At thirteen, David was proud of his vocabulary. He knew what ‘solipsism’ meant, and he was a ‘solipsist’, although he preferred to think of himself as an ‘egomaniac’, it sounded cooler; and, being a solipsistic egomaniac, he suspected that everything he’d ever experienced was created by his subconscious and only he was real.This was about to be tested. He and his tired parents and his older sister, who was more towards the nervous end of the nervous-excited spectrum than he was, were on a plane to Nagoya. They’d left Tipperary to move there and the new life they were headed for was beyond the boundaries of his imagination – he associated Japan with chopsticks, samurai, sumo, and violent video games; that was the full list – and he reasoned that, if he was all-powerful, Nagoya must not actually exist and they would never arrive. He was going to die in a plane crash. He could visualize that and he was calm about the possibility. If he was all-powerful. If he wasn’t, they should arrive safely.The flight was turbulence-free. He had a swooping feeling in his stomach during the descent but the landing wasn’t bumpy, and when the other passengers, his family included, rose from their seats, they looked like they expected to be where they were. And David was no longer a solipsist. He could barely claim to be an egomaniac.

 

He first heard ‘gaijin’ uttered in baggage claim. After loudly pointing out to his parents that one of their suitcases had thunked onto the carousel, he nudged in front of a pair of Japanese men in business suits who bounced the word between them while glaring at him as he retrieved the case.

They went directly from the airport to a hotel, where they collapsed into their beds, and, the next day, venturing out to explore the city by himself, he was called a gaijin on two occasions, once by the manager of a video-game shop when he didn’t step outside to sneeze, and again when, with no vehicles in sight and eating a bag of crisps by the handful, he crossed the road before the green man flashed – a number of people who were waiting to cross said it then. He didn’t dwell on it. He was spacey from the jet lag and there was so much to take in.

The hotel, for instance, was the tallest building he’d ever been in. Most of its exterior was glass and the lobby and the restaurant where they ate breakfast – he stuck to Belgian waffles, unready to try Japanese food or chopsticks – were dazzled by light, with guests and staff bustling by every which way. But no time to get used to it. They were only there two nights then he and his family moved into the house that the pharmaceuticals company his father worked for had arranged for them.

It was full of novelties. There was a shoe cupboard in the entryway so they adopted the practice of not wearing shoes indoors – ‘When in Rome,’ his mother said and he corrected her, ‘In Nagoya, Mam.’ The toilet had a control panel. One button heated the seat. He didn’t have the courage to find out what the other buttons did. The floors could be heated too. There were speakers in the walls and they could play music throughout the house. There were no keys for the front door, there was no keyhole, they had to input a code, and they could watch any visitors that buzzed the door through a camera. This was in 1994 but they were living in the future.

 

At the end of the first week, David and his sister started at an international school. 60% of the students were Japanese. Speaking English was mandatory and their parents had sent them there to become fluent. About half of the other students were American and the rest were from around the world. The curriculum was American-based – in Tipperary, David was in first year and now he was in eighth grade, while his sister was in tenth so they’d have to make their own way – and, with most of the teachers being American, the Japanese kids spoke English with Americanized accents.

David had to be mindful of the distinctions between Irish English and American English. In his first class, he made a girl blush, and impressed her with his confidence, when he asked if she had a ‘rubber’ he could borrow. It took him a moment to think of the alternative word – ‘Do you have an eraser?’ – and, to their mutual relief, she was able to provide him with one of those. And when his young teacher, a New Yorker, heard him mention his desire for ‘good craic’, she explained to him and his classmates that the same word, spelt differently, was slang for cocaine where she was from, and he was surprised by how matter-of-fact she was. In this school, teachers spoke to the pupils like they were supposed to be mature. No teacher would have dared to divulge illicit knowledge in his old school. There would have been bedlam.

Also that day, his class had been given the assignment of choosing an uncommon word to share. While David was excused from participating, he was happy to come up with something on the spot – he loved words and could get away with anything here! The word he wrote on the blackboard was ‘castration’. And, indeed, with a hooked eyebrow and a frozen smile, the teacher let him proceed with its meaning, which drew some aghast laughter. Another boy, Paul, shared the word ‘defenestration’. David wished he’d thought of it – it was a better word than his.

 

Paul told him what a gaijin was. White or black foreigners were automatically gaijins but the word wasn’t restricted to non-Asian foreigners. It translated as ‘outsider’ and could be applied to any non-Japanese citizen, or to someone who was born and raised in Japan but one or both of their parents weren’t Japanese, or to someone who was born here with two Japanese parents but had lived abroad then returned, especially if they were perceived to have picked up foreign habits. The word could be neutral or derogatory but when used to describe a true fish-out-of-water gaijin like David it tended to be the latter, so he wasn’t just a gaijin; he was, essentially, a fucking gaijin.

He and Paul became fast friends. After school, they’d play video games at Paul’s house and bond over their appreciation of gratuitous gore – David never encountered a real-life samurai but in some games he got to be one, beheading his enemies with a sweep of his sword, their felled bodies spouting blood from their open necks.

And they would watch sumo on TV. It wasn’t what David thought: a comical sport featuring interchangeable fat brutes slamming into each other and that was it. Sumo was steeped in history and ritual. Before a match could begin, the dohyō had to be purified by the tossing of salt and the wrestlers would stamp their feet to drive off evil spirits. They were cultured men, their sport was an art and a disciplined lifestyle, and many of them were talented musicians and multilingual.

David was learning how uncultured he was. Paul’s father was a white American and his mother was half-Japanese and half-Chinese, and, when he asked him how many countries he’d been to, Paul had to pause to count them all up, and that wasn’t unusual among the international kids. Most had been to more than ten countries and everyone spoke two languages but some spoke three or more. Irish was David’s worst subject back home so he had one-and-a-half languages at best and, apart from Ireland and Japan, he’d only been to England and France, and, for a kid his age from Tipperary, four countries was loads! His new classmates, though, were far more worldly.

Yet he was perplexed by some of their ideas. A few of the American kids didn’t believe in evolution. Despite his Catholic upbringing, David was an agnostic and it was news to him that evolution was up for debate, and when one girl, Georgia, said they were all the descendants of Adam and Eve, he assumed she was joking and laughed, and she snapped, ‘I am not descended from apes,’ and suggested it was eccentric to think otherwise.

He wanted to make amends for offending her so when she invited him to the bible-study meetings her father, a teacher at the school, hosted, he went. And, of course, he fancied her. Even if he didn’t stand a chance. She was his age but tall and tanned and could’ve passed for seventeen. She was beautiful. He was a late developer and looked two years younger than he was. He’d never be beautiful. Genetics were unfair. Still, soon he was saying that, thanks to her, he’d found God and believed it too, pretty much. She accompanied him to go buy his own bible. Half of it was in English, half in Japanese.

His classmates and his teachers had strange notions about Ireland. Most of them didn’t know the difference between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and thought terrorist acts were a daily occurrence throughout the island – that was if they knew Ireland was an island; one kid asked if there was a train running from Dublin to Paris. He could’ve said he used to tiptoe through a minefield to get to school every day and they’d have believed it. One teacher asked him to demonstrate to the class how to milk a cow, because apparently you couldn’t grow up in Ireland and not know how to handle an udder. He winged it and made some elbows-out up-and-down jerking motions with his hands, and the teacher was satisfied and didn’t recognize that he wasn’t being entirely serious. His classmates struggled to tell when he was being sarcastic or not as well – his delivery was a little deadpan either way. As they got used to him, they got a better read on his sense of humour.

In Tipperary, he wasn’t above feigning illnesses to take days off school but he loved school in Nagoya and he’d often get his mother to drive him there an hour early so he could play basketball on the outdoor court with his friends before class. The international kids came from a wide variety of backgrounds but being different was what they had in common. They were outsiders among other outsiders.

 

Away from school, Nagoya was highly homogenous, almost as much as David’s sheltered hometown was. He’d never known anyone of a different race before arriving here and had taken it for granted that the ‘normal’ perspective from which to view the world was his white, Irish one. That changed. In Nagoya, there was nothing normal about him. He had a face full of freckles and shoulder-length red hair. Sometimes small children would reach out to touch it, checking if the colour was real. Sometimes he was mistaken for a girl. People didn’t know what to make of him. His exoticism turned heads. He liked this. He felt special.

But he wasn’t always greeted with benevolent curiosity. One day, three Japanese boys ran up to him near his house and said, ‘Fuck you, American!’ and ran off. He didn’t take it personally; it was a clear case of mistaken identity. When he’d sit next to someone on the subway it wasn’t unusual for them to get up and sit elsewhere. Westerners were blamed for bringing diseases to Japan, terrible ones like AIDS, and, among other things, they were thought to be unclean, but the racism he experienced, while eye-opening, was mild. He was never threatened, never oppressed, and his time in Japan was limited – in fact, it was already slipping away – so the microaggressions didn’t take much of a toll. They may have deepened his empathy towards people who had to put up with more. And most Nagoyans were friendly and courteous. If he was alone or if it was just him and his sister and they looked at all lost, someone would approach them and ask in laboured English if they needed directions. And there was a sense of fellowship with other foreigners. If he passed anyone on the litterless streets who wasn’t Japanese, they’d acknowledge each other with a nod and an amused smile.

 

His favourite wrestlers were Konishiki and Akebono. They were lots of fans’ favourites – Konishiki was the heaviest wrestler ever, Akebono the best – but he was primarily drawn to them because they were gaijins. Both were from Hawaii.

At over six hundred pounds, Konishiki made the other wrestlers look svelte. He was only a so-so wrestler, however. For his opponents, the trick was to sidestep him when he was thundering towards them, then his momentum would send him tumbling out of the ring. If they were a step slow, his girth would eclipse the light and it’d be like having a house, or an aircraft hangar, fall on them.

Akebono was six foot eight and had the most intimidating game face and would stare down his opponents as if he was channelling the power to obliterate them with his mind, just like a solipsist might think he can do. He had no weaknesses David was aware of and he was the first non-Japanese-born yokozuna. Originally, his name was Chad and he had some Irish blood. Before coming to Nagoya, David never would’ve expected that he could look at a guy like Akebono and see so much of himself.

He wished he could be even more like him. Akebono probably still had to deal with his share of xenophobia – journalists writing snarky things about his background from a safe distance, and the like – but if anyone were to run up to him and say, ‘Fuck you!’ he would end them. More than his fearsomeness, though, David admired how he had adapted to and embraced a foreign culture while not being afraid to stand out and stand tall. Akebono was thriving. How many people, anywhere, could you say that about?

 

A year after arriving, the quickest year of David’s life, it was time to leave. His father’s project was finished and they were moving to a town in Pennsylvania for his next.

David spent one last day with his friends. They took the subway to an amusement park that boasted eight giant rollercoasters and he was determined to go on all of them to show Georgia how brave he could be. The only problem was that he was terrified of heights. Not all heights exactly. Flying didn’t bother him. On a plane, he could ponder the extent of his ability to control the world and his mortality at length without his heart racing. It was more heights plus instability, a fear of falling helplessly through the air, like the fate of the defenestrated.

They went on rollercoaster after rollercoaster, beginning with the least scary and progressing to the most, and on each ride Georgia sat next to him. For the first seven, he held the lap bar so hard, white-knuckling it through banked turns and sudden drops and inverted loops, that his hands ached when they came to a stop and his fingers cracked when he flexed them. The final rollercoaster, the third-largest in the world, was a monster but it provided the best experience. For the duration of the ride, he held the lap bar with only one hand and Georgia held his other hand. He must’ve hurt her with how hard he squeezed. She didn’t complain or let go.

When it was over, he agreed to one more ride. Not a rollercoaster; a pendulum ride, the Heart Attack. They were seated, with over-the-shoulder restraints, inside a gondola attached to an arm attached to a tower. The arm swung 360° degrees horizontally while the gondola spun 360° vertically, faster and faster and faster, and David lost his mind. He screamed so loudly at such a sustained pitch that he was probably heard in Tipperary. People might’ve thought it was the wind, but, no, it was him. The attendants on the ground nearly stopped the ride. At his side, Georgia wept.

After the ride ended and he was screamed out, and was fine, she continued to weep.

He hadn’t realized he had so much power in his lungs or that he could make a girl cry like that. Akebono, he was sure, would have acquitted himself better, and he remained terrified of heights, but, it was okay, some fears don’t need to be overcome. Then others lead to regret if they’re not. He never told Georgia how much he liked her.

 

On the plane to America, the new life they were headed for was beyond the boundaries of his imagination. He didn’t know that he’d become an agnostic again, then an atheist, or what interests he’d replace sumo with, or that he wouldn’t fit in at his new school, where being different wouldn’t serve him well. He didn’t know that, decades later, he wouldn’t have returned to Nagoya.

Ronan Ryan is an Irish writer, based in Dublin. His debut novel, The Fractured Life of Jimmy Dice, published by Tinder Press, was one of the Irish Independent Review’s ‘Books of the Year’ and a finalist for The Lascaux Prize. His work has appeared in The Irish Times, Narrative, Boston Review, Banshee, and elsewhere, and was a finalist for the Tobias Wolff Award (twice), the Slippery Elm Prose Contest, the Narrative Winter Story Contest, the Machigonne and Breakwater Fiction Contests, and the Screen Craft Cinematic Book Writing Competition. He has won The Well Review Award, Bursary Awards in Literature from the Arts Council of Ireland and Dublin City Council, and Writer in Residence posts at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, the Kerouac House in Orlando, Brendan House in Birr, the Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island, and the Užupis Arts Incubator in Vilnius.