A Room Where the Star-Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard by Hideo Levy

Author:Hideo Levy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000, Fiction/Literary, LIT008030, Literary Criticism/Asian/Japanese
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

WHEN HE TURNED RIGHT, BEN FOUND HIMSELF IN FRONT OF a pub and the entrance to a building next door. He continued on, weaving through piles of black and blue plastic bags of rotting garbage. He kicked at the fallen leaves and pieces of paper with the words OK1 swirling in the wind at his feet. All the while, he moved through the curious gazes of everyone he passed. Ben walked farther, trying to crack the codes of the city that appeared before his eyes: the signs for local bars, the billboards covered with advertisements, and the flyers plastered on every telephone pole shouting four-character slogans like and .2

Just past the ¥100 Tempura Rice Bowl joint, he ran across a bored-looking guy wearing a white waiter’s uniform, standing under a sad-looking willow tree near the door to a café. The two-story café was stuck between two tall buildings, reminding Ben of a stout, stone-faced king flanked by guards. At the entrance, beside a picture window tinted the color of whisky, was a sign that read and, next to it, the word FUGETSUDO.

When Ben approached, the waiter didn’t even look at him. Instead, he reached into his pocket with soiled, slender fingers and took out a crumpled, light-green box of Wakaba cigarettes. “Think I care if you go in?” he seemed to say as he lit up. Offering neither a harro nor a “welcome,” he just puffed away.

With no hesitation, Ben went in.

He found himself inside a wide, deep room. On either side of a long passageway were round tables in a salon-style arrangement, with several chairs around each table. Under a ceiling as tall as a temple’s, Ben proceeded awkwardly toward the back.

There were three wait staff, and no customers besides Ben. The place looked like it had just opened for the day. From the way the employees were standing around in front of a potted palm, they seemed to be waiting for a ceremony to begin. The laziness, the tedium, and the bleariness of eyes unfit for morning that he saw in each of their faces, however, told him that they had served in this ceremony many times before and were sick and tired of it.

Ben looked around the room, at the empty chairs and tables, at the sickly foliage of the plants, and finally at the large wall on the left. From among the various drawings and posters on the wall, a single black-and-white photograph caught his eye.

He walked up to the wall for a better look and immediately recognized the photograph, which he’d seen in either The Washington Post or Time magazine. It was of a young girl, twelve or thirteen years old, Asian, skinny, surely Vietnamese. She’d been captured by the U.S. military and had been unable to return to her village. A black blindfold covered her eyes, and her mouth was tightly shut. She was a refugee from a modern war, solemnly enduring her pain in a tropical country where there was no November, suffering humiliation at the hands of soldiers and photographers alike.

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