"THE DAY MR. NODA BECAME MR. WONG"
by Janice Valerie Young

Hiroshi Noda chuckled as he pulled out the keys he had “borrowed” from his superior Saito-san during a vodka party at the Finnish Embassy the night before. Saito-san was still blissfully passed out in the cloakroom.

Unlocking Saito-san’s desk drawer, Hiroshi sucked in his breath, locating the necessary hanko and opening the correct stamp-pad. Saito-san was particular about his work as senior officer of the Japanese consulate in Toronto, and as his assistant trainee, Hiroshi had been studying his superior’s stamping technique closely.

Then Hiroshi reached into his backpack, taking the koseki household registration sheet out of its folder, double checking that he had filled it out properly, by adding Cindy Wong, the name of his new wife in the appropriate place. He ticked off the box “Apply wife’s surname to all members of the family register,” and squeezed his eyes shut, envisioning with immense satisfaction his outraged father’s face. “See how you like that, bastard!” Hiroshi whispered. Waving the stamp dry, he dropped the paper into the tray on Saito-san’s desk marked Approved Documents for Tokyo Headquarters.

**********

“Don’t forget to go to the ward office and get a copy of the koseki and give it to Ogoshi-san at the bank before lunch. By the end of the day our loan should be approved! I’ve already made plans to meet my sister tomorrow in Ginza and I can’t wait to see her face when I tell her we’re buying a summer home in Hawaii!” In a surprising display of energy and happiness, Mrs Noda clapped her hands.

Mr Noda snorted, combing his hair with precision as he had every day since they got married. “Here,” he said, offering his wife the comb, “why don’t you flatten your puffy hair with this? It’s about time you got a new look. You’ve been doing “sophisticated aristocrat obasan” for years.” Laughing heartily, he folded his silk red scarf and tucked it into his breast pocket.

“Our pedigree requires us to be timeless classics, Noburo, don’t forget it,” Mrs Noda snapped.

Following her into the dining room, her husband asked, “When was the last time you reminded Hiroshi of our respected pedigree? After all those strings I pulled to get him that position with the Foreign Ministry abroad and he thinks he’s going to run off and marry a foreigner!”

“It won’t happen, Noburo. I won’t permit it,” Mrs Noda growled, rattling the antique teapot precariously as she poured their earl grey.

“And a Chinese foreigner no less! He knows his grandfather was a highly respected reporter in Manchuria during the war and that’s as close to China as we’ve ever cared to go,” Noburo added with disgust as he sipped his tea.

“He’ll come to his senses when he returns home and wants more money,” Mrs Noda predicted.

“Indeed.” Noburo nodded, enjoying this rare moment of marital solidarity. Theirs had been an arranged marriage, and although he had certainly grown used to her (they were after all, from the same high-quality stock), his wife’s lack of imagination was stifling. But she had agreed to live all those years in England when his job at the trading company required it, he reminded himself. He was grateful for that and it had brought them up even a higher peg in society, mingling as they did with the British aristocracy. But his wife was also the one who ordered him to quit university track and field when he had a great chance at qualifying for the Japanese national team and even the Olympics all those years ago. “Leaping like a rabbit over hurdles is unsightly and indeed unseemly,” he recalled her saying, his face clouding over.

“You better get going. The ward office will be open soon. After you get the koseki copy fax it to Ogoshi-san at the bank and I’ll call him later to confirm he’s got all the loan paperwork in order. Hurry up, your driver’s waiting.” And with that, Mrs Noda whisked her husband out the door.

**********

Noburo cringed as he walked up the ward office steps. There was a group supporting the homeless who dared approach him but quickly changed their minds when he swatted them away with his Gucci briefcase. The Documentation Section was as full of the lower classes as he’d expected, including some mixed Japanese and foreign couples, which he found particularly distasteful, reminding him that he’d have to warn Hiroshi to stop entertaining the idea of marriage to any girl his family deemed inappropriate.

He filled in the koseki-copy application form, gave it to the tiny frazzled clerk with thick glasses and a giant mole in the center of her nose, and sat down, waiting for his name to be called, although he was indeed loathe to have the leather imitation seats touch his bespoke suit.

Time had clearly stopped in the ward office, back to around 1976 he estimated, eyeing the grey carpet, orange walls, and noticing the lack of computers. Names of the other ward residents waiting for their documents were called in the low, robotic voice of the clerks, most of whom looked like they hadn’t seen daylight nor a bath in years. Finally, after nearly an hour, he was the only one left waiting.

The same clerk he’d submitted his request to got up from her desk, and approaching the counter she called, “Wong-sama,” through a garbled mess of teeth. Worse than the teeth I saw in Britain, he thought, recoiling. She repeated, “Wong-sama.” Was this girl as stupid as she was ugly? There was no one else waiting besides him. He looked over both his shoulders to double check, then she squawked again, “Wong-sama.”

He marched up the counter, saying with no small amount of derision, “I am the only one here, as you obviously cannot see. Apparently Wong-sama must have decided he had better things to do than waste his time at this pathetic ward office! I am Noda, now if it wouldn’t inconvenience you, get my koseki copy so I can get out of here!”

The clerk looked at her toes, quivering. “Wong-sama?” she whispered in confusion, throwing the requested koseki copy at him then bolting away in tears.

Noburo bent down and inspected the fallen paper as a dog would inspect mysterious food it’d been offered under the table. He fell back on his heels. Right there, beside his dear father’s name (Yoshiaki) and even beside the name of his sacred grandfather (Hiromitsu) the unbelievable had occurred: the majestic family name Noda had been changed to Wong. How could his son do such a thing—obviously his Chinese Canadian wife was behind this travesty! How dare she incite a takeover of her foreign name on the family register! What would his wife say? What could he do?

Suddenly a transformation occurred on the same scale as the Grinch Who Stole Christmas’ heart growing three sizes. Noburo snatched up the paper and bolted into the washroom. He stared at himself in the mirror and a grin worked its way across his face, not unlike the one associated with the aforementioned Grinch. Noburo wondered aloud, “What would Wong-sama do in this situation? Why I think he’d do this,” Mr Wong replied to his inquiry in English as he ruffled his hair, took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves.

He snuck out the side door of the building, eluding his driver. Then reaching into his briefcase, Mr Wong opened his portable CD player, ejecting Mozart and tossing the disc in the bushes. Stopping at a record shop he bought the Beatles’ Sgt Peppers’ and headed to Suntory Hall. When his keitai rang he threw it in a carp pond at a shrine he passed on the way. “Wong-sama doesn’t like keitais, especially when Mrs Noda is calling,” he sniggered. “And besides, Wong-sama isn’t married.”

At the box office he purchased a seat for the Afternoon Symphony Series which Mrs Noda had been dragging him to every Sunday for as long as he could unhappily remember. Easing into his front-row seat, when the orchestra finished tuning and the conductor turned darkly dramatic, Mr Wong put on his earphones and played his new CD, closing his eyes and turning the volume up higher and higher, reveling in the thump and exhilaration of Sgt. Pepper.

When he was in England as a student he actually met Paul McCartney at a party. The girls were shamelessly throwing themselves at Mr McCartney, and Noburo knew right then that he wanted to be cool—even more than being rich and from the right family, even more than getting a position in the world’s richest trading company. And he knew how to do it. It was within his reach. If he made the Japanese Olympic Track and Field Team he would be as worshipped as a rock star. Around that time he met his future wife, and that was the end of that.

At intermission Mr Wong headed to a game center. He tried the dance machine, happy to discover he still had the moves. During his student heyday he could dance with the best of them.

Tiring of the games, he decided to ride the train. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken the subway. He rode the trains for the rest of the day, transferring here and there whenever he got the urge.

Before he knew it he was at the end of the line, on the last train, deep in Saitama.

Approaching the ticket gate, he barely noticed the group of hostesses tottering on their heels on the other side, passing out drink tickets to attract drunk salarymen to their bars. That ticket gates reminded him of something, and before he knew what he was doing he dropped his briefcase and was shaking his arms and legs loose. Then he sprinted backwards a few meters, bending down into starting position, nodding hello to his fans in the imagined crowd. He heard the starter pistol in his head and he shot off, arms flaying in mid-air, the years peeling off his face, his body gliding long enough for him to safely clear the ticket machine. He landed in a heap on the other side.

The hostesses went wild, swarming around him, flashing their sexiest smiles. “Wow, that was fantastic! How did you do that? Who are you?”

Noburo winked at the cutest one and puffed up proudly. “I am Mr Wong, leaping freely like a rabbit over hurdles. I have no particular fixed address or pedigree. Can I buy you lovely ladies a drink?”

---

Janice Valerie Young is from Toronto and has lived in Japan for five years. Her work has appeared in Terrain, The Ultimate Hallucination, Faces in the Crowds; a Tokyo International Anthology, and her novella Muskoka was a finalist in the 2003 New Century Writer Awards.

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