East is East

to America, to find Doggo and live there among the American hippies in a degradation that knew no hope or bottom. She had no money, no passport, no hope or knowledge of her hippie husband. She tried to come home. Grandfather barred the door.

Eleven years old, his hair cropped close and his eyes like two tortoiseshell beads, Hiro sat riveted. The television spoke to him but he didn’t hear. He was that happa. He was doomed.

“And then,” ojisan said, “and then one night she did what she had to do.” Hiro knew in that moment what it was, the knowledge sinking into his blood like a stone in a pond, at once and forever engulfing the flimsy edifice of his grandmother’s lies. His mother hadn’t succumbed to some vague disease—always vague, never a name for it. No. She died by her own hand. But the shock of that sudden knowledge was a ripple compared with the rest of it: she’d tried to take Hiro with her, tried to commit oyako- sbinju, parent-child suicide, and she’d failed even at that. He knew the gardens at the Heian shrine, didn’t he? his grandfather asked.

Hiro knew them well—his obasan took him there to feed the koi in the pools and sit and contemplate the sculptured perfection of nature. The mouths—his grandfather spoke and he saw the mouths of the koi gaping at the surface.

And the bridge?

Hiro nodded.

One night, late—she was racked with an insomnia that fed on her shame—she came back drunk from her barroom and strapped the infant to her back. The gates to the shrine were closed, the shaven-headed monks long asleep. She propped her bicycle against the wall and hoisted herself over. In the dark she made her way to the low covered bridge and she lifted the infant from her back. Frantic, scolding herself in a nagging broken whisper, her breath coming in gasps, she fought her way back to the path and dislodged a rock, an ornamental boulder, tearing at it with her nails till the rocks beside it were painted with her blood. She pushed at the rock, strained against it, rolled and shoved and beat at it. Finally she worked it across the planks of the bridge to where the infant, where Hiro, lay sleeping. In a final mad superhuman effort she lifted the stone to the rail, forced it into the breast of her bargirl’s kimono, pinned the child to her and gave herself up to the inexorable pull of gravity and the black transfiguration of the water below.

Water. Hiro woke to it, rain on his face. His mother was dead, but he was alive, flung from her arm as she hit the water and caught up in the muck, the muck in which he was mired now, hopeless, screaming, and the bald- headed monks came running. He struggled to sit up. Lightning tore at the sky. The rain seethed across the water, leaden pellets of it, beating the surface to a froth, hammering at his cushion of mud. Monks, he thought, where were they when you needed them? And he began to laugh, wheezing, delirious, sick and starved and hunted, he laughed like a boy at a Saturday matinee.

But wait: what was that? Out there, beyond the trees and the crack of the storm? A voice. A human voice. The thunder rolled across the sky, harsh and angry. The lightning sizzled. But there it was again—he knew that voice. It was, it was—

“Hiro, Hiro Tanaka, can you bear me? It’s Ruth. I—Want—To—Help—You!”

Help me.

“Hiro. Listen to me. I—Want—To—Help—You!”

It was, it was—his mother, his haha, his mama!

He was on his feet, rain in his face, the silly grinning T-shirt swirling round him in tatters. “Mama!” he cried. “Mama!”

A silence, deep and expectant, a silence that reverberated over the swamp and through the storm. “Hiro?” the voice called and it came from everywhere, from nowhere, ubiquitous as the voice of an angel.

“Haha, haha!” he cried, over and over, till he was breathless, till he was cold, till his brain locked up on him and there was no other word in the language. And then he saw it, the boat breaking the mist as in a dream, coming toward him, the anxious white face in the bow—his mother, it was his mother, come for him at last—and behind her, crouched there at her side, hippie hair and hippie beard, he knew that face—it was Doggo, yes, Doggo, his own Amerikajin father.

And he stood there, in the rain, and he called to them, called till he was hoarse, called Mother, called Father.

Part III

Port of Savannah

Journalism

The day was high and clear, warm without being oppressive, and about as dry as Savannah gets. It was mid-September, the seasons grudgingly changing, the scorching humid endless days of high summer giving way to something milder, expectant, the rich long Indian summer that would push back autumn to the edge of winter. Ruth was unpacking, finding hangers for her things, clipping the tags from a new three-quarter-length Italian cloth coat with dolman sleeves and oversized buttons, and a drop-dead black-and-white suit that featured slashing triangles against a flowing field of parabolas. Saxby had called it a fish dress. Fish? she’d echoed, holding the skirt up for him to admire. They were in her room at Thanatopsis at the time and she was in her bra and panties, trying her new things on for him. It’s the scales, baby, he said, punching the sobriquet with all the lewd innuendo of a disc jockey. Is that all you ever think about? she’d responded and he’d said No, I’m thinking about something entirely different right now. Prove it, she said, and she dropped the skirt to the floor.

But now she was in Savannah, for the week, a guest in the glossy bright high-arching home of Dave and Rikki Fortunoff, a home that had been featured in the pages of Architectural Digest and the New York Times Magazine. Dave was a friend of her father’s from law school and he often stopped by the house when business brought him to Los Angeles—Ruth had known him all her life. Still, she hadn’t really wanted to stay with the Fortunoffs—they were thirty minutes by taxi from the hospital where Hiro was gradually regaining his strength, under guard, and refusing to speak to the press, the police or his speckle-faced tormentor from the INS—but the advantage of the arrangement was obvious: she could stay here for nothing. A hotel would have cost her sixty or seventy dollars a night, minimum, plus meals, and she didn’t have that kind of money. Not yet.

She studied herself in the mirror for a long moment, thinking she might just use a rinse on her hair before she left for the hospital. It would highlight her tan—and show off the new suit too. Outside, beyond the French doors to the courtyard, lay the bright vacancy of the pool, and beyond it the massed oleanders and potted begonias that fed off its reflection. She wished Saxby were here with her, but he was home at Thanatopsis, awaiting her return, his tanks and buckets overbrimming with pale little fish the size and color of a gum eraser. When she’d left for Savannah he was wearing a yellow hardhat and supervising the dredging of the reflecting pool, future home of the pygmy fish and their happy descendants. He’d waved as she pulled out of the drive, a look of pure rhapsody on his face.

Ruth dropped the tags in the wastebasket and crossed the room to hang the coat in the closet. The coat was brick red—not neon red, not flame red, not hello-are-you-acquainted-with-me-yet red—but a more restrained and dramatic shade. A more mature shade. In the course of the past week a sea change had occurred in Ruth, a change that saw her opt for the less flashy color, a change that had brought her to Savannah and required her to borrow fifteen hundred dollars from her father for three new outfits, two purses, a pair of scintillating (but mature) black snakeskin pumps and the Italian coat. What it amounted to was this: she was now a journalist. On assignment. Not that fiction wouldn’t always be her first love and true metier, and she hoped to get back to it someday—someday soon—but she’d had an offer she couldn’t refuse.

The whole thing began with Hiro. Began on that grim morning when she was impressed into the service of the INS, the morning after the single worst night of her life. Nothing could cheer her that night. Her reading had