THE TALE OF THE GAIJIN STRANGER
I have always taught my children and my grandchildren to be kind, and to offer their help to strangers whenever they can. I do this not only because it is humane and right. Sometimes, you never know what you will gain in return.
I was but a boy of eleven or twelve years in my native Nagasaki when I met the gaikokujin stranger. It was in the reign of the glorious Emperor Meiji and we had opened ourselves again to the West in our struggle to become a modern power. Nagasaki had always been Nippon’s door to the world, and with the new way of things it was prosperous and bustling with outlanders. Now, my fellows and I were playing in the street that day—some game or another—when the foreigner stumbled out of a doorway. At first we all laughed, for we had much experience of gaijin in those days and they were almost always yopporai, or “drunken.” But I noticed when his hand came away from clutching his side that it was covered with blood.
My friends started to run away, but my heart was moved to pity. I approached him and Akira-sempai called out behind me, “Kenji-kun! Stay away!” But I was a willful boy in those days and did not listen. The stranger collapsed to his knees in front of me and looked very pale. As I neared he stared up at me.
“Help me, please.” His voice was very weak but his accent and Japanese were flawless. I had met other foreigners in my father’s tailor shop and believed then that none were capable of speaking our tongue, only aping it in unlovely voices.
“Shall I send for a doctor?”
He shook his head. “No. Please. I have a box. Help me to the box.”
I wondered then if perhaps he was mad, or delirious. But I agreed, and he put his arm around my shoulders. I helped him to stand, mindful of the blood on my clothing. My friends stared, and then ran off. I was not certain if they were seeking help or merely abandoning me.
“What is your name?” He asked. I was helping him limp through the streets, and every now and again he seemed to weaken, putting more weight upon me.
“Uchida Kenji,” I told him.
“I am Deimien. Deimien Doraegonu.”
“Hajimemashita, Doraegonu-san.”
“Nice...to meet...you too.” He replied. Then he staggered and fell, slipping out of consciousness there in the street. I kneeled beside him, not certain what to do, and waited for what seemed like forever, sweating from heat and fear. My heart was pounding in my chest as I debated. Should I run away? Go seek help? If I did this, anything might happen to him in the street. And if I did not, he might expire and die. I felt paralyzed and unable to decide.
Slowly, he awoke again. “You are still...here?” He seemed surprised.
“Of course,” I told him. “I am not an animal. I cannot abandon you to die.”
What happened next I would never speak of, to anyone, for many many years. Doing so would have inspired my father to punish me for telling lies, or later in life made men think I was mad. Who could have believed such nonsense? I helped the stranger through the streets until at last we came to an alleyway, and just as he said, a great stone box was there. It looked completely out of place, but the most curious thing is that I never would have noticed it myself had he not brought me directly to it. It was almost as if I did not want to see it.
“I must get inside. Please.” He handed me a key in his blood-soaked hand, and I took it, utterly baffled. This was a little stone box, no bigger than two tatami in size. Through the iron gate I could see it was empty. “Please.”
But I fumbled with the key in the lock, and with a grating sound, the gate swung inwards...
...and I was looking into the largest room I had ever seen. It was immense, bigger than a warehouse, with some sort of ornate table or pedestal off in the center that seemed to vibrate and hum. Please understand, I knew this to be quite impossible. The alley stood beside a tea house and a brothel, neither of which would contain such a wonder. I often think it was only because I was still a child, and capable of believing childish things, that I immediately understood this room was inside the little box.
“Help me...inside...”
I should have been terrified, but curiousity got the better of me. I helped him stagger across the wide floor, past the strange pedestal table which seemed to be moaning, whispering, and humming directly to us. I felt as if the entire room was watching me. “It’s alright girl,” he said, “the boy is a friend.”
He directed me towards another great door in the distance, so far off I despaired being able to carry him there. “The Zero Room,” he whispered. “Please.”
Beyond that door there were other halls, chambers, doors. I felt I was inside some great and magical palace. He directed me towards a strange white room, a place more peaceful than anywhere my young mind had ever encounterd. “Leave me...here. Go back the way you came. Touch...touch nothing. She will let you leave.”
“You wish me to leave you here, bleeding on the floor?”
He nodded, and smiled. “Yes, Uchida Kenji. Thank you. You saved my life...or at least spared me a regeneration.”
I nodded, doubtful I should leave him, but his reassuring smile and look of peace in his eyes told me it was all right to go. I bowed, and ran back through the halls, feeling ever that presence watching me. As I raced across the vast pedestal room, the great doors opened for me all on their own, and closed behind me once I left. I went looking for the strange, magical box the next week, but it was gone. No trace of it was left behind.
The years ran by, rapidly passing like a swift stream. The boy grew into manhood and married. He took over his father’s business, had three children of his own, and quietly grew old. I passed the business on to my eldest boy, Hirotaka. Then the great War came, and the Americans. The ambitions of Nippon to be a modern empire like the British brought us only long, slow ruin. We suffered greatly at that time. There was little food or fuel, and my grandchildren’s faces were often filled with need and despair. I feared for them, for the future of nihonjin. Surely this was the end of our land.
I awoke that morning, in my 73rd year, to the sounds of screaming. It was my middle son’s wife, Hiroko. Outside the door of my room my grandson Kenta called for me. “Grandfather! Grandfather! Please come quickly. An American has come and wishes to speak with you!”
It was absurd, of course. We were still at war, and the only Americans in Japan were the ones taking back our Pacific islands. But I lifted my sorry old body out of bed and went into the living room, where my family stood huddled. My sons were surrounding a stranger, and they were armed with knives.
“Ohayo gozaimasu, Uchida Kenji-sama.”
I could not believe my senses. It was him. The gaijin stranger with the magic box, looking the same as he had more than half a century before. I raised my voice to my sons. “Let him free. He is...a friend.”
“Father! He is the enemy!” Hirotaka protested.
“Do as I say!”
My sons backed away, and the stranger straightened his jacket. He was still dressed in that style of clothes from so long ago. His face very grave, he came forward and put his hand on my shoulder like an old friend. “How can this be?” I whispered.
“Never mind that, Uchida Kenji. Is all your family here?”
Dazed, I glanced around. My sons and their wives were all present, and the grandchildren. I counted to make sure and then nodded to him. “Yes. They are all here.”
“Good,” he said. “Do you remember my box, Uchida Kenji?”
I shivered, and nodded. I had almost convinced myself that it was a dream.
“You must tell your family, all of them, to come inside the box, Uchida Kenji. You must make them do it now.”
I could only stare, thinking perhaps I was still asleep in my futon and dreaming. For how could the box I imagined in my boyhood truly be real? How could this strange man look the same, when he should be at least twenty years older than I? I had spent my life as a simple tailor, and none of this made any possible sense to me. “I do not understand.”
Now he grabbed my shoulders with both hands, staring hard at me. “They are coming.” He said, slowly and evenly. “Today is the 9th of August, 1945. It is now 10:40 in the morning, and they are coming. In twenty-two minutes they will drop a bomb, a terrible weapon, on this city and 60,000 people will die. I am going to take you and your family away from here.”
My family muttered amongst themselves, panicked. “How...” I whispered. Then, “We must warn others.”
“There is no time, Uchida Kenji. I am here to save you. You and yours. That is all I can do.”
I shook my head back and forth. “But why...why do you do this for me?”
He smiled sadly. “I am not an animal. I cannot leave you to die.”
Thus I did as he ordered, commanding them all into his strange and terrible box. The pedestal room was as I remembered, and the stranger pressed buttons and turned dials, making it light up with the most terrible groan and a sound of distant drums. One of the wives fainted, and my sons looked very white. They huddled together, unable to understand the riddle of how so much could fit into so small a space.
I approached the stranger, who had stopped and now rested his hands on the pedastal as if carrying a great weight. “Is this the end of us?” I asked him. “The end of my people?”
The stranger looked up at me, his face stern. He seemed to think a moment, and then shook his head. “Chigau Uchida Kenji. It is not the end. The Americans are not the monsters you suppose them to be, or the monsters war has made them. Believe me when I say the best years of your nation lie ahead of you, and not behind. Your great-grandchildren will live in a Japan that is safe and at peace.”
I believe I wept there, beside the strange man. I wept for those who were dying in Nagasaki, I wept in relief. For I believed him without question, without knowing what or who he was.
“A sixty-one year old debt has been repaid now, Uchida Kenji. I will take you someplace safe where you can wait out the war.”
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