A Brief Respite, Cursing the Night.

We drink on a jetty sticking out into the bay, fishing boats tied to the pier bumping and thumping nearby, a galaxy of stars dancing in the waves: the huge chemical plant across the way.

There’s three of us: Eiji, Kenji and I. Hanami is over, but we’re drinking still. It’s April, and the freshman from Eiji’s factory, the factory across the bay, have all gone to a bar. Eiji, a bearded, orange-haired man in his mid-thirties, declined their invitation.

“I can’t stand those guys, really,” he confided to me in English after they’d gone.

It had been Kenji’s idea to pick up some beers at the Lawson’s and head out to the pier. We’d drank there on more than a few occasions and, besides, the night was unseasonably warm and we weren’t quite feeling the buzz we wanted. Kenji, in his fifties and almost perpetually sunny, was unusually dour. “I wanna get shit-faced,” he said, using the expression I’d taught him a few months before when we’d first met at the yatai.

I’d carried the beer, Kenji’d brought the chairs, and Eiji bought a couple packs of cigarettes to share.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Eiji said in Japanese, leaning back in his chair, beer in one hand, cigarette in the other, smiling.

“Your factory?” I asked. Keiji sniggered.

“No, sorry. The ocean,” Eiji clarified. He switched to English: “You think factory is beautiful?”

I looked at it. Cranes loading and unloading all sorts of shit from a cargo ship.

“No, man. I think it’s ugly.”

“That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” agreed Keiji.

We drank the beers and smoked the cigarettes. Silence stretched on and on. I had to break it.

“How’s work?” I asked Keiji in Japanese.

“Maa maa,” he said, and then switched to English: “It’s bad.”

“Why?”

“Well, I’ve been working there for a couple years now, you know? Anyway, they haven’t paid me for a couple of months now.”

“What? Really?”

“How long?”

“Five months?”

“What?” Eiji and I said together. But when Eiji didn’ ask the question, I had to: “Why?”

“Bad economy, you know.”

“Bad economy,” I parroted. “But…five months? What have you been doing for money?”

“I had some savings.”

“Yep,” Eiji said.

“Well, why don’t you quit and get another job?” I asked.

“What other job?” Keiji asked. “I’m fifty-two.” That seemed to settle the matter for Eiji and Keiji, but I wouldn’t let it go, mostly because I didn’t get it.

“Well, you could look around. I don’t know. There’s gotta be some part-time work or something, some place that’ll pay you, at least.”

Eiji cracked open another beer and handed it to me. “You don’t get it.”

“Nope. If my company didn’t pay me for one month, I’d be outta there.”

“Keiji’s an ojii-san.” Old man. Keiji nodded.

“So what? My dad’s sixty and he just changed jobs.”

“Yeah, but your dad’s American, right?” Eiji said. “Americans quit easy.”

Keiji continued in English: “Japanese don’t.”

Eiji countered: “Old Japanese don’t.”

Keiji spit into the ocean. “Young Japanese have no… sticking?”

“Loyalty?” I offered.

“Yeah. Right. They quit easy.”

“Old Japanese guy doesn’t quit.”

“We loyalty to company.”

Keiji set down his can. It sounded empty. I opened a can and passed it to him.

“But five months, Keiji. That’s a long time. What’re you doing to do if they don’t pay you?”

“I am patient.”

“Baka,” Eiji mumbled. Stupid.

“Baka zya nai,” Keiji laughed. “The company takes care of us.”

“The company used to take of us,” Eiji said. “Now they don’t, but so many people still have this thinking. Especially around here.” Eiji meant Yamaguchi prefecture. He was from Osaka, the second-largest city in Japan, and he was always amused by the provincial attitudes of Yamaguchi people.

Keiji’d gone quiet. Maybe he felt there was nothing more to say. Eiji was right, I knew.

“Well, what about your job, Eiji?”

“What about it?”

“You gonna quit?”

“I can’t. Got family, got kids.”

“Yeah, but you just said—”

Keiji laughed and pushed himself up out of his chair. He went over to the water’s edge and took a piss.

“I can quit, but it’s difficult.” He looked sad.

I knew what difficult meant. In Japan, difficult means impossible. And since for me happily drunk means belligerent, I persisted, pressing for clarification.

“Do you like your job?” I asked.

“No.”

“Then quit.”

“If I quit, I won’t be able to get another job.”

“Why not? I heard the chemical industry is doing well.”

“They talk to each other,” Keiji said, sitting back down.

“What? Who?”

Eiji explained. “All these companies know each other, all the managers and presidents. When someone quits a company, they tell each other. The other companies won’t hire a quitter.”

“But we heard maybe this is just a rumor,” Keiji interjected.

“You just said younger guys quit their jobs,” I complained.

Eiji sighed. “Yeah, they can. But we aren’t going to get another job in the same industry, especially not if we are engineers or managers.”

“But you can get another job?”

“Yes, but it’ll be something very different. Retraining needed. It’s difficult. If you studied something at university, you want to get a job in that, right? If you studied engineer, you don’t want to be insurance agent, right?”

“Jesus-fucking-Christ, that’s just messed up! Aren’t there laws against that? In America, companies can’t do that.”

“Yeah, there’s laws,” Eiji said.

“But this isn’t America,” Keiji said. “In Japan, companies are number one. Government don’t do laws against company.”

“The government doesn’t enforce laws against the companies, you mean?”

“Right.”

“Well, then, I hate Japanese companies.”

Eiji stood up and laughed. “Me, too.” He flicked his cigarette butt out into the water as if to hit his factory. “Look at all that smoke. All my kids have allergies. I don’t. They grow up here, they get allergies. Government and factory say it’s not factories fault, but we know it is.

“You can’t say that,” Keiji said quietly. “No factory: no jobs. No town.”

Eiji subsided and sat down heavily on a stone.

Keiji and I left Eiji alone for awhile. It must’ve been about one in the morning. We all had to work in the morning. We’d have to go soon. The beer was almost gone, too.

From across the bay, suddenly there came the scream of protesting metal. Bells rang, horns sounded. The loading dock crane jerked to a halt. Dozens of men in uniforms and hardhats scurried around the dock shouting purposefully.

Eiji laughed once. “Oh, shit!” he said in English.

We kept watching, but nothing further happened. The machinery had stopped, but people were repairing it. There were no explosions and no fires other than those coming out of the chimney stacks of the nearby oil refinery.

“Shall we go?” Keiji said, standing up.

We agreed and stood up, also, collecting the cans and whatever butts we could find and putting them in the plastic bag.

An idea struck me. “Follow me,” I said, and went to the water’s edge. Eiji and Keiji came with me.

“Okay, on the count of three,” I said. “One, two, three!” I thrust my hand into the air, middle finger raised. “Fuck you!” I yelled.

Eiji and Keiji did the same, “Fuck you!”

Our yells died in our throats when the mirrored surface of the bay broke about halfway out. A black mound rose, breaking the rippling sheet of factory lights. Long and slow it moved, silent. And then the mound shaped into a fluke which rose even higher and then slipped under the water. The water rippled briefly where it had happened, and then went still again. The galaxy of lights returned.

We looked at each other.

Eiji was the first to laugh, and then we all laughed, together, not believing what we’d seen.

“Let’s get another beer,” Keiji said.

Eiji and I both protested, but we knew how this was going to go. Buy another beer at the secret vending machine that never closed, and then stumble home, passing the can between us. We’d done it before. We’d do it again. We’d complain, but we’d be at work again tomorrow. What choice did we really have?