A Tale for the Time Being (7 page)

Obviously I’m not a samurai warrior, and nowadays ronin just means a dummy who screws up her entrance exams and has to take extra classes at cram school and study at home while she works
up enough enthusiasm and self-confidence to take the test again. Usually ronin have graduated from high school and are living with their parents while they try to get into university. It’s
pretty unusual to be a junior high school ronin like me, but I’m old for my grade, and actually now that I’m sixteen, I don’t have to go to school if I don’t want to.
That’s what the law says, anyways.

The way you write ronin is
with the character for wave and the character for person, which is pretty much how I feel, like a little
wave person, floating around on the stormy sea of life.

2.

It’s really not my fault that I screwed up my entrance exams. With my educational background, I couldn’t get into a good Japanese school no matter how much I
crammed. My dad wants me to apply to an international high school. He wants me to go to Canada. He’s got this thing about Canada. He says it’s like America only with health care and no
guns, and you can live up to your potential there and not have to worry about what society thinks or about getting sick or getting shot. I told him not to sweat it, because I already don’t
give a rat’s ass what society thinks, and I don’t have enough potential to waste time worrying about. He’s right about the getting-sick or getting-shot part, though. I’m
pretty healthy and I don’t mind the idea of dying, but I also don’t want to get mowed down by some freaky high school kid in a trench coat who’s high on Zoloft and has traded in
his Xbox for a semiautomatic.

My dad used to be in love with America. I’m not kidding. It was like America was his lover, and he loved her so much that I swear Mom was jealous. We used to live there, in a town called
Sunnyvale, which is in California. My dad used to be this hotshot computer programmer, and he was headhunted when I was three and got this great job in Silicon Valley, and we all moved there. My
mom wasn’t too thrilled, but back then she went along with anything Dad said, and as for me, I don’t have any memory of Japan from when I was a baby. As far as I’m concerned, my
whole life started and ended in Sunnyvale, which makes me American. Mom says I didn’t speak any English at first, but they stuck me in day care with a nice lady named Mrs. Delgado, and I took
to it like a fish to water. That’s just the way kids are. My mom had a tougher time. She never got the hang of English or made many friends, but she was okay with it because Dad was making
tons of money and she could buy really nice clothes.

So, everything was great and we were just cruising along, except for the fact that we were living in a total dreamland called the Dot-Com Bubble, and when it burst, Dad’s company went
bankrupt, and he got sacked, and we lost our visas and had to come back to Japan, which totally sucked because not only did Dad not have a job, but he’d also taken a big percentage of his big
fat salary in stock options so suddenly we didn’t have any savings either, and Tokyo’s not cheap. It was a complete bust. Dad was sulking around like a jilted lover, and Mom was grim
and tight and righteous, but at least they identified as Japanese and still spoke the language fluently. I, on the other hand, was totally fucked, because I identified as American, and even though
we always spoke Japanese at home, my conversational skills were limited to basic, daily-life stuff like where’s my allowance, and pass the jam, and Oh please please please don’t make me
leave Sunnyvale.

In Japan, they have special private catch-up schools for kikokushijo
³³
kids like me, who get behind in their schoolwork after spending a bunch of
years at stupid American schools while their dads are on company assignments, and then have to catch up with their Japanese grade level when their dads get transferred back. Only my dad
wasn’t on a company assignment, and he wasn’t getting transferred back. He got laid off. And it wasn’t like I’d gotten behind my grade level—I’d only ever been
to American schools, so I’d never
not
been behind. And my parents couldn’t afford a fancy private catch-up school, so they ended up sticking me in a
public junior high school, and I had to repeat half of eighth grade because I was entering in September, which is the middle of the Japanese school year.

It’s probably been a while since you were in junior high school, but if you can remember the poor loser foreign kid who entered your eighth-grade class halfway through the year, then maybe
you will feel some sympathy for me. I was totally clueless about how you’re supposed to act in a Japanese classroom, and my Japanese sucked, and at the time I was almost fifteen and older
than the other kids and big for my age, too, from eating so much American food. Also, we were broke so I didn’t have an allowance or any nice stuff, so basically I got tortured. In Japan they
call it ijime,
³⁴
but that word doesn’t begin to describe what the kids used to do to me. I would probably already be dead if Jiko hadn’t
taught me how to develop my superpower. Ijime is why it’s not an option for me to go to a stupid kids’ school, because in my experience, stupid kids can be even meaner than smart kids
because they don’t have as much to lose. School just isn’t safe.

But Canada is safe. My dad says that’s the difference between Canada and America. America is fast and sexy and dangerous and thrilling, and you can easily get burned, but Canada is safe,
and my dad really wants me to be safe, which makes him sound like a pretty typical dad, which he would be if he had a job and didn’t keep trying to kill himself all the time. Sometimes I
wonder if he wants me to be safe so he’ll feel less guilty when he finally succeeds.

3.

The first time he tried was about a year ago. We’d been back from Sunnyvale for about six months, and we were living in this tiny two-room apartment on the west side of
Tokyo, which was the only thing we could afford because the rents were so crazy high, and the only reason we could even afford that place was because the landlord was supposedly a friend of
Dad’s from his university days and gave us a break on the key money.

It was truly a disgusting apartment, and all of our neighbors were bar hostesses who never sorted their recycling and ate take-out bento
³⁵
from
7-Eleven and came home drunk with their dates at five or six in the morning. We used to eat breakfast and listen to them having sex. At first we thought it was tomcats in the alley, and sometimes
it was tomcats in the alley, but mostly it was the hostesses, although you could never be certain because they sounded so much alike. Scary.

I don’t know how to write it, but it was like
ooo . . . ooo . . . ooooh . . .
or
ow . . . ow . . . owwww . . .
or
no . . . no . . . noooo
. . .
like a young girl getting tortured by a sadist who was kind of mechanical and a little bit bored, but wasn’t ready to stop yet, either.

My mom always pretended not to hear it, but you could see by the way the skin around her lips got really pale and tight, and she ate her toast in tiny bites that got tinier and tinier until
finally she just put down the half-eaten crust and stared at it, that she could hear everything. Of course she could! You’d have to be deaf not to hear those stupid girls, moaning and
groaning and squealing like boiled kittens, with the sounds of their bare bottoms slapping up against our walls and bumping on our ceiling. Sometimes little clumps of dust and dead insects would
drop from the fluorescent light fixture and land in my milk and, like, I wasn’t supposed to say anything? My dad pretty much ignored it all, too, except when there was a particularly enormous
THUMP! and then he would lower his newspaper and look at me and kind of roll his eyes, and quickly put the paper back up before Mom noticed and got mad at him for making me lose it and snort milk
out my nose.

In those days Dad was going out every day to try to find a job, so he and I would leave the apartment together in the morning. We used to leave early so we could take the long route. It was
something we never had to talk about or plan. As soon as we were done with breakfast, we’d dump our dishes in the sink and brush our teeth, grab our stuff, and then head for the door. I think
we just wanted to get away from my mom, who was emanating a pretty toxic vibe at that time in our lives. Not that Dad and I ever discussed it. We didn’t, but we didn’t want to be around
it, either.

There was always this moment, leaving the safety of our apartment building and stepping out onto the street, when we kind of glanced at each other, then looked away. I’m pretty sure we
were both feeling the same things—guilty about leaving Mom at home alone, and helpless about going out into a world we were unprepared for—that felt totally unreal. We both looked
ridiculous and we knew it. Back in Sunnyvale, Dad was cool. He used to bike to work in jeans and Adidas sneakers and carry this styling messenger bag, and now he was dressing in an ugly polyester
blue suit and slip-on loafers and carrying a cheap briefcase that made him look conservative and old. And I had to wear this dumb school uniform that was way too small, and no matter how hard I
tried, I couldn’t figure out how to make it look cute on me. The other girls in my eighth-grade class were petite and managed to look supercute and sexy in their uniforms, but I just looked
like a big old stinky lump, and I felt like one, too. So when we left the apartment, it was this doomed unreal feeling I remember more than anything else, like we were bad actors in terrible
costumes in a play that was guaranteed to tank, but we had to go out on stage anyhow.

The long route took us through all these old neighborhoods and shopping streets and finally past a tiny little temple in the middle of a bunch of ugly concrete office buildings. The temple was a
special place. There was the smell of moss and incense, and sounds, too—you could actually hear the insects and birds and even some frogs—and you could almost feel the plants and other
things growing. We were right in the middle of Tokyo, but when you got close to the temple, it was like stepping into a pocket of ancient humid air, which had somehow gotten preserved like a bubble
in ice, with all the sounds and smells still trapped inside it. I read about how the scientists in the Arctic, or the Antarctic, or somewhere really cold, can drill way down and take ice core
samples of the ancient atmosphere that are hundreds of thousands or even millions of years old. And even though this is totally cool, it makes me sad to think of those plugs of ice, melting and
releasing their ancient bubbles like tiny sighs into our polluted twenty-first-century air. Stupid, I know, but that’s the way the temple felt to me, like a core sample from another time, and
I really liked it, and I told my dad so, and this was way before I even knew Jiko, or had spent the summer at her temple on the mountainside, or anything like that. I didn’t even know she
existed.

“You don’t remember visiting her when you were a baby?”

“No.”

“We visited her at her temple before we went to America.”

“I don’t remember anything about before we went to America.”

We walked up the path through the wooden gate. A cat was sleeping in the sun by a stone lantern. We climbed some worn steps to where Shaka-sama, the Lord Buddha, was sitting in a shadowy altar.
We stood side by side, looking up at him. He looked peaceful, with his eyes half-closed, like maybe he was taking a nap.

“Your great-grandmother is a nun. Did you know that?”

“Dad, I told you. I didn’t even know I had one.”

I clapped my hands together twice and bowed and made a wish, like Dad had showed me. I always wished the same things: that he would find a job, that we could go back to Sunnyvale, and if neither
of those wishes panned out, then at least that the kids at school would stop torturing me. I wasn’t interested in great-grandmothers who were nuns back then. I was just trying to survive on a
day-to-day basis.

After the temple, Dad would walk me to school and we’d talk about stuff. I don’t remember exactly what, and it didn’t matter. The important thing was that we were being polite
and not saying all the things that were making us unhappy, which was the only way we knew how to love each other.

When we got near the gates of the junior high school, he’d slow down a little, and I’d slow down, too, and he would look around to make sure nobody was looking, and then he would
give me a quick little hug and a kiss on the top of my head. It was the most ordinary thing in the world, but it felt like we were doing something illegal, like we were lovers or something, because
in Japan dads don’t generally hug and kiss their kids. Don’t ask me why. They just don’t. But we kissed and hugged because we were American, at least in our hearts, and then
we’d both step away really fast in case anyone was watching.

“You look real nice, Nao,” he’d say, staring over my head.

And I’d study my shoes and say, “Yeah, you’re looking good, too, Dad.”

We were totally lying, but it was okay, and we walked the rest of the way not saying anything, because if we even opened our mouths after telling such big lies, the truth might come pouring out,
so we had to keep our lips shut. But even if we couldn’t talk frankly to each other, I still liked it that my Dad walked me to school every morning, because it meant that the kids
couldn’t start picking on me until after he’d waved goodbye and turned the corner.