Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail (9 page)

Nao’s favorite coins to hear were the aluminum one-yens, so flimsy their sinking seemed magic. The voices of the one-yens were inevitably those of children, and the will of a child, Nao thought, was like a freshly minted sword. These were the wishes that cut him deepest, and pleased him most. He had long forgotten the ring of intense desire, to want nothing more than a fat, sugared
gumball. He visited the hundred-yen shop with a laundry list of trinkets: toy car, rubber stamp, throwaway camera. Things like these he bought and left on the ledge, like offerings.

THOUGH HE COULD NOT PLACE HER VOICE,
her coins had appeared every summer: thick, heavy 500-yen pieces, a week before the Obon festival, when spirits were said to cross the river between the living and the dead. The wish was always the same, and to his ears like a mantra:
One more time.
He wondered if it was one of these ancestral ghosts asking for another chance. But there was nothing he could do for ghosts.

He always took this wish to the temple near his home, where he spent his weekends meditating and caring for the temple cats. He also took the extra-dark ones, the voices of pain, though these were few. Those voices usually found the temples on their own.

Of the hundreds of coins he brought home, he made a study of them, cataloguing wishes and wishers the way an amateur gemologist might label rocks. No one lied in a wish. Might this be one way to truth? Along one wall of his house sat six Breem disinfectant canisters Nao had scrubbed out. Each canister had been labeled with a character: Love, Accomplishments, Health, Power, Money, Objects. Once in a while he combined two buckets in a philosophical conclusion: wasn’t a wish for an object simply a wish for the money with which to buy it? Wasn’t a Money
wish also one of Power? Eventually he decided that all were merely subcategories of the first.

NAO WAS CONTENT WITH HIS LIFE,
with his work and his television and his weekends at the temple. Though he kept to himself, he was known throughout town and that was enough for him, to be greeted by name, drawing no more attention than a streetlamp.

He had planned to live out the rest of his days this way. But the news came that Old Castle Park was being dug up. The public preferred the newer park on top of the hill. There was nothing to be done; the land had already been sold. After Obon’s weeklong celebration, the land would be cleared for a pachinko parlor.

FRIDAY, THE FESTIVAL’S FINAL NIGHT,
Nao joined the crowd, wearing a
yukata
of orange and green. The light of colored lanterns was reflected in the river in the castle moat. A late-rising persimmon moon dragged across the sky as if it, too, sought to slow down the night. As Nao greeted an acquaintance from the market, he noticed a boy with wet hair and a dirty yukata run past, a disposable camera attached to his wrist by a plastic yellow loop. The boy stopped to photograph a fire hydrant. Nao smiled. He knew that camera, and the sight of one of his “gifts” in use filled him with joy.

He moved on, took in the park, and felt as if the
surroundings were an extension of himself. He became the dirt, the sturdy crabgrass. He drank beer from cans and sake from paper cups. He ate
takoyaki
and savored the hot-cold pucker of crispy batter and garlicky cream sauce on his tongue. The thick, fried air was occasionally cut with the cool smell of the sea. He sensed the vibration of his every atom.

A sharp, crunching sound pulled his eyes to one side, where they fell on the wet-haired boy. The child looked away quite obviously—he had been watching him. To be observed so closely by a child felt a great honor.

Up close, it was clear the boy had some handicap. His ears stuck out like mug handles, and his eyes were drawn far out and up, like a cat’s. The river-smell of mud and fish rose from his skin. He held the camera in both hands.

Nao turned away and walked through the crowd, moving from one person to the next, listening to their chatter, the tick-tock of words. It was not often he drank so much.

He recognized the voices of wishers but avoided their faces. Once he saw their eyes, he couldn’t unsee them. Instead he looked up and forced himself to contemplate the black sky. That star might not be a star billions of miles away, but a firefly, hovering within arm’s reach. Or an asteroid, heading toward Earth from a distant galaxy, its approach unnoticeable. Within minutes, the Earth and everything on it would be nothing but dust.

Dropping his gaze, he found himself looking directly into the boy’s camera. The boy jerked his arm to his side, hiding the camera that dangled there.

ON THE DAY OF THE DEMOLITION,
Nao sat in meditation at the temple. He was too far away to hear the machines at work, but as the hours progressed, he became aware of a faint wail coming from somewhere—in space maybe, or inside his own head—that grew louder as the day went on, and he came to know that this was the death cry of the fountain, that the structure itself had had a soul apart from the soul-bits imparted by the coins it received. Nao sat in meditation for two straight days while the rubble was cleared from the hill and the piping ripped from the earth beneath it. An orange cat slept curled in his lap.

When it was over he stood, slowly stretching his limbs. He felt as if he’d just awoken from a long sleep, as if the life he’d led until then had been a dream. Without the fountain to maintain, without the coins to shepherd, he was free. The thought filled his empty belly with anxiety.

A woman in a green dress like a sack turned up the dirt path. The way she walked, as if each step were a final destination, was familiar to him. There was a faraway look on her plain, moonlike face, and her hair hung around her chin in messy pieces that suggested an expensive haircut outgrown, a woman gone to seed.

“Such a lovely temple,” she said, and her voice rang in his head.

Her coins clanked into the donation box, and she pressed her palms together, squeezed her eyes shut, lips moving prayer. When she finished, she clapped her hands three times and tugged the rope that dangled over the box. The temple bell sang.

Nao spoke. “All these years—I never saw you throw in a coin.”

She brushed the hair from her eyes and looked at him closely. “I’ve always come at odd hours,” she said. “I don’t sleep much.”

Nao stroked the cat in his lap and felt its purr in his fingertips. “Did you get what you wanted? Did you get ‘One more time’?”

Her tiny mouth fell open. “How did you know about ‘One more time’?”

She held her face in her hands. Nao thought she resembled a paper doll.

She said, “I had a son.”

Nao nodded.

“He was not well. He should have been in a special school, but I was too stubborn. He wandered away from the class. There was a river nearby.”

“Certain spirits take their leave too early for our liking.”

He looked deeply into her, taking in her hair, her ill-fitting dress. It wasn’t a shade of green but the very spirit of green—fresh grass, elm leaves, the shy curlicue of a sprout from dirt. He looked at her ears and recalled the boy with the camera, his hair damp and matted, the way his dark eyes followed him, had picked him out of the crowd. He would not tell the mother about this visit. The spirits of children were foolish, weren’t they? The boy had snapped a photo, Nao was sure of it, the tiny
click
echoing from then to now.

THE YEAR WE LIVED IN JAPAN,
the volcano at the edge of town hiccupped, covering everything in six inches of heavy golden dust. The sky turned yellow, with clouds so low they were like ceilings. No one could remember anything like it.

Businesses and schools closed that first day; there was no way to handle the ash, no plows on hand in that tropical city. It was a nuisance, we were told, but not dangerous; children poured outside to play wearing bathing suits and surgical masks. Housewives vacuumed the street. Dust got into the air raid siren, and it blared over the city for the first time since World War II. Our
family was freed from obligation—Monte from going into the lab, Alex from a day of second grade, and me from filling time. We steered our bicycles through the fine dust and joined other families making ash angels in the park; we communicated through exclamations and gestures, and in that bizarre world I felt, for the first time in three months, part of something.

I got arrested on the way home from the park. A policeman flagged us down and checked the registration numbers on our bicycles; the name on mine did not match the name on my alien registration card, and I was put in the backseat of a police car while my husband and child stared. Monte kept pointing to the bike and repeating the name of his lab. His voice rose. I watched them get smaller from the backseat, half expecting my husband to chase us on his bicycle.

The police station was dark; the power must have gone out. They sat me at a wobbly card table next to a young, bug-eyed guy who smelled like fried chicken. Five older men looked on, smoking and chatting. Occasionally they laughed. The young guy opened a laptop computer, then typed something and angled the screen toward me. A window popped up:

Why do you steal a bicycle?

The misunderstandings never ended. My fingers flew as I explained.

He read the translation carefully, holding the laptop as if inspecting a scroll. He set it down, grimacing as he typed.
The record of bicycle is not found. Lab worker has no availability today for the confirmation.

One of the older men flicked his cigarette butt to the ground, put his palms on the table, and shouted, “Why you steal?”

A bored-looking woman arrived in uniform, her black hair still wet from washing. She sat on the other side of me.

When can I go home?
I typed to the bug-eyed man.

That is difficult.

Why is it difficult?

Yes, I see. You see, it is not believing you tell the truth.
He said something to the woman. They both stood up; she took my wrist. I jerked it away. I yelled, “I didn’t steal the goddamn bike!”

Handcuffs. Photographs. Fingerprints. At some point I gave up speaking; no one could understand me. The jail was half an hour away by car, and before I went outside, the woman fastened a leather belt around my waist. A rope hung from it like a leash. She gripped it in her fist and avoided my eyes.

AT THE JAIL I STRIPPED
in front of the female guard and put on the clothes she provided, a white T-shirt that read “LET’S ENJOY” and a pair of red sweatpants that barely covered my knees. The guard pointed to my navel ring and said, “Ehh?” When we came out of the changing room, she gestured at her belly to her supervisor.

“You must remove ring in your stomach,” the supervisor told me.

“It doesn’t come out,” I said. “You need special tools.”

“Sou ka,”
he said, nodding. “Yes. We find tools.
Renchi?”

They had me do it myself. The room got crowded. Someone gave my pliers; I watched my hand open them and thought, whose hand is that? I cracked the ring and pulled the jagged metal through my skin. There was some blood. I felt nothing. A bandage was taped over my belly button, and I was led into a cell. Two women slept on the floor atop a thin mat.

I don’t think I slept. Early the next morning, food— overcooked rice, pickles, processed meat sticks the color of Pepto-Bismol—arrived through a doggie door. One of my cellmates showed me a banana she kept hidden in the toilet tank, then motioned to her crotch and giggled.

The second day, a man named Ronald Ripples came from the American Embassy. He told me, with a wink, not to make waves. When I didn’t laugh, he pointed at his nametag. He told me foreigners weren’t necessarily allowed a phone call. Secretly, he took Monte’s cell phone number and promised to contact him. He told me I could be held for up to twenty-four days merely on suspicion. After he left, I threw up in the hallway.

Ronald Ripples brought an Elmore Leonard novel. To keep myself distracted, I read it up to the last two pages and stopped, then started again from the beginning. If I let myself imagine Monte and Alex at home, I would break into sobs. There was so much to daily life. Did Monte know that when he dropped Alex off, he needed to bow to the teacher greeting students at the gate? What would he pack him for lunch? Did he know that putting the rice maker on high would burn the rice and make the pot impossible to clean? For the first time in his life, Alex
would go to bed without me, without our nightly ritual of warm tea and a book of his choice—these days, we were reading
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
. Would Monte do the voices the way Alex liked?

The third day, Alex had a Sports Day at school, and I missed it. Alex loved those days, one Saturday a season, when the school held an all-day athletic contest. Each homeroom put forth their fastest sprinters, best kendo fighters, and longest jumpers in a good-natured competition for the school championship. Alex’s homeroom had tied for first last time, and his winning the hundred-meter dash had earned him instant acceptance among his new, formerly wary, classmates.

A girl in a cell down the hall yelled out a word I recognized from that first Sports Day:
Fight-o
! Then someone else echoed her, and then the chorus of
Fight-o!
got so loud the guards had to shut off the lights to quiet things down.

On the fourth day, we washed our underwear in a long trough while a man in an ill-fitting suit barked at us, words I was probably lucky not to understand but still longed to; my isolation was complete enough that any inclusion, even in a group scolding, would’ve been comforting. I wrung water from cotton and fought tears.

The next day I saw the prosecutor, a man with crooked teeth and fluttering nostrils. He looked like the prehistoric fish in Alex’s science book. The prosecutor told me that I would be released—after I signed a confession. I remembered what Ronald had told me: “FYI, in Japan, once indicted, 99 percent of defendants are found guilty.”

I looked at the paper, covered from top to bottom in tiny, illegible pictograms, and imagined spending months, or years, away from my son. I picked up the pen.