East is East by T. C. Boyle Read Free Book Online Page A

his throat afire, and though he knew he shouldn’t do it—he’d seen the movies, seen
Lifeboat
and
Mutiny on the Bounty,
knew that sea water made you go stark raving mad and was a prelude to cannibalism and auto-phagia and worse—he bent to the water and drank, drank till he felt bloated and sick. Then he flopped over on his back and lay flat and volitionless on his bed of roots, as the stirrings of his second vital need began to gnaw at him.
    He’d been in the brig a week, and in that time he’d lost twenty pounds or more. The turtleneck swam on him, his wrists were like the knucklebones of a pig, his eyes had sunk into his head and his jowls had evaporated. Two balls of rice a day. It was inhuman, medieval, barbaric. And it had been, what—two days?—since he’d got even that. Lying there in the stinking grass beneath the alien sun of a wild and alien country, wet and exhausted and starving, he felt his consciousness pull apart like a piece of taffy, till he was thinking with his brain and his stomach both. While his brain took note of the vacancy of the sky and squared off the boundaries of his distress, his stomach spoke to him in the terms of sharpest denunciation. Cavernous and hollow, rumbling, gurgling and raging, it accused him with each futile contraction. He was a fool, an idiot, a shit-for-brains. Why, even at that moment he could be tucking in his napkin on the Japan Air flight to Narita, asking the flight attendant for a bit more rice, another morsel of Norwegian salmon, just a drop more
sake,
courtesy of the Japanese embassy. Of course, they’d be waiting for him at the airport with a set of handcuffs, half a dozen charges ranging from assault and battery to dereliction of duty, and a humiliation that knew no bounds—but could it be worse than this? His stomach spoke to him: What joy in dignity, in life even, without food?
    Like most Japanese, Hiro regarded his stomach—his
hara
—as the center of his being, the source of all his physical and spiritual strength. If a westerner were to talk of people who are kindhearted or coldhearted, of heartbreak or heartease, a Japanese would modify the conceit to feature the stomach—in his eyes, a far more vital organ. A heart-to-heart talk would be conducted stomach to stomach,
hara o awaseru,
while a blackhearted cad would be blackstomached, a
hara ga Kuroi hito.
Two inches beneath the navel lies the
kikai tanden,
the spiritual center of one’s body. To release the
ki
or spirit in the act of
hara-kiri
is to release it from the belly, the guts, the only organ that counts.
    For Hiro, though, the
hara
took on an even more exaggerated importance, for he lived to eat. Harassed at school, tormented on the playground, he took solace in the pastry shop, the noodle emporium and ice cream stand, feeding his strength and determination even as he quieted the cravings of his gut. In time, eating became his sole sensual expression. Oh, he’d had the odd carnal encounter with bar hostesses and prostitutes, but he’d never enjoyed it much, never been in love—he was only twenty, after all—and life offered only work, sleep and food. And food was what he needed now. Desperately. But what could he do? He’d been in the water for eight hours, thrashing at the waves like a marathon swimmer, and now he was too exhausted even to hold his head up. He thought vaguely of chewing a bit of marsh grass to assuage the storm in his gut, and then he closed his eyes on the image of old Kuroda’s shirt and the lingering loss of his last two balls of rice.
    When he awoke again the sun was dipping into the treetops behind him. At first he was disoriented, the erasure of sleep giving way to color, movement and the reek of mud, but the water brought him back: he was in America, in the U.S. of A., starving to death, and the tide was coming in. He felt it warm against his chin, his shoulders, the swell of his abdomen. With an