To those who read the afterword first—your mind is temporally refracted. Just like this story.
“Grande latte?” asked the dark-skinned barista.
I repeatedly nodded, like a machine that had been poorly calibrated, and slid my credit card through the device at the register. The receipt that came squirting out on thermal paper contained some kind of tax I didn’t understand, making the price significantly higher than what was written on the menu.
It was early 2017, on the campus of an American university. I’d been visiting the café nearly every day, where I would order a grande caffe latte (four dollars). My English enunciation was so bad that they didn’t understand my order at first, but I’d been ordering the same thing so consistently that eventually, the barista would simply ask “Grande latte?” as soon as he saw me.
I sat down at a window seat, opened up my MacBook, and started writing my draft of Yokohama Station SF, Vol. 2 (the book you are reading right now). When it comes to novel series, the most advantageous retail pace is a new book every three months, but that was not going to happen at my writing speed, so I tried to be pragmatic and set a deadline of eight months for myself. That was the best interval, considering that I had to balance it with my university research job.
“Hi. Are you Japanese?” inquired a blond-haired, blue-eyed man sitting next to me. He must have spotted the Japanese on my screen.
I replied “Yes,” nodding exaggeratedly again. I was overemphasizing my physical gestures to compensate for the lack of confidence in my spoken language skill.
The man gave a look like What are you in such a hurry for? but asked, “I’m actually going to Japan on vacation soon. Do you have any recommendations?”
“Where in Japan? Kyoto? Or Hiroshima?”
“Around Tokyo.”
I called up a mental map of my home country. In 2017, the city of Tokyo hadn’t yet been Yokohama-Stationized, if I recalled correctly.
“I suppose you’d probably enjoy a trip to Senso-ji,” I suggested. He did a quick internet search for Senso-ji temple and nodded with satisfaction.
Relieved, I took a sip of my grande latte. It had been a while since I’d settled in the United States, but I still found even one- or two-sentence conversations to be exhausting. Whoever said “You’ll pick up English all on your own once you’re immersed in it” was lying their ass off. You wouldn’t learn it unless you spoke it. And both Japan and America were advanced enough that you could live your life almost entirely without conversing with another person.
There was a news program on the TV fastened to the wall. The volume was down, but the image and closed captioning were enough to make sense of it. The new president was claiming that he was going to build a wall on the border to Mexico. There was already a plan in motion, with metal wire strung along over three thousand kilometers. They planned to use it as a conduit for the structural genetic field that would automatically grow the wall on its own. There was great criticism from the strategic councils, who said that the results would be disastrous if they failed to control it.
Using the store wi-fi to connect to a Japanese news site, I saw that the prime minister stated, “I’m not in a position to comment,” regarding the story. That was correct. What could Japan possibly have to say about it?
My phone beeped with a notification—it was an e-mail from my editor back home. The title was “Another reprint,” and I smirked with delight, right where anyone could see. The initial printing royalties were like the proper salary for putting out the book, while reprints were more like unexpected bonuses. Obviously, that was a pleasant surprise.
In Japan, the first volume of Yokohama Station SF was selling extremely well in certain markets, and royalties were flooding into my bank account. That was very helpful when trying to make ends meet in an unfamiliar foreign country. Alas, the strong dollar was putting a big crimp in the spending power of my bonus.
After finishing up the Kumamoto chapter, I performed a simple spell-check and sent the file along to my editor. Once that was done, I disconnected from the wi-fi. That was a mental signal to myself that removing my connection to the internet meant removing myself from Japanese society, i.e. my novel work.
“Whew, I’m tired,” I muttered, stretching my limbs. That was when I noticed something was wrong.
“Huh?”
Uh-oh. I couldn’t move. Some of my joints were locked. Or to be more accurate, their range of motion was suddenly extremely narrow. I couldn’t straighten out my elbow to stretch my arm, and my ankle was practically fixed in place so that I couldn’t walk on it. What was going on?
I’d sprained my ankle once playing soccer and had been unable to move it, but this was something that appeared to be happening all over my body at once. After a bit of time twisting and bending until I’d learned how far each joint could turn, the word doctor popped into my mind. It was a word I’d hoped to avoid.
The city I lived in at this point was one of the major college towns in the United States. There were stickers on just about every public facility saying NO FIREARMS ALLOWED, and there were local text alerts about any shooting nearby, so it was extremely safe. However, the thought of medical costs was terrifying.
A friend of mine working on his postdoc in Seattle recently had to be hospitalized for his appendix, and the bill contained an item or two that he did not agree to, forcing him to call in to complain. I was anxious enough about using English that I didn’t want to get anywhere near a situation like that.
After some time waffling between I’ll probably get better with rest and Maybe I should nip this in the bud, I wrote an e-mail (because I was afraid of calling) to the college’s medical center.
“Uba. What does that mean?” asked Dr. Kawasaki. The young doctor was a third-generation Japanese-American, but he couldn’t speak a lick of Japanese. He pronounced Yuba as “Uba.” Aside from the weirdness of the sound, it made me wonder if I should start spelling my name Youba or Euba to get the idea across. But at the moment, it was hardly significant.
“Your blood YSC (Yokohama Station concentration) is too high. How did you get it so bad? Are you a competitive shumai eater, or what?” he said, staring at the iPad in his hands.
“No. If anything, I’m more of a potsticker guy.”
“That was a joke. Shumai isn’t going to shoot your YSC through the roof, obviously,” he responded, laughing. Few things were less funny than a doctor cracking wise. “Anyway, your entire body is infected with structgenes. I’ve never seen this before.”
I recalled that structgenes was another word for the structural genetic field that was used in the Anglosphere. “Huh? Can that stuff infect the human body? I thought they had no effect on any aqueous solution containing electrolytes,” I protested. Because of my profession, I could at least speak with relative confidence in technical terms.
“Ooh, I’m surprised you knew that. Are you majoring in structural mechanics?”
“Uh, no, I just had to study it.”
“Huh. Well, you’re right, normally it’s supposed to be impossible for this to happen to the human body. The only thing you might potentially see infected by structgenes are the bones; Yokohama Station simply cannot spread through the skin, no matter how much contact there is. What the hell did you do?”
There was only a single answer that came to mind. I didn’t want to say it, but I had no choice. I explained to the doctor that I’d written a book about such-and-such in Japan, and it was already in print. I wasn’t sure how much of my weak English Dr. Kawasaki understood, but he did nod along with me.