Abigail Mandlin

“Orenji juusu onegaishimasu.”

The 7-Eleven cashier asks me a thousand questions in a single glance. A white person? A white person who speaks Japanese? A white person who speaks Japanese without an accent? Who is she? So tall. So white. Almost translucent. What is she doing in Little Koreatown? A student? An expat? Is she here alone? Does she dye her hair? Does she bleach her teeth? Is she an otaku, a Japanese culture freak? Her lips are so full; her thighs are so thick. Is she not wearing a bra right now? Well, it is the middle of the night. Why is she up then? Merely a craving for orange juice at 2:30 AM? Or is it—?

I grow tired of the silent inquiry, and reach for a bottle beside the cashier where it sweats behind its tempered glass. Strange, I think; it proudly proclaims to be made in France. A French bottle, held by an American girl, sold in a Japanese convenience store.

One of my legs buckles under me as a child runs into it. The little boy, righting himself, begins the second investigation of the night as I watch the awe spills over his face. A gaijin? A gaikokujin? I didn’t know women could get this big! Her hair is so bright, so light. Does she live in my neighborhood? What was wrong with her old country then? What do I say? How do I say it? Will she understand my words, as they warble off my baby lips?

The boy’s mother takes him by the shirt collar, yanks him back with a bit more force than necessary. “Sumimasen,” she excuses. Fear weighs down her stare, her head, her shoulders. She lobs no questions, only accusations. Looks like an American. Ranbou. Yankii. Woman or not, they’re all the same. Loud voices, rough touches. She doesn’t belong here. Only we deserve to be in this 7-Eleven, amongst the prepared sushi and imported juices.

“Iie, Iie.” I dismiss it all with that common Japanese phrase: No, no. Never mind. Don’t worry about it.

The mother is taken off-guard; she smiles, the expression denting the skin beside her mouth in such a way as to denote disuse. I think about how the Japanese language doesn’t traditionally use question marks; if one asked something they expected the other to provide an answer to, they merely ended the sentence with “ka.” In this way, the mother’s declarative statements haven’t become interrogative in her mind; they’ve merely been added to, in the form of “ka.” American, ka? Ranbou, ka? Yankii, ka?

It leaves room for interpretation.

The 7-Eleven shrinks behind me, as I walk in the direction of my hotel. It’s a heavy night: peak July, the air thick enough to swim in; the dark is a weighted blanket, neon signs just enough to act as holes to stick your fingers through.

I travel through Japan, through Korea, into my lobby; there, a Dutch businessman I befriended earlier nods in my direction as he smokes, perched on an Indian couch—or is it Persian? Is anything Persian anymore, now that the country has been renamed Iran?

In the elevator, I clutch my prize: the orenji juusu. The orange juice. But no, they’re not the same; orange juice in this context, in this timeline, in this universe is its own separate entity. Orange juice in America is usually harvested by bow-backed Mexican immigrants working for a paltry pittance. This juice, sipped under a Tokyo skyline, occasionally lit up by North Korean missiles and frenetic calls from across the Pacific, cannot be equated.

The bottle will need to be meticulously recycled later; so it goes in Japan, where the island is too small to accommodate America’s level of garbage. Hardly anyone is buried here either, I remember reading; most are cremated, as they simply don’t have enough land for graveyards.

The hotel shakes, with the third earthquake to hit since my arrival. Upheaval. Settling. Leveling the playing field. The earth rearranges itself under our onslaught; it shall survive everything, even if humans do not.

The orenji juusu will outlive me, outlive everything. As I lift the bottle to my lips, pressed by a company and a people I will never know, every version of myself collapses into itself many times over. Am I the fruit? Am I the tree? Am I American? Am I Japanese?

The bottle hits the can; I roll over in bed, and the cycle begins anew.