Through the Arc of the Rain Forest Read online

  Also by Karen Tei Yamashita

  Anime Wong

  Brazil-Maru

  Circle K Cycles

  I Hotel

  Letters to Memory

  Tropic of Orange

  Copyright © 1990, 2017 by Karen Tei Yamashita

  Introduction © 2017 by Percival Everett

  Cover photograph © rck_953/Shutterstock.com

  Cover design by Carlos Esparza

  Book design by Bookmobile

  First edition published by Coffee House Press in 1990

  Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to [email protected].

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Yamashita, Karen Tei, 1951– author.

  Title: Through the arc of the rain forest / Karen Tei Yamashita.

  Description: Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016057047 | ISBN 9781566895040 (eBook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | Rain forests—Fiction. | Brazil—Fiction. | Magic realism (Literature) | GSAFD: Satire.

  Classification: LCC PS3575.A44 T4 2017 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016057047

  242322212019181712345678

  Para o Ronaldo: a tua estória

  I have heard Brazilian children say that whatever passes through the arc of a rainbow becomes its opposite. But what is the opposite of a bird? Or for that matter, a human being? And what then, in the great rain forest, where, in its season, the rain never ceases and the rainbows are myriad?

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION BY PERCIVAL EVERETT

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PART I: The Beginning

  CHAPTER 1:Kazumasa Ishimaru

  CHAPTER 2:Batista and Tania Aparecida Djapan

  CHAPTER 3:Mané da Costa Pena

  CHAPTER 4:GGG

  CHAPTER 5:Chico Paco

  CHAPTER 6:Jonathan B. Tweep

  PART II: The Developing World

  CHAPTER 7:The Pigeon

  CHAPTER 8:The Pilgrim

  CHAPTER 9:Three Hands

  CHAPTER 10:Fortune

  CHAPTER 11:Saved

  PART III: More Development

  CHAPTER 12:The Feather

  CHAPTER 13:Pilgrim’s Progress

  CHAPTER 14:Karaoke

  CHAPTER 15:Prendas Domesticas

  CHAPTER 16:The Matacão

  PART IV: Loss of Innocence

  CHAPTER 17:The Ball

  CHAPTER 18:Featherology

  CHAPTER 19:Michelle Mabelle

  CHAPTER 20:Promises

  CHAPTER 21:Homing

  PART V: More Loss

  CHAPTER 22:Plastics

  CHAPTER 23:Remote Control

  CHAPTER 24:Trialectics

  CHAPTER 25:Radio

  CHAPTER 26:Pigeon Communications

  PART VI: Return

  CHAPTER 27:Typhus

  CHAPTER 28:Carnival

  CHAPTER 29:Rain of Feathers

  CHAPTER 30:Bacteria

  CHAPTER 31:The Market

  CHAPTER 32:The Tropical Tilt

  Introduction

  BY PERCIVAL EVERETT

  Through the Arc of the Rain Forest was Karen Tei Yamashita’s first novel and the first work of hers that I read. I had never met Karen and would not for another fifteen or so years. That was a good thing. It allowed me to get over my jealousy. I harbored a grudge against her because her first novel was so much better, so much smarter than my own. And why not? Karen Yamashita is smarter than I am. That intelligence permeates this first novel. Its strength is that it is a work from Karen Yamashita.

  Through the Arc opens with a man who has a small sphere perpetually orbiting his head. In fact, the story is narrated by the floating ball and by Kazumasa, the man with the head. From there the novel becomes strange. But not really, but really. One not only believes that such a ball exists, believes that the ball has a voice, but believes the story that the ball is surrendering. I believe it. I believe it all. I believe it because it is true. After the first paragraphs of the story, I was willing to follow this story, this writer, anywhere. The prose is sure-handed, unpretentious, seductive, strange, and unadorned, yet beautiful, with turns of phrase that are as natural as the wilderness the novel depicts.

  Because of this novel, I will never be able to create for myself a character with three arms. The irritating thing about this is not that I am unable to do it because it has now been done, but because, damn her, Karen has done it so well.

  The complications of the novel rival those of Pynchon, but Karen achieves it all so economically that it is difficult to see them piling up until they, well, have piled up. This is done with dry, subtle humor. And like most great humor, Twain comes to mind, it is overlaid onto a landscape of most serious matters.

  Through the Arc visits and takes on the real stuff of our times, the destruction of our environment, the out-of-control corporate greed, the betrayal of our own by our own. This relatively short novel, which not short at all, takes on so much, but serves no issue with fleeting brevity. The work presents the whole arc of the story.

  Here, whatever passes through the arc, this rainbow, becomes its opposite. By the end of the work, I too had passed through the arc of the rainbow, and I too was forever changed. The novel showed me what it is possible to lose, and it showed me what is possible to save, what is possible for the human spirit, good and bad. As an artist I was shown merely what is possible.

  I applaud Coffee House Press not only for first publishing Through the Arc of the Rain Forest but for reissuing it here. I thank them also for allowing me to be a part of this celebration of truly fine art.

  Author’s Note

  The story that follows is perhaps a kind of novela, a Brazilian soap opera, of the sort that occupies the imagination and national psyche of the Brazilian people on prime-time TV nightly and for periods of two to four months, depending on its popularity and success. This is not an exaggeration. The prime-time novela in Brazilian life is pervasive, reaching every Brazilian in some form or manner regardless of class, status, education, or profession, excepting perhaps the Indians and the very isolated of the frontiers and rural backlands. In traveling to the most remote towns, one finds that a single television in a church or open plaza will gather the people nightly to define and standardize by example the national dress, music, humor, political state, economic malaise, the national dream, despite the fact that Brazil is immense and variegated. Yet even as it standardizes by example, the novela’s story is completely changeable according to the whims of public psyche and approval, although most likely, the unhappy find happiness; the bad are punished; true love reigns; a popular actor is saved from death. Still, the basic elements must remain the same. And what are these elements? Claude Levi-Strauss described it all so well so many years ago: Tristes Tropiques—an idyll of striking innocence, boundless nostalgia, and terrible ruthlessness. I thank you for tuning in.

  PART I:

  The Beginning

  CHAPTER 1:

  Kazumasa Ishimaru

  By a strange quirk of fate, I was brought back by a memory. Memory is a powerful sort of thing, although at the time I made my reentry into this world, no notice at a
ll was taken of the fact. In fact, everyone was terribly busy, whirling about, panting and heaving, dizzy with the tumult of their ancestral spirits. This was one of those monthly events under the influence of the full moon on a well-beaten floor of earth on what had once been known, many years before, as the Matacão. That I should have been reborn like any other dead spirit in the Afro-Brazilian syncretistic religious rite of Candomblé is humorous to me. But then I could have been reincarnated, if such things are possible, into the severed head of that dead chicken or some other useless object—the smutty statuette of Saint George or those plastic roses. Instead, brought back by a memory, I have become a memory, and as such, am commissioned to become for you a memory.

  But, of me you will learn by and by. First I must tell you of a certain Kazumasa Ishimaru to whom I was attached for many years. It might be said that we were friends, but although we were much closer, we were never referred to as such. I met Kazumasa quite by accident when he was still a young boy, recently born on the back side of Japan, on the shores of the Japan Sea, waves cast away in long arms out to Sado Island.

  In those days, a child racing across the sands in a band with others, Kazumasa felt the Divine Wind ripple through his hair and scatter with the clouds over the ocean’s mercuric mantle. One day, on such a race at the shimmering edge of the tide, the wind swept unusually quickly, raising the sand in changing drifts, a heavy comb through the white granules and the stray kelp. Suddenly, an enormous crack of thunder echoed across the shore, and a flying mass of fire plowed into the waves, scattering debris in every direction. There was a sudden burst of steam and sizzle as when tempura dipped in batter is plunged into hot oil. The children ran excitedly in two directions: away to their homes in fear or into the waves with curiosity. Kazumasa could do neither. A tiny piece of flying debris had plummeted toward him and knocked him unconscious. By the time any of the children had noticed his mishap, he was struggling, stunned, up the shore to his home, his bruised forehead a pulsating purple lump of raised skin and blood.

  Alerted by some excited children, Kazumasa’s mother sped off from her Yakult route, jamming her little red motorbike into third gear and leaving a befuddled grandmother with three six-packs of cold Yakult.

  Having fainted at the gate of his home, Kazumasa next felt himself rudely awakened, his head jerked up off the ground. His mother had thrown herself over her wounded son, rested her head on his heart to assure herself of its beat. But there, close to Kazumasa’s face, a small object buzzed between the mother and son. She swatted at the object irritably, and, coincidentally, Kazumasa’s head was swiftly flung to one side. Stunned, she examined the buzzing thing which was not, after all, an insect, but a tiny sphere whirling on its axis. With the instinctive duty and fearlessness of a mother, she grabbed the thing, wrenching it to one side. Kazumasa’s head was wrenched away also, as if by some magnetic force attaching itself to the whirling sphere. Kazumasa’s mother drew back in horror, but Kazumasa himself awoke, apparently with no side effects and none the worse for his bruised forehead. He spoke with wonder about the incident on the shore. His mother, not wishing to frighten her son, made no mention of the strange ball whirling a few inches from the center of his forehead and carefully avoided it as she washed and bandaged him.

  That evening, she spoke excitedly but quietly with her husband, who was a plant manager in a local dried-fish company. They were simple people who did not wish to have their lives come under any special scrutiny. However, Kazumasa’s father wondered if he should not, for reasons of national security, alert the National Space Development Agency. Maybe there was more to this than met the eye, but Kazumasa’s mother was cautious. She did not want her son made into a national phenomenon, a guinea pig for experiments. She wanted her son to be like the others, get solid grades in school, get into a good university, and then a good salaried job. All of a sudden, a ball, a tiny impudent planet, had come between her and her son, destroying the bonds of parent and child, literally setting them a world apart.

  But to Kazumasa, who had gradually discovered the thing in front of his nose, the ball became something of comfort. It was the sort of comfort a child derives from his thumb or an old blanket, and in that respect, his mother’s sense of Kazumasa’s sudden independence from her was perhaps true.

  As the days passed and Kazumasa’s head wound cleared, leaving only a slightly pink spot of skin, Kazumasa and his parents began to accept the ball which continued to float before his forehead no matter where he went or what he did. They began to forget their early anxieties as Kazumasa seemed to draw confidence and security from the ball. Like other parents bemoaning their loss of independence when rudely pressed into parenthood, Kazumasa’s parents, too, began to depend on the ball, accepting and justifying it as they might a pacifier or a battered teddy bear.

  Kazumasa’s father forgot to call the proper authorities, and his mother began to readjust her projections for her son’s future and to accept those readjustments as mothers usually do all their lives.

  Kazumasa was never again in his life alone. During the day, the ball bobbed and bounced and jittered merrily before him in the same wandering pattern of the boy following the intuitive dance of his growing muscles. After school they galloped madly home together. At night, the ball murmured and whirred sweetly near his pillow like a protective buoy. The ball was his pet and his friend, but it required no special attention nor any sort of responsibility on Kazumasa’s part. When he felt no particular impulse to do or accomplish anything, he simply followed his ball. On the other hand, when he was busy at work or play, on some new project or activity, the ball was always, faithfully and uncritically, there.

  Curiously, the ball had a strange effect on everyone around Kazumasa. It was a source of wonder and never, as his parents had feared, of derision. Perhaps this was because of Kazumasa’s comfortable acceptance of his difference, his obliviousness to the ball as a special attribute or oddity. He was a happy child, and everyone he came in contact with felt a general necessity to encourage that happiness.

  Kazumasa was genuinely proud of his ball. At his suggestion, his mother sewed tiny caps and hats for the ball to match Kazumasa’s own. Kazumasa and his ball went everywhere, to school and outings, in matching hats. Even on rainy days, the ball was appropriately dressed under a shiny yellow plastic cap.

  The years passed, and Kazumasa’s ball became a thing of general acceptance. Most people forgot it was there, just inches from his face, although people avoided looking Kazumasa straight in the eye. They felt the uncomfortable presence of an intruder or even a third eye, and many people struggled with the compulsion to go cross-eyed when talking to Kazumasa. Girls shied away from him; they smiled and waved from a certain distance. This was of no apparent concern to Kazumasa, who was intimately attached to his ball. He did not yet fathom how the opposite sex might supersede such an intimacy.

  After high school, Kazumasa took a job with the railway service. He punched tickets and hauled bags of mail. He found things for people in the lost and found and waved appropriate flags for passing and stopping trains. He posted train schedules and closed gates and kept the kids behind the yellow line on the station platform when the trains passed. But one day, his true talent in the railway service was discovered.

  Occasionally, he was sent on short runs to the next town to collect passenger tickets, wading down the aisles on the moving train, accepting tickets and greeting the passengers. Whenever the train ran over a certain place on the tracks, he could see his ball jerk suddenly, lurched into inexplicable chaos. He decided to mark this place where the train passed and his ball went wild. After several such trips, Kazumasa reported the phenomenon to his superior.

  His superior was skeptical but careful, and one day had the train stop just at the place where Kazumasa’s ball became visibly agitated. Together, Kazumasa and his boss stepped off the train to examine the tracks below. To their surprise they discovered that the tracks had worn dangerously thin at that point. The train wo
uld no doubt be derailed if those tracks were not replaced.

  All of a sudden, Kazumasa was the man of the moment. His ball had saved possibly hundreds of lives. Such a person was indispensable to the safety of Japan’s national rail system. Immediately he was given a substantial raise and a new title, Superintendent of Track Maintenance and Repairs, and he was called upon by national headquarters to make a complete inspection of the entire national system. From that moment on, Kazumasa rarely saw his home on the backside of Japan, but on the other hand, he saw, peering around his ball, every part of Japan where a train could pass, from snowy Hokkaido in the north to the sunny port of Nagasaki in the south. Kazumasa and his ball rambled, rolled, and sped through the Japanese countryside, along the seascapes and through the clutter and crowd of urban Japanese life.

  As Kazumasa traveled, he became familiar with the idiosyncrasies and precision of his ball and developed, with amazing exactitude, a system of standards and measurements to calibrate even the most imperceptible deterioration in any length of tracks. Kazumasa, carrying a detailed map and a notebook, would study, with tedious accuracy, the fluctuations of his ball over every inch of track throughout Japan. It was no small task. The Japanese national rail system could now boast of increased safety as Kazumasa and his ball carefully erased the margin of error.

  As the years passed, Kazumasa became a sort of one-man/one-ball institution. He required only one assistant, who arranged his daily traveling schedule and punched his records into a central computer. Kazumasa and his ball would appear promptly at the scheduled hour for travel in his national railway uniform, his ball neatly clad in its matching cap. He was treated with extreme respect and care. Boxed lunches, dinners, and snacks were always provided for his comfort and convenience.