who was still looming over us, peering at me. “Is there a problem—hey, you aren’t a ticket inspector, are you? What are you doing, looking at us so rudely? Get away from my daughter.” (She called me musume , daughter, in the same way that I called her Auntie—it’s just a courteous and friendly way to talk. It’s not my fault if they thought she meant it literally.)
“Well?” she demanded shrilly. “I’ll call the ticket inspector. Get away. Beast.”
The yak recoiled and lurched off down the train, and I let out the breath I suddenly realised I’d been holding. I would be spending the rest of the journey listening to every detail of Auntie’s life unless she moved on to another victim, but that was fine with me. Surely the goons would get off once they’d prowled the length of the train.
And then all I had to do was disappear into Japan while an entire yakuza family tore Tokyo apart looking for me, and while I worked out how to tell them they had the wrong woman.
You could say it began when Mama-san called me into her office in the early hours of the morning, or before that, when Mitsuyoshi-san walked into the Primrose Path. Probably it really started when Kelly—that bitch—joined the bar, and I wouldn’t change my name. But if you want the whole story, it began when a Swedish UN official married a Cantonese interpreter from Hong Kong.
My father was a typical Scand in looks, blond hair and blue eyes. I take after my mother—black hair, narrow hips, no bust to speak of and olive skin tone. My cheekbones are high and my face wide, and if you glanced at me in my dark glasses on a Tokyo street, you’d register me as Asian, if not necessarily Japanese. But I have my father’s eyes—heavy-lidded, but vivid, iceberg blue (which means there’s blue-eyed genes on my mother’s side too, but let’s not go there)—and when I put on the blonde wig and “gaijin up”, you’d swear I was middle European. A bit Slavic, a bit Germanic—you’d place me in Vilnius or Krakow, maybe. I’m a regular cosmopolitan girl.
I was brought up all over the place, like many UN brats. You could say I had three mother tongues, since French and English come with the territory, and my parents spoke Cantonese at home. So I started off with a lot of languages, and I didn’t stop.
Supposedly we’re all born with a language instinct hardwired into our brains—a natural grammar into which the rules and vocabulary of specific tongues are slotted. Much of a child’s brain is taken up with acquiring language, and then, around seven or so, the language engine starts to wither away, presumably because it’s done its job. That’s why adults find it hard to learn new languages fluently, why kids can create a grammatical language out of any old jumble of sound, why abused children kept from human contact will never learn to speak properly if they’re found too late. Language acquisition has to be done early or not at all.
For most people.
I’m one of the other kind.
There are quite a few of us, actually. We hang on to our language engine like some people keep their milk teeth. We acquire new languages in months or weeks, new dialects in days. I’ve never “learned” Italian, but after a fortnight in Florence I was chattering fluently. I know German and Swedish, and if you have those you can manage Dutch and Afrikaans and Norwegian…
I studied Japanese, along with Korean, at college because it’s one of the oddballs, a language with virtually no living relatives. I could already read Chinese characters, which Japanese uses, so although the US State Department classes Japanese at the highest level of difficulty to learn, by the time I graduated I was as fluent as a native speaker.
So. There I was at twenty-two, Kerry Ekdahl (named for my Irish godmother, since you ask), straddling east and west, with any number of languages under my belt and absolutely no idea what to do with them. Because the thing about
“Well?” she demanded shrilly. “I’ll call the ticket inspector. Get away. Beast.”
The yak recoiled and lurched off down the train, and I let out the breath I suddenly realised I’d been holding. I would be spending the rest of the journey listening to every detail of Auntie’s life unless she moved on to another victim, but that was fine with me. Surely the goons would get off once they’d prowled the length of the train.
And then all I had to do was disappear into Japan while an entire yakuza family tore Tokyo apart looking for me, and while I worked out how to tell them they had the wrong woman.
You could say it began when Mama-san called me into her office in the early hours of the morning, or before that, when Mitsuyoshi-san walked into the Primrose Path. Probably it really started when Kelly—that bitch—joined the bar, and I wouldn’t change my name. But if you want the whole story, it began when a Swedish UN official married a Cantonese interpreter from Hong Kong.
My father was a typical Scand in looks, blond hair and blue eyes. I take after my mother—black hair, narrow hips, no bust to speak of and olive skin tone. My cheekbones are high and my face wide, and if you glanced at me in my dark glasses on a Tokyo street, you’d register me as Asian, if not necessarily Japanese. But I have my father’s eyes—heavy-lidded, but vivid, iceberg blue (which means there’s blue-eyed genes on my mother’s side too, but let’s not go there)—and when I put on the blonde wig and “gaijin up”, you’d swear I was middle European. A bit Slavic, a bit Germanic—you’d place me in Vilnius or Krakow, maybe. I’m a regular cosmopolitan girl.
I was brought up all over the place, like many UN brats. You could say I had three mother tongues, since French and English come with the territory, and my parents spoke Cantonese at home. So I started off with a lot of languages, and I didn’t stop.
Supposedly we’re all born with a language instinct hardwired into our brains—a natural grammar into which the rules and vocabulary of specific tongues are slotted. Much of a child’s brain is taken up with acquiring language, and then, around seven or so, the language engine starts to wither away, presumably because it’s done its job. That’s why adults find it hard to learn new languages fluently, why kids can create a grammatical language out of any old jumble of sound, why abused children kept from human contact will never learn to speak properly if they’re found too late. Language acquisition has to be done early or not at all.
For most people.
I’m one of the other kind.
There are quite a few of us, actually. We hang on to our language engine like some people keep their milk teeth. We acquire new languages in months or weeks, new dialects in days. I’ve never “learned” Italian, but after a fortnight in Florence I was chattering fluently. I know German and Swedish, and if you have those you can manage Dutch and Afrikaans and Norwegian…
I studied Japanese, along with Korean, at college because it’s one of the oddballs, a language with virtually no living relatives. I could already read Chinese characters, which Japanese uses, so although the US State Department classes Japanese at the highest level of difficulty to learn, by the time I graduated I was as fluent as a native speaker.
So. There I was at twenty-two, Kerry Ekdahl (named for my Irish godmother, since you ask), straddling east and west, with any number of languages under my belt and absolutely no idea what to do with them. Because the thing about
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