ONE

I MET HIM IN KOBE, JAPAN, IN May 2004. Three weeks later, he told me he loved me. At least I thought that’s what he said.

We were hidden away far past midnight in my dorm room at a corporate training center. He was balanced above me on his arms while I stared up from below. I was a new faculty member in an East Asia executive MBA program. All twenty of my students were men. He was one of them. I’d already fallen in love with him, too.

I was supposed to be teaching these men business communication: how to lead teams and run meetings in a language and culture not their own. I knew almost nothing about English as a second language—or ESL—and had been hired under the flawed assumption that since I taught writing to American MBA students in Boston I could coach this group of Asian businessmen to talk like native English speakers.

I began to realize what I was up against on my first day of class, when I learned that most of my students had never worked with a woman who didn’t serve them tea. Anyway, by now, a few weeks into the job, I was already failing miserably in the classroom, never mind my extracurricular late-night transgressions with a student who could barely speak English but had already begun to make my heart spin.

•   •   •

BACK IN BOSTON a month and a half earlier, on the day I’d been recruited for the job, I’d been warned I might confront challenges as a young American woman teaching senior Asian businessmen. It was early April, and the Korean faculty director of the program had tried, indirectly, to prepare me. I had yet to learn that in East Asia the most important communication is almost always indirect, where meaning is often a destination arrived at through multiple circuitous way-stops.

The director was sitting behind the broad desk in his office, books piled high against the wall, when he introduced his pitch to me. The window behind him boasted a panoramic view of the Charles River, Cambridge stretched out beyond. One of MIT’s domes stood proud and gray in the distance, as if nodding sagely at its lesser colleagues across the water.

“The executive students all work for global Japanese and Korean corporations,” he said. “You’ll be traveling with them to Kobe, Beijing, and Seoul for each of the program’s monthlong summer modules, where they’ll see firsthand the manufacturing sectors across a range of markets. Then they all come here for nine months.” He drew his hands wide in an expansive sweep, as if displaying the whole group in miniature right there. “They’ll finish their degrees in Boston before returning next spring to their homes and companies in Asia.” He smiled broadly, then sat back and folded his hands.

“You won’t be giving them grades. Just sit with them at meals, get them talking, go to their marketing and strategy classes with them. Help them on their case studies and assignments. Some may be demanding, but you can handle this, yes?” He leaned forward toward me, both hands on his desk. “You have a Ph.D., so you’re a professional, no?” Sitting back, he laughed then, at what I wasn’t sure, but I laughed along with him. I wanted to suggest that—for the business-class tickets and a summer semester of highly compensated travel as a kind of “conversation coach”—this was work I could easily manage.

In truth, not only had I never been to East Asia or taught ESL, my Ph.D. was in English and American literature, not linguistics or organizational behavior. Moreover, I barely had an interest in cultures other than my own, although within my liberal academic circle, my provincialism wasn’t something I’d easily admit.

That April morning, just hours before the director offered me the job, I’d woken in my street-level studio apartment in Boston’s South End, the city where I’d always lived and planned to settle for good. As the sun streamed through my old floor-to-ceiling windows, I lay in my high-thread-count sheets and savored both the stillness and predictability of my life as a left-leaning, thirty-six-year-old confirmed Bostonian: overeducated, fiercely protective of my independence, and deeply committed to the cultural values of the liberal northeastern U.S.

Around me in the silence, the light swept across my bookshelves, full of volumes leaning left and right. Somewhere in the middle of all the Shakespeare and Milton, the Hemingway, Mailer, and Morrison, and the barely skimmed pages of literary theory, stood my own thinly bound doctoral dissertation on gender and violence in the modern American novel. On the floor lay a half-read copy of Vogue. My laptop was perched on a makeshift desk in front of kitchenette shelves stuffed not with dishes or pans but with papers and syllabi from ten years of teaching at local universities, which were crammed next to shopping bags and old tax returns. In the storage loft above the mini-kitchen were all the shoes I couldn’t fit in the studio’s small closet, rows of heels and boots and little ballet-slipper flats stacked on wooden racks.

As I did most days, I lingered awhile before leaving for my meeting on campus, luxuriating in the quiet, grateful for both the life I’d built around me and what it lacked: no complicated marriage or crying child to colonize my time. Then I climbed out of bed, showered, dressed, added a swipe of makeup, and stopped at my usual café for a soy chai before heading to the Boston-area university where I now taught. On my way out for the day, I ignored the mezuzah my mother had insisted I hang on the door frame, its tiny Old Testament scroll hidden in silver casing.

The only time my regular morning ritual differed, before my trip to East Asia changed everything, was the one day a week I’d go to Norfolk Correctional Center, a men’s medium-security prison. Then I’d wake at dawn, skip the makeup, wear an old pair of flats, and drive the barren highway west. I’d reach the barbed-wired complex early, then pass through a series of electric gates before arriving at the classroom where I’d spend three hours teaching literature and gender studies in a college-behind-bars program to male convicts. This was the work I truly valued, one in a string of progressive education jobs I’d had: running writing classes for homeless adults, preparing inner-city teens for college, teaching first-generation undergraduates at a public university. The writing seminars for American MBAs funded my work in these other programs.

Either way, whether I was headed to prison or the ivory tower, I always began my morning firmly rooted on the exact path I had scripted for myself, what one ex-boyfriend termed “your life as a nonpracticing communist.” I had a large circle of like-minded friends; a combination of academic jobs that satisfied me politically, socially, and intellectually; plus cash to buy great shoes. I’d planned each aspect of my world meticulously until together they created a kind of bulwark against the handful of mistakes I swore I’d never make: to take blind leaps of faith, give up my home in Boston, become dependent on a man, build a traditional nuclear family like my parents had, or, most important, cook dinner on a regular basis.

When he sought me out, the Korean director knew me only from my reputation around the business school. The year before, the deans had hired me to create a new writing curriculum for their on-campus graduate management program, and though I told him I’d never even been to East Asia, let alone taught there, the director had convinced himself that I was the woman to turn his foreign execs-in-training into English conversationalists—and to start in just a few weeks’ time. Once he floated the idea by me, I assured him (remembering my Spanish- and Vietnamese-speaking students in lockup), “Well, I have had nonnative speakers in my literature classes before, lots of times.”

“Excellent.” He nodded, confirming my perfection for the job.

I played along. After all, I reasoned, the money they were offering for three months of work was more than five times what I’d make in a whole year teaching in prison, and I liked to travel. Besides, what could these East Asian executives possibly throw at me that I hadn’t already seen either behind bars or in an MBA classroom?

•   •   •

IN THE WEEKS before I left for the Far East, I made only modest preparations. I bought sightseeing books about the three countries I would visit. In their brief introductions to each culture, I read that all were more conservative about gender than the West. But surely, this won’t extend much into corporate life in multinational corporations, I assumed. Not until many months later would I learn that, in Japan particularly, even the majority of professional women become what’s known as shufu1: housewives who after marriage give up their careers.2

My travel guides also introduced me to the phenomenon of culture shock, the five or so stages visitors can pass through in foreign places. The names of these stages sounded both mysterious and like pop psychology: Honeymoon, Disintegration, Reintegration, Autonomy, Acceptance. The books promised a kind of euphoria followed by a crash and then—if one spent enough time abroad—a whole other, more integrated self could emerge, combining one’s native and new multicultural identities. I dismissed these notions, too. I won’t be in any of these countries for long enough. So I turned my attention to matters I considered more relevant: buying outfits for my new short-term global gig.

When I arrived in Kobe in mid-May, the faculty director from Boston was already there. He’d come early, affording him a few days of golf with the Japanese head of the training center where we would be staying. My trip from the East Coast had taken almost twenty-four hours, and I was exhausted. But as a formal welcome, we went to dinner at a traditional restaurant downtown. Its entranceway was a mini-garden, tiny bonsai trees dotting the white stone steps from the outside door to the dining room threshold. A gentle glow from paper floor lanterns lit our way. Removing our shoes, we stored them in little wooden cubbies, then glided in slippers over polished floors to our table. Even through the blur of jet lag, the effect was serene, magical.

At our seats, the faculty director poured sake for me, his golf buddy, and another woman who had joined us, Ji-na. She was the young Korean program coordinator who would travel with me and the executive students throughout the entire summer. She had recently moved to Boston with her Jewish-American business-professor husband, then took this job for the chance to travel back to Seoul once a year to visit family.

Ji-na explained proper drinking protocol in Asia, her small face and thin frame leaning in toward me, her hair swaying like a shiny black curtain. One person poured, and then, when everyone’s glass had been drained—or better yet, when they were almost but not quite empty—we would take turns giving refills. She picked up the little round ceramic sake pitcher, holding it between delicate fingers, and did the honors.

For the first course, a kimonoed waitress brought sashimi. The entire fish was propped on a series of sticks over a plate of shaved ice, head at one end, tail at the other. Tucked inside its carved-out torso were slices of white flesh arranged in a neat row. I stared at our meal’s profile, its mouth slightly open as if caught by surprise, one black pupil facing me like a laminated disk. I’d never been able to bear raw fish, nor a meal that made eye contact, but I gamely picked up my chopsticks, dangling them a few inches from the platter while I tried to build an air of nonchalance. That’s when I noticed the tail waving, a slow arc through the air like a metronome.

“Um, it’s moving?” I observed. “Is it. Is it . . .” I could feel my eyes grow wide, my expression between confusion and horror.

“Yes! It’s still alive! So we know it’s delicious and fresh!” the faculty director enthused. I knew the polite response would be to tuck in with feigned relish or at the very least try a tiny nibble. But I couldn’t bring myself to do either. I put down my chopsticks, my face hot, my smile weak, and drained my sake cup completely.

•   •   •

THE NEXT MORNING, after jet lag propelled me through a deep but uneven sleep, I had time to explore the training center where we would be working, eating, and sleeping for the next month. Its air felt arid, disorienting. Every inch was tidy, basic, uniform: identical seminar rooms with long, tiered, curving desks; orange upholstered swivel chairs; plain gray carpeting; wall-length whiteboards with black markers spaced evenly across their trays. The faculty bedrooms occupied their own wing, separated by a hallway from the students’ rooms, but they, too, were basic and bare, with a narrow single bed, a nightstand, three sets of drawers for clothes, and a small white bathroom.

Classes officially began the next morning. It didn’t take me long to realize that the university had made an awful mistake. I was terrible at the job, not knowing anything about the field of ESL, how our brains acquire words, or how to help foreign speakers exercise the muscles in their mouths to shape new sounds. My students realized the same thing.

I learned immediately that although the Japanese and Korean participants were unable to differentiate between v and b or r and l (so “evaluate” became ebaluate; “product” morphed into ploduct), they were expert at discerning when a young woman who supposedly occupies a position of authority is, in fact, woefully bereft of experience. “When you meet a Western colleague, you shake his, or her, hand, look directly into his, or her, eyes,” I enunciated loudly as I stood in front of the classroom on the second day, my chin raised high. The hot sun baked the ground beyond the window, but inside our classroom and the hermetically sealed walls of the training center, the air conditioner was blasting. The room was bright, sterile, cold.

Twenty pairs of dark eyes stared at me. A few heads nodded politely in slight acknowledgment. The two youngest students in the room—Toru and Makoto, both Japanese, both in their early thirties, and both the only ones my age or younger—smiled kindly, but the other faces before me remained impassive. I began to sweat, my cheeks feeling bright. I opened my mouth to begin again, but instead of speaking, I gaped silently. I’m alienating them, I thought, and I’m not even sure why. Turning to glance at the clock, I swallowed, my throat like sand. Ten minutes past. Twenty more to go. And still no clue how to engage them.

What I did know: my Ph.D. meant nothing now. The confidence I had been trained to project as a professor in the U.S. came off as an insult here, an uncouth display of ignorance about my real status, determined by my age, my gender, and, most of all, my lack of knowledge about their countries. Why didn’t the faculty director warn me what an offense it is to show ignorance of their cultures, when he knew I’d never taught abroad before? I felt a flash of anger. But underneath, I knew the fault was mine. It was a foolish miscalculation to devote my few weeks posthire to reading travel guides and crafting business scenarios for reenactment instead of really learning about the homes and histories of my future students.

“The right, um, the American way to greet colleagues.” I plowed on, and the entire class stiffened. “I mean, in the West, in Canada or, or in North America.” I fumbled. “The usual way to greet people you work with . . .” I tried to backpedal, realizing my sloppy word choice suggested a terrible insult: that the American way is best, all others lacking. I was tongue-tied and sweating harder by the second.

Later, Ji-na, the program coordinator, pulled me aside. She explained that the students had designated one Korean and one Japanese participant to be their leaders and spokesmen. In both cases, they chose the eldest, men in their late fifties, since their companies’ Confucian hierarchies equated age with authority.

“The students are . . . commenting,” she said, after a pause. She looked down for a moment, then raised her eyes toward mine, resting them somewhere around the middle of my nose. “They like how . . . clear your voice is,” she added encouragingly. “But . . .” She stopped, looked down again. “Could you . . . talk more . . . quietly? Perhaps?” Then she giggled, her small, thin fingers coming up to cover her mouth. “Show less confidence? You know,” she said, waving her tiny hand in front of me. “Be more shy. Like women here are supposed to. Like the students are used to.” Later, in the dining hall, neither of the group leaders would acknowledge my presence, their eyes sweeping past me, their shoulders high and proud.

•   •   •

FOR THE REST of the week, we mostly stayed inside the training center, sallow under its wash of fluorescent lighting. The students began referring to it as “Kobe Jail,” its interior so sparse and ordered, so utterly removed from the outside world. Despite my experience teaching in a real prison in the U.S., I felt even more confined here. At least in Boston I could leave lockup after my three hours a week of teaching were up.

The few times I did venture out, to a nearby supermarket, I handed my ID to the guard at the security gate, then blinked into a sun made improbably bright after the dull glare of the training center’s lights. Outside, in a residential area on the outskirts of Kobe proper, I could communicate with no one. Children on the road stared shyly at me or hid behind their mothers, my long, wavy, blond-streaked hair looking very foreign to them, I supposed. Most of the brightly colored goods at the store remained mysterious to me, with vivid packaging and unintelligible black calligraphy dancing across their tops or down their sides, a kaleidoscope of the indecipherable.

When I found a bag showing peanuts on its front, with crescent-shaped rice crackers glowing like little orange moons, the women at the checkout counter smiled and bowed and laughed kindly as I struggled to count out correct change. Between the outside environment and the world inside the training center, I felt at once like a child in wonderland and like that fish on the platter my first night in Japan: flailing, stuck, utterly exposed.

After my talk with Ji-na, I spent the next week both ashamed and uncomfortable in the classroom. I spoke more softly. I looked down often, buttoned my shirts an extra notch around my neck. Except for the encouraging smiles of Toru and Makoto, I felt nervous meeting the eyes of the men around me. In the contest between the ideals that defined my life in Boston and the gender expectations of the East Asian classroom, I caved.

I did find some moments of reprieve, though. Especially outside of class, I was touched by most of the students’ polite manners, even as I could sense they wanted someone more experienced teaching them business conversation. “Oh, you like white rice!” a few would exclaim when they saw me in the dining room with an overflowing bowl. They’d incline their heads in welcome as I pulled out a chair at their table and set my tray down. They found it hilarious when I dumped soy sauce and wasabi over my serving, since in Japan and Korea, white rice is usually eaten plain. “This, this is natto,” a student named Sato told me when I eyed his dish of beans bathed in yellow gravy, sticky strands of sauce hanging from the end of his chopsticks. “Americans don’t like! Can you eat?” he asked. “Strong smell! But good taste! Good taste!” I shook my head and widened my eyes as I peered into the bowl, then pulled back abruptly as its scent hit me, and the whole table laughed good-naturedly.

While most of the students remained distant in the classroom, Makoto would repeat everything I said under his breath, practicing the movements with his mouth. Vertical marketing, he’d mouth silently. “V-V-V,” he’d practice, trying to push his teeth into his bottom lip to pronounce the v that Japanese replaces with a b. “Bertical, vertical, vertical marketing,” he’d repeat under his breath.

Then there was Toru. At thirty-one, he was at least a decade younger than most of his classmates. Not until I’d spent a few days watching him did I realize I was drawn to him. He’d tilt his head calmly in thought, search through his portable electronic dictionary for translations to English words, and smile slowly. Sometimes he’d stare off into space, then nod and bend his head over his compact laptop, spiked black hair and fine-edged cheeks suspended over the keyboard, muscled forearms peeking from his shirt. Next he’d raise his dark eyes, cock his head, and think some more, all angular features and unhurried gestures. When he laughed, his quiet expression would break into a grin.

“Can you help?” he’d ask me sometimes after class, handing me a case study with the vocabulary he didn’t understand circled in blue ballpoint. He’d nod slowly and seriously as I explained each word, watching my emphatic hand movements with interest. “Market launch,” I’d explain, mimicking a rocket in flight, my fingers slanting upward. “Ahhh, yah, yah, yah,” he’d say. “Okay, thanks you very much,” he’d add as we finished. “I’m appreciate you.”

Between my failures in the classroom and my disorientation in Japan, Toru’s shy sincerity washed through me with bright relief.

•   •   •

ONE NIGHT, a few days after she first broke the obvious news that the students were unhappy with my teaching, Ji-na and I were slumped together in one of the training center’s barren lounges. Her job was proving no easier than mine: since she was a young woman, and a Korean one at that, the elder Korean students treated her more like a secretary than the coordinator of an international executive program who had already earned her MBA. Mainly, they expected her to xerox their assignments and fetch them tea and snacks while listening to their litany of complaints. The air-conditioning was too high in some classrooms, too low in others, they insisted. The software for their marketing simulation was unsophisticated and slow.

Ji-na and I gossiped and giggled over beer and a Japanese approximation of Doritos. She told me which students she liked best, the few she thought were handsome and kind, and then I confided my small crush. In the twilight zone of the Japanese corporate training center—where we were the only women besides the uniformed cleaning or cafeteria workers who bowed silently to us each morning, where everything was more tidy, ordered, and sterile than our actual lives a world away—neither one of us dwelled on practical concerns such as professional boundaries or academic ethics. Instead, Ji-na pointed out how happy she was with her Jewish-American professor husband in Boston (“Just like you and Toru, sort of!”), how much calmer Toru seemed than the more senior, restive students in the program. How much she disapproved of my latest ex-boyfriend back home, the award-winning scientist with multiple diplomas and persistent fidelity issues.

That night when I slept, I dreamed about Toru, a hazy landscape of confusion and turmoil brought still by the shelter of his body. In the dream, I felt more comfort and warmth in his presence than I had ever known with another person—real or imagined. I woke feeling not so much excited as calm and safe. Then, although Toru and I could barely communicate, we came from entirely different worlds, and he was a student in a program where I was failing miserably as teacher, my feelings gave way to an even more surprising thought: this might not end disastrously.

•   •   •

THREE DAYS LATER, at an izakaya, a Japanese pub in Kobe’s center, the entire program had an official celebration of our first weekend. We drank and toasted and drank some more, a common practice in East Asian corporate culture, where getting drunk together builds the trust necessary to do business. In general, getting drunk and doing business seemed pretty strange to me. But getting drunk and making a pass at a student suddenly struck me as a great idea.

I thought I had noticed Toru staring at me that first week in the classroom. He had begun to hang back and wait for me when the group walked down the hall after class to the cafeteria or shuttled to the program’s factory tours. I imagined I felt heat rising off his skin as he sat near me, but then I’d think, I’m being crazy; he’s a student. Even though we were all adults and, divested of the power to give grades, I held no meaningful authority anyway, I was still supposed to consider him off-limits. Not to mention the disaster I’ve already made of this job without adding inappropriate sexual conduct to the mix.

None of this actually stopped me from checking my contract to see how the university defined fireable offenses. After all, I’d spent years dating lawyers in Boston. Interesting, I thought, as I read through the document. Relationships between teachers and students-of-age were not, per se, forbidden, as long as harassment played no part.

That morning, before our celebration at the Kobe izakaya, Toru and I had sat together on the train when the whole group headed to Himeji Castle for sightseeing. The others paired near us, Ji-na sitting with one of the younger Korean students, the two talking a blue streak in their native language. Toru made me laugh by imitating the white-gloved conductor bowing again and again to no one in particular. Then he checked repeatedly to ensure the open window wasn’t whipping too much wind into my face, brushing his arm against mine for a fraction of a second as he pushed himself up to close it in one quick, liquid movement. I was ecstatic, then chagrined. Then ecstatic again.

Now, at dinner, he was sitting next to me. Getting drunk like I was.

Afterward, we filed out of the restaurant as a group, crowding tipsily into the elevator. “We’re going karaoke!” someone announced. On the street, everyone turned toward the karaoke bar.

I touched Toru’s arm. Then I ducked behind a pillar, out of sight from the rest. Toru grinned and joined me, our backs pressed against the concrete slab, Kobe’s neon signs blinking through the night air around us. We watched silently as the others departed. When they were halfway down the block, we turned to look at each other. His eyes were dark but very still. I pivoted the other way, and he followed. We were finally alone, together.

•   •   •

TWO WEEKS LATER, he told me he loved me.

The night of missed karaoke, we’d stayed late at a bar in Kobe, kissing furtively in a corner between bottles of beer, then snuck back to the training center, holding hands the whole way until we parted at the guard gate. For the next couple of weeks or so, he’d sneak into my room after midnight, the other students tucked into their single beds or studying under the pale light of single-bulb lamps in their bare rooms. He’d leave around three a.m. Each Japanese student had been paired with a Korean one, and soon his Korean roommate, a shy man approaching middle age, was impressed, exclaiming to the group how studious young Toru was, how he’d stay late into each night in the computer lab working diligently on his solitary assignments.

Now, as Toru declared his love for me, I feared at first I’d misheard him through his accent. The curtains were drawn against the midnight moon, Toru’s spiky black hair jutting out in urgent tufts. He looked straight at me when he said, “I lub you.”

In keeping with my dismal performance as an ESL coach, I didn’t nod with brisk encouragement or prod him patiently to enunciate his syllables. Instead, I blurted out, “You what?”

If he was saying what I was hoping, it would be one of the best things I’d ever heard, since he’d already turned my own heart upside down. But still, I’d only known him for three weeks, this man who’d spent his life half a planet from my home, who bowed when I shook hands, ate miso soup for breakfast while I ate cornflakes. I didn’t want to think he’d said, “I love you” when, in fact, he’d said, “I live far from you.”

But he repeated it again, and a third time, and when I finally answered, “You do?” he said simply but unmistakably, “Yes, I’m love with you.” And somehow, right then, I knew I’d found a lifetime perk to the worst teaching job I’d ever had.

•   •   •

THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER Toru and I were together, though we spent very little time alone. We kept our relationship a secret, and during the week, in classes or sharing communal meals, we would go about as executive MBA student and faculty member. But on weekends, when the group would scatter for sightseeing or side trips, we would get away for overnights in Kyoto or downtown Kobe, and when the program moved to China and then South Korea, we’d escape to Beijing and Seoul. Away, we’d lie entwined for hours.

The initial heat of infatuation that had infected me like a fever didn’t so much dissipate as mellow, and alongside my yearning for Toru, I began to grow fond of him in a quieter, more balanced way. After a fifteen-year string of Ivy League academics, lawyers, doctors, and entrepreneurs who had impressed me with ambition and inspired me with wit but still left me empty in my chest, I’d finally fallen in love with a man I actually liked.

One weekend in Kobe, we stayed in a small hotel near the harbor. Like most spaces in Japan, our room was tiny but as sleek and modern as I’d ever seen: the clean, precise lines of the furniture edging its dark mahogany burnish; evenly placed pillows lined perfectly against impeccably white sheets pulled so taut that the sheer absence of wrinkles belied their buttery softness. One whole wall was a window opening to Kobe’s skyline, its pointed tower winking in the distance, headlights glowing in the street below, tall buildings with square windows stacked up like newly minted Chiclets. Off to one side, the sparkle of the city laced the dark expanse of water.

That night, lying face-to-face, I asked Toru about his family and his growing up. He told me of his middle-class, stable childhood in a small Osaka apartment and his parents, who loved and protected him and his younger sister with a mix of warmth and reserve that he found wholly unremarkable in Japan, but that I found intriguing compared to family dynamics in the West. “They could love me well enough, so I always knew I was safe,” he said simply.

“Did you feel lonely?” I asked, as he told me of the day he first went to school at five, when his parents said he should stop calling them Mama and Papa and use the more formal Okasan, Otosan: Respected Mother, Respected Father.

“Lonely?” he repeated. “No, not lonely. Maybe a little . . . a little sad. But proud. Now I was real boy, not baby, so I felt good. More good than sad.”

“Did your parents hug you?” I asked, getting ready to psychoanalyze. After six years in a Ph.D. program perfecting theories about the hidden meanings of literature’s greatest works, there was nothing I liked better than dissecting a real-life story—especially when it involved a romance of my own.

“Yes, of course, lots!” Toru answered. “Until I was older, in school. Until about five. Then, we didn’t touch so much. We Japanese, we don’t touch so much.” He nodded as if this were the only sensible choice.

“But still, you always felt . . . you always felt held, anyway?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest and rocking my shoulders to pantomime a child’s sense of protection.

“Yes! Always held, yes. Even though not a lot of hugging.”

His parents never once went out to dinner without him and his sister, he told me, nor went away without them—child-free vacations being a concept so novel to Toru that it took me a few tries even to explain. In fact, they hardly ever went out to dinner at all. “No need,” Toru said, in response to my surprise. “We were happy at home.”

Memories of my own parents, grim-faced but impeccably dressed, flitted through my mind: leaving instructions for the housekeeper on the way out the door, my mother’s French perfume scenting the air around me as she’d lean down for a quick kiss, her voice then permeating the large, dark house by intercom—“Kids, we’re leaving now. Corita will have dinner ready later.” Or, best of all, when they let us four children dress up and come out with them. I’d order shrimp cocktail at Josephine’s on Newbury Street and explain to my father, as he’d stare off into space, how the mirrored foyer made this restaurant my favorite. I’d feel safe then, as if anyone could see that nothing bad would happen among the gilded walls, the clinking crystal, the bathrooms with little lettered towels, all the pretty people in the rooms around us.

Back in the Kobe hotel room, though, all I said to Toru was “Huh, interesting.”

•   •   •

THE NEXT MORNING, we both woke a little giddy. We’d have to head back to the training center soon, and the anonymity of the hotel threw into stark contrast the confinement of the MBA program. Toru threw open the curtain and the sunlight glinting off of Kobe’s skyline tumbled into the room.

I began to recite the opening lines of Nabokov’s Lolita, a little pretentious academic humor that I knew he wouldn’t get anyway, so he wouldn’t be able to call me on my intellectual posturing or challenge me to recall anything beyond the book’s first few lines (a literary fluency I lacked). “Light of my life, fire of my loins,” I called to him from my cross-legged seat on the bed, my arm flung out dramatically, my long hair a tangled mess.

Toru turned from the window to throw me a silent smile, seemingly unconcerned that he couldn’t get my meaning. Then he swiveled back to the view. I felt equally unconcerned, and then surprised, as I suddenly thought how many relationships would benefit from a lack of shared linguistics, from the absence of expectation that our partners would, or even could, understand us most of the time.

A few minutes later, Toru turned toward me once more, his grin huge as he tried to remember and return the quote. “Love of my life, tenderloin of my heart!” he offered proudly.

I threw myself back on the bed in giggles, pounded my hands and feet up and down. “Tenderloin of my heart! That is so great!”

Toru smiled at me, head tipped to one side, looking quizzical. Then he couldn’t help breaking into a full laugh himself as I rolled around in the sheets, hiccupping. “What’s funny?” he asked, diving into the mayhem on the bed.

“Tenderloin is a steak!”

“Oh, terrible. Terrible mistake.” Toru shook his head with mock gravity and plopped himself onto the pillow beside me.

Still, I couldn’t help but notice that his was a proclamation more visceral, touching, and eloquently twisted than any I’d ever read in the entire Western canon.

•   •   •

ONE NIGHT A few weeks later, we were hidden away again, this time at the Chinese government’s Ministry of Commerce training center in Beijing, where the entire program had moved for the middle leg of our Asia tour. Toru would have to leave in a few hours to creep silently along the dark hallways and make it back to his own room before dawn. We had become less careful in China, since the facility there sprawled with multiple wings, affording privacy to the faculty suites. We still hid our relationship during the day but had lapsed into more frequent late-night sneaking around.

The night was dark and heavy beyond the window, the air-conditioning churning out a constant, guttural hum. I flitted in and out of fitful dreams while Toru lay quietly beside me, his breathing soft and even. I had grown to love the peacefulness of his slumber, so different from my own turbid sleep. He eased softly into the gentlest part of night while I was always wrestling to grab hold of a meager rest, like fistfuls of shadow I had to yank from an unwilling darkness.

I’d always been prone to angst-filled dreams. Sometimes they would hold scraps of films I had seen as the child of first- and second-generation American Jews with a Holocaust fixation. Despite having lost no direct relatives in the camps, my parents enthusiastically promoted our duty to “never forget”—and then extended that to “always be remembering.” In homage to this vigilance, my mother had even initiated her own version of America’s favorite prime-time activity: family Holocaust movie night.

When I was four or five and our temple showed live footage from the genocide in the adult service, my parents yanked us out of the children’s sing-along so we could fulfill our duty to bear witness. Half a decade later, when the network miniseries Holocaust aired, we brought notes to our Protestant private schools explaining that we should be excused from homework while we observed this latest chapter in our history of ethnic calamity, reenacted for network TV. I clutched the thick, lemony yellow notepaper my mother had given me, monogrammed along the top in rich red lettering, FROM THE DESK OF CHARLOTTE SLATER, and proudly handed it to my teacher before recess.

In addition to the mourning and anguish for those who perished in the camps, however, my parents hinted at another theme roiling just below the surface of these images. Or maybe in my confused efforts to grasp the ungraspable I just imagined a deeper message: the fatal naïveté of the victims. For these were the Jews who didn’t get out in time, who somehow failed to recognize or admit the gathering storm. So what I took most clearly from my Holocaust education was not my responsibility as an American Jew to blindly support Israel (my mother’s intended message, reinforced with a collection of window decals proclaiming I AM A ZIONIST! for each of our bedroom windows). Instead, I learned the importance of never being foolishly optimistic, never underestimating the potential for disaster, and never, ever assuming you could leave life up to fate.

Now, in the black of a Beijing night, lying next to a Japanese executive-in-training I had met just six weeks earlier and with whom I could barely converse, I was immersing myself deeper and deeper into a relationship that would eventually require some sort of optimistic stretch—or most likely a wild leap of faith—to sustain itself across two hemispheres. Am I just fooling myself here, I wondered, just inviting some messy, bicontinental breakup?

Then suddenly, Toru began to stir. I turned toward him, ready for him to cry out while I guessed about his own nightmares. The outlines of shapes—a wooden dresser, an aging TV, a book on the nightstand—ghosted softly in the dark. As Toru tossed beside me, then began to murmur quietly, I paused, weighing whether to wake him from his dreams or let them pass.

But then he laughed, a chortle bubbling up through slumber, like a child with a joke. I looked at his face, and the stress I expected there was absent; in its place, a small smile curved his lips, his cheeks peaking above a satisfied grin, almond eyes squeezed shut and crinkling at their corners.

Next he turned over, sighed, and fell back into peaceful rest.

Holy shit, I thought. In the inky black of night, Toru didn’t dream of horror and tragedy, didn’t dwell in fragmented scenes of Nuremberg, Nagasaki, or Nanking. Instead, he chuckled.

Hearing Toru laugh, I was struck with a new thought. Perhaps utter vulnerability and pure peace really could coexist, surrender sometimes culminate in quiet joy, not destruction. And right there, in the People’s Republic of China’s Ministry of Commerce training center, in bed with a Japanese businessman I had met less than two months before, I fell further in love than I’d ever thought possible, my heart crashing through a floor I didn’t know existed, revealing a deeper comfort than I ever guessed another human’s presence could embody.