East is East

our lackadaisical brewing giants have been able to produce, but sake, sake I could never understand, how do you drink that odious stuff? And your educational system, why, it’s the wonder of the world, engineers and scientists and chemists and what have you, and all because you’re not afraid of work, back to the basics and all of that. You know, sometimes I almost wish you had won the war—I just think it would shake this spineless society up, muggings in the street, millions of homeless, AIDS, but of course you have no crime whatsoever, do you? I’ve walked the streets of Tokyo myself, at the witching hour and past it, well past it”—and here the old lady gave him an exaggerated wink —“helpless as I am, and nothing, nothing did I find but courtesy, courtesy, courtesy—manners, that’s what you people are all about. It’s manners that make a society. But you must think me terribly unpatriotic to say things like this, and yet still, as a Southerner, I think I can appreciate how you must feel, a defeated nation, after all. What did you’ say your name was?”

Hiro was seated at the massive mahogany table in Ambly Wooster’s great towering barn of a house at Tupelo Shores Estates. He’d finished the soup course, cream of something or other, and he was gazing out on the gray lapping waves of the sea, nodding agreeably and praying silently that the Negro maid would emerge from the kitchen with a plate of meat or rice, something substantial, something with which he could stuff his cheeks like a squirrel before someone discovered his imposture and ran him out the door. The old woman sat across from him, talking. She’d never stopped talking, even to catch her breath, from the moment he’d slid into the passenger’s seat of her car. But now, as he watched the gathering dusk and fought down the impulse to attack the maid in the kitchen if she didn’t hurry and bring him meat, rice, vegetables, the old lady was asking his name. He panicked. The blood rushed to his eyes. What was his name—Shigeru? Shinbei? Seiji?

But then she went on without waiting for an answer, nattering about flower arrangements, the tea ceremony, geisha and robots (“… so unfair really of these yellow journalists, and that’s what they are, no one would deny that, least of all themselves, so unfair and irresponsible to characterize such a thrifty and hardworking, no-nonsense, nose-to-the-grindstone race as yours as robots living in rabbit hutches, shameful, simply shameful, and it just makes my blood boil …”), and Hiro relaxed. His function was to listen. Listen and eat. And at that moment, as if in confirmation of his thoughts, the kitchen doors flew open and the maid appeared, tray in hand, two intriguing wooden bowls perched atop it.

She was a big woman, the maid, big as a sumo wrestler, with nasty little red-flecked eyes and a wiry pelt of hair bound tight to her skull in rows that showed the naked black scalp beneath. Her nose was flattened to her face and she carried a sickening odor with her, the odor of the hakujin, the meat-eaters and butter-stinkers—only worse. From the moment he’d stepped in the door with his ragged shoes and dangling Band- Aids and thrown himself at the dish of nuts on the coffee table, she’d regarded him with loathing, as if he were vermin, as if he were something she’d squash beneath her foot if only he weren’t under the protection of her dotty old mistress. She saw through him. He knew it. And now, as she came through the doorway, she caught his eye with an incendiary look, a look that said his time was coming, and that when it did there would be no holds barred. Hiro dropped his eyes.

“There’s nothing more practical than a futon, that’s what I’ve always said, and I was just saying to Barton the other day—he’s my husband, Barton, he’s an invalid—oh, thank you, Verneda—I was just saying to Barton, ’You know, Barton, all this furniture, all these gloomy old antiques, they’re just such a clutter, so inefficient, I mean the Japanese don’t even have bedrooms—’ ” And then the old lady paused a moment, a look of bewilderment surprising her all but immobile features. “But then, where do your sick and elderly lie up when they’re ailing? … I suppose in those excellent hospitals, best in the world, our medical profession certainly can’t touch them, what with the AMA and all their infighting, our own students having to attend medical school in Puerto Rico and Mexico and all those filthy, horrid, Third World places—”

With an angry snap of her wrist, the maid set the wooden bowl down before Hiro, and he wondered in that moment if he’d come far enough, if she recognized him, if she’d called the authorities and they were even then bearing down on him, but the thought flitted in and out of his head, all his attention focused on the insuperable bowl before him. Meat. Rice. He couldn’t hide his disappointment: the bowl was filled with salad greens.

Later, though, with time and patience and the bleary, head-nodding endurance of the conscripted, he was rewarded with yams, several dishes of pale green vegetables boiled beyond recognition, and meat—fresh succulent meat, ribs and all. It was the first hot meal he’d had since his dispute with Chiba aboard the Tokachi- maru, and he lashed into it like the indigent he was. The maid had set great heavy ceramic bowls of the stuff on the table, and his hostess, pausing in her monologue only to take a birdlike peck at a scrap of meat or mashed greens, urged him on like a solicitous mother (“Oh, do have a bite more of the okra, won’t you, Seiji? Heaven knows Barton and I could never—and the pork too, please, please—”). He filled his plate time and again, scraping the depths of the serving bowls and sucking methodically at the naked sticks of the bones that littered his plate, while the old lady rattled on about kimonos, cherry blossoms, public baths and the hairy Ainu. By the time the glowering maid brought coffee and peach cobbler, he was in a daze.

He no longer cared what was happening to him, no longer cared where he was or what the authorities might do to him if they caught up with him—this was all that mattered. To be here, inside, with rugs on the floors and paintings on the walls, to be here at the center of all this wonderful immensity, all this living space—this was paradise, this was America. In a trance, he followed his hostess from the dining room to the library, and while the maid cleaned up they sipped a sweet and fiery liqueur and filled their coffee cups from a gleaming silver carafe that might well have been bottomless.

At some point, he found himself stifling a yawn, and noticed the clock on the mantelpiece. It was past one in the morning. The maid had long since seen to the needs of the invalid upstairs, taken leave of her employer and departed for the night—to her home on the mainland, as Ambly Wooster informed him, in detail and at length. He’d had no problem with the old lady’s accent, really—her speech was carefully enunciated and precise, not at all like the barbaric yawp of the girl in the Coca-Cola store—but this term, mainrand, was new to him. For the past hour or so he’d merely leaned back in his chair, letting the liqueur massage him, and he hadn’t caught more than a snatch or two of the old lady’s ceaseless rant. In fact, if it weren’t for his in-bred courtesy, his compulsion to avoid giving offense, his samurai’s discipline, he would have drifted off long ago. But now, suddenly, the idea of this mainrand sprang up in his head like a sapling disburdened of snow, and he cut her off in the midst of a paean to kabuki theater. “Mainrand,” he said, “what is this, sank you?”

Ambly Wooster looked startled, as if she’d wakened from a dream. Hiro saw now just how old she was, older than his obasan, older than the bird that laid the thousand-year-old egg, older than anything. “Why, the shore,” she said, “the Georgia coast. This is an island we’re on. Tupelo Island.” She paused a moment, blinking at him out of her watery old eyes. “What did you say your name was?”

An island. All the warmth went out of him like air from a balloon. So he was trapped, and the highway went nowhere. He cleared his throat. “Seiji,” he said.

The old lady studied him a long moment, silent for the first time in the past six hours. “Seiji,” she repeated finally, regarding him with a cold eye, as if she’d never seen him before, as if she were wondering how he’d ever come to invade her house, her dining room, the sanctum of her library.

Was there a bridge? he wondered. A ferry? Could he swim to shore? He held her eyes, trying his best to look humble, thankful, needful, all the while certain that she was about to order him out of the house, call the police, have him bound and manacled and flung into that dark foul gaijin cell that was his destiny. But then an evil thought crept into his head: what could she do, after all, old as she was and alone in the house with an invalid husband and the deep pulsating silence of the night?

“You’ll need a towel,” she said suddenly, pushing herself up from the chair to gaze serenely on him, her blue-veined hands dangling at her sides. And then she smiled. “So rude of me—here I’ve kept you till all hours chattering away like an old mynah bird—what you must think of me, poor man.” Then she turned and started out of the room. “Well, come on, then,” she said, pausing at the threshold, “I’ll show you to your room.”

He followed her through the softly glowing house, up the stairs and down a long carpeted corridor, in the middle of which she paused to glance over her shoulder and put a finger to her lips. “Shhhh,” she whispered, pointing to a closed door, “Barton.” He nodded, vaguely aware of a smell of medication and the soft suck and rattle of labored breathing, and then they were moving again, noiselessly, the old woman’s narrow shoulder blades working beneath the thin fabric of her blouse. “Here,” she said, swinging back a varnished door at the end of the corridor and stepping aside for him.