Reality as entertainment:
strange concept.
Like the tree in the forest
falling with no one to hear it,
if it doesn't happen on camera
then it never happened at all.
---Yureiko Tsuruta Crane.
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As I brought in the last box, Suzu—no, Shoko, I had to think of her as Shoko, or I might slip up and call her by her real name while Kemp was here—Shoko was reading over the receipt. "Two Hermitage armchairs, brown leather, five hundred ninety eight dollars together, one Hermitage sofa, brown leather, four hundred ninety-nine dollars, one Napa coffee table, one hundred forty-nine dollars, one Kala Medallion tufted wool rug, six feet by nine, two hundred ninety-nine dollars, one Erie computer desk—Which is the computer desk, Jun-san—J-on-a-tan?" She was trying her best to get the pronunciation of my name right.
"That box over there," I pointed at it. I had a desk, true, but it was also true that I had to prop one leg of it up with a copy of Condensed Latin Grammar, so I decided to replace it while I was at it.
She nodded. "One Erie computer desk, two hundred thirty-nine dollars, one Samarqand wall mirror, two hundred ninety-nine dollars—How much rice will a dollar buy? That is the only way I know how to value money, by rice."
"Not much," I replied, cutting open the box with the kitchen table in it (Provencal dinette table, one hundred seventy-nine dollars, assembly required.), "One of your obans is worth about ninety thousand dollars."
"Oh? Then this is not so bad as I had imagined." She brightened. "Ten percent first time purchase discount with new credit account—What does that mean?"
"It means that I have a bet on with the credit company." I laid out the table pieces and ripped open the bag with the hardware and the instructions. "They're betting twenty-nine percent of the balance that I won't pay for all of this within one year, and I'm betting I will. I've never gambled like that before, and I don't intend to in the future. This sort of expenditure is the kind one only has to make once—although since I—we might be moving again in a few months anyway, it hardly seems worth the bother. But wherever we wind up, we'll need furniture, so it's all one, anyhow." Putting the instructions aside, I picked up a screwdriver and two pieces of wood.
"Why might we be moving?" Shoko asked. "Would it go better if I held that piece in place for you?"
"Yes, it would," I said around a mouthful of screws, "thank you. I might not have a job here next academic year. The Head of Psychology doesn't like me and he plans on firing two out of three of us assistant professors. The irony is that I am the best teacher. I don't suppose you can think of a way to make him keep me?" She was the one with the people skills and the Machiavellian outlook, after all. Perhaps she would have some good advice for me.
"I might be able to, but I must know more."
I explained the situation in more detail while we completed the table.
"What you need is a patron," she said as we carried it out to the kitchen and put it in place, "someone of influence and power who will take an interest in your career either directly or indirectly. Do any of your students have important fathers?"
"At Gotham University? Hardly. Anyone whose father is that important wouldn't be going to school here."
"Oh. Are any of the other senior instructors inclined to be friendly toward you?"
"Professor Pigeon, maybe. He was my professor back when I started college—at a different college, though. He's too new here to have much sway."
"Then through your cooperation and work with Interpol you shall distinguish yourself as too valuable to be let go, at least for another year." Shoko decided as we went back and started on the coffee table. "In that time it would be possible to look around for a suitable patron. The missing Daimyo, Bruce Wayne, would be most suitable, but I know you do not want to discuss him. Are you sure that side is meant to be up?"
I looked at what I was doing. "No. Let me look at the instructions again…"
While we worked, I couldn't help but remember what she had said earlier. 'if he were young and handsome like you.' She hadn't said it as one usually pays a compliment or blurted it out, but in a matter-of-fact way while focusing on Kemp. 'Handsome like you.'—An opinion that had snuck out around the edges when she wasn't looking.
That raised certain possible problems to the forefront of my mind, and I carefully phrased a question before I said it. "Suzu—I mean, Shoko, what did people do, in your Japan, if there were enough children in the family already or if the time was not right to bring a child into the world—and there was reason to believe one might be coming?"
"What did people do—? There are medicines that will cleanse a womb, if I understand you right, and bring on a missed monthly flux, even two or more missed fluxes. Or there is riding over hard ground on a young horse. Breastfeeding one child often keeps another from beginning, or so I have been given to understand. It is for the father to decide. Is it not the same way here?"
"No, actually, it isn't. The mother--the woman's rights over her own body are held to be more important."
"But--excuse me, I don't question the truth of what you say, I ask only that I might understand--if a woman chooses to bear a child the man does not want, he is likely to cast her out, or beat her and in other ways do her injury. Even here, for in the paper I read about a driving shooting by a man who killed his woman because he did not want the child she carried, which was his."
"You mean a drive-by shooting. I can't lie and say such things don't happen, but it is against the law. Men are not allowed to kill, beat or rape their wives. Those who do are punished. But it works the other way. If a woman finds herself--with child, and for whatever reason, she decides it is better not to have it, she doesn't have to ask permission or resort to dangerous methods. Better still, there's a medicine women can take, a little at a time, every day, which, ah, safely prevents the need to make such a decision." My face was as hot as the surface of the planet Mercury. "There are other ways as well, some of which a man can do."
"I have heard of those," Was it my imagination, or was she decidedly pinker than normal? If one went by the light/dark contrast, she was actually whiter than I. Her complexion was like polished ivory; my grandmother would fume in envy, having ruined her epidermis with sunbathing. (My great-grandmother had loved to point out she always told her daughter she would look old before her time.) "But men do not like to inconvenience themselves, or so I have been told."
"Um. Well, I don't know about that." I could not look her in the eyes for embarrassment. How much had she understood?
"I thank you for telling me about these things, though. Also, I have been thinking about this 'democracy' of which you spoke. My father was a great man, a councillor highly trusted by the Shogun, so trusted that he was allowed to take his family with him when he left Edo in the Shogun's service. That was a privilege no other Great Lord had--their wives and children had to live in the Palace compound, hostages in fact if not in name. How he earned this, I do not know. He never spoke of it. By this you can tell he was a man of exceptional worth and wisdom.
"By law, a man of samurai rank could kill a peasant with impunity--just to test a new sword, if he pleased. That was the Shogun's law, ever since the first of the Tokugawa shoguns implemented it. My father did not agree with that law. He said that a peasant ought to be valued by the number of koku of rice he grows in a year, as a samurai is ranked by the koku he recieves as a stipend. A peasant might then be held as valuable, or more so, than a low-ranked samurai, because of his value to society. He had to sit in judgement over a samurai who killed many peasants simply because he took joy in killing, and the greatest punishment he could hand down was to order that the samurai's clan pay a heavy fine and that the man himself should enter a monastery and never return to the world. This troubled my father a great deal, but his was a lone voice saying 'No' in a crowd shouting 'Yes'. If there were peasants allowed in the government, then they perhaps could speak for their people and be heard. So if that is what democracy is meant to do, then I understand it better. Can that medicine of which you spoke be easily procured?"
"Um--yes."
"I think that is a wise thing. Better to prevent than to regret forever after. Even an aborted child is a soul that must be honored and remembered."
In terms of understanding, I had just been one-upped.
Eventually:
"Are you ready?" I asked Shoko.
"Yes," she nodded. "Let us visit upon him some of that fear which Naomi-san knew in the last months of her life."
"That's not for tonight." I cautioned her, "Tonight is groundwork. Much of fear lies in the anticipation."
"I understand. And I will not stab him no matter how provoked I may become." She nodded again.
"Very good." I picked up the phone and dialed Kemp's hotel room.
He answered on the sixth ring. "Hello?" His voice sounded thick, as if with drink, or sleep, or tears.
"Professor Kemp? It's Crane. When do you want to come over and exact your pound of flesh for the day?" At this point, he still had to believe he held the upper hand, so I tinged my voice with bitterness.
"I—I don't know if—Might we perhaps meet somewhere else? Or—no, I will come over. Yet…"
"What's wrong with you?" I said peevishly. "Yesterday we couldn't get rid of you. Come or don't come, as you please. This is your obsession, not mine. Just don't think I'm going to call you when I get the dowry chest open. Good bye."
"No!" he protested abruptly. "I'll be over directly. You were going to show me the document from the man who put the chest into storage."
"Until I get the chest open, there won't be much else I can show you."
"Then I will see you inside of an hour," he promised.
We exchanged farewells, hung up, and I turned to Shoko. "He's on his way."
He did not come to the front door first, like any normal visitor. I saw him from the window over the sink. He was lurking around in the garden, looking, no doubt, for the water container he had so carelessly left behind in his fright. He cast a glance at the house, and there was something of trepidation in his eyes.
I relayed all this to Shoko. "Shall I fetch him in?" she asked.
"Please do. This is getting to be ridiculous."
"What is that thing he has under his arm?" She had to stand on tiptoe to see over my shoulder.
"It looks like a gift bag." He had a narrow red and gold parcel just visible in the crook of his left elbow as he bent over to look under the bench.
"This grows more tedious." She threw open the back door. "Kemp-sensei! Whatever are you doing out here? We were looking for you in the front."
"Oh—nothing. Only I thought I had lost a cufflink here yesterday."
"Would you like me to help you look?" she asked.
"No. I just recalled that I had it after I left here, so I must have lost it somewhere else."
"What a shame. Would you like to come in? I did not want you to see the inside of the house yesterday because it was embarrassing, but since then it has changed completely." Dimpling up at him with a mischievous smile, she drew him into the house.
I met them inside the back door. "We went furniture shopping this morning and Shoko wants to show the place off." My smile was for her, not him.
"You are our first guest," she prattled as she led the way into the living room. Already I could tell when she was putting on a thick veneer of sweetness.
"Really?" Kemp asked. "Then I'm doubly glad I brought this. It can serve as a housewarming gift." He handed her the gift bag.
She glanced at me, not sure of the etiquette. "Thank you very much. Shall I open it?"
"Please."
She undid the bow. "Sake!" she exclaimed, pulling a bottle out and reading the label. "Thank you. I have not tasted rice wine since I came to America. I will think of you when we pour this." And we did pour it later—down the sink. Not because we were afraid he had adulterated it, because the seal was intact, but because the manufacturer already had. It was loaded with monosodium glutamate and high fructose corn syrup, among other things, which meant it bore about the same resemblance to true sake as a 'wine cooler' did to a fine Beaujolais, or so I gathered.
"What a very handsome and well-appointed room," he commented, looking around. There I had to agree. For someone who had never given a thought in his life to furnishing a home and probably never would again, I thought I had done rather well. The sofa and chairs looked as though they had come from a library of the better sort, which made them look right at home among Stickley's wood panels and bookshelves. The rug was also brown, darker than the furniture, but with colorful round crests, nothing gaudy, just enough to break up the darkness. Over the fireplace was one of the two paneled screens from the chest, the one with spring and summer flowers, and the large mirror had been hung in the stairwell.
"Oh!" Shoko cried out as we passed the mirror. "How odd. For a split second there, I thought I saw a fourth person with us. Well, you have seen the greatest changes now. It is a shame we could not get large tatami mats for the floor, but J-Jon-a-tan did find miniature versions which will serve well as coasters. Besides, I know I can't make everyone take their shoes off when they come in, not here in America."
"Tatami mat flooring?" Kemp's eyes lit with condescending amusement. "How very quaint of you."
"I was brought up in a traditional house," she explained, "and if liking wood instead of plastic and tatami instead of carpets, makes me quaint, then I fear I must be quaint. You don't mind if I take care of a few things in the kitchen while you visit, do you? I will make tea, if you would like some."
"I would be delighted." Kemp and I sat on either side of the coffee table, he on the sofa and I on a chair. The webcam, hidden on a shelf among my books, was sending everything it saw to my laptop upstairs, and my little recorder was in my shirt pocket, picking up every word spoken. In the background, we could hear Shoko in the kitchen, opening cabinets and turning water on and off.
Taking a folder from the table drawer, I placed it in front of him. In it was a photocopy of the statement by the anonymous last owner of the chest; I wasn't about to trust Kemp with the original. While he started reading it eagerly, I asked, "By the way, how did you track the chest down?"
"Through shipping manifests and bills of sale to a madman rotting in a mental institution," he said. "And you?"
"Through a case file from a mental institution," I said, off-handedly. "as part of my studies in deviant psychology. I had no idea who the patient was, as all names were blacked out. The name 'Suzume Murasaki' leapt out at me. Interestingly enough, I don't believe the man was, as you put it, mad. Or at least he wasn't at first. He was just a man who couldn't interpret what he saw and heard in a rational way. He saw a monster. I believe what he saw was his subconsious mind trying to communicate a deeper truth to his conciousness. He assaulted and nearly killed his girlfriend with a baseball bat--because the monster he saw was himself."
"That's a very interesting theo--." Kemp began in an 'isn't that amusing' tone, but he gasped halfway through the word theory because Shoko had just come out of the kitchen, and for a moment, just for a moment, she looked like a suffocation victim with a plastic bag over her head. Exactly like Naomi Miyabe.
A/N: Guess what? I'm cat-sitting for a friend for two weeks. The lucky bastard is going to Italy on vacation, and I'm down on my hands and knees trying to coax a scared cat out from behind a water heater. I'll manage it eventually; I'm an expert at this now. I better get a postcard, though!
