A WHITE blimp drifted over Asakusa, peering down from a vanilla blue sky. It urged consumers on the ground to beat the heat with Asahi beer. The blimp was radio-controlled and its operator was ensconced in a lawn chair on the roof of the White Rose love hotel. He wore wrap-around sunglasses, rubber zoris and baggy turquoise surfer trunks. By his side was a cooler of his employer’s beer, a plastic bottle of Coppertone 45 moisturizing sunblock lotion and a pile of comics.
He popped open another beer as the blimp bumped gently onto the roof of the ROX department store; he burped as it bounced and lurched back into the cloudless sky. It was the kid’s first and probably last day on the job and he laughed as he steered it over buses on Kokusaidori.
It was still early-morning cool as grandmothers stepped out of shops, glanced up at the blimp and waved kids off to school. Bent over short-handled brooms, sweeping the sidewalks and gutters meticulously, the ladies grunted with pleasure, content in weather kindest to old bones.
They swept between lines in the sidewalk, real or understood, that delimited each family’s area of responsibility. Resting at the demarcation points, they waited for next-door neighbors to catch up. When brooms converged they straightened their backs and chatted about friends down the street. The gossip paid no more attention to sidewalk boundaries than the dust kicked up by passing delivery vans—it settled equitably over everyone.
The impetuous blimp bumbled across the sky once more and the grandmothers thought a small glass of beer would be nice later in the day. It was Friday, the third week in May and the afternoons had become hot and hazy.
Finished sweeping and chatting, the old ladies sprinkled water on the sidewalk and turned shrewd eyes to their neighbors’ shops. They sniffed that many of the displays heralding the weekend’s Sanja Matsuri were ostentatious and commercial. Their own decorations, they decided, were tasteful, harmonious and perfectly appropriate for the most significant and lucrative festival of the year.
May and Kiyomi stood on the sidewalk in their blue and white sailor suits watching the blimp dive toward rush-hour traffic packing Kokusaidori. The cars were backing up past the Asakusa View Hotel and frustrated drivers honked their horns and slammed on the brakes. The blimp hovered like a great white egg ten feet above the center of the four-lane highway and refused to budge.
Today was the first day of the three-day festival and tourists were already arriving from all over Tokyo and its suburbs. They lined the sidewalks and watched open-mouthed as a traffic cop shouted and waved his hands at the blimp.
Kiyomi grabbed May by the hand and pulled her down the street. “Hurry up, we’re going to be late.”
May glanced at her watch. “Wait. We’ve still got ten minutes. I want to see what happens.”
The cop had climbed on the hood of a Toyota and was jumping up and down trying to grab the undercarriage of the forty-foot blimp. A distraught commuter leaned out the window and screamed, objecting to the dents the cop’s boots were leaving in his hood.
The blimp shuddered, soared as high as the tallest buildings, and escaped in the direction of Ueno station. The cop climbed down and retreated to the sidewalk. The commuter was right behind, shaking his fist and shouting about stupidity.
May laughed. “Hey, why don’t we skip school today? Nobody would know, they’re all too excited about the festival.”
Kiyomi dragged her around the corner. “Forget it, we’ve got to go. My mom says you’re a bad influence and she’s right. You’re always getting me in trouble. When I asked her if I could play drums with you, she nearly had a fit.”
“What did she say?”
“You know, a lot of stuff about homework and staying out late and things like that.”
“So what did you do?”
“I begged and cried a lot.”
May shook her head. “I told you not to wait so long. Manny’s all finished and we’re supposed to open on Monday. What are me and Helen going to do without you?”
“Don’t worry, I made a deal. I promised to try that new juku she’s been talking about and she said she’d think about it. That means yes.”
“Excellent!”
“Yeah, but I also promised I’d never ever be late for school again and...” Kiyomi checked her watch, “they’re going to shut the gate in four minutes.”
“Then what are we waiting for? Come on, I’ll race you.”
May took off running and Kiyomi followed hot on her heels. Little black oxfords slapping, navy blue skirts flying, they laughed and ran down the sidewalk. Parisian tourists saw them coming and leaped out of the way; panicky housewives protected prams with their bodies and humorless cops arrested the kid on the roof of the White Rose Hotel. Police marksmen shot holes in the disobedient blimp after failing to gain radio control. It fluttered and collapsed and blocked the sun.
Teacher Yokoi noted the blimp’s descent with satisfaction. Its untidy flight had upset the children and destroyed the order of the morning. He turned back to watch the students stream through the gate of Asakusa Middle School.
He checked the time. It was his responsibility to close the gate at eight-thirty and take down the names of late-comers. He shouted at three boys lounging on the other side of the street. They reluctantly crossed the street and passed through the gate with one minute and forty-three seconds remaining. Their voices were still floating with excitement and pleasure at seeing the rogue airship.
Yokoi grunted and set his shoulder to the gate. Made of heavy black steel, it ran on metal wheels over a track stretched between stone pillars. The pillars guarded a wasteland of sand and gravel called a playground. The school was a three-story building of gray concrete. Rust stains ran down its face like tears.
Yokoi glanced at his watch again and took comfort in its shiny face and solid gold band. It was a Rolex and very accurate. He’d bought it the previous year after the principal had assigned him gate duty. His wife had objected. While she’d admitted that the gate should be shut on time, she’d complained about a lack of new clothes for herself and the children.
Typically, she’d scoffed at his need for precision timing and had shouted that a few seconds either way wouldn’t make a real difference. Yokoi had countered with a lecture on rules and responsibilities and she’d burned his dinner for two weeks. He’d taken refuge in porno videos and solace in small blessings. She’d been too angry to pester him to learn English.
What she still refused to see was that he was already the perfect English teacher. His inability to speak the language was an asset not a hindrance. Even his most misbehaved students eventually came to understand that English was not an academic subject but an exercise in self-discipline.
Of course, at the beginning of every term a few always tried to rise above the general level of incompetence. But Yokoi had very sharp ears and any child that dared use a correct accent or words of more than one syllable quickly felt his wrath.
He taught obscure and obsolescent grammar with the intensity of a football coach and punished any child that deviated from his game plan. By humiliating the showoffs, Yokoi demonstrated the necessity of team play. After a month, one-hundred percent of his students could be counted on to blither incoherently when cued.
He looked down the street. There were a couple of small shapes laughing and racing for the gate. One looked like May. He liked her, she was a good kid and fit right in. When called on in class she was as inept as the rest. He’d heard that she was fluent in English and idly wondered if it was true.
The second hand on his watch ticked over. Yokoi braced himself against the gate, closed his eyes, and began a countdown.
May heard Kiyomi panting right behind and the screech of rusty wheels as Yokoi began to shove the gate closed. They weren’t going to make it, the gap between the pillars was narrowing too fast. She slowed her pace, intending to cruise to a stop in front of the gate.
Kiyomi surged ahead. I can’t be late. I can make it if I try.
May felt Kiyomi brush past and shouted a warning. She reached out to grab the embroidered flap on the back of her sailor blouse and missed.
Teacher Yokoi didn’t let May’s screams distract him from his duty. He rammed the gate home at precisely eight-thirty. It hit Kiyomi square in head and her heart fluttered as she collapsed and blocked the gate.
Two million souls gathered for the climax of the Sanja Matsuri Sunday evening. They stood twenty deep on sidewalks and streets. Red paper lanterns swayed to the concussion of a thousand taiko drums and splattered the crowd with a jerky yellow light. Babies cried—imagining the booming footsteps of giants—and blinked their irritated eyes as hawkers sold chicken and eel from smoky sidewalk grills.
Rough trade was out in force. Gangsters leaned on lamp posts and waited for the parade to start. They were thin men and nearly naked. Some wore unbelted happi coats over hairless chests, others were shirtless. Purple and black tattoos ran down their backs into loin cloths tied to emphasize their genitals. All wore headbands and the jingoistic Rising Sun was the motif of choice.
The thugs spit and strutted and squatted and surveyed the crowd with aggressive eyes. They poured down beer after beer bought from street vendors. Spectators smiled weakly and kept their distance as the yakuza growled their gutter dialect and tensed their hard ropey muscles.
The bargirls and waitresses that hovered nearby were slightly more discrete, keeping colorful happi coats loosely belted over tan breasts and white short-shorts. Their voices were shrill and excited as they drank to the beat of the pounding drums.
The parade mosaic also contained less exotic individuals. Law-abiding Asakusa residents outnumbered the criminals and their molls a thousand to one, and less tiresomely self-conscious, they had more fun.
The parade began in deep twilight and one-hundred mikoshi were borne through the streets. The portable shrines were generations old and made of gold and rich carved wood. Groups of little kids squirmed in native garb and carried small light shrines; adults hefted mikoshi so heavy three-hundred pairs of hands were not enough.
The procession worked its way around corners and down the main avenue. There was nothing solemn nor religious about the event. The majority of the onlookers and bearers were excited by the spectacle, the remainder simply drunk. The bearers chanted loudly, urged on by the crowd and the booming drums.
The slightest odor of restraint-abandoned, a whiff of mania, cued the parade marshals to guide the kids down safe back streets. The children gently lowered their mini-mikoshi to the pavement, rubbed tired muscles and fell laughing into the arms of waiting parents.
The drums and the chanting grew louder and louder as the mob returning the mikoshi to the shrine across the street came closer. Sam leaned over the balcony as the vanguard rounded the corner two-hundred yards away. “Here they come.”
May held her brother’s hand and did her best to look interested. She felt Helen’s hand on her shoulder and tried to smile. At their urging, she’d donned her happi coat and headband like a good little trooper but had declined to join the parade.
They hadn’t pressed her when she’d said she only wanted to watch this year, that she was getting too big for the kiddie mikoshi and was still too small for the rest. Neither mentioned that May and Kiyomi had been practicing with their mikoshi team for the last three weeks.
May had returned from St. Luke’s Hospital in Tsukiji an hour before. Again she’d brought flowers, again she’d had no one to give them to. The nurse had taken the bouquet away, promising to put it in Kiyomi’s room.
Kiyomi couldn’t have any visitors, they’d told her again and again. May had kept asking doctors, nurses and orderlies, anyone who would listen. Finally, this afternoon a nurse had relented and let her look in the door of the intensive care unit. “It looks worse than it is,” she’d whispered.
May had been prepared for the bandages but not the tubes and the bruises—Kiyomi had been punctured in too many places to count and her face was swollen and discolored. May had generally understood what was meant by a severe concussion but somehow had expected Kiyomi to look more hospitalized, more under control—cleaner. The scrapes on her face and the purple-black and yellow-brown bruises had made her look dirty—small and hurt and beaten.
May had been too scared to cry, she’d just stared at her friend until the nurse had led her away. Not until she’d been halfway home had she remembered that stupid teacher and that stupid principal. Full responsibility, the principal had vowed to take. So sorry, so sorry, the teacher had cringed. Both had lied and lied and said Kiyomi was too bad, too late and to blame. May had wished it had been their heads smashed in the gate.
The bearers maneuvered the mikoshi around the corner with great difficulty; they strained under two logs larger than telephone poles and shouted at spectators to stand clear. A dozen kids ran ahead and climbed on top of fences and garbage dumpsters to get a better look. They yelled up at May and waved enviously.
The procession halted below the balcony and the crowd swarmed around the mikoshi. Relief bearers dove into the fray, allowing exhausted men and women to fall away, shouting and reaching for beer. Speakers on the roof of the shrine blared direction and encouragement as the gates were flung open.
May clapped her hands over her ears and Helen shouted at Sam. He shook his head, unable to hear over the speakers, the drums and the wild chanting mob. The bearers lifted the mikoshi above their heads, the frenzy of the crowd fueling their exertions. Fore and aft, the mikoshi dipped and dived, as if bouncing between trough and peak of repression and release.
Helen chastised her body as it shied away from the rail, cursed her eyes when they searched for an escape route. She told herself she was a racist—they’re strange and alien and all the same—and wrong—they’re a breath away from atrocity.
She leaned over and shouted in Sam’s ear. “Pretty scary, ehh?”
