The Highliner Samurai

High-liner Samurai

She had a beautiful face, wide. There was something about the way the skin folded and swooped around her eyes. Japanese eyes. I stole glances at her while she slept, and even a couple pictures. Finally after I had gotten up enough nerve I started the conversation.
It turns out the bad leg she was sporting wasn’t from some war wound, like mine. She had Multiple Sclerosis. In one way she was loosing her nerves. But was in the process gaining another kind of nerve. I had to admit she was brave to be traveling all by herself. But I guess that old habits die-hard.
Meanwhile her father was a worrier about her. Did she have a place to sleep at the over night stop? Who were these people she had met? We spent the next day on the train together. She was insistent on being together. Yet the isle was between us.
When we arrived at the end of the rail, I could stay with her and her father. All three of us had or do work in Fish plants.
He was waiting, of course, when we got off the train. I had her cell-phone number, but had thought to call her after I had attended to myself through the town. This was a small town, on the coast. Almost like home; here I could be king. And this is where I became way laid. It happened almost imperceptibly. As I walked with them off the platform I tried to make a move toward the cabs, but I found myself caught by their expectations. Next to them I was standing at the truck of his car.
I tried to tell myself, I was only getting a ride into the town proper. Then I realized that they were carrying my bags. I felt like an offering being taken to the sacrificial altar. Worshiped then slaughtered.
“Here, You sleep couch, here.”
“I suppose You two would like to have some dinner. Catch up and all that. If You’ll excuse me I’ll just take a short walk around.” I felt like I was stammering nervously, but in truth I could tell I delivered the words flawlessly. “I have some things to do around town,” I tried to sound busy and important, “sort out my schedule and finances.”
“Yay.” His words were terse and determined. They were expelled through a sharp contraction of his abdomen.
She would always respond to questions with a surprised little exclamation, “oh!” like she either did not expect the question or did not know the answer, even though she would then launch into a lengthy and usually passionate response.
Normally I am comfortable with silence, but there was such an expectation on her. He didn’t understand her independence, or her diet. She was following a Chinese naturopathic medicinal diet and vitamin regime. He worried about her while she was traveling. She would rebuke him with her silence, even as it was expected of her.
The silence was like an edge he used for seppuku.
Meanwhile he took me grocery shopping. If it is Japanese custom to doubt upon their guests, than it is my custom to neither be a burden or an inconvenience on my hosts. The insidious parasite; I don’t want to be noticed or to leave a trace. I made exactly one effort to pay my own way through the grocery store. When they insisted my frugality bit my tongue for me.
I was carted around tour on a whirlwind tour. He would point at something mundane and tell us what it obviously was. She may have just been enjoying the time with her father, and I suppose I enjoyed something to distract me, while I waited for the next ferry. But somewhere in each of us I think we felt the generation gap. There were other things we might be enjoying.
He took us to museums: a cannery and a railway. I walked through each often trying to put distance between the geisha, her samurai father and I. I saw pictures of men whose lives I couldn’t possibly imagine, but without whom I would not be standing her gawking at their pictures incomprehensibly. Thanks to these men, thousands of people, tourists mostly, would traipse through these doors to ooh and aah over the lives they lead. The hardships they endured. To see the backs on which their country was built. And what remains of the country those men thought they were building? Who knows, really? Most likely nothing. Here I was, a European mongrel walking around with a Japanese and his second generation Canadian Daughter. In the cannery I pass by a machine with a plaque that named it “the Iron Chink.” And I have to ask myself, how far have we really come?
I wondered, could he tell our ambivalence? Could he interpret our moods for the enthusiasm that they lacked? Why then did he continue to suggest the same options to prolong our anguish at truly being tourists? Perhaps it was the language barrier again.
Yet the most awkward bit was still to come.
She was due to leave as the weekend came to a close, about three on the Sunday afternoon. I was bound for the ferry, but that ship did not sail until six on the Monday morning. Check in at the terminal was 4:30 in the morning. I would be alone with him for the evening, and he would insist on waking up to drive me to the terminal, even though he had to work a few short hours after that. Again I was not pleased with the arrangement, but only from a perspective of imposition.
Honestly, I could not be more grateful for the turn of luck. Hospitality is, in truth, the last shining beacon in the dark sea of strangers that is the majority of this world. We each of us have only one small island of people we know, and perhaps fewer still that we would trust. Though who among us thinks of these things? We stick to the people we know in such a way that it rarely occurs to us how vast the wilderness of strangers around us is. We, each of us, know only an infinitesimal minority of the people in the world. So how was it that I, out of that multitude could stumble across such a generous person?
Still, there was silence and awkwardness as our time alone together approached. We sat in the airline office with his daughter, the geisha who had captured me. Oddly, I sat between them, like a cultural wedge, splitting her apart from her heritage, all the while feeling uncomfortable with my position.