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Authors: Ruth Ozeki
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turned into a disaster. Mom wasn’t about to let anything like that happen again, so she was insisting he turn over his pay, and he was insisting that
he’d deposited it all into a high-yield blah blah account. Occasionally he’d hand her a stack of ten-thousand-yen bills, but that was it. And they would have gone on like this for
longer, only Dad got careless, and a couple of days before my fifteenth birthday, Mom found the stubs from the OTB in his pocket and confronted him, and instead of confessing he’d been lying,
he went out and sat in a park, getting smashed on vending machine saké, and then he went to the train station and bought a platform ticket and jumped in front of the 12:37 Shinjuku-bound
Chuo Rapid Express.
Luckily for him, the train had already started slowing down as it approached the station, and the conductor saw him wobbling on the edge of the platform and was able to slam on the emergency
brakes in time. It just missed him. It ran over that stupid briefcase of his. The station police came and hauled Dad up off the tracks and arrested him for causing a disturbance and interfering
with the timely operations of the transit system, but since it was unclear if he jumped or if he was just drunk and stumbled, instead of putting him in jail, they released him into Mom’s
custody.
Mom went to pick him up at the police station, brought him home in a cab, and put him into the bathtub, and when he came out, damp and a little bit more sober, he said he was ready to confess
everything. Mom told me to go into the bedroom, but Dad said I was old enough to know what kind of man my father was. He sat in front of us at the kitchen table, with his fingers white and clenched
together, and admitted that he had made the whole thing up. Instead of going to work as a chief programmer, he had been spending his days on a bench in Ueno Park, studying the racing form and
feeding the crows. He had sold his old computer peripherals to raise some cash, which he used to bet on the horses. Occasionally he would win, and he would hold back some of the cash to bet again,
and the rest he brought home to Mom, but recently he had been losing more than winning, until finally his cash was all gone. There was no high-yield blah blah account. There was no empathic
productivity software. There was no start-up at all. There was only the five-million-yen fine from the transit company that they make you pay for causing a “human incident,” which is a
nice way of saying when you try to use one of their trains to kill yourself. He bowed until his forehead almost touched the kitchen table and said he was sorry he had no money to buy me a present
for my birthday. I’m pretty sure he was crying.
The Chuo Rapid Express Incident was the first time and he was drunk, so you could almost believe it was an accident. In the end, that’s what Mom decided to do, and Dad went along with her,
even though his eyes told me that it wasn’t true.
6.
My old Jiko says that everything happens because of your karma, which is a kind of subtle energy that you cause by the stuff you do or say or even just think, which means you
have to watch yourself and not think too many perverted thoughts or they’ll come back and bite you. And not just in this lifetime, either, but in all your lifetimes going way back in your
past and into your future. So maybe it’s just my dad’s karma to end up on a park bench feeding crows in this lifetime, and really you can’t blame him for causing a human incident
and wanting to move along to the next lifetime pretty quick. Anyway, Jiko says that as long as you keep trying to be a good person and making an effort to change, then finally one day all the good
stuff you do will cancel out all the bad stuff that you’ve done, and you can become enlightened and hop on that elevator and never come back—unless, as I said, you’re like Jiko
and you’ve taken a vow not to ride on the elevator until everyone else
he’d deposited it all into a high-yield blah blah account. Occasionally he’d hand her a stack of ten-thousand-yen bills, but that was it. And they would have gone on like this for
longer, only Dad got careless, and a couple of days before my fifteenth birthday, Mom found the stubs from the OTB in his pocket and confronted him, and instead of confessing he’d been lying,
he went out and sat in a park, getting smashed on vending machine saké, and then he went to the train station and bought a platform ticket and jumped in front of the 12:37 Shinjuku-bound
Chuo Rapid Express.
Luckily for him, the train had already started slowing down as it approached the station, and the conductor saw him wobbling on the edge of the platform and was able to slam on the emergency
brakes in time. It just missed him. It ran over that stupid briefcase of his. The station police came and hauled Dad up off the tracks and arrested him for causing a disturbance and interfering
with the timely operations of the transit system, but since it was unclear if he jumped or if he was just drunk and stumbled, instead of putting him in jail, they released him into Mom’s
custody.
Mom went to pick him up at the police station, brought him home in a cab, and put him into the bathtub, and when he came out, damp and a little bit more sober, he said he was ready to confess
everything. Mom told me to go into the bedroom, but Dad said I was old enough to know what kind of man my father was. He sat in front of us at the kitchen table, with his fingers white and clenched
together, and admitted that he had made the whole thing up. Instead of going to work as a chief programmer, he had been spending his days on a bench in Ueno Park, studying the racing form and
feeding the crows. He had sold his old computer peripherals to raise some cash, which he used to bet on the horses. Occasionally he would win, and he would hold back some of the cash to bet again,
and the rest he brought home to Mom, but recently he had been losing more than winning, until finally his cash was all gone. There was no high-yield blah blah account. There was no empathic
productivity software. There was no start-up at all. There was only the five-million-yen fine from the transit company that they make you pay for causing a “human incident,” which is a
nice way of saying when you try to use one of their trains to kill yourself. He bowed until his forehead almost touched the kitchen table and said he was sorry he had no money to buy me a present
for my birthday. I’m pretty sure he was crying.
The Chuo Rapid Express Incident was the first time and he was drunk, so you could almost believe it was an accident. In the end, that’s what Mom decided to do, and Dad went along with her,
even though his eyes told me that it wasn’t true.
6.
My old Jiko says that everything happens because of your karma, which is a kind of subtle energy that you cause by the stuff you do or say or even just think, which means you
have to watch yourself and not think too many perverted thoughts or they’ll come back and bite you. And not just in this lifetime, either, but in all your lifetimes going way back in your
past and into your future. So maybe it’s just my dad’s karma to end up on a park bench feeding crows in this lifetime, and really you can’t blame him for causing a human incident
and wanting to move along to the next lifetime pretty quick. Anyway, Jiko says that as long as you keep trying to be a good person and making an effort to change, then finally one day all the good
stuff you do will cancel out all the bad stuff that you’ve done, and you can become enlightened and hop on that elevator and never come back—unless, as I said, you’re like Jiko
and you’ve taken a vow not to ride on the elevator until everyone else
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