SIX

WHEN WE REUNITED at Osaka’s Kansai Airport, it took only a few moments to feel myself melting back into shape beside Toru. His presence in my consciousness had been so large over the previous months that, as he came toward me in the crowded terminal, I felt momentarily surprised to remember that he was my height, not taller. But when I hugged him to me, bending my head slightly to bury it in the corner between his neck and shoulder, his warmth was expansive.

“Thank you for coming to here again,” he said.

Scanning the schedule board for buses back to the city, a white expanse crammed with black squiggles I couldn’t even begin to read, I felt myself surrender completely. The afternoon light was waning, the air cold and damp, and as we stood on the clean-swept sidewalk waiting to board our bus, around me flew snippets of an indecipherable language. The sound reminded me of a river running fast, only a modest gurgle rising up every now and then in whose echo I could trace some semblance of meaning. When the white-gloved attendant approached to load my luggage and inquire about our final stop, he looked only at Toru. My American identity as an independent, competent adult with an advanced degree, two challenging jobs, and a high level of cultural fluency receded back into its little corner, leaving in its wake a curious mix of diminishment and relief; I was once again a foreigner in Japan.

I’d found a subletter to cover my rent in Boston, and Toru had booked us another “weekly mansion” in the same building as before. This time, since we were renting for more than a month, he managed to secure one with a “full-sized” bed, only slightly wider than a twin. These apartments were designed for single working people who might occasionally have an overnight visitor. Like my room the previous summer, the studio was spare and tiny, outfitted with bare whitish-gray walls, one window, and the same sliver of a bathroom—where two people could not stand with the door open—plus hot plate, closet, mini-fridge, and diminutive set of drawers perched on wheels.

Once again, Toru kept all his clothes at his and his father’s house down the street, where every morning before work he would eat breakfast, shower, and dress. I kept half my clothes in the closet and drawers, and half in my suitcase under the bed, stuffing my heavy sweaters there and calculating how much shopping I could do before I would need to store things at Toru and Tetsunobu-san’s apartment, too.

As I had imagined, in the mornings, I would go to one of the neighborhood cafés I’d found the previous summer. The staff showed no signs of remembering me, although I couldn’t tell whether their obliviousness derived from Japanese manners—since conversations between strangers were to be avoided—or simply my lack of having made any lasting impression.

In preparation for my new food-writing career, I spent mornings flipping through the few entries in a Lonely Planet guide, a Frommer’s, and a Fodor’s and then searching the expat magazines for recommendations or even just advertisements. Since the Michelin guide to the area had yet to be published in Japanese or English, and the city’s Zagat guide appeared only in Japanese, I compiled minor notes based on Toru’s rough translation of the latter. “Yakitori,” he explained one night, “like chicken on stick. You might not like, though, at least not some.” Toru had kindly pretended not to notice the gaping flaw in my plan to play global food critic: my squeamish stomach. He referred only obliquely to it now.

“Some is like chicken . . . chicken ass,” he said, his brow knit in an attempt to describe chicken tail. Then he mentioned octopus balls.

“No way.” I shook my head, my eyes bulging with horror.

“You know, little dough balls with tako, octopus piece, inside,” he explained. “Like dumplings. Called takoyaki. Very famous in Osaka. Very Osaka food.”

At night, as we walked to the restaurants I had chosen, Toru would hold my hand, switching sides to buffer me even when the street was empty. As always, he’d do so quietly, as naturally as breath. He never once forgot or neglected to protect me this way even if we were running late or immersed in conversation, as if he held some kind of homing device within his body, and home was wherever I might need shielding. Even more than my relief at being held by him again, than my skin’s sense of rightness next to his, Toru’s calm, instinctual protectiveness made me feel rooted in space alongside him, despite it being Osaka’s skyline around us, not Boston’s.

We went to a food stall at a neighborhood market and ate those fried octopus balls: crisp takoyaki, crunchy on the outside but gooey within, the chewy tentacles and slimy, half-cooked dough sliding down my throat in a disconcerting slip. Next we tried okonomiyaki, Japanese savory pancakes, at a restaurant nearby. Its walls were plastered with cards signed by famous Osakan comedians and musicians. At the table next to us, a group of teenagers in low-slung jeans and grunge-chic skirts played quarters and smoked, laughing loudly.

The pancakes were made with mountain potato flour, cabbage, and egg, then layered with sliced pork and Worcestershire sauce, a drizzle of mayonnaise, and dried salted seaweed. I was happily surprised that I actually liked the seaweed topping, hoping my taste buds were maturing into a new global sophistication.

Toru proudly explained to the aproned waiter that I was a writer working on a piece for a Boston newspaper and would appreciate an interview with the owner. Moments later, an older man burst from the kitchen, blue apron smattered with food, round cheeks scrunched above his grin. I sensed from Toru’s polite but hesitant tone and his gestures that he was making another introduction, and then the owner-chef emitted a volley of Japanese, Toru throwing back his head occasionally to laugh in a way I could tell was, at times, more manners than mirth.

Toru tried to translate for me as the man forged ahead with more zealous commentary. Although I couldn’t follow his words, I laughed along with them, captivated by the chef-owner’s effusiveness, his expansive hand gestures. Later, Toru defined him as a quintessential Osakan, outgoing, boisterous, and much less reserved than other Japanese people tended to be.

“He’s saying okonomiyaki means ‘as you like,’” Toru said, turning to explain, while I grabbed my pencil. The gist, I learned, was something about applying this “as you like” ethos to free experimentation with ingredients, which the chef then funneled into a “global culinary vision” using creative flavors from around the world. “So,” Toru relayed, “this is why all world’s citizens enjoy and . . . and feel at home with his food.”

Another mini-monologue followed, and Toru nodded.

“He say he has many dreams.” Toru paused, struggling for English. “He say something like ‘But my final dream is to journey into black hole, into new universe, and make okonomiyaki in another world.’”

I looked up at the chef standing over our table. He laughed once more, mouth drawn wide, eyes wrinkling shut. Then he bowed a single salutation and returned abruptly to the kitchen, his culinary intentions explained, his ontological vision revealed.

Another night, we went to eat at the Hankyu department store in the central Umeda neighborhood. We passed an information desk manned by a line of young women in identical pillbox hats, then rode the escalator through levels of clothing boutiques, each one attended by more uniformed salesladies, their skirts pressed taut. At the top, we reached the Dining Stage, or “dainingu-suteiji,” as Toru explained it would be pronounced in the store’s Japanese approximation of English.

The place was lined with tidy stalls from some of Osaka’s most well-known restaurants. Customers could order at various counters, then wait at tables for aproned servers to bring their food. We ate crisp tempura, colorful slices of vegetables, and whole jumbo shrimp battered and dipped in the coarsely ground salt the waiter delivered in a little blue dish. Next we ordered sushi, an endeavor Toru approached with consternation after we’d first eaten it together the summer before. I had been bitterly disappointed then to discover that only in the West do rolls come with avocado and spicy sauce, or with tempura pieces tucked inside. Toru had frowned darkly when I’d asked where the California rolls and spicy salmon maki were. “Not real!” he’d said, shaking his head emphatically. “Not even sushi. Just fake food.”

But here in the Hankyu Dining Stage, I was attempting to nurture my new persona as sophisticated international food critic, so I let Toru do the choosing. I bit into a shiny slice of fish draped naked atop an oblong of white rice. I didn’t bother to ask what it was. My plan was to eat first without really thinking, just to get past the initial raw bite, and then take notes from the safe side of an empty plate.

All I could feel was slime. Before I’d even mustered my jaw to movement, my instinct to swallow—to get the slick flesh off my tongue—kicked in. I gulped, a small convulsion emitting an undignified little gasp from my throat. Then I snatched the beer in front of me.

Toru shook his head while I pushed the rest of my sushi toward him. Neither one of us mentioned the absurdity of my writing a food article on Japan.

•   •   •

SOME NIGHTS WE ATE dinner at Toru and his father’s apartment. The summer we first met, I’d told Toru that I never expected to cook, not even if I got married, and that I never—“and I mean never”—cooked at home in Boston. “There’s always takeout if you want to stay in, right?”

Toru had disagreed with a vigor I’d found slightly worrying. “Eating at home is most relaxing,” he’d corrected me. “I don’t want to go out every night. Too tiring.” He’d told me that he didn’t think it was realistic to have a family and never eat at home, even if you never had kids, that part of having a home was eating together in it. He hadn’t bought my argument that not cooking, never cooking, was a viable political statement about women’s independence, either. “Just not normal, never to eat at home, never once,” he’d grumbled.

I could tell he’d thought I was a little spoiled or at best lazy when it came to domestic matters. Now I considered the possibility that he could be right. Maybe alongside my political argument—or rather buried secretly beneath it—was a classist irresponsibility I’d inherited in the large suburban house where I’d grown up. As kids, we’d cleared the table and had been instructed to put away our toys, but mostly we’d been spared chores by the housekeepers. Then I lived in dorms in boarding school and college until, on my own, I’d built up both a tolerance for messiness and a love of restaurants.

In our conversations about cooking dinner, I found Toru’s sternness slightly rankling, felt somewhat disappointed by his failure to be charmed by my quirky undomesticity, but I also grudgingly admired how diligent he was about keeping our little weekly mansion neat. The apartment he shared with his father, where he’d grown up in a household of four, further highlighted both the differences in our backgrounds and his family’s apparent contentment with modest, mundane domestic life.

At about seven hundred square feet, Toru’s family home had two tiny bedrooms big enough only for single beds, one larger bedroom wide enough to hold a full, a kitchen that could seat no more than four people with legs near touching around a small table, and a living room. The latter had one two-cushion couch and an aging massage chair; trinkets from Toru’s mother’s visits to Catholic churches around the world; a large rack for hanging laundry; a TV atop aging wooden shelves; and two framed pictures of Toru’s mother with a plain cross hanging between them. The apartment also had one toilet room, just wide enough to hold the toilet and a tiny cold-water sink, and a shower room with a larger sink, a washing machine, and a small but deep yellow-sided bathtub. On the wall near the washing machine was the hot-water heater, which remained off until shower or dishwashing time, when Toru’s father would flick the switch and wait for the heating mechanism to kick in.

In the kitchen stood a seventies-style stove, microwave, rice cooker, and mini-dishwasher on the counter next to the sink, designed for only a handful of items. The sink, built for Toru’s mother, who hadn’t grazed five feet, was so low I had to hunch over to wash anything in it. Luckily, Toru’s father, at just about five-foot-two, agreed to wash dishes on the nights I cooked.

The first time I saw Toru’s apartment, I flashed back to my childhood house in the Boston suburbs: the marble-floored, window-lined plant room complete with burbling fountain; the sundial patio overlooking the tennis court; the winding front staircase we kids never used, since it bore an imported carpet we weren’t allowed to walk on; the dark-paneled library where my mother and father had delivered the news of their separation.

My parents had been known for giving big parties, especially as their marriage began to crumble, impressive affairs filled with polite conversation that morphed into tipsy laughter as uniformed valets darted through the dark, and tuxedoed bartenders served drinks in the library’s low glow. I wondered if we’d always clung to our imposing house, its expensive decor, its enviable landscaping, as proof of some deeper worth, even—or especially—as our family imploded. As a child, I had felt soothed by the shelves of delicate china and cut-crystal glasses, the European upholstery, as if they could hold at bay the diminishment of the humans they surrounded.

Now I wondered whether Toru had felt slightly depressed or uninspired living in such a modest apartment, no material magic to distract the mind from its own torments. But both he and his father seemed completely at ease there, unconcerned by the physicality of their home beyond their commitment to keep it immaculately clean, safe, warm, and well functioning. Almost as if the house itself, as a material object, was irrelevant. There was, I recognized, a kind of integrity in this: unexpected, utterly foreign to me, but very wise.

Still, I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea that if Toru and I built a life together, frequent cooking would be involved. But as my hopes of becoming a celebrated global restaurant critic waned, I acquiesced to making dinner a few times a week. “So if we did get married, could we at least agree to eat out, just somewhere casual,” I bargained, “let’s say three or four nights a week?”

“Yah, maybe three times a week, maybe sometime even four, but you know, not at expensive places. Not that often,” he insisted.

“What does ‘not expensive’ mean?” I asked, wincing at the thought of those octopus balls at plain food stalls becoming our thrice-a-week night out.

“Like, not too gorgeous,” Toru said, using his term for “fancy.” “Like, not Ritz!” He held out a carrot he knew would appease me. “Like new Indian place, or somethings like that,” referring to a dive we’d just found down the street that we both already loved.

Deal, I thought.

So I began trying to cook at the apartment Toru shared with his father. A few afternoons a week, while Toru worked long hours at his job, I’d go over and download recipes from the Internet, and Tetsunobu-san and I would sit together and list the ingredients on a little pad of white paper. I’d say each item aloud in English, and he’d write them down either in his tight English script or Japanese characters. Sometimes I would have to repeat the words a few times before Tetsunobu-san could understand what they were, and occasionally we had to look up translations.

“Pecorino cheese,” I tried to explain one afternoon, “like, do you know what Parmesan cheese is?” I made a triangle with my hands. “It’s kind of like that.”

“Paa-meshan cheez-u,” he repeated, thinking. “Maybe had better to be looking it up.” Then we bent together over the computer in the tiny room that used to be Toru’s mother’s. Usually, we’d find that the market didn’t have either kind of cheese anyway, and we’d settle for the little squares of cheddar they sold.

Tetsunobu-san would help me identify the food on the market shelves, since many items came wrapped in Japanese-covered packages. Yogurt and milk bore similarly shaped cartons, which I discovered only after trying to make oatmeal one morning on the hot plate in our studio: I’d ended up with a hot fermented mess. Even soy sauce was hard to identify, shelved alongside a slew of other brown sauces: dashi (bonito fish broth), mentsuyu (a noodle-dipping sauce), gyosho (a southeast Asian condiment), and dark vinegar.

The first time I cooked at Toru and Tetsunobu-san’s apartment, I planned chicken parmigiana with a cheddar substitute. Quick, easy, simple, I reasoned. After Tetsunobu-san had taken me to the market and we worked out that panko, or Japanese breadcrumbs, contained the same basic ingredients as Italian ones minus a few seasonings, I carefully followed the recipe. Standing in their tiny kitchen, I added a dash of oregano I found in a cupboard, then layered each item on a large plate while Tetsunobu-san watched TV in the living room.

“Okay, Tetsunobu-san!” I shouted out to him when I was ready to put the whole thing in the oven. “Where’s the oven?” I called out, thinking it strange I had never noticed it before.

“O-ben . . .” he mumbled as he gathered himself off the couch and made his way into the kitchen, substituting a b for the v the Japanese language lacks. “Hmmm,” he said, when he saw me, plated bird held aloft.

“You know,” I said, miming a door being opened, a rack being pulled out. “An oven. Where I can cook this. With a grill-like thing on the bottom.”

“O-ben is, actually, it is here.” He pulled out a tiny fish grill from a slot under the stove, no more than six by nine inches across, four inches top to bottom.

“No, I mean a big thing. Big black oven. Like that,” I gestured toward the fish grill, “but bigger. For cooking,” I added uselessly.

“Japanese house don’t have oben!” Tetsunobu-san admitted, and then he tipped his crown back and laughed. He pointed at the microwave.

“How do you microwave chicken parmigiana?” I asked.

Tetsunobu-san went to the microwave, examined it for a moment, checking the dials, the row of Japanese kanji running up its side. “I don’t know!” he finally said, laughing again. He had never eaten chicken parmigiana before.

Later that night after Toru arrived from work, he explained that you could set the microwave to a convection oven setting, but I had already sliced up the chicken and cooked it in pieces on the fish grill, smashing down the cheese topping so it would fit, splattering tomato sauce everywhere. The men were totally unperturbed by the strangely flattened bird. At least until they learned there would be no white rice accompanying it, a development they found utterly bewildering.

•   •   •

ONE EVENING, about halfway through my stay, Toru’s aunt and uncle held a dinner for me, a special honor to welcome me to their city, their home, their nephew’s heart. I knew this was a rare privilege in Japan, a country with houses so small and boundaries so cherished that usually only relatives are invited to enter. Toru’s aunt was his mother’s only sibling, and although I’d already begun to delight in Tetsunobu-san’s easy warmth, I sensed the other side of the family might be slightly more traditional.

Toru told me to refer to them as Michiko-san (his aunt’s first name, plus the suffix denoting respect) and Hamatani-san (his uncle’s surname, meaning Mr. Hamatani or Hamatani sir). They lived in a house on the outskirts of Osaka, larger than Toru’s family’s apartment but similarly modest in style. Michiko-san spoke barely any English; Hamatani-san was dean of the English department at a nearby private high school and spoke formally but clearly. I already knew from my own disastrous teaching two summers before that English in Japanese schools is taught for grammar and reading, not conversation, and students rarely learn from native English speakers, so I wasn’t surprised by Hamatani-san’s stilted manner. But he and Michiko-san were kind and generous and attentive, wanting to know all about the literature I had studied in school, my family in Boston, and how I liked Japanese food so far.

Hamatani-san would place his palms together and lean into the table, asking each question as if opening a philosophical discussion, while Michiko-san spoke softly and gently, laughing as Toru tried to translate or I blurted an inelegant oishii! (“delicious!”) in Japanese. She served a procession of small dishes—fried chicken pieces, stewed vegetables, little bread-and-cheese squares wrapped with a thin strip of nori seaweed, rice with simmered mushrooms—placing each on the table, then jumping up to pour more beer, or the wine we had brought, or tea. She barely ate anything herself, she was so busy serving.

After dinner, she walked us to the door. Then, before we stepped into our shoes lined neatly in a row, she dropped to her knees and bent so low her forehead grazed the ground. I bent with her, thinking she had dropped a contact lens or stubbed a toe.

“Stand up!” Toru whispered, his voice coming hoarse and sideways out of his mouth. I froze, confused, and it took me a second longer to realize that she was bowing, not searching for something missing or staunching a sudden wound. I waited uncomfortably for her to rise, certain that when she did, she’d stand with shame etched across her features: shame that as a woman she was expected to bend so low, in her own house no less, to curve her aging body in self-effacement until she was eyeing nothing but her blank and spotless floor.

Instead, she straightened in a fluid sweep, her limbs surprisingly agile, her movements calm, and on her face a gentle yet fierce pride: that she had brought me to her house; had so fully honored me and her nephew, her dead sister’s only son; that this was her culture and her home and she had welcomed me so beautifully to them.

I felt lost for a moment and then suddenly released. I realized once again how imperfectly my judgments could cull meaning from this strange world, even from this group of potential new relatives. So many of my beliefs and instincts were irrelevant here. I had no choice but to relinquish the task of navigating this place—and now this family—with any real acuity, of anticipating its slights and wounds and managing them or guarding myself from them.

•   •   •

ALTHOUGH I FOUND an unexpected comfort in my limited ability to engage in Japanese family life, I knew that, to build a normal existence here even part-time, I’d need friends. Struggling constantly with the language and culture was already exertion enough, though: I decided I wanted to socialize with only English-speaking expats, preferably from Western countries. I recognized the provincialism of my choice, thinking back to my years in academia. I imagined former professors shaking bearded heads, murmuring under their breath about my disappointing cultural chauvinism. But I’d taken on enough of Toru’s world, I decided. I’d stop short at searching out his countrymen for socializing. Besides, I’d had a few Osakans try shyly to strike up conversations with me in random cafés only to segue into broken, red-faced requests that I help them practice English. I didn’t want to work that hard with friends.

I found personal ads in the back of Kansai’s two English expat magazines. Lounging in our weekly mansion studio, pale winter sun filtering through the polyester curtains, I scanned each ad in the Friendship section, squinting at their tiny font, puzzling out their abbreviations. There were posts such as 20YO WSM FROM ENGLAND, LOOKING FOR JW FOR FRIENDSHIP, DRINKS, SITESEEING, FUN. Or a headline LOOKING FOR A JAPANESE WOMAN WITH 2-5 YEARS OLD CHILD, under which appeared I, AUSTRALIAN 38YSOLD WANT TO HAVE RELATIONSHIP WITH A JAPANESE WOMAN WHO HAS A CHILD IN HOPE THAT THE CHILD FEEL I AM LIKE A FATHER AND THE MOTHER FEELS HAPPY PLS EMAIL.

Gross. Not to mention the atrocious grammar.

I knew Western men here far outnumbered Western women. I’d seen it in the glances Toru and I attracted, not just because we were a mixed couple, but because almost all mixed couples comprised white men with Asian women. We offered a surprising reversal. People would look from Toru to me, then swivel their heads back to Toru as if perhaps they were mistaken, had gotten backward what they thought they’d seen. Mostly, Toru and I found this funny. My favorite were the elderly men, sometimes small and slight, gently stooped or leaning on canes but always neatly put together, zooming through the subway or along the block with an agility rare among the aged in the U.S. They’d glance at Toru, then down to his hand clutching mine, then up to my face, then quickly back at Toru. Sometimes they’d even do a final double-take back to me. Occasionally, they’d give a little grumble or a soft harrumph. Frankly, I was charmed—although then I’d pause momentarily, wondering if they were thinking about World War II. Do they hate Americans? Did they fight, lose loved ones, way back then? Were they in Hiroshima, Nagasaki? Or did they participate in atrocities in Nanking? I didn’t want to know.

Now I forced myself to go through all the personals in the expat magazines before giving up. Finally, in one of the narrow columns of Kansai Scene, I found a promising ad. A British woman in her late twenties was looking for “mates,” either women or men, just to befriend. I e-mailed her, mentioning what a relief it was to find an ad that wasn’t creepy or date oriented. Would she want to meet for tea someday?

The next week, Lea and I met at a café near Shinsaibashi, one of Osaka’s main shopping districts, with neon signs running up and down tall buildings and an enormous cartoon poster of a Lichtenstein print on a signboard spanning one whole block. On one end, high-end department and brand stores bordered tree-fringed Midosuji Boulevard: huge, shiny windows announcing Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, and Daimaru, a Japanese equivalent of Saks. On the other, a maze of streets coiled through the district, hemmed in by tiny boutiques, cafés, restaurants, karaoke booths, and pachinko places, or Japanese gaming parlors.

Lea had a funky blond haircut with pink stripes and, alongside her typical English reserve, she was warm and down-to-earth. She was younger than I and, I was excited to learn, had married a Japanese man. Like most native English speakers in Japan, she was here teaching.

She sipped her tea and in her clipped accent told me how she loved Japan, had never felt at home in England, and hoped to stay here forever. “Even if I were to divorce Shin,” she said, “I’d still stay here.” I was shocked to realize that some foreigners actually chose without reservation to reside long-term in Japan, as opposed to settling here reluctantly, fingers over eyes, peeking out in trepidation.

She also gave me the name of her hairdresser, who she promised could speak English and cut layers and highlights to match my hair. I wasn’t sure I had enough in common with Lea that we would have been close friends if our romantic situations weren’t so similar. But I admired her honesty, her sense of certainty about her life’s decisions, and I was eager to keep in touch.

On one of my last nights in Osaka, Lea called me to tell me she was meeting another new friend, this one American, like me. And Jewish. Jodi was from Florida by way of upstate New York, owned a business in East Asia working with American law firms, and spoke no Japanese, hiring translators to take care of logistics. Best of all, she lived half the year in Japan, half in the U.S., where she returned frequently to manage the domestic side of her company. They were going out that night for dinner: would I care to join them?

Since I was headed back to Boston in a few days, I had a date planned with Toru that I didn’t want to cancel, but I agreed to meet them earlier and have a drink while they ate. We gathered again in Shinsaibashi, outside the new Starbucks down the block from the restaurant, because I wouldn’t be able to find the place myself since the streets were all labeled in Japanese. It was cold, and I exited the subway station adjacent to the café in a long black-and-gray sweater coat I had brought from Boston, flared a little at the sleeves, shaped at the waist. I saw Lea standing next to a thin, brown-haired woman about my height, faint crow’s-feet tracing her large dark eyes, highlights streaking her head in a pattern just slightly chunkier and blonder than mine.

“Oh, my gawd, I love your coat!” Jodi gushed before we’d even concluded our requisite handshake, her New York accent betraying her childhood upstate.

I had, I knew, just found my first true friend in Japan.