A fortnight after visiting the spa at Atami, I met up with Masamichi’s wife, Yuki. Masamichi had gone to a business event – an all-male affair where endless drinking and exchanges of confidences about girlfriends provided a light-hearted cover for probing the possibilities of a deal – and I felt that a good way of thanking him for his hospitality would be to invite her to dinner.
She was an attractive and energetic woman of about fifty-five, with an engaging, though nervously random, laugh. As well as raising two children, she managed the day-to-day affairs of Masamichi’s business – the contracts, invoices and other administrative chores. Her extraordinarily self-controlled demeanour betrayed some deep inner confusion, and this seemed to be centred on how much freedom she (or any modern Japanese woman) could hope for within a dull and dutiful marriage. She was obviously preoccupied by Masamichi’s extended absences abroad, his habit of not returning home until the small hours of the morning, and his failure to answer his mobile phone when she called. Though more hurt by his indifference to her than by his lust for other women, she was by no means resigned to her lot. The question that clearly tantalized her was how far the rules of the game for married women were changing in Japan – and, in particular, whether the greater social acceptability of divorce would give wives more power within their marriages. Change was very much in the air – you felt it everywhere, at least in a great city like Tokyo – but to what extent was it actually happening on the ground?
We met at the station in Kamakura and wandered around trying to decide on a restaurant.
“I really enjoy that you eat me out,” she confided.
“Um, yes,” I replied; “it’s good not to have to cook.”
“You know, Japanese men always away work. Or always with other men. No time to eat out wife, even on vacation.”
I felt uncertain as to whether her English was faulty or whether she was just pretending to be naive. “Eating out is so much fun,” I retorted enthusiastically, “though I think I do it too often” – a reference to my lamentable sloth in the kitchen.
“I like it!” she enthused, “I like it! More eating out is best.”
We stopped in front of a small Zen vegetarian restaurant which Yuki remembered from a long time back as being simple but excellent. Judging by its emptiness and air of desolation, it had fallen on hard times. It was a far cry from formal Tokyo restaurants, and going inside it felt like gate-crashing a stranger’s home during a family row. Palpable tension was emanating from the open kitchen behind the counter, close to where we sat down. The old master shuffled about, wordlessly directing his younger colleague and a kimono-clad waitress. She was fraught with silent protest – against what I never found out, though I sensed it was against more than her subservience as a waitress or as a woman. All three faces were lined with some insoluble sadness.
Three other customers were sitting at the counter: a seller of goldfish and pet piglets, the owner-chef of a Chinese restaurant, and the toothless proprietor of a nearby soup bar. Their rough but taut faces expressed the immense capacity of the Japanese to endure. The only buoyant character among them was the dealer in goldfish and pet piglets. He explained to everyone how his business was recession-proof: in good times people buy goldfish as an adornment to their good luck, and in bad times as a consolation for their misfortune. The same logic applied to piglets, more or less. The owner of the Chinese restaurant, who was Japanese, was sunk in gloom, bemoaning the conservatism of the locals, who wouldn’t eat any Chinese food except for noodle soup; all the convoluted delicacies he had been trained to prepare went for nothing out here in the sticks.
So why did he choose to learn Chinese cooking, I asked him through Yuki, when Japanese food was so good – and appreciated by his clients?
“Chance,” he answered. “Just happened to meet an old cook from China who taught me the tricks.”
“Never trust the Chinese,” the old master put in, with irrelevant spite. Then, in an anxiously enquiring aside to me: “Are you Chinese?”
Yuki assured him that although I was an odd gaigin, I was not a hitherto unknown species of round-eyed Chinaman. He looked content at having spared my feelings.
“Things Chinese are occasionally all the rage here,” the other man continued, “then we turn our backs on them for a few decades. Ignore China. Ignore the world. This is always happening in Japan.”
I felt intensely observed by the three diners. At first, on my arrival, they had studiedly ignored me. Then they had started casting furtive glances in my direction, trying to size up the extent to which my foreignness was admirable or contemptible, and enquiring whether I could really manage the local food. (It’s so irritating that, however long you’ve been among Japanese, they almost always ask if you can use chopsticks, worry whether you will like raw fish – the word sushi being too unapproachably Japanese to risk on the uncomprehending foreigner – and explain that matcha is green tea.) Finally, the chef enquired with brutal directness what configuration of random fate could possibly explain my bizarre presence in his country.
Yuki tried to impress them not just by dropping the name of Tokyo University but by pointedly mentioning my title, Tetsugaku no sensei, Professor of Philosophy. In smarter restaurants I had found that this title possessed almost magical powers to secure my right to exist, and could even bag a reservation when all tables were said to be fully booked. But the master, who had a habit of punning with a sort of weary dutifulness, as if his clients expected it as part of the service, was decidedly unimpressed by Tetsugaku no sensei. “Sounds like Ketsugaku no sensei,” he quipped – Professor of Arseholes. An arseologist.
Meanwhile the owner of the soup bar – who kept interrupting the master’s wisecracks, so as to prevent him from dominating the proceedings – was playing up to his self-appointed role as the local eccentric, confident that his mordant wit could see off all-comers. Unfortunately, no one could really understand what he was saying: all his teeth had been lost in the Second World War, when he had fallen out of a train into a gutter during a send-off party for soldiers going to Manchuria. Since then he had failed to save enough money to buy dentures. In fact no one in this forlorn eatery, barring the waitress, had a full set of teeth – which might have been why they all ordered chawanmushi, a delicious and inexpensive savoury egg custard filled with seasonal vegetables, which certainly wasn’t doing anything to shore up the owner’s profits.
“You ever enjoy older woman?” Yuki asked, after having tried for some time to wean me off the banter with the other customers. Her expression was light-hearted, and it was by no means certain that she was advancing her own candidature.
“My first girlfriend was twelve years my senior. Since then, they’ve always been my age or younger. Do Japanese men often go for older women?” I asked, trying to deflect her question.
“Very common after forty-five. But only as mistress. And nobody admit it,” she added mischievously. “Modern Japanese girl don’t understand how treating a man. Forgot real looking after things. Forgot all tradition. I am very sorry. I love men who appreciate real woman attention…”
“Yes…”
“…and also good food.”
“Yes…”
“My dream is establish bar in my house, cook for husband on one side, and watch him eat on other side.”
“Oh yes!” I muttered, involuntarily.
“Actually, this give me even more pleasure than husband eating me out.”
I could see her point.
“When he enjoy his food I am so happy. Food bind man and woman.”
These were arguments with which I could wholeheartedly identify – unity through food; food as love potion; the libidinal power of the palate. I responded enthusiastically to Yuki’s fantasy of a counter in the home at which a husband is offered a suite of delicacies by his wife, who would in turn regard this pampering not as service but as bounty, or affirmation, which she alone could confer. I also relished the freedom to enjoy a fantasy about which I would need to be more guarded back home, if not downright ashamed. The scenario seemed perfectly wonderful.
“Don’t you think only older woman understand needs of real man?” she said huskily.
“So how about your future?” I countered, trying both to dodge the question and seem as if I were addressing it.
“Me?” Her face crumpled into a deep, oddly charming sadness. “I don’t know. What I can do?” She shrugged her shoulders pessimistically. “Nothing to do. We Japanese woman just trapped. Just accept man’s behaviour. Last week, for example, I find thirty-two page letter in purple ink from woman client of our company, a widow, not even very attractive, complaining that Masamichi try to seduce her and that he boast her his many girlfriends, even in office. What I should do? So embarrassing for wife. She is important customer, so response necessary. Of course, he too lazy to reply. But how can I reply for him in this case?” Then, after a pause, as if deciding then and there to rebel, she said:“You know, I don’t accept such behaviour any more. I used to be good Japanese wife, quiet, never complain. Now I consider divorce. Only freedom for me. My children will support me. But he will refuse. He will give me no money. So how should I live?” She looked at me with red eyes, trying to control herself, then broke down and buried her head in my shoulder.
The others stared unashamedly, trying to figure out what was going on. Their confusion wasn’t helped by my inability to stifle a snigger – while Yuki was still sobbing gently on my shoulder – at the thought of the thirty-two page letter in purple ink from a widow shocked to find herself being seduced by her architect, while he was making it clear to her that she was by no means the only one.
“She love you!” the soup-bar owner shouted jauntily out of the toothless aperture of his mouth.
“Woman is woman,” declared the master, smiling at me with a sarcastic I’ve-seen-it-all-before grin. “You are right,” he added, “laughter is best response for woman tears.”
His subordinates stared sullenly.
“And his mother will support him with everything,” Yuki complained miserably. “She always hate me. I don’t exist for her. She will be so happy when I am out of his company.”
“She hated you all these years?” I asked. “For thirty years?”
“Yes, always. I am not her family, not her blood.”
“But surely she values your contribution to the business?” I said, puzzled at her mother-in-law’s hostility. From what Masamichi had told me of his mother, it seemed that although she was stubborn, bigoted, and blindly doting on her son, she knew when to be pragmatic. And it was obvious that Masamichi, though a skilful architect and shrewd negotiator, couldn’t administrate his way out of a paper bag. Without Yuki’s organizational skills the business would have gone bankrupt or been closed by the tax inspectors long ago.
“No, she think I do nothing in Masamichi’s business. All these years she only complain, only accuse me that I use my husband.”
“Would she accept your children working for the business?” I asked, trying to test the blood theory.
“Of course. They are same genes. But I am alien genes. For her, any wife is alien blood. That’s it.”
Again she started crying.
There was silence in the restaurant. The waitress had disappeared by now, and the men were looking at us with awkward compassion. Yuki was embarrassed by her tears, but the others were neither embarrassed nor amused any more. On the contrary, they seemed saddened and perplexed.
Later, when we got up to leave, the confused melancholy abruptly gave way to ebullient bonhomie: no nation can manage a sudden transition of mood as genuinely and smoothly as the Japanese. The three customers shook my hand effusively, each holding it in a hoary clasp of affirmation, as though to mark our mutual participation in the magnificent disaster of being alive. I discreetly freed myself. Since in Japan you almost never get touched in public unless you are a dog, and then only if you are tiny and toylike or else huge and shaggy, I took this unusual gesture of affinity as a striking acceptance of my foreignness and, in its warmth and firmness, as a signal of the irrepressibility of all real contact between people, even when fleeting.
It had been an evening full of humour and sadness and affection and naturalness, and of gently intense connections. Yet, like most Japanese expressiveness, however ardent, it didn’t linger long, but seemed to rise up into the night and vanish, like smoke. It was genuine, yet left no residue. I went home; and still I felt alone.