5. Machiko

1

On Monday morning, a man in a poorly fitting navy suit comes into the office and takes a seat near Yumi; the heavy dark clouds that usually hang over my co-worker’s head break, the sun filters in.

Yumi chats animatedly to the man, using that gratingly high and overly delighted voice she normally reserves for the phone.

The man goes about his business, opening what looks like a large physician’s bag and taking out a narrow, but rather thick envelope which he places on the table. Yumi gives the man a slip of paper, which he examines and then marks with a small stamp. He hands the slip of paper back to my co-worker who continues to chatter away cheerfully. The man proceeds to open the envelope, revealing a two-inch thick stack of cold hard cash. Holding the stack at the bottom with two hands, he flicks his wrists a number of time producing a fan of ten thousand yen note.

Good Lord! Whatever this man’s job is, I want it!

As much as I’d love to stay and watch the man perform his magic, I’ve got a class to teach. This morning it’s a group of beginners, made up of six housewives ranging in age from their late thirties to early fifties.

When the oldest of the group, Miéko, asks me how I spent the weekend, it is tempting to say that it was spent lying naked on a wooly throw rug tossing about with a high school girl. I tell her, instead, that I spent Sunday studying Japanese, which produces a cackle of praise from the students. Miéko says she respects me and wishes her husband were as diligent as I was.

The woman should be careful of what she wishes for.

Miéko then tells me that her own weekend was horrible.

“Really?” I say. “Why’s that?”

“Finished dinner, my husband . . .”

“After dinner,” I correct.

“What?”

“After dinner,” I repeat. “Not finished dinner, after dinner.”

“I see. I see. Thank you.” Miéko looks down at her notebook, studies what she has prepared for today’s lesson, then starts over: “Finished dinner, my husband . . .” I tap the surface of my desk to convey my irritation. The message seems to get across. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says. “After . . . After dinner, my husband . . . How do you say . . . chidori ashi?”

It’s thanks to good old Mié that I know chidori ashi, literally chicken legs, means stagger. “My husband staggered,” I answer.

“What?”

“Staggered.”

Miéko says she doesn’t understand.

“Your husband, he was drunk, right? Yopparai, right?”

“Yes, very, very yopparai,” she says, laughing.

“Okay then, he staggered.”

“Sutahgah . . .?”

“Staggered.”

“Sutahgahdo?”

“Yes, staggered. He staggered.”

“What does that mean?”

I feel like a dog chasing its own tail.

“What does that mean?” she asks again.

“Staggered? Your husband was drunk. He staggered. Chidori ashi.” 

“Yes, yes. Chidori ashi. How do you say that in English?”

I am this close to losing it. “Chidori ashi means Stagger.”

“Huh?”

“Chidori ashi equals sutahgahdo.” This really is how they speak English here.

“Oh, I see, I see. Thank you. Finished dinner, my husband staggered . . .”

I am distracted by the distinctive whine of a 50cc motor. Going to the window, I look out and see the Man with the Cash, tooling noisily away on a cheap little scooter. When class is over and the students have left, I ask Yumi who the guy was.

“He’s from the bank,” she says.

“From the bank? On that dinky little scooter? And with all that cash?”

“Yes, today is payday.”

“He doesn’t ever get robbed?”

“Have you got your inkan?” Yumi asks.

“My inkan?”

“Yes, your inkan. Have you got it?”

I tell her I don’t. The stamp engraved with my name in kanji is back at the condominium.

“I can’t pay you unless you have your inkan. I have to stamp this book.”

“Here’s a wild idea, Yumi, that I’ll just throw out to you, see if you bite: How about I just sign the book.”

“No, no, no. You must use the inkan.”

Oh good fucking grief. “Okay, I’ll bring it tomorrow.”

“What about your pay?”

“I’ll just pick it up tomorrow.”

“But I can’t keep that much cash here.”

“Cash? We’re paid in cash?”

She says of course we are, making me feel like an idiot for asking. You can live for years in this country, study its language and culture, but you’ll still be scratching your head every time you bump up against their notion of common sense.

“Can you go home and get your inkan during your break?”

This is not a suggestion, so after a quick lunch at an udon shop near Ōhori Park, I take the train all the way to the condominium, get my ever so important inkan, and return to the office three hours later where I stamp a little box next to my name in the little pay book and get a brown envelope containing a stack of the newest, crispest bills I’ve ever laid my eyes on.

Unfortunately, my custodianship over the money is temporary. A few days later, I give the entire wad, and then some, to a woman sitting behind the counter of a shabby little used bookstore a block from my workplace. My first month’s rent, plus an amount equivalent to another four month’s rent, which I’ve been told, is the key money—fucking expensive keys—plus one more month’s rent for the reikin, a token of appreciation to the realtor, who in this case happens to also be my new landlord and downstairs neighbor. Thanks for nothing.

When I asked my co-workers if I will get any of this deposit back, they cocked their heads and sucked air through their teeth. I took that as a no.

So, it’s fine dining on stir-fried bean sprouts for the next four weeks: a small price to pay for not having to live an hour out of town in the middle of nowhere. What the hell was I thinking when I agreed to move there?

In the first few weeks alone at the condominium, I dozed off on the train and missed my station four times. Four times! The first time was in the morning on my way to work. By the time I woke up, I had traveled three stations beyond my stop. I had to scramble out of the train and run across the platform and catch the train going the opposite direction. Had I not been warned so unambiguously by Abazuré that were I ever late, that I’d be fired immediately, I might have taken it in stride. Instead, I was pushing people out of the way, dashing through the turnstiles and sprinting like an Olympian all the way from the station to the office where I arrived panting and sweating, a minute to spare on the time clock. The guillotine came to an abrupt halt an inch from my trembling neck.

One evening as I was riding the last train home, I succumbed to such a deep, dream-filled sleep that I did not wake until the train had arrived in the neighboring prefecture! As it was the last train of the evening, I was left with two options: crashing for the night outside the station with the drunks or forking over five thousand yen—half a day’s wages—for a taxi.

The third time, like the second, was on the ride home after a long tiring day of work. When I nodded off, the train was shoulder to shoulder with equally exhausted salarymen and office ladies who’d had the very life sucked out of them and were now staring vacantly before themselves as if at the smoldering remains of extinguished dreams. I was fully reclined and drooling on the seat, the contents of my grocery bags strewn on the floor, grapefruits and apples rolling about here and there like orphaned children when the conductor woke me. I was the only remaining passenger on the train, which had reached its final destination. The conductor helped me collect my scattered belongings and groceries. Had it been America, I probably would have woken to find myself stripped down to my skivvies. I didn’t have enough for a cab, so I had to hump it rest of the way to the condominium. An hour’s walk in the rain without an umbrella, and loaded down with a week’s worth of groceries.

The following morning, I overslept again, yet by the grace of God managed somehow to get to work in time to punch the clock But, by then, I’d had it.

2

The Friday evening class consists of three high school students and a rōnin, a boy who didn’t manage to get into the college of his choice and has decided to spend the year at a yobikō, a kind of cram school for students like him, and give it another shot next winter. I ask him where he wants to go, but he’s hesitant to tell me. He’s either too embarrassed, or just modest. I prod, I poke, I cajole, until he finally gives in. He wants to go to Waseda University. As it’s one of the best private schools in the country, I say he must be smart. He replies that he’s not smart, that he’s fat.

When asked what he hopes to study, he says he’s not sure. He just wants to get into Waseda like his father. He tells me his father’s fat, too. I wish him good luck and he laughs. Everyone laughs when I say good luck. Ten years will pass and people will still be laughing whenever the words “Good luck!” pass my lips and I still won’t understand why.

One of the girls, a short roly-poly sophomore at a private girls’ school, is excited about her up-coming school trip to Disneyland and the northern island of Hokkaidō. I ask when she’s going, she says Tōkyō. I ask her again, and she answers Tōkyō Disneyland. I say “When?” once more, and she tells me, “In Tōkyō.”

Is she doing this to me on purpose?

Deliberately and very slowly, enunciating as clearly as I humanly can and giving the “n” extra stress I ask, “When-NUH are you going?”

She nods! She gets it! There’s a big buck-toothed smile on her round chubby face! “I shee, I shee,” she says. “Hokkaidō.”

I break out the chalk, write WHEN and WHERE on the board, stab at the WHEN causing the chalk to crumble in my hand and ask for one last time. She apologizes then answers that she’s going in July. Progress! But wait, it’s only April, why’s she all fired up to go now? She says she can’t wait to go to Tōkyō Disneyland to see “Mickey Mouse ando Donarudo Ducku ando Poo.” I tell her that poo means unchi, then ask whose unchi she wants to see, Goofy’s?

She waves her hand frantically before her face. She doesn’t want to see Goofy’s feces. She wants to see the bear.

“Oh, you mean Winnie the Pooh.”

She says, “Yesh, yesh, yesh,” and then asks why on earth Christopher Robin would be so mean to call his bear unchi.

I shrug and say, “Maybe it sounded nice.”

She tells me she’s sad to learn what Pooh’s name means. I try to comfort her, telling her that she now has something funny to share with her friends at school tomorrow. She says she’ll never tell them. Why not, I ask. 

“Because they’d be sad, too.”

I ask her why they’re also going all the way to Hokkaidō which is an hour-and-half-long flight from Tōkyō and I’m told that they will visit the city of Fukugawa to see Clark’s statue. When I ask who this Clark person is, the rōnin answers, “Boys be ambitious!”

All of the students nod their heads collectively, and say, “Ambishush.” The phrase rings a bell and I recall having read about the missionary and educator who founded a school in Hokkaidō over a century ago. The sophomore points upwards, imitating the statue. I ask her what Clark’s statue is pointing at. She replies, the sky.

“What the hell’s he pointing at the sky for?”

She giggles and says she isn’t sure.

I tell the girl she’s lucky she isn’t a boy.

“Why’s that?”

“Because if you were a boy, you’d have to be ambitious and work hard. You’re a girl. You can take it easy and have fun if you like.”

She shouts, “Yea! Yea!”

The poor rōnin, however, hangs his weary head.

3

After work I squeeze onto a crowded train and head back to the condominium. The worn-out passengers hang loosely onto the overhead handles, swaying gently and bumping into each other like racks of beef, frozen and suspended from steel meat hooks.

Earlier in the day, Abazuré told me the students were happy to have me as their teacher, that I was doing a wonderful job. Compliments are cheap in this country, like smiles at McDonald’s, they don’t cost a cent, but Abazuré was sincere, eerily so.

So many of the adult students have declared me “a great teacher” and introduced their friends to the school that most of my morning classes are now filled to capacity. Even my co-worker, dreary old Yumi, after sitting in on one of my evening lessons, has rediscovered something to be enthusiastic about. All this praise depresses me because there is nothing that makes me feel more like a loser than being told how well I perform tasks embarrassingly beneath my potential. The compliment jars my confidence as malignantly as insults; I feel my dreams begin to slip through my fingers.

As I ride the train, pressed between the carcasses of salarymen and office ladies, an appalling realization finally begins to seep in. The deposit I paid and the contract I signed with Abazuré as my guarantor have all but indentured me. I was so eager to escape, at any cost, from the inaka, from the condominium in the middle of nowhere, that I didn’t give fuck about anything else. Now I do. As much as I am loath to admit it, I am probably looking at another two years performing the old eikaiwa soft-shoe routine. God, how depressing!

I look at the meat around me. Do they have dreams as well, or have those been extinguished by damp circumstance and necessity? What possesses them to be packed like cattle into trains, to work until they can barely stand? Just to pay off the mortgage on a place where they can drop their weary bones every night? I look at the expressionless faces, the vacant look in the eyes. Each day, inertia alone seems to be carrying them through. Were they ever motivated by dreams, inspired by love? Were they once animals in the sack, passionately thrashing about, lusting for life itself? Or, have they always been pathetic shells of men feigning impotence if only to get an extra half hour of blessed sleep? God help them. And God help me.

There isn’t a single light on in the condominium when I enter the front door. Not a sound, save the sickly hum of the second-hand refrigerator. Friday evening, alone again and with nothing in particular to do. Again. I’ve come to hate the weekends, hate how they remind me how little there is to look forward to after working all week. I couldn’t have been born to live this way.

I plop down on the woolly carpet in the living room. In the absence of the static work provided, my thoughts tune into Mié. As surely as the tide returns, my thoughts return to her. Where she is? What she’s doing? Who’s she with? Is she thinking about me, wondering these very same things, or is her mind elsewhere? Is there still a pulse to be found in the relationship we once had? Or am I wasting my time waiting for her to discover it, waiting for her to come back? Can the love we had be resuscitated, or is it as hopeless as a naked cadaver lying on a cold stainless steel shelf? It tortures me to think that she may have moved on, that I may have been forgotten when the pain in my heart is still so fresh.

What the hell am I still in Japan for? If only I could take my deposit back, erase my name and inkan from the apartment contract, and go back to the States. Coming to this country derailed me, and every day that passes is another day further off course.

I consider calling Aya, having her sneak out of her home to spend the night with me, to have her distract me with those glorious breasts of hers. But the way I’m feeling tonight, I doubt I’d find much consolation in screwing a high school girl. As surely as she would oblige me, I know the morning would greet me more depressed than ever, bitter that it weren’t someone I loved lying next to me.

With my move only a day away, I’ve got to stop moping about and start getting my things together, to pack up my clothes and belongings. Having never quite settled into the condominium, I have lived for the most part out of a suitcase, unpacking things as necessity required and hanging them up in the closet or putting them away in a drawer when I was finished. It doesn’t take long to pack everything back up.

My “roommates” are in town and probably won’t return until Sunday evening, meaning I’ll have vacated the condo by the time they return. I’ve heard stories of Japanese families digging themselves so deep into debt that they’re left with only two options: packing up what they can and moving out of their homes surreptitiously in the middle of the night, so-called yonigé, or committing ikka shinjū, family suicide. Considering that I haven’t mentioned my move to the “roommates,” I kind of feel like I’m yonigé-ing myself.

You think they’ll miss me? Think they’ll even notice that I’m gone?

4

I take a small box containing Mié’s pajamas, her yellow toothbrush and overnight kit, what she called her o-tomarisetto, from one of the drawers and place it in the clear plastic container where I keep photo albums and souvenirs from my first year in Japan.

It’s been months since I last opened the albums. Fear of an emotional breakdown has prevented me from summoning Lazarus out of his tomb, from taking the albums out and reviving the past.

I take them out now, one for nearly every month shared with Mié, with the exception of October. I still can’t bring myself to have the film from that month developed. They remain tucked away in a tin can, interned like dry bones and ashes.

Some of the happiest memories of my life are recorded on the pages of the albums. I can’t help myself, can’t keep myself from taking the first album out, from cracking it open, and diving headfirst before checking the depth. 

My twenty-sixth birthday: there’s Mié sitting among a group of some two dozen of my students who’ve crammed into one of the six-tatami mat rooms at my old apartment. She’s beaming at me—so beautiful, so vibrant, so engaging. She didn’t know if she would be able to make it, if she would be able to get away from work. I told her thirty people would be coming to the party, but she was the only person I really wanted to celebrate with. “Wakatta. Gambarimasu,” she said. Okay, I’ll try to be there.

I was on tenterhooks throughout the party, my eyes turning expectantly towards the front door every time I heard footsteps coming up the stairwell. When she did come, I could barely contain myself. “Mié-chan!” I shouted as she walked in through the door. That night after everyone had left we made love for only our second time.

On the following page, Mié and I are at an izakaya near my old apartment. We went to it whenever she drove up to visit me. In the first snapshot, Mié is pouring saké for me from a small earthenware tokkuri bottle into the tiny choko cup I am holding. Before us on the counters is a small plate of grilled saba (mackerel) with daikon oroshi (grated radish). It was my first time to try it. There were also dishes with a beef and potatoes nimono, and tempura on white paper. In the next photo, I am pouring soy sauce into the choko of the man next to me. Mié is laughing, but the man doesn’t quite know what to make of my little American jokku.

On the next page, is an adorable letter Mié sent to me after returning from a trip she took with all of her co-workers to the northern island of Hokkaidō. She included several photos of herself which had been taken while she was there. The letter mentions how mild the summer in Hokkaidō is compared to Kyūshū, the places visited and sights seen, the wonderful seafood she ate, so much she’s afraid she has put on weight . . . again. It closes with a few lines that reassured me when I had already started to fall in love with her:

“I’ve been thinking a lot about you recently. I don’t quite understand how I’m feeling, but I miss you so much and want to see you. Call me.”

When my eyes start to mist up, I put the photo album back into the storage container, clamp it shut, and then finish packing up my things. After a meal of tom yum gai soup, I sit down in front of the television and flip through the channels for something to get my mind off Mié. Without satellite or cable, flipping through the channels is like jogging around a short track. Around and around and around. A variety show featuring pop music, a variety show featuring a manzaicomedy duo, a dry documentary on NHK, the sober state-run broadcaster, an English language instruction program featuring sad excuses for foreigners hamming it up on NHK’s education channel, another variety show featuring manzaicomedians and pop music, and finally rounding up the lap, an old Schwarzenegger film dubbed in Japanese.

The phone rings.

5

“Moshi-moshi?”

“Hello. Is Chris there?” asks a soft, barely audible voice.

“No, he isn’t,” I reply, turning the TV’s volume down.

“Is this Peadar?”

“Yeah.”

“This is Machiko.” It’s Chris’s girlfriend.

“Oh, hi, Machiko.”

“Do you know where Chris is?” she asks timidly.

“No.”

My roommate, though affable enough, seldom has much to say to me whenever we happen to be at the condominium at the same time.

She asks if I am alone, what I’m doing, what my plans are for the weekend. Why the sudden interest in old Peadar, I can’t help but wonder. Is this Machiko a player? Is the quiet demeanor just a ruse?

“Yes,” I reply.

“I don’t believe you,” she says.

“I really am alone, regardless of whether you believe it or not.”

“You have a lot of girlfriends, don’t you?”

I’ve been getting this a lot. I tell her I’m not seeing anyone in particular. 

“Chris and I, we saw you Saturday evening with two girls. You were holding hands with both of them.”

Saturday night? Holding hands?

“Oh, them,” I say. “They’re just friends.”

Two former students of mine had come down from Kitakyūshū to see me. Sweet girls, both of them, terribly kind, but not what I’d call my cup of tea.

“We were drunk,” I offer as an explanation. I had completely forgotten about that.

“And I saw you with a high school girl near the park before that. You were holding her hand, too.”

Holding hands with Aya? Now that I definitely did not do, but there’s no use in protesting; Machiko has convinced herself.

“Chris tells me you are a playboy, a real lady-killer. Are you? Are you a lady-killer?”

This gives me a nice and long overdue laugh.

“Please be nice to them,” she says.

“Okay, I promise. Cross my heart.”

“I mean it,” she insists and then I can hear the gravity in her soft voice. “Peadar, please be nice to them.”

“I’ll try,” I say.

“Do you know when Chris will come home?”

“To tell you the truth, I have no idea,” I say, adding that he sometimes doesn’t come back at all. Oops!

The silence on the other end of the phone speaks volumes. It was a simple mistake; I was under the assumption that Chris had been spending the night with Machiko. Now that I realize that hasn’t been the case, I whip up a nice and fluffy white lie.

“Chris is busy, as I’m sure he’s told you, Machiko, lots of overtime. And he’s also helping a friend which . . .” I have to pull these fluffy white lies out of my arse because I don’t know Jack-shit about Chris’s private life. “He told me he sometimes stayed at a co-worker’s place in town, a Tony-something, whenever he misses the last train . . .”

The last bit has the merit of being based on more than the threadbare fabric of my imagination: it stems from hearsay.

Machiko remains silent. I can’t tell whether she has bought any of it, or whether she was able to understand what I told her.

After a long, pain-filled sigh, she speaks up. “I want you to give him a message.”

“Sure.”

“Tell him: I love him . . . I miss him . . .”

I can hear her sniffing on the other end.

“I want to see him . . .”

Her voice grows ever more quiet, and with all the sniffing, it’s hard to catch what she’s saying. Even so, I know the message she wants me to convey.

“Tell him . . . I love him.”

I write the simple words down on the only piece of paper available, a mauve napkin with a picnic basket and cartoon squirrels in one corner, write her words verbatim with ellipsis indicating the pauses each time she’s too overcome by emotion to continue. When I look at what she has had me write, I realize they are the very same words Mié spoke to me.

Mié and I spent a quiet weekend together at her apartment in Fukuoka, rarely leaving her bed. We made love, rested, made love again, and then after taking a shower together, fell into each other’s arms and did it one more time before falling asleep.

When I had returned to Kitakyūshū, I took a long walk by myself along the bank of the slow-moving Onga River, listening to a cassette Mié had made for me with some of her favorite songs. I couldn’t stop thinking about her, and felt vulnerable and weak because of it. I was lost in that painfully comfortable limbo, having fallen in love but distressed that the sentiment might not be mutual. That evening I walked up the hill to the cluster of mom-and-pop shops where the only public telephone in the neighborhood was to be found. The booth was alive with mosquitoes, moths, gnats and ticks, every kind of bug imaginable. Braving the insects, I dialed Mié’s number. That’s how badly I wanted to hear her voice, wanted to hear her say, “I love you . . . I miss you . . . I want to see you.”

“I miss you, too, Mié.” I told her, with my throat taunt. “I want to see you, too.”

“I’ll tell him,” I promise Machiko.

“Peadar?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I talk to you?”

“Of course.”

Machiko speaks for an hour, describing how she first met Chris. 

She had been walking along a street in town a month ago when she noticed him. Just like that, she went right up to him and asked if he was American. He said, yes, and the two of them started talking. They ended up spending the afternoon together chatting in a coffee shop.

“I was so sad and lonely before I met Chris,” she says sniffing. “But, he’s made me so happy.”

I start to cry. Mié had made me happy, too, at a time when I was desperately homesick and missing all of my friends back in Portland. I tell Machiko a little about Mié, only a little because to tell her the extent of what has been weighing on my heart all these months would be unbearable.

“Do you still love her?”

“Yes,” I answer, tears flowing down my face, my nose running.

“Then call her.”

“She’ll just hang up on me.”

“Try,” she encourages. “Give her one more chance.”

6

I stare at the phone for more than half an hour, before finally dialing Mié’s number.

How many times did I try to call Mié? How many times did I linger by the phone, wanting to make this very call, but was held back by fear, the fear that the relationship was dead, the fear that Mié was gone and would never come back no matter what I did or said? How many times? I should have moved on and found someone else, anyone, if only to fuck away the memories, if only to mend my heart by breaking others’.

Machiko is right, I have nothing to lose by calling, so I dial Mié’s number.

“Moshi-moshi?”

Mié’s familiar deep voice breaks the silence that has enveloped me since Machiko hung up.

“Hi.”

“Who is it?” she asks.

“It’s me . . .”

“Peadar?”

“Yes,” I say painfully, my throat dry and tight. “Yes, it’s me, Peadar.”

Mié sounds genuinely happy to hear from me, something which catches me off guard.

We exchange bland pleasantries like two old middle-aged women in a supermarket. She mentions the warm weather we’ve been having asks if I had a chance to drink under the sakura blossoms. I tell her I did, that I’m now working near West Park, one of the best places to see the cherry blossoms.

“I’m glad to hear that,” she says. “Do you like your new job?”

“It’s not bad,” I tell her. “A million times better than working for that idiot, Bakayama, in Kitakyūshū but then just about anything would be better than another year with him.”

She speaks of her own hatred for the tiring and boring routine at the pachinko parlor, then brightens up when she tells me that she got a new puppy.

“He likes to drink beer,” she adds.

Six months may have passed since we last spoke, but she is still the Mié I fell in love with and have been missing all these months.

Mié asks how I look, whether I’ve grown my hair out or have kept it short, and so on. Finally, she asks me if I have a girlfriend.

I tell her I don’t.

“No?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“I don’t believe you.”

I have no idea why everyone is finding this so hard to accept. Am I missing something here?

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” I say. “Haven’t had one since you . . .”

“I’m sorry.”

The tears begin to fall, betraying me again. Women will tell you that they want their men to express their emotions, but nothing turns a woman off faster than a man blubbering pathetically into the receiver of the phone and that’s exactly what I begin to do and I’ve never hated myself more than I do now.

“I’m so lonely, Mié . . . I miss you . . . I want to see you.”

---

Click here for Chapter One

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A Woman's Nails is now available on Amazon's Kindle.

3. Risa

1

I move to Fukuoka at the end of March and settle into my new job. The schedule is dead easy and so far I have no complaints except that I am working six days a week instead of five. One morning I mention to my co-worker Yumi that it would be nice to have the occasionally Saturday off as well so that I could do a bit of traveling on the weekends, because I wasn’t really in Japan to work all the time, ha, ha, ha. Later in the day, my boss takes me aside to reprimand me for complaining about the schedule.

“If you’re really not interested in working here,” she says, “I’ll be happy to find someone to replace you. I’m sure you’ll have plenty of time to travel, then.”

My conversations with Yumi are reduced to sparing exercises in polite banality after that. We comment on the weather, on the beauty of the sakura which were in full bloom my first week on the job, the azaleas which have started to blossom, and the mud nest the sparrows have built under the awning of the boutique downstairs, then fall silent. I retreat to the morning’s paper, she busies herself with whatever it is that she does at her desk before me. It’s very weird to say the least.

Most afternoons I’m free for four to five hours until it’s time to teach the evening class. On warm, sunny days I go to either of the two large parks that are near the school to write letters or read a book or wander. When the sky is overcast, I take a bus downtown, to Tenjin, and browse for books or CDs.

Evenings at the school are a huge improvement over the grim mornings. Yumi and the boss leave for the damp, dark caves they must surely inhabit shortly after I return from my afternoon break, meaning I am alone with Reina, a vivacious woman with wavy brown hair who teaches the junior high students in the evenings.

Yumi and Reina are like night and day, and the heavy veil of silence Yumi drapes over each morning is torn apart in the evening as soon as Reina punches in. Yumi and Reina do, however, share one thing: dread. Just as I dread my mornings alone with Yumi, I dread saying good-bye to Reina each night. Because there is nothing waiting for me but a sixty-minute-long train ride back to the condominium I’m living in. The condominium is located deep in the countryside, surrounded by untilled rice fields and an unshakable loneliness.

Though I am allegedly sharing the condominium with two other Americans, I am more often than not the sole inhabitant of the eighth story, four-room mansion, as the Japanese call it. My “roommates” are MIA on the weekends and don’t usually come home until well after I have retired to bed most weeknights.

I am no early bird, but my boss has so put the fear of being sacked into me that I find myself waking at the crack of dawn. I trudge like a somnambulist through a path between two rice fields to the unmanned station where I catch the seven-thirty train. I’m usually in town early enough that I can drop in at a shitty little coffee shop called, only God knows why, Henry the Eighth, where I have the mōningu setto of tōsuto, bēkon, sukuramburu eggi ando kōhī (i.e., the morning set of toast, bacon, scrambled eggs and coffee) before confronting Yumi and her intractable gloom.

In the middle of April once I’ve settled into a routine, I go to the International Center to look for a Japanese teacher and, I am embarrassed to admit, put a card on a bulletin board there, seeking “friends.”

I have often heard from the woman I have contacted through the International Center that I am the only person who has bothered to call them, so I don’t expect much of a response from my own card. Boy, am I ever wrong!

The day after my card is up, calls start pouring in. It takes several minutes to get through all the messages that have accumulated on the answering machine at the condominium while I was away at work. Three days later, letters written on adorable stationery start to arrive. By week’s end, I’ve got over a dozen women eager to meet me, and so like a starving man standing before buffet, I pencil in as many of them as I can into my Saturday and Sunday.

2

Shortly after work Saturday evening, I hurry downtown where I meet with Bachelorette Number One, a plain-looking young woman in her early twenties who leads me with a string of “please, please, please’s” to a coffee shop in a maze-like underground shopping arcade. As soon as we sit down, she produces several sheets of paper from her handbag and starts to read from it.

“My name is Hitomi. It’s nice to meet you.”

She looks up at me, smiles broadly and pauses. I take this as my cue to tell her that the pleasure is mine.

“Pleasure?” she asks.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I say.

“Pleasure?” She says with a puzzled look.

“Nice to meet you, too.”

“Oh, I see. Thank you.” Studying her crib sheet, she says, “Please forgive my poor English.”

“It is forgiven!”

“Pardon me?”

“Never mind.”

“Mind?”

“Please, go ahead. Dōzo.”

“Please forgive my poor English,” she repeats after checking her notes. “I want to be your friend.”

“Okay.”

She looks at the paper, mouths the words as she reads them silently, and asks, “Will you be my friend?”

“Well, it’s gonna cost ya!”

“Pardon?”

“Okay.”

“May I ask you some questions?”

“Shoot!”

“Pardon?”

“Sure, go ahead. Dōzo.”

“What is your hobby?”

What the hell is it with the Japanese and these stupid questions? I can count the times on one hand I was asked this before coming to Japan, but here it’s the most pressing thing that needs to be addressed. Ridiculous questions deserve ridiculous answers: “I enjoy groping strangers on crowded trains.”

“Trains?”

“Yes, trains. Groping.”

“Guroappu?”

“Er, I like traveling by train.”

“Trouble?”

“Not, trouble. Travel. I like traveling by train.”

“Oh, I see. I like to travel, too.”

“You do? Where have you been? Have you been abroad?”

“Next question,” she says looking down at her sheet. “Can you eat sushi?”

Good grief. “Yeah, it’s okay, I suppose.”

“Okay? You can eat sushi? Let’s have sushi next time!”

We whiz through her questionnaire in no time then sit in awkward silence until it’s time for me to meet Bachelorette Number Two.

3

Mika is an attractive twenty-four-year-old woman, who asks me what my dream is. The question itself is not as surprising as, say, the complete lack of context in which it’s asked: our order has just been taken by the waitress. But then, many Japanese mistakenly believe, like Bachelorette Number One, that rattling off a random list of questions in English amounts to communication.

“My dream? Huh.”

I’ve often asked the same of women and am usually disappointed by the replies.

“I want to master English,” one girl told me.

“Okay, then what?”

“What do you mean?”

“What are you going to do after you master English?”

“I don’t know. I just . . .”

“English is a tool, nothing more. A hammer, if you will. If you haven’t got any idea of what you want to build with that hammer, then it’s just going to sit on a shelf in the shed and get rusty.”

“Oh.”

“Oh, is right. If you don’t know what you’ll do with the English once you’ve mastered it—sorry to burst your bubble—you probably never will master it.”

When I asked a young college student the same question, she replied that she had never really thought about it. I was flabbergasted. “How the hell can you not have a dream? I mean, how the hell can you even get up in the morning?” The poor girl. She fell silent and stared at the table after that.

Mika’s English is pretty damn good, so I can indulge myself: “Most people are like flotsam drifting on the surface of the ocean their whole lives. They make no impact on life. Life, on the other hand, has a huge impact on them. They’re tossed about, they flow this way and that. You follow me?”

“I think so.”

“They don’t change the sea in any way. They don’t have much of an influence on the others around them. I mean, I suppose that from time to time they might bump into other flotsam, see? Or, what? Get tangled up in discarded bits of fishing net?”

She eyes me warily.

“I don’t want to be like that,” I tell her. “Not at all. No, I want to be like a tanker plowing its way along a river. Everything that is caught in its wake gets overturned and tossed about. Even people who don’t see the tanker go by still feel its impact and influence, good or bad.”

“You want to be a sailor?” she asks.

“A sailor! Nice one, hah! No, I don’t want to be a sailor.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“No problem.” I tell her of the megalomania, which fuels me, my interest in Japanese architecture and design, in the pop art here, particularly manga and anime, Japanese comics and animation. I talk about how I want to learn from it and use it in my own art and designs.

“Peadar, are you an otaku?”

“Otaku? No, I’m not a nerd. I’m a maniac. So, how about you, Mika? What’s your dream?”

“I want to travel.”

“Yeah? Where to?”

“Everywhere. Europe, Africa, Asia . . . Mars.”

“Mars?” I ask, not sure I heard her correctly.

“Yes Mars,” she repeats.

“Mars,” I ask again pointing toward the ceiling.

“Yes, Mars,” she replies, pointing to the same point in the ceiling. 

“Rotsa ruck!”

Mika is attractive enough, speaks English well enough, and has a sense of humor that accommodates my nonsense. There is even something, which resembles chemistry between us, but I get the distinct impression that I’d have to join the Realian’s Cult just to get to first base.

4

I dash over to the Nishitetsu Grand Hotel where I’ve promised to meet a young woman named Kumiko.

Of all the women I’ve set up “dates” with, it is this Kumiko I’ve been looking forward to meeting the most for the simple reason that we share similar tastes in music. Not saying it’s necessarily bad, but far too many Japanese women have their short attention spans captivated by flavor-of-the-month Japanese pop stars. They get all worked up over the one or two-hit wonders that are cranked out of production machines like burgers at Mickey Dees. I’m not into fast food, and am even less of a fan of fast art. This Kumiko, however, is different: she is gaga about British rock and what she calls “guranji”.

I imagined Kumiko to be cool, pretty in her own way, but when I get a load of how she looks, a reassessment of my musical preferences is in order. 

Kumiko has thrown herself whole-heartedly into the grunge look: baggy, soiled pants with holes in the knees, sweatshirt in tatters, and a loose-fitting flannel shirt. When I arrive at the hotel I find her sitting in the most un-ladylike manner, slouched and legs spread apart with a practiced indifference to the world and an unforgivable contempt for the five-thousand-dollar Arne Jacobsen leather swan chair she has planted her filthy arse in. I have the urge to race back to Mika and hop on the mother ship before it returns to Mars.

Kumiko introduces me to a pug-nosed, overweight and slovenly friend named Kazuko. Dressed in tattered fatigues, this Kazuko has been asked to join us because of her fluency in English. Normally, I would welcome tagalongs with “The more, the merrier!” but in this little piggy’s case, three’s a crowd.

Before I can recover from the disappointment they lead me out of the hotel towards an entertainment district a few blocks away called Oyafukō Dōri. As we make our way there, Kumiko asks, in Japanese, if I’ve ever been there, but just as I’m going to reply, in Japanese, Kazuko butts in with a heavily accented translation, “Oyafukō, you know? Been to?”

“I, I can’t say that I have.”

Kazuko translates my reply for the benefit of Kumiko who lets out such an expression of surprise it makes me wonder if the dog’s got it right.

“You know oyafukō mean?” Kazuko barks.

I shrug. I couldn’t care less. I just want to go home.

“You don’t know? Why? Why you don’t know?” Kazuko says with theatrical disbelief. I feel like whacking the girl.

Kumiko says that she and her friend are oyafukō, causing the two of them to split their sides laughing. It’s highly unattractive and I want to escape. Kumiko, well, I could manage spending time with her, perhaps even enjoy being with her, but this Kazuko? Let’s face it, Kazuko’s a pig and standing next to her is an embarrassment—people might think that we are, God help me, actually friends.

“I haven’t the slightest clue what the two of you are talking about.”

Kazuko leaps at the opportunity to inflict her Engrish onto me: “Oya mean mamma, pappa. Okay? You got that, Mistah Peadar?”

“Parents? You mean parents, right?’”

“So, so, so,” Kumiko replies, “pahrento.”

Kazuko continues, “So, fukō mean ‘fee-ree-ah-ru pie-ah-chee . . . want of.’”

“Huh?”

She repeats the same gibberish a few times, then digs a dictionary out of a large army surplus canvas bag that’s slung around her shoulder. After thumbing through it, she passes it to me, pointing at the entry.

Even though it’s evening, it’s so brightly illuminated downtown with glaring streetlights, building facades bathed in the glow of flood lights and massive neon billboards, you could read a newspaper, or, in this case, an entry in a dictionary.

After crossing the street, I pause to read. “Fukō: unfilial behavior; disobedience towards one’s parents; treat one’s parent’s disrespectfully.”

“You got it, Mistah Peadar-san?” Kazuko asks loudly.

“I, I guess so?”

“We are oyafukō!” Kumiko tells me again. The two of them point to their noses saying, “Oyafukō”, then burst into laughter.

“Ah, you make your parents cry, don’t you?”

“So, so, so,” replies Kumiko. “Pahrento. Wah! Wah! Wah!”

I take it this is how parents cry in Japan. No boohoo-hoos in the Land of the Rising Sun.

“So, so, so,” adds Kazuko. “My parents, too. Crying ohru za taimu.”

“All the time? Why do you make your parents so unhappy?”

Kazuko answers, “We still don’t marriage.”

I would prefer to speak with them in Japanese than endure this woman butchering of the English language, but the pug-nosed brute is relentless. 

“You haven’t got married yet?”

“No, still not marriage.”

Ah! “But, the two of you are still young. I mean, what’s the hurry?”

They get a kick out of that. “Oh, we love you, Mistah Peadar. You gentleman!”

“Don’t get too excited. You haven’t seen me drunk yet.”

Kumiko asks me how old I think she is.

I guess she’s a few years younger than myself, but say “Thirteen?” which causes her let out a shriek. She turns to her friend and says in Japanese, “I can’t believe it, he thinks I’m thirty.”

“Thirteen,” I repeat. “Thirteen! Not thirty. Ah, never mind. I was just joking.”

“Jokku?” asks Kumiko. “American jokku?”

What the hell is an American joke? “Yes, American joke.” Whatever.

Kumiko tells me she can’t understand “American jokes.” I reply that I don’t really understand Japanese jokes, which seems to consist primarily of one man slapping the other on the head and shouting, “Fool!”

“Oh, you just put us on, then Mistah Peadar?” Kazuko said. “Don’t surprise us so. Bad for heart.”

I’m tempted to whack Kazuko on the head and shout, “Fool!”

We come to a second signal where food stalls, or yatai, serving ramen and yakitori, are lined up on the sidewalk. The steady stream of pedestrians coming and going are forced to pass through a narrow path between the yatai and the street, walking over an obstacle course of electrical cords and hoses.

Looking across the street, towards what Kumiko indicates is Oyafukō Dōri, I am hit hard by the realization that I have been here before. It’s all disturbingly familiar.

On the left is a yakitori restaurant, belching out black smoke from a massive vent blackened with oil and soot. Above that is an Indian restaurant run by Sikhs, beards and turbans and all. Across the street is another tall and narrow building with a Yoshinoya outlet on the first floor that serves, gyūdon, bowls of rice topped with a mystery beef. The two opposing buildings form a gate of sorts at the entrance of Oyafukō. A sea of bodies flow in from the main avenue attracted like moths towards the neon lights and bright signboards. The street itself is clogged with dozens upon dozens of taxis, the lights on top of their cabins forming a string of illumination that runs the length of the street, all the way to a gazebo like police box in the distance.

Kōban. Police box. It had been a new word for me when Mié said it. “You don’t have police boxes in America, do you?” We’d just gotten out of a cab. “I didn’t see any when I was there.”

I told Mié we didn’t, that we had police stations and precincts and police roaming around in cars like stalkers, but no police boxes.

It was Mié and my first time to get together and I had only been in Japan for about a month and a half. Mié would treat me to dinner at a noisy Japanese-style pub, an izakaya she’d teach me, where the staff was constantly yelling at the top of their lungs, “Two drafts, hey!” or “Welcome, hoi!” or what the fuck ever. Later, we’d go to a hostess bar, called a snack, where she’d get jealous when a hostess tried to hit on me. Back at her place, we would sit on her bedroom floor drinking saké until there was no more left, and then we’d kiss for the first time. In the months that followed, Mié and I would go dancing at the discos or drinking in many of the bars here.

I can feel Mié’s presence as we cross the street and enter Oyafukō Dōri. I see her in the middle of the street on a Monday morning, wearing a simple, but tight-fitting orange dress with white polka dots, and smiling broadly, arms stretched out. I see myself ignoring the annoyed honking of a taxi driver to take her picture. It’ll become my favorite photo of her and will always remind me of everything that I loved about her, her vitality, her spontaneity, her smile and her body. I see us sitting at the Mister Donut where we share a cup of coffee and an old-fashioned donut and talk about going to America together. Oyafukō is as haunted with memories as my old apartment in godforsaken Kitakyūshū was and being back after all this time, after six months, is unsettling to say the least.

“Peadar, we’re here,” Kazuko says, tugging at my arm.

Is Mié out there somewhere? Is she having dinner with her roommate? Is she drinking with friends in a bar nearby? 

I look down the street beyond the milling mass of people towards the police box, at the passengers getting out of taxis. Is she there? I scan hundreds of faces but can’t find hers.

“Mistah Peadar?”

“Huh? Oh, right,” I follow them into a modest little bar called Umié.[1]

After the unexpected onslaught of memories, I’m not much of a companion to Kumiko and Kazuko. It’s difficult to put up with Kazuko’s incessant questions with my thoughts lost on events that are nearly a year old. God how I want to go back in time and relive that first night, that night which changed everything for me. I wish I could go back and undo the mistakes of last summer, so that it would be Mié I was with rather than these two. But I can’t. All I can do is try to chase after forgetfulness one cheap bottle of Heineken at a time.

“Is something the matter?” Kumiko asks later while Kazuko is off harassing someone else for a change.

“I’m sorry, I’m just feeling . . .” I can’t remember the Japanese for depressed. “I’m just feeling blah.”

“Blah? The band? I love them.”

“Not Blur, blah. I’m feeling . . . depressed.”

“Jipuresstoh?”

“De-, depressed. Blah. Er, melancholy.”

“Ah, merankoree. Me, too!” She clinked her bottle of beer against mine.

“To melancholy. Cheers.”

Without Kazuko’s meddling Kumiko and I are able to talk for quite a while about our “merankoree”, our heartbreak and our loneliness. Seems she’s been suffering for two years (two whole goddamn years!) from unrequited love. She wants to know what to do about it. She wants to understand what men are thinking. I don’t have the heart to tell her that most guys are thinking much about anything; that they just want to get laid without too many complications.

“Why don’t you just ask him out?” I suggest.

It comes as a revelation to the poor girl. “Me? Ask him?” What are you? High? She doesn’t say this, but she must be thinking it.

“Yeah, you. Ask him out. If he accepts, hey great, you’re lucky. If he says no, well then you can move on. Find someone better.”

Despite Kumiko’s poor choice of clothing and friends, she is still a sweet girl, and even if I haven’t found what I was looking for this Saturday evening, I have at least found a friend. And that, I cannot deny, is better than nothing.

I have to leave Umié around eleven so I can catch the last train back to my condominium in the middle of nowhere. Kumiko’s jaw drops when I tell her where I’m living. I still find it hard to believe it myself. After silent commiseration, she tells me to move out of the inaka, the sticks, before I turn into an imo otoko, a potato boy, that is, a hick. Her advice is like a virus, which finds a willing host in my mind. It’ll spread quickly and before I know it, I have a full-blown case of dissatisfaction, the only cure for which will be to find a place closer to town.

I get to the station in time for the final train, which is packed shoulder to shoulder with red faced salarymen, reeking of whiskey, and office ladies, trembling like lambs among wolves, hoping they won’t have to silently endure another clumsy grope.

A drunk standing to my side looks up, and noticing with exaggerated surprise that I am a gaijin, a foreigner tries to speak to me.

“American?” He says teetering precariously on unsteady legs. Were it not for the fact that the train was as full as it is, his knees would surely buckle, he’d drop like a sack of shit to the floor.

I pretend to read the ads that dangle from the ceiling like laundry on a clothesline, but he taps me on the arm. “Hey! You American?” Aside from the high-pitched woman’s voice giving the passengers an unnecessarily long running commentary over the intercom system, this drunk is the only person among the hundreds crammed into the carriage that is speaking.

Why me?

The man is not easily discouraged. He’s got a foot-long tuft of hair growing from his temple that’s been combed over an otherwise hairless crown. The Japanese call this the “bar code.” Do men actually think they’re fooling anyone when they do that? Give in to the balding, I say, shave it all off.

He asks again more forcefully, some strands of hair cascade down his broad forehead to the bridge of his nose.

I want to move away, but with the wall of bodies around me, there’s no way out. I’m trapped, so I answer softly, “Y-yes, I’m American.”

Oh, what luck! You can see the delight in his eyes. I imagine he’ll boast for days to his co-workers and family that he can not only spot an American among gaijin, but that he even had an honest to God conversation with one. What an international man he is! He slobbers and gushes about how much he loves the country of my birth. How lucky I am to be American. I wish I could share the sentiment, but my response to his or anyone’s enthusiasm over something so accidental as nationality is lukewarm.

He spares me questions pertaining to Japanese cuisine and goes right to the meat of the conversation: “So, what do you think of Japan? You like it here?”

Do I like Japan? There have been times when I thought I did. Some of the happiest times I’ve ever known have been in this country, but how long has it been since I’ve really been happy here? How long has it been since I felt glad to be here? It’s been six months, six goddamn months. I’ve been traveling solely on the inertia since then.

I tell him I do.

He gives a long-winded commentary on the sad state of his country. Japan’s tiny and weak, he says. The people are narrow-minded. They lack initiative, creativity. The young are stupid and lazy. He grumbles on and on like this for several train stops.

Please, God! Kamisama! Buddha! Allah! Let the next stop be his!

The speech he gives me is one I’ve heard other drunks make many times before. Even that idiot I used to work for in Kitakyūshū said similar things. If you bothered to inquire what kind of country these inebriated malcontents wanted Japan to be, they end up describing a country suspiciously reminiscent of the one that got them into so much trouble half a century earlier. The drunk then asks what I am doing.

“I’m going home.”

“You’re going home, ha! Nice one! American joke.” His breath reeks of puke. “What are you doing in Japan, not on this train, in Japan?”

What the hell am I doing? All my friends—the one’s I leaned upon so heavily after Mié left me, the ones who made the time here tolerable, and occasionally fun, the ones who stumbled along with me and helped me laugh at my mistakes—will be gone by the end of next week. There was a reason why I came, but I was sidetracked by the initial disappointment and culture shock, the falling in love, the heartbreak, the loneliness that followed and then the move that I never really got to pursue it. To say I’m in Japan to learn something I haven’t yet bothered to start learning is disingenuous. Before I am able to come up with an answer that would satisfy myself, the train stops, doors whoosh open and the drunk staggers out, saying, “American, me and you, we’re the same!” The doors close, and he gives me two big, wobbly thumbs up as the train resumes its westerly creep toward the middle of nowhere.

God help me if we really are the same.

5

Let me tell you, after last night’s letdown I’m not as fired up about going into town to meet new women as I was yesterday. It’s tempting to just stay in, stand the chicks up, and veg out in front of the good ol’ boob tube. Problem is, Chris and Machiko are here and it doesn’t look like they are in a hurry to go anywhere.

When I ask what their plans are, they giggle and say they don’t have any; that they’ll probably hang out all day in the condo. They giggle some more.

Wonderful. The last thing I want to do is listen to the two of them fucking each other’s brains out all day.

I first met Machiko briefly shortly after I moved in to the condominium. She and one of my nominal roommates, an African-American from Texas named Chris, were leaving just as I returned home.

“Hey, Peadar,” Chris said, bending over to tie his shoelaces.

“Going out?”

“Yeah. We’re going into town to catch a movie.”

“A movie, huh? I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie.”

“At eighteen bucks a pop, who could blame ya?” he said, standing up, then turning to his girlfriend behind him, added quickly, “Oh, man, I’m sorry. Peadar, this is Machiko.”

The girl was little more than skin and bones, but she had the kindest eyes.

“Hajime-mashite,” I said, stretching out my hand.

She gave me a cold sardine of a handshake and smiled demurely.

I met Machiko a second time only last Sunday morning. The girl had been so quiet that I was surprised to find her in the kitchen. Dressed in panties and a t-shirt, she was standing on her tippy toes, hand stretched above her, reaching for a box of Frosted Flakes on the top shelf of the cupboard. The t-shirt rose, revealing a narrow waist and what looked, I couldn’t be sure, like the edge of a large tattoo on her back.

“Ohayō,” I said as I entered the kitchen, giving the girl a start. “Let me get that for you.”

Standing next to her, I reached up and grabbed the cereal box. As I passed the box to her, I saw again what appeared to be a tattoo peaking above the collar of the t-shirt at the base of her neck. She thanked me with a smile and a nod, then sitting down at the dining table, she poured herself a bowl. Chris emerged from the hallway, dressed identically in an oversized t-shirt and underwear, and sat down besides her.

“Would either of you like some tea,” I asked as I put the kettle on.

They shook their heads.

With a cup of tea in my hand, I sat down at the opposite end of the table and pretended to read The Economist.

Though Chris had mentioned before that he had only recently met Machiko, they exhibited a familiarity with each other that suggested otherwise. They took turns taking large spoonfuls of cereal and whispered nonsense to each other that had them giggling like children.

I could almost have envied them their affections and apparent happiness, had it not been for the stubborn curiosity piqued by the flashes of indigo at the edges of Machiko’s t-shirt. I couldn’t help wonder what would ever drive a girl as seemingly timid as she, to get her entire back covered with a massive yakuza-style tattoos?

Chris asks what I’ll be doing. I tell him I’m meeting someone in town.

“He’s a playboy,” Machiko says to Chris. “I saw him yesterday with a pretty girl.”

Who’s she got me confused with, I wonder, but laugh it off and return to my bedroom where I get ready to leave.

6

I’ve got four dates lined up for today: Chie, Mayu, Risa, and Aya. Four names of women I know next to nothing about except that they will be waiting at specified times and locations expecting this gaijin to show up.

Ooh, the intrigue!

Chie finds me in front of the Iwataya department store standing before a wall of TVs. When she walks up to me asking if I am Peadar, I am tempted to say that she must have me mistaken for someone else because where there ought to be teeth in the woman’s head, there are what look like the pickets of a weathered fence. This poor Chie could have a face that breaks hearts, a body that drives me wild with desire, the compassion of Mother Teresa, but I would never be able to overlook those dreadful teeth.

Listen, I have become rather magnanimous in my attitude towards dentistry since coming to this country—call me British, if you will—but this woman’s mouth puts that generosity to the test. If I had those teeth, I’d suppose I might spend my days in reticence, mumbling through tightly closed lips only when necessary, but this Chie won’t shut up! She goes on and on and on: yackety-yak-yak.

Mayu is waiting for me outside the International Center two hours later. The girl is not all that bad looking, but the get-up she’s got on takes the cake.

Mayu is tricked out in a blouse, ridiculously frilly with broad sleeves that gather in yet more frills and ribbons at the wrist. Under the sky blue skirt she’s wearing is a multi-layered petticoat causing the skirt to flares out from her thin waist. Fluffy white lambs have been sewn on to the skirt here and there. She looks like Lil’ Bo Peep. All that is missing is a shepherd’s staff.

She apologizes that she hasn’t got much time that she’s on her lunch break.

Oh, thank God!

“Is this some kind of uniform?” I ask cautiously. Tell me it’s just a costume.

“Well, yes, in a way, I suppose it is,” she replies. “Isn’t it cute?”

“Um . . . Where is it that you work?”

“At Pink House,” she says, then suggests going there. I tell her she needn’t trouble, but she insists on taking me straightaway. “It’s just around the corner,” she tells me. So, I follow after her like one of her many sheep.

Once at the boutique, Mayu introduces me to her co-workers, all of whom are dressed in similarly ludicrous outfits. They wear eerily pleasant smiles on their faces.

“You don’t always dress this way, do you?” I ask warily.

“Oh, if only I could,” Mayu gushes. “But these outfits are far too expensive for me.”

I take a look at one of the price tags and I’ll be damned if my eyeballs don’t pop out. The petticoats alone cost a thousand dollars.

The co-workers nudge each other and giggle. They think Mayu and I make a nice couple.

These women are all insane.

7

“Call me Lisa,” Risa tells me.

Whatever.

Risa is disappointed when we meet because I am not black. I have so immersed myself in this culture that I find myself unconsciously apologizing for being white.

“I’m sorry, Risa, er, Lisa, for giving you that impression.”

I spoke to so many women in the past week, I don’t know to whom I told what, but I can safely assume that I did not tell her, or anyone else for that matter, that I was of African decent. I mean, why on earth would I?

I go through the filthy hamper of a brain I have, sifting through the unwashed laundry trying to remember what I may have said that led her to believe that I am a brother. Did she misinterpret something I said? This is highly probable; even the most fluent English speakers I know misunderstand much of what I tell them. Perhaps, I told her I was the black sheep of the family—which is true, that I blacked out last weekend from the drink—also true, that black was my favorite color, that I preferred black tea to green, that . . .

“You said you were black.”

“I said I was Irish. Irish-Amer . . .”

“Yes, and then I said, ‘Do you have orange hair and freckles . . .”

I see, said the blind man as he pissed into the wind, it all comes back to me.

And suddenly I remembered! “I said, ‘No, I’m black Irish.’”

“So, so, so, so. You said you were black.”

See what I mean?

Risa-call-me-Lisa takes me to a monjayaki restaurant that she says is the best. Outside the restaurant we look at the display case, which features uncannily realistic wax representations of the dishes served.

“Which one do you want?” she asks.

There are a dozen plates of what looks like vomit. I can’t imagine anyone looking at this display and thinking, Mm that looks yummy! I’ll have the puke with bits of bacon, please.

“I don’t know. They all look the same to me.”

She laughs. “You’re a funny man, Mister Peadar-san.”

So I am. So I am.

Risa-call-me-Lisa is going to have the seafood barf with squid, shrimp and bits of octopus, and I order the standard mixed monjayaki called, believe it or not, The Orthodox. We sit at the counter before a large teppan grill where the cooks prepare the vomit with the seriousness of funeral directors. I can’t help but chuckle.

Risa unzips the silver down jacket she’s wearing to reveal the skimpiest of outfits. She hasn’t got the greatest body in the world, but she certainly knows how to present it, how to put it into a small enough package that it gives me a personal boner. Even the cooks can’t help but take their eyes off the teppan griddle to sneak a peek.

She asks me if I like what she’s wearing.

“I do.”

She tells me she got it in Tōkyō where all the girls are wearing this kind of thing.

I should have moved to Tōkyō.

“Have you ever been to Tōkyō?” she asks.

“No, not yet.”

“Let’s go with me!” she says.

“Okay, let’s!”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

She asks if I want to drink.

“Is the Pope Catholic?”

“The Pope?”

“Risa, er, Lisa. I’m dying for a drink.”

“Beer? You want a nama?”

“Draught? Yeah, I’ll have a nama.”

She orders two namas which we put away easily before our food is served, so she orders two more. During our meal of monjayaki, which is actually quite good, we drink a couple more draughts and by the end of lunch we’re like too old lovers. She touches me playfully to make a point, leans against my body when she tells me something she doesn’t want the staff to hear, rests her head on my shoulder, places her hand on my thigh and says she’s tired. I’m thinking I may actually get laid today. She orders another beer moves her hand to the bulge in my pants that has been impatiently demanding attention ever since she removed her jacket.

“Wow!” she says. “It’s true.”

“What’s true?”

“You know.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“What they say.”

“What do they say?”

“You know.”

“I don’t.”

“That Americans, you know . . .”

A waiter places two draughts on the counter before us. Risa keeps her right hand on my friend, drinks with her left. She blushed with the first beer, grew red with the third, but now that she is on her sixth beer, she has lost her color altogether. I ask her if she’s all right. She strokes my crotch, making my cock bob up against her hand, and replies that I’m the one we should be worried about.

Then she asks: “Does it hurt?”

Hurt? Is this what Japanese men tell women here? That it hurts? Is that how the men get laid, by preying on women’s kindness? Well, when in Rome . . . I tell her it does, that I can’t stand the pain.

“Do you want me to help you with it?”

“I do.”

“Let’s go, then.”

Risa nearly falls over when she tries to stand up. I have to put one arm around her waist, place her arm around my shoulder and sort of drag her out of the restaurant the way a soldier would pull a wounded man out of a combat zone. As we pass the restroom, her body stiffens and she says she’s going to be sick. She pushes me aside and staggers into the women’s restroom, leaving me outside with her handbag and the silver down jacket to stand vigil as the sound of retching resonates against tiled walls.

When she emerges several minutes later, her face is ashen. I give her some gum and she thanks me with a heavy nod then walks quietly towards the elevator. I follow stupidly still carrying her belongings, which she takes from me once we get on the elevator. She struggles with the jacket. I help her get a rubbery arm through the sleeve. I put the purse under her arm, the strap over her shoulder. As soon as we leave the building, she places her hand on my chest to stop me from following her. She walks a few uneasy steps forward, turns slightly to wave a clumsy good-bye, totters towards a cab, and collapses into the backseat.

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[1] Umié is a long defunct bar that used to be on Oyafukō Dōri. It features prominently in this novel and has a cameo role of sorts in the sequal, A Woman’s Hand.

Oyafukō has changed a lot of the years. Where it once had popular up-scale restaurants and boutiques, today there is a collection of cheap eateries, “girls bars”, karaoke, and so on. Ten years ago it started becoming rather seedy, so the city began to clean it up. Gone were the blowjob joints. (Where they came from, I do not know; and where they went, is anyone’s guess.) Today, there are quite a few large condominiums in the area. The city seems to be trying to change Oyafukō into an “uppish” scale residential neighborhood. The name has also changed from 親不孝 (Oyafukō, “unfilial behavior” or “disobedience towards one’s parents”) to the nonsensical 親富孝 (Oyafukō, literally “parents + wealth + old age”).

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© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A Woman's Nails is now available on Amazon's Kindle.