Across Oceans a Pillow Book

By Camilla Lade

Memories of a young woman who travels to the Japanese countryside and falls in love with a local monk.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781387904891

Book preview

Across Oceans a Pillow Book

Across Oceans - A Pillow Book

Copyright © 2017 by C. Lade

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2017

ISBN

Here, now, I stand

And turn to look behind

And see my passion then

Was like one blind who does not fear

The dark

Ima koko ni/ kaerimi sureb/

waga nasake/ yami wo osorenu/ meshii ni nitari

- Yosano Akiko

Prologue

My belly tightened. A wave of pain tore through my body. I was told it would come in waves like that. I vomited after the nurses gave me the second injection. I wished they would let me off the bed. I was told it was easier to deal with the pain if I could move around. They had me strapped to a monitor that wasn’t mobile. I was sure I was going to die.

It was all because of that damn sore on my tongue. Because of it, I wasn’t drinking enough fluids. And because I wasn’t drinking enough fluids, they had to force these fucking injections on me to get things started.

The first injection hadn’t been so bad. I had watched movies lying in the hospital, strapped to the bed. But then after the second injection, that’s when things were moving too fast, when things had become too painful to bare.

I didn’t want anyone to see me like this. I had asked that there be no visitors. I never thought I would ever get a spinal tap, but I found myself requesting one after the second night in hospital. I could hear another woman screaming in pain from the next room. The nurses didn’t seem to mind. They were used to the screaming.

I had started trying to bring myself out of my body, after the first spinal tap wore off. The pain was too intense. I thought I was going to faint I didn’t know what to do. I knew there was something wrong. The pain seemed too much, even more than the last time I was in hospital with internal hemorrhaging. And that had felt like knives on the inside of my abdomen.

My mother was trying to heal my pain with her hands. She was holding them over me, and for a brief instant she said: It’s working.

But then I couldn’t bare it again. Everything was starting to fade, to become distant as if I were floating away from my body, from the pain.

I told her to find my story. It was hidden in a trunk, underneath my bed. I had wrapped it in an old piece of kimono I had bought in Japan. I told her she needed to do something with it.

I didn’t think I would live this time. The last time, when I had bled internally, I might not have lived if I hadn’t gone to the hospital when I did. I could have gone to bed and waited until the morning to see a doctor.

Everyone said me and the baby would be fine.

Chapter 1.

Things that Memory Can’t Let Go Of

A first kiss

The first time you make love

The first time you touch your newborn baby

Your first love

The things that you regret

The patter of rain, the stillness of snow, and the clap of thunder

I held the book and felt the weight in my hands. The pages were worn and bent from travel and storage. I ran my fingers down the pages feeling the grain, like washi, handmade paper.

I wrote my story under pen name, Ana. I don’t exactly know why. I flipped to a page in the book; I had scratched out a few words here and there:

In English there is no translation of the Portugese word saudade. In English it does not exist. Saudade refers to a longing for something or someone gone in both time and place. The thing missing cannot be experienced in the same way again. It is like nostalgia and yearning combined. In Japanese, the word translates into natsukashii. It describes a longing for the past, experienced by a physical feeling or a pang in one’s chest…

Summer, Japan, 2002

Ana was on a bus filled with strangers, each road-stop unloading them further from the city of Tokyo. They meandered through the highways, where there was no end. In the vast humid and hot summer it seemed like everything was slowing down as they drove further from the city. It was a sort of devastation. Road stops had plastic food examples; she could only point to what she wanted because she was illiterate. She visited places that remained nameless, ate food that was unknown.

The distances between cities grew longer, though in Japan there was very little landscape left uncultivated. Ana was wearing only an old white t-shirt and a cotton skirt. The sweat dripped off her body.

Her supervisor for the school year picked her up at the hotel in the city. She was there to drive Ana to her new apartment.

When you say ‘sank you’, Yuriko, her Japanese supervisor advised as she drove her around. "You must use the polite form ‘arigato gasaimasu’".

Yuriko mopped her forehead with a handkerchief every few minutes.

"When you are finished with visitor, you must use past form ‘arigato gasaimashita’, she said. Now you repeat".

Ana repeated, but she couldn’t focus. It seemed that everything was melting. The countryside was like a swamp. Every stop was a strip mall, a gas station, a car dealership.

The heat was like a furnace. The steam of Tokyo became more and more distant. Tokyo was a fog, a labyrinth with streets that looped into big awnings and electronic billboards, igniting the night. The country was more still, hotter, and the roads were dotted with slot machine parlors. These pachinko parlors were meant to resemble Las Vegas casinos, but looked more like cement boxes with flashing lights.

Yuriko took Ana to the shopping mall. Ana felt like she was sleepwalking. The neon lights made everything look plastic.

Now you must choose some foods before you go new apartment, Yuriko led Ana to the grocery section.

But she didn’t recognize half the food. She sort of knew some of the vegetables, and yes, the fruit looked familiar. The fruit looked perfect: each peach wrapped individually, every apple un-bruised.

As she wandered the grocery aisles, Ana remembered the look of the hospital she used to visit her aunt. She looked for the angels in the hallway, as a little girl, she thought she might see them too. Hospitals always had the same look, like public school, nothing on the walls. The walls were stark, the lights fluorescent. She didn’t see much else in the hallways, except that they were empty and they reminded her of school. They both seemed places where a person might never return, from the drabness, the sameness of the bare walls, the lifeless floors. Her aunt paced through the hallways when she was there. She spoke of the visions, the seven foot tall angels, who came to her.

Ana was to teach in Japan. She was to be an assistant teacher at a junior high school. She never did like public school.

Yuriko bought Ana some handkerchiefs.

These will be good use, she said as sweat dripped off her forehead.

Arigato, Ana said.

When she was dropped at her apartment, she experienced the same industrial dreariness she associated with the hospital. The stucco building sat in the midst of rice fields and strip malls. Rice fields sank just off the cement roads, without sidewalks. They were swampy, aside from summer when they were bright green. Just off into the distance there were hills. The three buildings in her apartment complex were yellow, with brown paneling, and a large house was situated next to the apartment buildings.

Her supervisor dropped her off at her apartment with a few handkerchiefs to wipe her sweaty brow in the sauna of the rural, Japanese summer in the inaka. She felt institutionalized. She thought of her aunt pacing around the room, shaking from her medication. Ana had been medicated before.

Here take these, the doctor muttered, scribbling a prescription onto his pad.

Should I see a counselor? she asked him, taking the prescription.

Why?

It was like he was telling her to take aspirin for the flu. The drugs were much stronger than aspirin. He hadn’t warned her of what would happen if she quit them cold turkey. When she was on them, she slept all the time, sleepwalking her way through the college hallways. When she quit, she didn’t sleep for days and could hardly speak. Ana always feared becoming like her aunt: mad.

Ana looked around her Japanese apartment. The floors were dark hardwood and tatami mats covered the bedroom floor. It was furnished. A bright yellow sofa filled half her living room, which was separated by wood and paper sliding doors. She sat on her large yellow couch with nothing to do. The television did not work and the heat was stifling. Ana could barely breathe in the humidity.

A knock on her door soon followed her arrival. A middle-aged Japanese man with glasses, casually dressed, stood at her door.

Hello. And you are A-na? he asked, putting out his hand as the Japanese tended to do for foreigners.

He spoke English well. She stood at the door speechless. She must have gifts for this man because it was the custom. Somewhere amongst her things there was omiagi.

This is my building. I am the landlord, I guess you could say. My name is Mr. Yamada, he said. This time he bowed, slightly.

Ana could see that he was smiling, his mouth only turning slightly upwards. He strolled into her apartment without being invited.

The air conditioner doesn’t work. I’m very sorry. It must be fixed. We replaced the tatami mats though, he said.

The television doesn’t work either, Ana said.

Oh, I can ask my friend who fixes cable to help you. That is no problem. You are welcome, he stood closer to the television. He looked at the back of the small box, fiddling with the cords.

Sweat was falling down Ana’s forehead. She wanted to change her clothes. She wanted to take all her clothes off and sit in a cold bathtub.

You can sleep at my house, Mr.Yamada offered.

Ana paused. She looked around the table for a handkerchief to wipe her brow. She wanted to wipe in between her breasts as well, but Mr.Yamada stood in the middle of the room.

How do you use this washing machine? I’ve never seen anything like it, she stared down at the pink and blue plastic washing machine. It was tiny, near the room that held her toilet. In Japan, the bath and the toilets had their own separate rooms.

I don’t know. Mr. Yamada peered at the washing machine, and fiddled with the cords at the back of it, much like he had with the television. He turned on the water faucet inside the machine.

How old is that washer? Ana asked. It looked like it required buckets of water to be manually dumped into it, and the spin cycle resembled a salad dryer.

I am not sure. Maybe something from twenty years ago. You can use our washer and dryer at my home, he offered.

Anyway, it is very hot today. You can sleep at my home. We can give you a room to sleep there. Maybe you can’t sleep tonight because of the heat.

Ana did not answer at first. She didn’t know how to react to a stranger offering for her to sleep in his house. She could see his house across the way. Instead of a lawn he had a rice field. Later, she would see him harvesting and watering the field with the changing seasons. He was not a lazy, wealthy man.

How do you speak English so well? she asked.

Oh, no, my English is very bad actually. I am an English teacher at a high school, but my English is not so good, he said, still fiddling with knobs on the washing machine.

It took her a few tries, spinning the timers to try different kinds of washes. Eventually she chose the Laundromat in the shopping mall instead. In winter, she would need to dry her clothes.

So, will you stay at our house tonight? I’m very sorry about the air conditioner. I will get someone to fix it very soon. But today is very hot, he moved away from the rattly, plastic washing machine.

Umm… I don’t know. I think I will be fine here. I can stay here, on the floor in my bed room, she said.

Well, if you need it we are over there in that big house, he walked towards the door.

Wait, she said, as something occurred to her. I have something for you.

She rifled through her bags and picked out a bar of soap and handed to him.

Oh, he frowned at it a little.

Ana was realized this cheap soap bar must have seemed ridiculous to a wealthy man. She almost apologized. Instead, she blushed.

Ana didn’t know what to do so she walked him to the door. He pushed his glasses up and walked towards his big house across the small road.

Ana began to unpack. She prepared blankets on her futon, which lay on the floor in the tatami room. At night, she could not sleep. She tossed and turned. The heat was stifling, like trying to breath through a hot air balloon. Her dreams were restless, and she lay twisted in her sheets. She thought of her landlord with desire - the desire of loneliness. His invitation must have been misinterpreted. His kindness must be just as a father would do by offering her a cool place to sleep. After all, now she could not sleep in the heat. Sweat drenched the surrounding blankets.

Her dreams were of far off places, restless dreams. People were connected by dreams, she whispered, as she tossed in her blanket. The more intense the dreams were, the stronger the connection. Maybe her aunt had access to what she shouldn’t have, access to other people’s nightmares or her own.

She finally got up and took one of the towels the teacher had bought her. She wet the towel with cold water, and put it over her brow. It was the only way she could sleep. She finally fell into a deep slumber, the stifling heat dampened with the wet cloth on her head.

Chapter 2

Things That Disgust

1. A dirty diaper

2. Eating crudely, mouth open while chewing, noisy, self absorbed

3. A selfish lover

4. A letch

5. A lie

6. Lying in bed awake knowing your lover is in another’s bed

A cockroach crawled over Ana’s toothbrush as she stood near the bathroom sink. It was early in the morning, and she peered down at the running water. The large dark thing scuttled from under the light she had turned on.

They crept up on her in the apartment. They crawled over the sink and flew across the walls. She felt as if she was ingesting them, like they were invading her sleep. She saw their wings and their large brown bodies with tentacles. They crawled in and out the secret spaces all around her apartment. When she took a shower, a cockroach scurried out of the drain as soon as she turned on the faucet.

Ana lost her ability to eat, and she was afraid to sleep because the cockroaches were invading her dreams. Ana was sure that she could feel them climbing over her blankets, over her face and pillows, perhaps even into her mouth as she slept. Ana did not eat meals at home; she was afraid that they had laid eggs in her food. Because of the heat, the roaches, Ana lost weight that summer from lack of appetite. Her stomach twisted and sank from the heat and the roaches.

Ana phoned her landlord one