Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: In the short, clipped sentences and fragments of “Superjap,” KJ Nakazawa-Kern narrates an uncle and nephew’s trip to Japan. Though the football-player uncle wants the speaker to learn what it means to be “a man,” his childhood is even more instructive to his nephew. The turn in the final paragraph does what the best of flash-fiction endings do: reframe the rest of the story in a way we didn’t expect.
To hear KJ read the story, click below:
Superjap
Uncle’s sleeping pills and whatever he washed them down with. Wrangling all the luggage and his former-D1-offensive-lineman ass up the jetway. Presenting his customs card, the nonsense curlicues scribbled thereon, to the agents. Looking at one of them like, Shit, man, I don’t know. Him looking back like, Yeah, I’m supposed to take lunch in twenty. Eventually getting waved through with a shrug.
Murata-san, our homeland connect. The bald part of his head. Uncle laid out in the third row of his minivan, asking him to pull over so he could go shi-shi on the side of the road. Then, the van yammed into a carport. Sitting on the floor of Murata’s living room, his kids climbing all over me and grabbing fistfuls of my arm hair like they couldn’t believe any of it.
Waiting in the car outside a dojo. Uncle preparing to give a talk to the students, telling Murata to make him sound good in the translation. Murata letting him know that a lot of the people in there were pretty good at English. Oh, I see, so no bullshit? he wanted to confirm.
Driving through the mountains to visit one of my grandma’s cousins. Not having a phone number or an address, but knowing the name of the town. Pulling up to a vaguely governmental building. Letting Murata do all the talking. Finding out thirdhand that our cousin had been dead for months. Deciding to head up to his spot anyway. Murata’s minivan pulling us up and through the color, goatlike on the skinny roads. Parking in front of the house and looking through a window. Visiting the gravestone across the way. Taking a picture by it as Uncle remarked on the convenience of our afternoon opening up.
Uncle talking the whole time like he knew I’d write about this one day. Saying, Here’s what it means to be an alpha male: you work with everyone, work with them and work with them really hard—and then you fuck them in the ass. Saying, as we stood by the pump at a mountainside gas station, If a day comes where no one has heard from me and no one can find me, you’re the one who knows that this is where I’ll be.
And I couldn’t have been sure what he was thinking as we lay in the dark on our twin beds in Murata’s guest room and he groaned over half-century–old football injuries. But if I had to guess, maybe he thought about Tolleson, Arizona: growing up across the street with my great-grandma because he had a different dad than his sisters; asking his boy Arthur Jimenez to translate the schoolyard song: Chino, chino, japonés, come caca y no me des; the sun drilling the back of his neck as he stood in the McDonald’s parking lot waiting for a fight; or the give in the asphalt as he ran home after, faster than the cops could drive, to tend to the coop of pigeons he kept behind the house.
KJ Nakazawa-Kern lives in Phoenix, Arizona. He received his MFA in fiction at the University of Montana. His work has appeared in the Montana Quarterly and the Southampton Review Online.
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