Luce Pull Me Under

1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-911547-06-8
Verlag: Daunt Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

Chizuru Akitani is the twelve-year-old daughter of the famous violinist and Japanese Living National Treasure Hiro Akitani. Overweight and hafu (her mother is white), she is relentlessly tormented at school. When her mother dies suddenly and the cruelty at school only intensifies, Chizuru snaps in a moment of blind rage and fatally stabs a classmate in the neck. After seven years of institutionalization, Chizuru flees Japan for a new life in the United States. She renames herself Rio, graduates from nursing school, marries and has a daughter, determined to keep her past a secret. But when a mysterious package arrives on her doorstep announcing the death of her father, she feels compelled to return to Japan for the first time in twenty years. Back in her homeland, long-kept secrets are suddenly unearthed and Rio's dark past is thrusted back into her life. Full of sensual descriptions of Japan, its culture, and its language, Pull Me Under is a fierce and suspenseful exploration of home, identity, and the limits of forgiveness. 'A suspense novel with a female protagonist that gets more right about women than so many others.' - NPR 'A fierce and suspenseful exploration of the profoundly mysterious nature of identity, written with precise and spectacular beauty.' - Laura van den Berg 'The writing of Kelly Luce is beautifully stark and simple, and at the same time playful, earthy, and violent. She's unique, a natural born writer, and Pull Me Under is a strange and very appealing novel, a journey to Japan and the primal scene of the main character's self - which, like a volcano, may have already blown its top.' - Rachel Kushner<

Kelly Luce is the author of the prize-winning short-story collection Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail. She is a fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a contributing editor for Electric Literature. She lives in California.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Luce, Kelly

Leseproben

BEFORE

KAWANO JUVENILE RECOVERY CENTRE occupied a compound originally built to house orphaned A-bomb survivors. It was turned into a detention centre for juvenile delinquents during the seventies. Some kids claimed the bomb survivors had brought radiation with them and infected the place, that no one could recover there, but for me it became home. I was twelve when I arrived, and I didn’t leave until my twentieth birthday.

Those first days did feel like the aftermath of an explosion. I both did and did not know why I’d been sent there. The shock of what had happened – what I’d done – kept my mind cloudy, my memories watered-down. I met twice daily with Dr Kankan, a white-crested psychiatrist fond of naval metaphors. Dr K told me I had hurt someone but he would not elaborate. I wanted to know who – was it someone in my family? A stranger? I worried about my parents.

‘We’ll discuss that when you’re anchored,’ was his unchanging answer.

But other patients – inmates, we called ourselves – managed to learn what had happened. There were no secrets at Kawano. It didn’t matter that we weren’t allowed to read the juicy parts of the newspaper, or that, back then, the world was Internetless. Knowledge seeped in anyway. I killed a kid at my school, a boy whispered to me in the cafeteria. Stabbed him to death. Did I feel like a murderer? I didn’t know how to answer. I knew what he said was true, but I also didn’t know what feeling like a murderer meant. Still, if I’d killed someone, shouldn’t I know?

I noticed at a young age – four years old, five – a dark presence in my chest, a blackness, clinging to the back of my heart. Mostly, the thing lay dormant and I could put it out of my mind. But occasionally it swelled like an infected gland. These were the times I felt hurt or angry, the sensations so closely linked that I never separated them until a therapist pointed out the difference. My anger was an organ.

I feared this black organ. It was responsible for the evil thoughts I had – the visions of hurting the person who hurt me, Tomoya Yu, his taunts of Fatty Potato! ringing in my ears. And those visions had come true. I was not in control of my body.

The kids didn’t make fun of my weight at Kawano. Relatively little teasing happened there. Instead of insults we gave each other practical nicknames and my extra flab paled in comparison with other personal details. They called me Sutabi-gyaru – Stabbygirl – or kireru, the term the doctors threw around in their hushed conversations; it meant ‘to split’, or ‘snap’. Like a wishbone, or a rubber band stretched too far. Before I left Kawano eight years later, seven more kireru kids would come. Three girls, four boys, each in their early teens. All killers, with the exception of one girl who’d pushed a handicapped boy off a roof but ‘only’ (her word) succeeded in paralysing him.

Dr K carried a yellow notepad in his coat pocket and pulled it out often. He said it was good I had some time away. I was allowed no visitors for six months, not even family. ‘Your subconscious needs to be bailed out,’ he said.

He was worried for me. My mom had only been dead a month, a fact I kept forgetting. I talked about her as if she were alive and asked when she’d be able to visit. Dr K listened. Then he’d remind me that she was gone. He had me tell him how I’d felt when I’d heard the news, wanted to hear the story over and over. He believed her death and my ‘outburst’ were directly connected. Which, of course, they were. Her presence had soothed the black organ. Three weeks after she killed herself, it took control of me and Tomoya Yu was dead.

I’d been in history class, learning about the role of the shogunate, when I was called into the school nurse’s office. Tachiyasan was there that day, the only male nurse on staff and my least favourite adult at school. A spaghetti sauce stain ran down the front of his white coat. He told me there’d been a car accident; my mom had swerved to avoid a child in the road.

‘It was a quick and noble death,’ he whispered, drumming his fingers on the table.

I stared at his fingers. Dark hair swirled above each knuckle. When I found my voice, it said, ‘She doesn’t drive in Japan.’ I grabbed his hand – he leaned back but did not pull away – and added in English, ‘Fuck you.’

I learnt the truth from my father, who was never one to spare details: she jumped off the new Onaruto Bridge while the tide was going out and the whirlpools were at their peak. She must have consulted a tide table, which meant she’d been determined; my mom was never one for schedules. She referred to herself as a ‘quintessential Pisces’. When I was little, she explained that a Pisces was a fish and for a long time I thought she was part mermaid. Her looks backed this up: her amber hair was long and tangled and lightly waved, her eyes a bright grey, and the way she walked, as if gravity didn’t affect her, was a little like swimming. I understood later why she never wore make-up, never styled her hair the way other moms did, the way, as a child, I wished she would. Any embellishment would have made her beauty garish.

We took her ashes to a temple near the house and had them blessed, but we did not take them to the Akitani family grave in Ehime Prefecture. There would be no funeral. My father told me, it was better that way. ‘Remember her at her best,’ he told me, handing me a stack of photo albums. I didn’t know what that meant or what I should remember.

My mom’s father had died by then – I never met my grandpa Bill – and her mom and two older sisters, who still lived in Texas, refused to have anything to do with the remains. They were the ashes of the worst sort of sinner. Hadn’t she brought enough shame on the family already? The list of her sins was long. The first was leaving the Lone Star State – and for a filthy New York City commune, of all places. Fornication (with an Oriental!), wasting her gifts on those smeared canvases she called ‘art’, and finally, leaving the US of A altogether. Her own religion, people, country weren’t good enough for her, and God would punish her for her pride. I learnt all of this from my mom’s younger sister, my aunt Peggy, in the letter she mailed to me at Kawano. ‘I believe Jesus would have said about Elena: live and let live. Though I don’t condone her choices, she was my sister. We shared a bed until we were confirmed. I must afford her some grace.’ I sent her half the ashes in the small porcelain urn I kept in my room. She wrote back with a card that said, ‘Bless you, child.’ I never heard from her again.

I didn’t display the urn when I was still at home and I didn’t display it at Kawano. I tried a few times, setting it on a shelf or near my pillow when I slept. But these attempts felt vulgar; I’d look at the urn and try to feel something and inevitably succeed only in feeling wretchedly sad at my failure. Finally, I put her away for good. My mom was not a decoration. What did I need a handful of dust for? Certainly not as a reminder of her. She was everywhere.

My father made me go to school, arguing that it was best to keep busy and not wallow at home, overeating. I don’t remember those days well. The other kids stayed away from me even more than usual, as if death were contagious. Even Tomoya took a break from ridiculing me. But the grace period extended after my mother’s death only lasted a couple of weeks. She hadn’t killed herself in an honourable or a glamorous Japanese fashion – a lovers’ double suicide; or a seppuku – so soon I just became the fat hafu girl with a dead mom. I made people more uncomfortable than ever.

I don’t remember much about arriving at Kawano. Hiro must have brought some clothes and personal things for me, since I had the ashes along with some of my after-school clothes. But he forgot underwear and for weeks the only pair of shoes I had to wear during outdoor time were the red patent leather flats I’d worn to one of his performances in Tokyo.

I wished for the orange shoebox. Mom and I kept the box a secret from my father. Inside were three rows of cassette tapes arranged alphabetically. Aerosmith, the Beatles, Blue Öyster Cult, Depeche Mode, Dire Straits, Heart, the Moody Blues, U2, the Who: bizarre, beautiful names I knew through her, my umbilical cord to the world of Western popular music. She bought a new one every month during her trips to Mitsuya, the high-rise department store downtown that carried her favourite brand of acrylic paints. The organisation of the shoebox was in sharp contrast to the bottom of the family stereo cabinet, where my parents’ classical tapes lay in a foot-high heap. One of my earliest memories is of watching my mom pluck a tape from the shoebox and slip it in the player. The click of belonging as it fell into its place – a place it was expected, that had been made for it. The sounds that came from the speakers made more sense to me than classical music. They matched something in my body. I could tell my mom felt it, too, by the way she moved not just her feet but her hips, shoulders, arms, fingers. Even her face danced. We were like girlfriends listening to those tapes.

I would have flushed her ashes down the toilet in exchange for that shoebox.

Through talks with Dr K I began to face the...