Ken's War (20 page)

“Ouch! Stupid cat.” He smacked her snout
harder than he’d intended.

Neko slunk into a corner where she daintily
licked her paw, feigning disinterest in her tormentor and his
string.

Ken waited for Wizard to tell him he’d been
asking for it and got exactly what he deserved from the cat, but
instead Wizard said, “A wise man used to counsel me not to chew on
what’s eating me.”

Ken ignored the invitation to unburden his
mind.

Wizard continued throwing away unused forms,
and reorganizing the contents of his file cabinet. Stacks of new
material requisition and control forms, with fewer lines to fill
out and only two, not multiple, copies attached, bound with the
kind of twine Ken had been taunting the cat with lay on the
desk.

“Put those in this drawer,” Wizard said. He
pointed to the stacks on his desk.

“I ain’t your slave.”

“I’m not your babysitter. Be useful, be
friendly, or be gone.”

“What’s got into you lately?” Ken carried one
stack to the file cabinet and let it drop noisily into the empty
drawer.

Wizard made a pitying smile.

“I sat all damn morning in the bamboo forest
waiting for Sikung to show up, but he never did!” It burst out in a
gush, and Ken felt immediate relief, relief and remorse, too, for
acting like a prick toward Wizard. And his cat.

“Sikung Wu left yesterday morning for the Pan
American Gerontology Congress in Brasília.”

“You mean the new city in Brazil?” he
asked.

“That’s the one.”

A rag ball of questions jumbled up. Finally,
Ken asked, “Does Sikung speak Spanish?”

“Yes, and Portuguese, the national language
of Brazil.”

“What’s geron lodgie?”

Wizard explained the meaning of gerontology.
He explained that Sikung Wu was a keynote speaker at the
conference. He explained that gerontologists were interested in
applying Western scientific tests to measure and document the
effects of
chi gung
on the quality of life of elderly...

Sikung Wu’s words, nonsensical-seeming then,
came back to Ken. During their last meeting in the bamboo grove,
the master had said:
Your
body is a vessel of your
history and a premonition of your future. Practice chi gung each
day or you will lose yourself. Chi gung is yours. It is something
you can take everywhere. It costs nothing. It weighs nothing. No
one can steal chi gung from you.
In light of Wizard’s news
about the master’s journey to Brasília, the remembered lecture rang
of finality.

“When’s Sikung coming back?”

“I haven’t the foggiest.” Wizard cleared a
space on the desk and wiped the surface with a cloth. He divvied
the contents of a
bento
onto two plates. “Practice what he’s
taught you.”

“That’s boring. I want to learn how to flip
somebody.” He flipped a chopstick into the air and caught it.

“That’s peculiar,” Wizard said thoughtfully.
For a moment, he intently inspected a memory or a half-forgotten
idea. Seated, he duck-walked his wheeled chair over to the
door.

Takuya walked by the door with a baseball
mitt in one hand and the mask of Shishiko swinging at his side.

There was nothing to be said that both Ken
and Wizard didn’t already know.

Chapter
Sixteen

~ Obon Festival with Yasuko
~

Ken studied the
kanji
on Yasuko’s
note. It was the note she’d tucked into his hand when they were at
the teahouse with her parents. He vaulted off the train and
compared her handwriting with Japanese signs on shops and teahouses
near the station. The narrow lanes were clogged with vendors
selling lanterns, sweets, and dumplings to village folk and to
relatives who’d turned out to give thanks to ancestors on this last
day of the Obon festival.

He edged between two women wearing brightly
colored matching kimonos, and waving fans above their heads. He
entered an empty space in the otherwise crowded intersection.
Accustomed to people staring at him while pretending they didn’t
notice him, he rearranged his face into an expression of no
expression, and strolled across the cobblestones. He recognized
orderliness in the way the crowd hemmed in the edge of the cleared,
circular area. Women holding fans stepped clockwise, then
counterclockwise in unison. Shit! He was standing in the hub of
dancers.

He strode, not ran, to the edge of the circle
where a woman, without appearing to alter her dance steps, stepped
aside to let him pass through. He followed a dirt road leading him
away from the throng and his embarrassment. He showed Yasuko’s note
to a persimmon vendor, who pointed to a teahouse down the
street.

Tall potted lilies and hanging lanterns
decorated the teahouse. He peered inside, and at first didn’t
recognize Yasuko. It was the first time he’d seen her in a
traditional kimono. Over cups of green tea she told him about past
Obon festivals, as if her childhood occurred during a distant
time.

“In my childhood, over the summer holidays,
we cleaned up the house, set a special rack on the altar, and hung
scroll paintings. Sometimes, on the first day, I carved a boat out
of eggplant for the family altar. It meant I wished ancestor
spirits could travel to the temple in the boat. We set lanterns on
the pond.

“On the second day we went to the tombs to
fetch ancestors’ spirits. I remember the gifts and offerings. There
were many fruits, sweets and crackers. I ate secretly. It was found
out and I was scolded.” As she described the days of Obon, he
grinned. He imagined her sneaking food from the ancestor offerings
the way he used to eat cookies and drink milk left out for Santa
Claus.

“The day the festival ended, the sunlight
became weaker and the shadows became longer. Summer would soon be
over.” She cast her eyes down to the table.

“Don’t say it.” He squeezed her small hand.
“Don’t say it.” He’d never told anyone about his dream. It was too
weird and delicate to expose to the light, but some nights he
dreamed of the albino monkey swinging in the branches above him and
Yasuko in the
ofuro.
In that dream his mother and father sat
fully clothed on the edge of the hot springs, smiling at each
other. He’d awaken with a blissful, full feeling. When he was with
Yasuko, he tried to recapture that dream feeling. It refused to
surface.

They walked along the village lanes. They
spoke of trivial things. They ate in a noodle shop and visited the
carts of vendors touting candy, pet turtles and incense. He bought
roasted chestnuts for her. They walked to the center of the village
where men beat large drums, and that was when she began circling in
on the one thing he didn’t want to hear.

“My father wants me to be American in my
education, and for the opportunities. He wants me to be Japanese in
my manners and respect for tradition. When I behave American, he
scolds me for being brash. When I behave Japanese, he says I will
not succeed in American go-go culture.”

He learned that she was eighteen years old
and was studying for a political science degree at a West Coast
university. He learned that she’d slipped away from her parents and
relatives during prayers, and they’d be looking for her now. He
learned that forbidden love was the safest love. With her, he
couldn’t say or do anything wrong. All was good. He was good.

He asked her to wait right here while he
stepped into a shop. When he returned, he gave her a geisha doll
with a cute, hand-painted face.

“It is too much,” Yasuko protested. She
tucked her hands up inside her kimono sleeves.

“It will make me happy if you take it.”

She bowed her head and held out her arms for
the doll. “Please, come with me.” She led him by the hand, ignoring
the stares. “We will do something.”

They walked down the narrow twisting lane.
Past a cannery. A barbershop. A florist. They came to the lip of a
pond where many people stood. Hundreds of illuminated lanterns and
their reflections floated on the pond. She lit the candle in her
lantern; he did the same.

“This is called the escorting of the spirits,
so they do not lose their way. We honor ancestors for the quality
of life we the living enjoy.”

“My grandparents died. Do they count as
ancestors?”

“Hai
.”

They set their lanterns afloat on the
pond.

She might have been thinking of how life
could be in another time, or she might have been listening to the
wind. It was rising somewhere on the island, advancing with the
night, ushered in by an eerie green tinge descending on the
mountains.

“It is too soon for typhoon season,” she
said.

“Or too late.”

They followed a footpath into the
mountain.

Gusts, brutal gusts, one after the other,
wrestled at their legs, making them walk as if on a listing ship.
The gales played sad notes in the utility wires and palms. The wind
rang temple bells, buzzed over volcanic rock, clunked bamboo
trunks. Flying debris hit their bodies, grit scoured their skin. A
sideways rain stung them. For protection, they ran into a niche
previous winds and fire had sculpted into the black rock. They
crouched beside one another in the nook, and watched the maelstrom
gather strength.

He asked her, as the typhoon moaned, why her
parents had chaperoned them at the movie, if they didn’t want her
to be with him? Her answer impressed the part of him that
appreciated the skills required to manipulate adults, and
disappointed the part of him that wanted to preserve her in his
heart as the ideal lotus flower, pure in thought and deed. Gently,
she’d told him that her parents didn’t know that on their way to
the cinema, they’d encounter a
gaijin
who believed he’d been
invited into the fold.

Once the Watanabes understood that Ken
believed he was their guest, their graciousness wouldn’t permit
them to inform him of this mistaken idea, a reaction Yasuko had
predicted accurately. The meeting at the teahouse was more
transparent. She’d told them she would never mention his name for
the remainder of her life, if they agreed to have a farewell tea
party. Her father accused her of becoming too American, but had
agreed to his daughter’s deal.

She spoke with her mouth against his ear,
blocking the roaring wind. “At the American college co-ed dances,
the boys are afraid of girls. They only have courage with girls who
are bad. The boys go outside to drink and smoke pot. They come back
inside to fight with each other. I cannot fit in there. In this
country of my ancestors, I walk invisible because Japanese boys are
taught not to see girls. I must respect my heritage, but how can I
if I am nobody? You were not afraid to see me. You saw me and you
did not make your eyes dance away when I saw you. When you look at
me, I become alive. I wish to tell you what this feels like, but my
words will sound indecent.”

Droplets of water stood on the geisha doll’s
face. Its soiled kimono dripped dirty water onto the floor of the
niche. The winds wailed.

“Ken, I want the emotions and touch between
girlfriend and boyfriend.”

He placed one hand on the doll that was in
her lap. His dirt-rimmed fingernails, thick fingers and freckled
hand, streaked with welts where the cat had raked him, repelled
him. She rested her pale hand upon his. She was of another species
altogether, a fine-boned species of delicate, sensitive creatures,
with tapered fingers and paper-thin skin.

His father had been right in forbidding him
to be with her. Right for the wrong reasons. He felt duty-bound to
protect her from himself and his swelling.

The storm blew itself out to the Sea of
Japan. The sky was dark when they emerged from the niche and walked
toward the village. Rainwater dripped off foliage, tapping on
leaves as it found its way to the wet earth. Fallen branches
crisscrossed the path. And she sang, her eyes distant, her little
arched throat trembling in earnest like a songbird’s.

Walk with your chin up

So the tears won’t drop.

Walk with tears in your eyes.

A lonely night,

Remember a lonely autumn night.

Happiness is on top of the clouds.

Happiness is above the sky.

He swiped his sleeve across his eyes.

“It is a sad time,” she said. “Let us be
happy together so our memories will be happy. Tell me a happy
story.”

Happy stories fled his mind. “I don’t know
any.”

“Tell me a story your mother used to tell
you.”

Fact was, she didn’t tell stories, unless you
counted talking in a brittle tone about officers’ wives’ poor taste
in clothes and hairstyles a story. So he told her about Br’er
Rabbit begging,
Please, please, don’t throw me in the briar
patch
, which was where he actually wanted to be because his
enemies couldn’t go in the thorny bushes.

Yasuko laughed. “A clever rabbit he was. I
will try the same method. I’ll tell my father, Please, please, do
not let me see that red-haired American again. I do not like him.”
She stuck out her tongue and shook her head emphasizing her
disgust.

Even her false disgust tore at him. She took
his hand and ran her finger along one of the lines in his palm.

“This line is curving and twisted,” she told
him.

“Is that bad?”

“It means you have an honest
personality.”

He didn’t tell her the gazillion reasons why
this wasn’t the case.

Chapter
Seventeen

~ A Death ~

Ken picked up a flat stone and winged it
across a muddy pond. The stone skipped to the opposite side. By the
time morning sounds of birds and creaky well handles started up,
Yasuko was his equal in the art of skipping stones. They were both
pretty happy about that. They heard a vehicle approaching and,
without consulting each other, ducked behind bushes.