When You Are Engulfed in Flames

  March 3

  In the lobby of our building, there are four leather sofas and two coffee tables. People occasionally sit down there, but not too often. “Maybe because of this,” Hugh said yesterday, and he pointed to a sheet of rules written in Japanese. “No smoking” was clear enough, just a cigarette with a slash through it. Then there was “no drinking milk from a carton” and what was either “no eating candy hearts” or “no falling in love.”

  March 4

  I’d always thought of myself as a careful smoker, but last night, while watching a burning building on the evening news, I remembered the afternoon I started a fire in a hotel room. What happened was that I’d emptied my ashtray too soon. One of the butts must have been smoldering, and it ignited the great wads of paper in my trash can. Flames licked the edge of my desk and would have claimed the curtains had I not acted quickly.

  Then there was the time I was taking a walk in Normandy, and the tip of my lit cigarette brushed the cuff of my jacket. One moment my wrist felt hot, and the next thing I knew I was like the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. Flames leapt from my sleeve and I jumped from foot to foot, batting at them and calling out for help.

  In all the excitement, my half-smoked cigarette dropped from my hand and rolled to the edge of the road. Once the fire was out and I’d halfway regained my composure, I picked it up, brushed off the dirt, and stuck it back in my mouth, just happy to be alive.

  March 6

  I took the train to Yokohama yesterday and was at Shinagawa Station when a couple got on with their young son, who was maybe a year and a half old. For the first few minutes the boy sat on his mother’s lap. Then he started fussing and made it clear that he wanted to look out the window. The father said something that sounded, in tone, like, “You just looked out the window two days ago.” Then he sighed and bent forward to remove his son’s shoes. The mother, meanwhile, went through her bag and pulled out a small towel, which she then spread upon the seat. The boy stood upon it in his stocking feet, and as he considered the passing landscape he smacked his palms against the glass. “Ba,” he said, and I wondered if that was a word or just a sound. “Ba, ba.”

  We all rode along for a pleasant ten minutes, and, shortly before the train reached their stop, the father put the boy’s shoes back on. His wife returned the towel to her purse, and then, using a special wipe, she cleaned her son’s fingerprints off the glass. Coming from France where people regularly put their feet on the train seats, and from America where they not only pound the windows, but carve their initials into them, the family’s display of consideration was almost freakish. Ba, I’ve since decided, is Japanese for “Watch carefully, and do what we do.”

  March 7

  Four hours into Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees, and I wondered how I had survived all these many years without Kabuki. It helped, I think, that we rented those little radio transmitters. Hugh’s and mine were in English, and Akira’s was in Japanese. The play was in Japanese as well, but the stylized manner in which people spoke made them very difficult to understand. The equivalent, in English, might be Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West calling out that she’s melting, only slower, and with frequent pauses.

  If I hadn’t had the radio transmitter, I would have been perfectly happy watching the sets and the elaborately costumed actors. I would have noticed that most of the women were on the homely side, some of them strikingly so, but I wouldn’t have known that these roles were played by men, which is one of the rules, apparently: no girls allowed, just like in Shakespeare’s day.

  The story of Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees was both simple and complicated. Simple in that things never change: people are consistently jealous or secretive or brave-hearted. As for the rest, it all came down to a series of misunderstandings, the type that could happen to anyone, really. You assume that the sushi bucket is full of gold coins, but instead it’s got Kokingo’s head in it. You think you know everything about your faithful follower, but it turns out that he’s actually an orphaned fox who can change his shape at will. It was he who spoke my favorite line of the evening, five words that perfectly conveyed just how enchanting and full of surprises this Kabuki business really is: “That drum is my parents.”

  There was a lot of sobbing in last night’s presentation. Lots of teeth gnashing, lots of dying. Our transmitters explained that the playwrights wanted to end on a dramatic note, so at the close of act six, after Kakuhan reveals himself as Noritsune and vows to one day meet Yoshitsune on the field of battle, he climbs a two-step staircase, turns to the audience, and crosses his eyes. What with his fist clenching and a hairstyle that might be best described as a Beefeater shag, you had to laugh, but at the same time you couldn’t help being moved. And that, I think, is pretty much the essence of a good show.

  March 9

  Riding the high-speed train — the Shinkansen — to Hiroshima, I supposed that to the untrained eye, all French cities might look alike, as might all German and American ones. To a Japanese person, Kobe and Osaka might be as different as Santa Fe and Chicago, but I sure don’t see it. To me it’s just concrete, some gray and some bleached a headachy white. Occasionally you’ll pass a tree, but rarely a crowd of them. The Shinkansen moves so fast you can’t really concentrate on much. It’s all a whoosh, and before you know it one city is behind you and another is coming up.

  If the world outside the train is fast and bleak, the world inside is just the opposite. I like the girl in uniform who pushes the snack cart down the aisle and the two girls in brighter, shorter uniforms who come by every so often and cheerfully collect your trash. Nobody talks on his cell phone, or allows music to bleed from an iPod. You don’t see any slobs either. On the first leg of our trip, we sat across from a man I guessed to be in his midfifties. His lower face was obscured by a mask, the type people wear when they have a cold. But his hair was oiled and carefully combed. The man wore a black suit, matching black shoes, and canary yellow socks that looked to be made of wool rather than cotton. It was such a small thing, these socks, but I couldn’t take my eyes off them. “Hugh,” I said. “Do you think I would look good in yellow socks?”

  He thought for a moment before saying, “No,” this without a trace of doubt, as if I asked if I’d look good in a body stocking.

  March 10

  Having written that so many Japanese cities look alike, I couldn’t help noticing that Hiroshima was clearly different: greener, more open. We caught a cab at the station, and after telling the driver where we were going I explained that my friend and I were Europeans, visiting from our home in Paris.

  “Oh,” the driver said. “That’s far.”

  “Yes it is,” I agreed.

  The trip to the hotel took maybe ten minutes, and Hugh and I spent most of it speaking French. We did this a lot during our time in Hiroshima, especially at the memorial museum, which was torturous. Just when you’d think that it couldn’t get any sadder, you’d come upon another display case, one in particular with a tag reading, “Nails and skin left by a twelve-year-old boy.” This boy, we learned, was burned in the blast, and subsequently grew so thirsty that he tried to drink the pus from his infected fingers. He died, and his mother kept his nails and the surrounding skin to show to her husband, who’d gone off to work the day the bomb was dropped but never came home.

  The museum was full of stories like this, narratives that ended with the words “But he died / but she died.” This came to seem like something of a blessing, especially after we passed the diorama. The figures were life-sized and three-dimensional, a ragged group of civilians, children mainly, staggering across a landscape of rubble. The sky behind them was the color of glowing embers, and burnt skin hung in sheets from their arms and faces. You couldn’t fathom how they could still be upright, let alone walking. One hundred forty thousand people were killed in Hiroshima, and more died later of hideous diseases.

  There were a dozen or so displays devoted to the aftereffects of radiation, and
in one of them a pair of two-inch-long black rods, curled, and the circumference of a pencil, sat on a pedestal. It seemed that a young man had his arm out the window when the bomb went off, and that some time later, after most of his wounds had healed, these rods grew from his fingertips and took the place of his nails. Worse still is that they had blood vessels inside of them, and when they broke off they hurt and bled and were ultimately replaced by new rods. The narrative was fairly short, no more than a paragraph, so a lot of my questions went unanswered.

  The museum was crowded during our visit, and nobody spoke above a whisper. I spotted two Westerners standing before a photograph of charred bodies, but because they were speechless, I have no idea where they were from. After leaving the main exhibit, we exited into a sunny hallway filled with drawings and video monitors. The drawings were done by survivors and were ultimately more haunting than any of the melted bottles or burnt clothing displayed in the previous rooms. “Jr. High Students’ Corpses Stacked Like Lumber” was the title of one of them.

  March 11

  A booklet in our hotel room includes a section on safety awkwardly titled Best Knowledge of Disaster Damage Prevention and Favors to Ask of You. What follows are three paragraphs, each written beneath a separate, boldfaced heading: “When you check in the hotel room,” “When you find a fire,” and, my favorite, “When you are engulfed in flames.”

  Further weird English from our trip:

  • On an apron picturing a dog asleep in a basket: “I’m glad I caught you today. Enjoy mama.”

  • On decorative paper bags a person might put a gift in: “When I think about the life in my own way I need gentle conversations.”

  • On another gift bag: “Today is a special day for you. I have considered what article of present is nice to make you happy. Come to open now, OK?”

  • On yet another gift bag: “Only imflowing you don’t flowing imflowing.” (This last one actually gave me a headache.)

  March 12

  Saturday night’s dinner included small pieces of raw horse meat served on chipped ice. It wasn’t the first time I’ve eaten horse, or even raw horse, for that matter, but it was the first time I’ve done it while dressed in a traditional robe, two robes actually, the first one amounting to a kind of slip. The woman who served us was a little on the heavy side, young, with big crooked teeth. After showing us to our table on the floor, she handed us steaming towels and then looked from Hugh to me and back again. “He is you brother?” she asked, and I recalled Lesson 8 of my instructional CD. “He is my friend,” I told her.

  This same thing happened last month at a department store. “Brothers traveling together?” the clerk had asked.

  Westerners often think all Asians look alike, and you don’t see the ridiculousness of it until it’s turned in reverse. Back home, Hugh and I couldn’t even pass for stepbrothers.

  March 19

  It was cold yesterday, and after lunch, armed with an out-of-date guidebook, Hugh and I went to Shinjuku Station and then changed trains. The neighborhood we wound up in was supposed to be packed with antique stores, but that, most likely, was back in the eighties. Now there was just a handful of places, most selling stuff from France and Italy: pitchers with “Campari” written on them, that type of thing. Still, it was well worth the trip. Few of the buildings were more than three stories tall. Architecturally, they weren’t that interesting, but their scale gave the area a cozy, almost familiar feeling.

  We wandered around until it started getting dark and were heading back toward the subway station when we came upon what looked like a garage. The door was open, and leaning against a counter was a naive painting of a beaver, not the kind you’d see on all fours, building a dam or whatever, but breezy and cartoonish, wearing a shirt and trousers. I had just stepped forward to admire it when a man appeared and held an electronic wand to his throat. The voice it created was completely flat, never varying in tone or volume. Robotic, I guess you’d call it. Otherworldly. It’s how movie aliens used to sound when they asked to be taken to our leader.

  The man was so difficult to understand that for the first minute, I couldn’t tell if he was speaking English or Japanese. I sensed that he was asking a question, though, and, not wanting to offend him, I agreed in both languages. “Yes,” I said. “Hai.”

  I’d guess the guy was about seventy, but youthful-looking. He wore a baseball cap and a collarless leather coat that left his throat unobstructed and open to the cold. I pointed once more to the painting, and after I said how much I liked it, he brought me a brochure. On its cover was this same cartoon beaver, only smaller and less charming.

  This time I said, “Ahhh. OK.”

  It was hard to tell what this shop was all about. One entire wall was open to the street, and most of the shelves were lined with what looked like junk: used newspapers, grocery bags, a championship cup made out of plastic. “My daughter,” the man droned in English, and he held the cup aloft and gave it a little shake. “She win.”

  I was then shown a photo of a smiling fat guy with his hair in a bun. “Amateur sumo champion,” the shopkeeper told me.

  And I said, in Japanese, “He is a big boy.”

  The man nodded, and as he returned the photo to its shelf, I asked him what he sold. “Ah,” he said. “Yes. My business.” Then he led me to the street and pointed to the roof, where a handmade sign read, “Cancer Out Tea.”

  “I have cancer,” he announced.

  “And you cured it with tea?”

  He made a face I took to mean “Well . . . kind of.”

  I was going to ask what kind of cancer he had, but then I thought better of it. When my mom got sick, people would often push for details. It was their way of setting her at ease, of saying, “Look, I’m acknowledging it. I’m not freaked out.” But when they learned that she had lung cancer, the mood tended to change, the way it wouldn’t have if the tumor was in her breast or brain.

  Because of the electronic wand, I assumed the man had cancer of the larynx. I also assumed, perhaps unfairly, that it was prompted by smoking. What shocked me, standing in that ice-cold garage, was my certainty that the same thing will not happen to me. It’s so queer how that works. Two months without a cigarette, and I’m convinced that all the damage has reversed itself. I might get Hodgkin’s disease or renal cell carcinoma, but not anything related to smoking. The way I see it, my lungs are like sweatshirts in a detergent commercial, the before and after so fundamentally different that they constitute a miracle. I never truly thought that I would die the way my mother did, but now I really, really don’t think it. I’m middle-aged, and, for the first time in thirty years, I feel invincible.

  Part III (After)

  One

  On the return flight from Tokyo, I pulled out my notebook and did a little calculating. Between the plane tickets, the three-month apartment rental, the school tuition, and the unused patches and lozenges, it had cost close to twenty thousand dollars to quit smoking. That’s 2 million yen and, if things keep going the way they have been, around 18 euros.

  Figuring that I bought most of my cigarettes duty-free, and annually paid about twelve hundred dollars for them, in order to realize any savings I’d have to live for another seventeen years, by which time I’d be sixty-eight and clinging to life by a thread. It’s safe to assume that by 2025, guns will be sold in vending machines, but you won’t be able to smoke anywhere in America. I don’t imagine Europe will allow it either, at least not the western part. During the months I’d been gone, France had outlawed smoking in public buildings. In a year’s time it would be forbidden in all bars and restaurants, just as it was in Ireland. Italy, Spain, Norway; country by country, the continent was falling.

  Hugh and I flew British Airways to Tokyo and back. Most of the flight attendants were English, and as one of them roamed the aisle with the duty-free cart, I flagged her down. “Ordinarily I’d be buying cigarettes,” I told her. “This time I’m not, though, because I quit.”

&nb
sp; “Oh,” she said. “Well, that’s all right then.”

  As she turned to leave, I stopped her again. “For three decades I smoked. Now I don’t anymore.”

  “Lovely.”

  “Cold turkey, that’s how I did it.”

  Then she said, “Brilliant,” and hurried off down the aisle.

  “Why did you do that?” Hugh asked.

  “Do what?” I said, and I turned back to the movie I’d been watching. The truth, of course, is that I’d wanted some praise. I’d denied myself. I’d done something hard, and now I wanted everyone to congratulate me. It was the same in 2000 when I lost twenty pounds. “Notice anything different?” I’d say — this to people who had never seen me before.

  Two

  It was one thing to be a quitter, but I didn’t have to call myself a nonsmoker — to formally define myself as one — until I returned to the United States. By the time I landed, I hadn’t had a cigarette in exactly three months, almost an entire season. My hotel had been booked in advance and, upon my arrival, the desk clerk confirmed the reservation, saying, “That’s ‘King Nonsmoking,’ right?”

  The first word referred to the size of the bed, but I chose to hear it as a title.

  Adjusting my imaginary crown, I said, “Yes, that’s me.”

  Now when I travel, I like the hotel to have a pool, or, better yet, a deal with the local YMCA. That’s been one thing to come out of this: a new hobby, something to replace my halfhearted study of Japanese. Though I haven’t yet learned to enjoy the actual swimming part, I like all the stuff around it. Finding a lap pool, figuring out the locker system. Then there’s the etiquette of passing someone, of spending time alongside them in the water.

  In Tokyo once I complimented a fellow Westerner on the gracefulness of his backstroke. “It’s like you were raised by otters,” I said, and the way he nodded and moved into the next lane suggested that I had overstepped some fundamental boundary. It’s the same in the locker room, apparently. Someone can have a leech stuck to his ass, but unless it’s a talking one, and unless it personally asks you a question, you should say nothing.