The Island Dwellers Read online

  My parents asked me all the time, at first, when I was coming back. But in my second year they came to visit, flying halfway around the world, jet-lagged and preparing to be grumpy. And Japan had seduced them. Utterly. Shining sidewalks, glass and neon, spotless train stations, smiling attendants. Things that never happened to me when I was alone happened for my parents. I took them to shrines where old women offered us sweets. I took them to parks where children invited us into their soccer games. I took them to museums, and shy pretty college boys materialized, offering to translate various plaques for us. By the time I took my parents to Narita Airport to catch their flight home, they were wide-eyed with wistful awe.

  “There are a lot of opportunities here,” was all my father said. “Don’t waste them.” But my mother, before passing through customs and out of reach, gave me a hug and whispered enviously, “What a life you have!”

  * * *

  —

  IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED Iseya’s question, I could think of nothing else, though we didn’t talk about it. In the evenings when we got home from work, we made dinner together. We watched TV curled up on the couch, or played video games on Iseya’s computer. On Friday we caught the shinkansen down to Osaka to visit his college friends, and spent a night wandering through the brightly lit and pumping streets of Shinsaibashi. We went to the adult section of Donki Hote, where Iseya bought me an S&M keychain with a tiny hog-tied schoolgirl dangling from it, and I bought him a thong with the Japanese character for treasure printed over the ball-sack. Not once did either of us raise the subject, but sometimes when we were walking he’d take my hand and squeeze it, and I knew he knew what was on my mind.

  * * *

  —

  I MET PIETER FOR LUNCH on Monday, after our morning classes. I found him at the southeast exit of Shinjuku Station, since our favorite ramen restaurant was a block or so further.

  Pieter looked bad. I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly—he was well dressed as always and clean-shaven. But as we descended the long staircase toward the street, I realized what it was.

  “You aren’t talking shit,” I said.

  Pieter glanced at me. “Sorry?”

  “You haven’t said anything shitty yet. Nothing completely fucked up.”

  “We only met up five minutes ago.”

  “Yeah, that’s sixty times five, that’s three hundred shitty things you could have said.”

  Pieter considered my math. “Maybe today’s a slow day. Your lucky day.”

  I looked at him more carefully. “You haven’t slept.”

  “No.”

  “Drinking?”

  Pieter made a buzzer sound. “Wrong.”

  “All right,” I said, as we cut down an alley. “This is the part where either you tell me, or I ask.”

  I expected Pieter to make me ask so that he could be cajoled into the telling. But instead he replied, as casually as if I’d inquired about his morning class, “Hitomi tried to kill herself.” I stopped in my tracks but Pieter kept walking, so I jolted into gear again. “Yesterday. In the morning.”

  “Is she okay?”

  He shot me an irritated look. “No, obviously she isn’t okay. Obviously she is completely unhinged.”

  “But she’s alive,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Her parents’ house.”

  “You told her parents?”

  “I found her hanging in the fucking bathroom, Daniela, of course I told her parents. I can’t miss more work, and I couldn’t just tell her not to do it again and leave her alone, could I.”

  “How’d you find her in time?”

  “She kicked a glass off the counter when she was jerking around on the rope,” Pieter said with disgust. “Shattered and woke me up. Can’t even fucking hang herself properly. And this is the girl they want me to marry.”

  “Marry?”

  “She told her dad that she’s preggers.” Pieter made a face, rubbed a hand across his throat. “Thought the old guy was gonna kill me. Choking the shit out of me against the wall, the dude is an ageless ninja. Been drinking his green tea, I guess.”

  The ramen place was full with the lunch-hour crowd, and the rich smell of beef broth suddenly made my stomach uneasy. Pieter didn’t seem in a rush to enter, either. He lit a cigarette and leaned against the lamppost, blocking the sidewalk.

  “Are you going to marry her?” I asked. I couldn’t leave it alone, but Pieter didn’t seem to care. He looked relieved to be talking about it.

  “I don’t know,” he said, dragging deep. “I mean she’s a kid. Yeah? Nineteen. She can’t speak English, Daniela. She still lives with her parents when she’s not with me, she has homework, she watches anime on Sunday mornings. We can’t talk about things, what can we talk about? We don’t talk, we fuck. That’s not marriage material.”

  “But it’s your baby,” I said, not accusing, just pointing out a fact. “It might look like you. You could dress it up. Name it.”

  “Yeah,” Pieter said, surprising me again. “I think about that, too.”

  A silence, as he smoked. The crowds continued in a steady flow, people frowning from time to time as they stepped off the sidewalk to avoid colliding with us.

  “She really tried to kill herself, huh.”

  “I’m telling you, Daniela, these girls here, they’re completely crazy. Nobody does this shit back home.”

  “No,” I said, “somebody would shoot you before you even had the chance to kill yourself.”

  Pieter grinned, despite himself, and I smiled, relieved to see him smile.

  “What would you do,” he said. “You’re me. Got a ticket to South Africa and a body hanging in the bathroom. What’s your plan?”

  I tried to imagine being Pieter, tried to call up Hitomi’s face—the wide hopeful eyes, the smooth baby cheeks, the little hats she liked to wear. Instead, I saw Iseya with his sleeves rolled up, hanging wet laundry on the balcony to dry. Iseya waiting for me on the train platform, hands shoved in his pockets. Iseya singing me the Japanese songs he’d learned as a kid: “Momotaro-san,” “Kagome,” “Toryanse.” Iseya fresh out of the shower, the long lean planes of his body glistening and slippery with water. Iseya, having the guts to love a foreigner, having the patience to love her in a language that isn’t his first.

  “I don’t know,” I said at last. “I have no idea, how could I.”

  I expected Pieter to say something mocking, or something harsh, but he didn’t.

  “I know,” he said quietly. “Me neither.”

  * * *

  —

  PIETER TOOK THE REST OF the day off from work. He didn’t seem to care if they fired him or not—“What’re they going to do,” he said with weary humor, “deport me?” I left him by the south exit, next to Tower Records, and went back to teach my afternoon class. But my mind wasn’t on it, and when the kids took their break, I stepped out into the hall and called Iseya.

  “Would you move to South Africa?” I asked when he picked up.

  A silence. I could hear background noise from the street through the phone. Iseya was outside, walking somewhere.

  “South Africa,” he repeated, slowly. “Where?”

  “Pretoria,” I said, as if I’d thought about it. I hadn’t though, not until then. I’d imagined going back myself countless times, but never bringing Iseya with me.

  “To visit?” he asked.

  “To live,” I said. “Would you move there to live, if I asked you?”

  Again that silence. Cars swishing past.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “Right now?”

  “Yes, Iseya.” I was suddenly irritated. “Right now, where are you?”

  “Walking to the conbini,” he said. “Do you want a street address?”

 
Now he was irritated too. I felt that he didn’t have the right to be angry with me for posing a question he’d posed weeks ago.

  “Would we marry?” he asked at last.

  “Would it matter?”

  “Yes,” he said, “to me it would matter.”

  I glanced back into the classroom behind me. Kids sipping tea out of their thermoses, like it wasn’t a hundred fucking degrees outside. Two minutes left, by the clock on the wall.

  “If we married, then,” I said ungraciously.

  “Do you really want me to go with you?” Iseya asked.

  “Why else would I be asking you?”

  “You’re not asking me, Daniela. You’re asking what-if.”

  And he was right. And I opened my mouth to ask him, to say, “Move to Pretoria with me.” To say, “Marry me.” And the words stuck in my throat. I physically could not say them. I listened to the cars passing him on his side, and he listened to the hum of the air-con units on mine. My heart was beating so quickly I felt dizzy, and it didn’t make any sense to me, I couldn’t imagine why.

  Finally I said, and my voice was small and ashamed, “Can we talk about it tonight when I come home?”

  “Yes,” Iseya said, and I wished suddenly that I could see the expression on his face because I couldn’t read his tone at all. “If you want to.”

  * * *

  —

  PIETER WAS WAITING FOR ME at the south exit, where I’d left him. I came out of Shinjuku Station into a cool wet world, and was amazed that somewhere between catching the train and arriving here, it had started to rain. He was sitting on the steps, head bowed, but when I stopped in front of him he looked up. I was startled by the clear water-color of his eyes and the way the rain made his cheekbones shine. For a split second I wondered if I had been mistaken, if this was some other foreign man waiting for some other foreign woman. And then he quirked his mouth in that uneven half-smile and said, “Fancy meeting you here,” and it was Pieter.

  “Have a good day?” I asked. “Go shopping with the Harajuku girls?”

  He stood, shaking water out of his hair. “You don’t wanna talk about that,” he said easily. “Something happened, or you’d be on your way home to Iseya instead of calling me. Yeah?”

  I froze, momentarily paralyzed by his directness. Then I blurted, “I can’t ask Iseya to move to Pretoria.”

  To his credit, Pieter didn’t laugh. He tilted his head to one side, considering what I’d just said, water dripping from his jaw onto his saturated shirt.

  “Why not,” he said at last.

  “He wouldn’t last a day there. He has no idea what it’s like. He’s got a safe little world here, everything’s clean-clean and nice-nice. He’d be treated like shit back there, you know he would. Here he’s got a good job, people bow to him, they use all their politest verb forms—there they’d just see him as a Chinaman on the corner. That’s what they’d call him, how they’d talk to him. They wouldn’t respect him, Pieter. No one would respect him.”

  I hadn’t expected to say any of that and I stopped abruptly, feeling that strange dizziness closing in. But Pieter didn’t look taken aback.

  “Yeah,” he said, like all of that was obvious. “But why can’t you ask him?”

  I shook my head. And so Pieter answered for me, without any accusation. Just stating facts as cold and clear as the downpour.

  “Because he’ll be a burden to you. You’d have to care for him, guard him. He wouldn’t know danger signs or social cues unless you pointed them out, sign by sign. Day by day. Like raising a child. You would be responsible. For him. Always.”

  “He did that for me,” I said, sick to my stomach. “Here, in his country, he does that for me.”

  Pieter waited. The rain picked up. It felt like we were standing under a waterfall in a place very far away. And so, from the safety of that remove, I answered his unspoken question as honestly as I could.

  “I don’t lock the doors at night here. I don’t look over my shoulder. I don’t understand what’s being said all the time so I’m politer. I bow! That’s who I am here with Iseya. But when I go home…” I took a deep breath, searching for the right words. “Sometimes I’m afraid I’ll forget how to be who I am, and I’ll just keep being the person he loves. And that person is too weak to survive where I come from. The longer I’m with him, the weaker I’ll become.”

  “Just say it,” Pieter said.

  And so I said it. “I don’t want him to come.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I THINK BACK, THAT was the moment in which I betrayed Iseya. Not in what came after. I know it’s bizarre—I could have turned around right then, returned to our apartment. Iseya would have fetched a towel from the bathroom, he would have dried my hair. I would still have been the closest person in the world to him, and the barrier between us would still be yet to come.

  But when I remember it, the world divides into two parts: everything up until that moment, standing in the rain with Pieter, and then everything after. And no matter how hard I try, no matter how many alternate endings I envision for myself, it always seems to me as if the second part was derived inexorably from the first. After an admission of that magnitude, nothing could have been different from how it was.

  Pieter and I didn’t talk about it. It was something we decided, somewhere between the third bar and the fourth one, but we didn’t discuss it with words. I don’t remember what we talked about. I remember the sharp wet slope of Pieter’s throat tilted back, amber-colored beer falling lower and lower in his mug until only foam remained. I remember the bittersweet taste in my mouth: Sapporo, Kirin, Asahi. The small ceramic dishes of bar food: slices of octopus, cucumber, shreds of raw fish dressed with green onion and soy sauce. The food changed from bar to bar, but those little white ceramic dishes didn’t. In the fourth bar we sat in a corner, and I realized that it was dark outside, that it had been dark for some time, and I wondered if the rain had stopped. Pieter paid the tab, waving away my bills, and I knew he’d decided then. We’d paid halves on the other tabs. But this one Pieter paid, and later—after wandering in circles through backstreets, the rain and the alcohol and the neon blurring the world into a place of strange and beautiful colors—later, he paid for the love hotel as well.

  * * *

  —

  IT HAD BEEN TWO YEARS and eight months since I’d slept with someone other than Iseya. I remember being startled by how rough Pieter was, how demanding; Iseya was gentle, always attentive. I was amazed too by Pieter’s hair under my fingers, how light it was, the textured patches of hair on his chest. Iseya’s skin was smooth like wet stone; I had always liked running my cheek over his bare chest, feeling both the heat of his heartbeat and the slipperiness of his skin.

  The time that we spent in the love hotel is blurred when I remember it, just as our walk there was. Sometimes the memories surface as if from a strange dream, and then it seems to me as if both Pieter and Iseya were in that room together. I think I can remember the low timbre of their voices, the side of Iseya’s face. But when I woke up, a few hours later, it was Pieter and only Pieter who was asleep on his side of the bed, in an easy naked sprawl that was wholly, essentially, South African.

  He didn’t wake up when I slid out of bed, nor as I dressed. It occurred to me once or twice that he might be faking, lying very still with his eyes shut, listening to me move around the darkened room. But I don’t think he was. Iseya had been correct in his assessment of Pieter—neither nice nor kind nor generous—and it would have been uncharacteristically generous to feign sleep and let me leave. I closed the door quietly behind me, walking down the hall in bare feet, pausing only in the empty lobby to slip my shoes back on and walk out into the street.

  I didn’t know what time it was. The rain had stopped, but perhaps only just—the sidewalks still glistened. I wanted to take my cell out of
my pocket and look at the time, but when I searched for it, it wasn’t there. It must have fallen out in the love hotel, and I couldn’t go back. I didn’t know where I was, but it was somehow comforting to walk, carried along by my own momentum through the narrow streets.

  I walked until my shoes were soaked through, stopping occasionally to puzzle over street signs, but each time that hollowness roared up in my head and a wave of nausea started in my stomach. I found I was speaking to myself out loud, in a hushed whisper, and I listened to my voice with a stranger’s curiosity. “It’s okay,” I was crooning, “everything’s okay.” It took me some time to realize that I was speaking in Japanese.

  I stumbled on Shinjuku Station by accident. I looked up and there it was, a neon oasis, a humming throb of life. The southeast exit lay above me, up that lengthy flight of stairs, just as Pieter and I had left it hours ago. Japanese kids were playing soccer in the plaza, and I realized that it must be late, because otherwise a policeman would have told them to stop. Host boys draped themselves over the railings of the stairs, advertising their various clubs, the white collars of their starched shirts soaring fiercely up. One of them was foreign, his hair long and tangled around his shoulders. He didn’t seem to be on duty. He was walking quickly through the plaza, scanning the faces he passed, looking for someone.

  Nausea hit me again suddenly and without mercy. I stumbled to my knees and was sick into the gutter. I crouched there until the flowing water had washed the vomit away, then stood and wove my way unsteadily through the plaza. The escalator had stopped running, and I took the stairs slowly and carefully, both hands on the railing, until I reached the top and discovered that the trains had stopped running as well. In that moment, Iseya suddenly seemed unreachably far—beyond trains, beyond language, beyond apologies. I felt my knees give, and, crouching outside the south exit, my back against a stone column, I cried.