TEN

I WOKE THE NEXT MORNING achy and low. Toru had gotten up earlier, and now he came to the side of our narrow bed and knelt. He stroked my forehead lightly: he’d sensed my anxious mood from my restless shifts throughout the night, tangling the sheets around his tranquil sleep.

We looked at each other silently for a few moments, neither one of us moving. “Poor my love,” he muttered.

“I feel low, Tof.”

“I know.”

“I think. I’m not sure.”

Toru’s gaze held: direct, steady, waiting.

“I feel kind of freaked out. And yesterday, after the consulate was closed and, and I felt relieved, and now I’m wondering what that means. Or if I can really go through with this.”

Toru looked down. Swallowed a moment.

“So you mean,” he said, his eyes rising back to mine, “you don’t want to marrying now?”

I felt stuck, bog-heavy.

“I don’t know,” I finally said. “I don’t know if I don’t want to get married. I mean, I do want to marry you. But now I don’t know if we should wait, or put it off for a while, or what. I mean, I know we have a week before we can do anything anyway, with the New Year holiday and all.”

Toru looked down again, his jaw clenching in tight little pulses.

“So I’m not saying we need to do anything, or rather not do anything right now because of the holiday.” My words came in a rush. “But I just feel like I need to tell you, to be up front, that I’m not a hundred percent positive that next week, when the consulate reopens, I can still go through with this.”

He shuddered then, a quiet shaking beneath the usual equipoise of his body, as if it might take all his strength to call that stillness back once more. Then he just exhaled slowly. “Okay,” he said finally. “But please just think on it.”

For the next few days, indecision plagued me, jabbing me like a bully. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to marry Toru. I just didn’t want to make a decision I was supposed to be sure about forever. I felt trapped, not by Toru, but rather by Japan. Like the country was a prison I could never fully escape if I married someone who called it his home. Our home.

Screwing up my brain, I tried to imagine if I’d ever fall in love with Osaka the way I’d fallen in love with him: the strange rhythms of the city, its rushing crowds and jigsaw buildings, its housewives and same-suited salarymen. Would this ever be a place where I felt at home? I couldn’t wrap my heart around the vision. I saw an endless sweep of days with unreadable signs and blank stares, smiles covering or conveying unreadable emotions. Doors with strange shapes printed above their handles. Is this PUSH? Is it PULL?

I tried next to imagine going back to Boston to build a life without Toru. I envisioned the safe, familiar sidewalks of the South End. Neighbors with broad, easy smiles offering greetings, trading expressions. Yet also a hollow space by my side, an emptiness even more gaping than the vacuum of life as a displaced American in Japan.

Something else nagged at me, too, a realization hidden beneath my struggle over Osaka versus Boston, pushed down even farther within my chest. When I tried to picture Toru moving to the U.S., my anxious indecision wouldn’t cease. Not because I couldn’t imagine Toru leaving his career, abandoning his father, and still remaining at peace, but because some things I most treasured in our relationship were tied to Japan. I loved how confident and fluent Toru was in Japan, not just linguistically, but professionally, culturally, logistically. I wanted to believe I was an independent woman, but deep down I wondered if, even more than autonomy, I prized how completely Toru took care of me, especially in his country.

Nothing had ever made me feel as safe and loved as Toru navigating me through an entire world both fascinating and impenetrable. I knew I would love him no matter where we were. I’d already loved him just as fiercely in Boston as I had in Kobe, Beijing, Seoul, or Osaka. But I had to admit: a part of me loved our relationship most when we were in Japan. If I was trapped by this country, it was a trap of my own construction.

I didn’t know how to solve this conundrum or even if a solution existed. But I knew what scared me most. It wasn’t even the dual reality of my desire for independence scraping up against the comfort I found in someone taking care of me; instead, what terrified me was the permanence both Japan and marriage would assume in my life if I became Toru’s wife. If I could just marry him for, like, three years or something. Just make a shorter-term commitment, I think I’d feel less freaked out.

I thought back to our earlier decision to build a life both together and apart, to have me live in the U.S. and Japan. People said it couldn’t, shouldn’t be done. But we’d done it anyway. And so far we were happy. Why not make our own rules about marriage then? Why not try our own form? Try marrying on a three-year term?

I wasn’t sure Toru would go for it. I didn’t want to get divorced, and I was loath to repeat a mistake similar to my parents’. But I was more loath not to give my relationship with Toru the most earnest attempt I could.

I imagined being old and bent, and looking back—if I was lucky enough to survive to such an age—and feeling the deadweight of an avoidable regret. A life whose potential gifts I had shunned. Sometime during the next few days, a realization coalesced: becoming family with Toru was one of those gifts. So was our freedom both to wed and to make our own rules. In my mind, I nodded to that gnarled-handed woman. I was not necessarily prepared, but I was still willing to risk trying marriage, despite my confusion and ambivalence. At least for three years.

When I presented the idea to Toru, he grinned, but to his credit he didn’t laugh. He smiled as if my zany mind was one of the things he might love most about me, as if he was thinking, Who else would suggest, in all seriousness, a three-year marriage—across two continents? I loved him for that, and even more for what I read in the steadiness of his grin: he felt compassionate about my fear, charmed by my neuroses, and completely unthreatened by either.

•   •   •

A WEEK LATER, we filed our marriage documents and were handed a paper at the Osaka Central Ward Office declaring us a legal unit. It was now early January 2007. Because we had created our own nuclear entity in Japan, we were required to make a new family register, removing Toru from the one he’d always shared with his parents. Toru showed me the form before he filed it: a white sheet of columns next to long vertical lines of Japanese characters. He pointed to his name and our address (or rather his father’s address, which we would list as our main domicile until we signed a lease on our own apartment). Along the bottom edge, in a field resembling one for footnotes, sat a space with letters in katakana, the Japanese alphabet reserved for foreign words. The letters looked just like the ones I’d learned to write my own name.

“What’s that?” I asked Toru. “Down there?”

“That’s you!”

“Me? Why am I down there? Why aren’t I on the main part of the form if it’s our family register? Why aren’t I listed as your wife?”

“You are listed. As wife,” he assured me. “But only listed in note field. Listed as wife down there.”

Foreigners, Toru explained, were not permitted to appear in the main body of the family register. So although I was now legally Toru’s wife, I was also apparently the family footnote.

When a little while later I obtained my official alien registration card (which I was ordered to carry at all times), I was heartened to see my name written prominently in English along with my nationality and place of birth: BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS. The latter was listed in both fields, as if my nationality extended down to my city and state.

“What’s that?” I asked Toru, pointing to some Japanese characters that looked like his name on another part of the card.

“That? That’s me.”

“And what’s that line in Japanese above it, introducing your name? What does that say?”

Toru peered closer at the tiny black font. “Oh that? That say ‘master of the house.’”

•   •   •

THE WEEKEND AFTER we married, we went to a hot-springs resort for an impromptu mini honeymoon. We stayed at a ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn with lacquer-wood furniture and shoji screens. We slept on soft futons rolled out each night over a floor of straw tatami mats bordered with silk stitching. During the day, we wore thin, patterned yukata robes, and in the evening we were served dinner in our room, course after course of tiny elaborate dishes. The only entertainment besides eating and lounging involved onsen: dipping into natural thermal waters bubbling up from underground.

Except for rooms with private onsen baths—out of our budget—most hot springs in Japan are separated by gender, switching once a day. In the morning, women will use one side and men the other; in the afternoon, they switch. Toru and I chose our ryokan because although the baths were single sex, they shared a low wall on one end over which a bather could see the neck and face of someone sitting on the other side. We could soak separately in the steamy water and still see and talk to each other if we perched in just the right place.

Entering an onsen is a detailed affair. After taking off your clothes and storing them—usually in little wooden baskets—you enter a shower room lined with individual handheld showerheads, each featuring a little stool and bucket in front of a tray of soaps and scrubs. Then you crouch on one of the tiny seats and scour every bodily plane and crevice. Arms and chest, face and neck, thighs, calves, and torso. In between each toe. Hair and scalp. A surreptitious rinse between the legs.

Not until you are pink with careful scrubbing should you approach the actual onsen water, walking naked from the shower room to the thermal pool. At our ryokan, a good fifteen or twenty minutes had elapsed between the time Toru and I parted at our separate entrances and when I approached the hot spring on the women’s side. I’d dutifully lathered my body with soap, shampoo, and conditioner, then chosen among the different facial exfoliators, or what I figured were such by their varied cartoons of women rubbing circles on their cheeks.

Entering the onsen itself, my skin felt rosy. I waded into the shallow pool, the hot water swirling slowly around my legs as I crossed the main expanse, then turned left slightly toward an alcove bordered by the low wall separating the gendered sides. I saw someone already sitting there, his head resting back, a small towel thrown over eyes and forehead, black hair sprouting from its edges. Toru’s already here! I thought happily.

“Hi, kakoii!” I sang out, using one of my nicknames for him, a cross between “handsome” and “cool.” He didn’t answer, but I smiled hugely as I strode toward the little ledge, snug against the rough stone wall just inches from where he sat. “Was there anyone else in the men’s side?” I called out, as I waded forward.

Still, no movement.

He must be so relaxed he can barely move. “I was the only one in the women’s!” I didn’t bother crouching down to hide my torso in the water: his was the only figure visible.

It wasn’t until he removed the washcloth and gave a little scream that I realized, no, this wasn’t Toru. It was another Japanese man, his face a mask of shock before the naked white woman striding, mid-conversation, toward him. Taking in the full scene, his jaw dropped even faster than I did, and by the time I had crouched under the waterline, his eyes had widened into horrified saucers.

Like a synchronized swimmer on steroids, in one jerky movement he turned, half stood, and began hurling himself through the water to the exit, the hot spring leaving small tornadoes in his wake. I could still hear his antic swishing when Toru came into view, his head turned back to watch the fleeing bather.

“Huh!” Toru said, as he approached me, turning for one more glance behind him. “Guy is in kind of rush.” Then he swiveled fully toward me. “Why’re you hiding so low in water?”

•   •   •

WE LEFT THE hot-springs resort the next day, our cheeks scrubbed smooth, limbs heavy, as if the onsen had leached all torsion from our bodies. Sitting side-by-side on the express train, watching the landscape rush by in streams of color, I felt a jolt of joy. Toru laid his hand over mine, warm as the water we’d just left. He made me laugh with jokes about the other passengers: a man dozing openmouthed like a soprano in mid aria, a grandmother chatting away while her oblivious husband, head buried in manga, emitted strategically timed grunts.

My love for Toru is actually increasing, I thought, now that we’d signed our marriage papers. Such a simple feeling, such a common, unremarkable truth, but to me, it came as an utter surprise: that you could love someone even more after you married him than before you pledged to wed.

Suddenly, the idea of marriage’s permanence felt safe, not threatening. Toru’s my partner, and I’m his. I couldn’t believe such a thing had happened to me. It was like having a perpetual buddy in one of those systems from summer camp where they pair you up so someone saves you if you start to drown. I’d always fretted as a child during these assignments: “What if my buddy is drowning, too?” I always asked the counselors, and they never had an answer beyond throwing up their hands or ordering, “Enough already. Just get into the lake.”

But I knew Toru. He’d never drown unless human survival was impossible. He’d tread water for as long as it took to figure out a way to save us both. I’d been fortunate enough for the universe to assign him to me. And if luck held, I might even love him more and more, not less and less, now that we’d signed up to either sink or swim together.

Then I realized, as Toru drummed his fingers against my palm and Japan rushed by outside the window, that maybe this wasn’t just great odds in a cosmic buddy system but something more basic. Maybe this was what it meant to find a home. Although Osaka would never be my home, it was Toru’s, and now, in addition to Boston, he was mine.