Divided into three sections covering the recent past, our current era, and the world to come, the stories gathered here—with characters stymied by loneliness, motherhood, illness, even cataclysmic climate change—interrogate the idea that so-called better times ever existed, particularly for women.
Divided into three sections covering the recent past, our current era, and the world to come, the stories gathered here—with characters stymied by loneliness, motherhood, illness, even cataclysmic climate change—interrogate the idea that so-called better times ever existed, particularly for women.
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Overview
Divided into three sections covering the recent past, our current era, and the world to come, the stories gathered here—with characters stymied by loneliness, motherhood, illness, even cataclysmic climate change—interrogate the idea that so-called better times ever existed, particularly for women.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496211958 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Series: | The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 156 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
When Her Father Was an Island
In his dreams it was always a child who told him about the end of the war. From his perch high above the fields Father would watch as the figure approached, grass bending beneath its feet. A light mist would be falling and, as the child reached the guard tower, Father would turn his face up to the sky, close his eyes, and thank the emperor for allowing him to serve. He would awaken feeling refreshed, happy. If nobody came he was happier still. It meant he had not failed the emperor and the emperor had not failed the world. "Stay and fight," the emperor had told him, and that was what Father would do.
Maemi was two years old and being held in her mother's arms when she first heard her father was missing. Missing in action, she would learn. Presumed dead, she would learn even later. At the time she did not know any of this. She just felt her mother's heart breaking. The war had been over for six months by then. She did not know this either. But, it seemed, neither did he.
When Father signed up for the war, Mother was five-and-a-half months pregnant, their child roughly the size of a ripe pomegranate. She did not beg him not to go and he did not wish her to. They had the same understanding of duty. In those early days of the fighting, everyone did.
Father had always been a quiet man, but this did not make him a simple one, and during his intelligence training he was routinely singled out by his superiors as an exemplary officer. They called him "the Ghost" for his ability to sneak up on others. He was rumored to walk through walls. His was a country of mountains and valleys, all of them being ravaged. After a month of combat on the laced edges of the land, after grappling with attackers that came by sea, he was sent to an island jungle outpost with two others, a private and a lieutenant, where his quietness could be weaponized into stealth. Their operation was simple: ward off invaders in any way they could. The airstrip had been destroyed, the pier blasted into the sea. The isolation of the mission matched the strangeness of their surroundings. All civilians had been evacuated long ago. Only the rubber trees, weeping their gluey tears, remained while the soldiers waited for the emperor's divine word.
Maemi was growing up in a sorrowful house. Her mother wore her grief like a new skin. When she bathed Maemi she would often weep silently, a condition that terrified the girl. But it was also the only time her mother touched her, so she would dirty herself unnecessarily by making mudcakes in the yard or rolling about in the fireplace soot. "Worse than a mutt," her mother would say, but she would be tender with her, rubbing a soft cloth under her fingernails, dabbing at the shallow webs between her toes.
Once a week they would visit the temple in Nagoya and pray for her father's safe return. It was not a ritual that Maemi enjoyed. She hated the way their shoes clacked against the floor, signaling their arrival even if no one else was there. The silence was heavy enough to force them to their knees if they were not already on their way there. She tented her hands as her mother did, but thoughts floated through her head like clouds. Her father was a photograph to her, a family legend, a hoax. Or perhaps he was a ghost now, a vengeful spirit. When her mother lit the candle for the shrine, dragging a match along the wood until it sparked, Maemi imagined her father dancing in the flame, spinning and coiling until it built and billowed and swallowed whole the room around them. The first time she was allowed to light a candle by herself she cried.
Father had fallen in love with Mother's legs first. One day while walking past the pear tree fields he spotted a ladder and two long tapering limbs dangling under wispy ends of a skirt, the rest of the body lost among the leaves. The skirt was thin and yellow, as if the sun had been caught in its net. He watched a hand reach down and drop a piece of the fruit into a basket below. He moved to her side without her hearing and the next time the gesture was made he was there to take hold of her fingers. The air around them had the rumor of bees.
Father thought of her often while out in the bush. There was plenty of time. In the mornings he kept watch while his two men went into the wilderness to gather bananas and coconuts or to steal rice from the abandoned fields. Once a week they would sneak further out and kill any cattle that could be found, butchering and roasting the meat over a fire. They shied from the bramble of mosquitoes, patched their uniforms, and cleaned their rifles. At night, while the stars strung themselves together above, he lay down and lifted himself back into that tree, tasting the nectar that lived in the hollows of his beloved's skin.
When Maemi was eleven her mother found her a new father. One morning he was sitting at the kitchen table, sipping a cup of black tea, and then he never left. She was told to call him "Uncle," but that felt false on her tongue. He had no look of anyone she'd ever known. His hair was dark and tied in a long braid down his back. When he walked the braid swung like a metronome, keeping the music of time. One day, two days, one month, a year. She sat across from him and watched as he grew fat on their food. He called her "Mutton Chop" while wiping crumbs from his beard.
"Did you stop loving Father?" Maemi asked her mother.
"Of course not," Mother said. "But I cannot stay dutiful to a dead man."
When her mother and Uncle had been married a year, Maemi took down the only photograph of her father still remaining in the house. She slid it out from under the glass and moved her fingers over the glossy surface. His face was tinted green, his uniform pressed and snug. He held a rifle over his shoulder, like a soldier in a school textbook. He had no wrinkles, like her new father did, so she took a charcoal pencil and drew some in. Then she smudged hair onto his chin. From beneath his cap she snaked out a braid that fell over his left breast.
When Maemi was finished she hid the photograph under her bed. At night she whispered her secrets to it, recounted the events of her day. She kept waiting for her mother to ask where it had gone, but she never did.
The years were beginning to weigh the soldiers down like stones in a pocket. They had grown ragged and wild. Hair that once crept close to their scalps now brushed at their shoulders. Their clothes drooped from their bodies. But they built themselves huts and taught themselves songs and prayed for the safety and wisdom of the emperor.
One day the private and lieutenant returned from scavenging with a leaflet. Worn and sweat-stained, with frayed edges, it declared in bold red text the end of the war. A picture of the emperor was printed on it, his face hidden in his hands but recognizable nonetheless. "Where did you get this?" Father wanted to know, but they just shrugged and buried themselves in the crypts of their coats. "The enemy," he said, "is everywhere and can take many forms. We must be prepared. They wish to weaken our resolve. We must not let them."
But he, too, was shaken by the news. His mind passed over his wife and child, girl or boy he did not know. Were there invaders among them? Corrupting them? What would home look like now? Was there even any home to return to? That night Father tore the leaflet up and watched it dance upon the fire, the smoke rising to linger above the trees. Let them find us, he thought, so we may know them.
Maemi had trouble making friends at school. She had a reserved and forlorn nature that the other children had no patience to test. Her hair fell over her face in a black curtain and, when meeting the eyes of others, she had a tendency to blink rapidly until they looked away. She played solitary games in the courtyard; she made the television her confidant. She dreamed herself into worlds ruled by her words. At the dinner table her mother and Uncle talked around her. The fading photograph beneath her bed no longer seemed to be listening either.
She was sixteen before she knew the touch of a boy. He had a gentle but curious soul and was able to coax things from her that others couldn't. He would bring her pears from his parents' farm and cut them in halves to share, the insides of the fruit grainy and sweet. The first time he kissed her his spit melted on her tongue like sugar.
"What is your deepest fear?" he asked her one August evening. The sun was bowing over the horizon. She looked down at how her fingers laced through his, a cat's cradle of skin, and said, "That my father is still alive somewhere and has forgotten about me."
In the fall the boy left for college and she did not see him again for many years.
Father was finding it difficult to make his bones work. They creaked and moaned at the slightest provocation. The skin between his fingers was loosening, going rubbery. He was slipping away from himself. There were things out in the jungle he had seen but didn't quite believe. Shadows that shifted their shapes when he looked at them. Forms that danced at the edges of his vision. Once, when he was awakened in the night by the sound of heavy rain on his tent, he opened the flap and swore he saw pears falling from the sky.
One morning he spotted a rustling in the leaves at the edge of the fields. He crouched down low and sighted through his rifle the flashing black blur of a figure. He felt a nick in his heart and a charley horse in his chest. He waited for its next move and hoped it would not make one. Then it darted forward and he could make out the ruined tan of a man's face, a sneer worming over his lips. "Stop!" Father shouted. "In the name of the emperor!" There was a pause, and then the man moved nearer again, the green grass blades bending and waving to Father now like hands with broken fingers. "Stop at once!" he repeated, "or I'll shoot!" If the man heard him he did not seem to care.
When he ran to make sure the figure was dead, Father was horrified to turn the body over and find the face of the private. He buried him quickly, without ceremony, and washed his hands with canteen water until the container was empty. After returning to camp he was shocked anew: both men were there to greet him, intact and concrete. There were demons about this place, Father thought. He would have to be more careful.
Maemi decided to study genetics at Kyoto University. She spent many evenings in the lab, building rungs of DNA into a ladder of inheritance. Her hair still fell over her face and her eyes still strained to focus on others, but many men in the science department took an interest in her. During her first semester she lost her virginity to an entomology professor, pinned beneath him like one of his beetles. At the annual faculty party he introduced her to his wife. Maemi smiled as they shook hands, then locked herself in the coatroom and hit herself on the upper thigh until the tears retreated. There would be other men after him and each one would hurt a little bit less.
In her second year at school she got a phone call from Uncle. Her mother had not been feeling well the previous few weeks. When she went to see a doctor, they discovered cancer rooting in her stomach, spreading its poison limbs through her body. "She wants you to come home to see her, Mutton Chop," Uncle said. The line crackled between them. Anger writhed in Maemi like blood. How could her mother leave her? How much more grief must she gather? How much more family could she forge? "I don't know when I can get away," she said, unwept tears braiding in her throat.
At the funeral the next month Uncle wrapped two limp arms around her and told her she was welcome to stay with him whenever she liked. But without her mother there it didn't feel right. He had never been her father and he certainly couldn't be so now. During the holidays and summers she went to live with boyfriends instead.
The private and lieutenant were restless. They paced in their huts day and night. Voices swirled around but none belonged to the emperor. The jungle whispered secrets to itself. The stars snickered at them from above. "Why is there no word from him?" they asked. But their doubting only strengthened Father's resolve. Their mission was a sacred one and it required an obedience that not every man was capable of. He would stay until the end, no matter how it came.
But then the private wandered off and did not return. They waited until evening to search for him, the moon above casting a phantom glow over the trees. Each cracking branch beneath their feet was a premonition. Father held his breath like a glass he feared breaking.
They found the private on the outskirts of the forest, spread eagle and face down. His hair was matted. When Father touched the back of the private's neck, his fingers came away freckled with blood. The bullet, wherever it had come from, had killed him instantly. The lieutenant, when he saw the carnage, turned away and heaved up air. Father steeled his own stomach and rolled the private over. His face was unmarked; in the light his features had a guileless calm. "What have you done?" the leaves murmured. But what had they done? Who was this man, now dead twice over? They agreed to return for him the next morning, but when they came back the body was gone.
Three weeks before her twenty-fourth birthday Maemi married her last sweetheart. He was a stern but thoughtful man, an accomplished physics professor who spent hours locked up in his office, parsing through the riddles of the universe. She had loved men with their heads in the sky before, but never one with a purpose for being there. He was a man unlike any she had ever known, which allowed her to believe he could be like her father. He had recently been declared an official casualty of the old war.
They settled in Kawagoe, not far from her husband's school in Tokyo. He did not like her to work, so she had given up on her research, remaining at home to cook meals and otherwise wait out the day. Sometimes she went to Kitain Temple and walked among the hundreds of Gohyaku Rakan, the tiny statues of Buddhist disciples packed together like stone sardines, their faces sanded down from years of exposure so they all seemed to be sleeping. Sometimes she bent down to whisper secrets in their ears. She would be dutiful, she told them, and that would bring her closer to love.
Her husband handled her body like it was an equation, delicate and decipherable. Sometimes late in the night, after they had made love and her husband had gone to sleep, Maemi would lie awake and imagine the molecules of the world pinging around her, cells binding up and breaking apart, the living and the dead existing beside one another if only for a short while.
By the twenty-ninth year in the jungle Father was the only one who remained at the post. Not long after the death of the private, the lieutenant abandoned camp during the night. But Father's existence continued as it had before: scavenging for food, sleeping out beneath the stars, and awaiting word from the emperor. He did not consider himself lonely. It had been long enough for the isolation to simply become a life.
He allowed himself to dream again. He saw himself out one morning on the perimeter of the fields, performing his routine surveillance, when a figure approached him. It was a young man, shaggy haired and dressed in strange loose clothing, not more than thirty years old. He held his hands up, a reporter's camera strapped over his chest, and asked for his name. When Father gave it, the young man smiled and said, "I've been looking for you." He told him that the war had ended long ago. He pleaded with him to come home. But Father refused. "I am awaiting orders," he said.
The young man kept returning to him night after night, always saying the same thing. The war is over. We did not win. Finally he came with a delegate from the emperor's service. After Father was relieved of his duty and pardoned for any crimes committed while believing himself at war, he presented the delegate with his rifle. Then he dropped to his knees and wept until his body gave out beneath him. It was a dream so real and yet so curious, so filled with a foreign longing, it was as if someone else had given it to him.
Maemi did not remember her old childhood love right away when she answered the door. They had both grown older, of course, but it was more than that. His body was long and knobby as a green bean. His curiosity had hardened into philosophy. The child at her hip squirmed so at first Maemi did not hear what he was saying. Something about an island. Her father living there. He would be returning home soon. There would be a parade.
An island. Her father. Living. A shudder ran through her and though her body heaved with tears she did not shed them, not until later while her daughter was out playing in the backyard and she wept over the stove, salting the soup with her tears. That night, as her husband slept beside her, Maemi drifted off with a single image forming in her mind, the dream that all her other dreams had been guiding her toward: Father in an open-top car, sitting in the back with a representative of the emperor. He'd been given sunglasses and a new suit to wear, which itched at his elbows and knees. His hair had been cut back to the military cropping of his youth. Bits of gray peppered his chin hairs.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Better Times"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments, ix,
THE RECENT PAST,
When Her Father Was an Island, 3,
Laika, 13,
Foreigners, 27,
No Man's Land, 45,
THE MODERN AGE,
Cleavage, 69,
North Country, Early Morning, 87,
Departures, 97,
Lookaftering, 109,
THE WORLD TO COME,
Those Who Left and Those Who Stayed, 125,