NINE

THE WEEKEND OF KEI’S WEDDING, Tokyo was a furnace. The sky was steel blue, the sun clamping down like a vise. I stepped outside and within a minute my skin was slick: August in Japan. Osaka, when we’d left it a few days earlier, had been even hotter.

I’d brought a thin, sleeveless, V-neck black sheath with a little camisole to shorten the neckline’s plunge. But the morning of the wedding, I discovered I’d forgotten the right underwear. The ones I had were visible through the dress and pinched a bit at the waist, giving me a little fleshy swell at my hip that Toru thought was sexy and I thought was out of the question. My size-six frame, petite in the U.S., was already big by Japanese standards. I wasn’t inclined to further accentuate any curves.

Also out of the question were stockings. I never wore them, and I wasn’t starting in ninety-eight-degree weather. Besides, by the time my lingerie crisis became apparent, we had no time to buy either new underwear or hosiery.

Standing in our tiny hotel room, air-conditioning blasting, I said, “Well, I guess I’ll just go without underwear, Tof.”

“Oh, great . . . ,” he said, still captivated by the sheet he was studying that held directions to the restaurant and wedding space. He clasped the strong swoop of his jaw in one hand, eyes staring hard at the paper.

I held up a little compact mirror to try to see how the dress looked with me denuded underneath. We were staying in a business hotel, a no-frills place offering rooms not much bigger than our weekly mansion, but immaculately clean and about a quarter of the price of a regular hotel in Tokyo. I angled the hand mirror toward the small wall one they provided.

I moved the little mirror right, then left, then right again. The room had one night-table lamp and a fluorescent ceiling light, but I couldn’t tell if my dress would be see-through where Kei’s ceremony and party would be held. From one angle, it looked fine. But from another: How much is visible back there? I imagined standing up to be introduced as Toru’s fiancée to all of Kei’s new in-laws and hearing uncomfortable Japanese murmurs rippling through the room.

“Tof!” I yelled, even though he was only a few feet from me. “Is this see-through?”

“It’s fine,” he said, still not looking up from the printed directions.

“Seriously, Tof. I need to know.”

He glanced upward, nodded, and looked back down. “No problem!”

“Because you know how embarrassed I’d be if, like, Funaki-san’s grandmother noticed I was naked underneath?” I shifted the hand mirror some more, angling it high, then lower, then turning to face the wall mirror so I could study my reflection straight on.

“I don’t think grandmother will come,” Toru muttered, no more consumed with those directions than he could be if they held a map to Atlantis.

“Tof! Seriously! Won’t you be embarrassed, too, if someone notices?”

He sighed, put the directions down in his lap. “You’re enough sexy anyway,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“You know. Enough sexy!” he repeated.

I slanted my head and widened my eyes at him, giving him my best “in English, at least, that doesn’t clarify anything” stare.

He sighed again. “You can’t help but be sexy,” he said, forehead wrinkling under the black spikes of his hair. “Underwear or no underwear is no matter. Still sexy, either way.” Then he motioned for me to turn around so he could give my backside one final check. I wondered if the vision of Funaki-san’s grandmother, mother, whomever, noticing suspicious swells and valleys under my dress had finally unnerved him.

“It’s fine,” he said again, as I turned back to face him. “Looks good! And anyway,” he said, eyes now wandering back to that beloved direction sheet, “no one looks at your hip but me!”

•   •   •

ONCE WE HIT the sidewalk and were swaddled in humidity as thick as gauze, I stopped worrying about panty lines. The less I had on, the better. We walked the eight or nine blocks to the wedding venue, a restaurant in the upscale Ginza neighborhood with an extra room that could be transformed into a makeshift chapel. In the heavy, heat-blasting air, I was glad Toru had studied the directions so well. I had to wipe under my eyes to keep my mascara from running down my face.

As we entered the building, cold air-conditioning hit me, licking up my arms, legs, and face. Bliss, I thought. At the elevator, Toru’s older cousin Jiro-san joined us, along with his wife, Sachi-san. I’d never met them, but I’d heard they were funny and outgoing and, as Toru said, “a little wild.” At their wedding, Toru had told me, one of their friends had gotten drunk and hoisted himself onto a table—minus pants or underwear—and lay with his legs spread up into the air.

“You. Are. Kidding me,” I’d gasped through laughter. This was not my vision of staid, polite Japanese people. And Toru’s aunt and uncle, Michiko-san and Hamatani-san, seemed so proper. “What did his parents say?”

“Hamatani-san just kept shaking head and saying, ‘Too much! Too much!’ But Michiko-san laughed a little. Maybe thought was a little funny.”

“Really? But isn’t that so not Japanese?”

“Well, kind of unusual, but not so much. When getting drunk, these things can happen. Kind of crazy, but kind of not so, for party.”

In Osaka, I’d already noticed a surprising acceptance under very specific circumstances of behavior that in the U.S. would be considered outrageous anytime. Toru and I sometimes saw drunk salarymen in rumpled suits passed out on the sidewalk in broad daylight, pedestrians streaming by unconcerned; or well-dressed people weaving down city blocks late at night, leaning over periodically to retch. The first time we found a businessman asleep on the street next to his own stomach contents, I’d been aghast, but Toru had tried to convince me it was actually “sign of peaceful society”: people feel safe enough to be vulnerable in public without worrying about crime or injury. I’d been both skeptical and amazed.

But I could also understand how—since Japan exerts so much pressure to be contained, controlled, rule bound—when people let loose, they can really let loose. In general, the society seemed to tolerate it, perfectly happy to ignore it as long as the person was drunk or participating in some other sanctioned activity for blowing off steam, as if it were all a necessary byproduct of living with such strict self-regulation. I wondered if this was why Japanese pornography and crime fiction were so violent, or the sex clubs I’d read about so outlandish: some apparently featured women dressed as kilted schoolgirls standing on mock train cars so customers could pretend to molest them. As long as a behavior remained relegated to the sphere of imagination, of fiction—or of the alcohol induced—people by and large remained un-concerned.

“But,” Toru had added, when he’d told me about the naked table dancer at his cousin’s wedding, “not so good to do in front of parents. Better to wait for after party, just with friends.” Well, at least my lack of underwear can’t compete with that, I thought.

Now, as we crowded into the elevator at the wedding venue with Jiro-san and Sachi-san, I felt curious to see them up close. Both were thin and smiled easily, and Jiro-san had short hair that tufted upward like Toru’s, although his facial features were softer. Sachi-san wore a plain pale dress with short sleeves, her straight dark hair reaching her shoulders. She nodded up and down after we met. “Kakko ii, ne!” she said, gesturing toward me. I smiled, then said through my teeth, “What’s that mean, Tof?”

“It means good-looking, or fashionable, or kind of chic,” Toru said, and then they launched into Japanese with lots of laughter and, I assumed, catching up.

Because Toru’s mother had been Catholic and Kei still identified as such, a priest officiated the wedding ceremony. I’d heard that in Japan many white men rent themselves out as “fathers,” fake priests who will perform at Japanese weddings to provide a Western feel. It’s an alternate way to make money that tends to pay more by the hour than teaching English. (One BBC article quotes a fake British priest saying, “People like the dress, the kiss and the image. Japanese Christians make up only 1% of the country, but now about 90% of weddings are in the Christian style.”3)

I was a touch disappointed when Kei’s priest turned out to be Japanese. “Is he a real priest?” I whispered to Toru.

“Ya, real,” Toru whispered back. “Not like fake whitey,” he said, and we snickered. We’d been laughing about this term since we’d noticed one of Osaka’s underground malls was named Whity (but pronounced as if the word included a penultimate e). We’d immediately taken a series of pictures of the sign along with a nearby café called Honeypot, which I found equally hilarious. Toru had stood in front of the signs and pointed, making mock-horrified faces while I cackled like a tween and aimed my camera, confused shoppers turning to stare in confusion at our mirth.

When I thought about it now, though, it made sense Kei would want a real priest for her wedding, since her religious beliefs were real, too. I smiled at the father, and he nodded prayerfully at me.

The ceremony proceeded in Japanese, and Tetsunobu-san, sitting on Toru’s other side, held up a picture of Toru’s mother. I heard the priest say her name, “Eiko-san,” and then a string of solemn words. I bowed my head, felt my silly mood condense into something softer, quieter, then sad. Up at the altar, Kei and Funaki-san stood still and expressionless, he in tails, she in a white gown. I glanced at Toru, who sat with his eyes down now, equally expressionless. His father looked up toward the picture he held aloft, Eiko-san’s framed face smiling, but he, too, remained expressionless.

I knew inside they were all rent by grief, and I felt momentarily shocked at how seamlessly they hid it. I knew Kei must have missed her mother achingly, especially at this moment. I knew Tetsunobu-san must have felt a cold space by his side where his wife should have been sitting. I remembered Toru on the afternoon he learned of his mother’s accident, his body trembling in that taxicab in Seoul, and then again on the night he’d returned to Korea after visiting her in the hospital in Osaka, only to learn she had died just after his plane had taken off. I imagined them seeing her in a coma in the hospital before she died, gathered in the gloom by her bed, tubes hooking her to machines. I wondered if they were remembering her that way now, or thinking of other scenes: a mother’s nighttime kiss, cool and soft; an encouraging hand waving on the first day of school; her back at the kitchen sink, arms moving as she peeled the skins from vegetables.

Suddenly, although I had never met Eiko-san, I missed her sharply. I wondered how it would have felt to be related to a woman so different from my own mother. I grieved for her, too: for her missed chance at being here with her children, her husband, at the altar of her daughter’s wedding. Inside, my chest felt wobbly as I thought about her family in their silent, hidden grief. I wondered, considering the stoicism of Kei and Toru and Tetsunobu-san, if doing something as overt as crying here and now, in public at an event meant to be a celebration, would be judged excessively emotional: by the other attendees, by themselves, by Japanese standards in general. Somehow, that made me even sadder for them.

I wanted to grab Toru’s hand but I didn’t, because I didn’t know if he would find it an intrusion, and I didn’t want to shatter his equilibrium if he was, in fact, fighting down tears. I couldn’t see the other attendees because we were in the front row, but the room was silent save for the priest’s monotone intonation.

I felt a sob push against my own throat, and my eyes began to sting, but I pressed down the emotion as hard as I could. I pushed my leg alongside Toru’s knee so he would know, would remember through that quiet pressure that I was beside him, with him. Quickly, I wiped a tiny tear that had leaked onto my lash line. Then Tetsunobu-san lowered the picture, and the priest’s prayers turned to other matters.

After the ceremony, the rest of the guests went one floor up to the dining room, while the two families lined up in a room adjacent to the makeshift chapel. We sat on two long benches facing one another, Kei and Funaki-san standing at the end. Tetsunobu-san, Michiko-san, Hamatani-san, Toru, and I were there to represent Kei’s side.

Now Funaki-san announced each of his relatives, calling their name and, if relevant, their job or professional title. As each person stood and bowed, our side would say, “Hajimemashite. Dozo yoroshiku onegaishimasu,” roughly translating to “Nice to meet you. It is an honor to make your acquaintance.” Then Kei repeated protocol with her side.

When I stood up, I put my hands flat on my thighs and bent low at the waist, as Respected Teacher Fujita at the YWCA had taught us was the polite way to bow. My back was to the wall, so I didn’t worry what was visible through my dress. “Hajimemashite!” I said on my way down. Then I raised myself up and, embarrassed, forgot the rest. “Dozo . . . gozo . . . ,” I muttered, turning red-faced to Toru. He said something to the line of Funaki-san’s relatives, offering an apologetic dip from his seat, and everyone laughed kindly. I sat down abruptly, feeling both grateful and childlike.

Funaki-san’s grandmother nodded her powdered face, then gave a lipsticked smile, as if pleased I had made the effort but not the least surprised it had proved beyond me. After all, I was a foreigner, and this was Japan, where the language, food, and customs remain inaccessible to outsiders, even in the unlikely event one marries into a native family. I knew I was doing nothing to dispel that myth.

I also knew that in some Japanese families, a foreign relative was considered a mark of shame. I’d heard of the common Japanese practice, especially popular before the mid–twentieth century, of people hiring private investigators to research potential mates’ clans to avoid a scandalous match. A gaijin in the family could definitely be a no-go.

I’d asked Toru if he thought Funaki-san’s parents were wary of my becoming, technically, related to them. “Could be,” he’d said. “But probably not. We’re not such high family.” Nowadays, he explained, mostly only very wealthy or politically important people researched potential matches. “I have aunt who married Bhutan doctor,” he’d said, so I would not be the first foreigner in the family anyway, although I would be the first non-Asian. “Besides,” he’d added, “my uncle was student leader in communist movement at Tokyo University, in 1970s.” At least, according to the old guard, Toru had assured me, that was even worse than being a gaijin.

But all throughout Kei’s wedding, I thought I sensed a weird energy coming from Funaki-san’s mother. She was unfailingly polite but so reserved that I wasn’t sure whether she was just immaculately contained or inclined to coldness. She wore a red and gold kimono, and when we met, she smiled tightly and bowed very slightly, like a wooden statue tipping down one notch. She spoke a little English, and I tried to congratulate her, comment on the beauty of her kimono, yet still she only smiled and inclined her head.

Maybe she’s shy? Uncomfortable speaking English? Or I’m imagining things? I couldn’t tell if her reserve meant anything or not. Was it one more sign I didn’t know how to read, or not a sign at all?

“I think Funaki-san’s mother doesn’t like me,” I whispered to Toru as we made our way to the dining room. We were placed at a small table with his father, the picture of Eiko-san next to our plates. Funaki-san’s family was at their own table across the room. As is customary at Japanese weddings, Kei’s and Funaki-san’s bosses were at tables, too, rising to make some of the first toasts.

“She probably just shy,” Toru said. Later, when we went to have family pictures taken, we all gathered in one long line, Kei and Funaki-san in the center. The photographer put me and Toru on one end, then went to his tripod and surveyed the group. He gave an order to his assistant, who approached the line and made some adjustments: a torso turned here, an arm or foot adjusted there. Then she came toward me. She moved me left a bit until a small gap separated me from Toru and the family chain.

“See, I told you she doesn’t like me!” I said to him after the photo shoot. “I bet she told the photographer to move me aside so she could cut the gaijin out of the family photo!” I was more curious than upset, though. On one hand, these were technically my extended family-to-be. On the other, they were people I couldn’t have a conversation with. I wasn’t even sure whether they cared I was a foreigner, and I didn’t have the language or cultural skills to read between the lines and find out. Like my strange detachment from Japanese gender norms that in America would disturb me, once again I thought, This isn’t my country or my culture. My remove kept me feeling both isolated and protected from what happened here. Moreover, Toru didn’t seem upset, which I figured was the best sign.

Now, he laughed at my accusation. “They just were adjusting line, making space even,” he said, grabbing my hand. “Although maybe . . . maybe she will decide to cutting gaijin out of family photo!” he teased.

Then another thought seized me. “Oh, God,” I said. “What if the photographer could tell I wasn’t wearing any underwear! Could see through my dress. In front!” I grabbed Toru’s wrist, my tone somewhere between a shriek and a whisper. “Maybe that’s why he needed his assistant to separate me, so he could crop my . . . my crotch out of the photo later!” I spent the rest of the day with my hands crossed below my waist like Adam and Eve in Eden, maneuvering Toru to stand in front of me whenever I could.

•   •   •

FOUR MONTHS LATER, we were on a sidewalk in Osaka, layered in heavy coats and hats. It was December 2006, and a wet winter wind stung our faces as we peered at the door of the U.S. Consulate. Toru and I needed to retrieve a form claiming I was of sound mind and acting under free will, certifying that when we filed our Japanese marriage papers a few hours later, even though I couldn’t read them, I’d understand their meaning.

In the cold, Toru and I looked at each other for a moment. Our hands were clasped, but neither one of us spoke.

We’d been preparing for this day for months, although I’d gone home to Boston in the interim after Kei’s wedding. I’d found another subletter to rent my apartment for part of the semester, but he only needed it for two months, and I planned to be in Osaka for four. I was beginning to feel more frazzled by both the financial and practical burdens of the Boston studio, in part because my rental agreement forbade me from subletting.

I guessed my landlords knew and didn’t care as long as I paid my rent on time every month and fixed anything that broke, but I couldn’t be sure. “We love you,” they always told me when we talked. They were both male flight attendants, now based on the West Coast. “Never leave us. Never.” They’d been crestfallen when they heard I was marrying a man from Japan, then delighted by my plan to keep living in Boston half the year. Once, when I got stuck in the apartment because the aging lock had broken from the inside, they responded as if I’d called with news of a three-alarm blaze. “I have a mani/pedi appointment in forty-five minutes,” I’d told Stu, “so if you can get the locksmith here in thirty, that would be great.”

“Oh, girlfriend, no, not a mani/pedi,” he’d said, his voice hushed. “We’ll have you out of there as soon as possible.” Ten minutes later, a locksmith was dismantling my door.

Wow, they must have had really bad luck with tenants in the past, I thought, having been unaware that simply paying your rent on time made you a hot commodity. Still, I tried to keep the subletters secret in case my landlords balked—or kept my last month’s rent and security deposit after kicking me out.

In the weeks in Boston before I returned to Japan to get married, my chest felt tight and my skin a little wrong, like what should be a seamless layer threatened to gap or slip. I tried not to wonder what those feelings meant. I’d lie awake and listen to the sound of late-fall traffic on the South End streets outside my apartment, the drunken laughter spilling from the bar across the road, boys with high voices shouting into the night. In addition to all the work of finding and vetting subletters, the task of preparing to leave home for four months was itself overwhelming: packing my personal belongings while still leaving the apartment adequately furnished; finding a place to store my car; drumming up new freelance work; preparing to reenter a world of opposing rules, rhythms, and customs; scrambling for the best price on the twenty-four-hour trip in economy-seat hell it would take to get there. I imagined myself floating in dark, empty space at the end of a flimsy rope, like the cartoon figure from the beginning of Lost in Space, a TV show we watched when we were young.

Jodi and I had a name for this: the Reentry Phase. We both suffered from depression and angst in the first weeks of our transitions to and from Japan. Even the things we most looked forward to in each country felt remote or insubstantial: for Jodi, the food in Osaka or her garden in Florida; for me, the warmth of Toru’s body or the utter sense of home I found in Boston. No thought or comfort could completely dispel the fog of anxiety that came on either end of our bicontinental stays. The shifts always felt tectonic: too huge, too unsettling, and just plain wrong.

We both took heart that the other experienced the same internal roiling, though. Neither one of us knew anyone else trying to live one life on two continents, so we assumed these emotions just came with the territory, like jet lag on a body: the mind’s inability to deal gracefully with planet-sized moves. We promised each other we would never make any life decisions during the Reentry Phase. We would acknowledge but not act on any emotion within the two weeks buffering either end of our Japan-U.S. transfers.

Once I get back to Osaka, get settled, feel Toru next to me, and make it through my first two weeks there, I’ll be better, I’d tried to comfort myself. The borders of my life would shift back into line. The unusual arrangement Toru and I had made, to have me living in both countries, would start to feel manageable again, normalized. If maintaining my Boston life while I was in Osaka became too much, I’d deal with that problem then. I didn’t like not having a firm plan, a perfect blueprint for how to cope with this contingency. But I was learning that in real, messy life, sometimes you can’t fully smooth down the future before it arrives.

Things did recalibrate eventually: the axis of my world tipped upright again, not sideways at an angle that left me feeling I might slip off reality’s edge. In Osaka, I got back into my rhythm of going to one of my morning cafés and working on freelance assignments from our tiny weekly mansion in the afternoons, then cooking a few nights a week at Tetsunobu-san’s apartment. On the weekends, Toru and I walked around the city or went out to dinner, and the soft pressure of his hand holding mine always stilled me, as if his palm could summon gravity to coalesce once more around my feet.

During the weekdays, I sank back into my minor expat bubble, like a little glass globe keeping the real Osaka both in sight and out of reach. My orb contained the few restaurants I could go to on my own, the train stops I knew, the stores whose aisles I could navigate solo. I became accustomed once more to the background murmur of a language I could barely follow, printed signs whose messages withheld meaning.

I enrolled in another Japanese class at the YWCA and joined a gym near the school. I could now very slowly sound out words that were written in the two alphabets we’d learned. This helped at cafés: I could recognize items like hotto cohee (hot coffee), ca-fe o-rei (café au lait), or butta toast-o (buttered toast) even when there were no pictures. But I quickly realized that learning Japanese would prove much harder than even I’d anticipated. For one, the writing system provides no separation between words, so whole sentences run together in one long string combining all elements, including kanji, the primary one I still didn’t know. To me, it felt similar to trying to read soMEthiNGLIkeThiSBUtwitHONeextRaunrEAdAbLeaLPHabeTTHRownin.

Even apart from reading, the language seemed like Japan’s phonological equivalent of China’s Great Wall: an impenetrable barricade barring foreigners. In addition to regular conjugations (different verb forms for past, present, etc.), the grammar encompasses up to five forms of honorifics, each dependent on both your role and that of your interlocutor. Understanding roles, in turn, requires extensive cultural knowledge about both hierarchy and the Japanese notions of groups and boundaries: elder relatives require different forms than both younger relatives and elder nonrelatives, but speaking to the latter about the first requires yet another variation. The word for “husband” changes depending on whether you are talking about your own spouse to a family member or stranger, about a stranger’s spouse in a formal setting, or about a stranger’s spouse in a casual situation. And that’s just the nouns.

“Why can’t I just learn the most polite form,” I asked Toru, “and use that all the time?”

“Actually, kind of rude to use most polite form in casual situation,” he said. Employing too formal a conjugation at the wrong time suggested snobbery and an uncouth mixing of boundaries, more hierarchical no-no’s, he explained.

Then there was the counting: well over a dozen different ways to say “one, two, three,” depending on the kind and shape of the object being counted. Flat objects, like plates, require one word, long items like bottles or pencils another, people a third, buildings yet another, and on and on.

In school, the verb forms we were learning were not the ones people used in everyday conversation. So after months and months of Japanese class, I could order a drink, ask for a bigger size at a store, or inquire formally about someone’s hobbies (which never did come in handy), but having a conversation remained well beyond my reach: once someone responded, it was usually all over.

The gym proved equally challenging. One week, I summoned the courage to try a yoga class—or what I thought was yoga. I knew which studio held the classes, and I looked on that room’s schedule to see which time slots contained notations. Where a time slot has writing, that must mean a class, I reasoned.

On the day in question, I arrived at the gym early. At the threshold to the locker room, I removed my “outdoor” sneakers, as required, and stored them in a cubby, then walked in stocking feet to my locker. After changing into yoga pants and a T-shirt, I carried my “inside” sneakers to the edge of the locker room before putting them on. I didn’t understand the logic of inside and outside sneakers, since we wore both up and down the stairs to the locker room, but I knew enough to follow protocol.

When I got to the yoga studio, a number of women were already lying on their mats, wispy hips encased in stretch pants and matching tops, indoor sneakers removed and set neatly beside. Some lay with their eyes closed, and two had their faces pointed toward each other, whispering softly. Lying down myself, I alternated gazing up at the ceiling and looking around the starkly tidy room: wooden floor shiny and dustless, mats and blocks stacked in their corners, edges aligned. I tried not to stare at the other women, but I wanted to keep watch, knowing I would need to follow their movements once the class started.

When the teacher entered exactly on the hour, sat lotus style in one fluid swoop, and began to talk in Japanese, everyone closed her eyes. Must be some kind of beginning meditation. I squeezed my eyelids together, then cracked them open to check for signs of stirring, maybe a transition to Downward Dog pose. No movement.

Fifteen minutes later, we were still prone on our mats. Sometimes the teacher murmured in Japanese, and sometimes she went silent. Straining to move soundlessly, I toggled my head from left to right and back again, anxious to catch the beginning of the first yoga posture. This is the longest intro meditation ever.

Twenty minutes in, and still no change. On the ceiling, I thought I noticed little puffs of steam or fog coming from tiny apertures, but their outlines were indistinct. Good God, is there a gas leak? And when is the damn yoga flow actually going to start?

By thirty minutes in, I was taut with exasperation. I wondered if the subtle puffs of vapor coming from the ceiling were meant to be part of the meditation. Or is this an aromatherapy class? I never did find out. After fifty minutes of quiet commentary from the instructor alternating with periods of silence, my head flopping right and left on my mat as I tried to peer through pinched eyelids at what was happening around me (which was always nothing), the other women began to stir, sitting up, rolling their mats, nodding thanks to the serenely smiling teacher.

My cheeks burned as I gathered my indoor sneakers and replaced my mat. I imagined the other women trying to discern if I was fluent in Japanese or just hopelessly confused about both the class schedule and what had occurred over the past hour.

“Poor my love!” Toru said, a laugh breaking through his frown, when I told him that night. He offered to get a copy of the schedule and translate it for me, but I declined. I’d had enough of group activities. I’d just exercise on my own, on the treadmill I knew how to program or the cross-trainer whose controls I’d figured out.

Still, I was hopeful that my world might expand once Toru and I were officially married, or at least that life in Osaka would become more normal. With a spouse visa, I could come and go from Japan as I pleased, not worrying about travel restrictions for tourists. I’d have health insurance through his company and could give up my U.S. coverage to save money. Plus, we’d move into a real apartment, and I might have a place in Osaka that felt like some kind of center.

•   •   •

AS PART OF my increasingly settled half-life in Osaka, I’d begun making a few more friends. I met Jessica, a poet, through a group called the Association of Foreign Wives. I’d known about the organization for a while but had resisted joining: the name sounded disturbingly like the TV show Desperate Housewives. Eventually, though, I gave in and signed up, knowing I’d need a community around me if I was ever going to have a quasi-normal life in Japan.

Jessica and her Japanese physician husband lived in Kobe, a twenty-minute train ride from Osaka. She was about my age and had striking red hair, gray-blue eyes, and a round, lovely face. She’d first come to Japan years ago when she’d decided to quit a Ph.D. program at Caltech and, not knowing what else to do, came overseas to teach English. As a kid, she’d grown up in a conservative Mormon family with seven siblings in Pennsylvania, but she had stopped going to church when she married her husband.

Jessica fascinated me: Who gets into a Ph.D. program at Caltech and quits midway? Who starts off as a Mormon and ends up a funky foreign wife in Japan? She had gravitas, I decided, and the integrity to make hard decisions. Plus, she’d gone to high school with a lot of Jewish kids, she’d told me, so she totally got my kvetching.

Like me, Jessica was ambivalent at best about living in Japan. She’d come here for her own reasons, but she’d stayed for her husband. She also felt much more comfortable in the U.S. and struggled with all she’d given up by marrying a Japanese man whose career was not transferable. Moreover, like Toru, Jessica’s husband was the eldest son and designated caretaker of a widowed parent.

At lunch one day at a Southeast Asian restaurant in Kobe, Jessica ordered us pho noodle soup from a Japanese waitress in a Vietnamese dress. She spoke quickly, even adding little native-sounding fillers, quick pitter-patters of “ano” (“umm”) and “et-to” (“so . . .”), and her ease with the language made me momentarily wistful.

Bent over our soup, we gossiped about the expat scene, marveling at how different we felt from many of the foreigners we’d met. “Those gaijin who dress up in yukata robes, or who insist on only speaking Japanese? Like if someone speaks to them in English and they still respond in Japanese?” I rolled my eyes.

“I know!” Jessica shrilled. “As if it’s not totally, one hundred percent clear that they are not Japanese, as if everyone can’t see that they’re foreign. Um, hello, you’re white!”

“The thing that I find most incomprehensible is when people say they feel more at ease in Japan than in their own countries. I don’t get it! How, in Japan of all places, can any Westerner feel more at home than in their real home!”

“Especially,” Jessica said, leaning forward, “when Japanese people are constantly reacting to you like you’re some kind of bizarre alien?”

“Frankly, I really think you’ve got to be a little screwed up to move halfway around the world and make a home in a country as completely different as Japan,” I confided, as if both Jessica and I hadn’t ourselves done the same thing.

Then Jessica confided a revelation of her own. She’d read something—she wasn’t sure where: an online forum? an expat magazine?—that supposedly could predict perfectly whether a foreign woman would find contentment long-term in Japan. The answer depended on three criteria: “Whether she was unhappy in her own country and came to Japan as an escape,” Jessica said, counting the first item off on her forefinger. “Whether she came to Japan for her own reasons, and not for a man,” she ticked her middle digit, “and whether she’s fluent in Japanese.”

Jessica tapped her third finger as she listed the final requirement for, I realized, my own future happiness. The platinum band of her wedding ring caught the afternoon sunlight, and then as she lowered her fingers to her lap and nodded at me with her gray-blue eyes, I felt my chest sinking with her hands. Strikeout, I thought as I stared silently back at her, my heart boring into my stomach. I’ve failed on all three counts.

Jessica smiled at me, unaware of the panic her “gaijin-girl” quiz had shot through my torso. I didn’t bother considering the source of her information, didn’t question whether online forums or expat magazines always offered airtight information. Instead, it felt as if my failure of the future-happiness exercise confirmed my own hidden suspicions: I knew I’d been kidding myself that this whole arrangement could sustain itself. And now I have the test results to prove it.

•   •   •

WHEN THE END of December presented itself and the day arrived that Toru and I were to file our marriage contract, I woke with a slight sore throat, my skin oversensitive. Toru had taken the day off of work so we could get to the U.S. Consulate during business hours to retrieve and notarize my Affidavit of Competency to Marry. After the consulate, we would file the affidavit at the Osaka Central Ward Office, along with an official copy of Toru’s family register and a statement signed by two other witnesses (Tetsunobu-san and Michiko-san) acknowledging our nuptials. Once we’d filed these, we could fill out our license and have it processed that same day. Signed, stamped, wedded.

But at the door to the consulate, a Japanese guard stopped us. He wore a blue officer’s uniform, a gun in a black pouch snug at this side. He held up one hand.

He and Toru spoke in flat-sounding Japanese. Toru paused for a minute, looked down and examined his shoes, then raised his head and addressed the man once more. The guard responded, neutral-toned, disinterested.

Toru turned to me. “Terrible!” he said. “Document section is closed!”

The major New Year holiday wasn’t set to begin until two days later, when offices, stores, and government facilities would shut for a week or so. When we’d double-checked the consulate’s website that morning, it said they were open. But the guard now explained that the American staff in the document office had decided to start their holiday early. Toru nodded as he told me this, part emphasis of our misfortune, part confirmation of his countrymen’s stereotype about mine: when it comes to Americans’ work ethic, these slipups were bound to happen.

We stood on the sidewalk under a bony row of tree limbs and wondered what to do with our day now that we weren’t going to get married during it. We’d have to wait until after New Year’s before both the consulate and the Osaka Central Ward Office would be open again.

So we grabbed a bowl of hot noodles and went to the movies—some Hollywood blockbuster with Japanese subtitles and too much noise—and tried to enjoy our unexpectedly free day. In the darkened cinema, I shivered, my head feeling thick and cottony. My mood had slipped along with the theater lights as they’d dimmed. I felt weary, overwhelmed, and pricked raw by a realization I couldn’t shake: when I’d learned that morning that we couldn’t sign our marriage papers, my first feeling was disappointment; my second was relief.