Tomo Read online

  “Just scrounge up some blank pages, then. I’ll steal a pen from the clipboard the doctors bring in.” I say this unkindly, a terseness in my voice. It surprises me, this rancor, a tone with which I have never spoken to my mother. But that it does not surprise my mother—she does not flinch or even blink—surprises me even more. She does not reprove me but merely takes in my harsh tone quietly.

  When she leaves, her footsteps clipping down the corridor, a nudge of guilt nestles into my ribs. My curtains are undrawn, and I stare at my dim reflection. Beyond my reflection, the city lies dormant and blackened; only a scattering of lights outside breaks the canvas of darkness. But it is my reflection I gaze at, diminished in color and definition. I used to be always on the move, my short hair perpetually swinging back and forth past my ears. But now I am only a gray stillness. I breathe; it breathes. Darkness encages us.

  I am passed from doctor to doctor, each one progressively younger. The latest is a baby-faced man in his late twenties, nose hair jutting out of his left nostril. It is not until the fourth session that I realize that it is not nostril hair but a stretched mole. At the end of that session, I ask him for some sheets of paper, and his pen.

  “For my journal,” I tell him, when he looks at me quizzically.

  “A journal,” he mumbles to himself, as if not understanding the word.

  At the next session, the doctor seems unusually animated. He asks more questions about the journal, and I tell him everything: that I have written an entry every day since I was ten.

  “Including the last two years?” he asks. “The years you do not remember?”

  I pause. “I don’t know,” I tell him. “I don’t remember.”

  But he is already nodding his head. “But you probably did?” he says, and it is not a question.

  “I probably did.”

  “It will be good if you could read your journal. All your entries over the past two forgotten years. It might jog your memory. “Yes,” he says, nodding vigorously as if to assure himself, “it will help. Do you know where it might be? The journal.”

  “I always kept it in my bedroom. In my desk.”

  He nods. “Then you must do it,” he says, looking at his watch.

  “Do what?”

  “Visit your home, if it’s still there. Go find your journal.”

  I stare at him blankly.

  Two days later, I step out of the hospital for the first time in months. Despite the daily physical therapy regiments, my legs are still weak and I walk with a wobble through the hospital exit doors. Outside, my mother waits for me, sitting on a scooter, an extra helmet in hand. Two minutes later, we are rolling down the street, zigzagging our way through the sea of debris. I do not recognize the terrain, the leveled destruction lying around us. I have been dropped in the middle of Hollywood disaster movie. It is the small things I see, and not the utter vastness of devastation, that gain traction in my mind: a baseball glove caught in the upper branches of a tree; a salariman’s attaché case placed upright on top of an upturned car, as if a kind stranger has left it there for the owner to retrieve; an elementary school backpack, face down in a large puddle, its bright red nearly completely smeared over with mud.

  Our neighborhood, I see as we wind our way in, is devastated. Only here and there does a house still stand, its empty, glassless window frames blank and wide as if still shell-shocked. But not ours; our home has been crushed to the ground, as if an angry hand has smacked it down. It is utterly leveled into the overlapping wreckage of other pulverized houses. Shards of wooden beams lie scattered like matches out of a matchbox, the blue roof tiles strewn about. A washing machine—not ours—juts out from the debris. My mother and I stand in front of where our house once stood, leaning against the concrete wall that once ran along the front side of the house. Now there is nothing to do but to run my fingers along the engraving of our family name carved into marble at the end of the wall.

  Finally, I step forward.

  “Noriko, don’t,” she whispers, but I ignore her. I step onto a beam of wood, testing it, then another, and now I stand atop of what used to be our home. I turn my eyes downward, searching for something, any remnant of the past. I hope to find my desk, the smallest trace of it, but there is none. I will not find my journals. All those forgotten pages of my lived life, never to be retrieved.

  I speak, with a deepness of voice that still feels alien to me. “The journals are gone, I’ll never find them.” I turn to look at my mother. “What should I do?”

  She slowly walks over to the scooter. For a second, I think she wants to leave, needs to leave. But then she lifts up the scooter seat. From the compartment underneath, she takes out a white grocery bag and walks back to me. I step down, off the ruins of my home, my upper body swaying with a top-heaviness I am still unaccustomed to. She takes something out of the bag.

  A brand-new journal. The cover is a splish-splash of glossy red and hot pink, the bright sheen startling amidst the drab gray and brown of the fallen neighborhood. She holds it out to me, her ceramic white hands speckled by mud.

  “Start a new one,” she says.

  Shuya’s Commute

  by Liza Dalby

  It was March. His first year of high school was almost over. Shuya had thought he wouldn’t be able to bear the hour-long commute to Rikkyo High School from his house in Meguro. Two hours every day wasted going back and forth to Saitama on the train! But lots of businessmen did that and more, his mother reminded him. And his friends too. An hour commute each way was nothing to complain about. Even if he had to change trains four times.

  “Read a book,” they said. “You like to read—here’s your chance.”

  Shuya did like to read. And he had discovered he liked to write too. His favorite after-school activity was the Literature Club. Members spent a month composing numerous haiku, a month on short stories, two months for screenplays, and a semester on novel writing. The novel part was daunting. But everything up till then had been fun.

  Too bad Rikkyo had moved out to the suburbs in 1960. Before that it had been located in Ikebukuro—Shuya could have gotten there in no time. Rikkyo was one of the first Western high schools in Japan. Originally it had been built in Tsukiji, near the big fish market, but those buildings were destroyed in the Great Earthquake of 1923, which had devastated most of Tokyo. Each time it relocated, the campus expanded.

  Spring break was coming up. Then in April there would be a new crop of wide-eyed freshmen to start the school year. Shuya was looking forward to being one of the experienced students. By now he had established a routine for his commute. There were never any seats on the Yamanote loop train, but the ride was quick. Shuya usually got a seat on the following leg. Then he could settle in and for the next 13 minutes read a mini-novel on his cell phone. Shuya had a turquoise blue Docomo phone with a black plastic rat dangling from the strap. He had gotten the phone in junior high—the rat was a present from his sister, because Shuya had been born in the year of the Rat.

  Today was Friday, a little chilly, but clear. Tomorrow would likely be the same. Shuya shivered a little on the platform. Wished he’d brought his jacket today, hoped he would remember tomorrow. But once pressed inside a standing crowd on the loop train, he forgot being chilly. Ah, Sunday he could stay home and his mother would let him sleep until eleven. Now, though, get off at Ebisu, snag a seat on the train to Ikebukuro. Shuya pulled out his cell phone and flipped it open. What to read? Most cell phone novelettes were stupid romance tales. Shuya liked ghost stories and science fiction. Those were a little harder to find. But he came across one that looked interesting:

  The Butt Jewel

  Deep in the mountains the rivers are green as jade. Clean, too. The carp that swim here don’t taste muddy at all, people say. In early June the fireflies glimmer over the banks in a blinking cloud. Not too many places left now where the streams are this pure and the fireflies still hatch into phosphorescent stars. They’re not hard to catch. You can trap one in the cup
of a bellflower and make a tiny lantern. The girls like to do this.

  There was something else that used to live in these rivers too, I know. I saw one once. A kappa. Green as the river, with bumpy skin like a cucumber and wild hair like riverweeds. Scrawny, about as tall as a three-year-old human child, it was squatting on the bank, washing something and muttering. So intent on its task, it didn’t notice me staring from across the river. The sun shone fitfully through white patches of mist that were rising from the water. It glinted off whatever it was the kappa was carefully washing.

  What could be so precious? I wondered. I pretended to wiggle my fingers in the water, as if scaring tadpoles and not at all concerned about anything on the opposite bank. Could the kappa tell that I had seen it? I hoped not. Just the day before, my friend’s cousin, who had been visiting from the city and not familiar with the currents and rocks of the river, hit his head on a boulder and drowned. They found him downstream later that day. I looked up again. The kappa was gone.

  A kappa has no soul, but it yearns for one. Which is why it is always looking for an unwary person it can drag down to the bottom of the river. When the person stops struggling and thrashing, finally going limp, the kappa reaches its skinny green hand up inside the person’s anus and pulls out the butt jewel. People may think their soul resides in their heart or possibly their head, but in fact, it is found in their intestines. The kappa knows this. This is the precious butt jewel, and while you are alive, this is where the soul is found.

  I have no doubt that on that day I had come across a kappa washing a just-removed butt jewel. I hope it was satisfied. I hope it was able to keep it for its own and not feel the need to grab another one. But perhaps, like humans, kappa are not satisfied with just one thing if another chance arises. I don’t know what satisfies a kappa. Maybe they just like the taste. . . . Still, I don’t ever swim in the clear jade green river. Nor do I eat the fat carp or even, really, enjoy the faint glimmerings of the fireflies anymore.

  Shuya snapped his phone shut. He had never seen a firefly in Tokyo. Lots of people always got on at the Shibuya station. They were squashed in like sardines in a tin. The announcement came on as usual.

  “Please set your phones to silent mode.”

  Why did they even bother to say that, thought Shuya. The car was completely silent. No one ever talked to another person, let alone on their cell phone. So many people in such a small tight space. Practically all were reading, though. Shuya scrolled through more stories. And he found:

  The Hole

  The freak tornado faded into the distance, leaving the village a twisted morass of destroyed fields, shredded trees, and smashed houses. Clothing, cars, books, bottles, chairs, shoes, and pictures stewed together in a mash-up of detritus. Nothing remained that wasn’t now garbage. As people trickled back to what had been their homes, the mayor urged everyone to take heart that at least they were still alive.

  “Tomorrow we’ll start the cleanup. . . .”

  And so they did. For weeks thereafter the people sifted through the remains of their village. Roads were cleared, property lines redrawn. One day someone noticed a hole that hadn’t been there before. At least, nobody could remember anything like it in that location. They decided to push the bulldozed waste from the ruined buildings into the hole. Down it went. After this, the cleanup went much faster. Everything that was dumped into the hole simply disappeared.

  One day, a voice came floating out of the sky. You couldn’t tell from which direction exactly, only that it was from somewhere above.

  “Hey! Whatcha doin’ down there?”

  Some pebbles rattled to the ground. The only one who heard was a construction worker who had just at that moment removed his hard hat to wipe the sweat off his forehead. He looked around to see who had spoken. His companions were busy running their bulldozers. He shrugged and went back to shoveling.

  “Ikebukuro . . . Ikebukuro . . . Don’t forget your belongings. . . .”

  Shuya shut his phone and struggled into the crowd surging for the doors. He had to catch a train to Saitama from here. He sprinted to make the connection. From this point on, he would be going against the crowds, as most people were coming into Tokyo from the suburbs. He never had a problem getting a seat. Settling in, he reopened his phone.

  After a while, neighboring villages that had also suffered tornado damage heard about the seemingly bottomless hole, and asked if they could dump their rubbish in it too. The villagers saw an opportunity, and began to charge for the service of using the hole. Pretty soon, the regional reconstruction office heard about it and they contracted to throw all the waste from the renewal projects into the hole. Of course the central government was bound to find out, and before long all the politicians were dumping documents they preferred the newspapers not to see into the hole. Down it all went without a trace. A chemical factory had an accident that created mounds of contaminated waste. Why not put it in the hole? Not everyone thought this was such a good idea, though.

  One day a teenage boy from the village was walking by the hole. He picked up a handful of rocks and made as if to throw them in.

  “You better not do that,” his friends warned.

  “Why not?” He threw the pebbles hard into the hole.

  “Hey! Whatcha doin’ down there?” he called out as he did.

  That was it.

  What the . . . ? Shuya closed one eye. He had forgotten the beginning so he scrolled back to the top of the story. Oh. Right. Ha ha, pretty good.

  Who wrote this? The name was unfamiliar. Shuya was pretty sure it was a fake name in any case. Few cell phone authors posted their real names. He thought about one of the girls in his class who was indignant when she found out her favorite romance had been written by a middle-aged man. In the story, the narrator’s voice was that of a teenage girl, and she had identified with it completely.

  “Eeeew—that’s disgusting!” she exclaimed.

  “Why?” Shuya asked.

  “It just is . . . plus, it’s a lie.”

  Shuya thought about this. You could say that all fiction is a lie, after all. Did it matter if a middle-aged guy wrote as a teenage girl? They had debated this very question in the Literature Club. Did you need to know the author to appreciate the story? Or, once the thing was written, did it float free from its creator? In Shuya’s opinion you had to admire an old guy who could write like a girl. That’s being creative! In fact, more so than a girl writing like a girl—which was, by and large, pretty boring.

  The train was almost at his next stop, Asagiridai. Seven minutes to walk to the north side of the station to catch his last connection. Time for one more story. He already had it picked out:

  New Voyage to Space

  Back in the 1960s it seemed not unreasonable to suppose that in fifty years’ time, we could all honeymoon on the moon if we wished. Certainly, we expected that by 2010 humans would have pushed on to Mars at least, or possibly beyond.

  But as it turned out, humans were the problem. The frailty of the human body and mind subjected to the fierce radiation outside of our cocoon of atmosphere . . . we were the weak link. So a team of geneticists teamed up with NASA to develop humans with characteristics drawn from animals—behaviors that would give them advantages in space.

  I am a science reporter, writing this now as I am on my way to visit this secret lab to report on their progress. I am ushered into the office of one Dr. Koda, the lab director. He takes me on a tour of what the team has done. Genetic serums have been created. They can be ingested in varied doses, depending on how long their effects are meant to last. In the first room we enter, a group of young people are crouched on the floor. They spring up as the door opens—but not as you would expect. Their powerful legs carry them almost to the ceiling.

  “Frog genes,” says the doctor. “That will allow them to easily reach any part of a spacecraft to make repairs.”

  In another room a large man stands quietly in a corner. I can’t tell what he has been give
n.

  “The strength of an ox,” I am told. “Useful for building colonies once a mission has landed.”

  In yet another room a woman is curled up, sleeping on a couch. Her eyes barely open as we enter.

  “Sloth,” says the doctor. “For much of the travel time, the explorers should be able to slow their metabolism and just sleep. Plus,” he added, “a sloth doesn’t get bored. . . .”

  One after another I am shown various subjects who had been given the genetic essence of different animals. Impressed, I ask Dr. Koda if there had been any failures.

  “We tried fish,” the doctor replies, “because it would have been useful for humans to be able to breathe in water. But all that happened was the subjects developed scales. . . .”

  I was diligently taking notes on everything.

  “Is it possible,” I ask, “for me to observe one of these transformations taking place? Nothing terribly complicated . . . the simplest example would do.”

  “Well, let’s see. . . . I have a vial of the monkey essence here. That was the first one we developed, since it’s closest to the human genome.”

  “Great!” I say, as the doctor reaches for a small tube on a shelf. “How long will the effect last?”

  “Oh, about ten minutes,” he replies, opening the tube and swallowing the contents.

  Quickly the monkey essence manifests itself. The doctor jumps onto his desk and stretches his face in a rubbery grin. The spectacle is so funny I can’t help laughing. And my laughing just encourages his monkey nature to make more silly faces. I am laughing so hard I drop my pen. Gasping, I look around for a water fountain. All this laughing has made me thirsty. The monkey-doctor sees immediately what I want and bounds out of the room. He comes back in a few minutes with a tall glass mug of yellow frothy liquid.

  “Thanks!” Thinking it is beer, I take a big sip. . . .

  Shuya couldn’t help a quick snort of laughter. Monkey tricks . . . that was not what he was expecting from the portentous beginning of a sci-fi scenario. Still smiling, he switched off the silent function on his phone as he got off the train and called his friend Ryu to meet him at the school gate.