CHAPTER 63

It didn’t start till they were out of the airport. Airports, after all, tend to have little character, little that marks them out as different from each other. So Thomas felt nothing as he wandered Narita airport’s cramped and cluttered environs, except perhaps when he heard the pattering announcements in Japanese, and even those were too predictable to really do it. But once they were on the bus into the city, it started, that sense of the familiar and the strange crowding in on him like déjà vu, as if he knew this place, as if a part of him had never left, and—at the same time—that he didn’t belong and never had. By the time the bus was idling at the station in Shinjuku, Thomas’s hands had begun to shake slightly. Twenty minutes later, as they dragged their luggage into a down-market noodle house for a bite of what Ed called “local color” before looking for Kumi, Thomas—now ashen pale and taking hurried, shallow breaths—was seriously considering taking the next bus back to the airport.

He concealed it from Jim, whose face had been pressed to the tinted window ever since they left the airport, marveling with a tourist’s awe at the landscape, at the road signs, at Tokyo Disneyland flashing past pale and tawdry, at the clustered sky-scrapers, the sea of black-haired people moving through the streets, the splashes of neon and the colossal video screens. Jim talked constantly, exclamations mainly, but punctuated with questions no one answered, and all the time he gazed around him, his eyes like saucers, a man transported to a planet he had never truly believed in. It was hardly surprising that he was oblivious to the fact that his traveling companion was experiencing something like posttraumatic stress. Thomas was buoyed on steadily building waves of panic and anxiety bizarrely underwritten by the insistent sense that he had never left this place, that he still lived here with a girl called Kumi whom he one day hoped to marry. . . .

He had known it would be like this or, more accurately, had known it would be something like this, some pained and bewildered sense of stepping back into the past. He had never experienced anything quite like it in the States, even when returning to the streets where he’d been raised, pacing the rooms of the house where his parents had lived and, eventually, died. All that felt lost and immediate at the same time, but it also felt real because he had never doubted that it would be basically the same as when he played stickball on the corner with Ed and Jimmy Collins from two doors down. But this, this was different. Japan was different.

Thomas had known nothing about Japan before he had gone to work there. For him it had been exotic, foreign, and however much he grew used to being there in the two years he had taught high school in the little town southwest of Tokyo, it had never stopped being exotic and foreign. When he left, he took a piece of it with him in Kumi, but when she left him, it had all gone away, shut out of his life, his reality. In a few years it became hard to imagine that such a place really existed, that he had been there, that it had shaped who he was. Even on those rare drunken occasions when he could bring himself to look at pictures taken there, his experiences in Japan increasingly felt as if they had happened to someone else. He could stare at those photographs baffled for hours, gazing at himself, trying to remember what it had been like, that life on the other (planet) side of the world, trying to believe in it. But it was too strange, too alien, too utterly lost to any notion of who he was now.

And now he was back and it was all still here. The faces. The voices. The traffic. The climate. The immaculate gardens. The tiled roofs and timbered houses. The glimpses of ancient wooden shrines clanging in the mind like temple bells. Then the model food in the restaurant windows. The cries of “irrashaimasse !” from the staff as they came inside. The red and black paper lanterns splashed with calligraphy. The new-wood smell of the building, almost smothered by the rich but simple aroma of the food itself. The picture menus with their bowls of thick, steaming noodles . . . There was nowhere he could look that didn’t somehow insist that the world had wobbled on its axis and reality had changed.

You don’t belong here. Never did. Never will.

But it was inside him too, dyed indelibly in his sense of self.

Ay, there’s the rub.

Because however much he had tried to shut Japan out of his life forever, it had shaped him, had even—he dreaded to think it—given him his best years. Since then everything had unraveled. Being back here again was like stepping back a dozen years to when he had been young and cocksure, when the world and all that was in it had been spread out before him, when life had been so full of promise, of purpose, of fulfillment.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” he muttered suddenly. And as Jim snapped out of his reverie for a moment to stare at him, Thomas looked for a place to throw up.