Tom Boyle - East is East

Yes. And throughout the day, when they left him to himself, when the guard at the door followed a pair of legs and buttocks down the hall or let his eyes go slack with a dream of food or sex or violence, when the nurse was changing bedpans or doing her nails or crouching over a tuna-paste sandwich in the nurses’ lunchroom, Hiro had been honing the cold stiff handle of his spoon against the concrete wall behind his bed. Just a stroke at a time. Swish. Swish, swish, swish. It was the hardest steel and it made the softest, most loving whisper. Yes. And now it was a spoon no longer: it was a shiv, a blade, a samurai’s sword.

There was plenty of time, he told himself, no need to rush. Do it right. Do it with honor and dignity and elegance. He sat up in bed and braced himself against the wall. His hair was a mess, he knew it, and he regretted it. And his skin too—he wished he’d thought to ask Ruth for a bit of powder or rouge, anything to give him a little color. But he’d been sick, starved, hunted and abused: what could they expect? He wetted his fingers and ran them through his hair, again and again, until it lay flat. The guard sat in a chair just outside the door. His shoulders were slumped and his head propped up against the doorframe. If he wasn’t asleep, he might as well have been.

What was it Jōchō had said?— In a fifty-fifty life or death crisis, simply settle it by choosing immediate death. Fifty-fifty. It was a joke. If only it were fifty-fifty, if only he had that much optimism, if only he had the foolish serenity he’d attained in the moment of his plunge into the oily black Atlantic. Ninety-five, he thought, ninety-five to five, all stacked the wrong way. It was a small matter, wasn’t it?

He honed the blade once more, a deadly whisper, steel against concrete. While we live, death is irrelevant; when we are dead, we do not exist. There is no reason to fear death. A small matter. He studied the back of the guard’s head, the arm that hung limp in the muted light from the hallway, and then he drew in a breath, lifted the thin cotton hospital gown to expose his hara and felt for the place, for the kikai tanden, for the spirit awaiting release. He held that breath and turned the blade, turned the shiv, the sword, to his flesh. One beat of the heart, two, and then he drove it in with all the strength he had.

It was like a punch, a terrible hammering blow, but worse, far worse, hot and invasive, a pain like nothing he’d known: he’d swallowed molten lead, burning lava, he was nothing but sweat and a brain. And a will. He drove deeper and he couldn’t stand it; he slashed across, dragging the blade, hacking, and his arm locked with the shock of it. Again and again, forcing himself, digging deeper, on the edge of blacking out. And then he was giving birth, his own pale intestines bulging at the hole he’d torn in himself, the heat and the pain and the limp still arm of the guard still framed in its pitiful light … and the smell rose to his nostrils then, the heat of his blood and the corrupt rank fecal stench of the mud, the mud that had cradled him and brought him down …

And then suddenly he felt his hara lift—it wasn’t actual anymore, it wasn’t wet and hot and heavy in his hands, it was as light as air. He was going, but not to the city of Mishima and Jōchō, not to the city of his ojisan and his mother and all the generations of samurai and kamikaze and the pure unimpeachable Yamato race. No. He was going to the City of Brotherly Love: there, only there.

He closed his eyes. He was already home.

A portion of this work first appeared in Rolling Stone.

The author would like to thank the following for their assistance: The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; the University of Southern California; Tom Rohlich; John McNally; Rob Jordan; Kevin McCarey; David McGahee; Marie Alix; Clarence, Sarah and Dodds Musser; and Len Schrader.

T.C. Boyle is the bestselling author of Water Music, Budding Prospects, World’s End for which he won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1988, The Road to Wellville, The Tortilla Curtain, Riven Rock, A Friend of the Earth and After the Plague. His fiction regularly appears in The New Yorker, GQ, Playboy and Esquire. He now lives near Santa Barbara in California.

www.tcboyle.com

Dana sits in a courtroom with her legs shackled as a long list of charges is read out. But there has been a terrible mistake – she didn’t commit any of these crimes. She and her lover Bridger set out to clear her name and find the person who is living a blameless life of criminal excess at her expense.

In 1939 on the campus of Indiana University, a revolution has begun. The stir is caused by Alfred Kinsey, a zoologist who, behind closed doors, is a sexual enthusiast of the highest order and as a member of his ‘inner circle’ of researchers, freshman John Milk is called on to participate in experiments that become increasingly uninhibited…

This collection of short stories finds Boyle at his mercurial best. Inventive, wickedly funny, sometimes disturbing, these are stories about drop-outs, deadbeats and kooks. With a unique deftness of touch and a keen eye for the telling detail, Boyle has mapped the strange underworld of America.

After the Plague is a masterful collection of short stories – tales that superbly veer from the psychological to the slapstick, from surrealism to satire, once again proving him to be one of America’s most formidable writers

Star has travelled to Drop City to be free from society’s constraints, but when the hippies decamp to the wilds of Alaska where they intend to live off the land, the group runs into trouble, unexpected friendships are made and dangerous enemies are born.

Shortly after marrying Katherine, Stanley McCormick suffers a nervous breakdown, is diagnosed with a tormenting sex mania and is imprisoned in the forbidding mansion known as Riven Rock. Stanley is confined for the next twenty years, yet Katherine remains strong in her belief that one day he will return to her whole.

Walter is a dreamer, and a lover of drugs, alcohol and speeding on his motorbike, until he crashes into a barrier and loses his right foot. Walter is a descendant of Dutch yeomen and since the day of the accident he has been haunted by their ghosts and becomes determined to find his father who deserted his family years ago, and to uncover the secrets of his ancestors.

Visit Bloomsbury.com for more about T.C. Boyle

Drop City

The Inner Circle

Talk Talk

The Women

When the Killing’s Done

Riven Rock

The Tortilla Curtain

The Road to Wellville

World’s End

Budding Prospects

Water Music

A Friend of the Earth

T. C. Boyle Stories

Without a Hero

If the River Was Whiskey

Greasy Lake

Descent of Man

After the Plague

The Human Fly

Tooth and Claw

Wild Child

This paperback edition first published 1996

Copyright © 1990 by T.C. Boyle

This electronic edition published in 1990 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc