蝗之寓言 (Parable of the Grasshopper)

[ruth]

Hey everyone! I've been working on this for a while over on AH.com, but have decided to start crossposting it over here as well in case there are those who are interested. For now, I'll be uploading new chapters a few times a week until I've caught up.

Prologue

One abyss succeeding another:
this is the nature of water.
It flows onward, never overflowing;
it pursues its way through a dangerous abyss,
never losing its true nature.

I Ching (The Book of Changes)
䷜: Hexagram 29 (坎, "Gorge")​

Full disclosure: I hate planes.

I mean, it's one of those things I've felt as long as I can remember, starting with those dreaded cross-country family reunions where you get crammed into steerage class and of course the whole family's there but some perfect storm of slapdash planning and general airline terribleness means that despite the fact that you're like five years old at this point everyone gets split up and so you get shuffled off into a seat next to someone you don't know and end up probably crying and throwing up and then wailing at the top of your lungs, thereby also ruining the flight for everyone else in the process. The fact that this happened more than once is, honestly, just icing on the cake of my full-bore loathing for aircraft as a mode of transportation, and unless you're totally unreasonable I think you'd agree with me that given these kinds of experiences my general aversion to flying on planes is, at the very least, understandable.

But unfortunately, all the reluctance in the world won't get you anywhere when you genuinely need to do some inter-continental travel. Which is just about the only way to explain how I'm currently trapped in like the next-to-last row of some long-haul airliner instead of somewhere more reasonable, like, say, anyplace other than 35,000 feet above the earth hurtling around in a tin can with no way of escaping for another twelve hours. Unfortunately, this kind of thing is unavoidable when you're trying to get from Japan to California, unless you're interested in being stuck in a floating tin can with no way of escaping for months.

Studying in Japan the last few years, I've had to learn to suck it up and take red eyes back and forth to visit my family for the holidays. Given the aforementioned hella agitation over racking up the frequent flyer miles in a festering tube, well, I had to figure out some way to deal with it. What else was I going to do?

If this sounds like justification, you're totally right. But then I'm here trying to explain what the hell happened in the first place, so your guess is probably as good as mine. Still, given everything has just gone south, and in the absence of anything better to condemn for consigning me into what appears to be my very own personal I'm going to go ahead and lay the blame on the meditation for catapulting me into the metaphorical shit.

I'd decided after takeoff to try out some meditation strategies that Kanako, a friend of mine in Japan who was really into zen, had suggested. I figured even if it doesn't end up doing much of anything, it can't hurt either, right? And I'm not really all that spiritual or anything, but even I can appreciate that there's definitely something intangible you get, a little bit of clearing the mind and if I can't quite will myself to say something as cheesy as "inner peace," then, like, at least it's some kind of good feeling. So what the hell, I said to myself, why not try it. If nothing else, it gives me something to focus on, or not focus on, while I'm on a rocket filled with exploding gas and a whole crowd of people, other than the obvious.

Kanako always says the way to clear your mind is to get a single-minded focus on one thing, think only about that thing, and then to stop thinking about it. It sounds easier than it is, but it's not a bad strategy, and so I took a look around for something to concentrate on. I usually have trouble with this part, but I'd just gotten a necklace for my birthday, and it seemed like the perfect candidate for something easy to zero in on, so I took it and started turning it over in my hands. Thinking about its blunt, gunmetal sheen, the heft of the pewter chain, the chill the metal sent through my hands, and then trying to cast it all away from my mind, along with everything else, the anxiety, frustrations with my life and the world, all the petty emotions I'd accumulated in the corners of my mind since the last time I'd done this.

Maybe I got into it more than usual. I couldn't tell you, I'm no expert at this. But I'll tell you that the funny thing is that it wasn't immediately totally obvious to me when I first kind of came out of that state. Now I'm trying to train my focus back on the world, looking around to get my bearings, and I swear that some things looked just a little different before I'd gone under. My first guess is that I hadn't been paying close enough attention, and that I must just be remembering things wrong. I mean, doesn't the plane somehow look a little more old-fashioned than I thought? Isn't my seat a little too comfortable for an economy flight? Didn't that seat back have an English translation to "please keep your seat backs and tray tables in the upright position during taxi, takeoff, and landing" on it?

These are little things, though, and I guess they're small enough to be liable to misremember if you've just had, I dunno, a transcendental meditative experience? I'm still trying to sort that out. (Not that using up brain cycles cogitating over what is plainly a totally absurd experience is going to help or anything, but I guess that's what brains do.) But that's when the really bizarre occurrences start piling up.

First there's the flight attendant—a white woman, last I checked—speaking in pitch-perfect NHK Japanese to me, another white woman, as she asks me whether I'd like a refreshment. I guess this is possibly not without precedent; I am obviously not the first foreigner to study Japanese and who knows, maybe this woman learned it too. But this is an American Airlines flight, right? And unless she has some kind of eerie telepathic ability, she wouldn't assume that I would speak Japanese, right? Bear with me here, a little validation goes a long way to my own self-conception as someone who isn't totally demented.

Okay, maybe my brain's filing system is just corrupted. I'll find my papers in my bookbag, and they'll calmly explain to me that I've just casually managed to forget the entirety of my return flight's itinerary, or that I've accidentally been shuffled onto a Japanese domestic carrier and that I'm not going to San Francisco after all. But things only get worse once I open my bag. The first thing I notice is a thick, heavy hardcover book. 易経, read the embossed gold characters on the front. Hold on, what? I don't remember owning a copy of the I Ching. Who would try to sneak a copy of the I Ching, of all things, into someone's bag?

Bilious dread is rising in my stomach as I consider the alternative. Is this even my bag? Fuck, have I left my bag in Narita? I can see the t-shirt now: I lost all of my meaningful material possessions and all I got was this stupid I Ching. I try to sort through my memories methodically, and don't remember any time it could have gotten switched, so I shake my head and continue rifling through the contents of the bag that might or might not be mine. More unfamiliar objects—a Polaroid camera, an old-fashioned makeup case, and a pocket mirror.

That's when I pull out the organizer with my tickets and my passport and my brain boggles. Why is this ticket in Japanese? It's from Tokyo to San Francisco, all right, but it's using old-fashioned characters to write everything, it's from an airline I don't even recognize—Trans Pacific Airlines—and there's hardly a lick of English on the entire print-out. I can tell already that something isn't right with it all, but my heart still sinks when I see the name written on the ticket: 平山伴奈. Hirayama Hanna. In other words, not me.

But that's when I realize. My name is Hannah Friedberg. Friedberg, in case you don't know any German, means "peaceful mountain". Want to take a guess at what Hirayama means? If you guessed "peaceful mountain", then you're right (and if you didn't then you're a chump, but that's not here or there right now). A couple of seconds of frantic searching through the organizer brings me to a passport with my very own face glowering back. Hirayama Hanna is me, all right. But what the fuck is the Pacific States of America, and since when was I born there?

 

[ruth]

第１章

Against oppression,
one may still make progress.
The great man's perseverance
brings unfailing fortune;
but if he relies on words,
no one will believe them.

I Ching (The Book of Changes)
䷮: Hexagram 47 (困, "Confining")​

By the time the airplane—according to the card in the seat-back pocket, a Mitsubishi Ri-500, which I'm pretty sure, for the record, has never existed—has touched down in San Francisco, I think I've at least wrapped my mind about what seems to be going on in this world, if totally lost as to how or why exactly I showed up. Everyone's speaking in Japanese, and everything's written in Japanese, right down to the new name of San Francisco International (金門国際空港, or "Golden Gate International Airport," for the folks following along back home). The first thing I'm imagining is a world run by shadowy networked corporations operated out of the seedy cyberpunk underbelly of Tokyo, whose all-powerful imperial-type machinations mean everyone has to speak Japanese to do business, and also that the United States exploded. Given what I'm working with here, it seems like as legitimate an explanation as any while I sit here trying to convince myself that I'm not certifiable.

So, okay. Maybe I have an imagination on me. But the way I see it, it's starting to become a pattern that whatever I think might be going on, something somehow far weirder and vaguely more sinister is right around the corner. Because as I walk out of the gate into the main space of the airport I can't help but notice that despite the fact that I'm supposedly in America, they haven't even bothered to translate half the signage into English. And the advertising—forget it. I might as well be right back where I started. For what I'm reasonably sure is a Saturday afternoon, the place looks almost deserted, too; at the very least the place looks like it was built for a much larger amount of passengers than are actually flying. I'm almost ready to ask myself what the next venture into absurdity is when I see it: in the direction of Pacific States Customs is a protective curtain of heavily armed police officers, and there's no mistaking the stiff white armbands emblazoned with the characters 憲兵隊. Kenpeitai.

Before I can react in plain-faced horror—before my brain can even fully process the fact that I've apparently been dumped into a fascist hellscape where the long arm of the Japanese law is given carte blanche to conduct operations in some kind of culturally assimilated rump America—one of said guards brusquely orders something like "move along" and shocks me into action. This is really happening. Between me and the outside world—whether it's my home that's even still out there I have no idea, which is something I hadn't really given a thought to when I was on the plane but which is really starting to concern me—is a heavily militarized police most famous for carrying out large-scale genocide, and I don't have the faintest idea what "Hirayama Hanna" has been doing for her entire life, let alone the last year.

Well, here's hoping I'm a natural actor.

____________________________________
​

"Where is it that you reside, Miss Hirayama." That's the first thing that the Kenpeitai officer says once we've sat down at the table. He's pulled out an imposing stack of papers that he's started to leaf through languidly in between glancing at an oversized CRT screen. I'm hoping it's not actually my file and that's just for intimidation purposes, but I can tell you that it's working and I am fucking shaking in my seat.

"Well, er, here. I mean, I was in Japan, but—"

"Which is it, here or Japan?"

Already starting with the rapid-fire questions. I am so fucked. For my own sake, I hope that this bizarre world's version of me was doing the same thing that I was in Japan. "I was studying Japanese literature there for two years. I finished my program, so now I am coming back here, which is where my family lives."

"And by 'here' you mean…"

"San Francisco." I try out the old-fashioned name, 桑港都, written on my ticket, when I tell him. It feels foreign on my tongue, like I'm speaking another language even from Japanese, but the man just grunts and flips through a few pages of the file. I guess that's as much confirmation I'm going to get that San Francisco is now Sōkō-to.

"Why would you study Japanese in Japan? Can't you do the same thing in the Pacific States, where you live?" the guy says, clearly suspicious. I'm not sure how the hell to explain to him that no, the last thing I checked I would not be able to do that anywhere in a place called the Pacific States, which also was up until relatively recently not a thing that was real.

"Yes, of course," I say, as if I am not making this shit up as I go along. "But I had a particular area of interest in nikki bungaku [1], the Tosa Diary and such, and my professor, Kotobuki, specializes in it. So I was accepted to his program, and I applied for and received this visa to attend Aoyama for two years." This explanation has the advantage of not being technically false, at least if I can assume that there's some kind of parallel universe conservation of reality, but there's pretty much nothing I can do if that isn't the case anyway, so I produce the visa papers from my organizers anyway. Staking your life on the truth of something that might not even be true is not the best feeling, so I occupy my brain looking over the visa papers, which seem to have become about three times more byzantine since the last time I took a good look at them. They seem to confirm more or less what I said, but more importantly, it looks like freedom of movement has been dead and buried for a while now—not only is there an entry and exit visa for the Empire of Japan, there's also an exit visa for "Golden Gate Province" (they've even changed the name of California, the bastards!) and the Pacific States of America.

The guard swipes my papers, opens the door and yells gruffly. "Sasaki! Pull up the papers on the K-net [2], make sure they match." Right, okay, so I'm now even more at his mercy, with the only papers telling me I haven't been on the lam from my totalitarian Japanese overlords in another room. I find myself hoping none of these guys somehow have a grudge on me in a past (or current? Or parallel?) life, because if so I can plainly see how fucked I am.

I swear to god, it's like they've figured out how to make time itself slow down. Every second feels like a year in here, and the thing I'm learning is that sweating 31 million times more than I should, well, first of all, it does not feel good, and second of all it probably does not look good, since the guard starts asking me questions again, probably because sweating bullets is usually probable cause for suspicion. Thanks, traitorous body.

"Where were you living in Tokyo?" he says. Now he's biding his time by glancing back at the CRT screen, typing a few simple commands as he waits for my answer.

It barely registers, at this point, that he already knows I lived in Tokyo. "Shibuya."

"Your address?"

"2-chōme 4-ban 9-212-gō." [3] Again with the rapid fire. I am leaning so hard on the preservation of meaningless parallelisms between my real life and this bizarre distortion that the smallest violations will sink me. An iron maiden of coincidence is just waiting to draw blood here.

Again the guard grunts. A few seconds pass as he types something else, and then he speaks up. "That's a nice neighbourhood," he finally says, face finally taking the shape of something other than a vague scowl. "My wife grew up around there. I keep trying to get a posting in Tokyo, so she and I can visit her family more often, but no, it has to be American airport security…"

Is this relief? Have I been saved from certain death by small talk with a fascist border guard? I decide to press the advantage while I still have it, in the only way I know how: throwing out some blatantly false praise for a neighbourhood that made me question whether I could possibly make it two years in Tokyo. "I have to say, in many ways I'm sad to be coming back here. That neighbourhood was like a second home for me."

He nods, and even chuckles a little. I don't want to be jinxing my luck here, but I may have just found a light at the end of the tunnel. "Is that so. That's great, I'd like to at least visit again some time as well."

A few more perfunctory questions follow, but somehow the tenor of the room has changed, and pretty soon the guard is knocking on the door. "Sasaki, quit screwing around. Have you finished with the papers?"

"Yeah, yeah," comes another voice from outside—Sasaki, I'm guessing—who stuffs the papers into the other guard's hands. He passes them back along to me and points toward another set of booths. "Miss Hirayama, take these papers and present them to an official over there, and they will verify your entry visa into the Pacific States of America."

____________________________________​

And that's it—my time in a glorified interrogation chamber is over. I can't help wondering whether I got out easy, despite being in there for what felt like an hour. And once I'm through the last line of officials, I'm "free". Now that I've gotten what I wanted—to get out of the bureaucratic bramble that was threatening to catch me within hours of me waking up in this world, whatever it is—I don't even know what to do.

I could go home—but where's home? Is it even still there? And my family—what about them? A brief wave of horror washes over me as I consider the implications of this world. An Imperial Japan ascendant over the Pacific implies something else somehow more horrifying taking residence in Europe, and thus that my Jewish family might be living in constant danger, if it even still exists.

My mind's still racing as I reach the baggage claim (totally alien to any I've seen before, as a uniformed guard is checking identification as he distributes suitcases), but a great relief comes over me when I see my mom waving from behind the security gate. Once I have my suitcase again—eerily familiar handwriting of an unfamiliar name written on the tag—I'm finally "back". I think I'm steeling myself for a certain amount of culture shock, showing up in what is essentially a foreign country, my own under occupation, but I'm not even close to ready when the first thing I hear out of my own mother's mouth is "おかえりなさい!" A hearty "welcome home," except it's in Japanese, which my mother has never spoken a word of in her life.

How do I even begin to query something like that? A quick word of thanks spills out of my lips autonomically, but that doesn't do anything to answer the bewildering riot of questions I now need to answer.

Or, you know, preferably I can meditate my way out of this nightmare before it gets any worse.

____________________________________​

[1] 日記文学 nikki bungaku is the Japanese term for "diary literature", a common literary form in the Heian era (8th-12th century), where predominantly female writers recounted stories and poems from court life in native Japanese, a notable departure from the male court diaries which were largely factual in nature and recorded in Classical Chinese.

[2] The K-Net (計網) is the military intelligence's "internet"-type network.

[3] Addresses in most of Japan are not based on numbers along a street, but in 丁 chō (districts), 番 ban (blocks), and 号 gō (building number). ITTL, the same system is applied to many areas of the Pacific States, especially places like San Francisco that have been "integrated" more thoroughly by the Japanese.

 

[ruth]

第２章

In the family,
the greatest advantage
is a virtuous woman.

I Ching (The Book of Changes)
䷤: Hexagram 37 (家人, Family)​

Any vain hopes I have that the whole airport situation turns out to have been one huge prank, or like some kind of extended delirious night terror, end when I take my first step outside of the airport, and everything's still the same as it was inside. My mother rambling on about some Japanese pharmacist where she buys all of her medicine now. Brightly painted flags heralding the arrival of the Emperor for a birthday address at his San Francisco palace. A few pop-up stands advertise "traditional American handicrafts" which apparently begin and end with cowboy hats and leather bomber jackets, little newsstands hawk "American manga" alongside Japanese newspapers like the Yomiuri Shimbun, and the snack bars offer onigiri, takoyaki, and melon bread alongside "traditional American specialties" like "hamburger pizza".

Cowboy hats, American manga, and hamburger pizza. Incredible. So I guess this is what it is to be a colony, or a banana republic, or whatever it is that Japan has done with the "Pacific States".

There's a long walk to the economy lot, where, ominously, it appears that all of the Japanese people—and the luxury vehicles—have disappeared, "economy lot" being, apparently, the polite term for "second class citizens lot." I don't even realize when we've arrived at my mom's car because it looks nothing like anything she'd buy. To say nothing of the fact that it looks like the 80s never ended, when it comes to automobile design, my mother wasn't exactly the type of person who would buy something that adhered to the principle of "function over form". How, exactly, the occupation of America has resulted in her ownership of a utilitarian little matchbox hatchback is a question beyond what I'm strictly looking to answer at this point, but that doesn't mean I don't notice it among the thousands of other little things just wrong in this world, from the small and insignificant to the things I can't even begin to fathom.

For example, my mother and the fact that apparently, she not only speaks Japanese now, but speaks it in private. To me, her daughter. Part of me is wondering at first whether there's a problem with speaking it in public, where the walls might have eyes and ears, and the loyalty to the Japanese occupiers might be in question, but she doesn't stop when we're inside the car, either. At this point, I feel like I have to get some kind of answers, or at least start moving in the right direction, so I take a chance and switch to English. At the very least, I might learn something of why she hasn't spoken it so far.

"So," I start, "I'm sorry I didn't keep in touch as much as I could have. They say that Japanese universities are easier than the ones here, but it definitely didn't feel like it once I was there!" I stick with something light, whose truth value would be pretty difficult to dispute, and which would hopefully draw attention away from the painfully awkward process of actually changing which language you are speaking with someone. It isn't helped by the fact that I have trouble coercing my mouth into the right sounds for English, which I realize I haven't spoken to anyone in weeks. I can't really have gotten so rusty that quickly, can I?

Instead of maybe a small laugh and a sheepish return to our (I assume!?) mother tongue, she looks at me like I've just spoken to her in Swahili, tilting her head to the side and opening her eyes wide with confusion. Immediately I push further, hoping I'll draw out an explanation of why what I did was so weird, but mostly fearing what I might hear. Have I woken up in a world where English has become a dead language or something? No, that's impossible—my mother speaks Japanese well, but there's still an accent in the way she speaks. Surely there's another explanation for the confusion. "What's wrong?" I say, returning to Japanese, thinking that will at least allow her to return to some assumption of what she conceives of as our "normal" relationship, but it's a little disturbing how much more natural it feels rolling off my tongue.

"Nothing, nothing," she says, sounding like she's rushing to explain herself. "Nothing's wrong. It's just…I'm surprised to hear you speaking in English, I guess. You never seemed to be interested in learning it much when you were younger, but now you come back from being away—from being in Japan, studying Japanese literature, of all things, speaking English better than I've heard you speak in fifteen years? Not that it's bad, at all. In fact, I'm happy to hear you speak it, and how well, too. I've been saying all this time, even if Japanese is more useful, it's important that you don't forget your native language. But give a mother a little right to be shocked!"

Her words are more a mix of Japanese and English than I'd noted before, slipping in and out for a phrase or two, but I do my best to take in what she says regardless, concentrating with each off-handed remark to try to put together the world of Hirayama Hanna in my head. It's a strange and worrying place: I've hardly spoken English since I was eight years old? And the halting, blundering mess that just tumbled out of my mouth was my "best effort" since my age was in the single digits? And just to top it off, we've been communicating mostly in the language of the occupiers for even longer?

None of it's especially comforting to think about, least of all having to explain away my ability to string together a halting sentence in my own native language, to my own mother. But for the sake of maintaining…whatever this is, a charade that I'm not really from another world (hey, I wouldn't believe it if it hadn't happened to me), I put together some kind of excuse that, once again, is technically true, if you take my experience in the Japan-that-was as veridical. I hope I can still say that, at least. "You'd be surprised. There are lots of Japanese people who are interested in English, so they would frequently ask me to practice. I guess I had to get a little bit into the role of a teacher in order to be any help to them, so I studied it a little more."

About as smooth an answer as one could be expected to half-ass on the fly, and though it's apparently a little too incredible for my mother to take totally at face value, she doesn't dispute it either. "Well, either way, I suppose it's for the best that you spent some time in Japan. Nobody likes to hire the Americans who don't speak "properly", never mind that the zaibei [1] sound just the same. Oh!" my mother exclaims suddenly, interrupting her own train of thought. "I just remembered. Speaking of hiring, I mentioned to Fukui-san the other day that you would be coming back soon, and she said there was a job opening at Nishimura Tandai. I know you'll want a few days to rest after your trip, but you should think about submitting an application."

I have no idea who Fukui is or what this Nishimura Tandai is—and listen, I'm hoping I can just meditate away from all of this so I don't have to worry about them—but another rational part of me kicks in, with a nagging concern that I might have to know if I can't find a way back to my own world. "I'll think about it. By the way, that Fukui, which one do you mean?"

"Huh? There's only one Fukui, as far as I know, but I meant Yuka's mother. Don't you still keep in touch with her on Amici?"

Amici? Oh god, there's already enough I don't know already about my own life, without confusing new terms being thrown into the mix. Without anything better to do or say, I meekly accede the point. "Ah, of course, sorry. I just got her confused in my mind for a second with another Fukui, that's all."

I think I need to lie down before I can take in more about this world. There are too many things that I should know, that I need to know, that are totally foreign to me. God, if my meditation strategy fails, if I end up stuck here—just thinking about it makes me feel queasy. Mercifully, my mother catches on and speaks up. "Your face is looking a little pale, Hannah. Maybe you should take a rest when we get home?"

"Yes, I'd…I'd appreciate that. Sorry, I'm just tired from the long trip, I didn't sleep well on the plane." She nods sympathetically, and turns her eyes back to the road as she veers to an exit on the highway, into a San Francisco that I've never known. It'll take a while yet before I'm really home, but for the moment I'll take what I can get.

____________________________________​

[1] 在米 zaibei is ITTL's term for ethnic Japanese permanently residing in the Pacific States (usually for an extended period of time). Though only some of them are actually citizens of the Pacific States (as Japanese citizenship is widely understood to allow you greater personal freedom of movement), living in the Pacific States is a popular move for many Japanese citizens as land is much cheaper, is subsidized by government programs, and allows for a higher standard of living for the same amount of money. As long-term residents (some were even born in the Pacific States themselves, although they are somewhat culturally distinct from ethnic Japanese descended from those who came to the United States in the pre-war period), with children who have spent their whole lives in the Pacific States, there is a certain degree of culture shift that has occurred among the Japanese resident population of the Pacific States that separates them from those who live in Japan (or those who simply come to the PSA on a temporary basis to work).

 

[ruth]

第３章

When obstructions occur,
look southwest for advantages;
in the northeast there is none.
Seeking the great man
is also advantageous;
in this perseverance is good fortune.

I Ching (The Book of Changes)
䷦: Hexagram 39 (蹇, Obstruction)​

"Here we are," she says, which is once again news to me. I take a brief glance around the neighbourhood, trying to figure out what I can about the area from the immediate surroundings. It looks like parallelism has finally given up the ghost here, because whatever this is, it's not the old family home in the Haight. In what I can only guess is the former Oceanview (known, like seemingly everything else in this universe, by its Japanese name 海見, or Kaiken), long rows of walk-up tenements trickle down the hillside, uniformly dull six-story brick behemoths where it looks like the non-Japanese population of San Francisco has been holed up in its entirety. Now including me, and that's how I find myself clinging to the railing trying to make it up the six flights of treacherously slippery steel staircase to my new home.

臨海區海見2丁目8番5-603号, reads the mailbox. Even the address system of San Francisco has fallen victim to the creeping cultural imperialism of Japan. I'm feeling more and more like I never left Japan, and also that the ever-present extreme right wing has abruptly taken control, but the thing I force myself to remember is that for everyone else, it's always been this way. Hence the previously mentioned fucked up situation where I somehow feel more comfortable speaking to my own mother in Japanese. And it just leads me to dwell further and deeper, wondering what else could possibly be waiting for me inside this apartment.

"We're home," my mother calls. The smell of unfamiliar cooking wafts in from the kitchen, and briefly I think to consider whether I even have the same family anymore. The same people, maybe, the same genetics, but—no, that's too philosophical even for me. If I'm going to stay sane in this world that's gone insane right before my eyes, I can't question everything. I have to take some things for granted. So my little brother surges into the room and yells "お姉ちゃん!" at the top of his lungs. I want to say that I'm just his big sister, just Hannah, not his onee-chan. That Japan may control the world outside these doors, but that they won't control what I call my little brother. But as unexpected, foreign, and somehow keenly painful it is to hear how thoroughly this world has changed even the simplest of social interactions with my family, I don't say that to him, and take it in the spirit in which it's meant. It's just something I have to accept with the world around me, at least until I figure out what's going on.

"Hey, kiddo," I answer, trying my best to act the part of myself-but-in-Japanese, at least while the spotlight's on me. "What's for dinner?" Might as well find out what I'll be eating tonight at the family round table while I try to sort through just how and what and even who "I" am to the rest of my family. I figure I'll learn best by observation, and that it's probably worth learning; a horrible, dark part of my mind tells me that in the absence of any knowledge of why I'm here, I'd best get comfortable, and even my inner optimist is reminding me that I'm better off safe than sorry. So while I mostly want to scream for all of these imposters to run away, to leave me to my mind palace so I can return to the universe where I belong, I bite my tongue. And despite the wave of exhaustion finally coming over me—I realize I'm reaching 24 hours without sleep, including maybe twelve on the wrong side of a parallel universe—I realize that in the near term, I'm facing a war of information against a world that's seen fit to give precious little to me. The sooner I can settle those, the sooner I can put my mind to the other pressing question of how, exactly, I can get back to the world I know.

But for now, back to the "real world", or the world of the Hirayamas at least. My brother's explaining that tonight's dinner is nabe udon, and I'm wondering just how deep the rabbit hole goes—how far I'll have to go before I run into something, anything besides my own mind that hasn't been touched by this world that frankly is starting to just become creepy, when a voice like a keening foghorn pierces the room.

"Helen!" is the first thing that I hear, long, loud, and high, as if someone's left a teapot on too long, and the voice is unmistakable. That would be my grandmother, and though a decent chunk of me is fearing that if she goes on any longer, I'll be going deaf, the rest of me is just relieved that there's something, someone else I can cling to who seems to be the same as she ever was, even if that means grouchy and perennially dissatisfied. "Barely two minutes back and the kids are already back to their godawful moonspeak! Didn't I teach you better than to let them consort with the enemy like this?"

Well, I guess I'm "consorting with the enemy" now. Which I guess is probably a fair charge to be laid at my feet given what I've evidently been up to in this world, but part of me still wants to protest that I didn't do anything wrong. Hirayama, maybe, but not actually me! Still, I can't exactly explain the difference between those two right now, so I'm going to have to swallow my pride and own her decisions like my own, for now. So my mother tries to raise a word in defense of my resorting to Japanese, but I decide now's not a bad time to break out an English-language peace offering with grandma. "Ah, don't worry, grandma. I don't have to speak in Japanese if you don't want me to. It's good to see you again! It's been so long since I've seen you, hasn't it?" That's what I say. Or at least it's what I wish I could say so smoothly—instead, I stumble over the sounds and the words, embarrassing myself in the process. Come on! I know it's been a while before I've used English, but this is something else entirely. It's like all the muscle memory I've ever had that makes my tongue able to speak is different, and, now that I think of it, is probably biased in favour of Japanese. And my grandmother certainly picks up on it.

"See! Even your own daughter speaks like one of them! She can't even put a sentence together without sounding like she's fresh off the boat from Tokyo," she cries. So much for a peace offering. But the sad thing is that I can't even exactly argue with her: the words may be in my own mind, but if my tongue won't obey, they'll sound just the way Hirayama-me would pronounce them, which is to say, evidently terrible.

"I know, I know, I'm out of practice," I admit to her. I know this can't exactly end well, when it's my grandmother I'm trying to pacify, but I suppose it's better this than confronting her with a Japanese-language tirade. "It's been almost two years since I've gotten to use English, but now that I'm home, that should be easier."

"And whose decision was it to raid the family finances to get your fancy Jap education," she grumbles, and in doing so finally drives my mother over the edge.

"That's enough, Talia! There's no need to make Hannah feel guilty about receiving an education. Now, to the table. Dinner's ready."

As embarrassed as I am for managing to stumble backwards into a fight, I feel like there weren't many ways it could have gone any better. For the moment, at the very least, I feel like I've learned a little more about the person I'm supposed to be.

____________________________________
​

Dinner's predictably tense, with the shadow of a clearly long-standing conflict between my mother and grandmother looming over the table. There's never any burying the hatchet with something that large, so instead it falls to my little brother and me to act as if it never happened, or at least for him to act as if it never happened and chatter to me about his new favourite manga while I listen and try to remind myself what the real Ben would be talking about now. Certainly not "Bakumatsu Heroes", but then I don't even know what they even allow to publish here, so who am I to judge? I tell him it sounds interesting, but to tell the truth I'm still biding my time until I can go back to my room and try to meditate my way back out of this. In the meantime, I find my self marginally unsettled by the fact that nobody seems to have mentioned my father or my grandfather. My mind immediately jumps to the most dire of possibilities—that they're gone, or dead—but I don't dare to mention either of them, since presumably I already know about whatever has happened to them.

The same feeling goes when my mother strikes up a conversation about my time in Japan, made worse still by the fact that I not only have to conjure up a history of my time in Japan that gels with the realities of this world, but also that my mother apparently really wants me to have met someone marriageable in Japan, and that to top it all off my grandmother begins bellowing about how it's a good thing I didn't come home wrapped around someone's arm—was my trip to Japan really supposed to be a way to find a rich Japanese guy to marry up into? I shudder just to think about it—because, as my grandmother warns, then my mother would have to reckon with the reality of "slanty-eyed grandchildren" to look forward to.

Now we've apparently reached the gratuitous racism portion of the evening, and I can't take any more of this. Fine, the Japanese took over their country, and they have reason to resent it. But I'm not involved in any of this. I just want to go home. So at the risk of coming off like a petulant teenager, I abandon the table in favour of sanctuary. Anywhere that isn't here, even if it's a bedroom that is only mine by dint of having nobody else sleeping in it.

With only three options, it isn't hard to quickly determine which bedroom is mine, but my first look inside does give me an impression of just how different Hirayama Hanna's life has been. The first thing I feel is totally inferior—and I can't help a little laugh that I feel inferior to myself, of all people—because the one impression I get from this room is that Hirayama Hanna studied like a crazy person. Bookshelves line a good half of the room, stuffed two layers deep with books varying from doorstop kanji dictionaries to Chinese classics to biology textbooks to, mercifully, what I actually did study: medieval Japanese literature. Two walls play host to Japanese woodcut prints, but it's the third wall—with a large poster of the eight trigrams of the I Ching—that really catches my eye. The I Ching in my bag—I hadn't given it a thought since coming to on that airplane, but it makes perfect sense now that it would belong to Hirayama.

At first, I want to chide her for her superstition, but I realize quickly that I'm not one to talk now: my mind is awash with possibilities that I would have considered too absurd to entertain just one day ago. Failing any kind of logical explanation for why I'm even here, beyond some deeply unsatisfying "many-worlds" theory that couldn't tell me how it happened to begin with, science is out the window completely. And anything that might have an answer, be it spiritual or magical or otherwise, is potentially fair game if it gets me out of this situation. Which is why I'm back to Kanako's meditation strategies, sitting in seiza on the floor of a room that isn't mine in a home that isn't mine in a world that isn't mine.

Try as I might, though, trying to meditate away the night amounts to nothing, with my thoughts insistently pounding away at the edges of my concentration, and leaving me with too many ideas swirling around, festering and breeding even more possibilities. My eyes flicker open and catch the poster of the I Ching again, and all of a sudden the thought crosses my mind that it might not have been me who triggered this change, but rather the other me, the me that abandoned this universe, who sought an escape from it. Before I know what I'm doing, the I Ching is in my lap, and I'm leafing through the pages in an attempt to understand it. Like I said before, I'm no spiritualist. The superstition of an ancient book would never hold this kind of sway with me under normal circumstances. But I suspend my disbelief and push onward anyway, hoping, if nothing else, to understand a little better just who I am.

I Ching, or Eki-kyō to the Japanese, literally translating to the "Book of Changes", is all about divination. You pose a question to the book, then, using sticks or coins, you get an outcome in the form of a hexagram. All 64 are represented by one or two Chinese characters, and the idea is they give you different information, different explanations, and different suggestions for your question. From what I can tell, given how well-used the book looks, how many bookmarks and marginalia she's left, Hirayama really followed it religiously, so I figure there's nothing to lose here, take three coins, and pose my question: How the hell do I get myself out of this mess?

Broken-broken-unbroken. Gon, the mountain. Broken-unbroken-broken. Kan, water. Together they make hexagram 39: Obstruction. Flipping to its page, I find a few spare sentences in the top, written in the original classical Chinese. Then, below, its explanation in Japanese:

When obstructions occur,
look southwest for advantage;
in the northeast there is none.
Seeking the great man
is also advantageous;
in this perseverance is good fortune.

It makes about as much sense to me as you'd expect, which is to say, not much. What kind of advantage do you find in the southwest? Why southwest and northeast? Obviously they mean something beyond just the compass directions, but there's too much assumed cultural background for me to understand the subtext. Likewise, I can only make an educated guess that "seeking the great man" is some kind of appeal to authority, and that finding good fortune in perseverance is a platitude that rings true in most cases. It isn't much to go on, but the little I can understand is enough to keep me going for another day. I'll seek the great man—learn more about this world and this book, and persevere in finding a way home. At this point, I'm willing to do anything if it brings me the good fortune of having my own life back again.

 

[ruth]

第４章

To tread on
the tail of the tiger
which does not bite back:
this is success.

I Ching (The Book of Changes)
䷉: Hexagram 10 (履, Treading)​

Despite everything that's happened yesterday, I eventually manage to sleep, trying to make up for hours and hours of jet lag on top of the heavy weight of exhaustion brought upon by taking a one-way trip to another universe. Still, when I wake up the next morning, I still feel a petty shock from the room I'm in, surrounded by the trappings of another world, all these artifacts that shouldn't exist but still do. At this point, I'm not sure what I could have, or should have expected, but a part of me clearly wasn't expecting this place. Some night-before-leaving nightmare in my Tokyo apartment, maybe, or a long-festering mid-flight fever dream—that's what I'm hoping.

But it isn't to be, and the first thing I get a look at when I come to again is the I Ching at my bedside. I pick up the urgently beeping straight-out-of-the-seventies alarm clock at the side of my bed (Hirayama may have been a Japan-obsessive above and beyond what would even be possible for me, but I'm grateful she didn't spring for a futon) and by chance, as I turn the device around in my hands to figure out how to turn it off, see the sticker still attached to the back: 米國製. Beikoku-sei, made in America: the international symbol of cheaply-made plastic products, no doubt. Well, that's one way for the universe to wake me up, beating me over the head with situational irony.

I try not to think too hard about the bizarre, minute little adjustments that the universe seems to have made to account for me, starting with the way all of my clothing now features brands I've never once heard of, and which considering my little encounter with the alarm clock, were probably made in American sweatshops to top it all off. The rest of my closet and my half-unpacked suitcase aren't much better, with kimonos and yukatas running the whole gamut from everyday to Japanese bridesmaid. Well, even if I did want to ask, I can't exactly ask myself, so I just try to pick out the most normal thing in my closet to wear. From what my still half-asleep mind can tell, the style in this world is, well…not exactly what I'm used to, for a start.

But okay. Fine. A conservative dress is hardly the most onerous burden of living in the totalitarian post-Nazi future. Part of me wonders when the hell I got this shallow, but then it's the little things like this you take for granted all the time, so when you get jolted out of your comfort zone, or, you know, comfort universe, all of these things you never lend much of a thought to come to the forefront. So while I know I should be worrying about things like how I'm possibly supposed to get back to the world I know, I can't help but be arrested by how deep the changes run, how all of the smallest changes can grate against you like an ill-fitting sweater.

Well, I can only sit here endlessly cogitating and agonizing over the smallest details for so long, hiding away from the world that, now that I'm remembering the events of last night, I abandoned pretty quickly in favour of sullenly poring over the contents of some ancient book of superstitions. So I'm not exactly bright and eager at the prospect of emerging from my cave this morning and facing whatever the hell is going on with my family. What does the I Ching have to say about this, I idly wonder? What was that passage from last night?

When obstructions occur,
look southwest for advantage;
in the northeast there is none.
Seeking the great man
is also advantageous;
in this perseverance is good fortune.

A little mental gymnastics takes place as I turn around a rudimentary map of this apartment in my head, and compare it to the lightening skyline and the sun split by the horizon, which means this is the eastern, and therefore…this room is in the northeast. No "advantage". Furthermore, to get to the southwest, which is apparently where I want to be, I'll have to brave the family feud in the kitchen. It doesn't do much good to sit here "considering my options" when I know there's only one, really, which is to get out of my room and see what I find outside. And, to be fair, at this point I'm taking advice from 2,000-year-old dead Chinese guys, so it clearly isn't looking all that promising to stay in here, where all I can do is keep consulting a fortune-telling book. Okay, might as well rip off the band-aid and get out of here.

…Well. I wasn't really sure what to expect, but for once when I walk into the kitchen everything looks normal, more or less. A freshly brewed coffee pot sitting in the corner. Some cereals, bread and jam sitting on the countertop. My mother's blowing on the steaming cup in her hands. My brother, same as ever, seems to be frantically doing all of his homework on the morning it's due. My grandmother, the driving force in whatever the whole mess last night was about, seems to have gone home, or at least somewhere else. Otherwise, besides for the fact that I still haven't seen my dad or my grandfather, I can almost trick myself into thinking that things are normal.

Of course, when I say that, my brother has to go and break the spell by opening his mouth. "Oh, morning, big sis. You're up early, after everything."

"Yeah, I'm kind of questioning that decision myself now. That flight took a lot out of me." Like, you know, my entire life, not that I'm going to mention that to anyone. It does make me wonder—and worry, a little bit—just how long I can pretend to be someone I'm not. Even if that someone is me.

"So it's like that… I've never been on a plane, but it sounds really cool to me. I guess if you think it's tiring, it must be a pretty big deal. Just don't overdo it, okay? Like with grandma and everything..."

"Oh, I'm sure it'll be fine..." I'm saying it as much for myself as I am for him, at this point. Something, anything really, to calm the chills that grip my nerves just from basic human interaction here.

"Sorry, Hannah." My mother puts down the coffee in her hands, sighing heavily and, for once, replying in English. "I keep telling her why you went abroad," she says, before switching to Japanese, "but sometimes it seems like she's just looking for something to fight over."

"Really, it's okay, mom. I'm just...glad to be home."

"Of course." How she manages to make what is ostensibly a reassurance sound so ominous, I have no idea. "I know. Hannah, you should take the train with me downtown today so you can pick up that application from Fukui."

Right, this again. She really seems to be eager about me trying to get this job. Last night she thought I should apply in a few days, but now she seems to be implying I have to do it today. Now that I think about it, the way my grandmother was talking about the family finances, I can't help but wonder if that's the reason. Well, there's no point in saying no at this point, and anyway holing myself up in the bedroom and trying to zen my way out of the problem didn't accomplish much. I might as well not throw away the morning and figure out what I'm up against here: scope out the city, meet the big-name players in the freshly-hellscaped drama that is apparently my life.

"Sure. When are you planning on leaving?"

My mother gives me a sort of quizzical look. Damn it, I've asked something Hirayama should already know. "Same as always. It's already eight, so you should get yourself something to eat quickly, if you want to have the time to finish it."

That doesn't get me all the way to knowing what my mother's routine is like, but it's better than nothing. So I take some toast and jam, quickly pack a bag and stuff in a few papers and, after a little bit of thought, the I Ching (why not?), and let her dictate the pace of the morning. Having some company on my first real day in this world could save me some of the effort of having to figure out literally everything from the ground up, at least.

____________________________________​

I realize just how grateful to be when I realize that the train that my mother's talking about is no train I've ever seen before in my life. The last time I lived here—years ago, in another world—it resembled nothing like it does here and now, and by the time we're a block from home I'm already completely lost. I'd expected the train mentioned by my mother to be the familiar BART, but even that was a vain hope; whatever has replaced it isn't in the same place, isn't known by the same name and certainly doesn't look anything like it. For all that I grew up in San Francisco, I might as well be in a foreign country now—that's the first thing I think, followed quickly by the fact that, as it turns out, I am in a foreign country. Maybe not so hard to forget if you're hearing the story told all at once, but it's definitely something I have to remind myself as waves of astonishment at this overwhelming unfamiliarity wash over me, one by one. Street corners stripped of their familiar white name placards and red octagonal stop signs, replaced with the Japanese triangular signs and road paint I came to know well during my time in Tokyo. Something about the totality of these tiny, omnipresent changes fills me with a strange homesickness for a place that doesn't—maybe even can't—exist in this world.

I realize as I'm marvelling in something between horror and wonder at the city around me that my mother is glancing over me, no doubt surprised that I look like the city is foreign to me. "It hasn't been that long since you've seen home, has it?" she asks.

"Sorry, it's just a little bit of an adjustment. I know it must seem strange, but Japan is more different from home than you might think." I'm on a roll with saying things that are technically true, so why stop here?

"Is that so. Well, with how long you were away, I suppose it can't be helped. You know, when you said you would be going to Japan, part of me was worried that you were never going to come home again. I know it isn't easy to be authorized for travel there, even just to visit." A little sigh as she fiddles with her bag and withdraws a pack of cigarettes. I almost flinch in surprise, since she never once smoked in the other world, but for once I manage to keep a straight face: I have to keep this charade going, at the very least until I know more. "Believe me, I tried," she mutters casually as the lighter in her hand flicks open. It's more information for me to store away for now, and though it doesn't get me any closer to learning why I'm here, it's at least useful to know now that I seem to be hurtling towards having to navigate myself through the pitfalls of the Pacific States while I search for answers in an ancient Chinese supernatural advice column.

"Don't worry, you didn't miss much. I was pretty busy for most of the time." Something tells me Hirayama didn't get long summer vacations to travel freely all over Asia, and my San Francisco life doesn't look like it was exactly the picture of fulfillment, so it's probably a good bet that I threw myself even deeper into my work over in Japan.

"You always have been, Hannah," she says, sounding halfway between proud and exasperated. I wonder whether that's really true, or if the new rules for social interactions in this world have just turned everything on its side. Instead of trying to figure out how to artfully respond to that, I decide to let her have the last word as we approach what looks like the entrance to South San Francisco subway station.

It's here where I realize that my views of the real country I'm in have been fleeting and oblique up to this point. I've gotten glimpses of the Pacific States of America through my travel documents, the airport crawling with secret police, my strange interactions with my family, and the scenery between it all, but my first eyeful of the South San Francisco subway station puts it all into bloodcurdling relief. For a moment I wonder if I haven't stumbled headfirst into another universe, some kind of rebooted-Red-Dawn nightmare where North Korean subterranean public transportation was imposed from on high. The stairwell down to the subway tunnels are painted into brilliant murals depicting scenes from some kind of battle; Japanese soldiers stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Americans and fight off their assailants, who appear, confusingly, to be Germans and similarly Nazi-styled Americans. A broad banner held up by some of the soldiers in the mural reads "The Triumph Over Nazism through the Harmony of All Pacific Nations".

While I'm filing away in my mind that the Japanese and the Germans have evidently had some kind of falling out, there's plenty more to take in. Apart from the already obvious indications of Japanese domination everywhere, there are the subtler, more insidious ones. Everyone I can see hustling up and down the stairs is in some kind of uniform or another; of course, most of the white people look to be janitors or factory workers, and the Japanese are dressed in the attire of professionals; few are wearing anything other than suits and ties. Given the fact they seem to all be wielding cell phones that look like they're ten years behind the times, it seems like technological innovation—or at least access—is behind the other world. God! The other world, I'm already calling it. As if it isn't this one that's the other one, the one that shouldn't exist.

That's what my mind won't, can't let go of, what it keeps playing on repeat through my mind as I'm just trying to get my bearings. As I phase in and out of paying attention to my surroundings, I think to be grateful for the din down here in the jam-packed subway station, letting me just follow along behind my mother and not get myself in any more trouble talking about things I don't know about. It gets me past the awkwardness of having to fake my way through knowing how to purchase a ticket here and all the way onto a seat on a narrow car stuffed in between hundreds of people headed downtown. No one's saying a word, and despite how full the train is the only sounds I can hear are the crinkling of newspapers and the rattle of the car as it leaves the station. In a way, I kind of wonder if the train's leaving the station for me—am I dooming myself to this world by becoming a part of it?

I think back, again to the words that the I Ching, and realize that the train is going downtown; in other words, to the northeast. Shit. I guess meeting Fukui could fulfill the advice to "seek the great man", but either way, I wonder if I couldn't use another fortune to lead me.

It's not the easiest fit in the busy subway car, but I make a couple flips of the coin, and after a little cramped adjustment and consulation of the book, I have my answer. Hexagram 10, "treading":

To tread on
the tail of the tiger
which does not bite back:
this is success.

I'm no oracle, but I can read between the lines here, and it's not exactly reassuring. I guess it figures that the only way out of this mess would be to put myself at the mercy of tigers. But without anywhere else to look, and with no one else to turn to, that's my ticket home. I guess I'll be going tiger hunting.

 

[ruth]

第５章

Great progress and success
come to those who work
on what has stagnated.
Advantage comes
by crossing the great river;
but it is wise to consider
the events of three days since
and three days hence.

I Ching (The Book of Changes)
䷑: Hexagram 18 (蠱, Decay)​

At a station whose name I don't recognize and which I've never once seen before—nothing new there—my mother begins to elbow me. "Hannah, pay attention. This is you."

I'd considered the possibility that we'd be splitting up at a certain point, but with so many other thoughts dominating the space in my mind, I don't immediately pick up the meaning behind what she's saying. "Huh?"

"Your station. For Nishimura. Hurry, or the doors will close!"

"Oh! Right, sorry. I'll be off now," I manage to rush out of my mouth as I collect my belongings haphazardly and scramble out just as a cool, calm voice announces that the doors are going to shut. And just as they do shut I realize just how boned I really am.

Let's go over the basics here: I'm in a place that for all intents and purposes I have never been to before, going to another place I've never even heard of, and judging by the flip phones even the rich businesspeople have been wielding, where the words "Google Maps" would elicit confusion at best. While the train finally picks up enough speed to leave the station, I take a moment to punch myself not sucking it up and asking my mother for directions to the place, but then again, I'm just as lost when it comes to how much I should and shouldn't know. What if I went to Nishimura Junior College? What if we used to live in the area? And from the way my mother talks about Fukui, she seems like a pretty close acquaintance, so what if we're family in some way? I'd have no way to follow up on erasing the massive suspicion nuke that would go off in my mother's head if any one of those things were true; there's only so many times I can make the excuse that "it's been a while," after all. That doesn't exactly leave me in a great position myself, though, since now I'm in this station standing around like an idiot because I have no idea where I'm supposed to go.

I spend the next few minutes perched at a bench while I try to think of ideas, but my saving grace comes with the glimpse of a city map I catch from halfway across the platform. I won't exactly be able to rely on this all the time, and I file away a mental note to find or go buy a city map, but it gets me most of the way there, especially once I orient myself. For all that I said that Kaiken—the neighbourhood where I'm now apparently living—was a cipher to me, the areas further downtown are instantly recognizable to me as belonging to San Francisco, even if what is where isn't immediately obvious. But Nishimura Junior College seems to be occupying some of the buildings around where the University of San Francisco is (was). A fifteen-minute walk, but, to my relief, a more familiar one than before: my itinerary takes me right through the Haight, my old neighbourhood. Saved once again by a combination of coincidence and managing to pull a solution out of my ass, I figure having something to go on can't hurt. Filing through my bag, I find the cheap camera inside and take a quick Polaroid (well, I guess in this world they'd call it a Nikon or something, but I'm the one keeping score here, damn it, so Polaroid it is) of the map before moving on.

If a look around the airport, my (new) neighbourhood, and the triumphalist murals in the train station hadn't been enough, my introduction to downtown San Francisco would have sealed the deal. Every building carries some mark or another of Japanese influence, sometimes vague and sometimes overwhelming but always present. Whether the peaked, ceramic-tiled roofs, the narrow stone walls lining the homes, the elaborate bronze nameplates identifying the residents, or the long rows of translucent paper-like screens, no building is without another reminder of the world's cultural titan. Looking down side streets is much the same: izakayas festooned with red paper lanterns, convenience stores with large flags all advertising 特売—special sale, though strangely not the English loanword セール I found so commonly in Japan—and even the occasional Buddhist temple or Shinto shrine. Only the occasional refurbished Victorian home remains to remind me that this was once San Francisco, and it's by turns fascinating and horrifying; as I consider the denser, more thorough Japanization in this neighbourhood, I realize that the only ways it could have gotten this way are through street-by-street ethnic cleansing or a program of cultural extinction more profound than I thought possible over 70 years.

Or, considering the fact that Hirayama (and by extension me) can barely speak English, both. A chilling thought, but one that I can't shake as I approach the place where my old home stands—no, where it once stood. I don't know whether to be saddened or unsurprised when I see it's just another one of the many unremarkable Japanese homes in the neighbourhood, but a heaviness settles in my heart anyway, no matter how much I tell myself that it's foolish. The most I can will myself to do as I stand there, glaring at the nameplate by the mailbox and fighting the burning tears that threaten to overwhelm my cheeks and feeling as small as ever against the tall, cold wrought-iron fencing, is mutter a silent curse against the Ikeda family within. It's meaningless, and for all I know the Ikedas are blameless in the whole exercise, but it's enough that I feel that I can move on for now, that I can make it at least to the doorstep of Nishimura Junior College.

The main building of the college looks strangely out of place in this heavily-Japanized neighbourhood. Where all of the surrounding buildings have taken cues from their Pacific overlord, Takaoka Hall, as the plaque to the outside helpfully informs me, looks as Western as it could be, with a towering Spanish Gothic façade that seems like it would fit better on a church. As I continue reading the plaque, I learn the origins of the building come with the San Francisco College for Women, which built the place in 1932. Now, at least, I feel like I'm on slightly more solid footing; I can guess from context that Nishimura Junior College is similarly intended for women, and a few guesses more besides—if the burbling worry in the back of my mind is right, then Japan's conquest of America means that educational, let alone political, equality for women never arrived. Implying my highest prospects for employment in this universe are as an office lady, or teaching other women how to be office ladies. As if I didn't already have enough reasons to hate this universe, it just keeps getting more and more fantastically shitty. Something to keep my spirits buoyed as I walk through the monumental doorway and into the abattoir of my personal dignity.

It's almost like I'm walking into the nave of a church, the way the airy, arched ceiling vaults over the foyer below, but the illusion is quickly shattered: these are students, not supplicants, and the noise and bustle confirms it. Though I don't know my way around the building in the slightest, it's not hard to find a directory that sends me in the direction of the administrative offices, and a few wood-panelled hallways later I'm there, and no more prepared than before when I open the door to hear a bright, clear woman's voice utter "Hannah-chan!"

Fuck. An acquaintance—no, worse, with the way she calls me chan there's nothing else she can be but a friend—who with my luck is going to start spouting off on topics I know nothing about. I'm already fragile enough at this point, but the best I can do for now is try to get through this without breaking down. "Oh, sorry to bother. Good morning!" [1] I respond in my best I-recognize-you voice. The woman sitting behind the broad, lacquered desk across from me—actually Japanese, I note, looking to be in her fifties but with a jolly face and welcoming, motherly disposition—doesn't immediately respond but waits until I've fully walked into the office, and she seems to busy herself with organizing the disaster area of printouts on her workspace while I adjust my backpack and approach her. The thought crosses my mind that this is the Fukui that my mother keeps mentioning.

Who knows whether I've committed, but at the very least it doesn't sound like too many alarm bells are going off when she answers casually and informally. "Please, please, take a seat! How are you doing? I haven't seen you in so long, what has it been, two years now?"

Oh god. I just got done half-assing conversations with my family, and now I'm going to have to do it with someone else, who I know even less about. Once again, I'm back to breaking out the most generic possible conversational parries, hoping it'll fend off questions that hearken back to a history that I can't remember, and honestly, given how crazy I feel already just being in this universe, really hope I never do. "It has been a long time, hasn't it? Well, I guess there's no way around it, with how long I was away. I'm glad to be back, but now that I'm not studying abroad anymore, my mother thought I should apply for the job here?" I leave what I'm saying vague, in case I'm wrong about my suspicion that this is Fukui, but to my relief she seems to light up in satisfaction.

"That's right, I had told your mother about the opening here, didn't I?" Okay, well at least I have confirmation now that this is who I think it is. "I know these jobs usually go to naichijin [2], but you're not just anyone, is what I told to your mother. I heard from her you've wanted to do something else other than being an OL. Well, on the record I can't say I approve, but I can tell you, when I divorced I was not exactly looking forward to having to get back behind a desk again."

There's so much there to unpack, and yet, starved of context, there's a lot that I can't speak to, either—whoever Naichi people are, it sounds like they're valued, and I'm not one of them. And the darker implications of the rest of what she says—I can't even begin to scratch the surface. So I nervously laugh and try to transition to an easier topic. "Is that so. Well, I'm not sure what I'd like to do, but given the possibilities, this one sounded interesting." Code for the rising horror in my stomach at the way this world seems to treat women, and also a way for me to gently introduce my desire to get the application and get out of here before I risk making a fool out of myself. "By the way, I came to pick up the application. Do you have any copies of it with you?"

"Yes, I can get it for you. Sorry about this, but it'll take a second," she says, beginning to file through a stack of papers on her desk. "But, tell me, I heard from Yuka that you had found something serious in Japan. What does he think about you coming back here, especially to work?"

What. Suddenly eerie parallelism is out the window in favour of the Cultural Marriage Imperative creeping in once again, and I think back to the fight that erupted over last night's dinner table over my hypothetical vows to a Japanese guy. I'd been half-convinced at the time that it was just a bit, but now I'm forced to reckon with the possibility that it might be dead serious. At this point I don't even care that I'm supposed to be best friends or something with this Yuka girl who, like everyone else who's apparently a part of this life, I can't tell from a stranger off the street. Mostly, thinking any harder about the false relationships already taking over my life just two days into being spirited away from my old one is really making me feel really damn queasy. And without even the vaguest idea of how to get back, I can't afford to burn it all down.

It takes every ounce of self-control for me to not lose it then and there, but I know I can't really keep up this charade much longer, either. Seeking a quick exit, I notice that Fukui seems to have extracted a few copies of the job application from the stack of papers, and before she can press any further, I put together a shamble of a few disconnected statements, grab the paper, and make my way to exit stage left without rocking the boat even more than I already have. "Is that so. Well, I'm not really sure what to say, but I'll definitely be hoping to get this job. But I just remembered I'm really quite busy and have to go, so I'll see you later! Thank you for your help, sorry again for bothering!" Which is about as bullshit as it sounds, and I'm sure she knows it. So although I get out with a copy of the job form, it isn't before she utters a justifiably confused and irritated "Wait, where are you going? Hannah?"

Away. No offense, Fukui, but I'm hoping I'll never have to see your face again.

____________________________________​

I can't help but feel that it's a little ironic that I end up running away from my brief encounter with Fukui right back out into the actual world where all of these problems are coming from. At the very least, I can sometimes trick myself into thinking I'm back in Japan on the outside, when I don't have to think about people like Fukui and their lives here. It's better than the more uncomfortable alternative of thinking any harder about the cascade of Unfortunate Implications that follow from it all—I've had plenty of those for one day, and yet somehow I get the feeling that they aren't yet through with me.

Considering that feeling, I know it's probably a mistake to let myself wander, but without any other engagements or obligations, pretty soon I'm gravitating towards downtown, morbid curiosity and a desire for knowledge getting the better of my own brain warning me that I'm probably not going to like what I find. Maybe I'm just so struck with awe and existential dread by everything I've seen and heard that it doesn't feel real anymore, some kind of defense mechanism preventing the full shock of seeing Geary Street turned into a dead ringer for the Ginza—too absurd for me to take in, even after everything else I've borne witness to—from sinking in.

While this crazy dissociated part of my brain takes full control, it's impossible not to be fascinated by the changes this universe has wrought on my hometown, and in the course of my meander to the downtown core, it seems like every single one of them presents itself to me in exquisite, ghastly detail. The first landmark I run into is the place that, another world away, I would have called "Japantown". Here, it hardly seems like an appropriate name, seeing as the whole city could go by the name, but there's still a marked contrast going from the more residential areas of Nishimura and the Haight to the main drag of what the authorities seem to have renamed 古町—the old town. Immediately, my mind is thrown by the alienness of it all; there's almost nothing to hold onto from my own world as a landmark, and whatever parallelism that the universe has mandated just instills a sense of the uncanny valley in me, capped off by the old shopping plaza where, as a kid, I fell for Japan, its language, and its culture for the first time. Now it seems like its primary purpose is to taunt me—to show me the destruction this culture I studied for the better part of my life is capable of, right down to the life I live, right down to the bright neon sign, 紀伊國屋書店—Kinokuniya Books—advertising the store featured by so many of my childhood memories.

For the first time I'm left to wonder just why this happened: Is this a test I'm being subjected to, or some kind of cosmic punishment? Am I even supposed to discover how to escape, or am I even supposed to be able to escape? If I'm supposed to prove myself, why? If this is intended as some kind of psychological incarceration, what is it for?

Almost immediately, I regret letting myself think about the whys, as I'm overwhelmed by the limitlessness of the line of inquiry. Better to focus on what I can answer, for now. And the answers I can find—understanding the "truth" and the "history" of the world I'm in, might be right in front of me, inside Kinokuniya Books.

____________________________________​

[1] Really wasn't sure how to translate this, since it sounds weird any way I try, but 失礼します shitsurei shimasu (literally, 'I am being impolite') is a common set phrase used when entering or leaving someone's office.

[2] 内地 naichi ('inner lands') is this world's term for "Japan proper", which includes the Home Islands, Sakhalin, Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, and Primorye. 内地人 naichijin ('people from the inner lands') specifically is a beisei-nihongo term euphemistically used in the Pacific States to refer to ethnic-Japanese born in Japan (and is commonly understood to exclude other Japanese citizens/subjects who are not ethnic Japanese), who come to work. Frequently it's used to contrast with the previously mentioned zaibei. In Japan, this shade of meaning doesn't exist, and the term naichijin is not generally used.

 

[ruth]

第６章

Great progress and success
come to those who behave
with moral rectitude.
But for those who falter,
they will fall into errors,
their fortunes will vanish,
and no directions
will yield an advantage.

I Ching (The Book of Changes)
䷘: Hexagram 25 (無妄, Innocence)​

At once, Kinokuniya Books looks nothing like I remember and exactly like I remember it. I've been subjected to a relentless parade of the unfamiliar crossed with the familiar, and the bookstore is no different—eerie reduplications of every bookshelf, but everything within them is alien to me, the product of another world's history and language and people. The riot of vividly coloured stacks of manga from the Kinokuniya I knew are gone, but somehow the books that replaced them are no less striking. Instead, the things that catch my eye are streamers of loud, blocky calligraphy that hang from the ceiling, directing me to different shelves, each one holding hundreds of brightly bound but otherwise largely unadorned books. In other sections it's slightly different, with the relaxed standards of magazine publishing allowing for pictures of smartly-dressed young women or steely-eyed Imperial soldiers on the cover, but even a cursory glimpse of the store indicates to me the limitations of bookselling in a world with stringent censorship. In a world where there's only one story that's "correct", I guess it makes sense that the history shelves are going to be more monotonous, but as usual, I'm reacting in retrospect to every atomized change that I can't quite imagine until I see it.

Scanning the aisles for something that could prove useful, I instead find more reminders than I'd like of the truth that I keep trying to push out of my thoughts, little forget-me-nots like weeds in the bookstore's open field; I keep having to pinch myself, recall once again that this isn't Japan, despite what my traitor gut would like to believe. I'm thrown enough as it is by the eclectic mix of ten-year-old flip phones, twenty-year-old computers, forty-year-old cars, sixty-year-old fashion, and eighty-year-old culture, and it only jars me further when I see them juxtaposed against my hometown. Instead of acne-wracked teenagers cradling themselves in the corner and watching anime on their MacBooks, the only people I see in here aside from the occasional customer is a group of white children, looking like barely old enough to have the fine-motor skills for stuffing food into their own faces, being instructed in calligraphy, and honestly, I feel like the universe is beginning to lay it on a bit thick here. Having spent two whole years in Japan and a good while longer before that studying its culture with a possibly unhealthy fervor, I feel like I've at least developed a decent compass for what's "really" Japanese and what isn't, to the point where I'm kind of half-proud to say I developed a reputation for debunking often-shared Facebook memes about "those crazy Japanese", and being honest here, this universe is beginning to fail the smell test here. On no planet that I recognize are four-year-olds being sat down in front of a brush and paper and instructed on the importance of stroke order in kanji. Is the imperative for cultural assimilation this overpowering, that government-mandated 書道 keeps the little white kids busy all weekend? Or are American parents willingly shuttling their kids to shodō Sunday school in order to get a leg up in a Japanese-run world? I can't tell which is worse, but it makes me queasy enough to make me want to turn away, and pick up my walking pace to get me over to the history section faster.

Hustling through the aisles as I put as much distance as I can between myself and the unsettling children's calligraphy class, I get a cursory glimpse of the religion section, and though I only catch a few words on the titles and in the sections, it's enough to make my stomach turn further. I've never thought there's anything wrong with Shinto or Buddhism, but the way they are here, in this world, they seem perverted beyond recognition, turned towards war, towards the patriarchal teachings of Confucianism and away from the simple teachings that I came to recognize as embodying them. Whatever the issues with Kanako's universe-bending meditation might be, at the very least I can't say that they don't hold a candle to this masturbatory altar to Buddhism, Shinto, and You: How to Serve the Emperor and Your Ancestors by Dying Gloriously in Battle, Probably. It doesn't get my hopes up for the history section, to say the least, but you know what? At this point I'm pretty much ready to take whatever I see at face value, to believe that humans are capable of acts of fundamental evil, and that I now live in a world where those fears have been realized in the most horrific fashion possible. Emperor-worship is the least of my (at least immediate) problems, and it's quickly dismissed from my mind as a store clerk approaches me.

Once again, the petty shock of a white girl looking to be barely out of her teenage years addressing me with the kind of reverential Japanese formality that wouldn't sound all that out of place in a princess anime is almost enough to make me think that either my eyes or my ears are deceiving me. A quick squint at her nametag—Sakura Pulaski—only turns up the dial on this situation's Nightmare Anime Factor from around an already gratuitous eight to a patently ridiculous eleven; it seems not even first names are safe from the clutches of Japanese cultural imperialism when in the belly of the beast like this. "Is there anyway I could help you find what you were looking for, miss?"

I'm looking for my country, is what I come halfway to saying, before reasoning to myself that the best-case scenario is that I come off like a smartass, and that the worst-case scenario ends with me getting dragged away in chains as a "subversive". Instead, I work up the best polish and class I can—no need to have this go any less smoothly than it needs to—and get to the point. What I really need is to learn what happened here during and after World War 2. It's guaranteed to be suffocatingly propagandistic, but whatever they say about how—and why—the Japanese won is at least a starting point for my knowledge of this new world. "Ah, I'm looking for a book about World War 2 and its aftermath. I see that we're in the history section, but I haven't been able to find one. Do…you think…you could…?"

She begins to look pale, almost queasy, before I even finish the sentence, and I barely muster the last few words, trailing off into a non-committal half-question for fear of making things worse. Once again, my lack of knowledge threatens to reintroduce me to hell in all kinds of new and exciting ways. This time, I've managed to petrify a clerk for the sheer gall of asking for a book—or at least that's my first thought, before I realize what an idiot I've been. It dawns on me as she begins formulating her response through awkward half-laughter what I've done wrong. "Oh, I'm sorry, yes, do you maybe mean, the Greater East Asia War? Or the Greater Pacific War?"

It figures that Japan's fascists would have their own name for the war, and that even a "neutral" name for it would be perceived as suspect. Well, as embarrassing as it feels to be put on the spot like this, fortunately it doesn't seem like the girl is planning on reporting me to the thought police. Feeling more grateful than perhaps I should for dodging a bullet, my cheeks flush with a mix of petty shame and relief as I manage to stumble through an answer. "The, ah, the Pacific War, yes…I'm mostly just interested in…well, America— the Pacific States, that is, and how it was formed. Do you have any books like this?"

It seems I'm in luck, because she quickly nods and skitters off to a nearby bookshelf, scanning the shelves before returning with a hardcover book, thickly bound in royal scarlet and adorned with an imperial seal and its relatively straightforward title: A History of the Pacific States of America. "Would you be looking for something like this, perhaps?"

Just the adornment of the book is enough to put my stomach in a nauseating tailspin. That these icons of domination, of foreign empire would represent whatever notion of American nationalism remained—or even that there might be none of that left, and this is just the remaindered ersatz allotted to us by our colonial overlords—it's enough to leave me weak-kneed, overwhelmed once again (as usual, it's becoming) by the totality of this hell on Earth. It leaves me doubting whether even a divine being could consider the depths, the almost rich completeness of the world I was reckoning with.

Girding myself to speak, I turn to the clerk and put on my best smile. Strained as it is, I still manage to get a hasty "Yes, this is perfect. Just what I'm looking for," before the horrific fluttering in my throat arrests my voice, and with it much of my thought process. Without so much as another look at the book, I thank her and head for the cash register. At this point, I have what I need—or at least what I can get—to learn more about this world. With my spotty record on human interaction for the day, I decide that it's probably best to forgo any more of it, and take my book back home. There I can—well, I can't do anything, really, but I can maybe start to rectify a little of the uneven playing field of knowledge, even if it doesn't do anything to fix my unwilling deportation to what I'm pretty much convinced at this point is a revenge fantasy concocted by someone who wants to get back at me for my teenage infatuation with all things Japan.

____________________________________​

After having survived my morning introduction to this San Francisco's public transit, aided in no small part by my mother's not-so-gentle coaxing, it's a considerably easier trip home. A quick consultation of a city map I buy at the bookstore's checkout counter confirms that the closest station is the Civic Center—scratch that. The Pacific Diet is the new name for the complex in the nexus of the city that used to house the city hall and many of the lesser functions of the city, but now it serves as the heart of the collaborationist administration that has governed the country since 1951.

Here's where my history book, whatever its dubious accuracy, can at least deliver the official story. Flipping to the section on the origins of the PSA, I begin to understand how and why all of the symbols of America have been so thoroughly purged. In the postwar order, with the Japanese having occupied large chunks of the Pacific coast of the US, assorted state governments, "freed" from the "fascist revolution" overtaking the eastern US, came together with the "assistance" of Japan to establish a new nation and constitution, one that have none of the Unfortunate Associations with the closest ally of the Nazis. I've had my own suspicions for a little while now—this morning's glimpse at a mural depicting Japanese and American soldiers fighting off the Germans with their own American cohorts really should have hammered it home more, if I'm honest with myself—but seeing it written out on paper brings the hot wet horror in the pit of my stomach to a boil.

All at once I realize the sheer scale of what my family was subjected to when the Japanese came; nothing I had considered previously held a candle to the unravelling thread of understanding I now followed. My great-grandparents fled the Nazis in 1933 only to have their adoptive homeland hurtle headlong in the same direction within the decade; how could they support this country? And on the other hand, the brutal dictatorship of the Japanese which rewarded those who participated most gleefully in the dismantling of everything our nation once valued and stood for. But the Americans, the ones who rallied around the Stars and Stripes, who revelled in the culture of liberty and spoke in the language of freedom—these were the ones who, after this revolution, walked hand in hand with Hitler in advancing the cause of the Final Solution.

I realize, now, and my blood turns to ice and my heart stops and a great electric shiver arclights up my spine and my lungs are lead balloons as I think it, that this could never be the work of some vengeful demon intent on showing me the shortcomings of the culture I've devoted my life to studying. Because the heartless, callous soldier society that presided over the dismantling of my homeland, the desecration of an entire continent to further their own aims of glory, the colonial subjugation of any human unfortunate enough to have oceanfront property on the Pacific? The culture that demands its subjects obey the strict and heartless order imposed without quarter, without forgiveness, that stops only when it has accomplished total cultural extinction of thoughts and language that contradict its goals? These are the good guys. They're the ones defending me and mine in a war that started seventy years ago, against the country I thought I once belong to, now exterminating without a second thought its Jews, blacks, Asians, political dissidents, and gays alike. The regimented, militarized orthodoxy of the seventy-year Japanese occupation is the only thing keeping whatever remains of my family from total annihilation.

I glance upward from my book, seeking a breath of fresh air from the roil of devastation gripping me with every turn of the page, and my gaze lands upon the watchful eye of a security camera atop a lamppost in the Civic Center plaza. For a brief, sick moment, my thoughts tangled in genocidal terror, I feel all the safer for it.

 

[ruth]

第７章

To be receptive represents
what is great and originating,
the success that comes when
persevering like a loyal mare.
A great man who undertakes
a task, and tries to lead, fails.
But one who follows, finds
guidance in his proper lord.
Friends are best found in the
west and south, and foregone
in the east and north.
If he perseveres thus,
he will be blessed with fortune.

I Ching (The Book of Changes)
䷁: Hexagram 2 (坤, The Receptive)​

Once I've worked up the mental strength just to block out the world and will myself to take the trip back home, I'm rewarded with a few hours of blessed silence, for what feels like the first time in living memory. Alone in Hirayama's almost absurdly serene bedroom, sprawled out in a crucifix of weariness, I'm given one of my first opportunities for solitude and self-reflection. I don't know where any of the rest of my family is. And that rising, bilious spite must be getting the better of me, too, because what I see looking back at me is uglier than any Hannah Friedberg I know. For the moment, for all that I know they could be trapped inside a Japanese labour camp with the fucking Kwantung Army and it wouldn't make a lick of difference, because the big joke is that as long as they're still breathing, our overlords are still the good guys.

I know even as I think it how spiteful it sounds, how I shouldn't even consider the thoughts that won't leave me, but like before, it doesn't stop me. The silence and the solitude are in a lot of ways the first opportunity for me to reckon with this world, and maybe it says something about me that I don't feel ready to unleash the twisted, screwed-up angerterror piledriving itself into me until I'm all alone, until there's no one else to bear the brunt of the blows except myself.

Like that maybe, I care more than I think that my family has led this life of fear and suffering and they've still got their thin-lipped smiles and their resolution and their perseverance, where here I am just two days into even the narrowest sliver of the life I might have led and I'm falling apart at the seams. Like that I wonder whether anyone else has been faced down the horrific void at the heart of this universe before, not because I'd want anyone else to be subjected to it, but because at least if they were, neither of us would be quite so alone.

Or maybe all of that is just window dressing, just more of the feel-good nonsense that won't get me anywhere in a cold and unforgiving world, and what it really means is that if I want to make it out sane and alive, I need to get with the program fast. To adjust to every last whiplash of insanity being brought down by our psychotic surveillers, and to glean more from every fragment of knowledge and belief that might have brought me here. To know the history of this traitor cosmos like it's my own, like it's more real than what I know because it is, and to take my Japanized doppelgänger's creed to heart. If the I Ching was important enough to guide her life, then it doesn't matter what I believe, not really. Because this isn't my life I'm dealing with here, and even if it is, if there's no escape—it hurts to think, but it's impossible not to—it's a change that demands an answer, and there's nowhere else to turn but the mystic and arcane.

I sound like a crazy person to myself, as I lift myself off the bed and reckon with the I Ching poster across from me, trying to glean the meaning that Hirayama would from looking at the eight trigrams before me. What do they mean? Why did they mean so much to her? Why should they, for me?

…Well. It occurs to me that this is pretty much exactly what she used it for, and I chide myself, for not thinking enough like her. If I want to make it in this world, like they always say in those movies where clichés are enough to save the day, "when in Rome…" And if San Francisco isn't where all roads lead to in this perversion of parallel universes known as the Pacific States, then I'd hate to see what is.

Three coins, six flips each, and six unchanging broken lines. Even without knowing all that much about divination, I know a clear message when I see it, and this is as definitive as it gets. Whether I like it or not, or whether I can even really understand what the ancient Chinese would have to say about my situation, is another question entirely, but I put thoughts like those aside as irrelevant while I look up the explanation for the lines I've been given.

Hexagram 2. "Field", apparently, but more metaphorically representing "the receptive". Not that the metaphor makes sense to me at all, but the translation of the Chinese tells me in no uncertain terms what the best course of action is.

To be receptive represents
what is great and originating,
the success that comes when
persevering like a loyal mare.
A great man who undertakes
a task, and tries to lead, fails.
But one who follows, finds
guidance in his proper lord.
Friends are best found in the
west and south, and foregone
in the east and north.
If he perseveres thus,
he will be blessed with fortune.

So that's the way it has to be. That there's no point in me forging my own path, because the only way forward is by following "my proper lord"—the phrasing makes me feel like I'm going to puke at this point, the way it reeks of the culture of order and domination now hemming me in on all sides—which is to say, do what Hirayama would do. Accept the unspoken atrocities around me as they are, because they must be if I'm supposed to find any whisper of good fortune in the shadow of the valley of punishment. And like before, look to the southwest. What can that be? Is that my escape? My redemption? No—with nothing else to go on, like the hexagram says, there's nothing good that can come of leading. And in this moment, the best thing to do is to follow; to do what Hirayama might have, to apply for this job opening not because it means accepting the world as it is now, but because it could bring me the good fortunes I'll need to begin to tackle the problem. Money and knowledge: and then, with enough of those, maybe the clouds will open to the northeast, and the peaceful mountain promised me by my ancestors will rise from the mist.

____________________________________
​

When I finally brave a shot at reopening the history book, something like a study session reminiscent of university-age all-nighters emerges, as my research rather quickly demands the recruitment of heavier hitters: for starters, a kanji dictionary for the hundreds of characters either too archaic or too complicated for me to have either learned (or even seen) in the Japan I knew. On top of that, a regular dictionary, one of my brother's world history books, the I Ching (at this point, why not?), and, fortuitously, a few scattered scraps of Hirayama's high school material that I manage to find in an old binder. While I can't say that I haven't learned a lot—about the power of propaganda over truth, if nothing else—more than that, I've realized how out of my own league I currently am. The language I speak, understand, and remember is different than the one that people here speak; the hefty superstrate of English loanwords that pervade Japanese is gone, or perhaps it's more accurate to say it was never here. As well-read as I am, it turns what could be a page-turner (however horrifying, some small, morbid part of me has to know why and how something like this could happen) into a frustrating slog through a morass of linguistic confusion. With vocabulary peeled straight from a primer on Meiji futsūbun, a scattershot spelling standardization that can't decide if it wants to modernize or stay in the Middle Ages, and a style that leaves me half-convinced that an English speaker was just phoning in the translation, it makes for jarring reading, and it's stranger still that this seems to hold true across everything I read, including my own alternate self's writing. Still, a picture starts to build in my mind of the world I'm in, a more complete scaffold against which I can compare society, language, and even my family.

Six hours into my study session, I hear the first stirring from outside. Since coming back, and resolving to try to do something a little more productive than moping around in this utterly foreign end-of-the-road apartment, I haven't given much thought to anything beyond the stack of books and papers now scattered around my desk, let alone outside my room. But with dusk long having fallen, leaving everything outside the halogen desk lamp's diffuse glow in the purple-yellow gloaming of city nights, I think that I must have either tuned out any sign of life (and thus been left to my own devices long past dinnertime, my mind tacks on with prickly disdain) or else they've been working very late. Meaning the most likely candidate for coming home earliest is…

"Oh, it's you," says my grandmother, tone halfway between surprised and bemused.

"Yes," I say lamely, unable to will myself to trade barbs with her like I used to. Maybe I'm still feeling wounded from her contempt over dinner, or maybe I'm just ashamed that I can't seem to string the right words together in English, which feels right now worlds away, like my brain and my mouth are wired all wrong, and my traitor tongue won't obey my own commands. With tortured care, each word slow and deliberate as I try in my mind's echo chamber to rehearse a language I should know better than any other, I offer her an answer in English. "I went to pick up the job application today. Decided I should start refreshing my memory with some studying if I wanted to have the best shot I could," I say, gesturing at one of the books in my hands.

"The tandye job your mom keeps talking about? Well, listen, Hannah, you've got a wreckshow anyone would be jealous of. Well, not me, of course, but you know I've never been interested in any of that Jap nonsense."

I hazard a nervous laugh, chancing the tone in her voice that doesn't sound quite as deadly serious as usual, though her peppering her language with Japanese loanwords surprises me. Instead it's more serious than I can imagine.

"But you listen to me. Remember when you do what you think it takes to get ahead in the world, that they're always going to put their own kind ahead of you. You have to make yourself better than them at anything to have a chance." Her eyes glaze ominously as she continues. "Don't let the same thing that happened to your grandfather happen to you."

A wave of vile imagination washes over my mind. It explains a great deal, too much even, and makes me fear for everyone I haven't seen since returning. Whatever the terrible fate of my grandfather, with my grandmother living with us I could at least imagine, however dimly, the reason had something to do with him. But my dad? My closest friends? Had they been ground into the dirt for their rebellious attitudes, faced prison terms? Or almost worse to consider, had their rakish iconoclasm and quirks of personality been mowed down to nothing to fit the demands of Japanese colonial conformity? I hedge, and address her statement more obliquely. "I'm not naïve. I know there are plenty of problems with this world. But I have to do something." All of these things are debatable at this point, but fuck it—my alternative is sounding like a crazy person and spilling my guts about my powers of cross-dimensional travel.

"This world?" She laughs a raw, sharp chuckle, like she's heard it all before. "Now you're starting to sound like the Resistance. 'Another world is possible,' and all that. Let me tell you, if another world was possible we would have gone tattikye to make it happen, that's for damn sure." She heaves a sigh, sounding older and more tired than she's ever seemed before, and I can't help wondering, now, whether she knows all this from personal experience, an entire life led that my (own world's, I force myself to remember) grandmother would have found utterly alien.

And how does she want me to respond? Am I supposed to side with her, sympathetic but skeptical of the revolution? (Would she even believe me if I did?) Or is my role in this relationship to reject that, and to stress my own independence and presumably generational attitude? Once again, with no easy answer, I sidestep the issue. "I just want to find a place for myself, live my life out in peace." And at this point, now that I'm trying to suppress the rising panic that I'll never escape from this dystopic plane of existence, that promise of peace is truly all I really want.

My grandmother just scoffs. Did she expect better of me, or does she already think me a lost cause? No—worse, it's seemingly both of them at once, a reckoning more terrible than I could imagine playing out in horror-movie slow motion. "Oh, Hannah," she says, tongue drenched in a scorn I didn't think she had the will to direct at me, "did you learn nothing? I knew this trip to Japan was a bad idea, giving you all these false fantasies of what your life could be, and all these opportunities to throw away all the parts of you that don't fit with the world." And then the coup de grace, delivered with such utter spite and finality that her voice quavers. "There's no peace for our people in this world, not in this generation, hell, maybe not ever. But you, you just—did you just forget that? Ignore selfishly your responsibilities to remember and bear witness because you'd rather live under the false delusion that if you become one of them, they'll forget that they were shuttling us off to our deaths in your mother's lifetime? I can't believe I need to be the one to tell you this. I can't believe you don't already know. You can't ever be one of them. All you can do is keep your head down and make sure that memory doesn't die."

In the span of a couple of sentences, she's destroyed me. My whole existence, my whole purpose in life, the life I'm devoting my daily life to return to, rebuked down to the very kernel of its meaning. Washing over every thought I had before is a new cascade of dread, every part of me questioned by my grandmother's evisceration of me. Is my purpose on this earth to escape it and remember what could have been, or to stay here and remember what already is? Have I forgotten who I am, or at least who I should be, and have I failed in my duty to my great-grandparents by not remembering well enough? Even if I do leave this world, will everyone else remain trapped in it, or is it only real as long as it's real for me?

Maybe my grandmother's right, regardless of all these questions haunting me. That I'd given too little thought to remembering, and far too much for myself. It's more than enough to leave me hollow as my grandmother leaves the room with a dismissive sigh. There's nothing left, really, but the pages of the I Ching splayed open before me, chiding me that the best course of action comes by obeying your masters.

 

[ruth]

第８章

Modesty brings success,
And nobility completes it.

I Ching (The Book of Changes)
䷎: Hexagram 15 (謙, Humility)​

Several days go by where, for all I know that I should be keeping entries in my diary (not mine, it's too neat by half to have ever been mine, but the things I've recorded within it are my only real link to my real life, that feels like it's fading further and further out of reach), I can't will myself to take down another word. My arms and my heart and my mind tremble with numinous dread whenever I think about putting pen to paper about the incident with my grandmother, a feeling so horrifyingly overwhelming in its totality that I can't even untangle the unresolved knot of emotion burning in the pit of my chest. Is it anger at her, for the way she treated me as if I were nothing? Fear, for the world I'm living in, for the thought that I could be hurt or killed without the second thought of the powers-that-be? Doubt, more than at my failure to escape, but the haunting prospect that perhaps there may be no escape? Or is it, more than anything else, uncut terror at the thought that she might be right, and that this crucible I've been dropped into at a moment's notice is both test and punishment for my failures?

It's a little ironic to consider, but the more I think about it, reliving the sharp rebuke in my mind over and over and over again, letting my grandmother's condemnation rattle around the inside of my head, the less I can think about escape from this world. I feel like I'm beginning to be drawn, like too much actually, to the metaphysics of it all, a voyage across time and space to get schooled on some kind of cosmic Object Lesson that I've failed my people, and only by living through the hypothetical consequences of my ignorance can I be seen as adequately penitent before the brimstone gaze of my grandmother. But then as long as the mechanics continue to be this mysterious, what else is there to do but obsess upon the impossible?

And that's what I end up doing, one way or another, as the days shuttle by, the fervid roil of conflict in my head making their passing feel at once interminably slow and impossibly fast. Somehow, though that insistent sense of alienation doesn't leave, through the miracle of not giving a shit I manage to find some kind of twisted normalcy in the ritual of being Hirayama Hanna. My mind is a hopeless bramble of unwavering panic, until it feels so thoroughly unsurprising for my heart to squeeze my throat in a wrestler's grip that the thoughts melt away and yield to this automatic rhythm; while my brain exhausts itself in endless loops of unreality, Zombie Hannah plays catch-up with archaic Japanese orthography and the absurdist propaganda passing for history. I forget that my mornings ever started with blearily checking social media accounts long consigned to the dustbin of an alternate history, that my days were spent studying a culture and a language I found fascinating because of its distance instead of one that had become all-encompassing and omnipresent, and that my nights were my own instead of being haunted by the spectre of my misshapen family.

But what does it even matter? I realize that since I touched down at the airport I've done nothing but fall into line, nothing but embodied the damnable Receptive that's ground me into the dust with my grandmother's searing judgment, contorted my empty frame into some sick simulacrum of what I'm sure this world would have wanted me to be more than anything. Demure, yielding, passive, unassuming and yet at once studious, scholarly, diligent, obedient.

It physically turns my stomach as I consider that this shattering of my will has made me exactly the kind of woman that this world would want me to be, and yet all I can muster in response is this: here, take my life, mold it in your hands, do with it what you will. Want me to teach a juku for the white girls whose lives will turn out just as mine is? Fine, here's your damn lesson plan. Here's your stroke order worksheets and your old-school kanji and your grading system and your smiling, hollow-hearted teacher looking all the part of good wife, wise mother and your repulsive glory-bound culture I was once naïve enough to let myself be romanced by. Here's your lurid forgery of morality, your spiritual unity and Confucian precepts and your Kokutai no Hongi and your hakkō ichiu, and here's my shallow pretence that for a half of a second I believe the lies that spill from my lips to further your cause of cultural extinction because I won't survive in this savage world for any longer unless I learn to play by its rules, and how else can I even fathom escape if I can hardly fathom survival?

And just a few days later there I am, grinning like an idiot, seated before the almost maddeningly motherly visage of Fukui, with not a single honorific out of place, every form filled out in immaculate kyūjitai, hundreds of relearned characters swimming about in my head among the tapestry of lies they call 'history', as I suppress every protesting nerve in my body and the overwhelming wave of psychological nausea and deliver everything she wants from a prospective teacher. I leave with a teacher's handbook, a schedule, a small pamphlet on connecting to Amici, and a bleak cloud over my conscience reminding me that if there really are devils, then there's no doubt left in my mind that I've driven myself headlong into a deal with them.

 

[ruth]

Well, the pandemic threw a wrench in my plans, but I'm back to continue my previously scheduled plans! Thanks for waiting, everyone—here's a double feature update.

第９章

Good fortune attends a maiden's marriage,
as does persistence in a righteous course.

I Ching (The Book of Changes)
䷴: Hexagram 53 (漸, Development)​

Weeks upon damnable weeks have passed, I note with a dim realization, since the incident where I was spirited away from a trip back home straight into this purgatorial perversion of it. And yet no matter what I've tried—Kanako's meditation techniques, the divining words of the I Ching, research into the history of this nightmarish world—I'm no closer to discovering an escape, and finding myself every day more embroiled into the hellscape on all sides. Where once my only concrete connections to this world were the mirror versions of my family, dark reflections of how being brought up in a society built up out of cold, callous jingoism, every day spent here creates new and unexpected chains. It isn't merely the prospect of employment that has me feeling more and more like my life in this world is becoming entangled and involved in ways I try not to think about, but as I'm quickly starting to find out, the connections it entails are more profound than simply interacting with new coworkers. That's where the Pandora's box that is Amici comes in.

For a short time, the thought of Amici breeds a brief thrill deep inside of me. Ha ha, how petty can I get? After weeks shunted into this claustrophobic corner of hell, to the point where I was ready to get back onto a plane of all things and fly right back to Japan, having some kind of access to the outside world, the closest thing this version of events has gotten to the "internet", unclenches my heart in a way that I don't exactly like to think about. Had I really gotten myself so addicted to social media that even this shallow imitation gives me butterflies? Or am I just that desperate for escape, even if that escape comes at the hands of false friendships that affords me the dangerous possibility of forgetting where I really am?

So I throw caution to the wind. After my teaching orientation at Nishimura Tandai, I plot a course for its library, where a bank of computer terminals lay in wait—connecting anyone with a 'legitimate reason' to consult the repository of academic material it contains with other students and teachers throughout the Pacific Rim. Alongside ordinary, if old-fashioned, names for Japan, China, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, and Mexico, the pamphlet boasts accessibility to the Pacific States, Canton, Guangxi, Malaya, Dai Nam, and a number of other places that shouldn't exist and yet do all the same. Sitting before this fuzzy CRT screen, I wonder whether the names of the people I know in this world will be familiar. And yet, a chilling thought lingers as the old-school interface begins to boot up: I didn't even know my own damn name, so why should I know theirs?

Finally, after a decent amount of false starts, I enter the code provided in my handbook, log in and begin to stumble my way through the program's menus into the heart of Amici's communication system. Like everything else I've seen in this world, the language of the program largely eschews English loanwords for archaisms and unfamiliar coinages; instead of the typical 'file, edit, view' taskbars, I'm greeted with 文書, 編集, 見方, and a cascade of other Sino-Japanese compounds. Rather than e-mail or even メール, it's 電便—'denbin'—that gets me to an archive of Hirayama Hanna's messages from the other side of the Pacific. That's when I see, once again, the version of myself that's left this world behind.

It's not the first time I've seen her writing. I've always been a compulsive diarist, and it doesn't look like Hirayama Hanna was any exception to that—so it was less of a shock than it could have been to see my otherworldly high school self's journals lined up neatly on a bookshelf in my bedroom. But flipping through them was a frustrating exercise in futility; the seventeen-year-old me was naturally more inclined to write about crushes and Brazilian pop music idols than the unjust system of the world. Here, I get a glimpse not just of the things a lonely teenager might have thought of when she was alone in her bedroom, but the face she presented to the world, and to her close friends. Among other things, I find a long, sprawling back and forth mail chain with Fukui Yuka, the closest this universe has come to gifting me with a best friend out of whole cloth.

Through the contours of the conversation, I begin to piece together who she and I are in this world, and to each other. A little reading between the lines, alongside the copious helpings of soap-operatic renderings of her own life story as a Single Japanese Female Just Trying to Get By in the Big City, and I'm beginning to get why a girl who I might have otherwise assumed to be in a different social class from me—white and Jewish in a world where both those things are clearly impediments—is in this position. With the lingering suspicion hanging over her of being a fourth-generation American and ancestors who emigrated before the Great Pacific War, it's clear that the two of us are closer in standing than I would have otherwise guessed. There's the syncretic culture binding us to note as well, as I see a fair mix of Japanese, American, and even a few Hispanic names in our wider circle of longtime acquaintances, though I wonder just how many of those Japanese names are names like mine, a shallow replication of our dominators' language for the sake of more thorough assimilation.

As I stare back to the replies given to Yuka by my alternate-universe shadow aspect, though, and see in her the ugly truth laid bare, I can't argue with the fact that it worked. Far from the valiant rebel I might have liked to think myself if I'd been in history's trying times, I see in the language of Hirayama Hanna someone not just assimilated to the normalcy of Japanese imperial tyranny but for whom the existence of something else outside it is unthinkable. She mentions offhand the divisions of gender in Aoyama Gakuin as if it's the most natural thing in the universe—of course, I realize with a growing horror, in this world I didn't even graduate from a proper university, but from a women's junior college—and it chills me knowing how easily those injustices are legitimized by the person I might have been. Even things as seemingly small and trivial as cringing to Yuka about my grandmother sending me off to Japan with a care package of American snacks and sweets leave a pang in my heart for how callously she treated a culture that at the end of the day, is still mine.

But then, what would Hirayama Hanna make of my life, my cultures, my values? I wonder now if she might have traded places with me, and she might now be poring over a foreign Facebook feed, reeling with culture shock in a world of American supremacy, aghast to see the only culture she'd ever known looked upon as a global oddity, more well-known for sickly-cutesy mascots and sketchy porn than for the thousand-year history of poetry and literature I—and she—had both come to love. What would she make of my silly back-and-forths with Kanako, herself a somewhat reluctant connoisseur of the cutesy, or for that matter our more serious conversations bemoaning the sluggish pace of women's rights, or the continued dominance of the LDP?

As I struggle to make sense of this version of her—no, of myself, even though the views she might hold are antithetical to who I am—for a moment I can relate more simply, more viscerally. When I imagine Hirayama Hanna lost in the maze of my life in the foreign lands of the United States, I think that if she's really out there, she must be pretty lonely and homesick too.

Well, there's my sappy side out in force. Thankfully, a more businesslike fraction of my thoughts marshals me back into action, and I start pushing through the bulk of the messages archived on my account, from the oldest to the most recent. I'm beginning to ponder just what I'm going to do about these existing social relationships, which if Momma Fukui is any measure of, I'll be embroiled back into sooner than I'd anticipated, when one of the names that pops up, both in my conversations with Yuka and in direct messages, begins to incite an unease in my stomach that only grows over time as the messages grow more recent.

If you ask me, the story's like straight out of a romance novel. A student at the nearby Aoyama Gakuin University evidently caught the attention of my other self and inflicting her with a strong case of the butterflies. For a gaijin like me, such a match was obviously doomed for failure, because what self-respecting Japanese man would stoop so low as to consort with a foreigner? I consoled myself in messages to Yuka, detailing the things I loved about this tall man and his kind eyes, his warm voice, and his strong jaw, imagining what might have been between us star-crossed lovers.

Only…it's clear things didn't end there. As I tell Yuka breathlessly, Eijiro is not just a second son—and thus not considered by the family for the position of patriarch-to-be—but the product of a hannichi (context guides me to its meaning of 'half-Japanese' rather than 'half-day') marriage, and thus further outside Japanese polite society. Enough that him seeing an American like me is at least as acceptable as the relationship between his parents, which is to say, certainly frowned upon but at least grudgingly accepted enough to occur. My vain hope that the pressure from society would break up this burgeoning relationship (…hang on a second, did I just cheer for systemic racism?) yields to a more and more urgent panic every time I see myself informing Yuka of our progress over the years, every word on the page dripping with infatuation, then love, and then mentions of words I wish I could unread.

Too late, I realize the magnitude of the situation before me. A Japanese boyfriend, with apparently serious and long-term ambitions. (Whatever higher power thought it'd be funny to throw in an upgraded love life in with the fascist dystopia is more sick and twisted than I'd feared.) A cultural marriage imperative that deems any single woman over 25 to be condemned to spinsterhood, reaching its nightmarish traditionalist zenith. Most ghoulishly, even as a newcomer, I can see what the smart play would be if I belonged to this world, providing me what little social advancement I could possibly hope to achieve. I know that I don't belong here, and yet…

I really need a sign. That I'm not just going crazy, that what I remember is real, or it'll start feeling harder to believe that it's my own reality that was false. The alternative is knowingly signing away the death warrant to the version of me that ever lived in a more just society, and well, when all you've got is a Confucian guidebook that sees every problem as something you can solve by obeying your proper lords and elders, divination starts to ring hollow.

Trying to affect my best version of Hirayama Hanna's spritely, casual 桑港っ子 speech that she used freely over Amici, I work up the courage to write Yuka a message, letting her know that I've returned to San Francisco and asking whether we can catch up. As nerve-wracking as it'll be to confront someone who knows 'me' far better than I know myself, there's value in having an ally in navigating my outstanding Eijiro Problem if things really start going sideways. The unanswered e-mail from Eijiro, well…that'll have to wait for another day.