spoke of her writing—She was an author?; the idea seemed to surprise him, though he’d sat there all day watching her at work—and of Jane Shine, and how she’d come to Thanatopsis to usurp her place. He sympathized. “Very bad sitration, Rusu—don’t let her push you in a circle.” And then he told her of Chiba and Unagi and of his dream of the City of Brotherly Love.