East is East

legend: GEORGIA BULLDOGS. And then she spotted the shoes—not Thalamus’s worn-out tennies with their tears and perforations, but a gleaming new pair of Nike hightops. Ruth smiled. Tomcat, indeed.

She didn’t want to wake him, already picturing the startled eyes, the jaw slack with horror, Goldilocks up and out the window, but she couldn’t stand there all day and she did want a cup of coffee. After a while—five minutes, ten?—she tiptoed across the room, filled the kettle and set it on the hot plate to boil. Then she began to tidy up, sweeping the crumbs from the table into a cupped palm, dropping the empty tins into an old supermarket bag she’d stuffed behind her desk, dribbling water over the stiff pink funnels of her pitcher plants. The lid of the kettle had just begun to rattle when she turned and saw that Hiro’s eyes were open. He was lying there motionless, hunched like a lost soul on a park bench, but his eyes were open now, and he was watching her. “Good morning,” she said. “Welcome back.”

He sat up and mumbled a greeting. He looked groggy. He dug at his eyes with the blades of his knuckles. He yawned.

Ruth stirred a spoonful of the replenished instant coffee into a mug. “Coffee?” she offered, holding the mug out to him.

He took it from her with an elaborate half-body bow and sipped gratefully, his eyes reduced to slits. He watched her pour herself a cup and then he stood, rising awkwardly above her. “I want to sank you so very much,” he said, and then faltered.

Ruth held the steaming mug in both hands and looked up into his strange tan eyes. “My pleasure,” she said, and then, seeing his puzzled look, she gave him the textbook reply, enunciating each word as if she needed time to chew and digest it: “You-are-very-welcome.”

He seemed to brighten at this, and he held out his hand, smiling hugely. His front teeth were misaligned, overlapping, and the effect was just a little, well, goofy. Was this the first time she’d seen him smile? She couldn’t remember. But she smiled back, and she couldn’t imagine what all the uproar was about—Abercorn, Turco, Sheriff Peagler, all the old biddies of the island. He was harmless, maybe even a little pitiful—if she’d ever had any doubts, she was sure of that now.

The smile suddenly faded and he began to shift his feet and cast his gaze round the room. “I am called Hiro,” he suddenly blurted, and extended his hand. “Hiro Tanaka.”

Ruth took his hand and bowed with him, as if they were at the very beginning of a minuet. “I’m Ruth,” she said, “Ruth Dershowitz.”

“Yes,” he said, and the smile returned, blooming with teeth. “Rusu, I am very please to meet you.”

The Other Half

Seven days earlier, hiro tanaka had stood poised on the shoulder of the tar-bubbled blacktop road that promised him release, the road that would lead to the swift clean highway and all the anonymous cities beyond it. He hesitated, looking first to the right and then to the left, the road raveling out into emptiness in either direction. It looked pretty bleak, he had to admit it. The secretary and her lunchbox lay behind him now, buried in swamp and scrub, while directly across from him the waning sun pointed the way west, where a wild continent and a wilder ocean lay between him and the place he’d turned his back on forever—though he ached for it now. What he wouldn’t give for the yawning boredom of the corner noodle shop, where nothing ever happened, except to the noodles. Or the tranquillity of the tiny twenty-mat park across from his grandmother’s apartment, where nature consisted of pruned bushes and cultivated flowers, a trickle of water pumped over a glaze of cemented stones. He remembered sitting on the bench there as a boy, reading comics or the latest besuboru magazine, the murmur of the water lifting him out of himself for hours at a time.

But there was no sense in thinking that way—all that was lost to him now. Now he was in America, where nature was primeval, seething, a cauldron of snapping reptiles, insects and filth, where half-crazed Negroes and homicidal whites lurked behind every tree—now he was in America, and he had a new life ahead of him. And what he wanted was to turn right, to the north—that was where the great mongrel cities lay, that much he knew—but he’d traveled that road already, to the Coca-Cola store, with its subhuman proprietors and deranged customers, and he hadn’t thought much of the experience. And so he turned to his left, and headed south.

This time he strode along the shoulder of the road, defiant, angry. If they came for him, he’d fight. Screw them all, the long-nosed bastards. He was wearing clean clothes for the first time in weeks— hakujin clothes—and he’d be damned if he’d plunge into the cesspool alongside the road like a scared rabbit. He’d had it. He was fed up. He was going to walk all the way to the City of Brotherly Love. On his own two feet. And god help anyone who got in his way.

He walked, one foot in front of the other, the sun sinking, the mosquitoes massing, and the road never changed. Tree and bush, creeper and vine, stem and leaf and twig. Birds wheeled overhead; insects danced in his eyes. He looked down, and the corpses of lizards and snakes, wafer-thin and baked to leather, stained the surface of the road. He looked up, and something slithered across the pavement. Before long, the canvas of the tennis shoes began to chafe at his ankles.

And then he heard it, behind him: the ticking smooth suck of an automobile engine, the hiss of tires. He hunched his shoulders, set his teeth. Sons of bitches. Hakujin scum. He wouldn’t turn his head, wouldn’t look. The ticking of the engine drew nearer, the tires beating at the pavement, his heart in his mouth … and then it was past him, a whoosh of air, rusted bumper, children’s faces pressed to the rear window. Good, he thought, good, though he was slick with sweat and his hands were trembling.

He hadn’t gone a hundred yards when a second car appeared, this one hurtling out of the crotch of the horizon ahead of him. He watched his feet and the car came toward him. Dark and long, the teeth of the grille, the high wasteful whine of the Amerikajin engine, and then it too shot past him, the memory of the driver’s pale numb unblinking gaze already fading, already useless. But what the specter of that second car had done was to mask the presence of a third, and he realized with a sudden jolt that not only had another vehicle crept up behind him undetected, but that it was now braking alongside him, the huge demonic white thrust of its fender right there, right there in the corner of his eye. Be calm, he told himself, ignore it. The tires crunched gravel. The fender was undeniable, gleaming, ghostly, white, the long steel snout of the entire race, nosing at him. Every word of Jocho shot through his head, but he couldn’t help himself. He looked up.

What he saw was a Cadillac, an old one, with fins and glittery molding, the kind of car TV personalities and rock stars maneuvered round the streets of Tokyo. In the driver’s seat, hunched so low she could barely see over the doorframe, was a wizened old hakujin lady with deeply tanned skin and hair the color of trampled snow. She slowed to nothing, a crawl, and her eyes searched his as if she knew him. Unnerved, he looked away and picked up his pace, but the car stayed with him, the big white fender floating there beside him as if magnetized. He was puzzled, tense, angry: What was she doing? Why didn’t she just go away and leave him alone? And then he heard the hum of the electric window and he looked up again. The old lady was smiling. “Seiji,” she said, and her voice was a jolt of cheer, strong and untethered, “Seiji—is that you?”

Astonished, Hiro stopped in his tracks. The car stopped with him. The old woman clung to the steering wheel, leaning toward him and gawking expectantly across the expanse of the passenger’s seat. He’d never laid eyes on this woman before, and he wasn’t Seiji, as far as he knew—though for the moment he couldn’t help wishing he were. He shot a quick glance up and down the road. Then he bent forward to peer in the window.

“It’s me, Seiji,” the old lady said, “Ambly Wooster. Don’t you remember? Four years ago—or was it five?—in Atlanta. You conducted beautifully. Ives, Copland and Barber.”

Hiro rubbed a hand over the hacked stubble of his hair.

“Oh, those choral voices,” she sighed. “And the shadings you brought to Billy the Kid! Sublime, simply sublime.”

Hiro studied her a moment—no more than a heartbeat, really—and then he smiled. “Yes, sure,” he said, “I remember.”

“You’re so clever, you japanese, what with your automobile factories and your Suzuki method and that exquisite Satsuma ware—busy as a hive of bees, aren’t you? You’ve even got whiskey now, so they tell me, and of course you’ve got your beers—your Kirin and your Suntory and your Sapporo—and they’re every bit as good anything