Ken's War (7 page)

They greeted her. “Ohayo goziamasu.” The leaf
collector didn’t reply, but stooped down and selected only the
leaves that suited her particular purpose. The pearl in Ken’s core
stirred. Would Grandpap have known what you do with ginkgo
leaves?

Ken had learned a smattering of Japanese
words and phrases and had ascertained through his relationship with
Maeda, and through observing her interactions with his dad and
others, that it wasn’t only possible to lose face by doing
something stupid like blowing your nose at the table, but that one
could also give face and take face from another person. He’d taken
Maeda’s face when he’d fried tuna for his dad. Wizard had explained
that Ken’s act was tantamount to criticizing her cooking.
But
that’s the thing,
Ken had quipped,
she doesn’t cook it!
He’d tried to give face to her in various ways—by teaching her how
to cook simple western-style foods so she in turn could gain face
in front of Paderson, by over-complimenting her efforts, and by
sticking close to the house so she wouldn’t worry where he was.

He looked up from the leaf-strewn path and
discovered that he was lagging. He caught up to Maeda as she bought
two bus tickets. He let her hold his hand as they boarded the bus.
They bumped along past villages, some smaller than, some larger
than the one near his house. In all of the villages, people had
hung fish out to dry. From the bus they watched a man wearing
rolled up pants wade like an egret in a rice paddy. The sun rising
over the rice farmer’s back silhouetted his task of plucking rice
plants out here and transplanting them there. This crop of rice was
the second of the year. Maeda handed Ken a carton, one of two she’d
bought from a hawker at the bus station.

“Bento.” She started opening his boxed
lunch.

“I know. I can do it.”

“Sushi
inside,” she said.

“I know.” He ate sticky rice wrapped in
sheets of seaweed called
nori.
He jiggled rubbery stuff
between his disposable bamboo chopsticks and aimed for his mouth.
The stuff had no taste whatsoever. Pink, white and green sugary
candy molded into tealeaf shapes melted on his tongue. When they
finished eating, he let Maeda wipe his mouth with a hankie she kept
hidden up her kimono sleeve. With her spine as straight as a bamboo
pole, she closed her eyes and appeared to doze off.

Occasionally, people, especially children,
stared at him. They did not smile. He was convinced they were
talking about him, improvising stories about how a Western teenager
came to be in the care of a Japanese woman, referring to him in
their fictions as high nose, foreign devil, or worse. At a bus
stop, a clutch of boys boarded the bus. He put his guard up. They
reminded him of the gang he’d seen kill a boy. What was more
disquieting was that they did not look at him. He scooted closer to
Maeda. Her eyes flickered open briefly and closed again. She didn’t
move away from the press of his body against her. The boys sat in
front of Ken and Maeda and opened their schoolbooks. The bus picked
up speed only to slow down again and pull in at a train
station.

Stepping off the bus and clop-clopping toward
the train station ticket window, Maeda said, “We have few time.”
The statement was her polite way of telling him, don’t dawdle. Pots
of cascading yellow chrysanthemums lined the station platform. Moss
grew on the steep roof. Maeda and Ken joined the people boarding
the train, its plumes of black smoke chuffing out the stack. The
tracks were narrower than tracks in America. Immaculate too. No
Nehi bottles or cigarette butts. When he focused only on the hills
in the distance, he could hardly tell the train was moving. Except
for the rhythmic vibrations and rattles, they were standing still
in time. He rested his head against the window.

He awoke and half-remembered blinking at his
own reflected eyeballs superimposed in the train window onto
nighttime Japan. While the train cut through broken coastlines,
they had napped on and off, eaten several meals, drunk quarts of
green tea, and stretched their legs at village stations where
passengers disembarked and other people climbed aboard. The hour
was noon according to his watch, but he didn’t know what day it
was.

Maeda gently shook him and pointed out the
window on the left side of the moving train. He looked out the
window. Tucked in the hills, rows and rows of manicured bushes with
glossy, dark green leaves absorbed the sun’s rays.
So what? Big
deal,
he thought. She pointed again and wiggled in her seat. He
smiled, looked out the window, and tried to pretend that he cared
about a bunch of tea bushes as much as she did.

There it was! The mountain from the jigsaw
puzzle! Soaring up to the sky. The mountain that was depicted on
the framed jigsaw puzzle in his old dining room hadn’t been in
Hawaii as he’d once thought.

“Fujiyama,” Maeda said, softening the F to
sound like a breath.

Fujiyama had snagged a white cloud necklace
on her snow-capped crest. The dazzling sun illuminated spears of
snow radiating down her colossal slopes. Cranes soared on the
thermals rising from the compacted towns clustered at Fujiyama’s
foothills. As the train approached the mountain, the symbol of
Japan loomed ever larger, ever larger, allowing no place for
self-pity amid this mighty beauty.

This was what she’d brought him to see.

On the return trip to Kyushu, the American
redhead and his Japanese housekeeper got off the train at the bus
station close to their village and entered a nearby darkened
doorway with short red curtains hanging from the lintel. Wet,
slurping sounds originated from shadowy figures seated at booths in
nooks in the cramped, dim shop. His mom, if she were present to
hear this noise, would have cracked sarcastic remarks about the
Japanese people’s bad table manners, and she would have warned Ken
not to slurp, not to even
think
about slurping. His eyes
adjusted to the darkness and he saw adults, not ornery children,
hunched over large earthenware bowls, slurping on purpose.
Here
a slurp, there a slurp, everywhere a slurp, slurp,
he whispered
to himself.

A man scuffed toward them and set two
steaming bowls of noodles on the wooden table in front of them. Ken
had eaten with Maeda numerous times during this journey, so he knew
to say, “
Itadaki masu,”
before eating. Maeda raised her
loaded chopsticks to her lips. Long noodles dangled into the broth.
She fed the noodle tails to her chopsticks with a spoon to maintain
a continuous feed, slurping all the while in a most ladylike
manner. Hot soup steamed his face. He gave it a try. Broth gurgled
down the wrong pipe. He choked. After he recovered and was
breathing almost normally, he tried slurp-eating again, this time
with more success. The watery sound, however, wasn’t right, it was
too timid. He slurped, he decided, with a Yankee accent. That
thought struck him as humorous. Slurp with a Yankee accent. He
almost laughed out loud.

Maeda told him she wanted to buy greens and
pork for their dinner later at home. While shopping with her, he
learned why she never returned from the market with the ingredients
his father had ordered her to buy. Nothing on the market tables, in
the stalls, on the shelves or in the cubicles resembled Kraft
Macaroni and Cheese, not to mention a plain ol’ humble potato.
Normal foods just weren’t available here, not even to Wizard, who
wrangled the random carton of Jell-O gelatin or cans of corned-beef
hash from U.S. Army commissaries. You could only eat so much of
that canned stuff anyhow before your taste buds hankered for fresh
food.

He kept within range of Maeda as she chatted
with vendors whose language and skin were rough compared to hers.
Vegetables soaked in wooden buckets of brine. An old woman arranged
gingerroots, shaped remarkably like her bowed legs, in a bin beside
persimmons stacked in pyramids on a green cloth. Seafood displayed
on ice in neat rows resembled no creatures or parts of creatures
Ken had learned about from watching TV nature shows or perusing
encyclopedias. A wooden barrel in the main thoroughfare where
shoppers streamed around it appeared to be full of wood shavings,
cedar maybe. The curls were reddish. Through pantomime and a patois
of Japanese and English, Maeda explained that the curls were dried
fish shavings used for soup stock.

They continued roaming between sacks of rice,
dried kelp, ginkgo nuts, packets of green tea, bamboo shoots, tofu
in sundry states and shapes, and millions of miles of noodles—thin
ones, transparent ones, brown ones, beige flat ones. Food was
plentiful. His dad would just have to adapt to Japanese food.

They emerged from the canopied street market
and onto a busy cobbled street. Ken heard a rhythmic thunking
sound. It reverberated through his feet and up through his body.
Rather than being edgy, as he might have been before seeing
Fujiyama, he was curious and ran ahead of Maeda.

Two beefy men took turns whacking giant
wooden pestles against a wooden mortar as high as the tops of their
thighs. Decades of pounding had indented the mortar surface into an
accommodating curve. The men grunted with each swing as the giant
pestles came down and kneaded a green glutinous glob. The men
whacked and grunted, whacked and grunted, their pestle blows
hurling flecks of the green substance from the mortar. Their
secondary objective, Ken supposed, was hitting the mixture of rice
and green tealeaves with sufficient force to send gummy bits onto
passersby. Ken stepped closer to the men whose bare chests were
sweaty in spite of the cool weather. Gummy, green dots flew onto
his tan shirt. He picked one globbit off his sleeve, pressed it
between his thumb and finger, tested its stickiness.

At a canopied stall beside the grunting men,
a woman was selling green balls the size of chicken eggs. She
rolled them in a brown powder and wrapped them in paper. She
presented one to Ken.

“Mochi.”
Maeda nodded and smiled,
encouraging him to repeat the word.

“Mochi,”
he said to please her.

“Mochi.”

“Mochi! Mochi!
”

Maeda handed the lady a coin. They bowed with
the quick economy acceptable between vendor and customer. The green
ball, the consistency of raw pie dough, tasted slightly sweet. The
brown powder, he decided, was pulverized peanuts. The center was
filled with red azuki beans.

“It’s not snot,” he informed them in serious
tones.

The vendor and Maeda exchanged indulgent
smiles. The men whacked and grunted, whacked and grunted. No one
had understood that he’d said a gross word. This was his license to
inform everyone what he’d discovered and to use any kind of words
he wanted to. He strode down the sidewalk, holding his sticky hand
aloft, and announced, “It’s not snot! It’s not snot! It’s not snot!
It’s not snot!” He laughed out loud. His laughter seesawed and
hiccupped on a high note at the end. He’d forgotten what his
laughter sounded like. And what it felt like to be himself again.
He felt good.

Maeda used her key to open the door. Without
speaking she began dredging the pork chops in flour and salt and
laid them in a hot frying pan the way Ken had taught her. He
checked the sleeping area, but his dad wasn’t there. He wanted to
ask if he should set the table for two people or one, to find out
if his dad was expected soon or not, but Maeda let him know she
didn’t want to answer questions. She drew her eyelids down to flat
slits, her attention seemingly transfixed by grease spattering the
wall. She set to wiping it with a damp rag.

Paderson tromped through the doorway and
dropped his duffel bag on the floor. He crossed the kitchen area in
two sweeping steps, tossed a packet of mail on the table, and
grabbed a Kirin out of the tiny fridge. He took a long pull on the
beer and found himself. “Ahh.” He looked at the label on the beer
can appreciatively as he slipped his tie out of his collar. He
whipped his tie at Ken. “Did you manage to stay out of trouble
while I was in Okinawa?”

Ken glanced at their housekeeper. Maeda
turned the pork chops over in the pan, elegantly, with chopsticks.
The sizzling increased as heat seared the meat and then settled
down to a reserved, quiet buzz. He knew what had happened. Maeda
hadn’t asked Paderson for permission to take him on the trek to
Fujiyama. She’d arranged their trip to coincide with Paderson’s
absence. Ken was no longer unsure how he felt toward the Japanese
woman. “Yeah,” he said. “Maeda kept me out of trouble.”

Maeda set two plates of pork chops and greens
on the table, bowed, backed away, and waited with her hands tucked
up her kimono sleeves.

Ken picked up an entire pork chop between his
chopsticks and tore off a hunk with his teeth. His dad rested his
left hand on the table next to the beer can. The white line on his
ring finger was almost tan. With his right hand he rocked his fork
to cut the meat. He popped a big piece in his mouth and chewed.

The familiar back-slanted penmanship on the
airmail envelope on top of the mail packet was Tricia Paderson’s
handwriting. The letter was an uninvited guest at the table. They
continued eating. Maeda continued waiting. The last letter from his
mother had brought on a spell of heavy weather. Neither Ken nor his
dad, as far as he knew, had received anything, not even a measly
Christmas card or a box of store-bought cookies from her since that
day over half a year ago when Paderson had sent their dishes
crashing to the floor.

“It’s not going to open itself,” Paderson
said.

“It’s probably just a birthday card.”
Upside-down pineapple cake was what his grandma had always baked
for him. One of those sent by airmail would be fine and dandy. He’d
forgotten what homemade cake and Oscar Mayer Wiener hotdogs tasted
like. It was funny how things that used to seem so important could
be forgotten until an unexpected reminder prodded the craving into
life again, a dispassionate life that could be swiftly dispatched
if that’s what you needed to do to adapt.