“That’s so much better,” I said, trying to make it sound like I meant it. At the keyboard, Mrs. Ogawa made a quick ducking motion, as though someone had zinged a baseball at her head. I’m pretty sure this meant “I know you’re lying. But thanks anyway.” She folded her small hands in her lap and awaited instructions. She was wearing her “home” uniform: gray jumper, furry, pink slippers and a powder-blue apron that said Loving Food Enjoy.
Ducking my own head was something I did every Wednesday, when I came to Mrs. Ogawa’s apartment. I didn’t really need to. The door frame was big enough for most Westerners, and I’m only five eleven. But I ducked anyway, even after I’d reduced my height by taking off my shoes. Maybe because the space I was entering was so ridiculously small. Maybe because I was afraid of doing some kind of humiliating damage. Or maybe it was just Japan. The whole country made me feel like ducking.
Mrs. Ogawa’s husband was a wholesaler of fish cakes in the famous Tsukiji seafood market. Or something like that. I’d never met him. Even if I had, I probably wouldn’t have asked about his place of business. If I’d known that my last night in Japan would be spent in his fish market, I would have.
His wife had her heart set on learning Clair de Lune, by Claude Debussy. We’d been at it together for two months and were closing in on page two. I didn’t have the heart to tell her what was coming on page three. Mrs. Ogawa had applied herself equally hard to learning English, so we could communicate after a fashion. But these piano lessons were a challenge for both of us.
“Try thinking of a full moon,” I said. Mrs. Ogawa ducked another baseball. “You’re standing on the shore of a lake, the moon’s risen, and it’s just pouring this warm light over the water.” She ducked again. “As though…” I stopped. What was I thinking? There were probably another fifty Mrs. Ogawas in this building alone. Ditto for the building next door, ditto as far as I could see into the smog outside. A whole army of Ogawa-sans. All of them seemed determined to learn Clair de Lune, or Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. But here was the problem: the moon in Tokyo, if you saw it at all, was about as brilliant as a dirty twenty-five-watt bulb. Neon light and air pollution took care of the moon. As for a deserted lake—forget it.
We sat in silence while I struggled for words. Together we listened to the muffled roar of the Chuo Expressway half a mile from the Ogawa family’s tenth-floor apartment in Setagaya. Mrs. Ogawa’s apartment was tagged in my smartphone—otherwise I’d never be able to find it.
Mrs. Ogawa paid me well. So did the other Mrs. Ogawas who’d seen my ad and convinced their husbands to allow a gaijin—a foreigner—into the family home for a weekly shot of culture. I wanted her to get her money’s worth. But it was in moments like this that I felt the most alien in Japan. Real communication seemed remote.
“We need a little more emotion,” I finally said. “You know what I mean? Emotion?” Mrs. Ogawa looked at her hands, and her head bobbed, ever so slightly. Everyone knew what emotions were, even if they dealt with them differently. “May I?” I tapped her on the shoulder, and she shot to attention. I slid onto the piano bench.
“Lake. Moon. All alone.” She stood behind me and I played the first few bars. Clair de Lune really is a beautiful piece, even if it was written for a pianist with hands twice the size of my student’s. I could hear Mrs. Ogawa breathing behind me. Or maybe it was the Chuo Expressway. I decided to let Debussy do the talking. I didn’t stop until I’d played the whole piece through.
Then I just sat there. Mrs. Ogawa’s breathing sounded different. I turned around. She had one hand over her nose and mouth. There were tear tracks down both cheeks. She sniffed. The lesson was over.
“Thank you, Frank-san,” she said from behind her hand. She darted into her miniature kitchen and extracted five thousand yen from a drawer the way she always did. Then she presented the banknotes to me formally, with both hands and a little bow. Japan was still a cash-dominated society. Every housewife seemed to have her own private stash somewhere. One of my students kept it underneath the rice cooker.
Mrs. Ogawa’s money was wet with her tears. That was as close as I was going to get to knowing what she was really thinking. She darted to the door, smiled bravely while I crammed my big feet into my shoes, then lowered her head while I lumbered out.
When I reached street level, the roar of the city engulfed me and the midday heat had me sweating in seconds. Middle-aged ladies hid from the sun beneath umbrellas and pizza-sized plastic visors. Elegant grandmothers pulled wheeled shopping bags. It was early June. The national tie loosening and boozing of cherry blossom festival was over. But the city still had another ten degrees of cloying heat in store for us.
Spotless cars crawled beneath a yellowish haze. Most of them were white. One of Tokyo’s millions of silent silver bicycles blew past me on the sidewalk, its basket jammed with shopping bags. I staggered into a concrete telephone pole.
I had two free hours before my next student. I’d need all of that time to get to Ota district by train, grab a cheap bowl of ramen to fortify me, and cover the last few blocks on foot. And, to be honest, I needed that time to get ready for Akiko.
When I said that all my students were exactly like Mrs. Ogawa, I left out Akiko, who was in a category of her own. Akiko lived in a house, not an apartment. And she’d spent enough time outside Japan to learn excellent idiomatic English. Akiko wore designer jeans and probably didn’t even own an apron. She took her lessons on a gleaming Yamaha grand that had a room of its own. Akiko had looks, brains and more than a little talent. So far, I’d never seen any sign that she had a job. But somebody must have paid for the cosmetic surgery that had given her that narrow nose and those Western-looking eyes.
Akiko was complicated. Every time I entered her house, I felt like ducking, all right—ducking out. And every time I said goodbye and walked back to the train station, I found myself wondering why I was still in Japan at all.