Random Fragments

Bad Translation

Translator's note: This document was found in 1882. A man named Katsuhiro was staggering down the road through a violent rain storm in Akita in Northern Japan. He was there delivering a message to a consulate regarding military conscription. He endured a great many misfortunes on his way there, including getting carjacked.
In places, the road was so wet that it became a muddy swamp. The man went down a narrow path off to the side to find some cover from the rain. A muddy embankment protruded to his left. As he passed, something caught his eye. He moved in closer to examine it. It seemed to be the corner of a slim metal case. Driblets of mud ran down it. The rain must have uncovered it. He worried the case out of the embankment. In it, he found the following story.

The evening was disquieted, and, despite a lacking of any solid evidence indicating so, everyone knew that it would rain. The virtue was in deciding when precisely the clouds would burst and the rain would come pouring down. The smug were always early in their predilections. The dumb were not to be considered, as theirs were always far off the mark and without explanation. The more subtly clever, those that had advanced beyond the smug, were usually closer to the mark, but even they were early. It was only those who sat quietly off to the side, with little movement, that knew precisely when the rains would come down.

And sure enough, though no one had asked him, middle-aged Yukio was the only one in the room who made the correct prediction. That night, at 3 o'clock in the morning, the dark clouds opened up. It was truly a violent storm, and one of the mistresses of the palace awoke. It was not clear whether the storm woke her up, or if there was another reason, but she was up nonetheless. In another area of the quarters, a maid had lain awake the whole time. She noted it to herself when she heard the rain. She had made the correct the prediction.

Trans.: R. Morris, 1932

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Story Fragment

Where is Kinu Tanaka? I repeat the question over and over again...

I was in a small village in Chiba prefecture, Tomosaki. From across the bay, we could see the lights of Tokyo. The Japanese were incredibly civil. I could hardly believe it, especially since they were wildcats on the battlfield, fighting to the death in battles where French or Russian soldiers would wave the white flag in surrender.
But I was far from the battlefield in Tomosaki. Every day, I'd wake up and feed the pigeons, walking under the Buddhist trellis and past the trimmed bushes.
Occasionally I would dream of being back home, and she would come to me, embrace me. My queen with a head of fire. But those dreams were far and few between. My time in Japan is remembered warmly. The Japanese (I refuse to call them "Japs") loved their sake, and I daresay they drank to excess. The master of the house, Kado Tanaka, had old samurai swords mounted on his wall, and he let me play with them and practice with them in my spare time. My leg wasn't good for much after a Japanese musket ball struck the kneecap, but I could still walk, albeit with a limp. I didn't feel as though I truly knew how to defend myself when I was without my gun. The samurai-play made me feel more confident in my own power. I would spend hours out there, chopping at the air or bamboo.
How did I get there?
Noncom boat...terror...explosion...shrapnel...below water...gasping for breath...arms around my arms...air...darkness.
My eyes opened in the idyllic town of Tomosaki, a place which, according to every expert I've talked to, doesn't and has never existed.
I didn't speak Japanese. My hosts communicated with me in a makeshift dialectic of hand gestures, eye movements and facial expressions. That is one of my greatest regrets. I never truly met Kado and Hitomi Tanaka. They were about as strange to me when I arrived as when I left.
That was in the beginning. Later, I had my own house, that was when the business with Kinu Tanaka started. He was their son. I never knew how old he was, but I'd say about eight. He was away at school for the first three weeks when I arrived. That was in May, year of the Hare.
I was sitting in the office of my white house on the edge of town when the bell rang. I had no maid to take the visitor's card, so I opened the door myself. Before me stood a beggar. He was old, his head bent, missing teeth. He wore a rag of a tunic, ripped at the shoulder, which made it look like a Greek toga. The tunic was scarlet red. His knees were dirty.
I said nothing. Just stared hard at him. He grinned his toothless grin and held out his hands in a beseeching manner. I cleared my throat.
"Yes?" He shook his head. He must be mute, I thought. He stepped into my house. "Sir!" I tried to remain polite, but this was most unusual. He continued to grin and shook his head, rather condescendingly. He wiped his dirty sandals off on the welcome mat and walked on purposefully.
In America, I would have applied force to the old man, but something about this cozy village made me feel secure. I followed the mute beggar. He went around the corner and down the stairs into the basement. The basement had fallen into disuse. After all, I was the only one who lived here, and I only occupied a few rooms in the house.
A little background on the house: Despite the language difficulties, I became close to the Tanaka family. I stayed there for 11 months, working alongside the women in the rice paddies to earn my keep. I had a few enemies in the village, unsurprisingly, and many men jeered at me as they passed by. But I learned to ignore them. The women loved me. I joined them in their rice-picking songs, my American baritone a sore thumb amidst the chorus of oriental tenors. The work was rather miserable. Foraging around with your fingers underwater, in the mud, coming home wet and dirty every day, it gets old. But I couldn't complain. The Tanakas were wealthy, and they liked me, despite our differences. Kado correctly predicted the influence of America on the rest of the world, and he became excited whenever the television broadcast an American show or news on America. He loved American cars, and asked me to sketch them for him. I've always had a proficiency with drawing.
The Tanakas had a house that was recently vacated with the death of Grandpa Tanaka. It was a white, bright, clean house. It wasn't a sad place. The Tanakas had accepted his death with grace and understanding. When I could no longer stay with them, the Tanakas invited me to stay in the grandparents' house. I graciously accepted the offer, and had been living there for 2 two weeks when the beggar came to my door.
We went down the stairs to the far wall. The beggar tapped it, revealing that the wall was actually made of a relatively thin rice paper. Then, he tore the delicate paper and ripped the wall down. A Buddhist altar glowed in the darkness. I knew it must be the Tanaka family altar. The beggar lit a match, his eyes gleaming. The darkness ebbed away, and I saw the altar in the light. My God I thought. Stacks and stacks on money sat on the altar, right at the foot of the Buddha statue. They were neat stacks, covered in a light film of dust. The beggar grinned his toothless grin. He made as if to walk away.
"Wait" I said, grabbing the back of his shoulder. He was frail. "What is your name? Write it down." I fumbled for a piece of paper and a pen and handed it to him. He wrote down a Japanese figure I couldn't decipher and handed the paper back to me. He walked away, leaving me alone in the darkness save for a torn open wall and a small fortune in yen.

. . .

The telephone burst into sound. "RRRRRRINNNNNGGGGGG." I dashed up from the basement to answer it. This was the first time the phone had ever rang. I didn't even know I had one.
"Hello?"
"William?"
"Hello?"
"William – William Garbo, it's me – Peter."
"Peter...Peter Cantor. Holy shit..."
"Yeah! It's me! Everyone here thinks you're dead, Willy." I exhaled an excited breath, unsure whether to laugh or cry.
"I'm alive and well Pete, alive and well...how the hell did you contact me? God it feels good to speak English again..."
"A helluva lot of research...those Japs don't speak any Ingrish, huh? Hahaa...Well anyway, I contacted every known survivor of Midway, until I tracked down some old crackpot named T-Bone Willis–"
"T-Bone...jesus..."
"Yeah, T-Bone, he's in a shelter now...but he said you and him got kinda tight on the ol' creaker."
"Yeah."
"Yeah, he said his last memory of you was hopping into a life-boat and heading toward the jap boat for some kind of Indiana Jones mission or something."
I laughed uneasily, "War does strange things to people."
"Yeah...well, after that, I looked into any records of hostages with the Japanese. Tried to talk to the embassy, but its all chaos over there. Seems every high-ranking official involved with the war has up and left town. Anway, there aren't any records, the Japs are already trying to forget about all this. But I heard that the ship, the Karyu, was sold off to some rich investor from Tokyo. I called him up, real worldly type. Spoke good English, knew more about our economy than I do. He told me what he knew about the history of his boat. After the battle of Midway, it was moored in the bay until he bought it. He didn't know anything about any hostages though.
He connected me to an old major in the Japanese army. That was rough, lemme tell you. Real tight-lipped. The Japs don't deal well with humiliation. He told me that any hostages who weren't beheaded were usually brought into camps...but...after the war, there was no need to hold onto them. He told me that, usually, well, hostages are left to fend for themselves on the streets."
Memories came flooding back to me. I was...adopted. They were carting us off to anyone who would make an offer. Two angry teenagers were given custody of me. They weren't too happy about the war, I gathered. They took me to the wharf, tied some cinderblocks to my ankles, and threw me into Tokyo Bay.
"William," a soft tone entered his voice, "When are you coming back?"
"I– I don't know." We paused in silence, him expecting a reply, me thinking what to say. "I've built a life here. I've got a house and everything."
"Why did you never try to contact us?" He sounded genuinely hurt.
"Well–," I started, "I guess...I just wanted to get my bearings, give my leg some time to heal, then I figured I'd start trying to get back. I didn't know where the hell to start looking."
"Well, you're coming back now, right? We can all pitch in for the plane ticket."
I thought about going back to America. Back to normalcy. Back to Rhonda. There was life in America before the war, but could there be life in America afterwards? I felt like I was truly possessionless here, my memory wiped. I had been...reborn on the shores of Tomosaki. How could I go back?
"William?"
The voice came to me from a thousand miles away. It was a voice from the past. I thought about the voice in my ear, and then I looked around at the bright, clean-swept house. If only I'd gone back to America like everyone else, I thought to myself. But no, I'm here. I would go to America today, I thought, if only there wasn't a war standing between me and it.
"Pete, buddy, I can't go back immediately. I just came upon an opportunity to make a large sum of money here and Japan, and I want to pursue that. So I'll have enough money to support me and Rhonda when we start a family." He'll understand money. There was a long pause at the other end of the line, like he was waiting for me to change my mind. He sighed.
"Ok."
I wrote down his phone number and address. I gave him my address, told him where I was in Tomosaki, near Tokyo. Then we said goodbye and hung up.