I know this because I spent 6 years in Tokyo. I graduated from Waseda University International Relations, class of 2022. Top of my department. I hold a Japanese Language Proficiency Certificate N1 level, the highest.
I've interpreted at the Japan-US Business Council, the Pacific Economic Forum, and seven bilateral trade conferences, where the deals on the table made your 30 million look like a rounding error. Yuki looked up from the table. Her eyes were wide. Not with shock, with something closer to awe.
Her lips parted and for the first time all evening, the tension in her shoulders released. Someone was finally saying what she'd been choking on for 2 hours. Iris held Nakamura's gaze for one more beat, then she turned to Harrison Brooks. She switched to English, seamlessly, without a breath between languages, the way only a true bilingual can, not translating in her head, but thinking in both at once.
Mr. Brooks, I owe you a translation. Brooks straightened in his chair. His blue-gray eyes locked onto hers.
Go ahead. When I first arrived at your table tonight, Mr. Nakamura leaned toward his assistant and said, and I'm quoting, "This restaurant lets a filthy black thing serve guests." The color drained from Brooks's face. "While I served the appetizer, he said I walked like, his words, a cow in heels.
He said my hands were rough, my skin was wrong, and that I looked like, again his exact words, a monkey in an apron." Brooks's jaw tightened. He looked at Nakamura. Nakamura looked at the tablecloth. "During the main course, he told his assistant that my ancestors were, quote, running barefoot in Africa three generations ago, that I probably couldn't count to 10, that serving food was the most sophisticated thing I'd do all week." A woman at the next table put down her fork.
A man near the bar stood up from his stool. "He called me livestock, said I belonged in a pen, said he could smell me, that my kind carries a smell that no amount of soap can fix." Brooks's knuckles went white around the armrest of his chair. When I tripped because he deliberately extended his leg to block my path and sauce [clears throat] landed on his sleeve, he called me a, {quote} "stupid, filthy animal." Then a worthless black [ __ ]. Then he threw a napkin in my face and told me to get on my knees.
Iris's voice didn't waver, not once. She delivered each sentence the way she'd delivered translations at trade conferences, clear, precise, neutral. No emotion, no editorializing. Just the facts, word for word.
He ordered me to kneel because, and this is a direct translation, "Your kind was born to serve mine." She paused. Every time you asked Ms. Hamada what he was saying, she told you it was nothing important. [clears throat] That he was commenting on the wine, on the food, on the decor.