The Dead Are More Visible
Read The Dead Are More Visible Online
Authors: Steven Heighton
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Short Stories (Single Author), #General
Also by Steven Heighton
POETRY
Stalin’s Carnival
Foreign Ghosts
The Ecstasy of Skeptics
The Address Book
Patient Frame
FICTION
Flight Paths of the Emperor
On earth as it is
The Shadow Boxer
Afterlands
Every Lost Country
ESSAYS
The Admen Move on Lhasa
Workbook: memos & dispatches on writing
ANTHOLOGIES
A Discord of Flags: Canadian Poets Write About the Gulf War
(1991: with Peter Ormshaw & Michael Redhill)
Musings: An Anthology of Greek-Canadian Literature
(2004: with main editor Tess Fragoulis, and Helen Tsiriotakis)
CHAPBOOKS/LETTERPRESS
Paper Lanterns: 25 Postcards from Asia
The Stages of J. Gordon Whitehead
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 2012 Steven Heighton
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2012 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.
Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Heighton, Steven
The dead are more visible / Steven Heighton.
Short stories.
eISBN: 978-0-307-36668-9
I. Title.
PS8565.E451D42 2012 c813’.54 c2011-907795-7
v3.1
For my sister, Pelly Heighton,
and my nieces: Tarah, Christine, and Julia
CONTENTS
[ THOSE WHO WOULD BE MORE ]
Now and then, the man and his boss discuss the weather
Principal Eguchi ordered scotch instead of beer. Scotch for both of us. We were meeting in Brain Noodle, as we did every week after the Saturday-afternoon cram class I’d been teaching for her since my arrival in Japan ten months before. In public like this, she was always formal with me, but today she was practically rigid and her English had developed a limp.
“You’ve promoted us from beer to scotch,” I said.
“I have—pardon? Promoted you?”
I knew that Brain Noodle’s manager and chefs and wait staff all considered Principal Eguchi a troubling phenomenon—a tall, polished woman who owned her own business and drank quantities of beer in public. And now
scotch
. She was not sipping.
“A manner of speaking,” I said, waiting for her to
slip out her pocket dictionary and demand details. I’d never had a student in Eguchi’s school as meticulous about learning English as Eguchi herself, as if she had founded her American-English school simply as a pretext to improve her own grasp of the language. Officially we met each Saturday to discuss the students and any problems that might have come up during the week, but largely these meetings—like our other encounters—were tutorials for her. I didn’t mind. My salary was good, Eguchi was intriguing on a number of counts, and the food at Brain Noodle was superb.
Today the dictionary remained in her pearl handbag, though she did snap the bag open to take out her matte silver compact. She wore as much makeup as any woman I’d ever met. It was applied kabuki-style and, in times of stress, fine-tuned in public. She was a good-looking woman and I never saw the point of this hyperbolic rigour, but of course I said nothing.
“Is everything all right, Ms. Eguchi?”
“Would you care for another Suntory!”
“Should we order first?”
She seemed confused. Her eyes were always evasive—she tended to focus on my mouth when I spoke, which usually made me light a cigarette or reach for the toothpicks sheaved in shot glasses along the sushi bar—but today her eyes could find nowhere to land.
“Uh, Ms. Eguchi …”
“Some of the parents are compliant,” she said in a rush, finally meeting my gaze.
“Compliant? You mean—in sending us their children?”
“They say the children are so happy in the
juku
.”
“Oh, oh, you mean ‘compliment.’ As in—”
“
Too
happy, the children. Too much play, not enough work. These parents are …”
I sat back. “Oh. These are complaints.”
“Several complaints. More than several. How many is several, Sensei? In English?”
“Well … I guess around three or four.”
“Ah. How many is many?”
“There’ve been
many
complaints?”
“They say that recess is half the class, Sensei! That means, two hours or more.”
I could only nod.
“And, you refuse to assign the housework.”
“Four hours seems like a pretty long time to keep three- and four-year-olds at a desk. On a Saturday.”
“You have said this before, Sensei. And I have said: Short recess, no problem. But not like this.”
“Some of the children aren’t even three yet!” Several. Many.
“Their parents are erecting to send them here. You are paid to teach them.”
I thought of how some of the smaller pupils couldn’t even understand the simple Japanese I had to use to give instructions. I’d tried before, diplomatically, to convey my feelings about the
juku
to Eguchi; she’d simply told me that Westerners—especially of my
generation—could never hope to understand Japan.
“Perhaps I feel I have not given you enough time off,” she said, inscrutably.
“Have you told these parents that we learn English
during
the recess?”
“But how, Sensei?”
“Like I said before. I play games with them. They learn to count. They learn verbs.”
“English for playing the game is not what the parents want to learn for them.”
I had to look away. I signalled the waiter for two more scotches.
“All right. I can try shortening the recesses.”
“Thank you, Sensei. But …”
“But only by so much.”
“But I have
promised
these parents, Sensei!”
She was looking at me in a kind of agony. I had seen this before. She was imploring me to take her meaning so that she would not be obliged to finish her sentence, to strip matters to the root. I decided not to help out. I finally sensed what was going on.
“I have promised to give shrift to their compliance, Sensei. I am very sorry. So sorry.” The scotches arrived. The waiter glanced at us sidelong. I picked up my scotch and drank it off, then stood, eyes stinging.
“I gather you mean that I’m fired.”
“No!” she said, aghast. “Only that I must replace you at once!”
——
Each day, the child brings to the teacher an apple
A month into my stay in Japan I began to notice oddities in the primer I had been using to teach myself the language. I’d bought it in a used bookshop on a cul-de-sac in downtown Tōkyō. It was close enough to the Ara River that you could smell the water—sour, swampy—as you emerged from the cramped interior. The shop was about fifty feet deep and maybe six feet across—four feet if you deducted the width of the high shelves on either wall. I suppose at one time the space had been no more than an alley between buildings that would have sprouted from the ruins left by the American air raids of ’44 and ’45. I was in a hurry (on my way to meet Principal Eguchi for the first time: job interview) and didn’t spend long comparing the different primers that crammed a good three feet of shelf space. I chose one of the less foxed and fretworn paperbacks:
Japanese for the Beginners and Those Who Would Be More
. The authors shown in the discoloured photo on the back—bespectacled, beaming under a cotton-candy froth of flowering cherry trees—were professors in Kyōto, a pair of elderly and venerable linguists. The book had been published in 1969. I supposed they would be dead by now. It cost just a hundred yen.
The vocabulary for lesson 1 was unsurprising:
thank you, pencil, dog, floor, home, why, when, this, that, him, her, good night
and so on. It was when I started memorizing the words for the next lesson that I noticed an oddness
of tone and trajectory. This was a few weeks later, when my honeymoon with the new was waning, giving place to spells of fatigue, commuter claustrophobia, sensory saturation—all the usual markers of culture shock. Among the cats, the cars, the uncles and aunts, houses, doors, windows and other basic vocabulary, the word
shitai
appeared: “corpse.” The authors, Drs. Sato and Okubo, then perkily urged me to translate a number of Japanese sentences into English, including
My mother’s pencil is on the table, When Father comes home, he sees the good dog
, and
When I looked through the window, there was a corpse on the floor
.
I flipped to the appendix to check my translations. All correct. Then, after a dozen or so other standard phrases, this:
My uncle says that there are some corpses in that house
. Bolder now, I tinkered with the sentence and, seizing some lyric license, settled on:
In my uncle’s house are many corpses
. It went on like that. The oddness was diverting enough, but more than once, trying to study while packed among standing, dozing salary-men on trains that were like human trash-compactors, I glanced up and looked around, spooked, like a man reading a tepid letter that swerves mysteriously into threatening tones.
In my second month I moved a backpackful of worldly goods into a midget flat not far from the bookshop and the river. I spent little time there. I ate in noodle shops or sat in the park with a book when I wasn’t working, commuting. The flat never began to
look lived in. Its vacant echoing never ceased—that audible sign that a tenancy has taken root. I was grappling now with lesson 3, which focused on the use of the past tense and introduced new vocabulary. The Second World War, or some discreetly unnamed facsimile, made its first appearance. I wasn’t completely surprised. Among the new words that I committed to memory were
rifle, battle, ruin, bomb
.
My aunt stayed with us here for dinner last night
.
The sun was bright that day and the wind was warm
.
My uncle has a rifle that he found after the battle
.
A rifle is no match for a bomb
.
——
I will, I shall, I am going to return
In my last lesson that Saturday, before Eguchi fired me, I’d introduced my students to the future tense in English. It seemed important that the toddlers in the class become acquainted with its nuances. As for the four-, five-, and six-year-olds, the concept would be novel for them as well, since there is no actual future tense in Japanese.
Tomorrow I go to the store. Next week I finish my studies. Before long I go home to Canada
. That was futurity, Japanese-style—simple, logical. By the end of the lesson, and not for the first time, I felt frustrated, mildly ashamed of my mother tongue with all its traps and catches, countless irregularities, fine print, provisos, codicils … If Japanese had a clear, military
order and concision, English resembled a sprawling civilian bureaucracy. Hard to get a definite answer. Harder to find your way around. Week by week, just as Eguchi alleged, I was extending the children’s recess.
Japanese may have been the more logical tongue, but months into my study of it I was still not fluent; when I gave the children instructions in Japanese they would titter and shout out delighted corrections. My best student, Yukon, would approach me at recess or after the class to footnote these corrections with the mild and beguiling pedantry of a six-year-old happily instructing an elder. Yukon was the “class name” her mother had asked Eguchi to have me use when addressing the girl. I could see the word’s attraction from the mother’s point of view—it was Canadian, yet in sound it was close to several Japanese given names, and easy to say. All sixteen children had been assigned class names, either by their parents (Clint, Rocky, ABBA, Milk Shake, Waylon, The Phantom, Marvin, Miami, Mickey Rourke) or by Eguchi, who favoured the sort of name she found in the chunky Victorian classics she was grinding through to improve her English: Dorothea, Clelia, Silas, Clement, Edmund, and—for two-and-a-half-year-old Toshiko Watanabe, who, you could tell from her lumpy form and cowpoke wobble, was still in diapers—George.