By Evan Morgan Willams
“Miss Hashimoto, nice of you to join us.”
Friday morning was the practicum, and Erica bustled in late, apologizing a bow, fixing her eyes on her desk to dodge the professor’s glare. Erica wanted to explain she was late because, unlike the other students, she had done the reading, but this irony died unspoken. Hiniku. She stared at the scratches on her desk. She would use the word another time.
The professor resumed. “As I was saying, the art of interpreting English into Japanese lies in context. You should be able to utter mere sentence fragments, yet still convey a coherent message. Subsequently, from Japanese into English, you build the context back. Expand, contract. Organic as breathing. These are field conditions, mind you, not the classroom, but, knowing context, you’ll know what to say, what to omit.”
The professor reached back to smooth her shiny blonde hair.
“Expand, contract. Write this down.”
The other students scrawled eagerly, their yellow notepads darkening with black and blue. They recorded the professor’s every word. If they had done the reading, they wouldn’t need to. Erica had done the reading. A boy in her bed this morning, she had done the reading. She couldn’t remember the boy’s name, but she remembered the god-damned reading.
“Familiarity is required, but you should never presume informality. And, as interpreter, always keep one ear on thoroughness. If there were a single word that unifies the familiar, the contextual, and the thorough, let it be concision.”
Fifteen girls. Fifteen women, Erica corrected herself, women in pleated skirts, nylons, cotton blouses, except the blonde, who wore jeans, a pink polo shirt, and—
The professor said, “Well, who wants this one?”
Silence.
“Come on now, Trojans.”
“Concision,” Erica blurted. The other students turned. Was Erica the first to dare today? Her voice clenched to a whisper. “Derived from Latin, con, meaning with and cis, meaning cutting. The suffix, ion, is syntactical. To use an idiom, one might say—”
“Morphological, not syntactical, Miss Hashimoto. As for context, notice how I didn’t say ‘nicely done.’ Miss Hashimoto implicitly knows. And your client, too, he will know. Yes, invariably it will be he. As a matter of fact, I’ve never encountered—”
“One cuts to the heart of the matter!” Erica got in her idiom.
“Context,” the professor warned. “Familiarity risks impertinence.” She cast Erica the evil eye, then shifted upright, hollowing the register of her voice. “But interpretation goes two ways. You’re a medium between the familiar and the big bad world. You can’t serve two masters.”
A student asked, “Are the words perhaps the master?”
Big bad world? Erica’s world was Los Angeles, and it wasn’t so big and bad.
Silence. The room’s lone window was a slit. Sunlight sulked in the corner. A fluorescent glare ruled the room.
Another student offered, “The client is the master?”
Erica smelled the boy on her skin.
Another student said, “There is the phrase… to walk a mile in his shoes?”
The professor took this up. “Which leads to…”
“Context?”
“Empathy?”
She tasted his sweet mouth.
“Concision? Wait, am I saying that correctly?”
“Maybe it leads to sentence fragments?”
What was his name?
The blonde student said, without inflection, “Sounds like it leads to an affair.”
Everyone giggled.
Erica offered her take, she couldn’t help herself, couldn’t contain her voice, inflecting now, like all the girls, like all the women. “Perhaps it leads to nothing at all?”
A student said, “That would be rather cynical.”
Another student added, “Yeah, I’m Japanese, and I always—”
The professor interrupted. “You’re not Japanese. None of you are Japanese.” She chuckled. She smoothed her hair. “I mean, really. Look at yourselves.”
No one looked at anyone. Maybe the blonde girl looked. Erica guessed the blonde girl looked. She couldn’t be sure, for she was looking down.
When I fucked the boy, I looked down. He lifted my eyes to his.
“Look, no offense, but California is decidedly not Japan. Not that you talk differently from your peers in the old country but rather that you talk so damn much.”
When he fucked me, I didn’t say one word.
Erica’s gaze found the scratches on her desk. For a good time, call… the number was unfinished. In another corner, deeply scrawled, a kanji read, just shoot me. It was rendered as a pun, just as in merely, humbly, worthlessly. Tan’ni. The scrawl was blackened with the ink of a hundred pens tracing the design year over year, deeper into the wood. Erica picked at the scrawl with her fingernail. She always found the scratches. She always read the words.
The professor said, “The world is a wilderness. You tend a small garden. Deft strokes with a spade. As few strokes as possible.”
What was the boy’s name? Erica felt a flush rise to her face.
The blonde student said, “You speak in riddles, master.” She twirled her pen.
Another student dropped her pen. “For goodness’ sake.”
The boy had whispered her name into her hair. Erica hadn’t whispered anything back.
A third student said, “Excuse me, shouldn’t we be saying all of this in Japanese? I mean, this is a practicum, right? At this level? Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry.”
The professor rattled off, “Sôkai. Kore wa dono reberu ka.”
Student, what level are we, exactly?
Formality imparted condescension.
What would her mom say, if she knew?
The professor said, “Okay, ladies, put down your pens. Do it. The readings don’t matter. To the extent you were raised speaking Japanese—most of you, anyway—you know this stuff. Have a gut feel for it. Do you know what it means to feel?”
Erica dragged her fingertip across the just-shoot-me scrawl. She felt the characters. When she rubbed thumb and fingertip together, the feeling vanished. She didn’t feel anything. Hiniku.
Erica regretted sleeping with the boy. No, she didn’t. Yes, she did.
The professor wrapped it up. “Very well then. Interviews begin next week…”
The students smoothed their yellow pads.
“Write your statement of purpose. And please don’t say you’re in this for the money.”
The students packed the readings away.
“Review your resumé, and not with your mother…”
The students stood to leave.
“Lacking qualifications, focus on your objective...”
Erica didn’t have one.
“Fight on, Trojans.” The professor smoothed her hair again. Her wristwatch flashed, small and gold and pretty, the sort of thing a woman would buy for herself.
Fourteen students stood and left. Erica was the only student to remain. She gazed at the window slit, the slice of light that beckoned her to the “big bad world.” The world was an ocean, the classroom a diving bell. Erica would swim in that light, swim in its scent. Light and scent were disparate elements. She would synthesize them. Suddenly, she had it. She had his name.
The professor stared. “Erica, dear, are you waiting to ask for a letter of recommendation? Because if you are—”
“Ricky.”
“What? Who?”
“No one.”
Evan Morgan Willams retired in 2022 after 29 years of teaching in a public school. He is the recipient of a 2024 Oregon Literary Fellowship and the author of four collections of stories: Thorn (BkMk Press, 2014, winner of the Chandra Prize), Canyons (2018), Stories of the New West (Main Street Rag Press, 2021), and The Divide (Cornerstone Press, 2025). He is also published in literary journals including Kenyon Review, Witness, Zyzzyva, and Alaska Quarterly Review. He holds an MFA from the University of Montana (1991), and is a three-time mentor in AWP's Writer to Writer program.
