Sinology III
The sky on Marine Day was full of big, white clouds.
Robert Francis covered the walls of his room in Jinbocho with rubbings gifted to him by the father of a friend. The rubbings were made on square sheets of rough paper. They fluttered in the breeze from the air conditioner and the constant agitation made them tear. They tore always along the edges of figures, so that the charcoal beasts and courtiers separated themselves from the paper and fell to the floor. Robert Francis received a new set each year when he visited Xi’an. They were inconvenient to bring back to Tokyo, but Robert Francis never declined the gift. They were a distraction.
Robert Francis was working on an essay. He was writing it for a woman named Tina Liu. They had both been undergraduates in Saskatoon. In those years, there were not many Chinese students in Saskatoon. That was why she was recruited as a volunteer to supervise the afternoon sessions in the office upstairs, where Robert Francis and the other students listened to cassette tapes on puffy headphones. On the night, several weeks earlier, that Robert Francis sent her an email, he had not seen her in ten years. He was drunk, occupied by nostalgia. His tone was self-aggrandizing, cautiously flirtatious. Tina Liu sent a reply a day later. She told Robert Francis that, even though she had gone to Saskatoon to study crop science, she had become a professor of Chinese. It was a way to stay there. Tina Liu had published a book about vernacular reformers’ archaic poetry. Tina Liu asked him if he would write something about Chinese students in Kanda. They had talked about this. She needed contributions for a festschrift honoring the department head, who Robert Francis believed he had never met. Robert Francis told Tina Liu that he would write about Chen Tianhua.
There was a clattering from the ceiling above him. Robert Francis imagined a man cupping two handfuls of marbles, admiring them mischievously, then dropping them on the floor. He imagined the marbles stippling the laminated wood with a pattern like that left on a bare foot by asphalt. In the alley below, a motorcycle moaned. Robert Francis walked to the window and looked out at the blinds on the window that faced his across the alley. The month prior, Robert Francis had occupied himself watching the tenant fill his room with things. He carried in crates of books. He brought in vinegar and plates for his kitchen. He laid a rug to sleep on. Each night, Robert Francis watched the man watch television. The next day, he brought in more things until he could hardly move in the room. The last thing the man got was a set of blinds. Robert Francis sat down again. His desk was a buckwheat pillow he had found when he moved in. There were no genuine distractions. He tried to type to the end of the sentence. …the “devilish barbarians,” as he termed them in the suicide note that was recovered… from his body… …pulled ashore… ice-cold December… …seemingly implacable… …perhaps, in his view… He wondered if Tina Liu was awake yet. He knew his imagination was flawed. She was still nineteen. She was writing a paper about pulse crop pricing. She wore pear body spray. He remembered the afternoon he had sat with her in a booth at Boston Pizza, when all he could think about was the Mountain Dew can of piss he had left that morning on the desk in his dormitory room. That was why he had turned her down, even though she had asked to come inside. …hint at his lack of patience… resolve…
It was while watching from the Keihin-Tohoku a Singapore Airlines jet come in low over Tokyo Bay that Robert Francis decided to cultivate the belief that Chen Tianhua’s suicide note must have been a forgery. It could not have been a malicious act to write the letter for him. Robert Francis looked out on the water. Chen Tianhua’s friends wrote the note because he had not left one. Perhaps whatever he had written had been washed away. Kelp hung off his clothes. His body was shipped to a crematorium near Shinagawa. It was true that he had been upset by the editorial in the Asahi Shimbun. He deserved, as a martyred pamphleteer, a final dispatch. By the time that Robert Francis got off the train at Omori, he was sure of this. He walked toward the beach, cutting the line between the park and the housing projects. Years before, it had been brownfield land. The housing projects would have had a view of smokestacks on landfill islands. When Chen Tianhua was there, it had been a village by the sea. The ward government canceled the sewage treatment plant. They trucked in white sand from the Izu Peninsula.
On the pavement, he slipped off his shoes, tied the laces, and hung them around his neck. He walked down the beach. He stepped across the scummy surf. He rolled his trousers over his knees and took a few steps into the sea. Small silver fish leapt in the waves. Large gray fish leapt in the waves. Black birds that he didn’t recognize perched on logs bobbing a few dozen yards offshore. He wondered how quickly he would sink into the mud if he just stood there. Every step forward became an effort. The water was colder than he expected it to be.
A lifeguard called to him through a plastic cone.
