Soon they found themselves on the street, a busy place with few cars, hundreds of bicycles, and thousands of people both on and off the glideways. Wang-mu was put off by these strange machines and insisted they walk on solid ground, which meant choosing a restaurant close by. The buildings in this neighborhood were old but not yet tatty-looking; an established neighborhood, but one with pride. The style was radically open, with arches and courtyards, pillars and roofs, but few walls and no glass at all. “The weather must be perfect here,” said Wang-mu.
“Tropical, but on the coast with a cold current offshore. It rains every afternoon for an hour or so, most of the year anyway, but it never gets very hot and never gets chilly at all.”
“It feels as though everything is outdoors all the time.”
“It’s all fakery,” said Peter. “Our apartment had glass windows and climate control, you notice. But it faces back, into the garden, and besides, the windows are recessed, so from below you don’t see the glass. Very artful. Artificially natural looking. Hypocrisy and deception — the human universal.”
“It’s a beautiful way to live,” said Wang-mu. “I like Nagoya.”
“Too bad we won’t be here long.”
Before she could ask to know where they were going and why, Peter pulled her into the courtyard of a busy restaurant. “This one cooks the fish,” said Peter. “I hope you don’t mind that.”
“What, the others serve it raw?” asked Wang-mu, laughing. Then she realized that Peter was serious. Raw fish!
“The Japanese are famous for it,” said Peter, “and in Nagoya it’s almost a religion. Notice — not a Japanese face in the restaurant. They wouldn’t deign to eat fish that was destroyed by heat. It’s just one of those things that they cling to. There’s so little that’s distinctively Japanese about their culture now, so they’re devoted to the few uniquely Japanese traits that survive.”
Wang-mu nodded, understanding perfectly how a culture could cling to long-dead customs just for the sake of national identity, and also grateful to be in a place where such customs were all superficial and didn’t distort and destroy the lives of the people the way they had on Path.
Their food came quickly — it takes almost no time to cook fish — and as they ate, Peter shifted his position several times on the mat. “Too bad this place isn’t nontraditional enough to have chairs.”
“Why do Europeans hate the earth so much that you must always lift yourself above it?” asked Wang-mu.
“You’ve already answered your question,” said Peter coldly. “You start from the assumption that we hate the earth. It makes you sound like some magic-using primitive.”
Wang-mu blushed and fell silent.
“Oh, spare me the passive oriental woman routine,” said Peter. “Or the passive I-was-trained-to-be-a-servant-and-you-sound-like-a-cruel-heartless-master manipulation through guilt. I know I’m a shit and I’m not going to change just because you look so downcast.”
“Then you could change because you wish not to be a shit any longer.”
“It’s in my character. Ender created me hateful so he could hate me. The added benefit is that you can hate me, too.”
“Oh, be quiet and eat your fish,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re supposed to analyze human beings and you can’t understand the person closest to you in all the world.”
“I don’t want to understand you,” said Peter. “I want to accomplish my task by exploiting this brilliant intelligence you’re supposed to have — even if you believe that people who squat are somehow ‘closer to the earth’ than people who remain upright.”
“I wasn’t talking about me,” she said. “I was talking about the person closest to you. Ender.”
“He is blessedly far from us right now.”
“He didn’t create you so that he could hate you. He long since got over hating you.”
“Yeah, yeah, he wrote The Hegemon, et cetera, et cetera.”
“That’s right,” said Wang-mu. “He created you because he desperately needed someone to hate him.”
Peter rolled his eyes and took a drink of milky pineapple juice. “Just the right amount of coconut. I think I’ll retire here, if Ender doesn’t die and make me disappear first.”