1
A few minutes after nine on Thursday morning the students start to trickle in and the lobby soon echoes with their excited clucking. For many of them, I have been told, my lesson is the high point of their week, an unsettling thought if ever there was one.
Babysitting is provided, so many of the young housewives come with their children. Sleeping infants are strapped tightly like papooses to their mothers’ backs. The more bashful of the toddlers fret unless their mothers carry them in their arms, while the naughtier children bolt in with the subtlety of thunder and stir up a perfect storm of mischief.
Although the kids—obvious benefactors of grandparental largesse—are dolled up in pricey outfits, wearing vivid t-shirts with kōan-like[1] sayings, such as “happiness is eating a potato”, the mothers are dowdy, frightfully so. Many of them are the “good wives” of bureaucrats or professors from the prestigious national university, meaning their husbands, like the samurai of the past, have all the status one could hope for, but none of the income. Though only in their mid-thirties, they look and act much older. Their limited experience in society, however, has them carry on like Catholic high school girls. The good kind, that is.
Once they’ve settled into their seats, the old soft-shoe routine begins.
I didn’t have much time last week to prepare for today’s lesson on account that I got stinking drunk at Umié the night before and ended up oversleeping. Only by the Grace of God did I manage to scramble out of bed and into the office—unshaven, half-dressed and reeking of whiskey—two minutes shy of getting sacked.
Believe me, this is not the way I would like things to be, but I couldn’t help myself what with Reina away on business. There was little else but the drink to distract me from the depressing fact that, as my twenty-seventh birthday approaches, I am doing absolutely nothing with my life. After two months in Fukuoka, I am not an inch closer to where I want to be and as lonely as ever and depressed as hell about it.
Having alarmingly little time to prepare my lesson, I blindly pulled Philip Roth’s Professor of Desire off my bookshelf as I sprinted out the door of my apartment. It is, again, only by the Grace of God that I didn’t puke the contents of my entire digestive system from tonsils to sphincter on the way. After punching in—that is, after having Yumi punch me in because my hands were shaking too much—I ran off several copies of the book’s final chapter, then passed them out at the end of the lesson.
Hungover as I was, I could not be bothered with going into the finer points of the novel, so I summarized briefly how the protagonist, David, had come to his decision to marry Claire because, in his words, she was enough. After years of seeking more, more, and yet still more, he came to settle for someone who was enough. I then asked them to read through the passage at home and recall why they had themselves accepted their own husband’s proposal. For an assignment I had pulled right out of my hairy arse, I must say, it wasn’t bad at all.
After an animated discussion about David’s decision and what they think it means, it’s the women’s turn to tell me their own stories.
“He was on his way to marry another woman, but she changed her mind at the last moment,” Hiroko begins with a laugh. A garrulous, cheerful woman in her mid fifties, Hiroko’s a goofy materfamilias of sorts for this bunch. “He was a friend of the family’s, my uncle’s friend, and I’d known him since I was a child, so . . . Well, when he came back to our village, he asked me to marry him, instead.”
“And?”
“And, I said, yes,” she replies with a light-hearted cackle.
I laugh, too, out of disbelief. I find it utterly incomprehensible at times how some people are able to get through life rather happily without putting any thought or effort into it. Is it all a matter of attitude? Am I asking too much out of life? Should I just be content with what I have, that is, with enough?
Eriko speaks next. “I was taking sailing lessons and . . .”
“Sailing lessons?”
“Yes, and my husband was the instructor. One day out of the blue he said ‘I will marry you.’ I wasn’t even interested in him and . . . and, hadn’t even thought about marrying anyone, let alone him. But, but he asked, so . . . I talked to my parents about it, they agreed and the next thing I knew we were married.”
I’m too flabbergasted to respond. I just blink and gesture for Fumiko to go next.
“I met my husband by o-miai,” she says. “My mother knew his mother and arranged for us to meet and we decided to get married.”
“You mean, several months down the road, right? After you had dated for a while, right?”
“No, no. We decided that day.”
“That very day?!?!”
“Yes.”
“And you’re happily married?”
She giggles.
2
Mié showed up at my apartment in the evening. She was wearing a tight pair of denim hot pants and a red halter-top that threatened to burst open and release those wonderfully breasts of hers.
She looked gorgeous.
Kicking off her sandals at the genkan, she stepped into my kitchen, dropped a canvas bag on the floor, and pulling out a large bottle of saké said, “Let’s drink!”
Mié always brought in so much warmth and brightness with her and there wasn’t anywhere else in the world I wanted to be but in that ugly kitchen of my miserable apartment in Kitakyūshū because that’s where she was.
I popped my head out of the kitchen window and hollered for Ben to come over and help us with the bottle of saké. More than happy to oblige, he hopped over with one shoe on, the other in his hand, a bag of Calbee potato chips in his clinched teeth. The three of us sat on the old tatami mats of my living room taking turns pouring cups of saké for each other. The lighter the bottle became, the louder our laughter. It was one of the best nights of my life.
Every night with Mié was.
The next morning, Mié, Ben and I packed into her Ford Escort and departed for the hot spring resort of Beppu, several hours’ drive to the east in Ōita Prefecture. After a full day of sightseeing, which included a tour of the “hells” of Beppu, and both Ben’s and my first experience in a Japanese hot spring, we checked into a ryokan, where we had dinner and saké served to us in our room.
We must have still been drunk from the previous night because it didn’t take long before the three of us were at it again. Ben tied the obi from the yukata around his head, and stuck chopsticks up his nose making us laugh as if it were the funniest thing in the world. And it was. It really was.
Later in the evening, once we had literally drunk the hotel dry of nama saké, Mié and I took a bath together. She was drunk and sentimental, the way she often became after a binge like that.
“Why you, Peadar?” she asked, burying her face in my chest. “Why do I feel this way for you? I’ve never felt this way about any other foreigner before. Why you?” Then, she began to cry. I held her in my arms and kissed the tears as they fell down her cheek. It only made her cry more.
I gently raised her chin so I could look into those tear-filled eyes of hers and spoke what had been warming my heart that whole day.
“I love you, Mié-chan. It’s been so long since I loved someone. I love you. I love you. I love you.”
“Why do you love Mié-chan?”
“Why? Why? Why do you ask why? Can’t you see it in my smile whenever we’re together? Can’t you read it in my letters? Can’t you feel it when I kiss you? Mié-chan, I’ve never loved anyone as much as I love you.”
Two days later and back at my apartment in Kitakyūshū, Mié first suggested what had already been on my mind: that I move to Fukuoka the following spring and live with her.
“I want to move now,” I replied, hugging her. It was then that I decided: Mié-chan would be the one I would marry.
[1] A kōan (pronounced “koh-an”, not like “Cohen”) is, according to The New Oxford American Dictionary “a paradoxical anecdote or riddle, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment.” One of the more famous kōans is “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”