A Tale for the Time Being (23 page)

He was really nervous at Tokyo Station, and we had to stand for about an hour underneath the departure board until he could figure out which bullet train we needed to take and what tickets we
needed to buy, and then we went to the wrong platform and ended up on the Yamabiko Semi-Local, instead of the Komachi Express, but it didn’t matter to him if we stopped at every single
station on the way, and actually it didn’t matter to me, either. So we rode through the suburbs of Tokyo, which go on and on forever, and then through some industrial areas, past factories
with smokestacks and ugly clusters of apartment towers and shopping centers and parking lots, and the train doors kept opening and closing, and people kept getting on and off, and the train ladies
in their little uniforms pushed their bento carts up and down the aisles, calling out, “Obento wa ikaga desu ka? Ocha wa ikaga desu ka?”
⁹⁵
Suddenly I was hungry for a sweet grilled-eel bento, but just as I was about to ask my dad I remembered that the last time we’d eaten sweet grilled eel was when we were celebrating his new
“job,” and when I remembered his lie, my fondness for eel disappeared and I ordered an egg sandwich instead. I ate it, staring out the train window at my reflected face as it skimmed
across the landscape like a ghost. Everything outside was dirty grey or cement-colored, but from time to time tiny green rice paddies shone like priceless emeralds, and as we got farther from
Tokyo, the world became greener.

When we finally got to Sendai, we transferred to a local train that took us to the town nearest Jiko’s temple, and then we humped my wheelie bag onto an ancient bus filled with really old
people to take us to her village. On the way out of town, we passed some minimarts and coffee shops and an elementary school, but honestly, there wasn’t much else: a fish processing plant, a
pachinko parlor, a gas station, a 7-Eleven, an auto repair shop, a roadside shrine, a bunch of small fields. But then, as we drove, the buildings got farther and farther apart until finally I knew
we were in the countryside because it was beautiful. It was like being in an anime movie, with our little bus chugging up and down, winding around the mountains and hugging the cliffs. Below, I
could see the waves crashing up on these crazy rocks, and sometimes we would pass a small beach, like a sandy pocket tucked into the rock face.

I used to love going to the northern coast of California, to Marin or Sonoma or Humboldt, and this had a little of the same feeling, only here in Japan everything was greener with a lot more
trees and none of the designer homes. Instead, there were these little fishing villages along the coastline, with clusters of boats and nets and oyster rafts bobbing on the waves, and racks of fish
hung up to dry like laundry next to the houses. The bus made about a hundred thousand million stops that didn’t look like bus stops at all, with just a bench on the side of the road, or a
rusty round sign on a post, or sometimes a little hutlike thing that looked like where you’d keep the filtration unit for your hot tub if you lived in California. There were lots of steep
hilly places in California, too, but I didn’t get the feeling that there were many hot tubs or pools or celebrity mansions around here where Jiko lived.

There weren’t many passengers left on the bus by then, just me and my dad and a couple of really ancient ladies with tenugui
⁹⁶
on their heads,
and spines that were bent over at right angles. The driver was a skinny young guy with great posture. He wore a smart little cap and white cotton driving gloves, and every time he pulled over onto
the shoulder of the road to stop, he bowed and touched the brim of his cap with his gloved fingers. Very kakkoi.
⁹⁷

The road was getting narrower and steeper, winding upward along the side of a deep gulch, when, once again, the driver stopped. I looked out the window at the mountainside, covered with trees,
expecting to see at least a bench or a rusty signpost, but this time there was nothing, just the mountain on one side and the cliff dropping into the valley on the other. But then I looked toward
the mountain again, and this time I saw an ancient stone gate, hidden in the trees and covered with dripping moss, and stone steps that led through the gate and disappeared into the darkness.

The bus door opened and the driver touched his cap. The old ladies looked at us expectantly.

“We have arrived, Naoko,” Dad said. “Let us disembark?” For some reason, he was speaking English. His English had never gotten real fluent, but when he spoke it, he
sounded so polite and intellectual, you’d never think he was the kind of guy who’d lose all his money at the OTB and lie down on a train track.

“
Here?
” I squeaked. I thought he was kidding.

But he was already on his feet, and the old ladies were grinning and bobbing their heads and saying things to us like they already knew who we were, and my dad was bobbing back at them as I
tried to maneuver my wheelie bag down the narrow aisle toward the steps. The driver was watching in the mirror, and when he saw me struggling, he jumped up to help, taking the handle of the bag
from me. I climbed down and stood at the side of the road, looking over the gravelly edge of the sheer cliff that dropped into the valley and led to the sea. I could just catch a glimpse of the
water, sparkling and shimmering like some kind of promise of salvation.

I turned away from the ocean and looked up at the mountainside. No building in sight. Stone gate. Moss. Dark steps leading up to nowhere. My dad had gotten off the bus and was standing next to
me, and the driver was handing him my wheelie bag. I looked at the stone steps and started to put it together. I tugged on Dad’s sleeve.

“Dad . . . ?”

But the driver was bowing to my dad, and he was bowing back, and now the driver was climbing into his seat and closing the doors and putting the bus in gear, and the tires were crunching in the
gravel, and soon me and Dad were alone on the side of the road, watching the taillights of the little bus twinkle and wink as it disappeared around a bend.

Suddenly everything was really quiet, and all we could hear was the wind in the bamboo, which sounded like ghosts. I looked at my wheelie bag in the dirt next to me. It was pink, with a picture
of Hello Kitty on it. It looked very lonely and sad.

It hit me then. My dad was going to leave me here. First we were going to drag my wheelie bag up the mountain and then he was going to leave me up there with some really old nun who happened to
be my great-grandmother who I barely knew, for my whole summer vacation.

“Okay!” Dad said, striding across the road toward the steep steps. “Come on! Let’s challenge!”

My throat got tight and the inside of my nose started to prickle. Out of habit, I clenched my teeth to make the tears stop like I did when the kids kicked me during kagome lynch at school, but
then I thought, Screw it, I
should
cry. I should howl and scream and throw a huge tantrum, because maybe if I acted pathetic enough, my dad would feel sorry for me and take me home again.
I sniffled a little and then looked to see if he’d noticed, but he wasn’t paying any attention to me at all. He was staring at the mountainside, and his face was all lit up like he was
excited but didn’t want to show it. I hadn’t seen him look excited since we lived in Sunnyvale and one of his programmer buddies invited him to go fly-fishing. It was nice to see, so I
followed him across the road, dragging my wheelie bag over to the first step and up with a bump behind me.

Ku . . . lunk.

The bag was heavy, filled with all the books I was supposed to study over the summer holiday.
Ku . . . lunk
. Ancient Japanese history.
Ku . . . lunk
. Japanese current
affairs.
Ku . . . lunk
. Japanese morality and ethics.
Ku . . . lunk. Ku . . . lunk
. I was already sweating and about to give up, but Dad was ahead and waiting for me,
staring eagerly up at the steps.

“When I was young boy, I could run all the way to the top,” he said. “Maybe I still can do . . .”

But instead he came over and took the handle of the suitcase from me, and this time I let him. He’d tried to help me with it on the subway, and then on the train, and again when we got
onto the bus, but I’d told him to forget it. I mean, you can picture it—a middle-aged guy with greasy hair and bloodshot eyes and slumping shoulders, dragging a pink Hello Kitty wheelie
bag behind him. Would you let your dad out in public like that? It’s just too pathetic. He would have looked like a total hentai, which he isn’t. He’s my dad. Maybe he is a
hikikomori, but I love him. I couldn’t have stood it to see people staring at him.

Here, though, nobody was around to see.

“Come on, Nao-chan!” he said. “Let’s go!”

Hauling the bag behind him, he charged up the steps, and I followed, and together we climbed. The higher we went, the denser the forest got. Hotter, too. Sweat dripped from my armpits. The stone
was slick, not with rain but with humidity that made everything feel slimy, even the air. It reminded me of the fog in San Francisco, only fog chills the air, and this felt hotter than
Kayla’s mom’s sauna, even with the breeze. Moss crept over everything like a rash, oozing through the cracks in the stone. Dad kept climbing. One step. Another. Higher and higher. We
were an army of two, him and me, marching up a mountain, but not to conquer it. We were in retreat, a defeated army on the run.

A shrill, high insect whine pierced the air like a vibrating wire, growing louder and louder.
Me—, meee—, meeeeeee—
I couldn’t remember when the sound had
started. Maybe it had always been there, inside my head, only now someone had turned up the volume until my skull was throbbing like an amplifier, blasting the whine out into the world. I put my
fingers in my ears to see if I could tell whether the noise was inside or out, and Dad saw me.

“Me-me-zemi,”
⁹⁸
he said. He stopped and took out his handkerchief and used it to wipe the sweat from his eyes, and then he ran it around
his neck like he was toweling off at the gym, back when he used to go to a gym, in Sunnyvale. “It is only male ones who cry,” he said.

I wanted to ask him why, but I didn’t want to hear his answer. He tied the handkerchief around his neck and stood there, looking up into the forest canopy with a strange faraway expression
on his face.

“I remember this sound from when I was little boy,” he said. “It’s natsu no oto.”
⁹⁹

He was standing a few steps above me, and he looked really tall, and as I watched him, I thought maybe I could understand his faraway expression. Maybe it was happiness. I think my dad was
happy.

For me the happy sounds of summer were far away, too. They were the Good Humor truck and the lifeguard’s whistle and the automatic sprinkler, spitting in the twilight, and the sizzle of
ribs on somebody’s Weber, and the clatter of lemonade and ice in tall frosted glasses. It was lawn mowers and weed whackers and kids playing Marco Polo in somebody’s pool. My throat
clogged up like an old drain with these happy memories.

Ku . . . lunk. Ku . . . lunk.
Dad was climbing again. I wiped my eyes and followed. What else could I do? I had to look on the bright side and try to make the best of things. At
least Dad hadn’t hijacked the bus and driven it off the side of the mountain. At least he was still here with me, and maybe—maybe he wouldn’t leave. Maybe I could do something to
make him stay. Because even though he’d promised to come back and pick me up at the end of my vacation and take me to Disneyland, what if he didn’t? What if the special doctors
couldn’t fix him? Or what if, on the way home, the urge to die got too intense, and he suddenly had to hurl himself onto the tracks in front of the oncoming Disneyland Super Express? He
didn’t really care about shaking hands with Mickey-chan after all. How much can you really trust the promise of a suicidal father?

2.

We climbed up and up, higher and higher, not saying much, each of us busy with our own thoughts. Dad was thinking about his boyhood, and I was thinking about Dad. Do all kids
have to worry about their parents’ mental health? The way society is set up, parents are supposed to be the grown-up ones and look after the kids, but a lot of times it’s the other way
around. Honestly, I haven’t met very many adults in my life who I could call really grown up, but maybe that’s because I lived in California, where all my friends’ parents seemed
really immature. They were all in therapy, and always going to personal growth seminars and human potential retreats, and they’d come back with these crazy new theories and diets and vitamins
and visualizations and rituals and relationship skills that they tried to inflict on their kids in order to build their self-esteem. Being Japanese, my parents didn’t really care about
self-esteem, and they weren’t into all that psychological stuff, even if my dad’s friend was a psychology professor. He was nice enough, an old guy who got famous in the 1960s for doing
drugs and getting high and calling it research, so you have to figure he was a bit of a flake and probably pretty immature, too. Not that I’m an expert. I’m just a teenager so I’m
not supposed to know very much, but in my humble opinion, old Jiko is the only real grown-up I’ve ever met, and maybe it’s because she’s a nun, and maybe it’s because
she’s been alive on earth for a really long time. Do you have to live to be a hundred to really grow up? I should ask her this.

Hang on . . .

That’s what I just texted to her. I’ll let you know what she says when she gets back to me. It might be a while because it’s zazen time up at the temple. Zazen is the kind of
meditating they do there, which seems different from the California kind, or at least it seems different to me, but what do I know? Like I said, I’m just a kid.

Where was I? Oh, right, we were climbing up the steps to the temple. Damn, I really suck at this. Sometimes I think I must have ADD or something. Maybe I caught it in California. Everybody in
California has ADD, and they all take meds for it, and they’re constantly changing their prescriptions and tweaking their dosages. I used to feel really out of it because I didn’t have
any meds I could talk about on account of my parents being Japanese and not knowing a whole lot about psychology, so I just kept my mouth shut. But one day at lunch someone noticed that I never
took any pills, and Kayla had to jump in and cover for me. Actually, she outed me, but in the nicest way. She gave the kid this really superior look and said, “Nao doesn’t
need
medication. She’s
Japanese
.” I know that sounds kind of harsh, but the way she said it made it sound like being Japanese was a good thing, like being healthy or something, and
the kid just shrugged his shoulders and shut up.