If You Follow Me Read online

  If You Follow Me

  A Novel

  Malena Watrous

  For my parents,

  Contents

  Part I

  Gomi

  Chapter One

  My supervisor gives me the first letter on a Monday…

  Chapter Two

  The original gomi sin was not my fault.

  Chapter Three

  It’s late November, technically still fall, but it feels like…

  Chapter Four

  I first met Carolyn in our university bereavement group, at…

  Chapter Five

  Amana likes to come and go through the bedroom window,…

  Chapter Six

  Amana never came home last night.

  Chapter Seven

  Inside the lobby of Shika’s Royal Hotel, a carpet patterned…

  Part II

  Mo Ichi Do

  Chapter Eight

  At Shika’s elementary school, the children wear miniature versions of…

  Chapter Nine

  This morning, at the elementary school, I’m scheduled to teach…

  Chapter Ten

  On the drive home, I feel happier than I have…

  Chapter Eleven

  When I wake up, the whole world has been transformed.

  Chapter Twelve

  Trying to follow Keiko’s smudged charcoal map is like trying…

  Chapter Thirteen

  The dentist’s office is inside the Jade Plaza shopping center,…

  Chapter Fourteen

  The sun is not just out this morning, it’s actually…

  Part III

  Rabu-Rabu

  Chapter Fifteen

  As usual, the senior technical boys are practically naked when…

  Chapter Sixteen

  Carolyn is sorting things into three piles: hers, mine, and…

  Chapter Seventeen

  There is a hundred yen coin in my favorite bathroom…

  Chapter Eighteen

  During first period, I stand at the faculty room windows…

  Chapter Nineteen

  This morning when I wake up Carolyn is in the…

  Chapter Twenty

  In books, when a mystery is solved, it’s like a…

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I leave the faculty room ten minutes before the boys…

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  On the lawn in front of the museum of nuclear…

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  On the Monday morning after the festival, I arrive in…

  Part IV

  O-Bon

  Epilogue

  Although it must have been this hot when we first…

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART I

  Gomi

  AUTUMN

  Deep Autumn—

  my neighbor,

  how does he live, I wonder?

  —BASHO

  CHAPTER ONE

  semai: (ADJ.) narrow; confined; small

  Dear Miss Marina how are you? I’m fine thank you. A reason for this letter is: recently you attempt to throw away battery and jar and some kind of mushroom spaghetti and so forth, all together in one bin. Please don’t try “it wasn’t me.” We Japanese seldom eat Gorgonzola cheese!

  Now I prepare this sheet so you could learn target Japanese words and gomi law in one simple occasion. I hope it’s so convenient for you. It’s kind of so rude if you “can’t remember” about gomi law. Your neighbors feel some stress about you, and they must be so busy. They can’t talk to you every time you make a gomi mistake. I think they want to know you so much. First learn gomi law, second Japanese language, and third you can enjoy international friendship. This is like holding hands across a sea!

  Let’s begin with gomi law for Monday. Getsu-yobi means Monday in English. Kanji for Getsu comes from the moon. On a moon-day, you can throw soft plastic bottles, for example from Evian water, in blue bin by stone temple. Please save hard plastic bottle tops. On second and fourth Monday of a month, you can throw clear glass bottles in orange bin by #71 bus stop. But not bottle tops! You should take all bottle tops, together with brown or green glass bottles (for example from French wine you enjoy often), to red bin outside Caves de la Matsumoto sake store. Before you throw a bottle, please clean (very clean!) and remove paper from outside. You should save this paper for Tuesday’s burnable collection, to put in a bin by Mister Donuts. I think you eat a donuts every day. Maybe you know Mister Donuts location well.

  Please share this letter with your special friend. Your neighbor, Mister Ogawa, reports that she became angry when he tried so gently to explain gomi rules. “Kowai,” he say. He feels frighten. He is very old man. He only wants to help two young ladies sharing traditional Japanese house. You know some saying: when in Rome, please become Roman? When in Japan, please obey gomi law.

  That’s all for now.

  See you,

  Hiroshi Miyoshi

  My supervisor gives me the first letter on a Monday afternoon in late November.

  I am sitting at my steel desk in the buzzing, empty faculty room, reading a novel I should hate more than I do as I wait for the dismissal bell to ring. Since coming to rural Japan, I read only the books that my mom sends in her care packages, mostly comedies of manners. These novels are formulaic, but at least I understand them. People play by and break the rules of love and social conduct, and the right twosomes always find each other at the very end. At least I know when to cringe and when to cheer, who to be charmed by and who to be wary of. There are rules here too, governing my days and shaping my weeks, but four months into a one-year teaching contract, I still don’t have them down.

  As the after-school cleaning music starts to play—a Muzak rendition of “Whistle While You Work”—Miyoshi-sensei enters the faculty room, shuffling in flan-colored plastic slippers with the high school logo calligraphed on each toe. They make his feet look like hooves. As he nears my desk, rubbing a palm over his blow-dried hair, I hide my novel in the pleats of my skirt. “Mari-chan,” he says, and the female diminutive, chan, lets me know that I’m about to be reprimanded for something. “Would you care for a cuppa’?”

  The idiom is one he learned from Joe Pope, the British expat who taught English here until I took his place last August. Before his teaching contract expired, Joe was plucked off the streets of Kanazawa City by a scout from the gaijin modeling agency with the unfortunate name, “Creamy Talent,” which places foreigners in local print and TV ads. But he still makes the two-hour drive up to Shika every few weeks to join our teaching team, strumming his guitar and leading sing-alongs to which only Miyoshi-sensei sings along. Rumor has it that my supervisor pays for Joe’s visits out of his own pocket, and I believe it. On my first day here, Miyoshi-sensei informed me that English is only his number two hobby, his number one being karaoke. Usually, when he asks me to join him in a “cuppa’,” he has a new English CD and wants help translating the lyrics. But today he has no CD.

  “I’d love a cuppa’,” I say, waiting for him to leave so I can stash my novel in the drawer. Instead he leans over my shoulder, studying the photo trapped under my clear plastic desk cover.

  “Miss Marina’s friend is very…hansamu,” he says.

  “Thank you,” I say, wondering if the word “handsome” often applies to women here. With her short hair and lanky frame, Carolyn sometimes used to pass for a boy, and you can’t see her face very well in this picture, which was taken at the Halloween party we threw at Shika’s recreation center. Carolyn cut ribs, pelvises, and femurs from white contact paper and
we stuck them to black turtlenecks and jeans, smearing black shoe polish in the hollows of our eyes, across our cheekbones and lips. We tried explaining to the quivering senior citizens that Halloween costumes are supposed to be scary, but they preferred Joe’s Elvis costume, touching his sparkly gold jumpsuit as if it were something truly precious.

  “Do you enjoy putting on a costume?” Miyoshi-sensei asks me.

  “Yes,” I say cautiously. “Sometimes.”

  “I thought so,” he says. “Me too.”

  I follow him to the soshiaru kona or “social corner” at the back of the faculty room, where he pumps green tea from an electric carafe into two cups. As we sit side by side on the couch, my body sinks lower than his on the cushions. Our hips touch briefly and he pulls away, crossing his legs. He pulls a pack of Mild Seven menthols from his jacket pocket, clamps a cigarette between his lips, and lights it with his Zippo, the silver engraved with his favorite song title: “Imagine.” Usually he offers me a smoke, but today he puts the pack back into his pocket.

  “It’s good you stopped smoking,” he says, tapping his ash in an abalone shell piled with butts. “Woman teachers who smoke set a bad example, ne?” I’m about to point out that male teachers who smoke set an equally bad example when it occurs to me that I never told him I was trying to quit. I haven’t even told Carolyn, in case I fail again. “Recently,” he says, “your neighbor Ogawa-san discovered a box of Nicorette chewing gum in soft plastics recycling bin. Product description is in English. Also, we don’t have this gum in Japan. So we know it must be yours.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a folded piece of paper. The first thing I notice is that the page is covered in a strange cursive; faint swashes of lead joining not just the letters, but also the words. He tells me to study it well, then ask him any questions afterward.

  I chew my lower lip as I read his letter twice, just to delay looking up. When I do, he is also biting his lip. His right eye flickers, the way it does whenever he’s embarrassed and trying not to show it. He dislikes confrontation, and I feel worse for putting him in this position than I do for having thrown a box in the wrong garbage can.

  “Gomen nasai,” I say: forgive me. “Shitsureishimashita.” This translates literally: I have committed a rude. After four months in Japan, I’m fluent only in apologies.

  “Daijoubu,” he says. “It’s okay. I know there are so many gomi rules here in Shika. And you can’t read the Japanese signs above the bins. So I promised Ogawa-san that I would teach you better. After you read the rules in English, then you couldn’t make any more huge mistakes, ne?”

  “Miyoshi-sensei, I am sorry to cause so much work for you,” I say, slipping into Japlish like I do whenever I’m in trouble. “It’s true, Shika’s gomi system is so complicated. I have tried to follow the rules but…so difficult. In America, we can throw away all together. Thank you for your help. From now on I will do better for you.”

  When I first arrived here, Miyoshi-sensei told me that I needed to space my words more clearly, so that the students at this vocational high school would stand a chance of understanding my English. “Americans talk like cats,” he complained. “All sounds blend together. Mrowmrowmrow.” Now I pronounce English, “En-gu-ree-shu.” I drop contractions and speak like a record played at half its speed. By making myself as easy as possible to understand, I try to compensate for reading novels when I should be planning lessons, sneaking out of school early, and throwing unsorted garbage in the wrong bins. But the senior citizens who police our neighborhood garbage cans understand neither my glacial English, nor my stammering Japanese. They are not charmed into overlooking my negligence. Neither is Carolyn, who teaches at a rival vocational high school in Hakui, ten kilometers south of Shika. She gets up before me to ride the bus to work, so she is the one who usually answers the door when Mr. Ogawa turns up at dawn to return our garbage while the rest of the neighbors gather round to watch.

  “Mari-chan,” Miyoshi-sensei says, “I think for you, Japan must be so…” His eye twitches as he searches for a word. “Semai. Can you catch my meaning?”

  “Crowded?” I guess.

  “Nooo…Maybe yes, crowded, but also…semai. You know what I mean?”

  “Narrow?”

  “Yes! So narrow.” He claps my shoulder with the hand that holds his cigarette. Ash snows on my legs, but in his excitement over finding the right word, he doesn’t notice. Speaking in English animates Miyoshi-sensei. In English he talks loudly, emphatically, coming up with inventive, spot-on similes as strange as they are apt. At thirty-two, Miyoshi-sensei is ten years older than me, but he is the youngest Japanese teacher at this school and the only one who doesn’t yet have a family of his own. He is also the only son of the mayor of Shika. He alone has the time and money to spend his vacations abroad, in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. On these trips, he likes to slip into high schools, snapping pictures to shock his students back here. His desk is barricaded by a row of photo albums, filled with shots of cafeteria lunch trays, kids framed by metal detectors, and Dumpsters spewing trash. Miyoshi-sensei likes me, but he also likes to be an expert, especially on the paradoxes of the West. My presence makes this an interesting challenge.

  He stuff s the cigarette into the abalone shell, where a finger of smoke rises from the heap. It looks like a tiny volcano about to blow. I wish I could pluck it out and take a drag. Instead, I thank him again for his help.

  “It’s okay,” he replies. “You are my job. If you need help with something else, please ask me.”

  “Actually, we do need help getting rid of something,” I say. “Our refrigerator is broken. Joe offered to help us drive it to the dump, but we don’t know where the dump is.”

  “What is ‘dump’ meaning?” he says.

  “The place where you take big trash,” I begin. “Where you throw away furniture, cars, large appliances, that kind of thing.”

  “Oh no,” he says, shaking his head vigorously. “Japan is much too semai for some kind of dump system. You had better call refrigerator manufacturer, to come to your home and collect broken one from you.”

  “The refrigerator is an Amana,” I tell him. “I think the missionaries who lived in the house before us had it shipped from Iowa.”

  “Ah,” he says. “Probably Iowa manufacturer could not come to your home.”

  “Probably not,” I agree.

  “I have one unusual idea,” he says. “How about using refrigerator for another purpose, for example to hold all your books or souvenir?”

  “That’s an interesting suggestion,” I say, “but the fridge is huge and it smells bad and we’d really like to throw it away and get a new one.”

  “You had better not attempt to throw away some huge and smelly refrigerator,” he says, clapping his knees and standing up. “Please obey gomi law!” He taps his index finger against the page of gomi instructions before walking away. “Ask before you throw!”

  To: Miss Marina. How goeth thy day? Mine sucketh royally. In front of our first period class, my supe said, “Kyaroryn becomes so womanly lately in pretty dress and longer hairs. Maybe she has some secret new boyfriend, don’t you agree?” The drowsy studentia roused themselves to vote unanimously that yes, I indeed possess a shi-ko-re-tto ra-ba, hidden in the depths of my closet. If they only knew what’s really in there! Then, during lunch, my supe announced that I was showing great strides wielding my chopsticks. She said, “Don’t use chopsticks too well. If you eat too much, your bosom will become so big you couldn’t see your feet anymore.”

  AVESAY EMAY!

  Plz pick me up in front of school asap. I’ll be waiting outside.

  XOXO C.

  As paper inches from the fax machine on the vice-principal’s desk, I recognize the handwriting instantly. As always, Carolyn wrote in code to frustrate roving eyes. Whenever she faxes me at work, I imagine her sitting in a faculty room just like this one, having a day almost identical to mine, and I wonder if she might be feeling the exact same way as
me.

  I wait until Miyoshi-sensei has gone to the bathroom before leaving school ten minutes early. The wind whips a dust of new snowflakes across the driveway and the air feels tight with cold. Ever since the start of November, it has been snowing on and off. The cherry trees that line the school driveway are bald, each branch encased in a dripping sleeve of ice. But even though it was freezing this morning, I had to walk to work instead of driving, so that Miyoshi-sensei wouldn’t see the car he helped me buy three months ago.

  “Temporary people probably shouldn’t drive,” he warned me at the used-car dealership, having accompanied me there with reluctance to translate the epic sheaf of paperwork. “The rules here are different, the roads are semai, and how could you communicate in case of accident?” I assured him that I was a good driver, and that since the only vehicle I could afford was so small—a Honda Today! with a two-cylinder engine and Big Wheel-sized tires—Shika’s narrow roads wouldn’t be a problem. This did not turn out to be true. A week after buying the car, I scraped the left side against a telephone pole, knocking off the handle and side-view mirror. A month later I skidded on an ice patch, crashing the other side against the Dumpster in front of Mister Donuts. Now the car looks like it was squeezed by a giant pair of tongs. Neither door opens anymore, and we have to leave both windows down at all times, so we can crawl in and out like thieves.

  The upholstery is dusted with snow, which soaks through my tights and sears the backs of my legs. The heater activates the smell of mildew and cat piss. Keeping both windows down, I drive to the end of our block, turning onto Shika’s commercial strip. I pass a shop with a window display of dusty trophies, sporting goods, and knitting supplies, a store selling tofu in buckets of cloudy water and mountain yams still packed in dirt, a police station that doubles as a post office, and a liquor store with a wall of bootleg videos and a cooler of imported cheese. This is downtown Shika, the town where the Japanese Ministry of Education placed us, despite our request to live in a major Japanese city.