A Summer Chikan

Summer in Japan creeps in at the end of the rainy season. One day you wake up and the zaa zaa zaa of the rain drumming on the rooftops has given way to the shrill drone of cicadas, tentative at first, then louder and louder until you can hardly hear yourself think. The rain-soaked earth begins to steam and fairly hiss, and everywhere you look are tiny holes where cicada nymphs have crawled out of the ground to begin their lives as adults after years of hibernation. On the branches of trees and shrubs, even on window sills and lawn furniture, you find the shells of the cicadas which have been shed by the nymphs as they change to adults. By the time they have grown strong and begun to drone from the trees, you begin to envy them for the ability to climb out of their skins: if you could, you would too.

The heat that first summer was like a hot, heavy, wet blanket. Stepping into a restaurant or coffee shop offered the extreme relief of air-conditioning, and the school was air-conditioned too, but at home all I had was one window with an ill-fitting screen that was riddled with holes. The heat was so oppressive at night that sleep was all but impossible. I would lie there and listen to the drone of the cicadas, with a limp, ineffectual breeze wafting through the window only occasionally.

And then the mosquitoes came. You could see them hanging onto the screen outside, looking for a way through. It was almost axiomatic that you would hear that first drone just as you finally began to nod off into a fitful sleep. In your ear would be just a brief snatch of mosquito song – an angry, whining yirraaao – and as you lay there you would think, oh, please no – and pray that you had been mistaken.  But then a few moments later you would feel the telltale prickling, and pretty soon there would be a devilishly itchy raised bump where the mosquito had injected its nasty mixture of anti-coagulant and bug saliva. Once you’d been attacked, you had a choice. Either you could try and go back to sleep, hoping against hope that the bite would stop itching and the mosquito wouldn’t want any more of you, or you could get up and hunt for it. I almost always chose the latter option:  I wanted revenge and if it cost me half an hour of lost sleep, then so be it. The mosquito was going to keep me awake anyway.

There is nothing as infuriating as being woken up or kept awake by something half the size of a fly which nevertheless has the power to ruin your entire night.  Mosquitoes are maddeningly elusive and I was always amazed by their ability to land on the very spot where they could not be attacked: the corner of a room, say, or the edge of a door. Half of the time I found my attackers, and when I did, the most satisfying kills were the ones who were already full of blood. I always imagined that they were sluggish and dull-witted from having overindulged, weighed down by their swollen bellies. The sight of my own blood on my hands always made me feel far less guilty about nailing one of the little bitches.  Finally, I bought mosquito coils and used them to keep the numbers down, but the smoke made me cough, so I learned to live with mosquito bites. Nothing would induce me to sleeping with the window shut, given the oppressive heat – not even when a huge roach flew right onto my futon one night and needed to be dispatched immediately with a slipper.  In an effort to cool off, I took to drinking glass after glass of cold barley tea and sleeping with a wet towel over my forehead.   I patched the gaping holes in my window screen as best as I could and began to dream of autumn.

One sweltering morning, I was awakened by my mother’s voice calling my name. She called insistently and repeatedly in gentle tones, and although I wanted her to go away and let me sleep, something made me open my eyes instead. As I did, I looked straight into the eyes of a man who was staring down at me. He had lifted the sheet off me and had a look on his face of great interest and expectation. For half a second I felt absolutely no fear.  I stared up at the man and thought:  Who is this? Followed quickly by: Hey – I don’t know this guy!  as it suddenly hit me that the man was in my room uninvited, and I screamed as I had never screamed in all my life, a scream that kept pouring out of my mouth and frankly, alarmed me as much as it obviously did the man. It was as though my throat was a gun and the scream was a volley of ammunition that just kept rolling out.  And no sooner did I start to fill the air with sound, than my uninvited visitor came to his senses and made tracks for the door. I could hear his footsteps clattering down the stairs as I leapt to my feet – still screaming – and promptly fell back down. I have very low blood pressure and what with the heat and my shock, to say nothing of how winded I was after that sustained, gale-force scream, I didn’t quite faint, but hit the ground in an inelegant fashion, landing on my alarm clock and bruising my hip. Which is how the woman who lived next door found me a few seconds later when she came to my door to investigate the source of the scream.

“Doo shita no?” she inquired, staring down at me. I grabbed my tee shirt and held it against me, gesturing wildly at the door and rubbing my sore hip. “Ano, ano” – I floundered as I pulled the tee shirt over my head  – “chikan!”   My neighbor gasped and looked behind her at the door.

“Ima?”  Just now?

I nodded. “Ima.”  I took a deep breath and got to my feet. ‘Deta bakari,’ I said, letting her know he had just left.

She stared at me, concern all over her face. “Ehh!  Are you okay?”

I nodded again. “I screamed.”

“I know! I heard you. I figured it was another cockroach.”

“Was it another cockroach?” called another voice from the door. Another resident was standing in the entrance. She too was still in her pajamas, and her hair was done up in huge pink rollers.  She looked so funny I almost burst out laughing; I was feeling a little hysterical, actually.

“A chikan!” the first woman told her, eyes wide with the drama of it. “And he’s just left!”

“Eh!  A chikan? Here? I figured it was a cockroach!”

I blushed. Both of these women had been present the day that first cockroach had shot out from between the tatami mats.  I hadn’t realized how much of a topic that roach-induced scream of mine was then.

“Another cockroach?” came a third voice as yet another woman joined us. The first two women hastened to explain. “A chikan! He came right into her room!”

“Eh!  Is that who I heard pounding down the stairs? I thought someone was in a hurry!  How did he get in?”

Once again I felt my cheeks beginning to burn. The sliding doors to our rooms had flimsy little latches on them which we usually fastened at night. But considering the fact that the big door downstairs was usually locked by the last woman who came in every night and the toilets were outside the room, I had taken to leaving my latch undone. It seemed silly to fasten it every single time you came back from the toilet – especially when you’d had half a dozen glasses of cold barley tea the night before.  “I left my door unlatched,” I admitted.

“Oh no, you should never do that!” cried the first woman, and the others echoed this vehemently. I felt like a dental patient who’d just made the admission that she never flossed.

The first woman walked over to my telephone. “You had better telephone the police.”  The others agreed with her, but before we could phone, another woman came to our room and informed us that she had already telephoned the police and they were on their way.  It took them less than fifteen minutes to arrive – all ten of them.  I got the feeling that a call to a women’s dorm was the kind of call most policemen didn’t mind getting. The problem of a chikan who hadn’t even properly broken in hardly seemed to warrant almost a dozen of Yokohama’s finest, I couldn’t help reflect, but my neighbors seemed to appreciate the drama. I was almost hoping that one or two of the men might be the policemen I’d met during my unscheduled visit in the winter, but unfortunately they were all strangers.

“What did he look like? How old was he?” asked the policeman I assumed must be leading the investigation, a tall, sensitive-looking man with a horsy face and long, tapering fingers.

“Um, anywhere from 18 to maybe 25, I guess.”

“And Japanese.”

“Well, I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing that he was.”

“She wouldn’t be able to tell if he was or wasn’t anyway,” I distinctly heard one of the other policemen say. This irritated me. I don’t think anyone can necessarily always tell if someone is Japanese, Chinese or Korean, and I tried to say so now, but butchered the grammar something fierce in my agitation. “Anyway, this is Japan,” I lamely concluded, “so I just imagined that he must be Japanese.”

The horse-faced policeman noted down what I’d said. “What did he look like? Glasses? Distinguishing marks?”

“Um…no glasses, short hair. And –”  I floundered. We hadn’t covered physical descriptions of people in my Japanese class yet and I had no idea how to say ‘wide set eyes,’ ‘thin lips,’ ‘large nostrils’ or ‘blunt jaw.’

“All Japanese probably look alike to her anyway” breathed the policeman who’d expressed doubts about my ability to distinguish one Asian nationality from another.  This was such bullshit that I gave him a dirty look. No way would I mistake him with his coarse features, pale white skin and pudgy extremities for his darker, gentle-looking horse-faced colleague, and I yearned to be able to tell him so to his face. But even if I could have managed this linguistically, I knew it wouldn’t be the correct thing to say given the circumstances. The dirty look I’d given him would have to be enough for now.

“How tall was he?” persisted my interviewer, ignoring his colleague.

“I don’t know.”

“I suppose all Japanese look short to her,” murmured the smug policeman.  I was beginning to take a real dislike to this man. He was the kind of person who’d make a comment, then quickly look away, as if he was distancing himself from what he’d said. A bully, but one that lacked the conviction to stick by his words. Wimp.

“I was lying down!” I protested. “You can’t tell how tall someone is when you’re lying down and he’s standing over you!  It would’ve been different if we were standing next to each other.”

“Hmm,” said the obnoxious fellow, but he was quiet for a while afterwards.

For the next fifteen minutes, the policemen went over exactly what had happened, how the man had gotten in, what he was wearing – a white tee shirt and blue shorts – and, to my consternation, what I was wearing:  zip all, as it happened, though I did not tell them this. It didn’t really have anything to do with the fellow in my room, after all: I hadn’t been prancing about in front of my window in my birthday suit or streaking through the neighborhood.

“And he did not, ah, he did not hurt you,” hazarded the first policeman for perhaps the eighth time. The other policemen quickly looked away. One of them was talking to a neighbor of mine; I heard the word ‘cockroach’ mentioned.

“No, I’m absolutely fine,” I answered firmly. The policeman nodded. He didn’t look convinced.

“We’ll be back in a few hours,” said the sensitive-looking policeman. “I’m afraid you’ll have to come down to the station and see if you can identify the man from photographs.”  I sighed inwardly, but nodded.  It seemed as though I was destined to have interactions with the Japanese police, like it or not. As the policemen filed out of my apartment, it seemed to grow in size until it was a lot larger than it had been. My neighbors and I watched them get into their cars and leave. I went back into my room after repeatedly reassuring my neighbors that I was fine. As I left them, they remained in little groups, animatedly discussing the morning’s events. I got the feeling that things hadn’t been this exciting in Hakuraku for quite some time.

Less than an hour later, I got a call from a man who told me he was an American living in Yokohama who did interpreting for the police from time to time. He apologized for having to be so blunt, but had I been raped?

“Of course not!” I spluttered, indignant.  “I would have told them if I had been!”

“Well, you see, that’s not what a lot of Japanese girls would have done,” he told me. “Because of the shame of it, you know. I tried to tell them that American girls were different, but they wanted me to ask you anyway – just to make sure.”

“For God’s sake!”

“Okay, then, I’ll tell them that you’re okay,” he said, and hung up. I stood there, holding the receiver in my hand, pondering how a Japanese woman might be raped in her own home, then spend the next hour talking to almost a dozen policemen about the intruder without once mentioning the fact that she had been violated. Getting me to stop talking about it would have been the trick.

A few hours later, the horse-faced policeman came back to take me down to the headquarters. I looked through three or four high school year books, through hundreds of photographs of young men; some handsome, some plain, most somewhere in between.  Some of the boys were smiling in a cheeky, knowing way, others were grinning artlessly; some were staring at the camera in a surly fashion, others looked shy, as though they didn’t have a clue how to pose for a photo. Not one of them resembled my visitor in the slightest.

“Not this one?” said the horse-faced policeman hopefully, indicating a brutish, haughty-looking kid with a jutting jaw and an obnoxiously luxuriant pompadour.

“Sorry, no, that couldn’t possibly be him.”  My visitor had been older and reasonably good looking.

“What if you added a few years to him?”

I shook my head.

“You’re absolutely sure?”  I nodded firmly. “Absolutely.  This boy’s ah…” – I flailed about for the word ‘forehead’ – “this part of his face is too low. And he’s got too much hair.”

The young policeman sighed and I hated to think what the pompadour boy might have done; they obviously wanted to get him for something.

After I’d gone through a stack of yearbooks and several other piles of photographs to no avail, two of the policemen offered to take me home.

“There’s a Russian ship in the harbour!” one of them told me excitedly, sounding for all the world like a schoolboy. “Want to go and see it?”

I didn’t have to teach for another two hours. “Sure.”

My policemen drove me all around the Port of Yokohama. It was exciting to see the big Soviet ship with Cyrillic writing on its great, rusty hull.

“Imagine just getting on one of those ships and going to a foreign country like Russia, say, or Antarctica!” said the short policemen longingly.  I smiled. “That’s how I felt when I came here, even though I came on a plane,” I remarked.

The policeman looked at me. “Heh!  That’s right: you’re in a foreign country – I mean, for you, that is.”  He and his friend laughed and shook their heads. “Imagine Japan being a foreign country! Imagine Yokohama being considered exotic!”  I laughed too. Imagine them not seeming exotic.

The horse-faced policeman pointed to the Soviet ship. “Not that long ago, our countries were at war, you know. The Soviet Union, America, Japan.”

The other policeman and I nodded, and he went on. “I’m glad our countries aren’t at war now.  We’re the generation that has never known war.”  We’re the generation that has never known war was a sentiment I heard expressed many times during my years in Japan, but this was the first time.

“That’s what my father keeps saying to me,” said the younger policeman. “And that I don’t know how lucky I am not to have to fight, or scrounge for food.”

“Was your father in the war, then?” I asked, curious.

“Oh, yes.”

“Mine too,” echoed his colleague.

“So was mine,” I told them.  The two policemen turned to look at me.

“Where – what country did he fight in?” asked the horse-faced man.

“In the Mediterranean. He was in the Navy and his ship got torpedoed by the Germans.”

The two policemen exchanged a quick glance. “I’m glad he didn’t fight the Japanese!” said the shorter policeman, sounding relieved.  I was glad too.

“It’s too bad you couldn’t identify your intruder,” the taller policeman said to me as they dropped me off. “But tonight, make sure that you latch your door. And you ought to consider getting a better lock for it, too – and making sure that whoever comes in last at night locks the downstairs door this time.”  The policemen had conferred with the other residents of my boarding house and learned that the last person in the night before might not have realized that she was the last person. In fact, the girl who normally came in after 11:00 at night most likely didn’t come home at all – but no one told the policemen this. The only thing we knew for sure was that the downstairs door had been left open.

That night lying in bed, I suddenly began to wonder: had my intruder taken his shoes off before coming inside?  The more I thought about it, the more intrigued I was by this question. Say you were planning to rape someone: why bother to take your shoes off?  On the other hand, the thought of a Japanese person – even a rapist – boldly stepping over a person’s threshold with his shoes on was just inconceivable. How weird. I pictured the man on his way in, perhaps looking down at his feet and considering what he was going to do, pausing to decide that since he was going to commit such a crime, he might as well leave his shoes on. And then, just before entering my room, thinking that he could not do it – could not wear his shoes into someone’s house. To this day I think about it – and how lucky I was that I woke up and screamed and managed to scare him off, whatever he might have planned to do. I also wondered if he knew before entering my room that I was a foreigner. I did not have my name on the door and the pigeonhole for my mail which did have my name on it did not list my room number. I think he must have been quite surprised to find me lying there in all my obvious foreignness.

I never to my knowledge saw the intruder again, but the remaining time I lived in Hakuraku, I also never heard the end of this incident.

“My! That scream of yours! You must have been terrified!” said a woman who lived four doors down from us.  “I hope you are okay?”  I assured her that I was.

“I knew it wasn’t another cockroach!” said a lady I had never met before, in the check-out line at the local greengrocer. “It went on for much longer.”

“I hope you are locking your door every night now,” murmured a young housewife at the bath one night. I nodded tersely.

“No more intruders?” asked a middle-aged woman as I was disposing of my garbage one morning. I shook my head.  “That was some scream,” she said admiringly. “I’m not sure I could scream that loudly or that long so early in the morning!”  I watched her go back to her house after she had discarded her rubbish and I couldn’t help but notice that she lived more than a block away.