East is East (14 page)

The problem was, he couldn't sleep. He was exhausted, worn-out, as weary and heartsick as any human being on the planet, and he couldn't sleep. He kept seeing her, the woman, the
Amerikajin,
rehearsing her face and her body over and over again: the moment she turned to him, the rustled silk of her voice. And then he was thinking of his
ob
ā
san
and how when he was small and couldn't sleep she would read to him in the glowing little circle of the tensor lamp beside his bed. She hadn't liked Mishima, hadn't liked it when he gave up baseball for J
ō
ch
ō
and his
Hagakure.
And then he remembered the nights he couldn't sleep because of the clenching in his gut over the
ijime
—the bullying—they put him through in high school, and how J
ō
ch
ō
had been his hope and solace.

Hiro was seventeen when he discovered
Hagakure
—or rather, Yukio Mishima's appreciation of it,
The Way of the Samurai.
He was a boy in school, a
b
ē
sub
ō
ru
player—there, on the field, he was the equal of anyone—and he'd never heard the name of J
ō
ch
ō
or of Mishima either. He played ball with savage devotion, the harsh unpronounceable names of the
gaijin
stars like an incantation on his lips: Jim Paciorek, Matt Keough, Ty Van Burkelo. They were his inspiration, his hope. You could be a mongrel, a half-breed, you could be anything, and all that mattered was that you got a hit when you stepped up to the plate. That was democracy. That was
fea pur
ē
.
That was revenge. Fujima, Morita, Kawakami, the very insects who'd blackened his eyes and broken his nose, the ones who hissed
bata-kusai
at his back as he made his way down the corridor, these were the ones he silenced with his bat. They squinted at him from the pitcher's mound, from shortstop and centerfield, chanting their obscenities and waving their mitts to distract him, till his bat met the ball and their legs fell out from under them.
B
ē
sub
ō
ru,
that was his life.

And then one day, walking home from school and attracting the usual stares on the street—everyone knew at a glance that he wasn't Japanese, that he was something else, something alien, and their eyes flew to him and then dropped away as if he were dead, inanimate, a post, a tree, a smear on the sidewalk—he found himself gawking at a poster in a bookstore window. The poster—it was a blown-up photo, in black and white—showed a nearly naked man in the throes of death. He'd been lashed to a tree, his hands bound
over his head, and three stark black arrows protruded from his flesh. One penetrated his lower abdomen, just above the folds of his crude breechcloth, another radiated from his side, while the third was thrust nearly to the hilt in the dark clot of hair beneath his arm. His eyes were half open, staring off toward the heavens in glazed rapture, and his mouth was a fierce dark slash of agony and release. He had the musculature of a hero.

Too shy to go in, Hiro only gaped at the window that first day, fascinated, wondering if the photo was real—there was blood, after all, perfect black streaks of blood dribbling from the wounds like grisly brushstrokes. But then, maybe they were too perfect, maybe the whole thing had been staged—a still from a movie or a play—maybe they
were
brushstrokes. And where would anyone come by such a picture if it was real? People weren't tortured to death these days, were they? And with arrows? He wondered if the man might not be an explorer, captured and executed by some big-lipped tribe in New Guinea or South America. If he was, and there was a book about it, Hiro wanted it.

The next day, he steeled himself and went into the shop. It was a cramped and dark place, row upon row of books on metal shelves affixed to the walls, a smell of newsprint and mold and a fruity false air freshener. Fifteen or twenty customers browsed through the stacks of foreign newspapers or waddled up and down the aisles, arms laden with books. Aside from the rustle of lovingly turned pages, the place was as quiet as a shrine. Hiro approached the desk, where a big-shouldered man in smoked glasses with western-style frames sat behind a cash register. Hiro cleared his throat. The man, who'd been staring out the window at nothing, gave him an indifferent glance.

“The poster in the window, sir,” Hiro said, so softly he could barely hear himself, “is that a book? I mean, is there a book about it?”

The man looked at him a moment, as if deciding something. Finally, in a weary voice, he said: “That's Mishima.”

It was luck, it was fate, it was magic. Hiro stood bewildered
before the rack the shop owner pointed him to—twenty, twenty-five, thirty Mishima titles in duplicate and triplicate and more taking a good slice out of the wall. It was as if his hand was guided: the first book he chose, the very first, was
The Way of the Samurai.
He slipped it off the shelf, pleased by its glossy cover and the drawing of dueling swordsmen that seemed to dance across it. He never even glanced inside: the cover was enough. That and the poster. He laid down his money for the laconic shopkeeper and ducked out the door with his treasure, one eye on the cruel photo of the martyred author.

Like most Japanese boys, Hiro knew the mythos of the samurai as thoroughly as his American counterpart knew that of the gun-slinger, the dance-hall girl and the cattle rustler. The wandering samurai, like the lone man on the horse, was a mainstay of network TV, the movie theater, cheap adventure novels and lurid comics, not to mention classics like
The Forty-Seven Ronin
that were on every school reading list. But after a period when he was eight or nine and ran around all day with a wooden sword and a
hachimaki
looped round his head, he'd outgrown his fascination with the whole business of topknots and swords: samurai, he could take them or leave them. Still, when he opened Mishima's book, it brought him back. He didn't know then of Mishima's right-wing politics, of his homosexuality and grandstanding, or even of his ritual suicide—all he knew was that he'd entered another world.

The book puzzled him at first. It wasn't a story. There were no swordfights, no hair-raising tales of samurai derring-do and acts of redemptive heroism. No. It was a study, a commentary actually, by this man, this Mishima with the arrows in his groin, on J
ō
ch
ō
Yamamoto's ancient samurai code of ethics,
Hagakure.
Hiro didn't know what to make of it. I
discovered that the Way of the Samurai is death,
he read. And:
Human beings in this life are like marionettes … free will is an illusion.
He read that it was acceptable for a samurai to apply rouge if he woke up with a hangover and that wetting the earlobes with spittle would control nervousness in any situation. It all felt faintly ridiculous.

But he stuck with it, though it was like a textbook, a manual, like something he might read in a science or navigation class. He kept seeing the picture of the martyred author—only later did he realize it was a pose, Mishima's masochistic homage to an Italian painting of a martyred saint—and he plowed through the book as if it were written in code, as if it were his personal initiation into the arcane rites and ancient secrets that would make their master the equal of anyone. It was a game, a puzzle, a conundrum.
Hagakure
—Hidden Among the Leaves—even its title was mysterious. In the following weeks he went back to the shop several times—the poster was gone, replaced by a life-size cutout of an old man with the face of a bird and a shock of white hair—to sample Mishima's other books. They were novels, for the most part, and he enjoyed them, but none of them had the tug of the first. There was something there, and he didn't know what it was. Over and over he read the cryptic passages, over and over. And then one day, in the way that the sun suddenly breaks through the clouds in the midst of a storm, he had it.

They'd ganged up on him at the ballfield—six or seven of them—and they'd slapped him around and flung his Yomiuri Giants cap into the sewer. He was in a rage, but the rage gave way to despair. When would it end, he asked himself, and the answer was never. He barely spoke to his grandparents that night, and he was restless: he didn't want to watch the game shows, didn't want to listen to tapes on his Walkman, he didn't want to study or read. Finally, out of boredom, he picked up his dog-eared copy of
Hagakure,
opened it at random and began to read. The passage was about modern society, about how corrupt and weak it had become, and all at once, as if a switch had been flipped inside his head, Mishima's words made perfect sense. All at once he understood: the book was about glory, and nothing less.

The society around him—the society into which he'd tried to fit himself all the years of his life—was corrupt, emasculated, obsessed with material things, with the pettiness of getting and taking, selling and buying—and where was the glory in that? Where was the glory
in being a nation of salarymen in white shirts and western suits making VCRs for the rest of the world like a tribe of trained monkeys? Hiro saw it, saw it clearly: Fujima, Morita, Kawakami and all the rest of them, they were nothing, eunuchs, wimps, gutless and shameless, and they would grow up to chase after yen and dollars like all the other fools who made fun of him, who singled
him
out as the pariah. But he wasn't the pariah, they were. To live by the code of
Hagakure
made him more Japanese than they, made him purer, better. It was the ultimate code of
fea pur
ē
—or no, it went beyond
fea pur
ē
and into another realm altogether, a realm of power and confidence—of purity—that transcended the material, the flesh, death itself. He'd been made to feel inferior all his life, and here was a way to conquer it—not only on the ballfield, but on the streets and in the restaurants and theaters and anywhere else he chose to go. He would fight back at Fujima and the rest of them with the oldest weapon in the Japanese arsenal. He would become a modern samurai.

But now, as he lay on the
Amerikajiris
cramped little couch, using J
ō
ch
ō
as his pillow, all that seemed an eternity away. To rely on J
ō
ch
ō
had become automatic with him, but now he was in America, where everyone was a
gaijin
and no one cared, and he would have to find a new code, a new way to live. His tormentors were back in Yokohama and in Tokyo, they were sailing for New York aboard the
Tokachi-maru,
and he was free—or he would be, if only he could get to Beantown or the City of Brotherly Love. The thought soothed him—he envisioned a city like Tokyo, with skyscrapers and elevated trains and a raucous snarl of traffic, but every face was different—they were white and black and yellow and everything in between—and they all glowed with the rapture of brotherly love. He held that image as he might have sucked a piece of candy. And then he shut his eyes and let the night fall in on him.

He woke to a parliament of birds and the trembling watery light of dawn. This time there was no confusion: the moment his
eyes snapped open he knew who he was and where and why. He sat up with a long grudging adhesive groan of his Band-Aid plastic strips and examined his shorts and T-shirt and the ventilated tennis shoes that seemed to leer at him from the floor. He could see at a glance that the shoes were at least two sizes too big, designed as they were for the flapping gargantuan feet of
hakujin
giants. And the shorts! They fit, sure, but they were atrocious, ridiculous, a moronic blaze of color that made him doubt the manufacturer's sanity. What did she think he was—a clown or something? Was she trying to make fun of him? His gaze fell on the little table with its clutter of Sweet'n Low packets and the coffee jar he'd scraped clean in his greed, and he felt ashamed of himself. Deeply ashamed. She'd sacrificed her lunch for him, given him a couch to sleep on, gone out and found him clothes and shoes and Band-Aid plastic strips, and here he was complaining. He was an ingrate. A criminal. His face burned with shame.

Already he owed her a debt—an
on
—that he could never begin to repay, not even if he were back in Japan and working in a factory and he saved every yen he made for the next six years. The thought humiliated him, made him feel even lower than he had the night before when he'd come to her in rags. In Japan, any favor, any gratuitous kindness, however small or altruistic, saddles its receiver with a debt of honor that can only be redeemed by repaying the favor many times over. It has become so ritualized, so onerous, in fact, that no matter what their extremity, people are terrified of being helped. You could be run down in the street and insist on crawling to the hospital rather than have a stranger lend a hand—and the stranger would no doubt run the other way, out of respect for your pain and the impossible burden he'd be laying on your shoulders were he to help.