Kanazawa, page 16
Wondering why he’d never heard this before, Emmitt listened with interest. Still, he wasn’t sure what had prompted Avery to share this.
“There was a river researcher in Cambodia I got to know. He told me something about the Mekong River I never forgot. In the 1970s, when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, they banned people from fishing in the country’s lakes, rivers, and tributaries. You need to know that in Cambodia more than eighty percent of the country fishes for daily food—or they used to, anyway. Because of the ban, which if broken usually resulted in execution, in only one year the Mekong River went from being depleted of fish to being abundant with them. All it took was one year without human activity for the river to recover. And I see a parallel between that fact and the year I spent in Vietnam.
“The world has changed a lot since those times, and I’m not sure my experience in Vietnam could be duplicated anywhere now. And I wonder if that’s what you’re trying to do. But you have obligations that I didn’t have back then. I think you can improve the life you have here, but you can’t turn your back on it and walk away. Maybe at one time Japan was like the Vietnam I experienced—but back then the world wasn’t as interconnected as now. And that’s what I’m saying: You can’t go back; you can’t retreat from the world and still be fully part of the human experience.”
After thinking about the point Avery had come around to, Emmitt said, “Everything seems out of reach in a way it didn’t a few years ago.”
“The fundamentals can be hard to agree on, but when you and Mirai do that, I think things will fall into place. They did for Koyo and me. Life for us now is the best it’s ever been.”
Emmitt tried to think of when his and Mirai’s “best” had been. Certainly it was before they planned to rent the machiya. And now, only a few months later, they faced a major crossroads.
Avery lifted himself out of the bath. “I think I’ll head back now. Koyo won’t like it if I turn myself into a prune.”
“Good night,” Emmitt said. He wanted to thank him but somehow the words wouldn’t form.
After Avery disappeared into the changing room, Emmitt slid the door open to the outside bath. He settled into its hot water and, trying to empty his mind, peered toward the lake. Looking past the faintly illuminated fountain and temple jutting into the water, his eyes came to rest once more on the mountains.
As he contemplated what Avery had told him inside, he asked himself why staying in Kanazawa was so important to him. For a long time, he tried to answer the question. He was surprised by the difficulty of articulating the reason to himself. The reasons themselves were simple, however.
Kanazawa was his home. It had given him everything he’d ever wanted, and he’d only scratched the surface of what he could learn and experience here. Maybe it was true that Tokyo could offer him more, but he felt rooted in Kanazawa like never before, connected here in ways he could never feel about Tokyo. If something forced him to leave, he thought, he would die as pitifully as a fish laid out on a chopping board.
Kanazawa was his home.
AFTER DROPPING OFF AVERY and Koyo at Kanazawa Station, Mirai’s spirits flagged. Emmitt asked gently about Natsumi, but Mirai said, “Not now, please.”
As they approached the Nagamachi district, consecutive red lights slowed them down. Starlings in the sidewalk trees were screeching. It was early afternoon, several hours before they normally grew loud. They reminded him of the shores of Lake Shibayama, which they’d strolled along that morning. What was it that Koyo had said about the herons among the reeds? He turned and asked Mirai.
“She said she’d forgotten how big herons were.”
But Emmitt was thinking of something else. After another moment he remembered: Koyo said she hadn’t seen a heron since they’d moved to Tokyo, but that she’d seen them almost daily in Kanazawa, either on the Asano or the Sai.
When they got home Mirai told her parents about Natsumi. Her father couldn’t remember who she was, but the news made her mother cry out. Emmitt didn’t realize that his mother-in-law had known Natsumi, but she announced, as if to Emmitt or her husband, that Mirai had sometimes visited her family’s house as a child.
“I’ll send her family something tomorrow. Our condolences, and an appropriate arrangement.”
“Please make it from all of us.”
Emmitt glanced at his father-in-law, who hadn’t reacted yet to the news. His face wore a blank expression.
“Did Asuka know her?” Mirai’s mother said.
“Not well. They didn’t overlap in school, and their neighborhoods in Tokyo were far apart.”
“It would be terrible if she did, being there on her own.”
Mirai sat with her head down and said nothing.
Emmitt’s father-in-law turned toward the window. He pointed to the glass and said, “Well, well.”
Everyone looked to where he had pointed.
In a corner of the window, three geckos clung to the outside of the glass. Emmitt expected them to scramble away as his father-in-law approached, but none of them moved.
“I thought they only came out at night,” he said. He tapped the window and two geckos scurried off. The third one didn’t budge.
Emmitt saw its heart beat quickly through its leaf-brown skin. A second later its tongue shot out as if tasting the air.
Mirai stood and left the room. Her father turned to watch her go but seemed to see nothing strange about her departure.
When Emmitt returned his attention to the window, the third gecko had disappeared.
12
“I’M PLANNING TO GO away next weekend,” Mirai’s mother announced one afternoon after returning from her literary club. “It was a last-minute decision, but it was the only time our members could agree on.”
“Again?” her husband said, not looking up from his sketchpad. “Where are you off to this time?”
“What do you mean ‘again’? Some years we make three or four trips together. This will only be our second in the last twelve months.”
“Fine, but I asked where you were off to.”
“Yashagaike.”
Emmitt turned at the sound of the sketchpad falling to the living room floor. Rather than reach to pick it up, his father-in-law stared out the window in front of him, where the bright, blank sky made him squint.
“What on earth for?”
She laughed at the dismay in her husband’s voice. “It’s the source of several famous legends, some of which date back to the ninth century. More importantly, Izumi Kyōka set one of his best-known plays there.”
“Kyōka again?” Her husband’s tone was derisive.
Having heard ike at the end of the place name, Emmitt asked if her club planned to visit a lake.
“A mountain pond, actually, in Fukui, on the border with Gifu Prefecture. There’s a 1,200-year-old legend about a dragon that married a landowner’s daughter and brought her to the pond. Local people and travelers still offer items that the dragon’s wife might covet—cosmetics and hair implements, for example—placing them in the pond’s clear shallows. I’ve heard that, at 1,100 meters, it’s a difficult but exhilarating hike.”
Her husband shook his head, as if he wanted to hear no more about it.
“Since Mirai will be here,” she went on, perhaps to lighten her husband’s mood, “I won’t have to worry about the house only having you and Emmitt to look after it.”
Her husband mumbled something under his breath.
“I’ve been to Fukui many times,” Emmitt said, “but I haven’t heard of Yashagaike.”
“It’s a bit remote. But not as remote as when Kyōka traveled there. Some people say he never reached it, but I think he must have.”
She told him that Yashagaike meant “Demon Pond,” which was also the title of Kyōka’s play. Because of the literary associations with the pond and mountain, she’d long wanted to visit the area. Considering it too troublesome to travel there on her own, she was relieved that other members wanted to go, too. That they wouldn’t travel together this summer as they had in the past had worried her.
Since Emmitt had married Mirai and moved into her parents’ house, he could recall the literary club having traveled to Nara to visit the house of the writer Shiga Naoya; Dazai Osamu’s house in Aomori; the Takahan ryokan in Echigo-Yuzaka, Niigata, where Kawabata Yasunari wrote Snow Country; a Tanizaki Jun’ichirō museum in Ashiya, Hyōgo; the former residence of Natsume Sōseki in Kumamoto; a park in Echizen, Fukui, where Murasaki Shikibu, the author of Tale of Genji, once lived; and a museum to Matsuo Bashō in Yamanaka Onsen, a short drive from Kanazawa. And of course she’d visited many times the museums, monuments, former houses, and gravesites associated with Kanazawa’s four most famous writers: Izumi Kyōka, Murō Saisei, Tokuda Shūsei, and Fukuda Chiyo-ni. Yashagaike, then, was to be another literary pilgrimage like these others.
On the morning she left, she invited her husband to accompany her. She called from the kitchen into the living room.
“You only need to bring a change of clothes and a toothbrush.” Turning to Mirai and Emmitt she said, “You two don’t mind if he goes with us, do you?”
“Not at all. Emmitt and I can take care of things here.”
The front door opened and closed, surprising all three of them. Emmitt went to the living room window, where he saw his father-in-law in his exercise clothes walking down the street. None of them had heard him announce his departure.
Half an hour later, as a taxi pulled up to take Emmitt’s mother-in-law to the station, her husband still hadn’t returned.
“What a child he is to act like that. When he gets home, tell him as much. Do you suppose he’s jealous of a writer who’s been dead for nearly eighty years?”
“I think he doesn’t like the idea of you leaving him,” Mirai said. “Enjoy your trip and don’t worry about things here.”
The following night, after dinner, Emmitt’s father-in-law went out again in his walking clothes without a word to Mirai or Emmitt. When two hours had passed and he still wasn’t home, Mirai called him on his cell phone, only to discover that he’d left it on the living room windowsill. At ten o’clock she made up an excuse to buy something at a convenience store, but Emmitt knew she was going out to look for her father. She returned forty minutes later, her anger at him replaced by concern.
Emmitt was reading Kyōka in bed—a play-within-a-story that somehow reminded him of Hamlet—when the front door downstairs slammed open and shut. It was 11:35 p.m.
He and Mirai found her father propped against a wall in the genkan, his eyes closed as if he were planning to sleep standing up. Mirai pressed him about where he’d been, but he wouldn’t say. He reeked of alcohol.
“Where’s Okāsan? Is she home now?” He stomped through the house, stopping more than once to balance himself against a wall with his hand. When he lurched past them, they saw the back of his pants was dirty, as if he’d fallen or sat down for a long time on the grass.
Mirai helped him take them off, removing from their pockets his house-key, wallet, and a slip of paper the color of a robin’s egg. Emmitt saw a handwritten, five-figure number starting with a two, which meant that wherever his father-in-law had gone he spent around two hundred dollars.
“Where is Okāsan?” His father-in-law rocked back and forth in his sweatshirt, boxers, and socks as if someone were tugging him from behind.
Mirai said, “She’ll be back in two days. At the end of her trip.”
Her father stumbled back to the living room and collapsed on the sofa. He rolled onto his stomach and closed his eyes.
“Where were you tonight?” she asked, exasperated. “Did you go back to that sunakku bar in Katamachi with the Russian and Filipina girls?”
Without moving his face from where he’d smashed it into the sofa, he grunted affirmatively. Mirai handed Emmitt the wallet. “Don’t give it back to him until Okāsan’s home. Having it will only encourage him to cause more trouble.”
Mirai had drawn a bath for her father an hour ago, and though she’d covered it with a plastic board to keep it hot, she said she would reheat it now.
“Keep an eye on him,” she told Emmitt. “Don’t let him fall asleep. He’ll be impossible to deal with if we need to wake him.”
“Won’t he fall asleep in the bath?”
She stared at her father resignedly. “I’ll have to sit there with him. I’ll just rinse him down and wash his hair, and if he doesn’t want to get in the bath, I may ask you to help me put him into bed. At least Okāsan doesn’t have to be bothered by this.”
“Let him sleep as he is. He couldn’t possibly expect you to do all that for him.”
“It’s what Okāsan would do.”
“She’s his wife, not his daughter. Get him to brush his teeth and go to the bathroom. Then leave him alone to sleep.”
Mirai wiped her tears with her fingertips and left the room.
Emmitt stood over his father-in-law. He was breathing heavily with his eyes closed again, as if he’d fallen asleep already.
“Had a few drinks tonight, did you?” Emmitt said, poking his shoulder to make sure he stayed awake.
“A few,” he mumbled. “One or two.”
“Was it worth all that money you spent?”
“What does it matter?”
His father-in-law grunted and rolled onto his back. “There was a Russian girl there tonight. She was tall, and I thought at first she might have defected to Japan from a Russian volleyball squad, but she denied this repeatedly.”
Emmitt smiled despite himself at the image of his father-in-law, drunk, insisting on such an absurd premise for the woman being in Japan.
“She was older than the foreign girls who usually work in those places,” he went on. “She was so blond it hurt to look at her. Very attractive, too, but she couldn’t speak Japanese. When she tried, I kept looking to see if her mouth was full of nuts, because that’s how she sounded when she talked.”
“Why did you go?”
“Maybe I was thirsty. It makes no difference, does it?”
“We were worried about you.”
His father-in-law fell quiet, and in the background Emmitt heard Mirai reheating the bath. His father-in-law’s voice, too, when next he spoke, was softer. “I showed her your photo; I’m not sure why. Then I asked her what the chances were of you and she being related. At first she laughed, but after a while her sense of humor disappeared. Actually, it was a photo of you and Mirai. I wonder if I got it back from her before I left. It’s possible that she stole it.”
“I’m sure she didn’t steal anything.”
“Then I told her how Okāsan went to Yashagaike to worship a dead writer. She didn’t think it was selfish of her at all, and I couldn’t control my anger when she said that. I felt she was being inconsiderate, that she said that on purpose.”
“Why would she have wanted to upset you?”
His father-in-law raised a hand to his face and, screwing shut his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose. Recalling these events seemed to agitate him.
“I lost my patience with her and called her an idiot. She wouldn’t talk to me after that. A few minutes later a Filipina girl came to pour me drinks, but I didn’t want to talk to her. I wanted the Russian girl.”
He was slurring so that Emmitt could hardly understand him.
Mirai returned to the room. Standing in the doorway, she frowned at her father. “Are you really so lonely, Otōsan?”
He turned partway toward her. “Why would I be lonely?” He shut his eyes and this time it seemed he would fall asleep immediately.
Mirai came over and with Emmitt’s help led him into his bedroom.
“I’ve drawn a bath for you, Otōsan.”
But as soon as he hit the mattress he fell asleep. Shaking him did no good.
“Wake up!” Mirai yelled at him. “Why are you being so selfish? Look at what kind of person you are! Selfish! Selfish!”
Emmitt had to pull her away two times.
Mirai hurried from the room and disappeared upstairs.
Emmitt made his father tea in case he woke up in the middle of the night and found his mouth dry as sand. Afterward, as a precaution, he drained the bath.
EMMITT AWOKE EARLY THE next morning, feeling keener than usual to translate Kechō. Last night he had dreamed scenes from the story of his own imagination, although the setting had remained the Asano River and Mt. Utatsu, and it followed the same character, the boy Ren’ya. Emmitt had merely observed the scenes initially, as if from afar, but was soon drawn into them, interacting with the story’s characters—the King of the Boars, Mr. Monkfish, the beautiful winged lady, various animals, and even the flowers. They’d seemed to know he was translating them into English and were grateful, urging him to give every possible effort.
His mother-in-law had shared with him something interesting about Kyōka’s belief in the power and sacredness of language. For Kyōka, language possessed a supernatural life force, and he considered letters and words not only to be alive, but also to possess the capacity to “live on.” She told him that Kyōka used to cut printed words from shopping bags and burn them. He then ate their ashes believing they would protect him, particularly against cholera, which was a scourge during his lifetime. He sometimes sprinkled water droplets on his manuscripts, too, as an act of sanctification.
The idea that writing could be sacred made Emmitt approach translating with a deeper sense of purpose. More importantly, working with Kyōka’s writing helped Emmitt feel he was evoking the past, even keeping it alive. And in doing this he realized he was finding a place for himself.
