If You Follow Me (4 page)

“Welcome to Arisu in Shikaland,” he said.

“This is the nuclear power plant?” By that point, little would have surprised me.

“Plant is higher up the hill.” He gestured at a fence looped with double rungs of barbed wire, beyond which I could see a cement tower purging smoke into the sky. “Arisu in Shikaland is museum. To explain how nuclear energy works.”

“It's based on
Alice in Wonderland
?” I guessed, wondering if he got the irony.

“That's right,” he said. “Arisu fell down a hole. Into new world she could not understand. Rules were so confusing. To break them was kind of dangerous. Off with their heads,
ne
? People here in Shika felt the same when this nuclear plant was built. So the plant created this museum, to make us more comfortable.”

Inside the front doors, a Japanese woman wearing the same blue dress and pinafore handed me an English brochure. “Count Rabbit
explains about the benefits of radiation,” the cover promised. But instead of an explanation, inside was a poem.

 

‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves

And the mome raths outgrabe.

 

Curiouser and curiouser, I thought, remembering when I read
Alice in Wonderland
in elementary school, how I couldn't stop thinking about the cake that made her so large that her tears filled a room and almost drowned everyone in it. I was the Cheshire cat that year for Halloween. My dad made my mask out of surgical fiberglass, laying the wet strips across my face while I held a grin until my cheeks burned. The funny thing was, I hadn't really liked the book, the way Alice was always getting in trouble without understanding what she'd done wrong. It was arbitrary, there was no clear cause and effect, and this bothered me.

I followed Miyoshi-sensei into a small movie theater where the burgundy velvet curtain parted as soon as we sat down. We watched a man in a white rabbit costume guide a Japanese girl, in yet another blue dress and pinafore, through the control room of the nuclear power plant. “Count Rabbit was played by Mister Joe,” Miyoshi sensei whispered, even though we were alone. “Arisu was Shika High School freshman, Ritsuko Ueno. Narrator is head of nuclear power plant. Now he explains how nuclear power works.”

“I wish I could understand it,” I said.

“Me too,” he said.

At the end of the short film, he led me to a picnic area outside, where a vending machine stood next to the building. He banged a button twice, sending two cans of iced chrysanthemum tea down
the chute. “You don't need money here,” he pointed out. “Everything is
sabisu
. Meaning free. Including
gomi
collection.” He showed me a mesh bin heaped with trash bags and explained that this was where Haruki brought our trash.

“He had to walk all the way up here?” I asked.

“It's okay,” he said. “Haruki should move more. He has…how to say…spare tire?”

I laughed, resisting the urge to joke that Haruki looked like the Michelin man. “But you are English teacher, not exercise teacher,” he went on soberly. “Everyone follows the
gomi
rules. If you make a mistake, your neighbors will know it's you every time.”

 

After leaving the museum, he took me to Shika's “Beach Driveway,” a tunnel that ended on a stretch of sand rutted with tire tracks, littered with half-buried cans and bottles.

“There's a lot of trash on this beach,” I pointed out.

“Mmm,” he agreed, “but it's not Japanese.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “How can it not be Japanese?”

“Because it floats from Russian and Korean ships.”

“Come on,” I scoff ed, no longer able to maintain a polite veneer. “I'm sure not all litter in Shika is foreign. That's kind of racist, don't you think?”

“It's fact,” he replied coolly. “You can see for yourself.”

I rolled down my window and leaned out, trying to read the labels on the trash as we passed, but he was driving too fast, gunning the engine and making sand spray behind us. “Woo!” he yelled, taking his hands off the steering wheel as we sped toward the surf. He braked to a screeching halt, so close to the waves that they spat on his windshield. I could feel the wet sand sliding and shifting beneath the tires. Suddenly queasy, I pushed the door open and lunged out of
the car, bending over to grip my knees and take a few ragged breaths. I felt upset and a little humiliated by my reaction to what had obviously been a harmless prank. What had I thought—that he was going to drive straight into the ocean? As a wave swept over my feet, soaking my shoes, I noticed an old Coca-Cola bottle. The writing on the glass was etched away, faded but still legible, printed in Cyrillic.

“You were right,” I said, getting back into the car. “The trash is foreign.”

I waited for him to say “I told you so,” or some Japanese equivalent, but instead he apologized. “I'm sorry if I frighten you,” he said. “I was only goofing about.”

“I know,” I said. “I wasn't scared.”

He pulled out a pack of Mild Sevens and held it out to me before helping himself. As he lit a cigarette, I noticed that he had long narrow fingers, perfectly articulated, and that they were trembling slightly. My own hands always shake, so that people are constantly asking me if I'm okay when I feel perfectly fine. I wondered if he had the same problem, or if he was upset. I don't know how he guessed that I wanted a smoke, but it was a relief not to have to ask. I took one and he lit it with his Zippo. Then he rolled down both car windows and we smoked in companionable silence, our arms extending into the sunlight, still facing the sea.

 

At the end of my first week of teaching, Miyoshi-sensei offered to take me grocery shopping. “I had better teach you how to shop,” he said, which made Carolyn laugh. I've never had a hard time figuring out how to spend money. But the truth was we did need help decoding the Japanese supermarket, which still left us stumped after a month in Shika. We'd buy corn oil only to find out it was corn syrup, bring home fresh bamboo tips that remained woody after an hour of boil
ing, purchase a melon without doing the yen conversion and figure out too late that we'd spent twenty dollars on showpiece fruit.

Carolyn was especially frustrated. When I told her about Miyoshi-sensei's offer, naturally she assumed she'd be coming along. “Don't do anything to give us away,” I said as the doorbell rang. She frowned and I shrugged. I sensed that Miyoshi-sensei and I were on the verge of becoming friends—we noticed the same things and found the same things funny—and I wanted this to happen. But I also wanted to keep my home and work life separate. He was perceptive, and I worried that he'd guess Carolyn and I were a couple.

“It's great to meet you,” she said. “I've heard so much about you.”

“Ah,” he said, blushing slightly. “I hope it's good things.”

“Of course,” she said. “M is always talking about what a fun young supervisor she got. I'm jealous!” Carolyn's supervisor was a grandmotherly type with a subscription to Britain's
Royalty
magazine, who couldn't understand how Carolyn failed to share her single-minded fascination with the landed gentry of the world.

“Ah,” he said. “Sorry, but you are…?”

“This is Carolyn,” I said. “We both moved here from New York, remember?”

“Of course,” he said. “That's why you needed a house big enough to share.”

“Thank you so much for helping us find this place,” Carolyn said, “and for offering to teach us how to grocery shop. I do most of the cooking, so I'm the one who needs help.”

“Ah,” he said again, looking back and forth between us.

In the car he offered me a cigarette and I asked Carolyn if it would bother her if I smoked. “Do whatever you want,” she said, sounding annoyed. More than the smell of smoke, she hates to police me, to come across as uptight. When I turned around, trying to
catch her eye and share a private smile, she was staring out at the apartment buildings rising incongruously from the rice fields.

“Who lives there?” she asked Miyoshi-sensei.

“No one,” he replied. “They are vacancy.”

“Vacant,” she corrected him. “I thought there were no apartments for rent.”

I held my breath, waiting for him to blow my cover.
No apartments big enough to share
, is what he'd said. But instead he explained that these buildings had been erected during the real estate boom of the eighties, then abandoned when the investors went bankrupt.

“It's kind of a ghost town,” he said.

“This whole place is,” Carolyn pronounced with characteristic bluntness. She is compulsively honest, almost physically incapable of bullshitting. I worried that he'd be off ended, but instead he agreed. He told us that the Noto Peninsula was depopulating rapidly as companies shut down their small town branches and young people left for the cities in Central Honshu where all the jobs were. In the past, kids had attended their neighborhood high schools—he himself had gone to Shika
Koko
before it became a vocational school—but now, those with entrance exam scores high enough to qualify traveled as far as two hours by bus to attend prestigious schools in Kanazawa City.

“Shika is
inaka
,” he said. “Meaning hick town.” We laughed and he went on. “When I saw you were living on Manhattan's Broadway before this, I worried for you. It's true, there is not much here for tourists. But this is the real Japan,
ne
?”

“That's what I keep telling M,” Carolyn said, touching the back of my neck, pushing her fingers under my hair. And even though he could've seen in his rearview mirror, I leaned back for just a moment.

 

As we entered the supermarket, Carolyn was almost giddy with excitement. She admires produce the way other people do flowers or jewelry. Inspired by an ingredient, she'll create an ordinary weekday dinner for just the two of us to rival the finest restaurant meal. But Miyoshi-sensei was pushing the cart, and every time she wanted to buy something, he had a good reason why we “had better not.” The enoki mushrooms were too expensive; the fresh tofu was not a good bargain; peaches had gone out of season, so we “had better” buy apple pears instead.

In Tokyo, we'd been required to sit through a culture shock panel led by an ex-marine turned EFL teacher, who told us that the expression “you had better” was a direct translation of a Japanese idiom that didn't have the same patronizing tone. “If my Japanese wife tells me that I ‘
had better not
' go drinking with my buddies after work,” he said, “she's not trying to be bossy, she's just looking out for my best interests.” He winked. “And I don't have to do what she says.” Every time Miyoshi-sensei rejected something that Carolyn chose, she looked at me expectantly and I felt trapped. He was only trying to help us, and we could always come back later. She picked out a package of fresh ramen noodles and he took it out of her hand, adding a dusty stack of Cup Noodles to the cart instead.

“Let me guess,” she said flatly, “It's a better bargain?”

“Sodesune
,” he agreed. “Also, I think Americans prefer this kind of ramen. Maybe real Japanese noodles are kind of so difficult to cook correctly.”

“I used to work at a Japanese restaurant,” she said.

“Ah,” he said. “But American Japanese food is so different. When I spent a summer in California, I could never find real Japanese food like home.”

“Well you weren't going to the right places then,” she said under her breath.

 

He took us for lunch at Coco's California Café, a family restaurant off the highway that we had already been to several times. There were color pictures of everything on the menu, but he proceeded to describe the specials in detail. The Japanese
hambagu
, he explained, was different from the American
hambaga
, because the patty came without buns, heaped with grated daikon. “You had better try it,” he said, and when the waitress came to our table he began to order three
hambagu setto
. A
setto
, or “set,” was a prix-fixe meal, with an appetizer, main dish, and dessert. Unlike at home, there weren't different choices in each category, and substitutions were unheard of. You couldn't even ask for mustard instead of mayonnaise on the chicken sandwich, when the photo quite clearly showed a white and not a yellow stripe. The menu was nonnegotiable, with no exceptions.

“Actually,” Carolyn spoke up, “I'd like an omelet and a salad.” She waited for him to translate, but instead he inspected the menu. “Maybe you should order
hambagu setto
,” he said at last. “It's a better value,
ne
? We always order
setto
.”

“There is no omelet
setto
,” she said.

“Exactly,” he said. “Don't worry.
Hambagu
is not so different from
hambaga
.”

Carolyn kicked me under the table. She hadn't eaten meat since the fifth grade, when her class took a field trip to a farm. Sometimes her discipline impressed me, and sometimes I found it exhausting. I'd stopped eating meat—at least red meat, at least most of the time—when she told me that she could taste it on my breath when we kissed. But secretly I was looking forward to my
hambagu
.

“Hambagu
is a Japanese variation on an American theme,” Miyoshi-sensei said, “just like Miss Marina's American variation on a Japanese theme. Midwest-o sushi.”

This was a sore spot. On the application to teach in Japan, we had to answer the questions, “How does Japanese culture influence or inspire you?” and “How are you preparing for life in Japan?” At the time, I happened to be interning for a short-lived magazine called
Midwestern Palate
. My job was to come up with recipes to showcase the products of our advertisers. I wasn't a very good cook, and most of my best ideas—including Midwest sushi—came from Carolyn. I'd stapled a copy of the recipe onto my application, to go with an essay about how I'd been trying to bring my love of Japanese cuisine to small town America.