EIGHT

THAT SUMMER, TORU’S SISTER, Kei, was set to marry her longtime boyfriend, Funaki-san. They’d met almost a decade earlier in their college ski club, where in winter they’d go to nearby resorts and in fall and spring to Tokyo’s indoor mountain. A few weeks before the wedding, Toru and I went to Tokyo for the weekend to meet Kei’s future husband. Japan’s capital is considerably bigger than Osaka, its crowds even denser, its sprawl endless. The city also has many more foreign faces, so my light-streaked hair attracted no attention.

The four of us gathered at a restaurant for dinner, sitting on sleek chairs at a blond-wood table. Kei had a round, lovely face, high cheekbones, and neatly manicured nails, and she spoke beautiful English, as if she’d picked up a British accent at the private girls’ school she had attended. She still referred to her fiancé as Funaki-san, or “Mr. Funaki,” as she had done since they had met. They had been friends, but he’d been her elder and thus, according to Japanese tradition, deserved a formal salutation. He called her Kei.

Funaki-san had a wide, nervous smile, and he was sweating at the brow a bit as he bowed formally to Toru, calling him, as Kei’s older brother, by his last name and honorific, Hoshino-san. (Kei, like all little sisters, called Toru Onii-san, “Respected Older Brother.” After their marriage, Funaki-san could choose whether to call Toru Hoshino-san or, like Kei, Onii-san.) Everyone just called me “Tracy,” pronouncing it “To-ray-shee.”

Toru returned Funaki-san’s bow, inclining his head slightly less deeply, as befitting an elder. They spoke quickly, Toru’s tone a touch more stern than usual, again befitting an elder. But they also laughed easily, Toru tilting back his face and smiling as if to acknowledge both Funaki-san’s humor and his nerves. Kei dipped her head in a swift succession of nods as she followed their conversation. She seemed less tense than Funaki-san, as if she were both taking Toru’s sternness in stride and dismissing it as simple role-playing, all part of the expected: slightly annoying Japanese older-brother-meets-fiancé routine.

When I interjected to ask Funaki-san if he spoke English, his apple cheeks and broad forehead reddened. “Aaahh, a little, but . . . not good, not good!” he answered, grinning toothily and coloring even more, his hands waving in front of his face, his eyes going wide as if this was the part of the evening he dreaded most.

“Yes, he speaks,” Kei answered with her British-inflected accent, but she explained that he was too embarrassed to say much. Like many Japanese people, Funaki-san had a horror of shaming himself by speaking imperfect English.

“I study!” he offered, his blush now blooming crimson. “I want improve!” he added, paused, and then, as if the pressure was unbearable, broke down into rapid Japanese, gesticulating to Toru, who laughed again and nodded repeated sympathies.

For the rest of the evening, Kei and Toru translated questions between me and Funaki-san, or I sat quietly and listened to the sharp, foreign syllables of my family-to-be. I caught a word here and there—hai, demo, so desuka?; “yes,” “but,” “is that so?”—yet mainly the stream of verbiage eluded me.

The restaurant food was perfectly prepared and beautifully presented, the room bathed in a soothing glow that softened the strict tidiness of the decor. The service, as is typical in Japan, was flawless, no hint of unpleasantness, no detail askew. My seat was plush and cozy, and I felt peaceful and ensconced in our foursome, Toru stroking my wrist when I reached under the table to grab his hand. I was happy, grateful even, to be a part of this important gathering, to be sitting by Toru’s side, greeted as the elder sister-in-law. I was already becoming accustomed to my role as an integral part of the family—but one who nonetheless remained outside the fluid conversation, my face pressed to a pristine glass, so clear and light it was welcoming but for the invisible force of incomprehension sealing me off.

Since falling in love with Toru two years earlier, I’d been reluctant to learn his language. In agreeing to leave Boston at least part-time, I worried about Japan taking over so much of my life. Holding out against the language served as a kind of self-protection, a way to inculcate myself against the creep of expatriatism that flew in the face of the Boston-based academic I’d always planned on being. I didn’t want Japan to make me over, to change the woman I had worked so long and hard to become. Because I was someone who loved learning, my stance made little logical sense. But neither Japan nor its language was a topic in which I’d had any interest before Toru, and now I held some hazy belief that remaining impervious to Japanese would shield me from becoming too immersed in a culture and world I still approached with ambivalence. Moreover, I stubbornly resisted the idea that Toru and I would speak his language together. So much of our relationship had become defined by his world, and now with him in Japan full-time, he had to make so few concessions to mine. Speaking English together—a language I loved, whose shape and expressiveness and narratives I’d devoted years to studying—felt like some small way of ensuring my world and priorities remained front and center, too.

But the limits of this stance were becoming ever more apparent. Not only could I barely understand my future family, I couldn’t order in a restaurant that didn’t offer picture menus or ask directions if I got lost. So late that spring, I warily enrolled in my first Japanese class. I’ll learn a few words, I thought. Pick up a few phrases just so I can shop more easily, go out to dinner on my own. I planned to stop well short of learning to read or write.

One weekday morning, with Toru at the office, Tetsunobu-san took me to sign up for a course at the YWCA. When we had booked my enrollment by phone a few days earlier, I’d asked Toru to clarify that I spoke no Japanese. “I mean, can you make them understand, really no Japanese?” I added little swiping motions with my hands for emphasis, as if Toru were unaware of my linguistic limitations.

All Toru’s insistence came to naught, however. In a country where protocol reigns supreme, the Y still insisted I have the usual introductory interview—in Japanese. As Tetsunobu-san and I sat with knees scrunched at a low table in the tidy school office, a woman came toward us from around a high desk. She had neatly coiffed black hair and a pale pink lipsticked mouth, and she held an olive green binder. Behind the desk, rows of gray filing cabinets flanked the walls. I could see another woman in back sitting at a plain wooden desk with papers stacked in a perfectly straight line. She bent over a keyboard, eyes fixed on a screen, fingers tapping evenly.

The woman with the green binder smiled as she walked toward us, bowing and offering what I took to be extended formal greetings. Tetsunobu-san offered what I took to be an extended formal greeting back. She sat and looked at me, still smiling. “Konnichiwa,” she said. I knew that word, but after a quick head-dip of apology, I blurted out, “Konnichiwa, but really, I speak no Japanese!”

Tetsunobu-san laughed, and then they spoke in one long flow. The woman looked at me and smiled some more and said a few additional words slowly to me, none of which I knew. I smiled tightly at her, my cheeks flushing, my head shaking, my eyebrows raised with my best “seriously, I have no idea what you are saying” expression. How long is this charade going to last? I wondered nervously, a touch annoyed. I couldn’t say exactly why I was so embarrassed, but the practical American in me found this insistence on fixed procedure unnerving, as if I were caught up in a game whose rules had been explained to me but whose overall meaning I still couldn’t puzzle out.

Then the woman opened her binder and passed some papers to Tetsunobu-san. He pointed to each line and explained what I should put there. “Your proper name here,” he said, pronouncing the words pro-paa and then he-yaa. As a New Englander, I took heart hearing his Japanese lack of a final r. Just like a native Bostonian, I thought, pleased.

“Your other name,” Tetsunobu-san said next, sounding aahzaa. “Family’s name, here. Here, passport’s number. And birth date,” he instructed, baas-dat-to. He waited for me to fill in each blank, his neatly trimmed fingernail slowly gesturing from one box to the next. A faint trembling shook his hand as he hovered it above.

At the address line, he took the paper and wrote out his address in Japanese and then Toru’s name in the “sponsor” box. He pulled out Toru’s inkan, his official stamp used in place of a signature, blotted it on the little black ink pad they provided, and soundlessly stamped it onto the page, then carefully counted out the deposit fee, one crisp bill after the other. When he put the money down on the table, his hand shook again, and I wondered if the walk from the subway had tired him.

I brought the rest of the payment a few afternoons later, in time for my first class. We sat in compact chairs with individualized desks spread in a small circle, a wall-length blackboard on the right. I expected to find other Westerners in the class, but when I entered, everyone else in the room was Asian. There were two young women—one Korean, one Thai, I would later learn—and two men, one a teenaged-looking boy with skinny limbs, long dark bangs, and a faintly shadowed upper lip; one a stocky man in a suit.

Our instructor was a part-time teacher, a middle-aged Japanese woman with soft eyes and hair carefully curled at her cheeks. We were to call her Fujita-san or Fujita-sensei, the former meaning something equivalent to Mrs. Fujita, the latter an honorific reserved for doctors or educators, in this case translating roughly to Respected Teacher Fujita. She smiled ear to ear, and when she pointed to herself, instead of tapping a finger toward her chest, as we do in the West, she touched the tip of her nose. She wore a high V-neck sweater, a polo shirt buttoned all the way to the top, and a pair of what my mother would have called “slacks”: plain, neatly pressed, and polyester.

Everyone else besides me spoke at least some Japanese, and the two other women, married to Japanese men, used it at home with their husbands. We weren’t supposed to speak anything else in the classroom. The first week, we started studying the first of Japan’s three alphabets. The main alphabet, called kanji, consists of thousands of characters, each one a full word and based on China’s writing system. Only after learning the first two thousand of these characters is a student considered proficient enough to read a newspaper or function in Japanese society; schoolchildren, starting at age six, learn a thousand by the time they are twelve. Our class wasn’t even going to begin studying kanji, though, because we were too novice.

Instead, we began with hiragana, a letter-based alphabet like English of forty-eight units. Then we would move on to katakana, another forty-eight-unit syllabary, but one reserved for foreign words. As if in perfect expression of Japan’s insularity, no concept originating from another culture should sully the purity of hiragana. Words such as “coffee” (pronounced co-hee), “wine” (wiyn), “PC” (pasa-con, a kind of linguistic shorthand for “personal computer”), and “sexual harassment” (seku-hara) are all garrisoned securely within katakana.

Along with alphabets, we spent the first week practicing introductions. “Watashi-wa Tracy desu,” I learned to say, “I am Tracy.” “America kara kimashita,” “I came from America.” I tried at first to claim I came from the U.S., thinking that labeling my home simply “America” might be insulting to others from the far Western continents. “U.S. kara kimashita,” I offered, which resulted in a roomful of blank stares.

“America, desu-ne?” the teacher asked, a smile crinkling her eyes as her nod beckoned me on. “America, right?”

Unable to explain my political correctness in Japanese, I broke into English, the one language everyone in the room understood to some extent. “But isn’t that insulting?” I protested. “To call the United States just ‘America’?” I sat back, pleased to have proven myself one of my country’s more sensitive citizens in the age of George W. Bush. Everyone still stared blankly at me.

“You know,” I persisted, “wouldn’t that insult people from, let’s say Canada, or the rest of North or even South America or something?” Respected Teacher Fujita cocked her head at me, a look of utter incomprehension on her face, despite her ability to follow my words. The Korean woman stared around the room, as if searching for missing Canadians.

“Watashi-wa Fujita. Watashi-wa Nihon kara kimashita,” the teacher said, not unkindly, tapping her nose. “I am Fujita. I come from Japan.” Then she gestured to me. “Anata-wa To-ray-shee-san desu,” “You are To-ray-shee-san,” she said. “America kara kimashita,” her smile now a promise to guide me patiently through a lesson that had clearly confounded me.

Oy, I thought.

She gestured once more toward me, and I surrendered. “Watashi-wa Tracy desu,” I parroted. “Watashi-wa America kara kimashita.” Respected Teacher Fujita gave a little celebratory clap, then hugged her hands together as if savoring some small delight before she turned to the teenaged boy next to me.

He informed us that his name was Feng, which he pronounced Fung, and he was from Chu-gakkou. Before I could stop myself, I interrupted again. “Chu-gakkou?” I asked. “What’s Chu-ga-ko?”

Respected Teacher Fujita slid her eyes in my direction, a hint of patience possibly wearing thin on her eternally kind face. “China,” she said softly in English, nodding quickly in her own small surrender. Then she moved to the man in the suit. “Watashi-wa Chen,” he said. “Watashi-wa Taiwan kara-kimashita.”

Feng whipped around in his chair to face his neighbor. “Chu-gakkou!” he corrected.

“Taiwan,” Chen countered.

“Chu-gakkou!” the teenaged Feng said once again, and then he broke into a stream of what I assumed was either Mandarin or Cantonese.

I snapped my head around to see how Respected Teacher Fujita was going to handle the minor diplomatic showdown erupting in her classroom. She blinked a moment, then smiled wider, as if the conversation were all part of a polite nice-to-meet-you. I turned back to the China-Taiwan conflict.

Chen grumbled quietly under his breath, but then he began to laugh. He expostulated something in some language back to Feng: I guessed a gentle scolding from an elder. Then Feng began to laugh, too, a teenaged chortle followed by a quick swipe of long bangs from his eyes, and the moment passed. Respected Teacher Fujita happily clasped her hands together once more, looking almost beatific, and turned to the Thai wife.

A few weeks later, the class moved on to the topic of hobbies and jobs. I learned that Feng was here because his mother had married a Japanese man (a fact he had to explain to me in broken English, since the Japanese explanation was completely beyond me) and that he worked in a ramen restaurant. Chen was a Taiwanese businessman whose company had sent him to learn Japanese (also a fact learned through hushed English translation while Respected Teacher Fujita was busy at the blackboard). The Thai woman, named Bhuta-san, provided no end of mirth for the teenaged Feng, since the Japanese word for “pig” is bu-ta.

“Bhuta-san, shigoto-wa nan desuka?” “Mrs. Bhuta, what is your work?” the teacher asked while Feng sniggered. Bhuta-san looked at the Chinese teen with a tight, helpless smile, her dimpled cheeks reddening, and then she turned to Respected Teacher. “Watashi-wa shufu desu!” she answered.

“Shufu? What’s shufu?” I blurted out, as usual, in English. It was the first time I’d been introduced to the term.

“Shufu!” The teacher turned to me, as if I simply hadn’t heard, as if it were not possible not to know this word.

“Shufu!” Bhuta-san repeatedly kindly for me, this time a little louder.

“Shufu!” the Korean woman, An-san, echoed helpfully. Chen-san and Feng-san nodded knowingly.

I shrugged.

“Shufu! Housewife!” Respected Teacher explained.

“Oh,” I said. “Shufu. Housewife.”

“An-san wa?” the teacher asked, turning to the Korean woman.

“Watashi-mo wa shufu desu!” “I am also a housewife!”

“Watashi-mo, desu-ne!” Respected Teacher Fujita said happily, “I am, too, you know!” pointing to her nose again. Apparently, despite her part-time job teaching at the Y, she still defined herself by her primary identity as married to her house.

“To-ray-shee-san wa?” she asked me next, nodding. “To-ray-shee-san no shigoto wa nan desuka?” “What is To-ray-shee-san’s work?” “To-ray-shee-san wa shufu desuka?” “Is To-ray-shee-san a housewife?”

I thought about my years of university jobs in Boston, my work teaching inmates. I pictured myself at past faculty meetings, sitting forward at a table flush with academics, my blazer-suited forearm supporting my weight as I leaned in to expostulate, comment, challenge, or demur. Heads would nod. Jargon would be deployed, egos would plump up like a fat bird’s plumage in the knowledge that we spoke of learned things.

Now, I struggled to land a few simple words. “Oh, shufu, no,” I said, then dutifully added in Japanese, “iie, iie,” “no, no.” I shot a half-apologetic, half-I-hope-I-still-seem-respectful smile at Bhuta-san, nodded to An-san.

“Watashi wa . . . freelance writer,” I said, then added, “How do you say ‘freelance writer’ in Japanese?” I mimed holding a pen over an imaginary piece of paper, pinching together my index finger and thumb, and moving them back and forth, hoping to distract Respected Teacher Fujita from my persistent use of English.

“Ii, desu-ne! Furino raita!” she exclaimed. “Isn’t that great? A freelance writer!”

Bhuta-san smiled at me, her expression one of gentleness infused with perhaps a touch of pity, while An-san looked skeptical, as if, with all this freelance writing business, I was eventually bound to fail when my marriage became official and I graduated to shufu. Chen and Feng just nodded noncommittally. My classroom culture shock became complete a few days later when, moving on to the topic of favorite hobbies, Respected Teacher Fujita explained that hers was “cleaning house.”

When I brought my first quiz home—a line of wobbly katakana I had written mostly correctly, earning only a few swipes of Respected Teacher’s red pencil—Toru held it up for full view. “Oh, great!” he enthused, nodding in silent agreement with both the crimson corrections and the bright check mark at the paper’s corner. “That’s great!” he said again, and then he put the paper down and turned to me. He smiled wide, then drew his mouth together in a more serious aspect, as if he had important news to impart. “You know,” he said, nodding, “I have some information: I feel proud you.” Then he nodded once more, more firmly this time, and I buried my face in his shoulder.

•   •   •

BEFORE KEI’S WEDDING in August, Toru told me that the event would include formal family introductions, common at Japanese marriages. The bride’s family would sit in one line, the groom’s facing them in another, and one by one, each member would rise and be introduced. This would happen after the main ceremony and have no witnesses outside direct relatives. “So,” Toru asked me, “are you okay with being my fiancée? With being announced?”

We were in Tetsunobu-san’s apartment picking up more clothes for Toru to bring to the weekly mansion. His father was in the living room watching a National Geographic–like show on TV, animals chasing each other with hot, quick strides or lounging sleepily in their habitats, the hushed, liquid voice of the announcer strangely similar to American animal-show narrators even though the language was different. Every once in a while, Tetsunobu-san would sip cold tea from a small green ceramic cup, his right hand shaking again as he brought it to his mouth.

Suddenly, I felt a small, fluttering anxiety inside at the idea of announcing our engagement formally. But nothing is irreversible, I thought.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.” Then, “What do I have to do? Do I have to say anything? In Japanese?” A new kind of nervousness pulsed.

Toru assured me that I only had to say one line of greeting, which he’d rehearse with me beforehand. He’d sit next to me and tell me when to rise, and then I’d stand up and do a little bow toward Funaki-san’s family and give my salutation, and then I could sit down again. “But how about ring?” he asked. “Do we need? Do you want it?”

“Ring?”

“Yeah, ring, like engagement ring. We don’t need, though,” Toru said. He’d already told me he hated wearing jewelry. I’d already told him I thought diamond rings were a waste of money and I had no desire to own one. But we still hadn’t decided whether or not I would get a different kind of ring or wear anything to signify our engagement or marriage.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Let’s just wait and see. I don’t really need a ring, but if we find one, a cheap one that we like, maybe we could buy it. We have a few weeks, right?”

That weekend, we went shopping in Osaka’s Umeda District, flush with upscale malls and underground boutiques. I’d seen a ring I’d loved a few weeks earlier in a store called Beams, a sort of Japanese cross between the American shops Madewell and Barneys with a touch of the more youthful Forever 21 thrown in. The ring bore no resemblance to anything bridal, but it had a chunky sliver band that managed to look both graceful and substantial, with a dangling glass piece cut like a sweetheart diamond but as black as night, so it flashed darkly and made a delicate tinkling sound when I moved my hand.

It was the sound of that tinkling I liked best. Within the chaos of Osaka, the bright noise felt like Toru’s love: like an anchor, a little aural tether securing me in place amidst a swirling world.

“Huh,” Toru said when I waved the ring at him from my right hand. Although neither one of us was superstitious and the piece was clearly not meant for an engagement, I was reluctant to place the band on my left hand while we stood in the store. A thin, lovely salesgirl watched us, her lips pursed, her hands held neatly at her front, and my cheeks felt hot under her stare. Does she know we’re thinking of this for our marriage? I wondered. Is she surprised that he’s engaged to a gaijin? Does she think the ring is stupid? Then, Does she think my hips seem big compared to a Japanese woman’s?

Inside, I felt the sting of disappointment at my own self-consciousness. I tried focusing on Toru’s expression, on his words rather than the useless chatter in my head. As I waved my hand back and forth, his look of concentration cracked into a smile. “Actually, kind of cool,” he said. He watched my hand toggle to and fro another moment. Then, “Kind of great.”

“It doesn’t look anything like an engagement ring, does it, Tof?” A surge of something light washed through me, along with a smug sense of invulnerability, thinking of how the salesgirl wouldn’t be able to follow our rapid English.

After we bought the ring, we went for lunch at a little Vietnamese stall tucked into a hallway of Umeda’s sprawling underground. Toru sat across the table from me, grasping the shiny dark blue bag with the wrapped ring. We ordered pad thai and satay and soup, and then Toru pushed some fried rice crackers out of the way, little swirls of pink and white in a rough wooden bowl, and removed the jewelry from its box.

“Could you,” he said, suddenly quiet and grave, his voice soft, his dark expression fixed and staring carefully into mine, “Could you still consider to marrying me?” He handed me the ring, and I grinned at his sudden formality amidst all our shunning of tradition. Then I took the ring and slipped my finger through its shiny silver hoop, and we listened to the bright tinkle lifting in the air around us.