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  A few days later, I was walking home from school when I caught sight of a bulky figure on the road ahead of me, moving at a snail’s pace, so slowly that I couldn’t help but catch up. “Konnichiwa,” I said to Haruki. “Gomi…arigato.” Garbage, thank you? I hoped he’d get the point. I was about to pass when he reached out and grabbed my wrist. I laughed out of shock and nervousness.

  “Dontotesutome,” he growled.

  “I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I don’t speak much Japanese yet.”

  “Don’t. Test. Me.” He let go of my wrist and took off. Watching him run was like watching a cow sprint. It looked unnatural, like he was being chased, but I was the only other person on the street.

  CHAPTER THREE

  moeru: (V.) to burn; to get fired up; to have a crush

  It’s late November, technically still fall, but it feels like we skipped straight from summer to winter. Last month the leaves turned color and then dropped in a matter of days, like flares that ignited briefly before extinguishing, swept into piles and incinerated before they had time to settle on the ground. In Snow Country, the days start late and end early this time of year. By four in the afternoon, when I leave school, the sky is already darkening. At eight in the morning, the stars still faintly twinkle as our students straggle down the path that cuts between two rice fields, walking their bicycles to delay getting here until the last possible second.

  This morning I have first period free. I stand with Noriko Kaie, the high school librarian, warming our hands over the kerosene stove as we stare out the window, which is cracked to let out the toxic kerosene fumes. We watch the girls lock their bikes up, then roll the waistbands of their uniform skirts to make them even shorter, exposing thighs mottled fuscia from the cold. Their rusu sokusu or “loose socks” puddle over their platform shoes. Clomping along, they look like Clydesdale ponies.

  “Brrr,” I say, rubbing my palms together.

  “Do all new brides have to do this?”

  “No.” Noriko shakes her head. “Only…” She pauses to look up a word in the library’s large English/Japanese dictionary. “Only habitual new husband wants.”

  “Traditional?” I guess, and she nods.

  Rumor has it that Noriko used to date my predecessor, Joe Pope, until her father put an end to it by setting up a meeting with the local matchmaker. Now the librarian is engaged to marry a dentist, a man in his late forties, their wedding date set for early next summer. “Maybe you could not imagine such a thing,” Miyoshi-sensei said when he was informed of Noriko’s arranged marriage as we shared a cuppa’ in the faculty room one afternoon, “marrying someone you hardly knew.” I sensed that he was trying to get me to express the shock or disapproval that he could not as a member of this culture. Miyoshi-sensei’s own singleness is a subject of endless speculation. Several teachers have started conversations with me by saying, “Did you know that Miyoshi-sensei is not married?” or, “Probably he works so hard, he doesn’t have time to find a wife outside of school…” It’s how you gossip, an endless game of fill in the blanks. I can only guess how they try to fill in mine.

  “Will you ride in a glass van after your wedding?” I ask Noriko, hoping that I’m not overstepping my bounds.

  “Yes,” she says after a pause.

  “Kowai?” I venture. Are you scared?

  “No problem,” she says, but she’s not smiling anymore.

  As I lean forward to get a closer look at the bride, I press against the kerosene stove and a searing pain shoots up my leg. “Itai!” I cry out, momentarily distracted from the burn by the fact that I spontaneously recalled the Japanese word for “ouch.” Noriko drops to the floor and begins patting and blowing on my smoking tights. “Shit,” I say and she grins, recognizing the word she recently learned. I step out of my slippers, peel off my tights and pitch them into the trash. “Risaikuru,” she corrects me softly, moving them to the recycling bin. She opens her desk drawer and hands me a pair of pantyhose, still in their flat package. “Too small!” I protest. Noriko is bird-boned, narrow as a pencil. If I were hollow, both of her legs could fit inside one of mine. She looks up something in the dictionary. “Stretch!” she says. “Stretch!” It sounds like a suggestion. She watches me pull the waistband over my kneecaps, tugging so hard that they rip.

  “I’m so sorry!” I exclaim, mortified.

  “No problem,” she says, adding another ruined pair of stockings to the recycling bin.

  As Miyoshi-sensei and I walk down the hall to our first class of the day, he keeps glancing at my bare thigh. The burn is dark purple now, striped with grille marks. My leg looks like a roasted wiener. I’m grateful he doesn’t ask what happened.

  “So Miss Marina,” he says, “what shall we do today?”

  “Well,” I say, “I prepared a special worksheet about gender.”

  “Gender?” he repeats.

  “It means sex,” I explain. “Like, boys and girls.”

  “I know what sex means,” he cuts me off. “Is this appropriate for school?”

  “It’s very appropriate for this school.”

  At Shika High School, the female secretarial students study typing, word processing, and how to prepare the perfect cup of green tea to serve their future bosses, while the technical boys study basic engineering, computer programming, and machinery. Three years ago, the boys in the technical class sexually harassed their homeroom teacher, a young woman who resigned in shame after less than a month. The vice-principal’s solution? Keep women teachers out of their classroom. “You’re so lucky,” Miyoshi-sensei told me back in August. “Girl students are much easier to control.” When I asked him what the girls like, hoping to tailor my lessons to their interests, he said, “make.” I assumed this meant they like to make things. “No,” he corrected me. “Make. For example, lipstick, mascara…They are kind of standard girls.”

  But I believe that there is more to these future secretaries than meets the eye. I believe that nestled inside pigtailed heads are incendiary minds, that they just need the right person to expose them to the right ideas. Unfortunately, their English vocabulary is seriously limited, and so is my ability to think of simple ways to discuss complicated issues. They have barely mastered a few sentence structures:

  I am/am not. I do/don’t like. I have(n’t). I can(’t). I feel.

  Fill in the blanks, I wrote at the top of this worksheet.

  I like to be a girl because:_____ I would like to be a boy because:_____

  In Japan, only girls can:_____ In Japan, only boys can:_____

  I am not fooling myself. I don’t expect to spark a feminist revolution. My tools are crude. It would be like trying to start a fire by rubbing two soggy toothpicks together. Still, I’m excited to hear their answers, to spark a discussion at least.

  Miyoshi-sensei reaches for the stack of pictures that I tore from the Japanese magazines Cutie and Fruits, of grown women clutching stuff ed animals, standing pigeon-toed and sucking their thumbs. I explain that for a warm-up, I thought that we could show the students these pictures and discuss how the women are giving up their power by acting cute.

  “Just look at that,” I say, as he flips to a picture of a woman bending over to show off ruffled underpants. “She’s posing like a two-year-old.”

  “Don’t you like girls?” he asks, eyeing me sideways.

  “Yes,” I say carefully, “but not grown women pretending to be girls.”

  “But our students are not grown women.”

  “Well they’re not children either. Whenever I try to speak to them, they giggle or answer in baby talk. It makes me so nervous.”

  “Don’t be nervous,” he says. “Students are like crows on a wire. Always chattering about nothing with flashing dark eyes. They are mischievous, but not dangerous.”

  “Haruki doesn’t act like a crow,” I point out.

  “No,” he agrees. “He acts like a rice cooker. Outside he looks like nothing happening. But inside becomes more and more hot.”
/>   As we enter the freshman secretarial classroom, I’m sure the girls can smell my feet, which are clammy in my plastic hoof slippers. I’m sure they are ogling the grille marks on my thigh, wondering why I chose to put my big bare legs on display. “Hello,” I call out and they giggle as usual. I start to pass out my gender worksheet and Miyoshi-sensei says, “Maybe we had better use the textbook to discuss cultural issues.”

  “But I didn’t plan my lesson using the textbook,” I protest.

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “I will steer the discussion.”

  New Horizons teaches English through a serialized comic strip. International pals Yumi, Ken, and Pablo get in and out of trouble, all the while conversing in “the new global language: English!” Yumi’s uncle is a rogue scientist. In the last chapter, the three friends boarded his unfinished time machine. Rascally Ken pushed “the big red button,” and off they soared into the dark night sky, landing on the moon one text box later.

  “Repeat after Miss Marina,” Miyoshi-sensei says. “From the moon, the earth looks like a blue and white ball.” Only the most earnest girls mumble after me. The rest stare out the window or glance at the compact mirrors propped open on their desks. “Let’s go home,” says Yumi, and the friends climb back into the spaceship. They streak through the sky, but something goes terribly wrong and the time machine touches down on a smoking trashscape. A banner declares the year 2030.

  “Oh Ken, look at all this trash!” I read for Yumi.

  “Look at Pablo,” Miyoshi-sensei reads for Ken. “He looks sad!”

  “Of course he’s sad. The earth looks like a trash bin!”

  Looks like, Miyoshi-sensei writes on the board. Look at. He/she looks…

  “Miss Marina,” he says, “I think now is good time to discuss American culture.”

  “Great,” I say, gathering the stack of magazine pictures from the podium.

  “Actually,” he says, “I think maybe students are more interested to learn about American gomi situation. Could you please tell about the dump? Maybe we couldn’t imagine such a place.”

  In our team-teaching Miyoshi-sensei likes me to expose the problems of the Western world. I have learned that it doesn’t pay to get defensive, or to admit to how much I don’t know. I’ve begun improvising, making things up.

  “America is a big country,” I say, opening my arms wide. “We have so much space, we don’t need to separate gomi into a million categories. We don’t burn trash, or dig through our neighbors’ garbage cans. We put our trash in big black bags that we leave on the street at night, and early in the morning a professional takes everything to the dump and we never have to see it again.”

  “I’m afraid dump sounds so ugly,” Miyoshi-sensei says. “Like New Horizons picture of 2030. If I go to USA, can I be dump tourist?”

  “You can’t see the trash,” I say. “It gets buried in giant holes called landfills.” This actually sounds true.

  “You are from San Francisco,” he says. “You have many earthquake there. When the earth is unstable, you can’t dig a hole for trash.”

  “We just throw it in the middle of the ocean.”

  He turns to the board and draws an astonishingly accurate map of the United States. Next to it he draws a Japan that’s almost the same size. Between the two he sketches wavy blue lines. “One sea,” he says. “Same sea.”

  “And here in Shika, the mill pours dye into the river. What’s the difference?”

  “Only liquid in liquid,” he says. “Never something hard or floating sadly forever.” He pauses. “How about recycling? Don’t you think it’s important?”

  “Of course recycling is important,” I say.

  “Don’t you like a tree growing tall, offering some shady or apple?”

  “Of course I like a tree.”

  “Well then, please explain about Christmastime. We can see, in a movie like Home Alone, how every American family cuts down a tree only to hang some balls. It’s kind of so strange and wasteful, don’t you agree?”

  “Some people chop them up for firewood after Christmas.”

  He crosses his arms. “And when human being become dead, you put in a wooden box. Isn’t it true? Then you put wooden box in the earth. Same like dump-style?”

  “In my family we burn,” I say.

  “Excuse me?” He blinks rapidly, running a hand over his blow-dried hair.

  “My father was cremated,” I say. “Moeru ni narimashita.” This, I believe, translates: “he became burnable.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “He must have been so young.”

  “He was forty-eight.” I smile with difficulty, wondering why I started this.

  “It’s too young,” he says.

  I brace myself for the inevitable follow-up question. Before moving to Shika, I researched suicide in Japan and learned that it has reached epidemic proportions here. There is a forest at the base of Mount Fuji where so many people have hung themselves that park rangers sawed the lowest branches from the trees and nailed signs to their trunks reading, “Turn around!” and “Don’t give up!” Mount Mihara became a tourist destination after a nineteen-year-old jumped to her death in the crater and so many people followed her example that tour buses were prohibited from stopping there. Strangers form suicide pacts over the Internet, meeting at designated locations to gas themselves as a group. I learned that in the Japanese language there are different words for different kinds of suicides: suicide over a broken heart; suicide over bankruptcy; the suicide of a mother and child. But I still don’t know how to say that my father killed himself in Japanese. To my relief, no one here has ever asked me how he died.

  The bell rings, a shrill jangle. Before Miyoshi-sensei claps his hands to dismiss class, I pass my gender worksheet down each row.

  “Please tell the students to do these for homework,” I say.

  “Okay,” he says, “but I think it’s so difficult. Don’t expect too much.”

  At the end of the school day, when I return to the library to get my jacket, I hear a male voice with a thick British accent. The longer Joe Pope spends in Japan, the more exaggerated his accent becomes. Even when he’s reciting one of the five sentences he knows in Japanese, he still sounds like he’s speaking English. Through the window I see him sitting on the edge of Noriko’s desk, his long legs sprawled in front of him, his toes visible through his sandals. As a special guest here—a special guest who stands six-four and dwarfs the vice-principal—Joe alone is exempt from wearing the uniform hooves.

  “Hallo pet,” he says to me. “I was hoping I’d get to see you today.”

  “I’ve been sitting in the faculty room for an hour,” I inform him.

  “Roight.” He chuckles. “I try to avoid that place. A bit toxic, innit? Spent so much time in there last year, I actually developed an allergy to my desk.”

  “Are you teaching with us this week?” I ask.

  “Moight be,” he says. “We’ll see if Miyoshi-sensei wants to pay for one of me special visits. I just popped in for a chat with Norikokun.”

  “Noriko-chan,” she corrects him. “Kun for little boy. I’m girl!”

  “Are you sure?” he says. “Shall I check?” He flicks the hem of her T-shirt, she punches him in the shoulder, and he groans, doubling over in pretend pain. She eyes him with real concern before he laughs and straightens again, wrapping his arm around her shoulder and tickling her. She giggles and squirms closer to him.

  “Is that ad for jewelry or soup?” I point to a picture thumbtacked to the library bulletin board. He’s wearing an apron, serving a bowl of ramen to a pretty Japanese woman. Their matching gold wedding bands gleam like cartoon stars.

  “Neither,” he says. “It’s for life insurance.”

  We both laugh and Noriko looks at us, trying to figure out what’s funny. I should explain, but I don’t really know how.

  “Looks like you’ve had a lot of work lately,” I say.

  “Nothing to brag about,” he shrugs. Joe dismiss
es his commercial work as a lark, pretending to be annoyed by his celebrity status here in Shika, but he’s the one who brings copies of his ads whenever he returns for Noriko to hang on the Joe Pope wall of fame. “I did one commercial for a car dealership that was fun. I had to pretend to steal a mini-Jeep while the fuzz chased after me.”

  “It figures they hired a foreigner to play the car thief,” I say, rolling my eyes.

  “We’re a bunch of shady characters,” he agrees. “I’m up for the part of an English teacher on a soap opera. If I get it, I’ll have to move to Osaka.”

  “Osaka?” Noriko echoes faintly. “Toi desu.”

  “Not that far,” I say. “It’s only four hours by train.”

  “So what’s new with you lot?” Joe asks. “How’s Caro?”

  “She’s great,” I say. “We’re great.”

  “You two doing anything later on?”

  “Not that I know of,” I say. “Want to come over for dinner?” Even though Joe drives us nuts with his endless preening and his procession of Japanese girlfriend-du-jour, he is also mildly entertaining. He doesn’t mind being made fun of. He hardly seems to notice. Plus, he’s the only person here who knows about our relationship, meaning we can relax for a change, be ourselves around him. Whenever he comes over, we inevitably make a vat of pasta, drink one bottle too many of cheap red wine, and then go for a walk on the beach, where we build a bonfire, sing cheesy folk songs in bad harmony, and make fun of Joe’s questions, which grow progressively sillier and more obscene the drunker he gets. He has asked if we turn ourselves on when we look in the mirror. He has asked for pointers. He has even asked if he can watch, “just for educational purposes.” Rejection only seems to excite him, perhaps because it’s so rare in his charmed life.