East is East полностью

The problem was, he couldn’t sleep. He was exhausted, worn-out, as weary and heartsick as any human being on the planet, and he couldn’t sleep. He kept seeing her, the woman, the Amerikajin, rehearsing her face and her body over and over again: the moment she turned to him, the rustled silk of her voice. And then he was thinking of his obāsan and how when he was small and couldn’t sleep she would read to him in the glowing little circle of the tensor lamp beside his bed. She hadn’t liked Mishima, hadn’t liked it when he gave up baseball for Jōchō and his Hagakure. And then he remembered the nights he couldn’t sleep because of the clenching in his gut over the ijime—the bullying—they put him through in high school, and how Jōchō had been his hope and solace.

Hiro was seventeen when he discovered Hagakure—or rather, Yukio Mishima’s appreciation of it, The Way of the Samurai. He was a boy in school, a bēsubōru player—there, on the field, he was the equal of anyone—and he’d never heard the name of Jōchō or of Mishima either. He played ball with savage devotion, the harsh unpronounceable names of the gaijin stars like an incantation on his lips: Jim Paciorek, Matt Keough, Ty Van Burkelo. They were his inspiration, his hope. You could be a mongrel, a half-breed, you could be anything, and all that mattered was that you got a hit when you stepped up to the plate. That was democracy. That was fea purē. That was revenge. Fujima, Morita, Kawakami, the very insects who’d blackened his eyes and broken his nose, the ones who hissed bata-kusai at his back as he made his way down the corridor, these were the ones he silenced with his bat. They squinted at him from the pitcher’s mound, from shortstop and centerfield, chanting their obscenities and waving their mitts to distract him, till his bat met the ball and their legs fell out from under them. Bēsubōru, that was his life.

And then one day, walking home from school and attracting the usual stares on the street—everyone knew at a glance that he wasn’t Japanese, that he was something else, something alien, and their eyes flew to him and then dropped away as if he were dead, inanimate, a post, a tree, a smear on the sidewalk—he found himself gawking at a poster in a bookstore window. The poster—it was a blown-up photo, in black and white—showed a nearly naked man in the throes of death. He’d been lashed to a tree, his hands bound over his head, and three stark black arrows protruded from his flesh. One penetrated his lower abdomen, just above the folds of his crude breechcloth, another radiated from his side, while the third was thrust nearly to the hilt in the dark clot of hair beneath his arm. His eyes were half open, staring off toward the heavens in glazed rapture, and his mouth was a fierce dark slash of agony and release. He had the musculature of a hero.

Too shy to go in, Hiro only gaped at the window that first day, fascinated, wondering if the photo was real—there was blood, after all, perfect black streaks of blood dribbling from the wounds like grisly brushstrokes. But then, maybe they were too perfect, maybe the whole thing had been staged—a still from a movie or a play—maybe they were brushstrokes. And where would anyone come by such a picture if it was real? People weren’t tortured to death these days, were they? And with arrows? He wondered if the man might not be an explorer, captured and executed by some big-lipped tribe in New Guinea or South America. If he was, and there was a book about it, Hiro wanted it.

The next day, he steeled himself and went into the shop. It was a cramped and dark place, row upon row of books on metal shelves affixed to the walls, a smell of newsprint and mold and a fruity false air freshener. Fifteen or twenty customers browsed through the stacks of foreign newspapers or waddled up and down the aisles, arms laden with books. Aside from the rustle of lovingly turned pages, the place was as quiet as a shrine. Hiro approached the desk, where a big-shouldered man in smoked glasses with western-style frames sat behind a cash register. Hiro cleared his throat. The man, who’d been staring out the window at nothing, gave him an indifferent glance.

“The poster in the window, sir,” Hiro said, so softly he could barely hear himself, “is that a book? I mean, is there a book about it?”

The man looked at him a moment, as if deciding something. Finally, in a weary voice, he said: “That’s Mishima.”