Finding Home in Hokkaido

In this issue:

1. Cultural Revelations in Japan
2. Flash Fiction: Knife

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1. Cultural Revelations

I’m spending 2 1/2 weeks this winter in Japan with my extended family, from snowboarding in Niseko to touring Kyushu and Tokyo. Here I document my observations on differences between Japanese and either Californian or Singaporean culture. This is my fourth time in Japan, the previous time being in 2008, but I have now lived in the United States for 9 years and suspect that most of my observations will be made against an American yardstick.

• Japanese hotel room locks (at least at the two hotels here) lock equitably––by that I mean that if you lock the room from the inside, then you are also unable to open the door until you switch the lock back to its unlocked state. Most American hotel doors automatically unlock the door when you turn the handle from the inside.
• Roaming Sapporo with my young cousins, we found a ridiculous number of themed bars (where female servers dressed as Playboy bunnies, or skimpy candy-striped American diner waitresses) and hostess bars with walls full of brightly lit advertising tiles for you to choose the girl you want to drink with you. My uncle (a businessman in Australia, China, etc) told me Japanese businesses depend a lot on this sort of entertainment to do deals. They wine and dine you for days until the last day of your business trip, when you wake from your alcoholic haze and realise you haven’t negotiated as much as you should have, and feel the pressure to sign a contract less favourable to you and more favourable to your Japanese host. I suppose this culture explains why so many Japanese women have been requisitioned throughout history as entertainers to serve the patriarchy.
• The Japanese are obsessed with cleanliness. Most toilets are equipped with disinfectant for the toilet seat; most fitting rooms in boutiques make you take your shoes off, and even provide face covers for you to put over your head so that your face doesn’t smear onto the clothing! The upside of this is ridiculously clean restrooms––unlike in Singapore and the US, where many restrooms have dirty water sloshed everywhere and bins overflowing with paper towels––most Japanese restrooms are delightfully dry. The downside is, no paper towels.
• Yup, you have to be naked in the onsen. Yup, you have to have fully scrubbed yourself and shampooed and washed your hair before going into the onsen. At our ryokan they provided pretty yukatas for all the women to wear on their way to the onsen.
• All the national parks in Tokyo are closed over Dec 31— Jan 2, some of them for longer. New Year’s is not a great time to come except to see the Imperial Palace.

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2. Flash Fiction

Knife

I watch her take the knife to the mound of fishcake, paring off coarse slices for our ramen dinner. I found it in the drawer. It looks like a santoku, a lean lethal Japanese chef’s knife, but the blade is dull and tears food off with brute force. Her fingers are slender, almost translucent in exactly the same way Su Ching’s were, except ringless. The recognition of their rapid chopping motion strikes me like a brain freeze. Su Ching, too, had always been in a hurry.

When I think of the long years Su Ching spent working at that demanding job, keeping the house clean, and somehow managing to put dinner on the table before I came home from work, I realise what a miracle it was that she had managed to exist as a being independent of her love for me.

The homemade ramen falls far short of anything I’ve tasted in a restaurant in Singapore, let alone here in Japan, but perhaps my tastebuds have remained stunned by the second glass of Yamazaki. It’s not fair to her, I know, because I see Su in every mannerism, every utterance, in the very intimacy of us renting a room in wintry Hokkaido. But I am thankful that she has joined me, and that she says nothing about me stumbling home late last night while she had been sleeping off the jetlag.

Every few moments she glances my way, ready and willing to phlebotomise me anytime I need it. I don’t want to discuss Su Ching with her. I look out the window at the snow field beside our cabin, smooth as the foam on a freshly-poured beer.

“Hey, look at those tracks,” I say.

“What is that?” she says, walking over to the window. She squints. “They’re too small to be a person’s footprints. And I don’t think they have bears here. Hang on, over there by the trees.”

We watch as two red creatures the size of cats emerge from the woods. The bigger one is more confident and trots forward, coming all the way up to the azalea-bushes by our cabin to peer around, its whiskers twitching. Then the other bounds over to join it and I think that perhaps they are actually both the same size after all. They leap around, playing catch, retracing their steps and etching new prints into their pristine playground.

“Wow,” she says. “Real foxes. This is magical.”

“The Japanese sure think they are. They think foxes can’t say moshi moshi.”

“Say what? Mosh––so superstitious?”

I suddenly want to make her say it, but I keep it to myself.

There falls between us an eerie, ancient silence. She laughs, and the crow’s feet deepen around her eyes. “Your mother would have loved this.”

She loved Su Ching more than anything. Back in the days of my adolescent angst, struggling through the isolation of a girl not fitting in at an all-girls’ school, I remember resenting the fact that I only had a boisterous, troublemaking younger brother. I always thought my mother managed to achieve everything––supporting a husband through an acclaimed career in the government service, a group of enviably supportive friends, a picture-perfect family––through her love. If I had had such an adoring younger sister, perhaps I would have turned out better too.

I look over as she shakes the egg pudding out of the pan with relish. “The one thing my mother couldn’t do was cook,” I say. She has four children, and she cooks for them every day.

She shakes her head with a smile. “Your mother was selfish, you know,” she says. “As an older sister, she only thought about herself. I was the one who accompanied Mama to the wet market every Sunday while she stayed at home studying, and even then she never helped me with my homework. That’s why she never learnt to cook until much later in life.”

I have the funny sensation that there are two Su Chings existing in two separate universes. “I suppose she never had to before, when Dad could still afford the maid,” I say.

She doesn’t say anything.

“I’m going out for a smoke.”

A light, desultory snow is falling. I walk around to the eastern side of the cabin, to the fox tracks. The foxes are gone. There is only one set of prints now, the ones I had first seen from the window. My boots rock gently into the powdery snow as I stoop down to examine the prints. To my surprise, droplets of copper blood accompany every paw print. They do not look fresh.

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What I was thinking about at the time:
family, “A Wild Sheep Chase” by Haruki Murakami, short stories by Raymond Carver