Twenty-Six by Leo McKay Read Free Book Online Page B

copied her one from the storage box mounted on her kitchen wall.
    When the door opened at the twelfth floor, she rushed down the hallway, through the door at the end, and up the two flights of stairs to the steel door that led to the roof. Once through the door, she instantly felt her insides loosen, relax a little. It was the perspective that did it. This was the only place she knew inTokyo where you could stand back and look at something from a distance. The building was only twelve storeys tall, but it stood close to the crest of a hill in Shinjuku Ward. As she leaned on the chest-high concrete ledge, she could see in one direction all the way to the skyscrapers at Shinjuku Station, the few tops of blue-and-red neon signs that rose up in the foreground only a hint of the glitter of Kabuki-cho. In the other direction she could see clear to the Sunshine Plaza tower in Ikebukuro. Slightly north of the centre-point between the two gleamed the white roof of the Big Egg, Tokyo Dome, where the Yomiyuri Giants played their home games.
    The air was crisp and, for Tokyo, wintry. The lower temperatures made the air, usually laden with pollen, cooking smells, auto exhaust, sewage, and industrial effluent, seem relatively brisk, odour-free, and refreshing. She sniffed some in and held it in her lungs a moment before exhaling. The NHK forecast she’d listened to on the radio had said
kumori, tokidoki, yuki desu
. Cloudy with the possibility of snow.
    It would be good and cold at that moment in Nova Scotia, and Meta closed her eyes very briefly, pictured the big fields below the Red Row covered with snow all the way to the river.
    There was no cure for culture shock, she knew. After a year and a half in this foreign environment, she’d learned that culture shock came and went in surges. Only time would make the fed-up feeling, the sadness, the mental fatigue, go away. And they would eventually return. But coming to the roof helped her clear her mind. Moving above and away from so many of the things that physically boxed her in was always a relief. Getting a broad view of the sky was a reminder that she still inhabited the same planet on which she’d been born.
    This fresh wave of culture shock had come on in mid-afternoon Friday, two days ago now. Classes had been doing “how to” speeches, something most Japanese students were very good at. The culture was built around the kata, the series of programmed moves carried out in the martial arts. There was a prescribed and accepted way of doing almost everything, from greeting someone a certain number of years older, to arranging flowers in a vase, to wrapping a gift. For most of the morning and past the lunch hour, she’d sat through speech after boring speech. From “How to Smoke a Cigarette” to “How to Sharp a Pencil” to “How to Make a Maki Roll.”
    Then, completely unexpectedly, a bright but usually silent and reserved student, in a class of students with mid-level English abilities, walked to the front of the room with an easel under her arm. The full attention of the class had transformed her from a shy and contained young woman to a broadly smiling, highly animated performer. She set up the easel, established eye contact with everyone in the room (the first item on Meta’s evaluation form), and peeled back the cover sheet of the easel to reveal the topic of her speech: “How to Curse Someone with Straw Doll.”
    She had all the transitional words perfectly positioned. From “First, you must select your victim,” accompanied by a drawing on the easel that showed a large disembodied hand pointing an index finger at a frightened-looking asexual cartoon figure, to “
Next
, you obtain some hair or clothing” all the way through to the conclusion: “Please follow these steps carefully, and your victim will become sick,” here she bent over and mimed vomiting. “Or will surely die.” She lay her head gently on the podium and closed her eyes calmly in mock acceptance