Moeko Fujii

    Someone once told me that the Shibuya Scramble intersection is organized chaos, a piece of Tokyo at its unrehearsed best. In the sidewalks, crowds of black wind and hair wait. The red traffic-light man waits too. Vehicles cross and rush, and still. Green-blue lights flicker on in every crossroad. Then comes pedestrian paradise.



    Strip the Shibuya Scramble intersection of all activity, and there are two major roads, forming a giant black X. Draw a square tightly around the X, creating four white isosceles triangles. Welcome to Shibuya. These four white triangles represent the stores that lead fashion for Tokyo. Crossing the triangles, from one store to the next, requires a strip of white zebra lines: a white diamond square upon the middle of the black X—or, in other words, a run-of-the mill pedestrian intersection.



    But this is Japan. 250,000 hurried people cross this intersection per day, all in pursuit of lost time. It makes little sense for them to follow the outline of a square when they can cut straight across. Instead, when the green lights flicker on, 2,000 people cross in 35 seconds, moving directly or diagonally. The scrambled crossway system routinely stops all traffic. This is the mechanics of the Shibuya Scramble: This is pedestrian paradise.









    Apparently, the system itself can be traced to a Denver-based traffic engineer with slight Methodist leanings, and his curious daughter who jay-walked often on her way to school. Henry Barnes hated the normal traffic procedures for intersections. He thought pedestrians needed voodoo charms or four-leaf clovers to escape accidents. He also did not believe in bothering God with problems he could fix on his own, as he states in his autobiography, The Man with the Red and Green Eyes. So he reintroduced an earlier concept: the scrambled traffic crossing.



    Barnes’s first trial run for the Scramble was in September 1951. He slept for an hour and a half in a car parked near the trial intersection—a restless sleep. He had to succeed, or else it was an unpaid trip back to his rural Colorado hometown. The mayor and the city council of Denver had long supported motorists’ votes over those of pedestrians. Barnes was determined to tilt the odds in favor of the two-legged.



    Yet when the trial began, and metal cars locked into position, framing the intersection on all four sides, there were very loud honks. The street froze. Pedestrians didn’t know what to do and scuttled at the curb. Both man and motor stalled, and crowds began to form. A few people hurried across the streets the normal way, straight across, from one white triangle of the X to the other, armed with newspapers and extended arms. Barnes held his breath, along with the newspapermen, whose pens were poised to report the sad failure of the traffic engineer.



    But the adventurous ladies of Denver started to experiment with their newfound freedom. They crossed diagonally, forwards, backwards, dashing back and forth. One of them got so carried away that she thumbed her nose joyfully at motorists as she finished her sixth diagonal crossing. By the end of the day, according to City Hall reporter John Buchanan, people were so happy with the new intersection that they were dancing in the streets. Cars stopped yelling, and the wait for traffic was reduced, thanks to the new system now baptized the “Barnes Dance.”



    50 years and 5,000 miles from Denver, people dance with unrehearsed precision in the Shibuya Scramble. They are masters of utmost control. Pedestrians religiously adhere to traffic laws, and there are no mad dashes into traffic. The Japanese have eliminated the search for lost time.



    In Shibuya, the pedestrian scramble—the Barnes Dance—works, as 2,000 people converge on the small crossing at once. Without large volumes of people, the Scramble actually has negative effects. It wastes time for motorists, and studies show that it increases the level of accidents, because drivers in a hurry use pedestrian time to fly across seemingly deserted streets. Without a crowd, there is no use for the Scramble. “The Barnes Dance was a waltz,” writes Barnes in his memoir. Until forty years ago, however, its Japanese equivalent was largely a waltz without dancers, today’s crowds.



 



    In 1968, a young man with a poet’s eyes but a businessman’s spine walked up and down the suburban valley of Shibuya. Shibuya, until the early 1970s, was a prosperous part of suburbia, a railway terminal on the way to the more popular Shinjuku or Ginza. Many referred to Shibuya as “Tokyu Town” due to the famous Tokyu department store, which catered to wealthy, middle-aged patrons shopping for high-end products and electronics.



    This young man’s name was Seiji Tsutsumi, and he was the head of Seibu Department Stores. In five years, this scion of one of Japan’s wealthiest families would transform “Tokyu Town” into “Seibu City,” molding this nondescript, distinctly middle-aged neighborhood into a glittering temple of fashion and youth.  



    Seiji Tsutsumi wasn’t your typical Japanese business magnate. He was terrible at golf, for one, and he wrote poems until 3 a.m. each night. All he owned was a chain of department stores, a tiny fraction of the all-encompassing Tsutsumi business empire. But what he lacked in a traditional business background—he had been a student revolutionary and Communist in his youth—he made up for by reading the pulse of Japan’s future. Tsutsumi understood that the post-war generation of savers and purse-counters had now become parents, and that their children—an influx of baby boomers with no memory of war—were starting to spend. And he managed to diagnose their collective cry for individuality, which served as the source for his next project: a PARCO in Shibuya.



    PARCO was a boutique-style department store that emphasized individuality for a generation that, according to Lesley Downer’s biography The Brothers, had “everything they could possibly want.” Instead of electronics Tsutsumi sold fashion, and instead of sturdy home goods he sold an image, one that, though fleeting, defined personalities and advocated a certain lifestyle. Tsutsumi became patron to the avant-garde, the experimenters, the youth who would detract from tradition to become artists and writers willing to be “unaccepted.” He capitalized on the sense of alienation and the loss of identity pervasive among many who felt themselves to be no more than human cogs in what was becoming the banking and industrial capital of the world. He advocated taste and glamour and an aesthetic that could be found in, say, French fashions and cuisine.



    By the time he was done, Shibuya typified modernity for Tokyo. He filled the white isosceles with glamour instead of suburbia. By the 1980s, instead of middle-aged matrons, it was well-dressed, chic Japanese men in ponytails who flooded the Shibuya Scramble, accompanied by thin girls dressed in modish black. A brilliant advertisement agent for PARCO, the young Kiyomi Kuragami, built the image of PARCO itself. In one of her most iconic commercials, Oscar winner Faye Dunaway, her black lace veil covering a face of sophisticated perfection, spends a long, sensuous minute cracking, unpeeling, and eating a hard-boiled egg. Her dry voice-over pronounces, “This is a film... for PARCO.” In another commercial, a French ac-tress, Dominique Sanda, smokes, glitter coating half of her face. In a voice-over, a male narrator states, “She is a mother. She is an actress. She is Dominique Sanda. PARCO.” Both are close-ups. Both women are alone.



 



    A profound sense of alienation pervades Seiji Tsutsumi’s literary work as well. Perhaps it’s be-cause of his constant battle of identity between poet and businessman. Perhaps it was the student within him who had rallied for communism, grappling with his present position as the head of a burgeoning capitalist empire. His prose is powerful, gripping, and bleak. The brutal, confessional style that defined the postmodern Japanese literary novel is apparent in many of his autobiographical works of fiction. In an excerpt from a poem entitled “Letters from America,” he describes his loneliness:



 



   * People line up who have forgotten they*



*        were once created by people and*



*        flow like magnetic sands on a magnet.*



*    There, on the continent that was*



*        proclaimed to be new, love is no*



*        more than a crudely fashioned*



*        machine.*



*    I, like you, am alone and drink salt in the*



*        dawn.*



*

*



    In the Shibuya Scramble, people continue to line up in crowds, flowing like streams of sand on a magnet. It is controlled chaos, restlessness expressed through consumer goods. The customers Tsutsumi attracted in pursuit of self-recognition coalesce, and combine, in the crowd.



    In 2008, a truck ignored a red light and ran over five pedestrians in a crossing in Akihabara, between Chuo Way and Aoyama Crossing. People at the scene thought it was a traffic accident, and rushed over to help. Then Tomohiro Kato, the driver, got out of his truck. He approached the men and women aiding the victims and took out a combat knife.



    He was dressed in a black t-shirt and off-white trousers. After years of perfect grades and filial obedience, Kato stabbed 14 people and ran away into the crowd, screaming. A young police officer grasping a gun told him to drop his knife, or he would shoot. In a land where gun homicide deaths are in the single digits, the knife dropped before the gun.



    The Akihabara Massacre took place on a pedestrian paradise: a scramble. The police cancelled the scramble for weeks. To prevent imitators, they said, blaming the system instead of the individual. When webs are so thickly intertwined, it is hard to pick apart each of their lines.



    In the midst of a crowd, Kato felt his impermanence. He had outlined his plan in minute detail on an internet forum before carrying it out: He said he considered himself lower than trash, because at least trash gets recycled. “If it had been me, I would have smashed into the Shibuya Scramble,” someone commented on another online forum the day of the massacre. “Too many people,” replied Anonymous. Two other users streamed videos from the scene of the crime. Cars. Ambulances. Fire engines. Green tarp to cover the bodies. For ‘Lyphard,’ one of the U-streamers, it was all very exciting, as for the thousands who watched online.



    A minor novelist immediately churned out a parallel story. A character types on an Internet forum that he is going to drive into the Shibuya Scramble, because he wants to kill to gain attention. The book title states, in black letters on thick, white paper: It Didn’t Matter Whom. Kato later testified that he had written on the forum not to gain attention, but because he wanted the police to stop him. The book received disappointing reviews.









    A red man blinks at all crossing points, warning pedestrians to get off the streets, as motor traffic starts to flow again. Thirty-five seconds later, he turns green. Every ninety seconds, it all repeats.

“That’s how high it came,” the lady says, pointing at a faint brown line drawn straight by the waves, high across the exterior of her broken house. She gives us water and lukewarm orange juice, and we do our work. 



The woman’s fake eyelashes caught my attention as I dug away the mud. Half of them were still clinging on, although most of those remain- ing were half-hearted in their fight, drooping in strange angles from the side of her eyes. She was in her late twenties, and she was there for a week. As we carried back the sacks of dirt back to the white, beaten-up truck, she told me that her arms and thighs were sore from all this carrying. Usually she was a stylist, and she picked out clothes for wealthy women in Shinjuku. She was also known as the one who had the portable air shampoo. When evening came, women flocked around her large orange suitcase. One by one we took turns to sink the prongs on top of the air shampoo bottle into our hair. Water wasn’t running in the tsunami regions, then. 



With her holding the other edge, I concentrate first on removing the tatami. The straw mats are light when dry, but hard to get rid of when sodden with seawater. Too delicate to remove by machine, but too heavy for easy human removal, tatamis were usually one of the last pieces of debris left in tsunami areas. I was too weak to carry it alone. Thin slabs of tatami dotted the beaches of fish- ing villages, attracting flies. Sometimes, a tatami would split in the middle of a removal, presenting a mass of maggots and dirt wriggling at your feet. 



The ground left after a tsunami has a fine, gritty texture, dried dirt peppered with slivers of plastic and wood. We all try to move efficiently. I scrape away at the first layer, rubber strips peeling away from the metal of my shovel. Mud from the bot- tom of the sea bed, hugging asagao plants and tomato plants in the garden. I throw the dirt into a sandbag. There is just so much sludge. At first, teams talk amongst each other, commenting on the thickness of the toxic waste, the photographs. But after a while, we drift into silence. 



When we left Tokyo for the tsunami-stricken regions in the north, the bus stalled, waiting for a man to run on. He was a salaryman, 30 or so. He carried a big duffel bag over his Comme de Garçons suit and shirt. Snug in his arms were metal lined boots, minted fresh, and he slung his regular bag to his back so he could carry the duffel bag with convenience store food in his arms. As he sat and the lights dimmed on the bus, he muttered apologetically that he had to finish something overtime. No one really heard him, and the bus left for the north. 



II 



Aftershocks are fairly dependable and predict- able, unlike earthquakes. Their occurrence and magnitude follow certain empirical laws, and the number of aftershocks can be trusted to de- crease in time. In 2011, in the month of March alone, 2941 aftershocks rippled through Japan. Ten days after the main shock, there were only a tenth the number of aftershocks that rocked the island on the day of the quake. The release of the energy resulting from the fracturing of rocks relieves the stress at the earthquake’s focus, but also transmits the energy to nearby rocks. This causes new stresses in rocks, stress that had never existed before. 



When I left there was a big debate going on about whether young people should even go to the north to help out. Stereotypical disaster guilt. Fresh-eyed volunteers would arrive in a disaster spot just to leave a few days after, to satisfy their own need to help out. Going home to Tokyo, chanting that they had done what they could, and promptly forgetting whatever they had seen, except to humbly mention that that they had been there and had tried to help. Pundits argued. Newspapers proclaimed that the youth were apathetic. Groups on college campuses rallied and sent busloads of their students up north to retaliate. Loads of volunteers kept on pushing their way to the grimy truck heading back home, and girls in makeup back home played guessing games to figure out whether that last aftershock was a 4.5 or a 5.0. Why go. Why stay. Why leave. Why do we remain? 



In April my mom drove me to the big Costco out in Makuhari and bought me a good sturdy jacket and dozens of air masks—she tried some on herself, noting that the air in the north was toxic, according to national television—and heavy boots, and a duffel bag full of dried food. I asked around and found myself accidentally at a Peace Boat gathering, an organization that usually ships students around various continents on a big cruise ship to volunteer for a meaningful experience. They suspended their usual activities and were organizing volunteers to go help out with tsunami relief efforts. I wasn’t sure about the meaningful experience but they were the only organization that took those under the legal age—twenty. So I sold my so-called interpretive skills, and was told that I could be helpful, since there were a lot of foreigners helping out. I was on a bus the next day. 



After the earthquake in Tokyo I heard dozens of stories about what it was like in the north. Don’t tear the photographs of boys in sodden bowl cuts, stories stamped and sodden. You will meet people who had seen cars being dragged along six foot waves, filing up with water, with people in- side them. Women who had to leave their bedrid- den parents on the ground floor as they escaped upstairs with their children. How fast it must have seemed, to run up the stairs, and leave a lifetime of photos behind. A few minutes of warn- ing. And troops, troops of volunteers, stamping across toxic mud. The famous flying bus, lifted up into the sky by the waves and balanced on top of two twelve story buildings. Volunteers march- ing with Kodaks and Nikons. Tetanus, through a thin sneaker, by kitchen knives sharp and still hidden in the mud. 



III 



When I went back three years later, everything had changed. The streets were cleared of rubble, and I couldn’t find a trace of mud. The gargantuan towers of car metal and truck were gone. I visited the headquarters of one of the local news- papers. Their building looked half-done. It was spanking new on the bottom and old and wave- torn on top. 



I entered their machine room in the basement, led by a reporter who had been in the building the day of the quake. There were three printing presses, all of which went under a few minutes after the shaking. As their basement filled with water, the newspapermen were silent, and they clung to the windows on the highest floor of the building. They saw cars and trees pass. As soon as the black water receded, they would go down and survey the damage. They would divide into teams and go out to their neighbors to record, as quickly and accurately as possible, the typeface information: the number of dead, the locations of shelters and those still living. But their only means of doing so was underwater, and their ink was staining the mud of the sea. 



So the bureau chief bit his lip and unfurled a man-sized roll of paper—thankfully, the paper for distribution was stored on the second floor— and took out a big fat marker. The newspaper- men looked at each other, and they watched as their chief hauled and balanced his big body over the clean white expanse of machine-use pa- per. He drew a shaky box on the right side with the marker. Inside it, he wrote: 



March 11th. 2011. The pen squeaked. 



He kept on writing: numbers, figures, locations. The junior bureau chief took over when his hand was tired, and the next junior member after that. A fifty-year old Japanese man’s handwriting is not the most legible thing in the world, but it had to do. By the next day half of the bureau wielded markers and pens, while the other half were out gathering information. Beats, jurisdictions, as- signed topics—assignments and who-wrote-what didn’t matter anymore, as half a dozen reporters collaborated on one handwritten article. On one sheet, a sentence would break off, and the thick, tired dashes of a masculine hand would twist into the thinner swoops of a female reporter. With no backshift, mistakes were crossed out in red ink. This is how they did it before, they told each other, as they took shifts to prevent cramping. This is what we have to do. As soon as a sheet was finished they sent a runner to pin it on the bulletin boards of relief shelters. 



A week passed until they were able to find a print- ing press that worked. Three years later, the first sheets that they had hand-written were on their way to Washington D.C., to be preserved for posterity. On one of the sheets were lists of names, 



names of those who were in a specific relief shelter. “There were too many who passed,” the bureau chief said. He pointed to a few names writ- ten by a shaky, smudgy hand, and told me with an embarrassed smile that that was his writing. “At that point, it was more important to chronicle the living.” But the living names would go unrecognized in D.C. And soon the living beings those names represented would pass, and then the paper would simply be paper. 



IV 



There’s a blue bridge that crosses into a wide street next to my house in Tokyo, and the river is lined for a mile with persimmon trees. A name- less man planted them after the war, and when you bike down the street, every other tree flashing by would be a thick persimmon tree, followed by a cherry blossom tree. Come autumn, thick, waxy leaves bundling orange persimmons would collect on the gravel roads, and come April, drudges of pink-brown blossom petals would line the concrete encasing the river, and stink. 



One April afternoon after the quake I crossed over the bridge on my bicycle, heading home from school. I heard the whirring of a bicycle behind me, and a man’s voice saying that I had dropped something, stop. So I stopped and the man’s voice came closer, and I felt something, a petal maybe, touch the back of my neck. But it was the man’s finger, and he was asking, “What color is it?” 



And I answered with a rush of adrenaline and my foot stamped on the pedals, but his arm was wrapped around the head of my bicycle, his thumb on my brakes. The light touch moved from my neck to my collarbone. With that I swung my leg off my bike, surprisingly easily, and I started to run. I wondered if they recognized what was going on. The grandmothers in motorbikes, buzzing along in their white, plastic helmets. The boys playing with insects on the gravel. The pastel colored houses snug right next to each other, pushing bicycles and schoolgirls through their narrow streets. Middle-aged couples talking to their pets. Looking up, then look- ing down. 



I reached the front gate of my house, and his voice turned into an image. He was on a slender red sports bike, and he wore a yellow shirt. He was waving at me, and his grin blended into a white flash as he sped past. “I’ll see you again!” he said. The police came to my house and asked if I was wearing a skirt while I was riding my bi- cycle. A week later I left for the north. 



In the morning we had camp-wide morning exercises, radio calisthenics. Just like the old days. We spreaded out evenly across the university yard and picked our patch of grass. Then we swung our arms and stretched in unison to the rasping music from the radio. Most of us had been do- ing this since we were children, and our limbs swung automatically to the coordinated routine. The elderly do it to keep their memory fresh, and every time I swung my arms to the crackling I remembered with a laugh that my grandpa said he liked it because the Americans had banned it for a while, because it was too militaristic. One of the veterans led the radio calisthenics, though it doesn’t really need leading, as we all knew the routine anyway. He sported a black jacket and a black square mask and black boots. He lugged around a black megaphone, and—I checked— he had a black tent. 



There was a system of hierarchy, at least in the place where I was, which was the makeshift camp for Peace Boat in a local university. The man with the black leather jacket held the pow- er, because he owned the fleet of buses and vans that transported mud, food, debris, and water. Anyone who stayed longer than two weeks was called a veteran. 



Many would stay, accepting a new skin of dirt and donated food. But most would leave. And every Monday, the bus would leave and a pile of a line of unpopular ramen and beans would be carefully left in a big cardboard box, and veterans would swarm around the pile, picking up favorites from the fresh plastic debris. 



V 



While we ate, we talked. There was a big communal stove, and we dumped our ramen near it, while a veteran would find a big pot. 



Do you know the story about Kikosama and the 



scandal about how she bullied our Empress into mental breakdown? That’s why she won’t have any more children, poor woman. 



One time my boy got home and realized that he didn’t have his key to open the door. So— this is what he says, I can’t believe I wasn’t there to see it—he climbed up the fence and scaled the wall to our third floor window, which he knows is usually open, through using his ties as rope! 



So this happened to my friend, Saori. She was on the elevator one day and a man came in with a cellphone and a cap. Saori was looking at the mirror and he had come in and his cell- phone light flashed. She looked at him, and of course she said “Wait,”—matte, stop, wait, don’t move—“Did you just—” 



And the elevator door dinged and it was the first floor. With a shrug she walked out but before she did, she tripped. She tripped on his shoe, an oversized white shoe with two velcro pads, and dropped her bag. And then he ran out of the elevator and knelt down beside her. “Are you hurt?” he said. He ran two fingers, two surprisingly clean fingers, she said, up her forearm. And there they stayed. She looked at him and he looked at her, and she felt how nervous he was, and it scared her, she said. And then he said again, “Are you hurt?” and she ran. 



But the police of course did nothing and her parents decided not to change apartments. And then he came again. And his knife grazed her skirt and she knew she had to leave somehow but he pressed the button, B1, to the basement garage. Saori told me then that as she pressed herself against the cold linoleum, as he cut off the but- tons of her blazer, she thought about all those times when she had been grasped on the elbow by a scout from a modeling agency in Shibuya. She would be walking with her friends and they would appear from nowhere but they would have those voices, and of course you would say no— fathers, you know, hate that kind of thing—but you would take their company card and show it to the girls the next morning and complain that another one of those scouts had assaulted them on the street the other day. But somehow this wasn’t like that and she was actually scared be- cause the man’s pants were yellow. They were chemically yellow at the hems, stained yellow with chalk, and rode low on his hips, baggy like a construction workers’. And he was now taking off her socks, and putting them into his pocket. She didn’t resist because she had heard they let you off easy that way. The elevator wasn’t moving though. He’d noticed too. He banged the elevator door and the doors jolted like they were answering but our trusty Mitsubishi elevators don’t really work that way. He pressed the B1 button again. The elevator was too narrow. She’d told the police, hadn’t she, she’d done everything right. And they had said everything was going to be all right, nodded to her parents, and bowing, of course, they had left the apartment. 



And everything was going to be alright, though Saori hadn’t known it then, doesn’t really know it now, she says. The elevator had stopped on the first floor and a woman with her dog had come in and screamed and the man with the yellow pants had run out, leaving the knife and Saori on the floor. The woman rode with Saori down to B1 and up to the seventh floor where Saori’s mother had been waiting with her dinner and her piano lesson. And then Saori’s parents decided to change apartments. 



Did you watch the new Ghibli movie? I’m so jealous, I love Porco Rosso, can’t stand Spirited Away, thinking about re-watching Nausicaa again. Let’s watch it tonight, my computer still has a bit of battery left. Don’t call me otaku, I’m not like that, more like obsessed, more obsessed than too obsessed, you know. You know. 



They say that the next earthquake will hit Tokyo within the next five years. 



You wouldn’t believe it but I think I might want to stay here for a little while longer. 



 



I left after a month, and returned to the rhythm of my life in Tokyo, feeling the shiver of the ground underneath my feet. Out in the universe, even mud shines beautifully. 

  I found out I was a man when I was nine years old.



Next to a small woodpile deep in the mountains of Kobe, my grandfather grasped my hand and put a centipede on my wrist.



“Take it,” he said. If I hadn’t smiled at its 100 orange legs, if I had recoiled instead, then maybe ten years later I would have been on that plane from Logan Airport, running towards his hospital. But when the bug coiled, my arm calmed, and I cupped the centipede, feeling my palm warm. I asked if it was poisonous.



“Men are not afraid of bugs,” he said.



So I shed my girlhood for ten long summers, and sat in my dorm room at the age of twenty, getting ready to take a bath, as my grandfather went on dying.



 



 



“Catch a flight immediately after your test, then. He’s stable right now.” My mother’s voice echoed on the tiles. Her piano-teacher voice. “Are you sure?” I said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Call me if anything changes.”



 



 



I set my phone down, and walked to the bathroom to fill the bath with water and set the temperature to scalding, boil-a-lobster hot. I sat naked on the white cold tile floor. My ass numbed as I waited. This was part of being a man, being able to stand the heat. This was part of being the eldest of five granddaughters, and being the only son. I dug my feet into the water, my toes leaping from it without my consent. Soon my feet lost feeling and I inched my thighs in, clenching both sides of the bath for their cold support. I watched my body swell, pinked, my skin crying. I lathered. Every summer after Kobe, my mother used to try to scrape the tan off my skin, to expose the warm whiteness of woman. She would sweep my rail body with its lack of fat or breasts, her hard fingers pinching my chin left and right as she scuffed my neck. I was burned, tarnished. Eventually she taught herself Photoshop and used that to bleach my skin.



 



 



My mother was the only one who never accepted my manhood. But even she did not make a sound when my grandmother wrapped up my long thick hair and snipped right under my ear with her gray pearl-handed sewing scissors until the rest of my hair was the same length as my bangs. She was looking at her stomach, her chin from that angle crumpling in unexpected elderly folds.



She left the room as my grandmother told me to join my grandfather. He was cutting wood.



 



 



*** 



 



My grandfather liked simple things. He wore the same sweat-stained baseball hat on his head for 22 years, but he married a woman who likes to cover her long, white fingers with amethysts. A single flaw mars her hands: an index finger crooked at the first joint to the right, bent permanently in the angle at which she pinches her embroidery needle.



 



 



Their house is filled with dozens of tapestries of embroidered cloth, not Bible verses or proverbs but explosions of vicious color, fierce shrimp and fields of flowers and dancing children and red Noh masks and castles in Scotland. She started one every time my grandfather left for a business trip, and he framed each one once he got back. Tens of thousands of stitches formed neat silk bandages over clean white cotton.



 



 



A few years after he resigned from his job as the vice president of a metalworking company, he started learning Korean with a female Korean tutor. A few months later, my grandmother caught him trying to sneak out of the house with the second-floor air conditioner.



That was when my grandmother accused him—for the first time—of having an affair.



 



 



“It’s summer,” he said. “Her children need it, and they don’t have the money to buy one. No one was using ours, anyway.”



 



 



“I don’t accept that,” my grandmother said.



 



 



I knew instinctively that he was innocent. My instinct was supported by more than the childish belief in the faithfulness of grandparents, stronger by far than the belief in the faithfulness of parents. The idea was that if they had lasted for 50 years in the prime of their lives, they had basically mastered the art of overcoming anything that could break them apart. I knew because he once said that the man of the family could not be weak, because others were.



 



  *** 



 



In kabuki theatre, men who play women are called* onna gata*. *Gata* means mold, an example to follow. The delicate, settled gestures of kabuki men who play samurais’ wives, the lovelorn daughters of merchant families, or Yoshitsune’s mother are cast as the highest examples of form and motion for women to shadow. Successful kabuki actors are immortalized for their craft in “femininity,” and are often heralded as national treasures. Yet when women play men, they are called *otokoyaku*. *Yaku* means role, and connotes a kind of show. In the Takarazuka Revue—formed as an all-female counter movement to Kabuki 100 years ago—*otokoyaku* waltz on stage with four-inch heels, silver glitter eye shadow, and a seven-foot-tall feathered peacock tail harnessed to their backs. Their masculinity is an artificial interpretation, in which supposedly ideal male characteristics—constant declarations of love, chivalry, and honor—are acted out on stage. Audiences and fan groups are overwhelmingly women.



 



 



In the bath, I recall a page from a Takarazuka magazine that I used to subscribe to about a prominent Takarazuka actress. She had chain-smoked her voice to gravel from the age of fourteen, lowering it to the optimum male pitch, a feat made more impressive by the fact that she remained disgusted by smoke. She signed an agreement that detailed that when she married, or entered anything that could be taken as a sexual relationship—this included talking to anyone who was not a brother or a father in any personal or private setting—she would have to resign. She applied as an *otokoyaku*, cropped her hair, and watched Marlon Brando movies, absorbing male mannerisms. After 25 years of daily ballet training, singing lessons, and a grueling professional career on stage, she left the company to follow the musical troupe’s motto: “Takarazuka men become good wives and wise mothers.”



 



 



“At least I’m a woman,” I said one summer, following a dinner during which my grandfather had told one of his war stories. My mother was drying a kettle with my aunt and my grandmother. We had a little assembly line going on, and I was in charge of suds.



“Oh, are you one, now?” My mother took a white plate and raised it to the light. She then returned it to my basket, to wash again. “Tell me, exactly, how are you a woman?” My aunt laughed, and my cousins looked at me, washing carefully. 



 



  *** 



 



My grandfather used to go to the bathhouses with the workers from his father’s coal mine in Pyongyang and scrub their backs with soaped cloth just as roughly as they scrubbed his. He and his six younger sisters were born and raised outside of Japan as part of the colonization project in the Korean peninsula. My great-grandfather, along with ten other Japanese employees, oversaw hundreds of Korean workers, and sent coal for the war effort.



 



 



Near the company houses, there was a steam bathhouse, a tennis court, a swing set, and a makeshift baseball field. In winter he would skate on frozen rice paddies, and on his way home from the bathhouse, his wet towel would quickly harden into slabs of cloth ice. On sunny days, young Korean girls took turns swinging themselves high up into the air, their skirts flying in streaks of red. He took care not to watch.



 



 



My grandfather did not doubt that Japan would win the war. His father enlisted in the military, so my grandfather dreamed of joining the air force. Naturally, he skipped school with his friends most days to go to the aviation base, camouflaging planes with grass.



 



 



On August 15, 1945, my grandfather’s best friend told him that there was going to be a big announcement on the radio. My grandfather assumed that Japan was going to declare war on the Soviet Union. They gathered in the makeshift baseball field and stood to attention as the announcer told all citizens to rise.



 



 



At first, he did not understand the radio address. The radio waves were weak, the voice unsteady, using honorifics that were beyond his sixth-grade comprehension. The voice spoke soft and high, resembling that of his mother.



 



 



It was the voice of the emperor. He told them that the war was lost, that he had agreed to an unconditional surrender. That he was no longer god, but a man, just a man. They sat on the sand mound in the baseball field, and the swings were still, although the sun beat down on their necks. No one moved, but even the heavens were changing.



 



 



For a year, his family worked in the mines. Their belongings were taken and distributed among their former workers, or burned. They lived where they had housed the Koreans, where the red clay walls that invited the wind. The temperature dropped below -33 degrees Celsius. He carried pieces of heavy rail and lumber to the station and back in endless loops, tracing the steps and paths made by the friends who used to teach him Korean songs, laugh at his accent, and give him cigarettes while they all waited for his father to finish his turn in the bathhouse. These men now called him dirty, as he had teased them a year ago. One wore his father’s best coat.



 



By 1947, it was time to leave his homeland. It was past time. They had started to hear rumors of Japanese colonists killed by Soviet troops, by the Chinese, by the Koreans, all of whom were heading steadily south from the north. The Soviets were going to close the 38th parallel, and soon. His father started to make plans for the family to cross the parallel into American territory without him, before the border closed. His father would be forced to continue working in the Korean mines for a decade.



 



One day, my grandfather saw a blonde woman in a red dress standing with an officer on the station platform. She was tall, laughing, using her height to scan for someone in the crowd of troops. The officer’s chin dipped as he looked at her. My grandfather tried not to watch as he continued to walk on, hauling his rail to the mine where there was no color.



 



Each repatriate had a moment of realization that Japan had truly and irrevocably lost the war. For some, it was the radio address. For my great-grandmother, it was when she saw ashes instead of Tokyo. For my grandfather, it was seeing the blonde woman in the red dress, waiting on his station’s platform.



 



In the end, there was no safe way to cross the 38th parallel. My grandfather’s family and a few other Japanese families hired a boat to get to the south by sea, deciding to risk routine checks by Korean and Soviet troops who had prohibited any Japanese from crossing the border. When they got on the boat, his mother handed my grandfather the baby, his infant sister.



 



“Please take her,” she said. She then guided his sisters to the crates they would hide in for the five-day trip.



 



He carried his sister to his crate. He knew what this meant, what he had to do. What only he could do, because their father wasn’t with them anymore. When she cried. When Korean soldiers knocked on top of his crate, checking for warm bodies, listening for living sounds. He looked at his sister’s pink, cold nose pressed against his chest.



 



Her mouth was barely the size of his thumbs pressed together.



 



 



*** 



 



I got out of the bath and wrapped a towel slowly around my breasts. I fumbled in my dark room to my desk and took out a piece of notebook paper, folded in four, which I had stuck in my wallet. I hadn’t opened it since last summer, when my grandfather was in remission, when the steam was still curling in my hair and he had pushed a glass of orange juice towards me and told me to write down everything he said. On the paper were the names of a generation of men and women who left their childhood behind to raise a country out of ashes. And then there was me. I had finished my orange juice; my grandfather told me to go upstairs and sleep.



 



***



 



 



When I arrived, everyone was getting ready for the fu- neral, occupying the two rooms on the second floor of my



grandparents’ house: The women’s room and the men’s room. My room was full of strangers, except for my sister. She was looking in the mirror, tying up her hair. My sister, the daughter who knows before being told that she should divide her favorite type of cake into four, and that she should take the smallest piece.



“Why weren’t you here?” she said.



“What? I had a test, how could I know, dad told me I should stay in Boston.”



“You know he asked for you. He asked for you, he wouldn’t stop, he just sat there on the hospital bed connected to all these wires and asked why you weren’t there, kept on saying your name, like I wasn’t even there—”



My chin is almost on my chest, I feel so tired. Take it, take the centipede, its not poisonous; you just have to look at it carefully. Where did it go? You should’ve taken better care of it.



“I’m sorry, okay, I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I wanted to be there.”



“Try telling him that,” she said, and retied her ribbon. If only I were a girl who cried. I get up and leave the women’s room, to stand in the hallway between the two rooms. On the roof, the cicadas scream and call, and soon I am calm, but not quiet.