Osaka Heat

By Mary Claire Mahaney

Known for doing the right thing, American teacher Ginger O'Neill travels to Osaka to win a prestigious Japanese academy as a sister school for her own. Her three-week mission is being followed not only by her school district but by the Washington Post and the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C. Ginger, sole parent to her teenaged daughter, has spent the last twelve years - her widowhood - without romance; she claims there are no eligible men.

Things don't go smoothly for Ginger in Osaka, as her visit elicits one cultural predicament after another, each crisis taking its toll not only on her personally but on her ability to win the school partnership. Ginger's relationship with her host family, as well as her forbidden romance with a Japanese man, forces her to look at the path her life has been taking and, ultimately, presents her with a moral dilemma that will change her life.

Rich in literature, music, and cuisine, Osaka Heat is a journey deep into Japanese culture. Far from home and in the heat of a Kansai summer, Ginger O'Neill comes to grips with a past that haunts her and learns that a certain universal virtue is the key to her future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 30, 2007
• ISBN: 9781452060026

Mary Claire Mahaney

Osaka Heat is Mary Claire Mahaney's first novel. She has written short stories, poetry, essays, and reviews of the arts. A retired lawyer, Mahaney lives with her family in Virginia, where she is at work on a children's book. For more information, visit her website at http://www.maryclairemahaney.com.

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CONTENTS

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

ONE

Tempura

An observer looking down from high above Earth beholds jet trails of Hermes, wraiths of white, ghosts of eternity. Beneath that wispy covering lies the archipelago we fly to, and just off our island chain’s coast sits an angry realm of earthquakes and volcanic activity. This blistering zone encircles the Pacific Basin and is known as the Ring of Fire.

Lured from the darkness of her cave by the brilliance of her own reflection, the sun goddess Amaterasu, carrier of dawn, presents to us a world forever turning toward the sun. This land of the rising sun is first among nations free of night’s grip. Nihon. Nippon. Japan.

Under the sun, under the moon, the mouth of a great dragon has heaved forth the Kuril Islands, disputed territory, foggy and fishy. In the north, Oyakoba, also known as Atlasov Island (its Russian name), rises from the sea like areole and nipple of a nursing mother’s breast. Looking south, our eyes skim over the Hokkaido head, cross the Sapporo-to-Hakodate neck, and run down the Tsugaru Strait, a body of water that hides a tunnel. Our sight settles on the Honshu torso, and we find the dragon’s chest swelling alongside the marble-rocked Rikuchu Coast. The upper body of Honshu—Japan’s main island—is hollowed out beneath the creature’s heart, at Sendai. That same Sendai, home to the Japanese sailing vessel, Saint John the Baptist—first Japanese ship to cross the Pacific, its emissaries on a mission to Europe to meet Pope Paul V—had fallen victim by the time the men returned, like the rest of Japan, to the Tokugawa shogunate’s ban on Christianity.

The beast’s distended belly, curving alongside Tokyo, holding the capital prisoner, recedes with a bow to Fuji-san and courses to the southwest, toward the monster’s pelvis. The lower limbs taper off at Shikoku and Kyushu, the dragon’s tail dragging the Ryukyu Islands. Our story is set within the pelvis of the dragon, in the part of the country known as Kansai. Here, on a latitude with Los Angeles and Casablanca, lies Osaka, crown of Kansai. Osaka—Japan’s third-largest city, mercantile center, city of canals, Venice of the East. In Osaka is found the country’s oldest temple, marking the introduction of Buddhism from the Asian mainland. Osaka, which Americans pronounce oh-SAHK-ah, comes from the Chinese, meaning big slope; slippery in rainy season.

Ginger O’Neill arrives in Osaka in July, by which time the heat has ripened the suika—watermelon—small and sweet in fields alternately muddy from rain and mud-cracked from heat, the heat climbing from below, from the earth itself, and dropping from above, from the sun. The farmer cleaves suika with his knife; he sucks its membranes for midday comfort. That sun—taiyo in Japanese—the farmer can’t live without. It ties a person to it, to its life force, to life’s necessity, to energy from the burning star, to energy from the dying star.

July in Osaka—the air is hot in the city and countryside, hot in the rice fields and hot in dazzlingly bright buildings where the air conditioning, by American standards, is set warm. The ground is hot—hot in dry, thin soil and hot in irrigated, fertilized dirt. Farmers feel the heat, sweating as they weed their rice terraces, sweating as they feed their vegetable patches, sweating as they pick their fields of tea, each pick, as the season progresses, lower in quality than the one before. City pavements are sizzling hot, and after-hours, when it should be cooler and people should be enjoying their vodka martinis and junmai-shu, there’s scant cooling. Nighttime offers little break from the heat and humidity, the sun rising too soon for the darkness to bring much relief.

July in Osaka—families head for vacation in the mountains or in the cities or at the sea. The tourism industry anticipates one of the year’s stellar intervals. These summertime school holidays are good for business, and business is cash. In Anno Domini 2000, Japan is on a cash economy relative to other industrialized nations, credit cards remaining in wallets, tucked away for big expenses like hotel bills. Neighborhoods are quiet, houses dark, office parking lots deserted, but trains are packed, highways jammed, swimming pools rowdy, tennis courts hopping, shopping arcades hectic, parking decks full, pachinko parlors smoky. Shrines, temples, resorts, and playgrounds find in this time their heyday, their days of hay and harvest, flowering of fields echoed in flowering of trade. Restaurants featuring sushi on conveyor belts hit record sales. Geishas’ dance fans noiselessly lick at the coming dusk. Cormorant fishermen work at night, from lighted boats, in the traditional fashion. The summer has its charm, hot as it may be.

July in Osaka—life goes on. Farmers go on. Shopkeepers go on. Pensioners who can’t afford to leave town go on. Unaffected by school calendars or by corporate holiday shutdowns, these Japanese wait through the heat and the sun and the rain for a different portion coming to them at a different time: autumn train rides to see the maple leaves, New Year’s with family in the south, a winter ski trip to Hokkaido, a springtime cherry blossom pilgrimage.

Still other Osakans stay home through July because they are attuned to different academic calendars, different from the calendars of public schools. These are the Japanese who for philosophical or social reasons, not unlike their Western counterparts, enroll their children in private schools; they find themselves with shorter summer vacations, narrowing the possibilities for travel. With vacations two or three weeks shorter than those of the public schools, these expensive academies provide more value for the tuition-payer’s yen in summertime. This extra class time is a feature of private schools that parents are willing to pay for, but it obliges teachers to contend with classes and exams through the intensity and distraction not just of the heat but of the high school baseball season. The teachers, moreover, themselves sleepy from summertime partying, must lecture around the more-than-usual sleepiness of upperclassmen, upperclassmen who are pulling all-nighters to study for university entrance exams still months away.

In these hotter than hot days, Japanese private school teachers greet visitors from abroad with apologies for the heat. Some of these teachers live in suburban Osaka, in middle-class tract houses, in neighborhoods built in the boom of the 1980s. They are Japanese people who, for whatever reasons, professional or personal, host a foreign man or woman for a short time. This foreign guest of theirs might never have visited the dragon before.

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One of the things Ginger O’Neill has come to Japan for is the sushi. The problem is she isn’t getting