The Fifth Birth of Agnes Yoshioka
My first long form fiction. Be gentle with me.
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The day Agnes decided to wipe herself away from the memories and histories and spaces and people that she had carved herself into, she bought a one-way plane ticket to Tokyo, Japan. She wrote down an address in her notebook, bought a Japanese-English mini translating manual online, and cut her hair short. She asked for the next Friday off of work.
“I have to go to my sister’s wedding. Her third marriage.”
“That’s a lot of marriages.”
“Isn’t it? But hey, I actually like this guy for once. Plus, I’m getting the whole maid-of-honor thing down pretty well. Who knows,” Agnes said, straightening papers and gathering her things for the end of the day. “Maybe I’ll quit my day job.”
Laughter.
“See you on Monday,” her coworkers said.
“Mm,” she replied.
…
Agnes arrived at the Seattle-Tomac International Airport with one rolling suitcase holding three pairs of pants, five shirts, two dresses, two pair of shoes (not including the boots on her feet) three bras, and seven pairs of underpants. On her shoulders, a simple leather backpack held a laptop, a notebook, a passport, a small jewelry box, some pens and a wallet with only an ID and $497.25 inside. Her original amount was $500, but her last gift to herself in America, her favorite snack, a big soft pretzel, lay dense in her hands as she stood by the window in the airport terminal, watching low fog rise. She prayed the clouds would lift and disappear. The pretzel lacked enough salt for her taste. Her newly sold 2006 Honda was parked in the visitor lot with the keys hidden in the glove compartment, waiting for the anonymous buyer who had claimed it off Craigslist the weekend before. He was to come pick it up at 3:30PM. By then, Agnes would be halfway to Japan already. She still had about two hours to kill, though; her flight wouldn’t leave until 7:15AM. Choosing a seat close to the window, so she could keep an eye on the looming fog, she pulled her notebook out from her bag. She found a pen, clicked it to action, and began to write.
…
Agnes had been born four times. The first was on September 19th, 1987, at 5:01AM, under flickering fluorescent lights and masked faces in Tokyo. She had no first name until her second birth, which was marked by the exchange of her fresh and damp body from olive hands to white ones. She had merely been “Child of Yoshioka” before— “Agnes” is what she would be called in her second life. Her third birth would be five days and sixteen hours later, as she touched down on American soil for the first time and stripes and stars burned themselves to the insides of her eyelids, an initiation into the Western world. As she grew, the people around her told her what her nightly thoughts would be. “The American Dream” is what they called it, so fondly, as if it were a movie star they knew they would never meet and yet felt so strongly connected to. Agnes trained herself to let The American Dream recur, both in sleep and waking life, and the line between her dreams and her reality blurred itself into a hazy and patriotic half-existence. Her fourth birth was, in her eyes, also a death; her kind and handsome and educated boyfriend Christopher, with his shiny blond hair and successful law practice and his smart, clean glasses and his chest swollen with so much love, got on a perfect knee on a perfect night and presented her with a perfect diamond to choke a grateful finger. She became a public relations consultant by trade, a fiancée in conversation, and, although none near her knew it, a novelist in between.
Writing was the bridge under which Agnes the author hid. Using the pen name Agnes Young, she wrote stories of women who were outrageously and unapologetically loud, gloriously opinionated, living in utopias of female power and dominance over their social and political spheres. The women in her stories were beautiful, strong, of all shapes and sizes, pastiches of strangers she fancied on rainy Seattle sidewalks. The girls she imagined were colorful, defiant, heroic, more fantastical and more dynamic and more real than all the brunch-goers in the marketplace she frequented. Those women—those exciting opposites of Agnes’ American Dream—staked their claim in contemporary American literature as swift and cacophonous, brash and progressive, aggressively and absolutely present. The ink on Agnes’ fingers from hours of nightly first drafts was the only evidence of her moonlit craft.
…
Sitting on a gray plastic chair in the terminal, Agnes flipped to a blank page in her notebook and conjured up a woman she called Siyanda. Siyanda was a queen, ruling over her urban kingdom from a glass loft. Her afro was her crown, glittering under lights of stars and hovercrafts. Siyanda relished in her city paradise, that world of metal on metal, matriarchy, and milky moons. Maybe, Agnes entertained, Siyanda had never seen the greenness of trees before. Maybe she was so caught up in the mechanics of her skyscraper domain that she had forgotten the stories of walks in fields, babbling brooks, farm life, and even the idea of dust itself. Siyanda, of African heritage, means “we are growing.” Agnes’ outline bloomed with ideas. Maybe Siyanda would revolt against her own perfect world to reintroduce nature into the lives of her subjects and herself. Would Siyanda be able to restore greenness and life to her kingdom? Would restoration be a battle against her citizens, or the cooperative act of a community? Was the return to primal existence of life, with moss and oceans and creatures of all sizes, inevitable? Was Siyanda a tool of God? Just how strong is this woman, and how strong is the existence of Nature as a supernatural force, and who are they to one another? Flight C21 in gate 3. It was time to go. Agnes closed her notebook, threw it back into her bag, and headed to the gate.
…
On her eighteenth birthday, Agnes received a jewelry box from her parents. It was red with blue-green designs, and marked in the corners with gold paint. Inside was a thin gold chain with a charm in the shape of Japan and one strip of paper.
“We know that you’ve been getting…curious about where you come from.” Agnes’ mother tapped the table with thin pale fingers while she spoke.
“This is what we can do.”
201-0015 Tōkyō-to, Komae-shi, Inogata, 2 Chome−1.
Agnes didn’t understand.
“Your mother, Agnes. Your birth mother. That’s where she was living when we got you,” her father explained. “It’s a Japanese address.”
Agnes’ mother walked out of the room, wading through gift bags and ocean-colored tissue paper, not saying anything.
“If you ever feel the need,” her father said, “there it is. Just remember that there are no promises attached to that address. We don’t know anything more. And think of your mother here, too. She’s still—we’re still—just…do with it what you see fit. But don’t forget about us.”
Agnes quietly thanked her father, took the box with her to her room, set it in a drawer beside her bed, and did not touch it for ten years afterward.
…
While Agnes sat waiting for her luggage at Tokyo Haneda Airport, she thought about time travel. A ten-and-a-half-hour plane ride cost her day over twenty-four hours; how curious! She imagined a large and looming version of herself, sprinting her way across the globe, ducking so she wouldn’t knock her head against the moon, outsmarting the earth’s rotations, running up the downward escalator of time, her shadow wrapping itself around entire continents.
“Siyanda, in the bottom of the abandoned castle of glass and steel, found a tablet made of materials she had never seen before. Its outer coating was brown, with a grainy finish that flew into the atmosphere when she breathed on its surface. ‘This must be dust,’ she thought. She had heard about it in passing from old stories told by her family. It was far more intriguing than they had ever said. She loved the freedom of the particles in the air, and how quickly they disappeared from sight. Refocusing, she touched the edges of the tablet, and found that it broke apart at her slightest pull, opening to reveal words, permanently affixed to their own, impossibly thin tablets. ‘A book,’ Siyanda gasped. Books had long since been forgotten, even before dust had. She turned to the first tablet, that which they once called a ‘page,’ and began to read.”
A strip of paper in her jewelry box. That’s why Agnes was here.
201-0015 Tōkyō-to, Komae-shi, Inogata, 2 Chome−1.
A gold chain around her neck.
But first, breakfast. What do they eat for breakfast in Japan?
…
The night before her disappearance, Agnes stirred under the weight of Chris’ sleeping arm around her waist. She was dreaming, or, at least, she concluded that she was dreaming, of walking into a clearing in the middle of a forest. In the center of the clearing, marked by splotches of sunlight that fought their way past canopy leaves, was a large and bulbous tree whose roots unsettled the grass and dirt about its base. It was taller than anything Agnes had ever seen in her life, and its trunk curved and leaned diagonally so that its existence seemed like a marvel of physics, or God, or a combination of both. Around it, gorgeous vines, with large leaves and odd color not similar to anything around them, gripping the tree and pulling themselves up along the curves of its body. Agnes walked up to the tree and tugged at one of the vines, just to feel its weight and to touch the tree underneath. Underneath the grip of the vine, the trunk of the tree was scarred with indentations. The vine retracted against Agnes’ fingers, and with a sudden urge she resisted its pull, causing the vine to snap. At the break of the vine, all of its leaves withered and fell from the tree, revealing endless stripes and marks of restraint along its trunk and branches. A swelling energy filled Agnes, and as she turned she saw that the vines were not only connected to the tree in the middle of the clearing, but snaked their way along the ground, into the rest of the forest around her. Ripples of rustling leaves, the dying of that vicious beauty, the collective breath of the branches that surrounded Agnes, it all came with a wave that sprung from the small defiance of her fingers. The ground began to tremble, and Agnes lost her footing. She dropped to the grass near the tree and looked around: the forest past the clearing was crumbling, falling into a nothingness that sped its way toward the center. Agnes quickly sprung back to her feet and climbed the mother tree, hoping to escape the void approaching. It swallowed the tree line, the birds, and the grass, coming finally to the tree upon which she perched herself. As she looked down, there was nothing but black, a black so encompassing that it was dark and bright at the same time, so empty that it filled her, and she felt herself fall with the branches and leaves to which she clung.
…
Breakfast (which was, apparently, buttered toast and eggs with a cup of miso) left Agnes with 52,195 yen. That seemed like such a large number. Agnes felt rich in an odd, disillusioned way, and pictured herself as Japanese royalty from ages past. She had never written about a Japanese woman before. It wasn’t because she lacked the knowledge that she refused to write about it; she had done extensive cultural resources for her novels in the past, with dozens of stories of different cultures under her belt. But there always existed the hesitation, regardless of her ethnically ambiguous pen name, to write about a culture she felt that she should know and knew that she did not. It would not do her any justice to read about Japan in a book, to hear the language in recordings, or to learn the nation’s history in a classroom. It wasn’t enough. It had never been enough. Agnes continued writing on a patio outside the restaurant.
“Siyanda found, underneath layers of foreign dust and the unfamiliar inkiness of the written word on crisped pages, drawings of great skyscrapers made of edges and angles not possibly conceived by man, or at least by man alone. That erratic and outrageous jaggedness of its appendages were far too beautiful and random to be the work of any one mortal. This, Siyanda read further, was the Tree, born from Mother Nature. It had been a source of life, of air for people and other creatures, with praising arms called ‘branches’ and reverent hands called ‘leaves’, who always asked for sunlight and worshipped the one they once called God. She wanted to see one. To touch one. To watch it—as the book described to her—grow.”
Time went by so quickly in Japan. Agnes had already been in the country for four hours and hadn’t even left downtown yet. It would take three subway lines to get to her destination—an hour and five minutes trip exactly, if all went as planned. That wasn’t likely to happen. The map she had picked up from the airport sat dense in her jacket pocket, and her rolling suitcase burned her palm at the handle as she thought about the journey to come. The eyes of the locals scalded her. She feared that everyone knew she was an imposter. That she didn’t know exactly where she was going. The lack of purpose in her walk was terrifying; She was so used to just being sure. She reminded herself that she had chosen to give up that privilege when she erased herself. She was a stranger to everyone, including herself.
One hour went by. Two subway trains down, one to go. Then, a short walk—ten minutes at most—and Agnes’ fifth birth would be complete. She imagined herself as a baby, alone in a subway station, naked and soft and vulnerable and nothing. She adjusted her grip on her suitcase and boarded the last train.
She thought about Christopher. The future he promised. The plans they had. His heavy arm.
She prayed to her Christian God, the only God she knew, and asked to be thrown into a history she had yet to master. Agnes had to learn something, anything, about her or about her parents or her culture or about the things that other Japanese women worried about. What made her Japanese? What made her American? What made her anything but the adopted Asian kid with the white friends, the token, the trophy, the charity case, the successful corporate woman who is oh so thankful for her white parents’ generosity, the accomplished American working female with a doting fiancé with blond hair and straight teeth, the perfect woman who knew when to step up and when to shut up, who didn’t question who she was and why she was there, who pretended, because it was the easy way out, that she was nothing before her life was written for her? She wanted to tear the pages she didn’t write out of the book she hadn’t read and rip the vines that didn’t belong and die and live and die and live and die and live again.
The train car slowed to a stop, and the doors opened with a rush of air. Agnes’ breath caught in her chest. She had not come to truly realize the magnitude of her own self-abduction until that moment, watching patent leather mixed with New Balances shuffle out of the subway, like hundreds of black and white pebbles let loose on the side of a hill. Agnes rose from her seat and left with the rest of the crowd, the brown of her boots scuffling in the grand mass, like a speck of dirt kicked up in a storm of grayscale. And, as she began her walk to her destination, her new birthplace, her new life by her choice, she heard birds in trees at the mouth of the subway station entrance.
…
“‘We must never forget,’ Siyanda shouted, her voice echoing from window to window of buildings, her subjects gathered in balconies and on streets and perched on rooftops to listen. ‘We must never forget this.’ She held up her book, her rediscovery, her savior. ‘We must grow. But to grow, we must know our roots. If we know our roots, then we are already growing.’ The crowd that listened with eager ear, from their glassy perches and iron vantage points, pledged themselves to her revelation—not knowing what they would gain, not having seen what they had missed, but knowing they were missing something all the same. They were to be reborn, back into themselves, back into love and fear and uncertainty and sorrow, whatever those joyful lesions in the heart may signify, and they were to reimagine themselves as the all and as the nothing that occupies Life’s generosity of pure and salient existence.”
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There it is! If you read this far, thank you. I hope you enjoyed.
Much love,
Erin