FOUR
THE DAWN was bright through Logan Airport’s tall windows. It was late spring 2005, about a month after Toru had returned to Japan, and I arrived at five-fifteen a.m. to check in for my early flight to Chicago and then on to Osaka’s Kansai Airport. My bags were overstuffed, my hair in a loose ponytail still damp from the shower. A line had already formed despite the inhumane hour, and in it stood a clutch of women with Japanese passports bound for my same itinerary. Most stood stick-straight and impeccably coiffed, their makeup subtle but flawless, their bags compact and neatly arranged, gliding forward on perfect, tiny wheels.
They waited patiently to check in while I tapped my foot nervously, trying to straighten my unruly ponytail, lugging my bags awkwardly as the line inched forward, my suitcase scraping the floor in a minor cacophony. Still waiting, I called Toru to tell him I had made it to Logan on time. At just past six p.m. in Japan—hours before traditional salarymen like him leave work—he couldn’t talk for long, but he urged me to call from my layover in Chicago, telling me he loved me, reminding me he would be waiting on the other side of customs at Kansai Airport. “Thank you for coming to here,” he said.
In the weeks before he had left Boston, we had decided I would visit him in Japan from mid-June through mid-July. This would take the edge off his May departure from the U.S. without interrupting my fall teaching schedule, still leaving me plenty of time to prepare my September syllabi. Toru had convinced me that even though I couldn’t imagine actually living so far from Boston, I might as well explore Osaka a bit before I insisted on the impossibility of making a life there. “Why not just come, see what it’s like?”
“Well, maybe I could,” I had tentatively agreed. I let the idea take form in my head, solidifying slowly like liquid hardening into shape. Given the intensity of Japanese corporate life, Toru wouldn’t be able to take more than a day or two off from work, but there was a national holiday (Marine Day, which he termed “respect for the sea” day) in mid-July that provided one long weekend. Plus, it would be the rainy season and airfares would be cheap.
As I approached Logan’s ticket counter, I felt a sudden pressure behind my eyes and in my throat. This is going to be our life from now on, I thought. This is how we’ll live, with me returning a few times a year to this early-morning line, calling him thirteen time zones and half a world away, then boarding a plane for a twenty-four-hour trip across the planet. Unless I agreed to move to Japan or we decided to break up.
When Toru had arrived home in May, he had confirmed my fears about his sure place in Osaka. His father was spending whole days in front of the TV, his weight dropping as he declined food during daylight either because of mourning or apathy. Tremors had begun to shake his hand.
Grasping the phone in my studio in Boston, listening to Toru’s report of life back home, I hadn’t mentioned the possibility of his being transferred to America. Instead, I stared off into space and clutched the handset hard as, silently, we both agreed he needed to be in Japan, at least for the foreseeable future.
Now, standing at Logan Airport, I was swallowing back tears. Then a uniformed woman at the counter called, “Next!” and I shuffled forward. The rush of activity pushed back the burning in my eyes and throat: handing over my passport, removing my shoes and unloading my laptop at security, buying water and a paper near the gate, boarding the plane to my tiny economy seat.
Twenty hours and one layover later, I woke to the plane’s descent, its hulk banking through the clouds until Japan emerged below. I saw dark blue ocean and pancake-flat earth, urban sprawl jutting against gray mountains in the distance. Bays and basins dotting the land were topped with cargo ships, slivers of blue and white atop the shifting water. I had seen this landscape once before, of course, just over a year earlier when I had arrived in Japan to teach. But this time felt different. This time, I was landing, potentially, in a whole new life. I forced this thought from my mind. All that matters now is that soon I’ll be through immigration and customs, and then I’ll be with Toru again.
Touching down, I could see air-traffic attendants on the runway dressed in dark blue jumpsuits and light gray hardhats, red and white batons in hand. They stood still and straight as the plane slowed to a roll, their arms crossed at their thighs. Then they bowed simultaneously, lifted their batons aloft, and signaled us toward the gate. Watching them, I felt a little thrill, their polite choreography all the more delightful for the mundane labor of their task.
Thirty minutes later, the doors from customs swung open and I saw an ocean of Japanese people, some holding signs written in sloping English, others standing immobile in the late-afternoon light. Then there he was.
He started toward me with a hesitant smile. His black hair and dark eyes blended with the others’, but the familiarity of his face and gait stood out unmistakably to me. In a flash, I was pressed against his chest.
• • •
WHEN I WOKE early that first morning in Osaka, the sky peeking through the curtains was slate, promising a day with no sun. I glanced at Toru in the tiny bed beside me, taking in the room I had been too tired to notice the night before. He’d rented us what the Japanese call a “weekly mansion,” little box-apartments available for short-term lease. The “mansion” part must be an attempt at humor, I thought. I would come to learn that nonsensical phrases like this are everywhere in Japan, a culture that gleefully and unironically co-opts foreign terms without regard for spelling, grammar, or even meaning.
Toru’s father, named Tetsunobu, had invited me stay at the apartment where he and Toru lived together. I’d already met him briefly when he and Toru’s sister, Kei, had come to Boston the previous Christmas for a quick visit. He was kind, unassuming, and dapper in his five-foot-two frame, and when we’d met in December, he’d grabbed my hand and given it a friendly shake. “Nice to meeting you!” he’d said in English with a grin, and when I’d bowed awkwardly, he inclined his head as we both laughed at our attempts to assume the other’s culture.
Tetsunobu-san, as I called him (the “san” denoted respect), had made an unusual offer when he’d asked me to stay at his apartment in Osaka. Toru had told me that in Japan, families rarely meet partners until an engagement becomes official. Neither Toru nor Kei had ever introduced a girlfriend or boyfriend to their parents, or even mentioned having one before me. But Toru wasn’t surprised or overly impressed by his father’s hospitality. “We’re not so conservative family,” he explained.
I knew enough already about his history to know this was true: Toru came from a long line of liberal academics, his grandmother even attending college and becoming a teacher in prewar Japan, when most women ended their education at grammar school. One aunt had been a scientist, another taught at university, and his uncle, whom we called the “Communist Professor,” had studied Marxist economics and been a student leader in the Tokyo University protests of the 1970s. Even his mother’s Catholicism in secular Japan had been a mark of quiet independence.
When he learned I’d be coming to Osaka for an extended visit, Tetsunobu-san not only invited me to stay with him and his son, he told Toru he wanted to prepare me a toast breakfast every morning. He worried that I wouldn’t be able to order food at a restaurant or go to the market on my own. But by U.S. standards, their apartment was tiny, with one small bathroom and a sliver-sized extra bedroom, although it was the same place where Toru had grown up in a family of four. Touched by Tetsunobu-san’s kindness, I had asked Toru to decline for me. Toru, more annoyed at his father’s impracticality than moved by his generosity, had immediately agreed that we needed privacy.
The studio he rented us was slightly more than two hundred square feet, too cramped even for a full-sized bed, leaving us both squeezed into a twin, under which Toru had pushed my suitcase. The place boasted a hot plate and a mini-refrigerator, a rice cooker, a pint-sized toilet/shower/bath room, and a tiny washer-dryer tucked into a small closet. It also had another little closet for clothes, one Lilliputian set of drawers, and a television broadcasting three local channels. Toru and Tetsunobu-san’s apartment was just blocks away, so at least we didn’t have to make room for two sets of clothes.
Now, the studio’s curtains glowing faintly with a hint of daybreak, Toru lay straight and silent on his back beside me, his breathing steady and gentle, his expression tranquil. I resisted the urge to wake him with a kiss. This is what I love most about him, I lay thinking, this serenity in the face of life’s twists and turns. Soon his black eyes popped open, and he gazed at me, blurry for a moment. Then he focused his pupils and said, “Hi, my love. Ohayogozaimas! [Good morning!] You’re at Japan!” And just like that, he was awake and happy.
His bright confidence burned off whatever haze of unease I had about being in Osaka. And then we were up and dressed, and I was ready to meet his life in this new land.
• • •
JAPAN IS STEREOTYPED for being vastly different from the West, a country of intense conformity rippled with astounding strains of weirdness. In the days that followed, these stereotypes struck me as utterly true. Being sequestered in the training center almost 24/7 the summer before, I hadn’t had a chance to experience the country except in the most cursory way. This month would be different.
I learned that Kansai is Japan’s second most populated metropolitan area, and Osaka, Kansai’s capital, holds almost ten million people. Its streets combine modern high-rises and mid-rise seventies-style buildings slotted next to each other like mismatched teeth, a maze all the more striking for its utter tidiness. The sidewalks are bare of trash. The entranceways brook no disorder. Wedged between buildings sits the occasional traditional Japanese house (a few survived the city’s near total destruction in World War II), their gray scalloped roofs undulating in little swells.
Yet unlike most other huge cities such as Tokyo, Osaka’s population is surprisingly uncosmopolitan. Even in a country notorious for its homogeneity, Osaka has comparatively few foreigners: a much more modest ratio of gaijin—literally “outside people”—than even the smaller cities of Nagoya, Kyoto, or Kobe.
Toru took the first Monday off from work after my arrival and, holding my pale hand in his smooth palm, he led me through the Umeda subway station in the city center, then along its vast underground mall, between cascading waves of dark-suited salarymen and schoolgirls in blue kilts. I’ve never seen so many people moving at one time, I thought as hundreds of bobbing black heads waded through the subterranean halls, a sardine-can crowd that somehow kept pulsing smoothly forward.
In my guidebook, I’d read of the Japanese saying “The nail sticking up will get hammered down.” In Osaka, the fierce sameness of people’s manners was on full display, as was how much I, in turn, stood out, a woman simultaneously conspicuous and utterly irrelevant. On the sidewalk near our weekly mansion or in the subway neatly dissecting the city’s vast underground, mine was almost always the only (bottle) blond head visible. Except in Osaka’s commercial center, three stops from our studio apartment, where the Hilton, Ritz-Carlton, and U.S. Consulate had taken up residence, I could go for whole days without seeing another Westerner. Most passersby either stared at me quickly or pretended I didn’t exist, their eyes boring into the empty space in front of them or around me but never drifting to the contours of my body. Even the people who did stare looked away immediately when I caught their eye. Toru told me this was an act of politeness; in such a crowded country, making eye contact can be an invasion of privacy.
But the opposite would frequently happen when young mothers rode by on their mama-chari, ubiquitous one-speed bikes whose names were a riff on “mama chariots.” Their toddlers, tucked into little baskets in front, would often crane their necks to stare, tiny round heads and wide eyes following me as they swooshed past. Being so seen yet also so erased felt strange but not entirely disagreeable. I had unwittingly inherited a curious power: to be both a bright mystery and a blank space all at once.
On the subway, men in business suits read porn, flipping pages with an ease bordering on ennui. Next to them, schoolgirls in kneesocks and kilts texted madly on sequin-covered Hello Kitty cell phones, equally unfazed by the bondage scenes splayed across the newsprint of their neighbors. On the street, women in summer kimonos, called yukata, walked side by side with modestly dressed housewives and adolescent girls in short shorts, fishnet stockings, and stilettos. Sometimes a group of Goth-doll teenagers would walk by, feet plugged into black-and-white shoes atop preposterously high rubber soles, their short frocks decked with bolts of white lace jutting outward at the hem, thigh-high striped socks covering skinny knees. They would clasp their hands over their mouths as they giggled, radiating a mix of defiance and self-consciousness, a desire to stand out and shock but only in the context of a uniform group.
I felt my eyes widen and my stomach contract at these scenes. On one hand, it all looked so regressive, and a slew of academic arguments began to coalesce in my brain about how these trends must disempower the girls and women who adopted them. The schoolgirls with their sequined cartoon characters next to porno-reading men? The stiletto heels on teenagers in shorts? The middle-aged women’s bland invisibility? On the other hand, I had to admit I was riveted.
• • •
DURING THE WEEKDAYS, with Toru at work, I spent most of my time reading or walking Osaka’s streets under a humid drizzle. Tucked into random spots throughout the city were tiny Shinto shrines, wooden or stone structures usually no bigger than a large cardboard box, festooned with colored strings or hanging chains, bells sometimes hooked among their links.
My guidebook explained that Shinto was Japan’s original spiritual tradition. When Buddhism arrived via China in the sixth century, it gained equal prominence, although it did not usurp Shinto. Unlike in the West, most Japanese saw no contradiction in worshipping within two belief systems simultaneously. A form of animism, Shinto considers the earth one vast pantheon, with gods embodied in random rocks, trees, patches of grass, or even, apparently, concrete roofing. From the window of my tiny weekly mansion, I could see a mini-shrine erected on the top of an adjacent building, although I never saw anyone visit it, despite keeping watch for a rooftop supplication.
Near the city center at the intersection of two busy streets stood my favorite trace of Shinto. The road circled awkwardly around the base of an enormous tree, its trunk bulging like a well-fed belly swelling to embrace an orange hut a few feet high. The tree, Toru informed me, was supposedly a god, and the public works department had respectfully rerouted the pavement to accommodate the leaf-bound deity. Like so much of Osaka, the shrines were tiny treasures in an advent-calendar world, every corner revealing a minor wonder.
I was equally surprised by the city’s children and my reaction to them. Although I had never been drawn to kids before, I now loved seeing the little students with their yellow hats, dark uniforms, and identical boxy, red-leather backpacks. One afternoon, I watched a pair of teachers leading a long line of children who looked no older than six. They filed onto the subway platform, the boys in shorts, the girls in pleated skirts, hat straps snug under chins. When the train pulled in, one cluster broke off from the line and stepped onto the subway. Then they turned and bowed to the row of teachers and students still waiting for the next car, who bowed back in mirrorlike precision, two parallel lines of yellow caps dipping and rising in unison, mini-hands shooting up and waving to Japanese-accented cries of “Bye-bye!”
For a split second, a jolt of longing pierced me. I wondered what it would be like to hold one of those tiny children close. If Toru and I had a baby, would it stand here one day, too, a little bright-capped being in a freshly pressed uniform, all chubby fists and polite bows? But when I tried to focus further, the image blurred. Wouldn’t having a child bind me to Japan, in one way or another, for good? I turned my back then to watch a train on the opposite track arrive.
Between walking and taking the subway, I could navigate much of the city alone, ever more bewitched by its crazy constellation of opposites. Most of the main stations had English transliterations on their signs, so I could find my way around with a phonetically rendered list of central stops—Umeda, Shinsaibashi, and the one near our weekly mansion, Tanimachi-Rokuchome. Toru bought me a cheap cell phone with a prepaid plan so I could call him if I got lost. He also made a copy of our studio’s address spelled in Japanese characters, printing out a map and marking a big X over the black-and-white grid where our apartment lay among a maze of streets. I could give the paper to a cabdriver if I couldn’t reach Toru, since even pronouncing our address, let alone giving directions in Japanese, was impossible.
Although most people in Japan know how to read English, I was surprised to find that few in Osaka actually spoke it, and fewer still were willing to talk with a foreigner. Sometimes on the subway, people would move if I sat down next to them, and frequently the vacant seat to my side would be the last taken. Then I’d be left in the crowded car, the only white face among a swell of passengers, the empty orange seat next to me like neon blinking news of my otherness.
When I asked Toru why people were so reluctant to be near me, he explained they were probably afraid I was going to ask for directions or speak English to them, and then they’d be embarrassed by their lack of fluency. “Face is very important here,” he said. “People don’t want to do things they’ll feel shame for.” If they could not converse perfectly, they were loath to converse at all.
One day, Toru took me to a bookstore with a section for English books, although the sign marking it was in Japanese, so I couldn’t have found it again myself. I wanted to buy some expat magazines, learn more about the English-speaking community in Japan. Most were published in Tokyo, but two came from Kansai, covering Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe. They were printed on matte paper and staple-bound, not like my glossy magazines at home. Their thin, folded spines told me what a flimsy slice of life foreigners occupy in Japan.
• • •
EVERY MORNING while Toru was at work, I’d go to one of the many nearby cafés where, whenever a customer entered, the identically clad staff would proclaim in unison, “Irasshaimase!” “Welcome!” My two favorite places had pictures on their menus, so I could point to a photo of coffee or buttered toast, and the cashier would bow his or her head in little dips of respect, then smile, count out my change, and set my order on the counter.
The air would become heavy with smoke as the seats filled up. The “smoking sections” seemed a mere formality, placed smack against the “nonsmoking” areas—or sometimes even surrounding them. One morning, waving a puff of tobacco from my eyes, I gazed out the window, watching lazily as businessmen in suits rode by on three-speed bikes and cars idled quietly in traffic. Something about the urban scene’s tranquility struck me as odd, but it took a moment for me to identify what. Then I realized I had yet to hear anyone do something as obtrusive as honking.
At the intersection, I watched pedestrians at the curb. The walk sign was red, a white silhouette of a man in a suit against a glowing crimson square. No car approached, but still the people waited, obeying the mechanized order not to cross. They stood without moving until the sign changed, the white cutout figure now angling forward, arms swinging across a green background, calling its human followers to motion.
Then an immaculately washed, tiny purple garbage truck ambled past, bright pink flowers painted on its side. Two uniformed garbagemen sat in front, their expressions earnest despite the melody warbling like a nursery rhyme from a speaker on the roof. Written in white English letters across the top was their slogan: CLEAN OSAKA!
As morning extended into noon, I watched the café fill with office workers. Men in plain dark suits sat together, smoking and drinking coffee. Nearby, women in matching skirts and white blouses chatted at tables of their own. Toru told me these women were called OLs, a bizarre, shortened version of the English term “office ladies” (although, since the Japanese lexicon lacks a hard l, the second letter was pronounced as an approximate r, becoming even more bizarrely, O-er-uus). At most traditional companies like Toru’s, women wore uniforms while men—with the exception of factory workers—did not. If a female staff member reached management level, she could trade her OL uniform for business attire. In Toru’s office, that had never happened. He knew of few places where it had.
At the café, the OLs spoke quietly, nodding their heads rapidly, clutching frilly handkerchiefs in their laps, knees pressed together, sensible black shoes tucked under their chairs. When they laughed, some covered their mouths modestly like I had seen Ji-na do the previous summer. The businessmen at their own tables bantered more freely, their legs and arms spread out like branches.
Once again, I was surprised by the gender divisions around me, but even more surprised that they failed to rile me much. I wondered if that was racist of me: if I cared less about the status of women who looked different from me, whose skin was darker and syllables more staccato than my own. But I felt so removed from the world around me in Japan—as if I were walking around inside a giant bubble, rolling through a landscape fascinating yet untouchable. This is not your country, I saw written across the polite but closed faces, the unreadable street signs, even the kind but paternalistic surprise people showered on me at restaurants when I picked up chopsticks or when they asked Toru if I could eat soy sauce. When people’s eyes looked through me on the street or hawkers quietly pulled their advertisements back as I passed, I felt gently but firmly reminded of my outside status.
At times this left me alienated and lonely, and I wondered how I would cope if I actually moved to Japan. But tucked within the folds of this concern, I found unexpected freedom and relief. This is not my country. These are not my problems to solve.
• • •
ONE DAY, we headed to Kyoto, about forty minutes away by train, to visit the Kinkaku-ji, the famous golden pavilion. Covered in gold leaf and rising out of a pond, the site was once a shogun’s villa and then a Zen temple. I’d never seen it but had read about it. “Very famous. Very beautiful,” Toru told me. “Kind of big, golden temple,” he said, and for a second I flashed back to the Chinese restaurant my mother and stepfather loved in Brookline, the Golden Temple. I pictured plump fried chicken fingers and glossy, ruby-colored spareribs, but I didn’t mention this to Toru.
Waiting on the platform for our train to Kyoto, we were flanked on one side by a white-gloved station attendant tasked with ensuring no one strayed too close to the edge. On our other side stood a young man dressed in khaki trousers and a plain white button-down, the sleeves pushed up to reveal thin arms. He stretched one limb aloft, straining to lift some sort of device above his head, angling the apparatus toward the tunnel’s mouth.
“What’s he doing?” I asked Toru.
“He’s densha-otaku,” Toru said, his voice suggesting a minimum of interest. “Train nerd. Obsessed with trains.” Toru explained that Japan bred otaku of every stripe, fanatics passionate about one phenomenon or another: manga, anime, even cosplay, where adults dress up and walk around as characters from video games, movies, and comic books.
Densha-otaku study schedules and ride trains, sometimes all day. Then at home, they replay the sound of trains rushing in and out of stations. I imagined the man next to us sitting in his house alone, listening to his recordings while a frisson of locomotive-inspired delight surged through him.
“It’s so dumb,” Toru said, his laugh dismissive. But I was fascinated, a little thrill of my own shivering through me at the weirdness and surprise this country constantly offered up.
“Tof,” I said, “I know the U.S. is odd and crazy in its own way, but this country is just totally bizarre.” Toru emitted a small huh, somewhere between begrudging amusement and utter disinterest, and then we turned to watch as the train approached. The densha-otaku held his device even higher while the uniformed station attendant stood still and stick-straight until the cars slid into the station.
Then the attendant bowed to the similarly white-gloved conductor, who in turn bowed back, his head leaning out the window as he slowed the train until it reached a thin white line on the platform marking the exact spot at which the front end should stop. The conductor pointed to the line with a quick two-fingered flourish, nodded his head again, and proclaimed “Hai!” (“Yes!”). On the wall, the clock confirmed the cars’ presence at the precise time printed on the hanging timetable. Our train had arrived.
In Kyoto, Toru and I walked the grounds of the golden pavilion, staring up at its gilded walls, a soft gloaming in the pale afternoon. Like so much in Japan, the temple stood tranquil, stately, and in stunning contrast to the bizarre hypermodernity of the densha-otaku we’d seen earlier.
Another weekend toward the end of my stay, Toru took me to Kyoto again so I could see a Japanese tea ceremony. We rode through the flatlands of Kansai, houses of white, beige, and gray with dark-shingled roofs swooping by our window while mountains rimmed the distance with dusty blue. In Kyoto, we followed the Philosopher’s Path, a grass-bordered walkway along a small stream. The ground was damp, the famed cherry-blossom trees lining the path now well past bloom, rising in a green canopy under a wet sky. Little stores and restaurants flanked the path. Fat gray and orange carp broke the stream’s surface, gaping their mouths in awkward yawns before slipping back under the waterline.
At a small house advertising an abbreviated form of tea ceremony, we removed our shoes and stepped onto a platform of straw tatami mats. Instead of whisking the green matcha tea in one communal bowl and then passing it for each person to sip—as in a traditional ceremony—this teahouse offered individual bowls, served on a porch overlooking a Japanese garden. A white couple was already there, and from the brown sandals they had left at the entryway and the socks pulled up along their shins, I guessed they were European, maybe German. While we waited for our tea, the woman whispered something to the man, her accent guttural, while I asked Toru quiet questions about the tea ceremonies he had told me his grandmother had taught, all of us hushed for no clear reason.
I felt a sudden wave of conceit go through me. I grabbed Toru’s fingers, pride surging that I was there with a Japanese man who held my hand, unlike the obvious tourists sitting next to us, those poor souls lacking any real access to this mysterious world. I glanced pityingly at their tube socks and fanny packs, my compassion feeling generous. Then my knees began to ache from kneeling. I shifted uncomfortably, letting go of Toru’s hand. Apparently, my short skirt did not lend itself to a demure, cross-legged position on the tatami.
From across the hallway came a woman in a kimono. She held a tray with four small bowls and plates bearing tiny domed sweets. Removing her thonged slippers, she padded silently across the mats in white tabi socks, sewed with a separate compartment for her big toe. She held the tray perfectly immobile, balanced so it never betrayed a hint of movement. When she reached us, she bent fluidly to her knees, tray still in hand, and set the dishes down in utter silence.
“Irasshaimase,” she said softly. She placed a bowl in front of each of us, turning them forty-five degrees until they were positioned exactly as protocol demanded, then setting the small plates with sweets alongside our tea. She moved unhurriedly yet with complete economy, as if any extra motion would be an affront to tradition, an inexcusable sloppiness. The loose sleeves of her kimono dipped and rose as she served, and I caught my breath as they waved close to the tea, but they hovered perfectly, never grazing anything but air.
We sipped the frothy drink, its rich, dark green sediment washing across the bottom of the bowl. Toru cut a piece of bean-paste sweet for me, wielding the tiny wooden knife balanced along the lip of my plate. I rolled the confection around on my tongue, grainy and too sweet but a right balance to the bitterness of the tea.
“Tof, I’m kind of fascinated by this country,” I admitted. We stared together through the wall-length open window, the garden lush and still. “I even think I could consider spending more time here.” Inside, with all the newness and mystery crowding me, I was starting to feel like a new person myself, as if the bizarre but mesmerizing world around me had started to seep through my pores and reorganize the molecules of my body, opening me up to places and experiences I had never before known how to imagine.
“I’m happy,” Toru said, still staring out at the garden. And then, because he wasn’t like me and didn’t need to analyze every possibility at the moment of its conception or prod every happiness for signs of future demise, he looked at me with a contented smile, grabbed my hand, and left it at that.
• • •
BEFORE I LEFT TORU ten days later at the airport, we went one night to an Italian restaurant. The room was flushed with candlelight, the jacketed waiters hovering just past earshot. Toru read the menu, Japanese with Italian subtitles, while I flipped vaguely through it, looking for words that resembled English ones, wondering in half interest if the waiters might mistake me for European, if my gauzy tank top and strappy sandals might project Continental chic. Before Toru began translating from the parchment page, I put aside my menu, clasped my hands along the table’s edge, and leaned in. “Tof,” I said.
Then we hunkered down to address in detail what options remained for our bicontinental bond.
Toru had a week off in October, and he suggested coming to Boston for a four-day visit—what would be left of his vacation after the two and a half days of travel the trip would devour. We agreed. I took a breath.
“What if I came back in December for a month or so, and then again next spring for longer? Like, three or four months?” I said. I could take the spring off from teaching or come toward the end of the semester and stay through the summer. In the meantime, I could try to pick up some freelance writing work to do from overseas.
Toru smiled wide, then nodded more than once. “Of course, I’m happy if you can do that.”
We discussed the plan over the multicourse meal. If the pattern worked, I might even continue going back and forth, spending part of the year in Boston, the rest in Japan. “If you feel too hard, moving to Osaka for full-time,” Toru suggested, “maybe we can build life together this way, and you can go home whenever you need. And if we want to, we can marry.” He nodded his head again, this time a graver gesture.
“Do you want to get married?” I asked, one fingertip running nervous arcs along the bottom of my wineglass.
“I want to stay together. Married or not married is not so big deal to me. But stay together, yes.” He looked straight at me. Then, looking down, he added, “If we can.”
I exhaled a little wisp of relief. But my mouth still felt dry and tight. I picked up my wine and sipped. I looked at Toru.
Despite my fears about marriage and becoming dependent on someone, I’d grown to long for an enduring, hope-to-last-forever bond with Toru. I still didn’t necessarily need a piece of paper as much as I needed to trust that he wanted to stay together, grow old in each other’s presence. Knowing that he did, I felt stung with joy. But how to fit, long-term, both Osaka and Boston into the equation? The question terrified me.
“So, do you think, if we got married, we could move to Boston . . . or at least the U.S., in the next couple of years? Would your company ever transfer us?”
“Maybe, sometime in next few years,” Toru said. “Maybe to the U.S. To California, San Diego. Or else, could be Kansas City.” He held my gaze. “But to Boston, or even East Coast, probably not,” he said, shaking his head, his eyes still locked on mine. “To Boston, no.”
“Kansas City?” I gasped. Then, more quietly, as if I needed to get used to the words themselves, I repeated, “Kansas City.”
I had never been there. But I had my ideas. It was far from the Northeast. It was not Chicago or San Francisco, or even Seattle. It contained the word “Kansas” in its name.
“We have an office there. There and San Diego.”
I knew that in Japan, and especially in traditional jobs like Toru’s, most men stayed with one company for life. Switching jobs signified a failure of loyalty, and loyalty was one of the culture’s most fundamental values. Looking for a position at another Japanese corporation—one with offices in New York or Boston—could hurt Toru’s career. I also recognized the slim likelihood of his succeeding as a nonnative English-speaking manager in an American company. Or of my supporting us both in Boston, even if I quit teaching in prisons and taught business writing full-time.
I’d already done the math. If I lived in Japan and worked as a freelance writer, I could go back to Boston when I wanted, as long as I could continue to afford the flights, and, I supposed, we remained childless. If Toru lived in the U.S. with a corporate job, he’d have a few weeks a year, at most, to go home.
And, of course, Toru was his family’s eldest son. He—and eventually his wife—would be expected to stay in Osaka and care for his father now that his mother was gone. Unless his father agreed to move with us, too.
I both loved and hated Toru’s honesty about our dismal prospects for life together in my hometown. It made me trust him more to know he’d never offer hollow promises. But at the same time, a piece of me longed for him to hold out some tiny sliver of hope, or at least soften the blow. To admit a little less forthrightly that if we built a home together the closest we’d probably ever get to Boston, until he retired in thirty years, was Missouri.
Ultimately, though, I knew as I set my teacup down on its bone-china saucer, there was only one thought whose relief matched the intensity of my worry: when I leave Toru again at the airport, at least it won’t be for good.
• • •
WHEN SHE CAUGHT wind of the plan a few days later by phone, my mother reacted with considerably less relief. She baldly assured me that I was getting deeper and deeper into an “unsustainable arrangement.” I didn’t tell her we had discussed marriage, but I admitted I was planning to return to Osaka in December, and then again in the spring to give living in Japan an earnest try. “Oh, for God’s sakes,” she chided me, the long-distance line sounding tinny, “are you really going to prolong this situation even further? Unless you really are considering moving to that country.” She paused. “Where you’ll be a foreigner for the rest of your life,” she helpfully elaborated.
But surprisingly the idea of being a foreigner, at least part-time, was no longer so awful. After all, Toru had made me feel so protected in the past month. Never before as an adult had I been so unable to do things for myself; the flip side revealed the sheer comfort of having someone take care of everything for me. Instead of feeling helpless, most of the time I felt safe. I was ashamed to admit it, but in Japan, I found a delicious release in the unexpected taste of utter dependence.
I thought about my Boston-bound hunger for social challenges: writing my dissertation on violence and gender, teaching in prisons, hoping the classes might encourage my students to think about masculinity and power in new ways, that their degrees might help them get jobs when they got out of lockup so they could return to their own children and break the cycle of recidivism. But now I began to question whether passion or some confused mix of guilt and ego fueled my motivations. What if I lived in a world where I couldn’t confront these challenges? Sure, I’d be more limited, less useful. I’d also be playing into some gender stereotypes of my own: a woman dependent on a man to take care of her. But wouldn’t I also be absolved of the responsibilities accompanying both the privilege and potential of my American life? That absolution, that freedom, felt terribly seductive.