~ Fujiyama ~
“I follow you,” Maeda said, meaning she wanted Ken to follow her. Maeda’s wooden zori clop-clopped on the cobbled street to the bus station. She’d declined to tell him where they were going. The thrill of secrecy was heightened when they’d quietly left the house before dawn, while his father slept in his area of the house partitioned by the shojii. Ken didn’t know if she had cleared this trip with the captain or not. The possibility that she hadn’t secured Paderson’s approval for this venture endeared him to her as much as the possibility that she had gained the captain’s approval. Both avenues were rife with risks.
The sun was hinting at rising over serrated hills carpeted with bamboo and pine. He could look up from this moment of his life and see the rim of the sun, crackling with potential, ready to light up the valley. Things could turn out good, or turn out bad.
An odor that he first had thought was a decaying animal carcass or cat shit invaded his nostrils. The stench was from the fetid, over-ripe ginkgo nuts. Fallen ginkgo leaves, shaped like yellow goose feet, stampeded the gravel path he and Maeda were walking along. A middle-aged woman was placing ginkgo leaves, one at a time, into a red lacquered basket. The air was cool enough for her every breath to augment the low-hanging mist. She stood up straight with one hand pressed against her lower back and regarded Ken and Maeda openly.
They greeted her. “Ohayo goziamasu.” The leaf collector didn’t reply, but stooped down and selected only the leaves that suited her particular purpose. The pearl in Ken’s core stirred. Would Grandpap have known what you do with ginkgo leaves?
Ken had learned a smattering of Japanese words and phrases and had ascertained through his relationship with Maeda, and through observing her interactions with his dad and others, that it wasn’t only possible to lose face by doing something stupid like blowing your nose at the table, but that one could also give face and take face from another person. He’d taken Maeda’s face when he’d fried tuna for his dad. Wizard had explained that Ken’s act was tantamount to criticizing her cooking. But that’s the thing, Ken had quipped, she doesn’t cook it! He’d tried to give face to her in various ways—by teaching her how to cook simple western-style foods so she in turn could gain face in front of Paderson, by over-complimenting her efforts, and by sticking close to the house so she wouldn’t worry where he was.
He looked up from the leaf-strewn path and discovered that he was lagging. He caught up to Maeda as she bought two bus tickets. He let her hold his hand as they boarded the bus. They bumped along past villages, some smaller than, some larger than the one near his house. In all of the villages, people had hung fish out to dry. From the bus they watched a man wearing rolled up pants wade like an egret in a rice paddy. The sun rising over the rice farmer’s back silhouetted his task of plucking rice plants out here and transplanting them there. This crop of rice was the second of the year. Maeda handed Ken a carton, one of two she’d bought from a hawker at the bus station.
“Bento.” She started opening his boxed lunch.
“I know. I can do it.”
“Sushi inside,” she said.
“I know.” He ate sticky rice wrapped in sheets of seaweed called nori. He jiggled rubbery stuff between his disposable bamboo chopsticks and aimed for his mouth. The stuff had no taste whatsoever. Pink, white and green sugary candy molded into tealeaf shapes melted on his tongue. When they finished eating, he let Maeda wipe his mouth with a hankie she kept hidden up her kimono sleeve. With her spine as straight as a bamboo pole, she closed her eyes and appeared to doze off.
Occasionally, people, especially children, stared at him. They did not smile. He was convinced they were talking about him, improvising stories about how a Western teenager came to be in the care of a Japanese woman, referring to him in their fictions as high nose, foreign devil, or worse. At a bus stop, a clutch of boys boarded the bus. He put his guard up. They reminded him of the gang he’d seen kill a boy. What was more disquieting was that they did not look at him. He scooted closer to Maeda. Her eyes flickered open briefly and closed again. She didn’t move away from the press of his body against her. The boys sat in front of Ken and Maeda and opened their schoolbooks. The bus picked up speed only to slow down again and pull in at a train station.
Stepping off the bus and clop-clopping toward the train station ticket window, Maeda said, “We have few time.” The statement was her polite way of telling him, don’t dawdle. Pots of cascading yellow chrysanthemums lined the station platform. Moss grew on the steep roof. Maeda and Ken joined the people boarding the train, its plumes of black smoke chuffing out the stack. The tracks were narrower than tracks in America. Immaculate too. No Nehi bottles or cigarette butts. When he focused only on the hills in the distance, he could hardly tell the train was moving. Except for the rhythmic vibrations and rattles, they were standing still in time. He rested his head against the window.
He awoke and half-remembered blinking at his own reflected eyeballs superimposed in the train window onto nighttime Japan. While the train cut through broken coastlines, they had napped on and off, eaten several meals, drunk quarts of green tea, and stretched their legs at village stations where passengers disembarked and other people climbed aboard. The hour was noon according to his watch, but he didn’t know what day it was.
Maeda gently shook him and pointed out the window on the left side of the moving train. He looked out the window. Tucked in the hills, rows and rows of manicured bushes with glossy, dark green leaves absorbed the sun’s rays. So what? Big deal, he thought. She pointed again and wiggled in her seat. He smiled, looked out the window, and tried to pretend that he cared about a bunch of tea bushes as much as she did.
There it was! The mountain from the jigsaw puzzle! Soaring up to the sky. The mountain that was depicted on the framed jigsaw puzzle in his old dining room hadn’t been in Hawaii as he’d once thought.
“Fujiyama,” Maeda said, softening the F to sound like a breath.
Fujiyama had snagged a white cloud necklace on her snow-capped crest. The dazzling sun illuminated spears of snow radiating down her colossal slopes. Cranes soared on the thermals rising from the compacted towns clustered at Fujiyama’s foothills. As the train approached the mountain, the symbol of Japan loomed ever larger, ever larger, allowing no place for self-pity amid this mighty beauty.
This was what she’d brought him to see.
On the return trip to Kyushu, the American redhead and his Japanese housekeeper got off the train at the bus station close to their village and entered a nearby darkened doorway with short red curtains hanging from the lintel. Wet, slurping sounds originated from shadowy figures seated at booths in nooks in the cramped, dim shop. His mom, if she were present to hear this noise, would have cracked sarcastic remarks about the Japanese people’s bad table manners, and she would have warned Ken not to slurp, not to even think about slurping. His eyes adjusted to the darkness and he saw adults, not ornery children, hunched over large earthenware bowls, slurping on purpose. Here a slurp, there a slurp, everywhere a slurp, slurp, he whispered to himself.
A man scuffed toward them and set two steaming bowls of noodles on the wooden table in front of them. Ken had eaten with Maeda numerous times during this journey, so he knew to say, “Itadaki masu,” before eating. Maeda raised her loaded chopsticks to her lips. Long noodles dangled into the broth. She fed the noodle tails to her chopsticks with a spoon to maintain a continuous feed, slurping all the while in a most ladylike manner. Hot soup steamed his face. He gave it a try. Broth gurgled down the wrong pipe. He choked. After he recovered and was breathing almost normally, he tried slurp-eating again, this time with more success. The watery sound, however, wasn’t right, it was too timid. He slurped, he decided, with a Yankee accent. That thought struck him as humorous. Slurp with a Yankee accent. He almost laughed out loud.
Maeda told him she wanted to buy greens and pork for their dinner later at home. While shopping with her, he learned why she never returned from the market with the ingredients his father had ordered her to buy. Nothing on the market tables, in the stalls, on the shelves or in the cubicles resembled Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, not to mention a plain ol’ humble potato. Normal foods just weren’t available here, not even to Wizard, who wrangled the random carton of Jell-O gelatin or cans of corned-beef hash from U.S. Army commissaries. You could only eat so much of that canned stuff anyhow before your taste buds hankered for fresh food.
He kept within range of Maeda as she chatted with vendors whose language and skin were rough compared to hers. Vegetables soaked in wooden buckets of brine. An old woman arranged gingerroots, shaped remarkably like her bowed legs, in a bin beside persimmons stacked in pyramids on a green cloth. Seafood displayed on ice in neat rows resembled no creatures or parts of creatures Ken had learned about from watching TV nature shows or perusing encyclopedias. A wooden barrel in the main thoroughfare where shoppers streamed around it appeared to be full of wood shavings, cedar maybe. The curls were reddish. Through pantomime and a patois of Japanese and English, Maeda explained that the curls were dried fish shavings used for soup stock.
They continued roaming between sacks of rice, dried kelp, ginkgo nuts, packets of green tea, bamboo shoots, tofu in sundry states and shapes, and millions of miles of noodles—thin ones, transparent ones, brown ones, beige flat ones. Food was plentiful. His dad would just have to adapt to Japanese food.
They emerged from the canopied street market and onto a busy cobbled street. Ken heard a rhythmic thunking sound. It reverberated through his feet and up through his body. Rather than being edgy, as he might have been before seeing Fujiyama, he was curious and ran ahead of Maeda.
Two beefy men took turns whacking giant wooden pestles against a wooden mortar as high as the tops of their thighs. Decades of pounding had indented the mortar surface into an accommodating curve. The men grunted with each swing as the giant pestles came down and kneaded a green glutinous glob. The men whacked and grunted, whacked and grunted, their pestle blows hurling flecks of the green substance from the mortar. Their secondary objective, Ken supposed, was hitting the mixture of rice and green tealeaves with sufficient force to send gummy bits onto passersby. Ken stepped closer to the men whose bare chests were sweaty in spite of the cool weather. Gummy, green dots flew onto his tan shirt. He picked one globbit off his sleeve, pressed it between his thumb and finger, tested its stickiness.
At a canopied stall beside the grunting men, a woman was selling green balls the size of chicken eggs. She rolled them in a brown powder and wrapped them in paper. She presented one to Ken.
“Mochi.” Maeda nodded and smiled, encouraging him to repeat the word.
“Mochi,” he said to please her.
“Mochi.”
“Mochi! Mochi!”
Maeda handed the lady a coin. They bowed with the quick economy acceptable between vendor and customer. The green ball, the consistency of raw pie dough, tasted slightly sweet. The brown powder, he decided, was pulverized peanuts. The center was filled with red azuki beans.
“It’s not snot,” he informed them in serious tones.
The vendor and Maeda exchanged indulgent smiles. The men whacked and grunted, whacked and grunted. No one had understood that he’d said a gross word. This was his license to inform everyone what he’d discovered and to use any kind of words he wanted to. He strode down the sidewalk, holding his sticky hand aloft, and announced, “It’s not snot! It’s not snot! It’s not snot! It’s not snot!” He laughed out loud. His laughter seesawed and hiccupped on a high note at the end. He’d forgotten what his laughter sounded like. And what it felt like to be himself again. He felt good.
Maeda used her key to open the door. Without speaking she began dredging the pork chops in flour and salt and laid them in a hot frying pan the way Ken had taught her. He checked the sleeping area, but his dad wasn’t there. He wanted to ask if he should set the table for two people or one, to find out if his dad was expected soon or not, but Maeda let him know she didn’t want to answer questions. She drew her eyelids down to flat slits, her attention seemingly transfixed by grease spattering the wall. She set to wiping it with a damp rag.
Paderson tromped through the doorway and dropped his duffel bag on the floor. He crossed the kitchen area in two sweeping steps, tossed a packet of mail on the table, and grabbed a Kirin out of the tiny fridge. He took a long pull on the beer and found himself. “Ahh.” He looked at the label on the beer can appreciatively as he slipped his tie out of his collar. He whipped his tie at Ken. “Did you manage to stay out of trouble while I was in Okinawa?”
Ken glanced at their housekeeper. Maeda turned the pork chops over in the pan, elegantly, with chopsticks. The sizzling increased as heat seared the meat and then settled down to a reserved, quiet buzz. He knew what had happened. Maeda hadn’t asked Paderson for permission to take him on the trek to Fujiyama. She’d arranged their trip to coincide with Paderson’s absence. Ken was no longer unsure how he felt toward the Japanese woman. “Yeah,” he said. “Maeda kept me out of trouble.”
Maeda set two plates of pork chops and greens on the table, bowed, backed away, and waited with her hands tucked up her kimono sleeves.
Ken picked up an entire pork chop between his chopsticks and tore off a hunk with his teeth. His dad rested his left hand on the table next to the beer can. The white line on his ring finger was almost tan. With his right hand he rocked his fork to cut the meat. He popped a big piece in his mouth and chewed.
The familiar back-slanted penmanship on the airmail envelope on top of the mail packet was Tricia Paderson’s handwriting. The letter was an uninvited guest at the table. They continued eating. Maeda continued waiting. The last letter from his mother had brought on a spell of heavy weather. Neither Ken nor his dad, as far as he knew, had received anything, not even a measly Christmas card or a box of store-bought cookies from her since that day over half a year ago when Paderson had sent their dishes crashing to the floor.
“It’s not going to open itself,” Paderson said.
“It’s probably just a birthday card.” Upside-down pineapple cake was what his grandma had always baked for him. One of those sent by airmail would be fine and dandy. He’d forgotten what homemade cake and Oscar Mayer Wiener hotdogs tasted like. It was funny how things that used to seem so important could be forgotten until an unexpected reminder prodded the craving into life again, a dispassionate life that could be swiftly dispatched if that’s what you needed to do to adapt.
Sometimes though, he enjoyed the torment of thinking about the old days. He sliced the envelope open with a kitchen knife. The front of the card depicted a bronco busting cowboy atop a layer cake with the glitter words, “It’s your 16th birthday!”
Inside the card she’d written: “I deposited $1,000 in your savings account. It’s part of the proceeds from the sale of Grandma and Grandpap Paderson’s house and household goods. Tell your dad I kept a few thousand, to which I’m entitled, and the rest was used to pay his outstanding bills. Keep up with your schoolwork. You have a baby brother now. I guess he’s a half-brother since he’s Major Holm’s son. His name is Carl Gary Holm, born May 9. Love, Mommy.”
He looked up at his father’s face, etched with curiosity. “What’s it say?” Paderson asked.
“Why didn’t you tell me you’re not married anymore?” He pushed past Maeda who’d come gliding toward him with her handkerchief ready to soak up the tears welling in his eyes.
He stepped outside where humid air coated him like a waxy skin he couldn’t shed. There was no one to fight, no ball to hit, no rock to hurl for any kind of relief. He picked a scab off his knee and pictured his mom at the kitchen table writing the message in his birthday card, convinced that what she was telling him was for the best. With her tongue poking out between her frosty lipsticked lips, she would have licked the adhesive on the envelope flap. Then using the side of her fist, she would have patted the sticky flap down to the rhythm of the throbbing pearl of pain in his chest.
What did she need another son for?
When Ken returned to the house lost hours later, he found Maeda singing and snipping flower shapes out of rice paper with small scissors. She glued the shapes onto the shojii separating the kitchen from the sleeping area. The flowers—ghostly gray shadows—patched over holes Paderson’s drunken fingers had punctured through the translucent paper room divider.
That’s how Ken knew his dad hated the birthday message, too.
The tune Maeda was singing was the same song she sang in the mornings when she rolled up Ken’s futon, carried it outside, and spread it over the rocks to air in the sun. With a stick she chased off the pack of stray dogs that came ‘round sniffing, and cocking their hind legs up to mark their territory that had been invaded by an interloper’s odor. He didn’t know. He didn’t want to know if she had a son of her own somewhere, a son who resented her attention to him, a guy jean gaijin.
“How come you sing when you work?” His tone, full of belligerence and spite, shamed him.
She stopped singing but held her smile until Ken felt his own scowl smooth itself out. She said, “If not do job with happy, it is same as not do job.” She resumed snipping paper flowers and singing the folk song in a wispy, girlish tremolo. He skulked to his room and sprawled out on the straw tatami mats. In his palm he squeezed the stone he’d found in his grandfather’s potato patch. He pressed a quartz point of the stone as hard as he could into his thumb, and thought of the mighty Fujiyama.