Boundless deep and other.., p.1
Boundless Deep, and Other Stories, page 1
The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction
Editor: Kwame Dawes
Boundless Deep, and Other Stories
Gen Del Raye
University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln
© 2023 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover artwork © Valeriya Simantovskaya / Stocksy United.
Author photo © Xue Feng.
All rights reserved
The University of Nebraska Press is part of a land-grant institution with campuses and programs on the past, present, and future homelands of the Pawnee, Ponca, Otoe-Missouria, Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Kaw, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Peoples, as well as those of the relocated Ho-Chunk, Sac and Fox, and Iowa Peoples.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023007283
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Contents
1
Hideto, in Motion and at Rest
Hideto Worn Down in Gainesville, 2001
My Mother Takes Me to a Public Bath, 1986
Yukari Kneeling in My Mother’s Garden, 1994
Chie and George, 2015
Half-Blind
My Father Will Not Admit He Has Become a Clown
2
The Mystery of Animal Grief
Nishina Sekio in a Tunnel Alone
Preparations, 2015
Home Burial
Housefire
Suicide Drills, 1945
The Grandma Invasion
We Are a Woman Bombed / A Picture of Grace
Nishina Sekio in a Broken Machine
Harvest Mouse
Hack Science
A Shark Is an Animal That Blushes When You Touch Its Face
Synonyms for Climate Change
Boundless Deep
My Grandmother Stops Some Nights on Her Way to the Outhouse to Watch a Ghost Climb Down to the Sea
Nishina Sekio Imprisoned in Dreams
3
My Father and Shigenobu Fusako in the Hallway of the Hotel New Otani, 1980
Or Go Further Back
Elastico
What My Mother Doesn’t Say
The Failings of Our Fathers
Incredible Lifelike Whale Comes Up for Air, Again and Again
Acknowledgments
Selected Sources
Author’s Note
This book contains discussions of suicide. If you are in a crisis or feel that you are at risk, you can dial 988 in the United States to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Numbers for other crisis centers around the world can be found by going to www.findahelpline.com. Some stories also deal with themes of sexual assault and war. Please read with care.
1
We are brave children of braver parents, born into a web of nouns.
—Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End
赤い靴はいてた女の子
異人さんにつれられて行っちゃった
横浜の埠頭から汽船に乗って
異人さんにつれられて行っちゃった
今では青い目になっちゃって
異人さんのお国にいるんだろう
The girl who wore red shoes
was taken away by outsiders
On a steamboat from the pier in Yokohama
she was taken away by outsiders
Now she must have blue eyes
in the land of outsiders
—Noguchi Ujō, from 赤い靴 (Red Shoes), a popular children’s song
Hideto, in Motion and at Rest
Most of the time when I think of Hideto, I am waiting for a train. It doesn’t matter where. I could be in Minneapolis, or San Leandro, or back home in Kyoto. There’s something about the noise of train stations. How they sound vast and empty, like a cathedral, even when they’re nothing but a raised curb on one side of the tracks. I lean forward, close my eyes, and wait. A body settles down beside me, and for as long as I hold my eyes closed, it’s Hideto, back from the dead, matching his breaths to mine.
It must be because of something I heard from his father. Years ago, when I was back home for the winter, I visited Hideto’s father in Akashi with a stew from my mother and a loaf of bread from my father. My father had sliced up the bread and packed it into half a dozen freezer bags. My mother had poured the stew into four Tupperwares. On the way over, for the whole three-hour journey, I felt the warm stew against my shins under the seat of the train. A rainy day, and the train windows were grimed with fog. When I reached the station Hideto’s father met me by the turnstiles with a shopping bag and an umbrella under his arm, looking as though he were the one arriving from somewhere else. If you didn’t know him, you would have thought he was lost.
He didn’t look sad, exactly, but restrained. I think he had learned by then that there was no point in saying the things he most wanted to say except to certain people and at certain times.
Your parents know I can cook, right? he said when he saw what I had brought, and then laughed.
I didn’t know him very well. His son, Hideto, and I had been friends in high school, but we both lived far away from school in opposite directions, and we never visited each other’s houses. Also, it was less that I was friends with Hideto so much as that we were comfortable around each other. He was the captain of my soccer team and I thought the world of him. He was quiet and dependable in everything. We could sit next to each other on the spiky dead grass next to the field after practice with our shin guards half pulled off, feeling the pain ease into our feet as we leaned back on our hands, looking at nothing, and not feel the need to speak.
I met his father at graduation and sometimes at away games, where he showed up near the end of matches to drive Hideto home. I never saw his mother until the funeral. They had gotten divorced when Hideto was in middle school. She had moved back to Colombia not long after. Hideto would visit her once or twice a year, in winter or summer.
We’re worried about Tetsuo, my parents had said. This was in 2009, when Hideto had been dead for three years. I was home from grad school, for two weeks in December before I had to go back. My parents were one of a group of parents from my high school who took it upon themselves to check in on Hideto’s father immediately after the funeral, to make sure, in those first weeks, that he was fed. Even now, from time to time, they would visit him to drop off pies or pickled vegetables. He lived not too far from the new airport that had opened up in Kobe, and they would drive the extra twenty minutes or so on their way to budget vacations in Chiba or Okinawa. They said Hideto’s father seemed split into halves: on some visits he would be happier than anyone, on others he barely spoke.
I thought it was probably a matter of grief. How there was now a part of him that was consumed in the loss of his son, and another, smaller part of him, that was capable of moving on.
At his house he made me tea and apologized that he didn’t have any dessert or snacks to serve. He really seemed to have nothing to eat. Eventually he warmed up the stew on the stove and poured it into two bowls. We ate my parents’ offering at his dinner table, facing each other on two plastic stools.
He talked about his espresso maker. This was a gleaming copper machine he’d bought last month. When it came up to temperature, it sang him a section of a song that turned out, when he finally tracked it down on the internet, to be an air composed by Louis XIII. He’d named the machine Kinako, like a kitten. He was one of those メカラブ族 (a mecha lover), meaning he obsessed over appliances the way some childless couples obsess over pets. This had always been a bad habit of his, even when he was a college student comparison-shopping washing machines he couldn’t afford. He said he tended to get lost in his head, he called this 自家発電 (in-house power generation), and then he got up to use the bathroom, he called this ワシントンクラブ (the Washington Club) because of the initials WC, and when he came back I thought he had maybe been crying.
I was thinking of a time I met him at the station, he said, and I knew, of course, that he was talking about Hideto.
Hideto had dropped out of college a few years before he died. The college had been abroad, in Florida, and when he dropped out in his third year, he ended up living with his father in Akashi. It took him a while to find a job at a café in Sannomiya, and after that he started looking to move out. It shouldn’t have been too difficult, he was fine with a cheap rental, and he had his father to cosign the lease, but it took some time. Hideto was different when he came back from Florida, unsure of himself, often late to appointments, full of nervous energy when he called me on Skype. He’d had a rough time in college, though not in any dramatic way, at least as I understood it; just in a quiet, lonely way that ground him down and left him in the fall semester of his third year on academic probation, failing all his classes. He’d never lived abroad before. He didn’t have much of a problem with language—our high school was an international school—and there was me, in California, who was doing okay. This made it easier to blame him for failing.
Tough love. This is what his father thought was needed. After the divorce, he’d maybe treated his son too indulgently. He wasn’t much good at
The day he didn’t come home on time, Hideto had toured an apartment in town with a realtor. He should have been done by three. At six, Hideto’s father tried calling him, but no one picked up. At six-thirty, in the gathering dark, Hideto’s father put on his coat and headed outside. It was early March, a clear day, just cold enough to see his breath. Something told him to head down to the station. A gut feeling, maybe, or a parent’s aimless worry. He walked down the hill, through the old shopping center, across the bridge. He walked into the station building and used his monthly pass to get through the turnstile. In the end, he was a softy every time.
Hideto, he said. The boy was sitting on a bench on the train station platform. He had a jacket, but had taken it off, had folded it neatly at his side. Even from a distance, he looked cold. His shoulders were chicken bones. You could see them through layers of clothing, the way they stuck out, how sometimes Hideto’s father would hold his son by the shoulders and they were thin and cold as two metal bars.
How long have you been here? Hideto’s father said.
I don’t know, Hideto said.
Is there something wrong? Hideto’s father said.
I’m just tired, Hideto said.
Come home, Hideto’s father said. You can rest up at home.
And still, for a minute, for two whole minutes, the boy wouldn’t move.
After he died, Hideto’s father said, I was angry at him for a long time for not opening up to me. He never seemed to want me to help him. When he died, I thought, If only I had known, there was so much I could have done. I know it wasn’t simple, that it wasn’t just because of one or two things, but still, I think there must have been something, maybe a few things, where if they got better, it would have made a difference, because he would have seen that things could change. But then, the other day I was thinking some more about it, and I decided something. Because all of you (and here Hideto’s father looked at me squarely across the table, his left hand holding his right wrist, as though to comfort it), all of you kids, his old classmates, are keeping secrets, aren’t you?
* * *
When I met Hideto’s mother at the funeral, I recognized her voice. This was the first time I had met her. She was greeting an old neighbor, standing a little distance away from Hideto’s other relatives, in a plain black dress, so that she could have been a friend or an old teacher waiting to speak to the family. I had never heard her before, but still, I knew.
It was Hideto’s goofing-off voice. Or it wasn’t that voice exactly, but what that voice was an echo of. Like a cover of a song in another language. I heard his mother speak and what I was listening to was Hideto after a long day, lounging on the train, the sun coming in low through the windows or filling an awkward silence between strangers, the easy joke outside a convenience store or waiting in line, a quick laugh about nothing.
We all did it. All of us kids with one parent who was from another country and one parent who was not. We wouldn’t have dreamed of making fun of our mothers or fathers, but all the same, we never used those voices where we thought they could hear it.
We kept all kinds of secrets. Many of them were small secrets, and a few were big secrets we intended to take to the grave. We kept them both from our parents who were immigrants and from those who were not. We were often ashamed of them, our parents. That was one secret. We wanted to protect them. That was another. And we believed we were becoming them, which scared us, and this was a secret we kept even from ourselves.
Yes, Hideto’s mother was saying to the neighbor at the funeral. Yes, he was an extraordinary child. But she was using that goofy voice, Hideto’s voice, where the stresses were all wrong and the l’s were r’s.
It was like meeting an old, forgotten, and embarrassing friend. I remembered the context in which I had been fond of that voice, in which I had found it funny, and then I remembered the person I had been when that was true.
Though I’d never met Hideto’s mother, I knew some things about her. She spoke in an accent. The pitch of her voice often dipped at the end of a sentence. She held one hand aloft in front of her chest when she spoke about subjects she was passionate about. She preferred not to use chopsticks. She couldn’t read menus, though she was always up for a challenge, and she would try.
I can imagine Hideto, that day at the station, knowing he was becoming her. I can imagine the exhaustion of this. The bone-tiredness. This thing we tried very hard not to know. The private work we had always done of listing the various reasons that would make a difference. Our place of birth, our citizenship, our perfect pronunciation. Our careful schooling, our good teachers, our beautiful or terrible or forgettable faces. Our good nature, our sense of home, our youth, ourselves. How we tried to believe we would never not belong to this country or another in the eyes of friends and strangers in the way that our mothers or our fathers did not belong.
I can imagine how exhaustion pins him down. How it pulls him into his body so that he can’t move. I can imagine that it’s his future, how clearly he can see it, how it stretches out endlessly in front of him, that does this.
That day, at the apartment viewing, his future confronted him. The property manager, a small woman who could have been his grandmother, had turned him away. This was outside the front door of a faded pink building in the outskirts of the city that had bars on all the first-floor windows. There were factors that led up to it. The property manager had expected, based on Hideto’s full name, to see someone with a native-looking face. The realtor, who had been recommended by a colleague of his father, had probably never shown rooms for clients who tend to get mistaken for foreigners and didn’t know that it was better to explain things in advance and be rejected over the phone than to make the whole trip and be rejected in person. And there must have been luck as well, the age of the property manager, the inconvenience of the location, how maybe this was the first time the property manager had had to decide what to do in this situation. Look, she said. She was surprised into anger. You’re not a Tsuneishi Hideto, she said, and you can’t stay here. And then she turned to the realtor, holding out her hands. Help me, she said. Can you explain this in his language?
I’m a citizen, Hideto said, I’m half Japanese. But that didn’t help. There were various reasons. How would the neighbors feel. How would she trust him to know about trash days and earthquake preparedness. What if he went back to “his country,” and if he didn’t pay rent.
It must have been, not the fact of the turning away, but the memories that rose up afterward, on his way home, that hurt him most. The things he said for years without hearing himself say them. There would have been many examples, but one might have come to mind. This was in a bank. There had been some sort of question about his citizenship in relation to the type of account he wanted to open. He asked if he could return with his passport on another day and they told him he should. When he did, a few days later, the same smiling man was sitting at the desk. He gave Hideto a new account. He told him the new card and pin would be arriving in the mail. And at the end, as though it were nothing, he handed back the passport and said, The next time you visit us, you should bring this from the start.
Okay, Hideto said, as though it were nothing.
His mother would have understood. But he couldn’t tell her. He would have sooner died than let her think he was exhausted by the consequences of having been born to her.
His father would have understood. But he couldn’t tell him. He would have sooner died than let him think he was exhausted by the consequences of having been born to the family he chose to create.
Sometimes, on Skype, Hideto told me. But what could I do?
What I’m describing is not the trigger. It’s not the reason, or the worst of it. Between the day at the station and the end there were years of counseling, attempts, hospitalizations, new beginnings, recoveries. He called me sometimes for days in a row and sometimes, for years, he hardly called at all. He was all of the things during these years that he was when I knew him best. He was dependable, he was stoic, he was giddy, he was wise, he was pensive, he was breakable. I can imagine him in any way, but usually, in quiet moments, at a train station, I imagine him on the bench beside me.
