Anatomy of a Novel, Part 3, Episode 19

The Penultimate Episode

“Promise me you’ll be back before school starts, that you won’t leave me high and dry,” said Mr. Sugiyama, though I’d already promised him twice.

“I promise, but I’m getting the Mitsubishi class again, right?  And Melinda’s, the one that’s supposed to be reading “War and Peace.”

I hadn’t known about the “War and Peace” class until Melinda said I should ask for it as we were leaving Mountain Cabin two nights earlier.  I couldn’t remember telling her my “War and Peace” story with Natasha, but maybe I had.  Keeping track of my stories was beyond me by then.

Melinda’s deal with her students was that they would read certain sections of “War and Peace” in Japanese, she would read them in English, then the discussion would take place entirely in English during class.  It was the typically lame-brained idea that made A Cut Above the Rest such a poor school, but I was all in.

“War-and-Peace,” I said, before leaving Mr. Sugiyama where I found him, and making my way to Kinokuniya.

It was a warm day, much as it had been when I sat on that Pontocho bench with Kaori, much like it had been in London when I sat down next to Natasha, who didn’t countenance the interruption.  Whenever I was on the cusp of something it seemed that the day had to be warm, that cold days made me shove my hands in my pockets, my mind shoved into internal pockets, also.     

There were no copies of “War and Peace” on the bookstore shelves, so I asked a young saleswoman if she could look for one in their storeroom.  If I wasn’t able to read it on the train to Tokyo, and on the trains back and forth from Hokkaido, I wouldn’t be ready to teach it when our semester began.

She left for a while, the saleswoman, returning to say that she’d found one for me, but it was used.  “It’s got notes in the margins, written by a previous owner,” she said.

She spoke in practiced English, as if she’d stood in the storeroom working on that sentence, once she found the book.  I asked if the price would be lower since it was used, and said I’d take it when she told me that it would.  “War and Peace”, with another person’s notes in the margins…  maybe that meant I would have someone to help me teach it.

After leaving Melinda on her final night, I had stepped inside the Sugiyama’s house for the first time, to watch that TV show with Emi.  Her constant kibitzing; letting me know who was in love with whom; who might break into song at any moment; and singing along when someone did, far from being an irritation, helped me follow the storyline.  Emi was like the notes in the margins of the show, which was so much fun that I promised I would watch it with her when I got back from Hokkaido.  She also made me say that I would find a TV and watch it in Hokkaido, so she wouldn’t have to explain things to me all over again.

The “War and Peace” translation, by a husband and wife team named “Maude”, was the same one Natasha had me read in London.  Perhaps my love for Natasha gave the book its monumental effect on me, but it was the greatest reading experience of my life, up to and including the novel I was reading now.  Both were stories of the manners of bygone eras - eras I did not wish I had lived in - but Tolstoy wrote “War and Peace” some half a century before the Russian revolution - during the American Civil War - while my Japanese novel began in serialized publication in 1943, smack in the middle of World War II, its lack of comment on ‘real-world’ goings on quite striking.   Even the fact that the German family living next door to the sisters in the book had to suddenly pack up and leave, wasn’t clearly attributed to the catastrophic events that were about to unfold across the planet.            

When I left Kinokuniya I went to the same coffee shop I’d stopped at on my way home from Ryoanji, opened “War and Peace” and started reading.  The beginning of the novel was in French, with no English coming until the end of a first long paragraph.  I’d forgotten that, and sighed at the fact that not only my students, but I would have to pretend to understand French throughout the novel.  Down in the margin at the bottom of the first page the woman who previously owned the book had written, “What? You thought this would be easy?” in a finely legible script.  I knew she was a woman because a name appeared on the flyleaf.  She called herself “Charlotte-the-Reader,” and “War and Peace” was assigned number 633.  Was that how she lived her life, reading and numbering novels, then writing rhetorical questions to herself,  and now to me?  Where was Charlotte-the-Reader these days, what was she reading, and how many books had she read since number 633?  A previous version of me might have tried to find out.

I stayed in the coffee shop for three hours.  I had to be ready for class not only by staying ahead of my students, but by mapping out a teaching strategy, which, I could see, would have as much to do with the 19th century Russian aristocracy as with the English of this translation.   It was a ridiculous, monumental task, and when I closed the book my inability to handle it hit me like an onslaught of malaria.  I opened the book again to Charlotte-the-Reader’s “What?  You thought this would be easy?” and said aloud, “No, but I thought it would be possible.”

I left the coffee shop and went back to school to have a talk with Mr. Sugiyama.  Maybe I could switch it out for my Japanese novel, which had no French, though it often mentioned Paris.

It was there, outside the school on the sidewalk, that I ran into Bill.

“How many ways did they teach to kill someone in the Marine Corps?” he asked.

His hands were full of fliers.  He tried to give me half, so I took a few and looked across the street at Mr. Sugiyama, who had fliers of his own.  Maybe I wouldn’t bother the man after all, maybe I’d give him a little peace sticking with the difficult novel in my hands.

“Four,” I said.  “Shooting, stabbing, choking, and talking them to death.”

I hadn’t meant to insult Bill, but that was how he took it.  

“Fine,” he said.  “I was just trying to get into that military mindset of yours.”

I’d told Melinda long ago that I hadn’t been a diplomat, that I’d enlisted in the Marine Corps out of a warped sense of solidarity with my uncle.  But maybe she hadn’t passed it on to Bill.

“I have no military mindset,” I said.  “I was a duck out of water in the Marines.  People called me ‘egghead’.  And ‘talking them to death’ was just something our drill instructor liked to say.  The man could talk for an hour without taking a breath.”

“Well, you look like you’ve got a military mindset, but maybe it’s the haircut,” said Bill.

Actually, I was going with Emi and her mother the next day when Emi got her haircut, to get mine cut, too, so we’d both be freshly shorn for the photos Etsuko wanted to take of us.  Bill wore his hair pulled back into a ponytail, making it easier to see his face.  When his mouth was shut, his big teeth made it look like he was suppressing a belch.  When I told Melinda that during our hike, she said that she always thought he was suppressing a yawn.

“I feel sorry for Sugiyama,” Bill said.  “With Melinda leaving he’s only got you and me.  It would be bad for you to quit on him, man, like if you decided not to return from Hokkaido.”

So Bill wasn’t quitting, even if he took over Mountain Cabin…

“Damn,” I said. “Who told you about Hokkaido?”

He sucked his cheeks into his mouth as best he could.  “Can’t quite remember, but it might have been Melinda.  And are you really teaching ‘War and Peace?’ I wouldn’t touch that with a ten foot pole.”

When he nodded at the book in my hands and I held it up, Mr. Sugiyama smiled and waved from across the street.  Quite a few people were on either sidewalk, and no one took fliers.  I gave mine back to Bill, who put them into a folder with noticeable care.

“Let’s take a walk, talk a few things over, maybe grab some lunch,” he said.

It was after one, and I was hungry, so I said, “Sure, anywhere but Yamagoya.”

I thought that might bother him, but he said, “Let’s go down by the river.   Find us some Korean food.”

I’d already walked a lot that morning, but I’d been avoiding Bill since the day I met him, so off we went, me carrying my book and him the folder full of fliers.  Melinda’d said that Bill had lived in Korea for a year, after Thailand and before Japan, working near one of the US bases as a bartender.

“Korean food’s fine,” I said.  “I got into it in Tokyo, especially the soups.  Nothing like a spicy soup on a cold winter day.”

Since it wasn’t a cold winter day, that sounded forced.  I wanted to understand what it was about the guy that made me both dislike him and want to impress him at the same time.

“You know about Fritz and Etsuko, right?” he said.  “Man, that’s some weird shit… One of ‘em’s got a pole stuck so far up his ass that he can hardly walk, and the other one’s sneakier’n a church mouse on Sunday.”

He huffed and sped up, as if trying to leave me behind.

“I don’t think Etsuko’s sneaky,” I said, “but Fritz does walk funny.”

There it was again, me trying to impress him by denigrating someone else.

“What are you talking about, not sneaky?  Did you not see how hard poor Mr. Sugiyama was working back there, trying to hand out his hopeless goddamned fliers?  All he wants is to give his wife and daughter a roof over their heads, and what does she do but go get laid up in Fritz’s room whenever she gets the chance.  And all after not letting me wash my shirt!”

When I laughed, Bill took out a flier and placed it in the hands of a passing salaryman.

“Great school!” he said.  “Come learn English!”

“I know she went to Fritz’s room, I was with Mr. Sugiyama when he caught them.  But she wasn’t really sneaking, Bill,” I said.  “Etsuko’s loved Fritz since they lived next door to each other in Osaka before the war, and she was dealing with it the only way she knew how.”

Bill surprised me by barking out a cheerful laugh.  “That’s what I like about you, professor,” he said.  “You keep on saying what you think, even if it’s total horseshit.”

We had cut down a side street and when we came out of it again the river was in view.

“To tell you the truth, I am sorry about Melinda,” he said. “If she sent me an itinerary with my name on it now I’d packed my bags and catch the train.  Or airplane, I guess it would be.”

Since he’d barely mentioned Melinda, the sudden shift surprised me.

“But not before?” I asked.

“Not before what?  Make yourself clear, amigo.”

“Not before, when Kaori sent you an itinerary.  You’d go to New Orleans with Melinda, but not to Australia with Kaori back then?  What does that tell you?”

Bill stopped, so he could turn and face me head-on.  He seemed to be deciding whether I was worth the effort it would take to explain himself.

“Is it your considered opinion that it ought to tell me I’m in love with Melinda but I wasn’t in love with Kaori?” he asked.

Since he was right, I shrugged.

We’d arrived at a street full of Korean restaurants.  “That one,” he said.  “But forget about soup.  What I need for explaining things to an egghead like yourself is an ice cold beer and some greasy bulgogi.  And you ought to have some, too.”

When we went inside he said something in Korean to a waiter.  In the restaurant’s poor light he looked pallid but at home, like he spent all his time in places like this, no matter where in the world he lived.  When he told the waiter we would sit at the bar I got a sense of the tone he would use when running Mountain Cabin - half cajoling, half bossing people around.  Bill wasn’t meant for teaching, but for helping others get over a long and trying day by pouring them booze and telling them what to eat.

“Okay then, let me ask you this,” he said, still on the horns of his Melinda-Kaori dilemma.  “Do you fly up into the heavens when you know a terrible storm is coming, or do you wait until the weather clears?  And don’t get fancy on me, man, I am talking about on an actual airplane to Australia.  This ain’t theoretical.”

“So you’re saying that Melinda is safe but Kaori wasn’t?  That going with her was… I don’t know… something like Etsuko going to Germany with Fritz?  You loved her but you couldn’t stretch that far?”

“Bingo!  You’re not as dumb as you look, but let’s take it one step further.  What if I am also admitting that it was worse than my inability to stretch that far.  What if I am admitting that I was a coward with Kaori and that what I’ve learned since then, from Melinda, has let me know that even if the weather’s bad you sometimes have to get on the plane that’s waiting for you… Because you’ll never get such a beautiful offer again.”

When our beer came he hoisted his, while I left mine where it was.

“Have you talked to Kaori since she stopped speaking English?” I asked.  “Because it seems to me that though she won’t invite you to go to Australia again, she might invite you to a place where you will still have to leave your cowardice at the door.”

I meant to her house, into the real Japan, while he was about to wall himself off from in an artificial version of America, built by a guy who wanted to go back to the real one.

“Why would she invite me anywhere after I failed her test?” he asked.

His mouth twisted into a toothy rictus, but it had hope at the edges of it.

“There was never any test, Bill, so there was never any passing grade.”

When our bulgogi came, not at all greasy and with generous portions of rice and kimchi, I thought our talk might switch to something else, but he just sat there eating fast and drinking, and going more deeply into himself.

“It’s a tough nut to crack, ain’t it?” he said.  “Who you end up loving and who you don’t?”

What could I do but agree, and eat a bunch of rice and bulgogi myself?

Endnotes…

1. The Maude translation of “War and Peace” was first publish in 1922, and is thought to be the most faithful to the Russian original.  Aylmer and Louise Maude knew Tolstoy well, it seems. I first read “War and Peace” when living in Nairobi in the mid 1980s, and have read it several times since.  During one fateful semester, when I was teaching an undergraduate literary class at UNLV, in fact, the ONLY assignment for the entire semester was “War and Peace” - the Maude translation - plus the essays concerning the book that were printed at the back of the volume.  My students were aghast, at first, and the English Department chair took me to task regarding my abdication of the study of ANY other work of fiction.  In the end, however, my twenty or so freshmen and sophomore students were proud of what they’d accomplished, and I was proud of them.  One of the attached essays, by the way, was a thoughtful and erudite one by Vladimir Lenin.

2. Eating Korean food in Japan was an absolute favorite pastime of mine, whether it was greasy bulgogi in an “all you can eat, all you can drink (食べ放題飲み放題)” dive in Kyoto, or in one of Tokyo’s great Korean restaurants.  So I gave our big-toothed friend, Bill, that same compulsion.  Autobiography, in my novels, is almost always presented through some slight like or dislike, with deeper aspects of my characters’ nature and personality usually foreign to my own.