Suicide, sexual assault, blood

Mr. Frog

Three months after Sam jumped off the George Washington Bridge, I returned to Fukuoka, my parents’ hometown. I took a job teaching English at a third-tier public high school in Ogori, a suburb twenty minutes to the south by Nishitetsu Super-Express train, and rented an apartment in Yakuin, a busy neighborhood of the city. I wanted to be surrounded by noise. If I went to bed early enough, before the trains stopped running and the drinkers headed home or to love hotels, the raucous voices, the gliding of taxis, the ceaseless chime of machinery, audible in snatches when the automatic doors to the pachinko parlor slid open, all floated up to my bedroom and formed a sonic cocoon in which I could fall asleep.

But before long, that stopped working. It seemed I needed a more violent jostling around me to feel contained, to unclench my muscles and drift off. For a while, horror movies did the trick—the nastier the better. Nothing too psychological, no spirits with unfinished business gliding morosely along the walls of old mansions. I wanted real men, killers with chainsaws and flamethrowers. I wanted to see skin torn by powerful jaws or bubbling beneath blasts of heat. The louder, the hoarser the screams, the sooner I dropped into oblivion after removing my headphones, putting my laptop away, and arranging myself beneath the covers.

▴ ▴ ▴

Until I couldn’t. One night, after a movie about the terrible trials of a group of backpackers who stumble into the wrong bar in a Brazilian beach town, sleep refused to visit me. Maybe I’d finally gone too far, I thought, watched something gruesome enough to fire up even my deadened nerves, but within myself I could detect no emotional disturbance. Only my body, my outer shell, remained stiff, wouldn’t warm and relax into the mattress.

I’d never suffered from insomnia before this period of my life, but Sam had. I remembered him saying the worst thing to do was just lie there and try to urge sleep toward you. Better to get up, do something—go for a walk, have a snack, write in a diary—and in that way sidestep whatever was blocking the path to unconsciousness.

I decided to take his advice. It was late April, shortly after the beginning of the school year, the cherry blossoms blown away by warm breezes and replaced with ordinary green leaves, but the night was cool, the ideal temperature for a walk. I headed for the river, noting as I passed them the few windows that were lighted, high up in apartment blocks, the clump of teenagers still in their school uniforms smoking cigarettes in the parking lot of the Lawson’s, the salaryman slumped against a vending machine, his face pressed into its side. A yatai operator passed me, hauling his wooden cart home. He met my eyes briefly. “Take care of yourself, eh?” he said. A fog redolent of pork broth followed him.

As I walked, there were two channels open in my brain: one for the people, trees, buildings I was observing, the other for the reply I would compose to Sam’s mother. She had emailed me that morning to see how I was doing, how I was readjusting to the Japanese way of things. I have to admit, she’d written, it’s just not getting easier, and this admission, once loosed, was pursued by a torrent of them: In fact, it’s more unbearable than ever. It’s unreasonable a person should be expected to live with this. I wish I could be put into a coma until it gets better; though, I can’t imagine it ever will.

Soon, the words of my reply became the dominant channel. As I walked alongside the river, the lights of Nakasu, vivid smears on the dark water, dropped away. At first, I hardly registered him, about the size of a five-year-old child, crumpled on the cement shoreline where the river lapped gently. Then the shock of the body, a blot against the concrete, pierced through to me.

A blank, thoughtless period—like time spent under anesthesia—passed, during which I must have climbed over the railing and crawled down the banks. I returned to myself as it became clear this was not a child at all. My mind revealed its boundaries, throwing out one foolish explanation after another: it was a giant salamander, a Galapagos tortoise gone drastically off course, some rare domestic fauna we’d skipped over when we studied the animal kingdom in elementary school.

It lay unmoving on its back, its limbs a green-gray, its torso covered with hard yellow rectangles that resembled a baseball catcher’s chest guard. The thinnest sliver of darkness was visible between its eyelids, which trembled slightly as I skidded to a stop near its head. One webbed hand curled up and pointed to it. The beaklike mouth parted. “Water,” it said. The voice sounded male.

I saw at the crown of his skull was a concavity. I had no vessel, so I ran to the river, cupped my hands into the brackish water, and carried it over to him that way. He wrapped damp fingers around my arm to pull himself upright and tilted his indented skull toward me. I filled it.

Immediately his sage-colored skin darkened to emerald.

“More?” I asked, and he nodded with the smallest possible motion. I scooped river water into his crown again and again. I couldn’t say, really, what I was thinking; all my resources had been pooled toward this simple action, my sole purpose in the universe.

▴ ▴ ▴

Once refilled, he stood up and began speaking to me in a strangely familiar way, all informal verbs and jocularity, as though we had known each other a long time. He told me to call him Mr. Frog, and though he looked more to me like a turtle, his voice did have a froggy, croak-like tenor. He told me a heron had knocked him over and spilled his fluid. He told me he was not a liar, that he could be very dangerous to some, but not to me. To me, he owed a great debt. I could reclaim it whenever I wanted. He asked if he could see where I lived.

▴ ▴ ▴

Back at my apartment, Mr. Frog shared with me some of the rules for kappa. Only one per river, for instance. Mr. Frog belonged to the Naka River, which bordered Nakasu, the red-light district—or maybe it belonged to him, it was a little unclear—which helped to explain, later, why he could be so raunchy. They were not imps, as folklore had it. The kappa had no orientation, Mr. Frog claimed, skewed neither good nor evil. They had occasional meetings, but he could not or would not tell me what was discussed there. They loved cucumber, offal, the blood of cows and horses. In the old days, in exchange for horse blood, they would set the people’s bones and give them salves for smallpox. If the fluid in their crowns spilled, they could die. Water was a fine temporary replacement, but really what filled it was not water, which was why Mr. Frog could not stay very long on this particular night. But if it was all right, he’d like to come visit me again some time.

I said as long as he wasn’t interested in my offal or blood.

He shook his head. “You’re almost like a foreigner,” Mr. Frog said. On our walk over, I had explained that I’d spent some time overseas. “You don’t have the usual prejudices against kappa. It’s easy talking with you.”

“Thank you,” I said. “It’s easy talking with you too. You’re welcome back any time.”

He bowed, gingerly, so as not to spill the water. At my door, before leaving, he said with a grin spread over his green face, “Mr. Frog will return.”

It was a pun: the word for frog and the word for return sound exactly the same in Japanese. That’s why some Japanese, when returning from a long journey, will carry a frog amulet with them for protection. But I never went in for that sort of thing. I could never believe a trinket would protect me.

▴ ▴ ▴

When I returned to Japan as a teenager, after living for a couple years with my parents in Connecticut, my classmates regarded me with a mixture of suspicion and respect. The two added up to my being ignored entirely. The other students were curious about my experience abroad, perhaps a little jealous—some of them had never so much as left the Kansai region—but also wary that too much Japaneseness had been drained from me, to the point that I was no longer one of them. I had tried staying up-to-date with the latest in pop culture, but in those days, before the Internet, it was impossible, and they rightly sensed I had no idea what they were talking about when they referenced, in their little huddles at lunchtime, this artist or that. So their curiosities and their misgivings canceled each other out, and I was left alone.

It was much the same with my fellow teachers at Ogori High School. They were polite, no more than that. Some of them, I knew, would drive together at lunchtime to an Indian restaurant in town, but I was never invited to join them.

My sole ally at Ogori was Mr. Kaneko, another English teacher, a wiry older man with thick glasses who had also lived in New York City, way back in the seventies. He loved recounting to me his experiments with magic mushrooms. Sometimes he spoke to me in English, to rile the other teachers.

He did so the day after my first encounter with Mr. Frog. Morning meeting over, we were returning to our desks in the teachers’ room; we were both free first period.

“Wild night?” he said.

Mr. Kaneko was under the impression I lived a thrilling life in Yakuin. I suppose I did look tired that day. After Mr. Frog left, I’d dropped right off to sleep, but it only amounted to a handful of hours before I had to wake again.

“You know me,” I replied in English. The vice principal glanced over at us from his desk at the front of the room and frowned. “I’m a real party animal.”

Mr. Kaneko threw back his head and laughed louder than was strictly necessary. In this way, he was like an American, like Sam: both had that bluster, that heedlessness as to how a discordant word or gesture might disturb the waters of the group. Once I had mistaken this quality for freedom.

“Nao-chan,” Mr. Kaneko said, leaning in. “You ever…?” He mimed smoking a joint.

I looked over at the vice principal, who was, mercifully, busy speaking to a parent on the phone. Mr. Kaneko had been teaching in Fukuoka public schools for thirty years, but I was brand new, and dispensable. I changed the subject.

“How much do you know about Japanese folklore?” I asked him.

He leaned back against a desk not his and crossed his arms over his chest. “What, like obake?”

“Right. Like kitsune, yuurei, kappa…”

“Just from books I used to read my kids, always to my regret, because then they’d come crying to me in the middle of the night.” He shrugged. “Did you ever play Test-Your-Guts?”

I shook my head.

“It’s an excuse for teenagers to grab each other. You go to some spooky place and see how long you can stand it. When I was young a group of us went to the Suicide Forest.”

“Ah,” I said. “Scary.”

“We lasted about ten minutes walking around in there. Of course, we didn’t see anything. Only trees.”

“I had better go do some lesson planning,” I told him.

▴ ▴ ▴

I wanted to write back to Sam’s mother that day, but time kept getting away from me. And the teacher’s room, in and out of which filtered an unrelenting stream of students to be advised or reprimanded, seemed an indecent place to compose my reply. So I told myself I’d do it that night.

But Mr. Frog had taken my invitation to come back any time to heart. He was in my bathtub when I returned around seven p.m., after staying late at school to meet with the English Club. I knew he was in there because I could hear him paddling around, for which I was thankful. Otherwise, if he had caught me off guard, it might have been difficult to conceal my reaction to his appearance.

I knocked on the bathroom door.

“Come on in, Little Sister,” he called, so in I went. He was mostly submerged, green-gray body a blur under the filmy water, dark fringe of hair plastered against his face. The depression atop his skull was full.

“Ahh,” he said. “Nothing like a soak.” Then, slowly, he stood. Another reason for gratitude: his genitals were concealed. Tucked under, I assumed, those yellow rectangles that ran down his torso. I passed him a towel, which he used first to wipe down the tender front of his body, then drape over his carapace. “Shall I save you the hot water?” he asked.

I had no intention of bathing in it, but I nodded, not wishing to offend.

“Hungry?” I said. Mr. Frog followed me into the kitchen. He only came up to my mid-thigh. Padding alongside me like this, he could almost be mistaken for a pet. Sam and I had adopted an overweight black cat named Felipe, but he lived with Sam’s parents now, in their split-level abutting a canal. He loved watching the swans that floated up at dawn, Sam’s mother had told me; for hours, Felipe would sit at the back door with his nose pressed to the glass.

There was very little in the fridge: a couple bottles of salad dressing, a carton of eggs with one egg left. Remembering what he’d said about his food preferences, I extracted a cucumber from the crisper and handed it to Mr. Frog. He took it, bowing gently. In his physical mannerisms, he was nothing but polite, unlike Felipe, who nipped and scratched.

He ate the cucumber as humans do a cob of corn, running his serrated teeth back and forth over its length. Despite his bath, he smelled like a not-totally-clean fish tank. “So?” he said. “How was your day?”

“Nothing special.” It should have been stranger, after all this time, having someone to come home to again, but it was like I had fallen right back into the version of myself that was completely used to it.

“Did I see some booze in there?”

I opened the fridge again, peered in. “Lemon chu-hai.”

Mr. Frog grimaced. “Better than nothing. What do you say we crack open a couple and have them on the balcony?”

“Sounds good to me.”

The air was heavy, rainy season not far off. We sat directly on the concrete floor of the balcony, our backs against the door, Mr. Frog’s carapace clicking on the glass. He didn’t seem concerned that people in the building across the way might come out onto their own balconies and spot us in conversation.

“Judging by your apartment, you haven’t been here long,” he said.

“Just a month. I was in New York before.”

“Why?”

“I was teaching Japanese for a city college.”

Mr. Frog looked up at me. His eyes were like a sea turtle’s, two dark marbles under wise, heavy lids. “Living there all by yourself?”

“No, with a boyfriend. An American. We met here, but then I moved back home with him. It didn’t work out.” The sea-turtle eyes were peering down into the watery reaches of my mind, dredging up what I hadn’t yet said. “He ended up taking his own life.”

Mr. Frog shook his head and swigged from his chu-hai. “Kappa never do this.”

“Why not?”

“They are not our lives to take.”

“Because you belong to the rivers?”

In reply, he gave a grunt, affirmative or negative I could not tell. I recalled, when I was young, reading in some book of folklore that kappa would pull children into water to devour their livers. Once, on a family vacation to Lake Biwa, I saw a sign illustrated with kappa to warn of drowning danger. What about those lives—were those theirs to take? Maybe it was the effect of all those slasher films, but the thought of them, the ones sucked under, barely moved me. People died in the depths all the time. I knew that better than anyone.

I had intended to write Sam’s mother that weekend. But then I became preoccupied with my part-time job teaching Japanese to foreigners, mostly Americans who were themselves language instructors. I held private lessons in my apartment on Saturdays and Sundays; my only rule was we use as little English as possible.

My three o’clock appointment was with Jesse, who I judged to be in his late twenties, a few years younger than me. He was originally from West Virginia, and when I asked him, in our first session, whether he had liked living there, he said in Japanese, “No. Hated.” He did not elaborate further. I wondered whether this had to do with how he held himself so stiffly, even as we grew more familiar with each other, even as the afternoon sun slid around my tatami room, warming the straw, even when I served tea and cookies to put him at ease.

That afternoon we practiced talking about hobbies. Jesse said he liked BJJ.

“BJJ?” I echoed.

We were seated on the floor, beneath a low table; I had set up this room in the traditional Japanese style so that my students would feel fully immersed. Jesse’s forearms rested parallel to one another against the tabletop, although rest was hardly the right word; he was rigid as ever. Something hummed through him, something like steel. I found myself thinking of Sam, who’d had a titanium rod in his left leg, the result of a fall from a tree as a child. After he was cremated, the rod must have been left intact, gleaming within the ashes. What had been done with it?

“Brazilian jiu jitsu,” he said. “I practice…one week, three times.”

“Three times a week,” I corrected. Now I was remembering the horror movie about the backpackers in Brazil, seeing in my mind the bar patrons stringing them up, hacking into their flesh like sides of beef. There was the thrill of having any image I wanted, gruesome as can be, flickering inside me, while from the outside I appeared composed, seated with my hands in my lap before him.

“Three times a week. And as for Miss Naomi?”

It should have occurred to me it was the same for Jesse, that he too was capable of conversing calmly while inside him dark fantasies played out.

“Hmm,” I said. “I like going for walks. And traveling. Visiting foreign countries.”

Jesse’s cookies sat untouched on the plate before him. “We both like moving around.”

“It is difficult for me to stay still,” I agreed. This was a sentence construction we would work on soon: It is hard for me to, it is easy for me to.

He dropped his right hand and with it stroked the warm tatami. “Better than teaching, I like studying.”

“I like studying better than teaching,” I corrected.

“Yes,” he said. “Studying with Miss Naomi.” He looked up at me from the mat. His eyes were blue, or green; they changed with the light, shifting back and forth between colors.

▴ ▴ ▴

Mr. Frog returned that evening. I was making an omelet when he knocked on the balcony door.

I unlocked it and slid it open for him. “How did you get up there?”

He ignored the question. “What did your students learn today?”

I had warned him not to show up during my afternoon lessons. It would be too distracting, I started to say, and he waved me off, no explanations necessary.

For some reason I didn’t feel like talking about Jesse, so I told him instead about my lesson with Tania, a student from Singapore. “How to conjugate commands. I came across a helpful mnemonic for the te-form to share with her,” I said, at the stove again, my back to Mr. Frog. “It’s to the tune of ‘Clementine,’ an old American folk song. It goes like—”

But before I could begin to sing, Mr. Frog broke in. He sang in unaccented English, in a voice that lifted tunefully above his usual hoarseness, a verse I’d never heard before:

Drove the horses to the water, every morning just at nine.
Hit her foot against a splinter, fell into the foaming brine.
Ruby lips above the water, blowing bubbles soft and fine.
But alas, I was no swimmer, so I lost my Clementine.

I applauded. “Wow,” I said. “I never realized that song was so morbid.”

Mr. Frog raised his eyebrows—or really, the ridge on his face where eyebrows ordinarily would be. “Now you know, Little Sister,” he said.

▴ ▴ ▴

Sometimes Mr. Frog would call me Little Sister, other times by my name. He pronounced my name in either the Japanese or the American way, depending on his mood, but both sounded sardonic in his mouth, as though he felt neither really represented me. In Japan my name was pronounced now-me; in America, nay-oh-me. The first time I’d been addressed in this latter way was by a high school classmate, after my father was transferred by his company to its New York office. We’d settled in Connecticut, in Cos Cob, a town whose name I expected would make more sense once I improved my English, but it never did.

On my first day of school, another Japanese girl met me in the principal’s office. She would serve as my sempai, she said, though she hastened to explain that the sempai-kouhai relationship as I understood it did not really exist here. “Here, you’re Naomi,” she added, saying it in the American way.

My name had sprouted, like tumors, strange new syllables. But I decided I liked it. It was as though I was meeting another version of myself. And when my father was transferred again, two years later, to the Kobe office, and I reverted to the old Naomi, it no longer fit quite right.

▴ ▴ ▴

A week passed without a visit, and then Mr. Frog was back on Saturday evening, after my lessons were done. We were falling into a routine: chu-hai on the balcony, a plate of cucumbers to snack on. On the street below us, a river of people churned, flowing toward the city center for a night out, and we looked over the railing (or through its slats, for Mr. Frog) at the crowns of their heads, some black, some dyed shades of rust, others bleached almost white.

“What do you do,” I asked Mr. Frog, “when you’re not visiting me?”

“Kappa business.”

I remembered then I still had not replied to Sam’s mother. The task had slipped from my hands like a wriggling fish. Well, I reasoned, she had Sam’s father to confide in; she had a daughter, sisters and brothers, a large family, plenty of support. Whereas I had nothing to offer, save a reminder I’d broken her son’s heart. At the wake, she had tried to reassure me: “He had an illness. He died of it,” she said. “No one blames you.”

But a mist of unease settled over me. “What is ‘kappa business?’ Swimming? Hunting? Mating?”

“Worry about yourself,” Mr. Frog croaked. It was the first time he snapped at me. He kept his black eyes on the street.

I stared at his carapace, its intricate patterning, the black pentagonal outlines and tan rings within them, like the rings of a tree, until my vision blurred.

“But wasn’t it a good thing,” I said, “when I worried about you?”

He turned and gave a little bow, bending from the waist, shell shifting, leathery neck craned upward so the stuff in his crown wouldn’t spill. The fish tank smell wafted off him again.

“Otsukaresama deshita,” he said. It was one of the first phrases I taught my weekend students, the phrase I said at the close of each lesson, the standard formality spoken in gratitude to a person who has worked hard at something. But it sounded a little ironic coming from him.

“If you had died, would another kappa have replaced you?” I asked.

“Every river has its kappa,” Mr. Frog said.

▴ ▴ ▴

There had been, from the night I met Sam at a bar in Daimyo, what my American friends would call “red flags.” Sam’s drinking, for instance, and his insistence, once he was sodden with alcohol, that he was a failure, his life a monument to failure, his nerves and muscles and bones overwritten with failure. But more often than not he rebounded in the morning, once the heavy lid of hangover had been pushed back by coffee. He’d become optimistic then about the prospects for his novel. This was the artistic temperament, I thought, vacillations between hope and despair. I imagined when we moved to New York the situation might be different.

My American friends would call this denial. They have a phrase: wherever you go, there you are. But the saying strikes me as incomplete. As we move about the world, we encounter different selves. These selves have been lying dormant within us, only able to emerge under certain circumstances, certain pressures. So to me it was perfectly reasonable that Sam’s troubles were only the troubles of a Sam-in-Japan, and in New York I would meet him again for the first time.

▴ ▴ ▴

Rainy season had begun. That Saturday during our lesson I told Jesse about the Japanese name for it, tsuyu, the word made up of the characters for plum and rain. During the previous tsuyu, a mudslide onto a highway in Fukuoka had killed three motorists, and a river in Hiroshima prefecture overflowed its banks and swept away a handful of houses. I thought it must be Mr. Frog’s favorite time of year, damp and disastrous. And he did insist on having our chu-hai on the balcony as usual when he visited that evening, seeming to enjoy the way the rain sprayed into his face as it glanced off the railing.

“You work so much,” Mr. Frog said. “When do you take a rest?”

“I have to keep you in cucumbers, don’t I?”

“You know this is a problem with you Japanese. Taking your duties too far. Ever hear of death from overwork?”

“What do you mean, ‘you Japanese’? What are you, then?”

“If it’s money you need, just ask. It’s no problem. Remember, I owe you a debt.”

I didn’t ask where he would get this money. “It’s not about that. After being around teenagers all week, I like teaching adults.”

“Especially Jesse. You are attracted to him,” Mr. Frog observed.

I had referred to Jesse only vaguely, but Mr. Frog missed nothing. There seemed no point in disagreeing.

“I guess,” I said.

“So why don’t you sleep with him?”

“He’s my student. It would be unethical.”

Mr. Frog snorted. “It’s been ages, hasn’t it? Wouldn’t be surprised to see a tumbleweed come rolling out of there.” He nodded in the direction of my crotch.

“It hasn’t even been a year.”

“A year!” he said. He slumped against the balcony door, tilted his beak skyward. “What a nightmare.”

“All right, that’s enough.”

“Who are you kidding here?” Mr. Frog said. “You already know you’re going to do it.”

▴ ▴ ▴

The rain was impossible. From my balcony I watched as men squatted under the awning of the convenience store, smoking, waiting for a break in the torrent; then giving up, running, jackets hoisted overhead, onto the shining street. I should have been preparing for my lesson with Jesse, but my head felt overfull, all my students clamoring around in there, the young ones from the high school, the not-so-young who visited me weekends, their questions and their needs, all the lessons I had yet to teach them. And underneath that, Sam’s mother, wishing she was comatose. And underneath that—

A knock on the door. I went back into the apartment and opened it for Jesse, who shook off his outside shoes and dropped his dripping umbrella in the foyer.

“Tadaima,” he said, stiff as ever, shoulders back, arms locked to his sides, torso a brutal rectangle. I decided not to correct him, to explain that the phrase tadaima was the equivalent of Honey, I’m home, reserved for spouses and children. Many of the foreigners I taught struck me as people who had gone searching for the place where they fit, and, finding none, decided they had exhausted their home countries and should try a whole new one. But they weren’t exactly wanted here, either. Even on rush-hour trains they were given plenty of space, left to sit or stand inside a little circumference of nothing. If Jesse felt at home in my apartment, felt a sense of ownership, even, that was a good thing.

I went into the kitchen. “I’m sorry,” I called, “I haven’t made the tea yet. If you’ll just give me a minute—”

“That’s okay.” Jesse followed me in and leaned against the table, arms crossed. “Sensei,” he said, “you’re speaking to me in English.”

“Oh. Sometimes it’s hard to flip the switch.”

I took the kettle off the stove and brought it to the sink to fill, but his hand was there, wrapping itself around my forearm.

His lips pressed into mine; one of his hands snaked up into my hair and the other around my back, pulling me in. Behind his hard chest was a fluttering, a butterfly lightness. He moaned softly into my mouth, into the dark cave of me, and a flare went up there and spread its warmth throughout my body. Maybe that’s what it was, I thought, my compulsion for watching all those awful splatter films: simple horniness, needing to be released.

His mouth traveled to my ear, my neck, his hands to my hips. “God,” he breathed, “you’re so fucking sexy.”

Networks of nerves in my skin were awakening, coming online. I pulled him into the bedroom.

▴ ▴ ▴

The rain continued to hammer against the roof of the apartment block, and in the bedroom, curtains drawn, we were cocooned by it, groping around in the dim. Then Jesse’s cock was out, firm as the rest of him. I asked if he had a condom and he shook his head.

“It’s fine,” he said. “I’ll pull out.”

“I’m not so sure I’m fine with that.”

He sat back on his heels. “I’m clean,” he said.

I sat up too, pulled my knees up, rested my chin on them.

“What, you think because I’m American I’m dirty?”

My thoughts scrambled, Japanese and English words jumbling together. I grasped for the right ones. “I assure you that’s not it.”

“There’s a Lawson’s right across the street. Let me go grab some condoms, it’ll only take a minute.” Jesse tilted his head to the side, ran a hand over my foot and up my calf, up my thigh. His thumb brushed my pubic hair. “You know what I see?” he said. “A wet pussy that wants to get fucked.”

With Sam, I’d liked dirty talk, but not of this kind, that sliced off parts of me and separated them out. My desire dried up. “Let’s do other things for now.”

He sighed and craned over me again, resumed kissing my mouth and neck. Then, a minute later, I felt him push into me.

“Hey.” I scooted back toward the headboard and folded myself up again. “I was clear about how I wanted to proceed.”

“Why do you sound like that in English?” Jesse said. “Like a fucking robot?”

I couldn’t make out his features in the dim.

“Excuse me,” I said, and walked across the apartment, hearing under the rain my own ragged breathing.

Mr. Frog was in the bathroom, hunched atop the toilet tank. He had no reaction to my nudity, my flaming face. His black eyes glittered.

“Shall I get rid of this fool for you?” he asked.

I nodded.

▴ ▴ ▴

My hands were tingling. I went into the living room and pressed them against the glass of the window as it was pummeled by rain. They seemed not to belong to me. I’d had the same sensation when Sam’s sister called and told me he had leapt from the bridge. That was on a sunless January morning; the sky and the river would have been indistinguishable, one long sheet of gray.

I heard Jesse get up out of bed and make his way to the toilet, and the tingling intensified. It was as though it had a will of its own. It wanted to gnarl my fingers into claws and rip at his skin. The idea felt not mine, like it had been beamed into my brain from the outside.

From the bathroom I heard a huge, rattling gasp, the sound of someone drowning in their own blood. It rolled on, the sound, like the rain, and then dissolved into it, and the tingling sensation in my hands dropped off. I found myself calmed, the way I had been watching horror movies, present for a violence I could point to and name and therefore control.

I returned to the bedroom, slipped into bed, pulled the covers over me, and fell into a half-dream of currents of water flowing, bearing me along. At some point Jesse came in, wordlessly gathered his things, and left. I didn’t look up at him; I was so warm and comfortable between the sheets that I didn’t want to. And also, maybe, was afraid to.

Sometime after that, there were cold fingers on my arm, so much colder than a human’s.

I rolled over and came face to face with Mr. Frog. “What did you do to him?”

Even through the dim he was visibly changed, his skin a deeper emerald, his eyes shining.

“I took his shirikodama.”

“His what? His anus-ball?” I’d never heard the word before. “What is that? Can he live without it?”

Mr. Frog considered. “Technically, he is alive.” Then he grinned in a way I didn’t like. “My debt to you is repaid. Pleasure doing business with you, Killer.”

Was that all this had been—business? “I’m no killer,” I said.

He shrugged, carapace shifting, and turned to leave. There was a finality to his movements.

“Is that all?” I asked.

He stopped and looked over his shoulder. “Oh, you can bring me another.” He seemed to be considering again. “In fact,” he said, “I think we’d make a good team.”

▴ ▴ ▴

After he left my room, I lay listening for the sound of my front door opening and closing, but it never came. It was early evening now, and with it had arrived a small break in the rain. Wrapping a sheet around myself, I stepped back out onto the balcony. To someone across the way, pressing his face to his now-still window to feel the relief of precipitation’s end, I would have looked like a ghost.

I had the compulsion to watch Mr. Frog make his way out of the building and down the street, to see if anyone else noticed him, but he didn’t appear. Maybe he traveled through the sewers. Or maybe he never left my apartment at all. But where was there for him to hide?

Water puddled around my feet on the balcony, began soaking up into the sheet. My eyes traveled to the building across the street and stopped on a dark shape huddled under its awning. Jesse. He stood there staring up at me.

My thoughts broke apart again, shed their coherence. Seeing me staring back, Jesse came out from under the awning, moving with slow steps before stopping right in the middle of the street. Now I could read his expression. There was nothing there, nothing behind the eyes, the steel excised, the intelligence gone. A taxi braked before him and honked once, and he didn’t so much as flinch.

I had seen this absence before, in Sam, when he was very drunk, his whole wonderful self shrunk down very small and sunk to depths unreachable. And then, more terribly, when he was stone-cold sober, invaded by something worse than alcohol. When I tried to touch him then, it was as though he was behind a wall of glass. My hands slid right off.

“Go home, Jesse,” I called down to him.

With the unthinking obedience of an automaton, he turned and walked away.

▴ ▴ ▴

For many weeks after that there was no visit from Mr. Frog. At the high school I was swept away by preparations for the annual Culture Festival, overseeing the members of the English Club as they prepared a puppet show about kitsune, the trickster fox. They’d adapted into English a folktale about a kitsune who transforms into a beautiful woman and bewitches a traveling monk. Their version, condensed and eccentrically translated, was difficult to follow, but there was one line that stuck with me: “Kitsune haunt the most lonely of places.”

I stayed late every night with them, rehearsing. There was little time to recover on the weekends, with foreign students flowing in and out of my home, save for the one blank hour that had belonged to Jesse. And there was no time at all to write to Sam’s mother, not in a way that would do justice to her suffering. Better to wait, I thought, than dash off some hurried reply.

The high school faculty celebrated the end of Culture Festival—and with it, rainy season—with a party, in a private room at a seafood restaurant in Hakata. There was the usual awkwardness of waiting around the long table for stragglers to arrive, everyone’s hands folded in their laps, everyone pretending they weren’t aching for the first toast to be made and all the usual rules for behavior suspended. Then at last it was underway. Mr. Kaneko sat beside me, ready to refill my glass of beer the moment I drained it.

“You’re strong, Nao-chan,” he observed. “Your face doesn’t turn red at all.”

I’d had plenty of practice drinking, with Sam, and then with Mr. Frog. Still, I told myself, take it easy; wake tomorrow with a clear head so you can finally work out your response to Sam’s mother. But Mr. Kaneko kept filling my glass, and I kept draining it and drowning that little scolding self, shaking her finger.

Then my coworkers were getting unsteadily to their feet, pulling on the raincoats they’d brought just in case.

Mr. Kaneko leaned in and whispered to me. “They’re going to an after-party. We weren’t invited. Should we crash it?”

I didn’t want to go home, that was for sure. If I went home that meant tomorrow morning was near.

▴ ▴ ▴

Crushed beside me on the sticky vinyl sofa of the karaoke room, Mr. Kaneko draped an arm over my shoulders. It lay there like a waterlogged snake. Before us, the vice principal and physics teacher were belting out a song by The Carpenters, rocking side to side in unison, eyes squeezed shut.

Mr. Kaneko’s lips brushed my earlobe. “You’re too cute, Nao-chan,” he whispered again. The sound was like sand when your feet first touch it; a chill climbed my spine. The history teacher, a woman around my age, looked over at us and then quickly away. There would be no one to subtly intervene, as the more lucid teachers typically did when one of our number got carried away at work parties, so as to spare them from shame when meeting our faces again in the staff room on Monday. I was not one of them. They thought it was because of my years outside the country; only Mr. Frog knew the true reason.

“Let’s go to your place,” Mr. Kaneko murmured. The heavy arm dropped; its hand ran down the tender inside of my forearm. “My wife won’t mind. We have an arrangement.”

He had to be in his sixties, I thought. Could he really believe I would succumb to his charms—that he had charms to succumb to?

Of course I could have gotten up and left. But there was Sam’s mother, her unanswered email, a throb at the end of the line of hours between me and morning.

I stood and looked down at him, pinned by inebriation to the couch. I saw how easy it would be.

“Well?” I said. “What are you waiting for?”

He remained there a moment, stunned into place, before getting to his feet and following me.

▴ ▴ ▴

As I had expected, Mr. Frog was there, waiting atop the toilet tank.

“I have another one for you,” I said. I’d handed Mr. Kaneko a chu-hai and left him to wait in the kitchen.

“For us,” he corrected.

Locked inside the small space, his fish-tank odor was especially strong. I tried to breathe through my mouth. “But there’s nothing in it for me,” I said.

Mr. Frog crossed his thin arms over the plates on his chest, regarding me with his black marble eyes. Then he burst into cackles. “Ha! Ha! Ha!” he said, surely loud enough for Mr. Kaneko to hear.

“Be quiet, will you?”

“Nothing in it for you!” He went on laughing, the sound ricocheting off the walls.

“Fine,” I said, when his rasping giggles finally started to subside. “What’s in it for me?”

All at once he was sober. “You’re a killer,” he said. I parted my lips to protest, but he narrowed his eyes in a way that plugged up my throat. “You killed your boyfriend, and now you have the taste for blood.”

He hopped to the toilet seat, spun me with a strength that could not have come from those skinny arms, and pushed me to the mirror.

“Look yourself in the face,” Mr. Frog said.

A woman of thirty-some-odd years, with a face still soft save for a slash deepening between her eyebrows, looked back at me. I hadn’t really studied her in a while, the woman in the mirror, only for as long as it took to arrange her hair and brush makeup over her cheeks. I watched her now. And far behind her eyes I did see something stirring.

▴ ▴ ▴

In the living room Mr. Kaneko was sipping from his chu-hai and staring at the sole decoration I’d put up, a framed print of a Chagall painting Sam and I had liked. It was called Birthday. In it, a man floated over his wife, his neck lengthened and swiveled absurdly, to plant a kiss on her startled face.

His index finger hovered over the man’s closed eyes, the bouquet in his wife’s hand, the window through which a green village could be glimpsed. “This is really something,” he said. He turned to me. “You should decorate more. It’s so empty in here.”

“I know. I’m still settling in.”

“I can help you carry things up the stairs, if you need. Furniture or paintings or whatever.” Now that he was here, Mr. Kaneko seemed less certain of himself. He looked down at his feet in their thick athletic socks.

Was it true, what he’d said about his wife, that they had an arrangement? Would she miss him if what made him Mr. Kaneko—the generosity and the provocations, the disregard for group harmony, the stories from the seventies—was all sucked away?

He sipped from his chu-hai, and we stood there smiling at each other for a long string of seconds.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “to have made you come all this way.”

He nodded, understanding. “I’ll see you in school Monday.”

▴ ▴ ▴

Mr. Frog came bursting from the bathroom the moment the door closed behind Mr. Kaneko. “What have you done?”

The rage shaking his small frame should have been funny, but it wasn’t.

I chewed on my lower lip. “I chickened out.”

He glared at me with animal eyes. I’d long suspected Mr. Frog could see past words and gestures, could see at least another layer deeper, so I tried to keep my thoughts bland. I sank to my knees on the kitchen floor and bowed all the way down, my forehead touching the linoleum, in a show of deepest contrition. “Forgive me,” I said.

The back of my neck was exposed. He could strike me there and do who knew what else, but I was betting he wouldn’t. My eyes squeezed shut, I heard him pad up to me, smelled him standing close.

“All right,” he said. “Get up.”

I straightened my back, still in a kneel, and met his eyes. Then, before he could react or fight me off, I brought my hands slamming down, clamping his narrow shoulders. I thrust my lips to the slimy ridge at the edge of the depression on his skull, and slurped all its fluid down.

It tasted violently wrong, like rot and stagnation, poisoned algae, silt and pollution. And then all the waterways of the world were inside me, hammering through my blood, coursing together. They gathered, coalescing into a form lumpen and enormous, a giant woman, the crown of her head scraping against the lid of the sky.

The water pounded at my skin, at the container of me. It wanted out. I ran for the sink and it poured from my mouth, my nose, my eyes, more than all the rain in rainy season, and ran down the drain.

Finally it stopped. Emptied, I slumped to the floor, too limp to sit up. My fingers reached out into the air; I felt them brush up against death. With my last scrap of energy I called for help.

“Sam,” I said.

A sad, single syllable, it staggered around the kitchen and collapsed.

▴ ▴ ▴

When I woke up I found a gray-green husk of something beside me on the kitchen floor. I crawled over to it. It was a little frog, small enough to fit inside the palm of my hand. It looked long dead.

I got to my feet, went to the coat closet, and pulled on my raincoat. Then I went back into the kitchen, where I picked up the frog and put it in my pocket.

This time the street leading to the Naka River was silent. The yatai operators, the drunken salarymen, the rebellious teenagers must all have been in their homes by then, or in lonely hotel rooms, folded up in sleep.

When I reached the river, I climbed over the railing and sidestepped down the banks again. At the brackish water’s edge, I took the frog from my pocket and slid its body back into the river.

It was the middle of the night, the sky black and sealed shut around me. Overhead, far up in the high-rises, a few windows were lit. They circled my head like a constellation. The street rose up, slapping the bottoms of my feet, as I walked back home, planning out what I was going to write to Sam’s mother.


Alanna Schubach’s debut novel, The Nobodies, will be published by Blackstone in June 2022. Her short fiction appears in the Sewanee Review, the Massachusetts Review, Juked, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She lives in New York, where she works as a creative-writing teacher and freelance journalist.