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The Fifth Birth of Agnes Yoshioka

prose by: Erin Oquindo

   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. She would not be back the next Monday, or any day to follow.

 

   Agnes arrived at the Seattle-Tomac International Airport at 5:04AM. Her newly sold 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 was five years later as she touched down on American soil for the first time; stripes and stars burned themselves to the insides of her eyelids. Agnes trained herself to let the infamous American Dream recur, both in sleep and waking life, and the line between her dreams and her reality blurred into a hazy and patriotic half-existence.

   Her fourth birth was also a death in a way; her kind and handsome and educated boyfriend Chris with his shiny blond hair, successful law practice and smart, clean glasses, 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.

   Under the pen name Agnes Young, she wrote stories of women who were outrageously and unapologetically loud, beautiful, strong, of all shapes and sizes—pastiches of strangers she fancied on rainy Seattle sidewalks. 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 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 had forgotten the stories of walks in fields, babbling brooks, farm life, and even the idea of dust itself. Agnes’ outline bloomed with ideas—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.

 

 

   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, 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 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. 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 thought about how she had never written about a Japanese woman before. It wasn’t because she lacked the knowledge; she had done extensive cultural resources for her novels in  the past. But there always existed the hesitation, regardless of her 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.

 

 

   Breakfast (which was, apparently, buttered toast and eggs with a cup of miso) sat next to Agnes as she 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. 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.

   The train car slowed to a stop, and the doors opened with a rush of air. Agnes rose from her seat and exited with the rest of the crowd, the brown of her boots scuffling in the grand mass of humans, like a speck of dirt kicked up in a storm of grayscale.

   She prayed to her Christian God, the only God she knew, to be thrown into a history she had yet to master. She prayed for that elusive fifth birth—not wishing it to be the first, or the last, but for it to be one of many. She prayed to die and live and die and live and die and live again.

   And, as she began her walk to her new life, Agnes Yoshioka heard birds in trees at the mouth of the 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 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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