Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail (2 page)

I lingered near my truck and watched people come down the stairs, each clutching a piece of toast. So many People Who Knew. Some looked confused and some relieved. One woman was bawling so hard she dropped her toast, and when she did, I saw what it said:
suicide.

That was eerie, but even eerier were the ones whose faces were blank and empty and lost. Like maybe they were already dead.

A cry rose from the front of the crowd, and suddenly everyone got very noisy. People gestured and talked amongst themselves, and some turned away and started heading back toward the road.

“Broken? Right! I
knew
it was a fraud.”

“Just my luck... should’ve come earlier.”

“Not really sure I wanted to know, to be honest...”

I waited until everyone left, then approached the door with my crate.

“Yamada-san?”

She stepped into the hall, prim as ever.

“Keisuke! How good of you to come amid that throng. I noticed the truck outside earlier and thought you’d given up.”

“No, ma’am.” I held the crate out, and she took it with
out a word. I shifted around, trying to sneak a peek into the kitchen.

“Come on in and have a drink,” she said.

There it was, unplugged, sitting right smack in the middle of the round yellow table, a silver single-slice toaster trimmed in black, with rust lining the opening. The table was littered with crumbs. I wondered if you had to eat the toast in order for the prediction to come true, or if just toasting it was enough.

“Well, there it is.”

“Is it... broken?” I asked.

She frowned. “Seems to be.”

“Did it really work, though?”

Her smile returned, serene above her lace collar. “Oh, yes! God’s methods sure are beyond our comprehension. Who are we to judge His ways?”

“But... maybe you can get it fixed.”

“Maybe. But perhaps this is simply the toaster’s fate.”

She took a bottle from the crate and gestured with it toward the back door. “Please, come.”

I FOLLOWED HER OUT THE BACK DOOR.
The yard had been completely overtaken by a junglelike garden that seemed out of step with Ms. Yamada’s tidy appearance and manners. We picked through vines until we reached the back of the yard, where a stone shrine stood against the first tall mud terrace. The family grave.

“This is where my ancestors rest, and most recently, my husband,” she said, picking up the bottle opener lying at the base of the shrine.

“He loved beer. His favorite thing in life was a cold beer in the garden at sunset. Ah, Shuji,” she said.

She opened the beer deftly and poured it all over the shrine, slowly dousing the statuary in caramel foam. She shook the bottle wildly at the end, spraying us both with drops of beer. She looked like my sister dancing to a Morning Musume song when she did that.

When the bottle was dry, she set it on the ledge where offerings are left. The family name, Yamada—heavenly mountain and earthly rice field—was carved in fancy calligraphy above the shelf, and beer meandered down the grooves in the stone like a lazy river in summer.

She sighed. “I do that every day. That is my offering to him.”

After what I’d just witnessed, I felt comfortable enough to ask, “Yamada-san, what about the eighth bottle?”

She laughed. “You are an astute fellow.”

SHE WENT IN THE HOUSE
and returned with the toaster and another bottle.

“Do you know what baptism is?”

“No, Yamada-san.”

“Baptism is a ritual that washes away original sin,” she said, setting the toaster on the offering ledge. She reached again for the opener. “It makes you pure.”

Then she held the bottle over her head, closed her eyes, and turned it upside down.

I reached out automatically to help her, to save her from herself, but she raised her palm. The beer gushed over her hair, her face, onto her white, starched shirt and
long, beige skirt. Her hair flattened out. Here and there her makeup ran off her cheeks and revealed darker skin underneath.

About three-quarters through she stopped, opened her eyes, and held the bottle out to me.

I didn’t move. All I could hear was the drip-drip-drip of beer hitting the dirt around Ms. Yamada’s feet. I know what my uncle would’ve said: what a waste of alcohol. He always said it was a sin to waste liquor.

My impulse was to take the bottle—maybe she wanted me to hold it for her—but then she raised it to the sky and said, “For once, they came to me. I did the best I could, I explained God’s true will and purpose, and how to be saved, but no one listened.”

The remaining beer sloshed around inside the bottle. Her eyes were closed. It seemed she’d forgotten I was standing there.

“I have brought no one into the truth,” she said.

She opened her eyes and looked around, teetering as if she’d drunk all that beer instead of showering in it. When she noticed I was still there, she held the bottle out to me once again. Strands of wet hair clung to her cheeks. She smiled a smile I’ve never forgotten, a smile like a girl playing in a puddle.

I stepped close to her, close enough so that I could see the pink brassiere through her damp blouse. Together we emptied the bottle into the toaster’s vacant slot. When the slot overflowed, she pushed down the lever on the side.

She looked toward the sky. I wondered if she was thinking of her own death.

I followed her gaze. I could see the hilltop behind us, and the bamboo growing there. The stalks moved slightly in a breeze I couldn’t feel, revealing and concealing slivers of blue that formed words faster than I could read them, a marvel for anyone who cared to look.

MASA UNLATCHED THE GRIMY WINDOW.
A seaweed breeze doused the room, flushing out the smell of air freshener. On the low table, silk flowers stood in a vase of water. Saki sat before the table, popping off the petals so only the plastic stems remained.

“Let’s stay forever,” she said while Masa arranged their suitcases against the wall. There was no closet.

Masa had picked this inn on purpose—cheap and tacky, exactly the kind of place Saki loved. It hadn’t been his first choice for a honeymoon destination, of course, but he wanted Saki happy, wanted her, more than
anything, to feel
known;
his first wife had complained Masa didn’t understand her, or want to. And maybe that was true. He worked too much in those days; he was younger, still selfish.

Having denuded all the silk stems, Saki lay back and began to curl in and out of slow sit-ups. “I’ve decided to cultivate a twelve-pack,” she said. “My wedding gift to you.”

Masa leaned against the wall, admiring his wife. He’d first encountered her less than a year ago in an Osaka art gallery. She’d been hunkered on the floor before a toe-tapping marionette, wearing a print dress with a rip in the hem. Her long hair was unbrushed, and the soles had separated from her tennis shoes. She wore no makeup. Masa liked this. He’d just turned fifty and didn’t need the worry of handling a beauty.

“Saki-chan, shall we stroll on the beach?” he said. He had something important to discuss, and had found serious conversations were best held while engaging in simple, physical activity. “I bet this typhoon washed up some interesting things.”

She rolled gracefully to her feet. “You know I love debris.”

ALONG THE EDGES OF THE COVE,
concrete bulwarks rose from the water like ancient creatures. The sky was flat and gray, silver water meeting a dark horizon. Clumps of seaweed ringed the shore. The air smelled of fish, but the breeze tasted faintly sweet, like ice cream. Masa felt
content; this was not something he would have noticed before meeting Saki.

Now that they were married, it was time to discuss something of utmost importance: starting a family. It was a topic they’d addressed only indirectly—things had happened so fast—but Masa knew, the same way he knew that she’d love this crumbling inn, that Saki wanted children. Yes, she was unpredictable, nontraditional, even a bit eccentric, but she was still a woman. Kaori had wanted kids so badly she’d secretly stopped taking her birth control pills. When she got pregnant, they got married, and when she miscarried, he felt cheated, like an animal lured into a cage.

But that was all in the past.

He caught Saki’s hand in his. He gave it a squeeze and cleared his throat.

Just then they came upon the body of a gull lying in a bed of bright green seaweed. One eye was open, fixing them with its orange iris. Masa led Saki on, but she resisted.

“Poor thing,” she said. “How does a bird drown?”

“We don’t know it did. Maybe it died on land and was swept away.”

“Or maybe it got blown off course by the typhoon. Just imagine. Flying and flying but nowhere to land, and you’re so tired...”

“Surely it was already dead,” he said firmly, annoyed that he would have to put off their discussion now that such a bad omen had presented itself.

“Maybe you’re right. I bet it lived a full life,
flying where it pleased.” Saki gazed at him behind the hair blown across her face. She jumped with both feet into the tide as it came in, her long toes leaving tiny prints that melted as he watched.

They walked on, the damp, packed sand whining beneath their feet until they stood at the end of the beach, where a stone slab rose from a pile of rubble. Words had been carved into the rock—thin, shallow cuts.

“‘In great reverence...’” Masa read slowly. “I don’t even recognize some of those characters, they’re so old.”

Saki reached toward the stone and laid two fingers on the characters carved there.

“‘In deep appreciation for the gift from the sea... in this the year of...’” She pointed to a character whose strokes blended together.

“I think this is the old character for
blue.
Or more like the...
essence of blue,”
Saki said.

Masa loved her way with the Japanese language. She used the old words for things,
o-hia
for water,
seppun
instead of the modern
kisu
when she wanted a kiss.

He thought of his mother, full of warnings about marrying a
hafu
—a girl only half Japanese. And, she’d added wryly, practically half his age. How stubborn the old woman could be.

He made up his mind. Barring another bad omen, he would bring up children at dinner.

THINGS WERE GOING WELL.
Saki’s puppetry career was coming along, though she went through more money than
she brought in. Still, though, the finances were more than stable, thanks to a couple clever property investments Masa had made after his divorce. It was the right time to take the next step; Masa felt it in his bones.

That night, they walked down the empty main street to the town’s other, fancier hotel, which had a restaurant with a medieval theme. They sat in over-large chairs; his upholstered in leather, hers in dark animal fur. Over dinner, Saki leaned in close. “I can tell you want to talk. I’m all ears,” she said, and grabbed her earlobes.

Masa felt a rush of love for her, for that face like a heart, for those gray eyes that, when focused on him, held so much light.

He reached forward and encircled her wrists with two fingers. “I—I want to have a baby.” There, he had said it; not the eloquent speech he had practiced, but then again Saki was his wife, not a client.

“Now?”

“Yes. I’m—well, I’m no grandpa, but I’m not shedding years, either.”

“It’s possible, maybe in a few years. After my career has developed.”

“Even now, you could still pursue your art. Some-times—well, sometimes fate has other things planned.”

“You and your fate.”

She wasn’t at all superstitious; in fact, she went out of her way to be unlucky. When Masa’s mother express-mailed them a Shinto calendar to use in selecting a wedding date, Saki picked the least auspicious day of the year. His mother had refused to come to the ceremony.

In fact, Masa hadn’t talked to his mother since the calendar incident. His father made a point of calling one Sunday a month, but he rarely asked about Saki and never used her name; it was always, “and did She accompany you on that trip?” or “how is Her health?” Saki found it funny. “I’m your lawfully wedded pronoun,” she said.

“Everything about us is fate,” Masa said. “It’s all meant to be. Our children will know business and art, Japanese and English. We would never have met if it hadn’t been for—”

“I know, I know. The piano.”

Masa loved to credit the piano. It had fallen four stories from a crane and smashed onto the sidewalk with a sound like the end of the universe. Pedestrians on the street, Masa included, had been detoured along a narrow side street—the very street where Saki’s puppets were displayed in a tiny gallery. Feeling the detour to be a sign, Masa had stepped inside the gallery.

“You have to admit—we would never have found each other otherwise.” He liked the idea that he was fate’s gift to someone, and that it had gone to such outrageous lengths to deliver him.

“People don’t
find
each other. They just
happen
to each other.”

“Well, maybe I wasn’t looking for you, but I
was
looking—for something I didn’t know... but... that could only have been you!” His voice rose, and the teenage couple at the next table glanced over at them.

“The piano was a coincidence. Otherwise you would have ‘found’ someone else.”

“It doesn’t feel very special, when you put it that way.”

She set her bony elbows on the table. “Want to know the
real
reason we got together?”

“Certainly, my dear.”

Her scarf dipped into her soup bowl as she whispered, “I grew a tail.”

He laughed loudly, as if to let everyone in the restaurant know that things were just fine.

“It grew out of that mole on my lower back.”

He dropped her hands and sat back, gripping his chair’s stout leather armrests. “Amazing. Was it very long?”

Saki held up her hand and spread her thumb and pinkie apart.

“And tell me how that brought us together?”