A Tale for the Time Being (15 page)

If you’ve ever tried to keep a diary, then you’ll know that the problem of trying to write about the past really starts in the present: No matter how fast you write, you’re
always stuck in the
then
and you can never catch up to what’s happening
now
, which means that
now
is pretty much doomed to extinction. It’s hopeless, really.
Not that now is ever all that interesting. Now is usually just me, sitting in some dumpy maid café or on a stone bench at a temple on the way to school, moving a pen back and forth a hundred
billion times across a page, trying to catch up with myself.

When I was a little kid in Sunnyvale, I became obsessed with the word
now
. My mom and dad spoke Japanese at home, but everyone else spoke English, and sometimes I would get caught in
between the two languages. When that happened, everyday words and their meanings suddenly became disconnected, and the world became strange and unreal. The word
now
always felt especially
strange and unreal to me because it
was
me, at least the sound of it was. Nao was
now
and had this whole other meaning.

In Japan, some words have kotodama,
⁵⁶
which are spirits that live inside a word and give it a special power. The kotodama of
now
felt like
a slippery fish, a slick fat tuna with a big belly and a smallish head and tail that looked something like this:

NOW
felt like a big fish swallowing a little fish, and I wanted to catch it and make it stop. I was just a kid, and I thought if I could truly grasp the meaning of the big fish
NOW
, I would be able to save little fish
Naoko
, but the word always slipped away from me.

I guess I was about six or seven by then, and I used to sit in the backseat of our Volvo station wagon, looking out at the golf courses and shopping malls and housing developments and factories
and salt ponds streaming by on the Bayshore Freeway, and in the distance the water of San Francisco Bay was all blue and sparkling, and I kept the window open so the hot, dry, smoggy haze could
blow on my face while I whispered
Now! . . . Now! . . . Now! . . .
over and over, faster and faster, into the wind as the world whipped by, trying to catch the moment when the
word was what it is: when
now
became
NOW.

But in the time it takes to say
now
, now is already over. It’s already
then
.

Then
is the opposite of
now
. So saying
now
obliterates its meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn’t. It’s like the word is committing suicide or
something. So then I’d start making it shorter
. . . now, ow, oh, o . . .
until it was just a bunch of little grunting sounds and not even a word at all. It was hopeless, like
trying to hold a snowflake on your tongue or a soap bubble between your fingertips. Catching it destroys it, and I felt like I was disappearing, too.

Stuff like this can drive you crazy. This is the kind of thing my dad thinks about all the time, reading his Great Minds of Western Philosophy, and after watching him I understand that you have
to take care of your mind, even if it’s not a great one, because if you don’t, you can wind up with your head on the tracks.

2.

My dad’s birthday was in May, and my funeral was one month later. Dad was feeling pretty optimistic, because he’d made it though another year of life alive, and
he’d just come in third place in the Great Bug Wars for his flying
Cyclommatus imperator
,
⁵⁷
which was a big deal because it’s
really hard to fold the outstretched wings. So Dad was doing really well for a suicidal person, and I was doing okay, too, for a torture victim. The kids at school were still pretending I was
invisible, only now everyone in the whole ninth grade was doing it, not just my homeroom class. I know this sounds pretty extreme, but in Japan it’s rather ordinary, and there’s even a
name for it, which is zen-in shikato.
⁵⁸
So I was getting some major zen-in shikato action, and when I was in the schoolyard or in the hallway or
walking to my desk, I’d hear my classmates saying things like, “Transfer Student Yasutani hasn’t been to school in weeks!” They never called me Nao or Naoko. Only Transfer
Student Yasutani or just Transfer Student, like I didn’t even have a name. “Is Transfer Student sick? Maybe Transfer Student has some disgusting American disease. Maybe the Health
Ministry has quarantined her. Transfer Student should be quarantined. She’s a baikin.
⁵⁹
Ew, I hope she’s not contagious! She’s only
contagious if you do it with her. Gross! She’s a ho. I wouldn’t do it with her! Yeah, that’s ’cause you’re impo. Shut up!”

Typical. It was the kind of stuff they used to say directly to my face, only now they were saying it to each other, but still in front of me so I could hear. And they did other stuff, too. When
you come into a Japanese school, there’s this place with lockers where you have to take off your outdoor shoes and put on your indoor slippers. They would wait until I had one shoe off,
balancing on one foot, and then they’d walk into me and push me down and step on me like I wasn’t there. “Oooh, stinky!” they’d say. “Did someone step in dog
shit?”

Before physical education class, you have to change into your gym uniform, but my school here is so pathetic they don’t have real locker rooms like in Sunnyvale, so everyone changes in the
classroom at their desk. The girls get one classroom and the boys get another, and you have to stand there and take off your clothes and put on these retarded uniforms, and when I had my clothes
off, the girls would cover their noses and mouths and look around and say, “Nanka kusai yo!
⁶⁰
Did something die?” and maybe that’s
what gave them the idea for the funeral.

3.

It was about a week before summer vacation, when I got the creepy feeling that something had changed once again. It’s all supersubtle, but you can tell, and if
you’ve ever been the target of military psyops, or been tortured or hunted or stalked, you’ll know what I’m saying is true. You can read the signs because your life depends on it,
only what was happening this time was basically nothing. I wasn’t getting pushed over and stepped on in the genkan
⁶¹
anymore, and no one was
making comments about me being smelly or sick. Instead, they were all walking around being real quiet and looking very sad, and when one of the nerdy little kids lost it and started giggling when I
walked by, he quickly got punched. I knew something was about to go down, and it was making me crazy. Then during lunch I noticed they were passing something around, some kind of folded paper, like
cards or something, but of course nobody gave me one, so I had to wait until clubs let out that afternoon to find out.

I went home after school like usual, and I was hanging around the apartment, pretending to do my homework and trying to think of an excuse to go out again, when my dad started rummaging around
for something, and then I heard him sigh, which meant that he was looking for his cigarettes and the pack was empty.

“Urusai yo!” I said, grumpily. “Tabako katte koyo ka?”
⁶²

For me to even offer was a big deal. My dad doesn’t like to go outside even though the cigarette vending machine is only a couple of blocks away, but normally I refuse to go buy cigarettes
for him because of all the ways you can commit suicide, smoking has to be the stupidest and also the most expensive. I mean, why make a lot of rich tobacco companies even richer off of killing you,
right? But this time his disgusting habit gave me the perfect excuse, and he was grateful, and he gave me a little extra money to buy myself a soda. I put on my running shoes instead of the plastic
slippers we usually wear for doing errands in the neighborhood, and on the way out the door, I slipped a small kitchen knife into my pocket. I ran down the alleyway and ducked behind the row of
vending machines that sell cigarettes and porno magazines and energy drinks.

I was waiting for Daisuke-kun. He was in my homeroom and lived with his mom in our building. He was younger than me, a little stick insect of a kid, and his mom was a single mom and a bar
hostess and poor, so he got picked on almost as much as I did. Daisuke-kun was truly pathetic, and after a while I saw him, holding his book bag up in front of him as he stumbled down the street,
keeping his back to the high concrete wall. He was the kind of kid who even in long pants looked like he should be wearing shorts. Just the sight of his little pinhead swiveling around on his
skinny neck, and his eyes bugging in all directions even though there was nobody following him, drove me crazy and made me really mad, so when he passed in front of the vending machines, I jumped
out and grabbed him and pulled him into the alleyway, and I guess the adrenaline from my anger gave me superhuman strength, because taking him down was about as easy as plucking a sock off a line
of laundry. Honestly, it felt great. I felt great. Powerful. Exactly the way I’d hoped I would feel when I fantasized about getting revenge. I knocked his school cap off and grabbed him by
the hair and pushed him to his knees in front of me. He crumpled and froze there, the way a baby cockroach does when you turn on the kitchen light, just before you crush it with your slipper. I
pulled his head up and held the little kitchen knife to his throat. The knife was sharp, and I could see the vein pulsing in his spindly neck. It would have been no effort at all to cut him. It
would have meant nothing.

“Nakami o misero!”
⁶³
I said, kicking his book bag with my toe. “Empty it!” My voice sounded low and rough, like a
sukeban.
⁶⁴
I even surprised myself.

He opened his book bag and began to dump the stuff inside at my feet. “I don’t have any more money,” he stammered. “They already took it all.”

Of course they did. The powerful kids, led by a real sukeban named Reiko, ran a whole operation fleecing the pathetic kids like me and Daisuke.

“I don’t need your stinking money,” I said. “I want the card.”

“Card?”

“The one they were handing out at school. I know you have it. Give it to me.” I kicked his Ultraman pencil case and sent the pens and pencils flying. He scrambled on his hands and
knees, searching through his textbooks. Finally he handed me a card made of folded paper, careful not to make eye contact. I took it from him.

“On your knees,” I said. “Close your eyes and bow your head. Sit on your hands.”

He tucked his hands under his thighs. It was a posture he knew well, and so did I. It comes from a game called kagome kagome
⁶⁵
that little kids
play, sort of a Japanese ring-around-the-rosy. The kid who’s It becomes the oni
⁶⁶
and has to kneel on the ground in the center, blindfolded, and
all the other kids hold hands and skip around him in a circle, singing a song that goes,

In English it means

At the end of the song, everybody stops circling, and the oni tries to guess which kid is standing behind him, and if he’s right, they switch places and the new kid
becomes the oni.

That’s how the game is supposed to be played, only the version we played at school was different. I guess you could say it’s kind of an upgraded version, called kagome
rinchi,
⁶⁷
that’s very popular among junior high school kids today. In kagome rinchi, if you’re the oni, you have to kneel on the ground
with your hands under your thighs, while the kids circle around, kicking and punching you and singing the kagome song. When the song is over, even if you could still use your voice, you
wouldn’t dare guess the name of the kid behind you, because even if you guessed right, you would still be wrong and they’d start all over again. In kagome rinchi, once you’re the
oni, you’re always the oni. The game usually ends when you can’t kneel anymore and you fall over.

So Daisuke-kun was on his knees in the alley with his eyes squeezed shut, waiting for me to punch him or kick him or cut him with my kitchen knife, but I was taking my time. It was still early
and nobody was in the alley at that hour, since the hostesses can’t ever get it together to bring out their recycling before dark. I unfolded the card he’d given me. It was an
announcement, written in nice brush calligraphy, for a funeral service. The handwriting was formal and neat, like a grown-up’s, and I wondered if maybe Ugawa Sensei had written it. The
funeral service was going to be on the following day during the last homeroom period before our midterm summer vacation. The deceased was former transfer student Yasutani Naoko.