A Bus to America
Nicolas Gattig
The lights were already out at the front desk. I rang the muffled bell several times, struck by how loud it seemed in the silence, until the receptionist emerged from another room. Without apology or seeming to notice me, he made a note in the daybook register. Then his eyes took me in at last.
“How long are staying you in Hakone?”
“Attending a funeral, leaving on Thursday.”
“Ah yes, the funeral. A friend of the family?”
“I’m the granddaughter. From America.”
He stopped in his tracks, perplexed. A look at the passport, then at me, then back at the passport. As if somehow persistent checking could make the data align. An unhappy riddle, I existed in between meanings.
“You mean . . . you are Japanese?”
“It’s all in there.” I nodded at the passport, ready for complex problems.
“Of course. And you work . . . in America?”
“I’m in sales, at a bookstore.”
“A bookstore, I see. In America. Oh–please do not lean on the counter. The wood is Japanese. A bit brittle.”
To many Japanese people, nothing causes more genuine confusion than a Japanese-looking woman, with a Japanese passport, who opens her mouth and speaks broken Japanese. A breakdown of meaning and association, like jelly coming out of a faucet. The question what is she? had numerous answers, and it messed with the poor receptionist the way it had messed with the man at the airport, the officer at customs and immigration. After checking every inch of my suitcase, apologizing for the delay while clearly thinking about removing the lining, he let me pass through customs at last, and then there was Japan.
“This place seems old. In a good way, I mean.”
“The Manju Muramatsu was built in 1870, at the start of the Meiji era. It is the first Western-style hotel in Japan and has housed many famous internationals.” The receptionist spoke slowly and used simplified Japanese, pausing and indicating the floor as he uttered the word Japan. A bit like talking to a little girl who is recovering from a head injury.
“The Muramatsu family has its own manju recipe, so they call us the House of Manju,” he went on. “You can get some in our sweets shop as a souvenir. I mean . . . if you like Japanese sweets.”
The history of the placed was palpable, so solemn that it hushed your voice. The heaviness in the air emanated from the hallways, the black-and-white photographs on the oak-paneled walls. Among the yellowed newspaper articles, I recognized Helen Keller and a Hungarian magician in the 1930s, who were enjoying some homemade sweet buns while the world outside went to hell.
I was spent from the flight and the train ride out to Hakone, a resort town famous for hot springs, ninety minutes southwest of Tokyo. A bus at the station had taken me through winding mountain roads, then a desolate stop marked by a wooden bench. The hotel looked surreal, with its blend of traditional Japanese and Victorian-American designs, surrounded by mountains with dreamlike isolation. A massive pagoda roof swept over the wooden entrance, keeping it in permanent shade. How on earth had Ojii-chan ended up here as a janitor?
The receptionist took a key from the rack, then made a motion to show me down the hallway. The carpet was faded and smelled faintly like mold, making me think of those spooky inns you see in horror movies from South Korea. Rounding a corner, we passed a curtained entrance that was tucked away in an alcove.
“Never mind this here.” The receptionist dismissed the curtain as though he didn’t know how it got there. “This bath is . . . a bit strange.”
Arrived at my room, he handed over the key. “Breakfast at seven, Western style and Japanese.” He gave me a wink that implied understanding. “If you need anything during the day, please ask for Nomura. That is me.”
I was about to enter the room when Nomura stopped and turned around in the hallway. He cleared his throat awkwardly. “The deceased is laid out downstairs. The cold room, next to the kitchen. In case you would like to see him.”
“He is here?” I dropped my suitcase and bag.
“It’s been arranged with the temple. The priest will come in the morning, and they’ll move him to the crematorium.” A pause, then he coughed apologetically. “Your aunt thought the morgue was too much of a hassle.”
I couldn’t believe it, the whole awful family. Poor Ojii-chan, alone in a cold room.
“Feel free to go down and pay your respects. Just be sure to bring a warm jacket.”
The store was empty when my mother called, the books on the shelves all silent. I’d come in through the rear and turned on the lights at the register, then wound up the shutters inside. Every summer the building was cold. The heater was out of order, and outside the fog rolled in from the ocean, searching the alleyways of Japantown like detectives of nisei dreams.
“I’ve sad news,” my mother began. Her voice sounded muffled, unsure what to do with the sadness.
Nobody knew when exactly my grandfather died. His condition wasn’t acute, even at ninety-two, according to the nurse on duty. He had slipped away without notice, alone in a hospital room, after a fall in his kitchen at home. No emergency room, no supervision, the doctors caught by surprise. How soon could I come for the funeral?
Ojii-chan had been widowed, estranged from my mother and uncle who had started new lives in America. The Pacific Ocean, Mom often said, was the right distance to have between them. An ocean can come in handy, an excuse for missing reunions and not seeing people you want to avoid as they remind you of your own past, for losing touch with a distant father who never knew what to do with his children. No interaction or confrontations, no staid lunches in family restaurants. Most news from Japan was relayed by Aunt Fumiko, each time a waitress had called the family after escorting Ojii-chan to his house, too smashed to go home on his own. The children were always embarrassed and kept telling him to behave, but then Ojii-chan never changed.
“Say hello to Aunt Fumiko. So sorry we cannot go.” A lie smooth as silk, because practice makes perfect. “I can’t get any time off at work.”
“He said nothing before he died?” I couldn’t believe it, the absence that was suddenly final.
“Please go to the funeral. And be strong.”
Numb in my bones, I held the phone while my mom kept talking. The moment you hear that someone has died, a conversation becomes instantly useless. You know all that there is to know, and it seems cold to start talking about the arrangements. Anything else you may say seems frivolous compared to the news you have heard. More than anything, you are waiting to get off the phone to start being alone with the news.
I hoped she wouldn’t ask me where I was, why I was even awake at this hour. She knew nothing about the new job or the fact that I left the band, and I didn’t need to hear her opinions on the shiftlessness haunting my thirties. After all, wasn’t it Mom who first tossed a grenade–a new life overseas, no matter what others say–into a conservative Japanese family?
The next call came right after. An order for a manga calendar and a Golgo 13 figurine.
“Does the figurine come with the target rifle?”
“Let me check.” I wiped my eyes absently. “It should be included in the package.”
I caught a standby to Tokyo the same day. Aunt Fumiko would meet me in Hakone, ten years after I had last been to Japan. “You’ll see. The place changed so much,” Mom said feebly before hanging up. But then somehow, it’s still the same.
The room was dark when I opened my eyes, save for the moonlight that fell on the ceiling in shafts. It was two in the morning; the building lay still. For a troubled moment, I wondered if I had woken by a sound at the door, a knock or rustle from the hotel ghost who had come for an introduction. I sat up in bed and listened to the silence, absorbing the feel of the room, surrounded by smells and things Japanese that called up the old familiarity. I thought of the past, the echoing footsteps of childhood.
Come down any time, see your grandfather, I heard the receptionist say. Come down. Say goodbye. You must have a lot to tell him.
Next to the bed stood my suitcase, the boarding tags dim in the moonlight. My traveler badge: SFO to Haneda, one suitcase. Traveling alone.
Ojii-chan hated Haneda because he hated saying goodbye, the one thing he ever came there to do. The day that my grandmother left him–not by coincidence, the same day that he started retirement–had made him that saddest of creatures, the old Japanese man living alone. For some years after that, I would come out to Tokyo over New Year’s and stay with him at his apartment.
Ironically, my mom asked me, the other lost sheep in the family, to keep him company and off the sauce. I was to report if he threw around money or gave gifts to a pretty waitress at his favorite Chinese restaurant. Like I was some sort of foreign spy. I had no problem with Ojii-chan blowing his pension, especially on a waitress making minimum wage. He had cheated death long ago and been spoiled for years by expense accounts until retiring at fifty-five, so now he maintained the random largesse. What else could he do with his money? All three of his children, two of them working minimum wage in America, refused his support with a vengeance.
Mostly we stayed in his small apartment, slouched on the floor in the tatami room as we watched movies on his old TV, until Ojii-chan fell asleep and I tucked him in and then turned off the lamp in a corner. Every time I went to the bathroom, he would remind me not to tear the shoji screen, the sliding doors covered with lattice and paper. Until they got torn, that is. Super thin, this shoji screen paper.
We had no tools to talk to each other, no way to know a life that was different. Ojii-chan never left the island, not in ninety years, not even for a weekend in Korea, and now he would rest just where he was born. Oddly for a former pilot, he always said he was scared of flying. He had no concept of comfort zones or being the foreign element, had never needed to read an environment, hoping not to stand out. He had no idea what it was like to be the sole Japanese in a history class in America, watching with growing discomfort as the textbook approaches the 1930s–the Great Depression and Steinbeck novels, the Japanese in Manchuria, the massacre at Nanjing.
Every time we got a new textbook, I would check how that time was covered, what kind of illustrations they had. I kept counting the pages until the war, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, hoping that by a miracle we wouldn’t get there. God please, please, spare me the shame. Pearl Harbor was bad, but Nanjing was the absolute pits. Unlike the American texts, in the whole history class in Japan, teachers ramble about modernization and the achievements of the Meiji Restoration, then run out of time just before the Pacific War. But my class in America was interested in Nanjing, and students kept asking the teacher questions about bayoneted women and children, all the while eyeing the Asian girl in the room. My face became hot, my eyes fixed on the book without seeing any of the text. I was sure they thought that my grandfather had raped Chinese girls and bayoneted them.
“Aren’t you Japanese?” A black girl approached me during recess, her face shy but curious.
“Almost.” I made a lame laugh that forgave her for thinking all Asians look similar. “I’m from Korea. You know, like K-pop?”
In turn, I knew nothing about Ojii-chan, didn’t know what it was that I didn’t know. I didn’t fear or dislike him, the way Mom and Shunsuke did. As we looked at each other, we knew that we didn’t understand what it was that the other saw. We respected that about each other, sitting quietly on our cushions and watching old shows on TV.
Seeing me off at Haneda, he would pick up a Sankei Shimbun while I bought snacks as a souvenir, and then we sat for a while in the lounge and just stared at the board for departures, until eventually my flight was called. We never talked much, never hugged or shook hands as we rose from the seats and glanced at each other, then made the same vague gesture with our hands. To us, it didn’t seem strange. Some people say they are bad at saying goodbye, but perhaps what they actually mean is that they can’t separate, that letting go of someone is too sad. Ojii-chan and me, we failed at the saying goodbye. Nothing prepared us for such a moment, and we knew and respected that too, a lack of social graces we could forgive.
Say hello to your mother, he called after me as I passed through the gate, the portal to my other life. No message for Shunsuke, the older child in America. I often wondered if he sat there a little longer, perhaps smoking and reading the Sankei Shimbun the way he had done for some sixty years, before heading back to the train and the long ride to the small apartment, his life by himself where the days were uneventfully similar and he closed the paper screens carefully. I never had a chance to ask because one year he suddenly cancelled–a hospital stay for an operation–and that put an end to my visits.
“A bus to America . . . ,” he said one day in the airport lounge, mumbling with old age already.
“What did you say?”
“If there was a bus, I could visit. Spend time with you and your mother.” He made a sigh, his eyes on his spotted hands. “When you were young, just a little girl, you saw a map of the world in my house. You saw America and asked how to take the bus there. You were curious about America.”
I sat up in the hotel bed, knowing I wouldn’t go back to sleep. Still dazed, I got up and went over to the window. The flooring under the tatami creaked ominously under my feet.
Behind the reflection of my own face, the moon in Hakone looked beautiful. The pine trees and mountains were still in the dark, but the grass in the back of the building showed the first gray of dawn. Nothing moved in the dreamlike isolation.
Why did I have to go when no one else would? Why am I the weird messenger girl?
Two floors down, the patriarch lay in the cold room. Waiting for his own funeral, waiting to get it over with. He always said all funerals are nonsense, a waste of money thrown at Buddhist priests in exchange for afterlife promises, that Japanese people dread them because, as the priest chants the endless sutras, you sit on the floor in the seiza position, legs bent and buttocks placed on your heels, which puts your thighs through a world of pain and makes it hard to follow the sutras. Getting up from the floor at last, you wobble with tears in your eyes, not from grief but release from torture. It is funny, the wobbling legs, but a funeral must be formal and somber and you must hide the fact that you wobble. At least I think that’s how Ojii-chan told it.
He lived in the past yet abhorred any sentimentality, unless it was connected to the war. He would tear up watching the movies, the scene where the young kamikaze pilots say goodbye to their family and head out in their planes towards certain death on the sea. Some planes had cherry blossoms painted on the wings, the Japanese symbol of a beautiful short life.
I should go down and tell him the last goodbye, then relay the message from Mom, perhaps even hold a short wake. After all, it was the reason why I was here. But then how do you say goodbye to an old man you hardly knew?
None of the writers that had stayed at the hotel were familiar to me, which didn’t mean that they weren’t famous. I had studied the framed articles in the hallways, learning about the novels that were penned at the Manju Muramatsu. On a deadline and pressured by publishers to submit, writers would check in under an alias and then hunker down in their room until the work was completed. Months might pass until they could leave. Once a feminist poet had hanged herself in the flower palace suite, but she wasn’t in any way famous, perhaps not even working on poems. I couldn’t imagine making money that way, sitting alone in an old hotel room and writing down things in your head until you can whip something into a shape that others pay money to read. No wonder so many writers commit suicide. According to the article in the hallway, the bellhop who found the dead poet had quit the following day, afraid that her ghost would haunt him.
Having finished the article, I was left with an urgent question. What room did she hang herself in?
“You should take notes, perhaps write a blog.” Aunt Fumiko phoned in the morning and I took the call from a booth in the lobby. “The emigrant in the homeland, connecting with her roots and ancestors. Americans like that sort of story.”
“I’m just here for two days. Couldn’t get more time off work.” The same excuse Mom had used. Smooth as silk, because practice makes perfect.
“You’re not going to see your father?”
“Hiroshima is far. And he doesn’t know I am here.” My voice became soft, almost caught in my throat, the way it did sometimes when Hiroshima came up. “We thought it better that way.”
Like many divorcees in Japan, where the law doesn’t allow for joint custody, my father had opted to make a clean break and effectively disappeared from my life. The exit was meant as a gesture of love, avoiding a mess of conflicting loyalties and the shuttling between estranged parents, and Mom was happy to keep things simple and her greatest mistake away from my life. Lucky me, to be loved like that.
“I didn’t know Ojii-chan was at the hotel,” I said. “Is that even legal?”
“It’s a bit strange. But finances being what they are . . .” Aunt Fumiko broke off, embarrassed. “The funeral is at eleven, so we’ll meet in the lobby at ten. You have a black kimono and prayer beads?”
“I brought the kimono. Mom said the beads aren’t necessary.”
“It’s just us at the crematorium–and that tramp from the Chinese restaurant. God knows how much money he left her.”
I decided to skip the breakfast and headed instead for the bakery, curious about the mizu manju. According to one of the articles, the hotel used to have cows on the property and even made its own margarine, a staple at Japanese hotels that symbolized Western culture, the good lives that Westerners have.
The clerk was polite but confused by my Japanese, then asked me if I needed chopsticks. My pronunciation sounds almost native but I worry about my grammar, my strange choice of words that might easily offend. Then again, who the hell uses chopsticks for a sweet bun? Once I tried it, however, the dough was just right–soft and translucent, almost like jelly, warm in my hand and mouth. The mizu manju tasted like childhood: a suburb on a summer Sunday, a treat in a hot musty shop.
Back in my room I sat down on the bed, trying to decide about sightseeing. The town of Hakone had a picturesque river and a shopping street lined with food stalls. There was Lake Ashinoko with a view of Mount Fuji, and nearby the emperor’s former vacation home. The place looked nice and I started making all sorts of plans, when the jet lag hit me like a ton of bricks. I stretched out on the bed, my whole existence aching to sleep. Then it was curtains, a dark embrace.
Born in 1926, at the end of the Taisho era, Ojii-chan lived past his certain death by well over seventy years. The day that he turned eighteen, he was conscripted by the Imperial Army and called for duty with the Divine Wind Special Attack Unit, known in America as the kamikaze. He had dreamed of becoming a pilot, but then unfortunately, during the war, they wanted pilots to die honorable deaths slamming their planes into Allied warships.
Ojii-chan told me he was ready to die, because that was the order and he was too young to understand that death was something forever. He had no beef with America, never hated Americans, never grasped what had started the war, and it was only through luck of the draw that he managed to come out alive. By the time his number was up, they had run out of planes to send into battle. Ojii-chan was relieved but also disappointed, having missed his one stab at glory.
Although he himself had been spared, Ojii-chan spoke with contempt of the kamikaze who returned from the mission, the ones foiled by equipment failure. By the end of the war, most of the planes that Japan had left were loosely wired pieces of junk, and they would throw in everything that took off. One pilot had returned three times until he was shot on the spot by an officer, who no longer felt that this kamikaze had the right stuff. I always felt sorry for that young pilot. I imagined myself in his shoes and thought that was exactly what I would have done, returning home with a weird excuse as to why–again, my sincerest apologies–I had been foiled in my duty for the emperor.
The kamikaze were the only time when Ojii-chan discussed his past. He might mention the construction company, but the stories often ended abruptly, as if he had forgotten the details. The company was his life, he said simply, the one place since the war where he knew exactly what he was doing. It made me wonder why after retirement he had worked again as a janitor.
“It wasn’t a job, not really.” Nomura put more sake before me. “He called a plumber every so often, telling them what to fix, and when he turned eighty-five, he retired from that. Nursing homes were like graves, he said, so he stayed here with us.”
“Has anyone been down to see him?”
“Not that I know. You see . . . mostly he kept to himself. His friends were all gone, the old colleagues at work. When he turned eighty, we started thinking about making arrangements, but then he turned ninety and we sort of forgot. Like we forgot he could actually pass.”
I was sitting in the empty hotel bar, warming up over a bowl of miso soup that Nomura had fixed in the kitchen. Enveloped by mountains and mist, the hotel seemed cursed with a permanent chill, even worse than summer in San Francisco. The cold had woken me in the evening, every limb as heavy as lead, and I was so hungry my stomach made ominous sounds. I had missed any chance for sightseeing in Hakone. High time then to explore the hotel bar, where Nomura doubled as barman dressed in the same suit and tie.
“Where are the other guests? Isn’t it summer season?”
“We’re mostly busy on weekends, mostly couples from Tokyo. You know . . . little getaways.” His tone suggested the extramarital.
“No more writers holed up in their rooms?”
“Pardon me?” Nomura stopped wiping a glass, a look of unease on his face. “That is all long ago. Haven’t seen a writer in years. Many years.”
“I should take pictures of the hotel. My family might like to see it.”
He put down the glass. “In America . . .” he started, but his mind opened a gulf of complexity as he was trying to fathom me as a concept–a concept that, hopefully, came with a label. Nodding thoughtfully to himself, he returned the glass to a shelf and then folded the towel with care, draping it on a rack. By the time everything was in its place, his question had been abandoned.
The barroom was empty save for an old man snoring in an armchair. A jazz standard came from a speaker while Nomura started closing the register, looking right at home and self-realized, as rooted in the elements of his life, as instantly recognizable as the exact thing he was and represented, as a tree is in native soil. No need to ask him all sorts of questions to figure out how to communicate, to be able to understand him and have a context where he made sense. Not like the woman reflected dimly in the mirror behind the counter. All legacies ended here with me, a dead limb on the family tree.
“It’s almost ten.” Nomura took me out of my thoughts. “I have to lock the downstairs for the night. Should go soon if you want to see him.”
His voice held a note of reproof, as though in a subtle way he were asking what the hell kind of family this was. Looking down at my hands, I realized I was anxious. A memory came of sitting with Ojii-chan at Haneda, two people in a departure lounge waiting quietly for time to run out, not wishing to stay there longer and not wishing to say goodbye, with so many things left unsaid.
“All right then,” I said out loud. I finished the sake to steel myself, thanked Nomura for making the soup and wished him a good night, then rose from the stool at the counter. My legs wobbled as I moved through the barroom, like a Japanese at a funeral.
The cold hit me as the door opened, along with the smell of seafood that came from the shelves and mixed with the incense on a table. I made a bow and stepped into the dimness, resolved immediately that this wouldn’t be a wake, just long enough to tell Mom I had been there.
He was laid out in a pine casket, his gaunt, hairless head facing north. Under the shoulders and lower back, the pity of his shrunken body, they had put some packs of dry ice. My gaze settled on the mottled face that rested on a cushion, cheeks hollow with ripe old age. His eyes were shut until the crematorium, where he would turn into bones and ashes in an aluminum urn for Aunt Fumiko.
It was strange to see Ojii-chan in a kimono, not the sweatpants and flannels he wore at the house. The kimono was crossed in front, right side over the left in the Buddhist manner for the dead. Placed at his side was a pack of cigarettes, a familiar thing to hold on to as he was crossing the great divide.
I thought of the seven decades that Ojii-chan cheated from death, the lucky number he had once drawn from a horribly unfair game. Seven decades to work and drink beer and eat ramen at Chinese restaurants, to get married and father three children, then see his wife leave and two of his children emigrate. As I looked at his face, so somber and quiet, without any power to harm or make anyone feel embarrassed, I wished that my mom and uncle were there. In his nostrils and ears were small tufts of cotton, and somehow seeing him there like this, the way he was prepared by strangers and lying there by himself, made me angry about our family. Forever absorbed in ourselves, we couldn’t even do right by the dead.
I leaned over the face in the casket, then squeezed my eyes shut. The tears came easily, softly, brimming over and leaving my eyes.
“Thank you for all the lunches. So sorry no one else could be here.”
It takes courage, the family photos. The thing that Mom couldn’t do, the reason why she made excuses for not coming to family reunions. Always hiding behind the ocean, the time zones and too much work, asking me to send her messages. Perhaps she was free now that Ojii-chan had passed and released her from the shadow he cast, but in that freedom, there was a new sadness.
Tears warm on my cheeks, I took a couple of mizu manju from a bag and placed them inside the casket, next to the feet in the white tabi socks. I wanted to stay with him, just a while longer, but the room was getting awfully cold.
“They are thinking of you,” I whispered, after relaying the message from Mom. “We miss you and speak of you often.”
I bowed twice in front of the casket, then turned and slipped quietly out of the room, closing the door on a helpless silence.
We were still bad at the leaving, the actual saying goodbye. We respected that about each other, always would. Until we could meet again.
Behind the curtain in the alcove was a changing room, wooden lockers and benches, an old dusty scale, and behind that a small tiled chamber that was lit by a single bulb. According to a note on the wall, the bath was fed from a spring in the mountains, which meant the thick green color of the bathwater was actually pure and rejuvenating. The touch of earthiness was completed by a smell of sulfur, the stones lining the bath in a mosaic.
After putting my clothes in a locker and entering the chamber, I saw why Nomura had said that the onsen was strange. A three-foot-tall ceramic phallus, faded and chipped, in a pale shade of green, towered over the steaming water. Some aid to get weekenders in the mood, the least subtle thing in Japan.
“Jesus,” I sighed. “Not in my bath.”
I lowered myself into the water, as far away from the thing as possible. The tiles had a lovely pattern, and the temperature was just right, warming me down to the soul. The heat and the alcohol in my system made me a little dizzy, but there was a homey feeling watching the steam move over the stones. Without the ceramic, I thought, this onsen bath would be perfect.
The woman didn’t announce herself, just slid the door open and stepped through the curtain. As she undressed in the light from a lamp, she looked so much like me that I almost freaked. Like one of those movies where someone meets their own double at an inn and then gets stabbed to death with a kitchen knife. But when she let down her hair, shoulder-length and with streaks of gray, I was relieved she wasn’t my double.
“I hope you don’t mind.” The woman approached the bath, whisper quiet.
“Lots of space. If you don’t mind some degenerate art.” I glanced at the ceramic phallus.
She made no reply besides a nod that meant she had seen it before. I liked how she didn’t get angry. Just like, ah–that again.
“A quick soak to relax. I’m on a deadline.”
“You’re a writer?” I blurted, despite what Nomura had said.
The woman chuckled neurotically. “At least till my publisher gets the manuscript. After that, God knows what I’ll be. Maybe staffing a convenience store in the boonies.”
“I didn’t know writers still stayed here. Someone said it was a thing of the past.”
For a while, we soaked silently a few feet apart, gazing at the old tiles as if no massive penis were between us. I was glad we could both relax and that she wasn’t put off by my strange Japanese, thinking that maybe back home, she could be my friend.
The tattoos really helped in Japan. Most people actually looked relieved when they saw the ink on my forearms. Things made sense again, there was a label they knew and understood. An alien from a distant planet; no expectations, all bets are off.
“Are you here for the funeral?” the woman asked conversationally. “I heard the old janitor passed away.”
“He was my grandfather. My mother and I live in America. Moved there when I was twelve.”
“I see.” She regarded her wrinkled feet as if making a decision. “I once wrote a poem about America. About fridges that hum all night and wake people up. So noisy because of their size. You don’t realize till you go to America that fridges can make so much noise.”
It sounded like a good poem, and it is true, American fridges are the noisiest in the world. I was enjoying the company of this woman, but as she bent forward to massage her feet, I could notice the smell of sake that wafted along on her breath. Perhaps the flush on her face came not from the water temperature? I had to wonder if it was wise to share a bath at the Manju Muramatsu with a female poet, especially as we neared midnight.
“Do you like your grandfather?” the woman asked. “I mean . . . how are you holding up?”
“He’s nice. Actually, we are not that close.” For some reason I spoke of Ojii-chan in the present, the way the woman did.
“My grandfather was an accountant. The tough, silent type. He would have liked this here decoration.” She nodded at the huge phallus.
“Not too close yourself, it sounds like.”
“Not really.” Her voice became quiet. “He was alright though. Always working and chasing skirts, but at least not a mean drunk. Maybe sometimes I liked him. With your own family, it can be hard to tell if you like them.”
“What kind of poetry do you write?” I tried to sound casual. “Anything feminist or just about fridges?”
She gave me a knowing look, then glanced at the clock in the changing room. It was almost eleven.
“I have to go.” She raised herself from the bath. “My deadline is midnight.”
As she toweled off, I peered at her from behind and noticed the lack of backside. In a straight vertical line, her lower back seemed to shape directly into her upper legs. Ghost ass, I thought to myself as she slipped into her yukata, the kind of light bathrobe they wear at hotels in Japan.
“Nice to meet you,” I said. “And good luck with your publication. May I ask, what is your name?”
“I am Yosano–nice to meet you. Good luck with the funeral and safe travels home.” She was at the entrance, about to slide open the doors, then turned and gave a polite bow. “By the way, I like your tattoos. They’re really cool.”
“Thank you so much.” I blushed, covering my upper arms.
The onsen was quiet after the poet left. I immersed myself in the warm water, closing my eyes and thinking about the next day. The funeral was in the morning, and, later at Haneda airport, a red-eye would be the bus to take me across the ocean. Enough time for a little sightseeing and saying goodbye to the House of Manju. I should buy some more of the sweet buns as souvenirs for my family. I was thinking how much Shunsuke liked them, how I would see him and Mom and there would be Ojii-chan’s picture on the family altar in her apartment. They would ask me a million questions the moment that I was home. Everything I had seen and learned about Ojii-chan and the rest of our family, everything I had felt at the funeral and during my three days back in Japan, like I was some sort of foreign spy.
Nicolas Gattig
The lights were already out at the front desk. I rang the muffled bell several times, struck by how loud it seemed in the silence, until the receptionist emerged from another room. Without apology or seeming to notice me, he made a note in the daybook register. Then his eyes took me in at last.
“How long are staying you in Hakone?”
“Attending a funeral, leaving on Thursday.”
“Ah yes, the funeral. A friend of the family?”
“I’m the granddaughter. From America.”
He stopped in his tracks, perplexed. A look at the passport, then at me, then back at the passport. As if somehow persistent checking could make the data align. An unhappy riddle, I existed in between meanings.
“You mean . . . you are Japanese?”
“It’s all in there.” I nodded at the passport, ready for complex problems.
“Of course. And you work . . . in America?”
“I’m in sales, at a bookstore.”
“A bookstore, I see. In America. Oh–please do not lean on the counter. The wood is Japanese. A bit brittle.”
To many Japanese people, nothing causes more genuine confusion than a Japanese-looking woman, with a Japanese passport, who opens her mouth and speaks broken Japanese. A breakdown of meaning and association, like jelly coming out of a faucet. The question what is she? had numerous answers, and it messed with the poor receptionist the way it had messed with the man at the airport, the officer at customs and immigration. After checking every inch of my suitcase, apologizing for the delay while clearly thinking about removing the lining, he let me pass through customs at last, and then there was Japan.
“This place seems old. In a good way, I mean.”
“The Manju Muramatsu was built in 1870, at the start of the Meiji era. It is the first Western-style hotel in Japan and has housed many famous internationals.” The receptionist spoke slowly and used simplified Japanese, pausing and indicating the floor as he uttered the word Japan. A bit like talking to a little girl who is recovering from a head injury.
“The Muramatsu family has its own manju recipe, so they call us the House of Manju,” he went on. “You can get some in our sweets shop as a souvenir. I mean . . . if you like Japanese sweets.”
The history of the placed was palpable, so solemn that it hushed your voice. The heaviness in the air emanated from the hallways, the black-and-white photographs on the oak-paneled walls. Among the yellowed newspaper articles, I recognized Helen Keller and a Hungarian magician in the 1930s, who were enjoying some homemade sweet buns while the world outside went to hell.
I was spent from the flight and the train ride out to Hakone, a resort town famous for hot springs, ninety minutes southwest of Tokyo. A bus at the station had taken me through winding mountain roads, then a desolate stop marked by a wooden bench. The hotel looked surreal, with its blend of traditional Japanese and Victorian-American designs, surrounded by mountains with dreamlike isolation. A massive pagoda roof swept over the wooden entrance, keeping it in permanent shade. How on earth had Ojii-chan ended up here as a janitor?
The receptionist took a key from the rack, then made a motion to show me down the hallway. The carpet was faded and smelled faintly like mold, making me think of those spooky inns you see in horror movies from South Korea. Rounding a corner, we passed a curtained entrance that was tucked away in an alcove.
“Never mind this here.” The receptionist dismissed the curtain as though he didn’t know how it got there. “This bath is . . . a bit strange.”
Arrived at my room, he handed over the key. “Breakfast at seven, Western style and Japanese.” He gave me a wink that implied understanding. “If you need anything during the day, please ask for Nomura. That is me.”
I was about to enter the room when Nomura stopped and turned around in the hallway. He cleared his throat awkwardly. “The deceased is laid out downstairs. The cold room, next to the kitchen. In case you would like to see him.”
“He is here?” I dropped my suitcase and bag.
“It’s been arranged with the temple. The priest will come in the morning, and they’ll move him to the crematorium.” A pause, then he coughed apologetically. “Your aunt thought the morgue was too much of a hassle.”
I couldn’t believe it, the whole awful family. Poor Ojii-chan, alone in a cold room.
“Feel free to go down and pay your respects. Just be sure to bring a warm jacket.”
The store was empty when my mother called, the books on the shelves all silent. I’d come in through the rear and turned on the lights at the register, then wound up the shutters inside. Every summer the building was cold. The heater was out of order, and outside the fog rolled in from the ocean, searching the alleyways of Japantown like detectives of nisei dreams.
“I’ve sad news,” my mother began. Her voice sounded muffled, unsure what to do with the sadness.
Nobody knew when exactly my grandfather died. His condition wasn’t acute, even at ninety-two, according to the nurse on duty. He had slipped away without notice, alone in a hospital room, after a fall in his kitchen at home. No emergency room, no supervision, the doctors caught by surprise. How soon could I come for the funeral?
Ojii-chan had been widowed, estranged from my mother and uncle who had started new lives in America. The Pacific Ocean, Mom often said, was the right distance to have between them. An ocean can come in handy, an excuse for missing reunions and not seeing people you want to avoid as they remind you of your own past, for losing touch with a distant father who never knew what to do with his children. No interaction or confrontations, no staid lunches in family restaurants. Most news from Japan was relayed by Aunt Fumiko, each time a waitress had called the family after escorting Ojii-chan to his house, too smashed to go home on his own. The children were always embarrassed and kept telling him to behave, but then Ojii-chan never changed.
“Say hello to Aunt Fumiko. So sorry we cannot go.” A lie smooth as silk, because practice makes perfect. “I can’t get any time off at work.”
“He said nothing before he died?” I couldn’t believe it, the absence that was suddenly final.
“Please go to the funeral. And be strong.”
Numb in my bones, I held the phone while my mom kept talking. The moment you hear that someone has died, a conversation becomes instantly useless. You know all that there is to know, and it seems cold to start talking about the arrangements. Anything else you may say seems frivolous compared to the news you have heard. More than anything, you are waiting to get off the phone to start being alone with the news.
I hoped she wouldn’t ask me where I was, why I was even awake at this hour. She knew nothing about the new job or the fact that I left the band, and I didn’t need to hear her opinions on the shiftlessness haunting my thirties. After all, wasn’t it Mom who first tossed a grenade–a new life overseas, no matter what others say–into a conservative Japanese family?
The next call came right after. An order for a manga calendar and a Golgo 13 figurine.
“Does the figurine come with the target rifle?”
“Let me check.” I wiped my eyes absently. “It should be included in the package.”
I caught a standby to Tokyo the same day. Aunt Fumiko would meet me in Hakone, ten years after I had last been to Japan. “You’ll see. The place changed so much,” Mom said feebly before hanging up. But then somehow, it’s still the same.
The room was dark when I opened my eyes, save for the moonlight that fell on the ceiling in shafts. It was two in the morning; the building lay still. For a troubled moment, I wondered if I had woken by a sound at the door, a knock or rustle from the hotel ghost who had come for an introduction. I sat up in bed and listened to the silence, absorbing the feel of the room, surrounded by smells and things Japanese that called up the old familiarity. I thought of the past, the echoing footsteps of childhood.
Come down any time, see your grandfather, I heard the receptionist say. Come down. Say goodbye. You must have a lot to tell him.
Next to the bed stood my suitcase, the boarding tags dim in the moonlight. My traveler badge: SFO to Haneda, one suitcase. Traveling alone.
Ojii-chan hated Haneda because he hated saying goodbye, the one thing he ever came there to do. The day that my grandmother left him–not by coincidence, the same day that he started retirement–had made him that saddest of creatures, the old Japanese man living alone. For some years after that, I would come out to Tokyo over New Year’s and stay with him at his apartment.
Ironically, my mom asked me, the other lost sheep in the family, to keep him company and off the sauce. I was to report if he threw around money or gave gifts to a pretty waitress at his favorite Chinese restaurant. Like I was some sort of foreign spy. I had no problem with Ojii-chan blowing his pension, especially on a waitress making minimum wage. He had cheated death long ago and been spoiled for years by expense accounts until retiring at fifty-five, so now he maintained the random largesse. What else could he do with his money? All three of his children, two of them working minimum wage in America, refused his support with a vengeance.
Mostly we stayed in his small apartment, slouched on the floor in the tatami room as we watched movies on his old TV, until Ojii-chan fell asleep and I tucked him in and then turned off the lamp in a corner. Every time I went to the bathroom, he would remind me not to tear the shoji screen, the sliding doors covered with lattice and paper. Until they got torn, that is. Super thin, this shoji screen paper.
We had no tools to talk to each other, no way to know a life that was different. Ojii-chan never left the island, not in ninety years, not even for a weekend in Korea, and now he would rest just where he was born. Oddly for a former pilot, he always said he was scared of flying. He had no concept of comfort zones or being the foreign element, had never needed to read an environment, hoping not to stand out. He had no idea what it was like to be the sole Japanese in a history class in America, watching with growing discomfort as the textbook approaches the 1930s–the Great Depression and Steinbeck novels, the Japanese in Manchuria, the massacre at Nanjing.
Every time we got a new textbook, I would check how that time was covered, what kind of illustrations they had. I kept counting the pages until the war, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, hoping that by a miracle we wouldn’t get there. God please, please, spare me the shame. Pearl Harbor was bad, but Nanjing was the absolute pits. Unlike the American texts, in the whole history class in Japan, teachers ramble about modernization and the achievements of the Meiji Restoration, then run out of time just before the Pacific War. But my class in America was interested in Nanjing, and students kept asking the teacher questions about bayoneted women and children, all the while eyeing the Asian girl in the room. My face became hot, my eyes fixed on the book without seeing any of the text. I was sure they thought that my grandfather had raped Chinese girls and bayoneted them.
“Aren’t you Japanese?” A black girl approached me during recess, her face shy but curious.
“Almost.” I made a lame laugh that forgave her for thinking all Asians look similar. “I’m from Korea. You know, like K-pop?”
In turn, I knew nothing about Ojii-chan, didn’t know what it was that I didn’t know. I didn’t fear or dislike him, the way Mom and Shunsuke did. As we looked at each other, we knew that we didn’t understand what it was that the other saw. We respected that about each other, sitting quietly on our cushions and watching old shows on TV.
Seeing me off at Haneda, he would pick up a Sankei Shimbun while I bought snacks as a souvenir, and then we sat for a while in the lounge and just stared at the board for departures, until eventually my flight was called. We never talked much, never hugged or shook hands as we rose from the seats and glanced at each other, then made the same vague gesture with our hands. To us, it didn’t seem strange. Some people say they are bad at saying goodbye, but perhaps what they actually mean is that they can’t separate, that letting go of someone is too sad. Ojii-chan and me, we failed at the saying goodbye. Nothing prepared us for such a moment, and we knew and respected that too, a lack of social graces we could forgive.
Say hello to your mother, he called after me as I passed through the gate, the portal to my other life. No message for Shunsuke, the older child in America. I often wondered if he sat there a little longer, perhaps smoking and reading the Sankei Shimbun the way he had done for some sixty years, before heading back to the train and the long ride to the small apartment, his life by himself where the days were uneventfully similar and he closed the paper screens carefully. I never had a chance to ask because one year he suddenly cancelled–a hospital stay for an operation–and that put an end to my visits.
“A bus to America . . . ,” he said one day in the airport lounge, mumbling with old age already.
“What did you say?”
“If there was a bus, I could visit. Spend time with you and your mother.” He made a sigh, his eyes on his spotted hands. “When you were young, just a little girl, you saw a map of the world in my house. You saw America and asked how to take the bus there. You were curious about America.”
I sat up in the hotel bed, knowing I wouldn’t go back to sleep. Still dazed, I got up and went over to the window. The flooring under the tatami creaked ominously under my feet.
Behind the reflection of my own face, the moon in Hakone looked beautiful. The pine trees and mountains were still in the dark, but the grass in the back of the building showed the first gray of dawn. Nothing moved in the dreamlike isolation.
Why did I have to go when no one else would? Why am I the weird messenger girl?
Two floors down, the patriarch lay in the cold room. Waiting for his own funeral, waiting to get it over with. He always said all funerals are nonsense, a waste of money thrown at Buddhist priests in exchange for afterlife promises, that Japanese people dread them because, as the priest chants the endless sutras, you sit on the floor in the seiza position, legs bent and buttocks placed on your heels, which puts your thighs through a world of pain and makes it hard to follow the sutras. Getting up from the floor at last, you wobble with tears in your eyes, not from grief but release from torture. It is funny, the wobbling legs, but a funeral must be formal and somber and you must hide the fact that you wobble. At least I think that’s how Ojii-chan told it.
He lived in the past yet abhorred any sentimentality, unless it was connected to the war. He would tear up watching the movies, the scene where the young kamikaze pilots say goodbye to their family and head out in their planes towards certain death on the sea. Some planes had cherry blossoms painted on the wings, the Japanese symbol of a beautiful short life.
I should go down and tell him the last goodbye, then relay the message from Mom, perhaps even hold a short wake. After all, it was the reason why I was here. But then how do you say goodbye to an old man you hardly knew?
None of the writers that had stayed at the hotel were familiar to me, which didn’t mean that they weren’t famous. I had studied the framed articles in the hallways, learning about the novels that were penned at the Manju Muramatsu. On a deadline and pressured by publishers to submit, writers would check in under an alias and then hunker down in their room until the work was completed. Months might pass until they could leave. Once a feminist poet had hanged herself in the flower palace suite, but she wasn’t in any way famous, perhaps not even working on poems. I couldn’t imagine making money that way, sitting alone in an old hotel room and writing down things in your head until you can whip something into a shape that others pay money to read. No wonder so many writers commit suicide. According to the article in the hallway, the bellhop who found the dead poet had quit the following day, afraid that her ghost would haunt him.
Having finished the article, I was left with an urgent question. What room did she hang herself in?
“You should take notes, perhaps write a blog.” Aunt Fumiko phoned in the morning and I took the call from a booth in the lobby. “The emigrant in the homeland, connecting with her roots and ancestors. Americans like that sort of story.”
“I’m just here for two days. Couldn’t get more time off work.” The same excuse Mom had used. Smooth as silk, because practice makes perfect.
“You’re not going to see your father?”
“Hiroshima is far. And he doesn’t know I am here.” My voice became soft, almost caught in my throat, the way it did sometimes when Hiroshima came up. “We thought it better that way.”
Like many divorcees in Japan, where the law doesn’t allow for joint custody, my father had opted to make a clean break and effectively disappeared from my life. The exit was meant as a gesture of love, avoiding a mess of conflicting loyalties and the shuttling between estranged parents, and Mom was happy to keep things simple and her greatest mistake away from my life. Lucky me, to be loved like that.
“I didn’t know Ojii-chan was at the hotel,” I said. “Is that even legal?”
“It’s a bit strange. But finances being what they are . . .” Aunt Fumiko broke off, embarrassed. “The funeral is at eleven, so we’ll meet in the lobby at ten. You have a black kimono and prayer beads?”
“I brought the kimono. Mom said the beads aren’t necessary.”
“It’s just us at the crematorium–and that tramp from the Chinese restaurant. God knows how much money he left her.”
I decided to skip the breakfast and headed instead for the bakery, curious about the mizu manju. According to one of the articles, the hotel used to have cows on the property and even made its own margarine, a staple at Japanese hotels that symbolized Western culture, the good lives that Westerners have.
The clerk was polite but confused by my Japanese, then asked me if I needed chopsticks. My pronunciation sounds almost native but I worry about my grammar, my strange choice of words that might easily offend. Then again, who the hell uses chopsticks for a sweet bun? Once I tried it, however, the dough was just right–soft and translucent, almost like jelly, warm in my hand and mouth. The mizu manju tasted like childhood: a suburb on a summer Sunday, a treat in a hot musty shop.
Back in my room I sat down on the bed, trying to decide about sightseeing. The town of Hakone had a picturesque river and a shopping street lined with food stalls. There was Lake Ashinoko with a view of Mount Fuji, and nearby the emperor’s former vacation home. The place looked nice and I started making all sorts of plans, when the jet lag hit me like a ton of bricks. I stretched out on the bed, my whole existence aching to sleep. Then it was curtains, a dark embrace.
Born in 1926, at the end of the Taisho era, Ojii-chan lived past his certain death by well over seventy years. The day that he turned eighteen, he was conscripted by the Imperial Army and called for duty with the Divine Wind Special Attack Unit, known in America as the kamikaze. He had dreamed of becoming a pilot, but then unfortunately, during the war, they wanted pilots to die honorable deaths slamming their planes into Allied warships.
Ojii-chan told me he was ready to die, because that was the order and he was too young to understand that death was something forever. He had no beef with America, never hated Americans, never grasped what had started the war, and it was only through luck of the draw that he managed to come out alive. By the time his number was up, they had run out of planes to send into battle. Ojii-chan was relieved but also disappointed, having missed his one stab at glory.
Although he himself had been spared, Ojii-chan spoke with contempt of the kamikaze who returned from the mission, the ones foiled by equipment failure. By the end of the war, most of the planes that Japan had left were loosely wired pieces of junk, and they would throw in everything that took off. One pilot had returned three times until he was shot on the spot by an officer, who no longer felt that this kamikaze had the right stuff. I always felt sorry for that young pilot. I imagined myself in his shoes and thought that was exactly what I would have done, returning home with a weird excuse as to why–again, my sincerest apologies–I had been foiled in my duty for the emperor.
The kamikaze were the only time when Ojii-chan discussed his past. He might mention the construction company, but the stories often ended abruptly, as if he had forgotten the details. The company was his life, he said simply, the one place since the war where he knew exactly what he was doing. It made me wonder why after retirement he had worked again as a janitor.
“It wasn’t a job, not really.” Nomura put more sake before me. “He called a plumber every so often, telling them what to fix, and when he turned eighty-five, he retired from that. Nursing homes were like graves, he said, so he stayed here with us.”
“Has anyone been down to see him?”
“Not that I know. You see . . . mostly he kept to himself. His friends were all gone, the old colleagues at work. When he turned eighty, we started thinking about making arrangements, but then he turned ninety and we sort of forgot. Like we forgot he could actually pass.”
I was sitting in the empty hotel bar, warming up over a bowl of miso soup that Nomura had fixed in the kitchen. Enveloped by mountains and mist, the hotel seemed cursed with a permanent chill, even worse than summer in San Francisco. The cold had woken me in the evening, every limb as heavy as lead, and I was so hungry my stomach made ominous sounds. I had missed any chance for sightseeing in Hakone. High time then to explore the hotel bar, where Nomura doubled as barman dressed in the same suit and tie.
“Where are the other guests? Isn’t it summer season?”
“We’re mostly busy on weekends, mostly couples from Tokyo. You know . . . little getaways.” His tone suggested the extramarital.
“No more writers holed up in their rooms?”
“Pardon me?” Nomura stopped wiping a glass, a look of unease on his face. “That is all long ago. Haven’t seen a writer in years. Many years.”
“I should take pictures of the hotel. My family might like to see it.”
He put down the glass. “In America . . .” he started, but his mind opened a gulf of complexity as he was trying to fathom me as a concept–a concept that, hopefully, came with a label. Nodding thoughtfully to himself, he returned the glass to a shelf and then folded the towel with care, draping it on a rack. By the time everything was in its place, his question had been abandoned.
The barroom was empty save for an old man snoring in an armchair. A jazz standard came from a speaker while Nomura started closing the register, looking right at home and self-realized, as rooted in the elements of his life, as instantly recognizable as the exact thing he was and represented, as a tree is in native soil. No need to ask him all sorts of questions to figure out how to communicate, to be able to understand him and have a context where he made sense. Not like the woman reflected dimly in the mirror behind the counter. All legacies ended here with me, a dead limb on the family tree.
“It’s almost ten.” Nomura took me out of my thoughts. “I have to lock the downstairs for the night. Should go soon if you want to see him.”
His voice held a note of reproof, as though in a subtle way he were asking what the hell kind of family this was. Looking down at my hands, I realized I was anxious. A memory came of sitting with Ojii-chan at Haneda, two people in a departure lounge waiting quietly for time to run out, not wishing to stay there longer and not wishing to say goodbye, with so many things left unsaid.
“All right then,” I said out loud. I finished the sake to steel myself, thanked Nomura for making the soup and wished him a good night, then rose from the stool at the counter. My legs wobbled as I moved through the barroom, like a Japanese at a funeral.
The cold hit me as the door opened, along with the smell of seafood that came from the shelves and mixed with the incense on a table. I made a bow and stepped into the dimness, resolved immediately that this wouldn’t be a wake, just long enough to tell Mom I had been there.
He was laid out in a pine casket, his gaunt, hairless head facing north. Under the shoulders and lower back, the pity of his shrunken body, they had put some packs of dry ice. My gaze settled on the mottled face that rested on a cushion, cheeks hollow with ripe old age. His eyes were shut until the crematorium, where he would turn into bones and ashes in an aluminum urn for Aunt Fumiko.
It was strange to see Ojii-chan in a kimono, not the sweatpants and flannels he wore at the house. The kimono was crossed in front, right side over the left in the Buddhist manner for the dead. Placed at his side was a pack of cigarettes, a familiar thing to hold on to as he was crossing the great divide.
I thought of the seven decades that Ojii-chan cheated from death, the lucky number he had once drawn from a horribly unfair game. Seven decades to work and drink beer and eat ramen at Chinese restaurants, to get married and father three children, then see his wife leave and two of his children emigrate. As I looked at his face, so somber and quiet, without any power to harm or make anyone feel embarrassed, I wished that my mom and uncle were there. In his nostrils and ears were small tufts of cotton, and somehow seeing him there like this, the way he was prepared by strangers and lying there by himself, made me angry about our family. Forever absorbed in ourselves, we couldn’t even do right by the dead.
I leaned over the face in the casket, then squeezed my eyes shut. The tears came easily, softly, brimming over and leaving my eyes.
“Thank you for all the lunches. So sorry no one else could be here.”
It takes courage, the family photos. The thing that Mom couldn’t do, the reason why she made excuses for not coming to family reunions. Always hiding behind the ocean, the time zones and too much work, asking me to send her messages. Perhaps she was free now that Ojii-chan had passed and released her from the shadow he cast, but in that freedom, there was a new sadness.
Tears warm on my cheeks, I took a couple of mizu manju from a bag and placed them inside the casket, next to the feet in the white tabi socks. I wanted to stay with him, just a while longer, but the room was getting awfully cold.
“They are thinking of you,” I whispered, after relaying the message from Mom. “We miss you and speak of you often.”
I bowed twice in front of the casket, then turned and slipped quietly out of the room, closing the door on a helpless silence.
We were still bad at the leaving, the actual saying goodbye. We respected that about each other, always would. Until we could meet again.
Behind the curtain in the alcove was a changing room, wooden lockers and benches, an old dusty scale, and behind that a small tiled chamber that was lit by a single bulb. According to a note on the wall, the bath was fed from a spring in the mountains, which meant the thick green color of the bathwater was actually pure and rejuvenating. The touch of earthiness was completed by a smell of sulfur, the stones lining the bath in a mosaic.
After putting my clothes in a locker and entering the chamber, I saw why Nomura had said that the onsen was strange. A three-foot-tall ceramic phallus, faded and chipped, in a pale shade of green, towered over the steaming water. Some aid to get weekenders in the mood, the least subtle thing in Japan.
“Jesus,” I sighed. “Not in my bath.”
I lowered myself into the water, as far away from the thing as possible. The tiles had a lovely pattern, and the temperature was just right, warming me down to the soul. The heat and the alcohol in my system made me a little dizzy, but there was a homey feeling watching the steam move over the stones. Without the ceramic, I thought, this onsen bath would be perfect.
The woman didn’t announce herself, just slid the door open and stepped through the curtain. As she undressed in the light from a lamp, she looked so much like me that I almost freaked. Like one of those movies where someone meets their own double at an inn and then gets stabbed to death with a kitchen knife. But when she let down her hair, shoulder-length and with streaks of gray, I was relieved she wasn’t my double.
“I hope you don’t mind.” The woman approached the bath, whisper quiet.
“Lots of space. If you don’t mind some degenerate art.” I glanced at the ceramic phallus.
She made no reply besides a nod that meant she had seen it before. I liked how she didn’t get angry. Just like, ah–that again.
“A quick soak to relax. I’m on a deadline.”
“You’re a writer?” I blurted, despite what Nomura had said.
The woman chuckled neurotically. “At least till my publisher gets the manuscript. After that, God knows what I’ll be. Maybe staffing a convenience store in the boonies.”
“I didn’t know writers still stayed here. Someone said it was a thing of the past.”
For a while, we soaked silently a few feet apart, gazing at the old tiles as if no massive penis were between us. I was glad we could both relax and that she wasn’t put off by my strange Japanese, thinking that maybe back home, she could be my friend.
The tattoos really helped in Japan. Most people actually looked relieved when they saw the ink on my forearms. Things made sense again, there was a label they knew and understood. An alien from a distant planet; no expectations, all bets are off.
“Are you here for the funeral?” the woman asked conversationally. “I heard the old janitor passed away.”
“He was my grandfather. My mother and I live in America. Moved there when I was twelve.”
“I see.” She regarded her wrinkled feet as if making a decision. “I once wrote a poem about America. About fridges that hum all night and wake people up. So noisy because of their size. You don’t realize till you go to America that fridges can make so much noise.”
It sounded like a good poem, and it is true, American fridges are the noisiest in the world. I was enjoying the company of this woman, but as she bent forward to massage her feet, I could notice the smell of sake that wafted along on her breath. Perhaps the flush on her face came not from the water temperature? I had to wonder if it was wise to share a bath at the Manju Muramatsu with a female poet, especially as we neared midnight.
“Do you like your grandfather?” the woman asked. “I mean . . . how are you holding up?”
“He’s nice. Actually, we are not that close.” For some reason I spoke of Ojii-chan in the present, the way the woman did.
“My grandfather was an accountant. The tough, silent type. He would have liked this here decoration.” She nodded at the huge phallus.
“Not too close yourself, it sounds like.”
“Not really.” Her voice became quiet. “He was alright though. Always working and chasing skirts, but at least not a mean drunk. Maybe sometimes I liked him. With your own family, it can be hard to tell if you like them.”
“What kind of poetry do you write?” I tried to sound casual. “Anything feminist or just about fridges?”
She gave me a knowing look, then glanced at the clock in the changing room. It was almost eleven.
“I have to go.” She raised herself from the bath. “My deadline is midnight.”
As she toweled off, I peered at her from behind and noticed the lack of backside. In a straight vertical line, her lower back seemed to shape directly into her upper legs. Ghost ass, I thought to myself as she slipped into her yukata, the kind of light bathrobe they wear at hotels in Japan.
“Nice to meet you,” I said. “And good luck with your publication. May I ask, what is your name?”
“I am Yosano–nice to meet you. Good luck with the funeral and safe travels home.” She was at the entrance, about to slide open the doors, then turned and gave a polite bow. “By the way, I like your tattoos. They’re really cool.”
“Thank you so much.” I blushed, covering my upper arms.
The onsen was quiet after the poet left. I immersed myself in the warm water, closing my eyes and thinking about the next day. The funeral was in the morning, and, later at Haneda airport, a red-eye would be the bus to take me across the ocean. Enough time for a little sightseeing and saying goodbye to the House of Manju. I should buy some more of the sweet buns as souvenirs for my family. I was thinking how much Shunsuke liked them, how I would see him and Mom and there would be Ojii-chan’s picture on the family altar in her apartment. They would ask me a million questions the moment that I was home. Everything I had seen and learned about Ojii-chan and the rest of our family, everything I had felt at the funeral and during my three days back in Japan, like I was some sort of foreign spy.