Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail (13 page)

“Well now, do tell!”

“Oh, no. Well, for one thing there was the band—”

“The marching band?”

“No, a rock band. Punk, really. I was the singer.”

“Ah—I played clarinet, myself.”

She nodded, slipping inside this invented life like a pair of old pajamas. “We were called Shards of Black, and we wore only white, to be ironic.”

While he was laughing, she excused herself and went to the bathroom. Hisao had left a voicemail, a habit he’d acquired recently.

She returned his call, explained to him the significance of the toaster oven sitting on the kitchen counter, what each knob did, and how long to leave the bread inside. He didn’t mention her quartet practice, which she found annoying, but when he asked whether she would be home for dinner, his voice stirred pity in her. She imagined him eating burnt toast—plain because he did not know where to locate the butter and jam—and she could not say no.

UPON HER RETURN SHE FOUND
Hisao sitting on the kitchen floor, surrounded by a mess of bottles, boxes, and cans.

“What are you doing?”

“Rearranging,” he said, examining a box of fish stock.

“
Why
?”

He looked up, irritated. “For greater efficiency.”

“You don’t even cook.”

He shrugged. She stepped over him and picked up the whiskey.

“Since when do you drink?”

“Since now. Why do you seem to think life is over, that it’s too late to try new things?”

He motioned at the mess around him. “I
am
trying new things.”

A LETTER FROM SHINJI ARRIVED
two days later.
He must have mailed it while I was on the train ride back,
Aya thought. In the letter he thanked her for coming to Tokyo and expressed his excitement for their next meeting, the next Sunday in Ueno Park. He closed with a line from
Kokoro,
the Soseki novel they had discussed:

She reread his letters each morning and began the day feeling like a plant just watered.

AUTUMN HAD SET THE TREES
in the park aflame, and Aya felt she’d never experienced such richness of color, even in the rural forests of her hometown.

He had bowed to her upon their meeting, a good sign,
she thought, since a hug would have meant something she was not quite ready for. His face searched hers in a way it had not upon their first encounter, like a connoisseur reevaluating a painting that’s been placed in new light. She thought it might be her lipstick: after locking up her viola, she’d applied “Shhh” without blotting it afterward.

His unsure manner disappeared quickly, and Aya wrote it off to nerves. Her suspicion was confirmed when, after just a few minutes of walking, he grabbed her hand. “I want to show you something,” he said.

He led her out of the park, through a shopping area, and into a quiet neighborhood of old houses and narrow lanes. “This is my house,” he said, and they stopped in the street. “Don’t worry,” he said, seeing her expression, “I’m not indecent. After all, we hardly know each other!”

She followed him down a narrow path behind the house. He kept glancing back, as if to make sure she was still there. A tiny shed stood in the yard, and when they reached it, he began unlocking it. There were four locks in all.

“Here we are,” he said, pushing open the door.

Aya stepped inside the dim little room, which smelled of wet wood and plastic. A large table, which held a device resembling a seismograph, took up most of the space. It was not a room built for company.

“This,” he said, throwing out his arm like a magician, “is the amorometer.”

The central component of the contraption was a metal case painted red. Inside the case, a needle hung poised over a thick roll of paper. Two leather cuffs, one large,
like a belt, and one smaller, the size of a blood-pressure cuff, dangled from the left side of the box. Rising behind the box like a crown was a clothes hanger—also painted red—that had been forced into an awkward heart shape. It looked like something Ryo would have built with scraps from the neighbor’s trash.

“I was hoping you’d be willing to, well, provide some new data. A longitudinal study, if you will!” He set his hand lightly on her arm.

“Ah!” She imagined herself cuffed to the device, the evidence of her fakery pouring forth, and shuddered. She sat down.

“Are you all right? Is there something you need?”

“I’m just not—”

“You see,” he said, opening and closing a clamp full of tiny metal teeth, “this way I can be sure...
we
can be sure...”

She thought of her lipstick, and touched a finger to her mouth, as if testing a wall one had regretfully painted.

“I think I should go,” she said.

HER TRAIN WASN’T DUE
for over an hour. She wandered the fluorescent underground corridors of the station, passing shops advertising souvenirs for places elsewhere—blackened eggs from Hakone, tiny limes from Shikoku,
habu
liquor from Okinawa. She wondered how many of the gifts she’d received over the years had come from places like this. Was everything so false?

She heard the music long before she saw the players;
it came from nearly the same place as the first time, next to the ticket machine for the Hibiya subway line, which, she’d learned from Shinji, was the deepest subway in the world. If you stood at the bottom of the Hibiya escalator, it was said, you could feel the heat of hell and see the light from heaven.

She looked at the spot the quartet-minus-one had been a week before but found it empty. She followed the melody with her ear. It was coming, she realized, from beyond the ticket gates, rising up the escalator.

She made her decision at once; or rather, she reflected later, her heart had made it for her—a luxury she had not allowed herself in many years. Inside the stall of a nearby bathroom, Aya flipped the latches on her viola case. She lifted the instrument from its bed and, drawing the ancient bow across the strings, began to play.

The strings were old; the A and G were frayed along the bowline and she worked the tuning pegs, cradling the wooden body to her chest. Shoes clattered on the disinfected floors, doors slammed, and hands were washed, and for once in her life, Aya did not care who observed her. These women were strangers, yet they shared this city; maybe some had been students at Keio University, maybe the other Aya Kawaguchi was in the stall next to her, pants down. The thought made her laugh, and without realizing what she was doing, she began playing the solo she’d performed her last year of high school, the first movement of Shubert’s
Arpeggione.
Heady, she watched her fingers land on the strings, and though the B was falling out of tune already, her rhythm was dead on.

It wasn’t perfect, but she felt it was good, and if she practiced, it could be marvelous, better than it had been in school because everything she had lived through would go into the music. She was no longer a girl. Her fears and desires were known and did not bind her. She hit the final notes with this in mind, standing alone in the corner stall of the women’s bathroom near the Hibiya Line in Tokyo Station, and when she was finished, a small clap echoed against the tile walls, and a second later more applause joined it. Aya lifted her head. She bowed to no one, then started from the beginning, thinking how the beady-eyed judge had nodded, even smiled, and said: “That was good, but let’s hear it again.”

Endless gratitude to Jill Meyers and Callie Collins, both incredibly insightful editors, and to the talented staff of A Strange Object.

Thank you to the MacDowell Colony, Devil’s Tower National Monument, Jentel Arts, and the Kerouac House for feeding, housing, and otherwise spoiling me rotten so that I could work on these stories. Support from the Wesleyan Writers Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Fishtrap, the San Francisco Foundation, and Intersection for the Arts was also instrumental to the writing of this book.

I’m indebted to the readers and editors of the literary
magazines in which these stories first appeared, in particular Minna Proctor, Richard Mathews, Sunny Woan, and Christine Lee Zilka.

Thanks to Angela MacFarlane and Brian Beckey for their friendship and the Caboose, where many of these stories were written.

Giant thanks to John Evans for reading many ugly drafts and for years of encouragement; my beloved Kristin Kearns for same, plus champagne and hoops and PB stirfry; to Jo Ann Heydron, Sky Kelsey, Kimiko Kobayashi, Josip Novakovich, and Stuart Dybek; to my family for their unwavering support, and finally,
domo san-kyu
to my
好きな人
Derek Seymour for that one scene, and for being willing to throw eggs at strangers who are keeping me awake, and for much, much more.

A Strange Object is a small press and literary collective established in 2012 and based in Austin, Texas. A\SO believes in surprising, wild-hearted fiction, diverse voices, and good design across all platforms.
Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail
is A Strange Object’s first book. Learn more at astrangeobject.com.