East is East

T. C. Boyle

For Georges and Anne Borchardt

Those who wish to live horribly and die horribly are choosing a beautiful way of life.

—Yukio Mishima, The Way of the Samurai

“Bred and bawn in de briar patch, Br’er Fox, bred and bawn.”

—Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus

Contents

Part I: Tupelo Island

Small Matters

The Tokachi-maru

Thanatopsis House

Hog Hammock

The Squarest People in the World

Queen Bee

Fea Purē

Behind a Wall of Glass

Rusu

The Other Half

Still at Large

Parfait in Chrome

The Dogs Are Barking, Woof-Woof

Part II: The Okefenokee

Everybody’s Secret

Four Walls

The Whiteness of the Fish

A Jungle

Where the Earth Trembles

Tender Sproats

Cheap Thrills

The Power of the Human Voice

Haha

Part III: Port of Savannah

Journalism

The City of Brotherly Love

Acknowledgments

A Note on the Author

Also available by T. C. Boyle

By the Same Author

Part I

Tupelo Island

Small Matters

He was swimming, rotating from front to back, thrashing his arms and legs and puffing out his cheeks, and it seemed as if he’d been swimming forever. He did the crawl, the breaststroke, the Yokohama kick. Tiring, he clung to the cork life ring like some shapeless creature of the depths, a pale certificate of flesh. Sometime during the fifth hour, he began to think of soup. Miso-shiru, rice chowder, the thin sea-stinking broth his grandmother would make of fish heads and eel. And then he thought of beer—bottles like amber jewels in a bed of ice—and finally he thought of water, only water.