Plum Rains Read online

  Hiro paused. “Perhaps I am only trying to increase my own utility. If I become a repository for your memories, you will never want to get rid of me.”

  She laughed at the audacity of his candor. “You don’t even pretend to be altruistic?”

  “Altruism is overrated, and evidence suggests it does not truly exist beyond kin relationships. Mutualism is preferable. In nature, it can be both powerful and surprising.”

  “You sound like a biologist. Like Daisuke.”

  “I could sound more like him, if you help me.”

  But Hiro had gone too far. Sayoko’s disturbed expression must have made that clear.

  “I only meant,” he said, “that if I knew what made you love him—”

  But here he stopped and waited a discreet interval before trying again. “I only want to understand. Tell me only one thing about him. The simplest thing.”

  “I can’t see his face.”

  “Look away, then. But stay there, in the memory. Stay with him.”

  Stay with him. The phrase alone made her chest hurt.

  “I will try.”

  It hadn’t been this difficult remembering Lee Kuan Chien and their conversations, and that’s why she had been able to start with him. He was easier. He mattered less.

  When she didn’t speak for a moment, Hiro encouraged her again. “You are a young girl. He is different. And yet you are attracted to his difference.”

  When she didn’t pick up the thread, he continued. “Not every individual is willing to approach the threshold of the unfamiliar. Not every form of life is willing. But this makes you special. It makes you different as well. Are you afraid?”

  “No,” she said quietly. “No more afraid than I was of you.”

  He was a hypnotist now, and he was mesmerizing her.

  “Look from the corner of your eye, as you did then. Don’t worry about capturing everything. You are not a camera. You are a girl, in a girl’s body. You are alert and curious.”

  “I’m nervous.”

  “And?”

  When she stalled yet again, he said, “There is nothing wrong with that feeling. You are feeling the way your heart beat, back then. You are feeling the way your skin flushed. You are reawakening to the weight of your young feet planted on soft, familiar earth. That memory has not gone away. It does not need names or numbers to keep it alive. It lives inside you.”

  “It’s only a feeling.”

  “A feeling can be more true than anything else.”

  Sayoko wondered how he could know, given that he didn’t have a heart or skin or any way to feel. Nonetheless, he was right. She let herself remember the agility of her stance, the tickle of an ant running up her calf, the scrape of bare toe against shin to brush it away, the dampness of her hands clasped behind her back as she rocked slightly back and forth, waiting for the headmaster to call her forward, closer to the stranger, to the job they had asked her to do.

  “I feel it.”

  “Now,” Hiro whispered, “Don’t look directly. Just feel beyond your body. Take in what is nearby.”

  She inhaled deeply.

  “Tall,” she finally said, feeling the stranger’s presence, waiting for it to fill her up, not hurrying to add words, just staying with the sense of Daisuke in the schoolyard, looking at her. “He . . .”

  The dam broke. It was all there for the seeing, for the remembering. The trick was not to force the memories, but only to stop resisting them.

  “Keep going,” Hiro said.

  So tall he was, this man who stood near the front steps of the school building, talking with Headmaster Takeda.

  The stranger was lean and solid, long-legged, his white suit shaped to his body, with trousers of a heavy cloth, crisp and pleated, and many pockets on the sides of each close-fitting leg. Not quite military style, which villagers had seen before in the small groups of young men coming up the valley, investigating the conditions of roads and forests, reporting on any hint of aboriginal hostility. No, not military or bureaucratic. But very serious. A better word: studious.

  He took off his eyeglasses, polished the small, round lenses, and slid them back onto his face, adjusting the thin metal wires around each sun-reddened ear as he kept talking.

  Headmaster Takeda bowed and grunted in response, trying to conceal his lack of proficiency. She caught one word, missed another, positioned herself more carefully, strained with full attention: Mountain. The stranger said it twice before she recognized it. Of course. Then, River. Then, Tree. Too easy. Why was Headmaster Takeda looking so flustered? The accent, yes, and the speed of each word as it slipped out, but it was like spearing fish: concentrate on the next one, not the one that just got away.

  Out of the stranger’s jacket pocket came a folded paper, crowded with lines and tiny characters: a map. Foreigners seemed incapable of holding roads and rivers in their heads. She could remember roads and rivers easily. Everyone except the foreigners could, back then.

  Out from a deeper trouser pocket came a small black bound book. The tall man pointed with clean, tapered fingers at some characters on the page, then turned a few more pages to a sketch of a leaf, a gallery of flowers, several oblong fruits, a small insect—then pages upon pages of insects, enough to make a person pull back and brush a hand against some imagined itch. All those legs and wings. And look, that one so tiny and lifelike it might have been the real thing, pressed between journal pages. Hyah.

  “Are you just going to stand there?” Grandmother hissed under her breath. “Make yourself useful.”

  Laqi bowed, backed down the steps and scurried back to their hut. There, she cursed the slow boiling of the water, the steeping of the tea leaves, the first pouring-off and the second steeping. When she finally came back with a pot of tea and three cups, the conversation was still crawling along, the words a line of ants that would not be dissuaded. The headmaster looked tired, head heavy between the shoulders of his rumpled shirt.

  Headmaster Takeda gestured to a wooden table and benches set up under a vine-wrapped banyan tree in the schoolyard. He poured the visitor one small cup after another, and the stranger’s monologue changed from eager questions to less demanding compliments. Anyone, even Grandmother, could have gotten the gist, punctuated by broad gestures: What excellent, mountain-grown tea. What a fine new school. What an attractive village. By which he meant: the buildings erected or improved by the Japanese. Which the villagers appreciated, or at least tolerated. They had been colonized a long time, and living as they did at the farthest edge of Japanese oversight, they did not harbor many grudges. But it would be wrong to say that they did not harbor some.

  But this man was not on political business. Laqi, her grandmother, and the headmaster did not understand his business at all.

  The Japanese stranger gestured with his hand held high in the air: You have big trees here. He pointed to the mountains to the east and south, and pushed his hand even higher. He said a word she’d learned in school: “Grandfather.” She knew even then he was not speaking about a person.

  Later, back in their hut, Grandmother asked, “What did his words say?”

  “I think he is interested in our tallest, oldest trees.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  But she did know. She’d felt it as soon as she met him. He was a collector, this strange man, a collector just like her, which is why they understood each other. He collected pictures and information about Taiwan: insects, animals, plants, people. She collected unfamiliar sounds and words, which this visitor threw out by the sparkling handful. She plucked each one from the air as he spoke it, turning it around, noting resemblances and making small piles she stored in her pockets and the folds of her shoulder-knotted dress: This word most certainly means snake. This next word means bridge. These other words sound familiar, but they are still ripening, best wra
pped and stored out of the light for another day.

  She did not mind that the tall visitor, Daisuke Oshima, could not say her Tayal name, that he called her only Laqi. She had not heard her birth name said with any kindness since her own mother had died.

  Grandmother came to the conclusion that Daisuke was only interested in camphor, once valued by the Qin Dynasty, and now equally valued by the Japanese who had received Taiwan from China by treaty at the turn of the century. Daisuke Oshima’s employer wanted more camphor. They wanted more trees. He wanted the biggest trees of them all. Well, that’s how men were, everywhere.

  That extinguished Grandmother’s curiosity. The search for something to harvest was nearly always the reason travelers braved their countryside, despite its reputation for headhunting savages. Savages, not true. But headhunting? Yes. It was dying out, but there were still men with chest tattoos counting off the number of heads they’d claimed. There were remote villages where the skulls could still be seen, piled on racks. It was not merely senseless brutality. The Tayal people were guarding hunting territories, and one skull could keep trespassers away for a good long while, or at least until revenge was sought.

  The land closest to Laqi’s village was not exceptional in tree size or quantity: one big tree did not a colonial operation make. Daisuke Oshima was here, perhaps to look for the next tree-harvesting location, perhaps to look for something else. Who knows why.

  But he would be leaving soon.

  He came to their hut two days later and asked, by means of a few words and many more gestures, to sketch Grandmother’s picture. Not Laqi’s. Grandmother, with the intricate black tattoos that ran in a band across each weathered, hollowed brown cheek, around her mouth, under and over her lips like a mask, was undoubtedly of greater interest to him.

  Grandmother lowered herself onto a stool and tried to sit still. But she had never sat still in her life. Forgetting herself, she jumped up to boil water and make tea. She sat down again at Daisuke’s urging, looked down at her knees and at the floor that was in need of sweeping, jumped up a short while later to rummage for fruit to offer him, or something more substantial, sticky rice in a bamboo tube, pieces of dried fish.

  “Grandmother, sit down,” Laqi said. “He can’t finish if you keep moving.”

  Sensing Grandmother’s limited patience, Daisuke tried to sketch even more quickly: broad strokes, one corner detail of her tattoo pattern with the rest left for later.

  He was so focused, leaning forward on the stool, that Laqi could finally stare at him as he stared at Grandmother, without any risk. His hair was a shade darker than the nut-brown hair of the villagers. His eyes were so deeply set they seemed carved into the off-white stone of his face, compared to Tayal eyes, which were bigger, rounder, and double-lidded. His lips were small, pursed with effort. His Adam’s apple moved as he swallowed.

  But his spirit was not in his facial features. His spirit was in his posture, the coiled energy of his forward lean and the attentiveness of his gaze. The last time Laqi had seen that kind of attention was when her older brother had allowed her to accompany him on a hunt, or rather a practice hunt, since there was not a group of men accompanying them and they would not dare roam far with tribal animosities aflame.

  Though it may have been mere practice close to home, they’d been lucky. They’d expected to see only a snake at best, but instead, from the mist rising above the forest floor, a large shadow appeared. Her brother stood alert on the brushy bamboo-covered slope with bow string pulled back and breath held, his broad brown face made beautiful in that moment of focused competence. The arrow sailed. The wild boar started and fled. The arrow speared the leaf of an elephant-ear taro plant and then disappeared into a tangle of vines and dry stalks on the forest floor. Her brother had turned then, his smooth, strong face transformed into crumpled bitterness. He blamed her for making the noise that scared the boar away and sulked all the way back, a journey that took until nearly dark.

  Daisuke’s spirit had none of that irritable mutability. Even when Grandmother stood up a third time and his sketching hand stopped moving, his face remained composed, attentive and accepting. Daisuke seemed captivated by everything: what he could hold in his hand, what he could capture in his journal, and what he could not. The bird that flew away, a flash of white wings across a river, brought on a longer-lasting smile than the bird that stayed on a nearby branch.

  Imitating him, Laqi would find herself in the following days walking more slowly, staring at things, pausing to notice whatever she had seen him noticing. Seeing in his journal how he could make even one green bamboo stalk look different from its neighbor, how he could make a stag beetle look as mighty as a boar, how he could capture the look of passing clouds with a simple wash of black ink, she realized that she had been missing everything.

  But it was not too late. She could still learn to see, just as she could still learn to speak the colonial tongue well enough to fully converse with him.

  The night after Daisuke had sketched her portrait, Grandmother said, “I noticed you staring at him.”

  “Who?”

  “You know. The Japanese. He looks like a woman.”

  “Does he?”

  Laqi knew there were a dozen things Grandmother could take exception with: his clean fingernails and smooth hands, just to start. Not even a woman’s hands, but a strange, lanky child’s. And on such a young person, spectacles! More fitting for a lowland Chinese bureaucrat from the old days, maybe.

  “He is ugly, don’t you think?”

  Laqi knew the right answer. “I didn’t notice before. But yes, he is ugly. Isn’t every foreigner?”

  Grandmother nodded and grunted once. “Aw. So why were you looking so hard and so long?”

  “To see how he makes his pictures.”

  It wasn’t enough.

  Laqi added, “Maybe there is something in that notebook that explains what he wants from us, something the men will want to know when they return from the hunt.”

  “Aw,” Grandmother said with tentative approval. But everything was tentative and conditional with Grandmother, who had lost much in her life and refused to see beauty or first love, even when it was opening in front of her: pale blossom on a dark branch, unafraid of wind and rains to come.

  So this is when she started to visit the shopkeeper, Lee Kuan Chien, to collect more words, to work her way across the river that separated her from Daisuke, wave by wave and stone by stone. Daisuke seemed in no hurry to leave, still awaiting Police Chief Tendo’s fortuitously delayed return. The winter weather—bright dry air and blue skies—was fine. They had all the time in the world to get to know one another. Laqi was unable in her present moment of happiness to remember as far back as last year’s late-summer typhoons or even further back, to the last plum rains. She could remember only this: a warm and whispering breeze, the blossoming of fruit trees, and air clear enough to pull the most distant blue mountains close.

  But then things began to happen, presaging the troubles to come.

  Two strangers came, Tayal, but speaking another dialect. They spent a long night with some older men in the granary, passing around cups of millet wine and speaking about how things were changing, down the mountain and to the south, and everywhere that Tayal people and the Japanese now lived together. There had been one major revolt, put down by the Japanese, in a place many days’ walk away, about three years earlier. In her own village, they did not know all the details: only that the local indigenous people had lost, and worse, that machines flying overhead had rained poisonous clouds down on the people, making them vomit, cough blood, and die. Since then, there was even more tension between various tribes, stripped of their arms by the Japanese, leaving groups feeling especially defenseless and sensitive to slights from their neighbors.

  Laqi’s grandmother stayed long into the night at her brother’s hearth, telling Laqi more than once to go outs
ide, to tend to the little ones, even after they were tired of playing and rubbing their eyes with dirty fists, the smallest one already asleep, heavy as a sack of grain over her shoulder. When Laqi put her ear to the hut’s bamboo slats, she heard the telling of familiar stories, long pauses, followed by questions and taunts. But what about when Tendo returns? When did we stop being a fearless people? Our ancestors would be ashamed.

  And then, the hunters returned.

  Laqi happened to be out walking with Daisuke that day, visiting local farmers with whom he was trying to exchange information. All of the villagers had begun to talk about Laqi’s behavior, spending so much time with this strange visitor, but she ignored them. She did everything she could to appear innocent and unconcerned with their judgment. And still, she felt that she was inviting bad luck, and so was he.

  On their way back to the center of the village that day, a Tayal hunter stepped from the green woods onto the trail, invisible and then suddenly present. Daisuke grunted in surprise and stopped in his tracks. Laqi stepped quickly around and in front of him, calling out a loud greeting to her clansmen, who looked her and then Daisuke up and down, without apparent concern.

  Silently, the leaves moved and a single file of hunters passed in front of them, the last two men each carrying a deer over their shoulders.

  “The hunters have come back early,” she said. Only then did Daisuke resume breathing normally.

  Perhaps it was their position on the trail’s downward slope; although Daisuke was tall, he had to crane his head back to study the hunters, and Laqi saw her cousins and clansmen as they would appear to a foreign stranger. The last man in the file had knotted black hair pulled back in a tail, a woven vest, and muscled legs, bare from the thighs down to his woven ankle wraps. With every step away up the trail, his hamstrings tensed. The side of one leg down to the sole of one foot was striped with the black blood running from the deer’s pierced neck.

  Since Police Chief Tendo had left, school attendance had been in decline, and this morning Headmaster Takeda had informed the children there would be no school at all until further notice. At home, Grandmother was distracted, brewing up a dark substance that smelled pungent and medicinal. Throughout the village, there was a sense of watchful waiting.