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| ISBN-13: | 9780897339957 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Chicago Review Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 05/28/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 239 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Too Late for the Festival
An American Salary-Woman in Japan
By Rhiannon Paine
Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 1999 Nancy RobertsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-89733-995-7
CHAPTER 1
ALL SHOOK UP
I woke suddenly in a strange bed. It was ten minutes past midnight by my alarm clock, which was bouncing up and down on the nightstand like a commercial for long-life batteries. But what time really? I counted on my fingers, trying to work out the time difference, and then gave up. In the uncurtained picture window across the room I saw my reflection go wavering across the glass, a ghost with wild dark hair and an O-shaped mouth. The hotel's luggage stand leaned forward, bowing to me, and dropped my big green suitcase on the floor.
I'm a native Californian and no stranger to earthquakes, but this was the first time I'd experienced one from the midsection of a Tokyo skyscraper. Should I get up? Get dressed? Run down twenty-two flights of stairs to get crushed under one of the ship-sized chandeliers in the lobby?
By nature, I'm not a person who springs into action. I'm more of a person who sits around and thinks. It seemed to me that if I was going to die, I might as well die in bed, so I plumped up the pillows and leaned back. I started by wondering if my friends Paul and Tessa Coleman were all right in their apartment in Mitaka. It would serve Paul right, I thought, if I got squashed into human sashimi in the ruins of the Century Hyatt Hotel, and he had to find someone else to document his software. It was his fault I was here.
"Dear Nano," Paul had written to me, five months earlier, "how can I persuade you to come to Japan and work with us as a Foreign Service Employee? How much money do you want? We need you desperately!" It was the most seductive e-mail message in my experience. I'd been a technical writer at Hewlett-Packard Company for three years and I had certainly been kept busy, but none of my managers had ever confessed to needing me "desperately." Nor had the question "How much money do you want?" been posed nearly as often as I would have liked.
Paul's message continued:
As you know, Tessa and Duncan and I have been here for a year, working on a special project for Hewlett-Packard Japan, HP's Japanese affiliate. We have a budget for a technical writer for one year, starting in April, 1985. Our SPN group will soon have almost thirty people. They are wonderful, though primarily of the male persuasion. The work should be interesting....
Managers were always telling me that our work was interesting. I always pretended to agree, sensing that an honest response, like "About as interesting as sludge," would detract from my next performance review. But I'd worked with Paul and his wife, Tessa,* for two years before they moved to Japan, and I didn't doubt his sincerity. If he thought that writing software for semiconductor manufacturers was interesting, well, he came from another planet, that was all. A planet where, at the moment, large salaries were apparently on offer.
I had just come home to Silicon Valley after a six-month leave of absence from Hewlett-Packard, which I'd spent traveling around Europe on the cheap. My checkbook reflected, with dismal accuracy, the fact that I'd earned no money for months. Visa bills that I couldn't afford to pay had started arriving from Paris cafés and London bookstores. Although relations were still cordial, the friend I was staying with was starting to hint that it would be nice if I had an apartment of my own.
And here was Paul Coleman asking, "How much money do you want?"
I wrote back, "I've just got home from Europe, Paul, remember? I've been traveling for six months and I never want to see a suitcase again unless it's stuffed with money."
"We'll give you a suitcase stuffed with money," Paul responded, explaining the Foreign Service Employee "compensation package." I roughed out a budget and calculated that in one year I could save as much as ten thousand dollars: a fortune. The most I'd ever had before was four thousand dollars. It had taken me five years to save it, and I'd just spent it all on my leave of absence.
So I had assented. I would work for Hewlett-Packard Japan for one year, starting in April, 1985. "My poverty but not my will consents," I wrote to Paul. If you have to give in, you might as well do it with a quotation from Shakespeare.
The alarm clock stopped its manic dance. The Century Hyatt Hotel rocked gently on its heels and then subsided. I slid back under the covers, but I couldn't sleep. I wasn't afraid of after shocks. I was afraid because I had come to live alone in a foreign country. I had lived in England for five years back in the seventies and I wasn't afraid then, but I didn't see England as foreign. I saw England as a grown-up United States, regal with years and dignity, a bit stodgy perhaps, but full of useful advice for us youngsters. "Wear your wellies in the rain. Speak properly. Don't be impertinent." And Europe, although more foreign than England, wasn't nearly as foreign as Japan. A German woman had stopped me on the street in Freiburg and asked me for directions. She thought I was another German. No one in Tokyo was ever going to take me for Japanese. I was going to stand out, and I don't like standing out. I like to blend in.
For many years I had cherished an image of myself as a Sophisticated World Traveler, a Citizen of the World. I was not the stereotypical American abroad, rampaging about in search of New York steak, central heating, and someone who speaks English. I wanted to be a portable person, someone who could make herself at home in any country. Plop me down in Burma or Nigeria or Costa Rica and you'd see how well I could adapt! In no time at all I would learn the language, master the culture, and make loads of wonderful friends.
So here I was in Tokyo, plopped. I was trying to be optimistic, but I had a feeling that my Sophisticated World Traveler image was going to be difficult to maintain in Japanese circumstances. I'd played a lot of roles in my thirty-seven years, some more persuasively than others. Wife of a British Merchant Navy Officer was one of my failures. My ex-husband is a thoroughly good man, but I never mastered the knack of saying, "So, darling, how's your cargo of liquefied ammonia?" as if I gave a damn. I did better as Candidate for M.A. Degree in English Literature at Liverpool University. I got the M.A., after learning how to churn out statements like, "Disbelief did not give rise to disregard; Hardy's inability to give intellectual assent to supernatural phenomena added to rather than detracted from his interest in them."
In the past few years I had learned to write shorter sentences and achieved modest success as a technical writer. Now, though, I was being asked to play not only technical writer, but also American Salary-Woman in Japan.
Living in England, I had tried hard to be English. I'd worn tweeds, drunk endless cups of tea, adopted an English accent, cultivated reserve, and never talked about money. (This was easy to do since I didn't have any.) I hadn't become English — the accent never fooled anyone but Americans — but I had changed, inside and out. "How do you feel about getting divorced?" my best friend asked me when I moved back to America. I fixed her with the look that English people give you when you ask "impertinent" questions and changed the subject.
If I were to prove similarly susceptible in Japan, I could end up in a Buddhist monastery with all my hair shaved off. Of course, Japan wasn't going to accept me the way that Britain had. Britain had held out her arms and said, Welcome home, I remember your dear grandparents, would you like to see the family albums? Japan had greeted me with a nicely judged bow, the kind you give to female foreigners of relatively low socioeconomic status. Japan would treat me with respect but would never let me forget that I was gaijin, unalterably different.
I wasn't sure what frightened me more: being different for a year, or finding out that I didn't feel different at all.
Either way, I thought, as I fell back into jet-lagged sleep, I'm going to be shaken, and by more than a minor earthquake.
CHAPTER 2A COMPANY OF DRAGONS
The next few days passed in a blur of impressions. Traffic, clouds, crowds, rain. Smells of cherry blossom, boiling noodles, tatami mats, stinky drains. The clackety-clack of passing trains; the tapping of women's high heels on pavement. In the department stores, raspberry-pink microwave ovens and lime-green refrigerators. Tens of thousands of people on the streets. I'm mildly phobic about even lightly populated public spaces, so the thousands of people were a problem. I was learning to calm myself by reciting silently a short poem by Ezra Pound — "The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough." Petals were good. Petals weren't threatening.
What else? Billboards and shop signs I couldn't read. Narrow maze-like streets lined with countless cubby-hole shops. Seafood. Lots of seafood.
A few days after the earthquake, my new colleagues gave a party for me at the Saffron restaurant in Kichijoji, a shopping district near our office in Takaido. The Saffron was in a basement. Most restaurants in Tokyo are in basements, I was to learn. There isn't room enough to put them all at street level.
Accompanied by Paul and Tessa, I walked into a warm dark room full of statues with big breasts, lanterns in amber glass, a glazed giant sea-turtle, and a selection of huge oil paintings depicting nude white women in an era when cellulite was considered sexy. "It's a Continental restaurant," Paul explained, guiding me to our table. Yes, but which continent? Over the table hung a fishnet full of shells. Atop the table, displayed on platters, were the shells' former occupants, all glazed eyes and neatly curled tentacles.
Three days in Japan and already my Sophisticated World Traveler image was slipping. I'd believed I had eclectic tastes in food because I liked foreign food in California. But the food at the Saffron restaurant bore scant resemblance to the Japanese food at "Benihana of Tokyo" in Cupertino, California. Benihana may come from Tokyo, but judging from the amount of beef he serves, he arrived in California after an extended stay in the Midwest.
I looked at the ill-favored life-forms on the table in front of me. My mind told my stomach, "This is tasty food, this is nutritious food." My stomach replied, "Shut up and get me a pizza." I don't like admitting that my stomach has more clout than my mind, but I ate so little at my "welcome to Japan" party that Miyuki Suzuki, our group's secretary, apologized for not having ordered more suitable food. In a pattern that would soon became familiar to me, a Japanese person was assuming the burden of my deficiencies.
I assured her that it didn't matter, there was plenty of food I could eat and I wasn't hungry anyway. I tried to be convincing because I liked Miyuki. She made me feel tall; I'm only five feet four, but she came just up to my shoulder. Never mind that she also made me feel old (she was twenty-four) and plain, with her flawless skin, perfect features, and wavy long black hair. She was soft-spoken, courteous, and intelligent. She had graduated from Keio, the top private university in Japan, and her English was excellent.
It seemed obvious to us Americans that Miyuki was wasted as a secretary, but in Japan in 1985, even the brightest and best-educated women took jobs as "office ladies." Miyuki didn't seem to mind serving tea to her colleagues every morning and afternoon, any more than she had minded translating my dinner speech into Japanese.
I'd rehearsed the speech, but there hadn't been time to memorize it. I had to read it. "Pati-ni-kite kurete arigato gozaimasu. (Thank you for attending this party.)" I couldn't tell whether my new colleagues understood, but they applauded politely. I bowed, sat down, and filled another bowl with rice.
"Good speech" said the young man next to me.
"Thank you."
"Nakamura," said the young man, blinking behind his black-rimmed glasses.
"I'm sorry?"
"My name is Nakamura."
He was in his mid-twenties, a small man even for a Japanese, with something nervous and alive in his face. I told him, "My name is Rhiannon-san."
Nakamura turned pink and looked away, apparently to study an oil painting in which a scantily draped woman was strenuously resisting the advances of a faun. There was something different about him, something that set him apart from the two dozen men around the table who all looked alike to me with their golden skin, black hair, dark eyes.
He turned back to me and I spotted the difference. He was the first Japanese man I'd seen who had a mustache.
"You can call me 'Yoz,'" he said.
"Really? Paul said I should call my male colleagues by their last names."
He nodded vigorously. "For most people I think that is true, but I am so different, you see! So I prefer to be called by my nickname."
"Well, okay, Yoz."
"How do you like Japan so far?"
"It's interesting. I'm learning a lot about myself." A nice self-centered answer.
"Maybe you didn't enjoy the earthquake last night." Yoz spoke English fluently, but with frequent and oddly-placed stresses. Listening to him was like taking a child armed with a pin into a room full of balloons. You never knew when a word was going to pop.
"Do you have a lot of earthquakes?" I asked. I tried to sound blase about it. After all, I'd spent most of my life on top of the San Andreas fault.
"Yes!" replied my new colleague, with enthusiasm. "One almost every day. In the old legends we have written that the islands of Japan are riding on the back of a catfish. When this so-called catfish moves his tail — boom!"
"A catfish," I repeated.
He frowned. "Some legends say, not a catfish, but ... Miyuki-safl!" He fired off a question that Miyuki answered in a soft voice. He turned back to me. "Dragon"
I was jet-lagged and very hungry. There were only four women in the SPN group: Miyuki and another secretary, Tessa, and me. All the men were strangers. Talk about your dragons! Cigarette fire gleamed in their hands. Smoke poured out of their mouths. Their speech was an incomprehensible, low-volume roar. I would never learn their names. I would never be able to tell them apart. I would not make any friends. I felt as hollow as the shells above my head.
I stood up and began to work my way around the table. I asked each man his name, repeated it, bowed, and shook his hand. They'd had enough to drink that it made them laugh, watching the face of each fellow as I reached for his hand, and I realized that I was embarrassing them because the Japanese don't shake hands, don't touch each other much and certainly don't touch strange foreign women, but it was too late, I was halfway around the table. It would be worse now to stop than to keep going.
So I kept going, under the shells, past the big-breasted statues and the oil paintings and the amber lanterns, through the smoke and the embarrassment and the shouts of laughter, and I could tell that although I was mispronouncing their names and making them shake my hand, my new colleagues weren't upset with me. My behavior wasn't proper, but they could see beyond the behavior to the impulse that had prompted it. They agreed, it seemed, with E.M. Forster. "Only connect."
I sat down again. I felt flushed and dizzy, as if I had walked a lot farther than around a restaurant table.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Too Late for the Festival by Rhiannon Paine. Copyright © 1999 Nancy Roberts. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
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