Ronin — Blog - Aonghas Crowe

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.

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.

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?

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.

“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.”

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.”