I spent three years immersed in the English language and in English literature. I travelled through Sir Walter Scott’s Scotland and Jane Austen’s Hampshire, Charles Dickens’s London, George Eliot’s provincial England and Elizabeth Bowen’s Ireland. These authors took me to places I would never visit, not least because they no longer existed but because they were set in a different past, as if in a foreign country where things are done differently. While the physical scenes of place and time – the hanging drapes of English meadows and Scottish heaths and of English and Irish country homes – pleased me, the emotional tableaux of unrequited and reciprocated loves intrigued and excited me. How and why Elizabeth Bennet and Maggie Tulliver throw themselves upon others – throw their selves away to others – fascinated me. I would reread novels’ endings in the fantasy that they might change, that our strong heroines would stand resolute and learn from past mistakes.
University had been different from school in two principal respects. The first was that I no longer had to contend with the furtive, uncertain advances of insecure boys, but with the propositions of self-assured, cocky young men. The second was that I grew to love the English language that I had found so charming at school and began to plan exactly how I would use it as a springboard out of my country. Additionally, university had opened my eyes to wider Japanese society and, by bringing me into contact with students from outside my prefecture, helped me realise just how sheltered my upbringing had been and how unconventional and open-minded my parents were. However, that only really hit home after university, once I’d started my first full-time job, at Yumimoto.
The evening before my first day at Yumimoto, after I had pressed my regulation white shirt and black skirt and polished my old black school shoes, I stood at my bedroom window. To my left lay a decaying sunset, as though a last call for those heading west. Soon, I thought to myself. Ahead, Keiko’s and Michi’s lightless bedroom windows almost shouted their absence. Keiko had gone south immediately after graduation to be assistant to the manager of her parents’ shop in Hamamatsu; she would board above it for the length of her secondment, returning to Sangenjaya only occasionally. Michi had been accepted for a master’s degree in clinical psychology and school education at Fukushima University. West-, north- and eastwards spread a quietening town, settling down for the night like a dog in its basket, and telephone wires that still whispered to me and sought to lead me astray and away. I was still me, the young girl with the ambition to travel as long as she could remember, but the closer I came to achieving my goal the less impatient I became.
I knew that taking ownership of myself and of my public image in a new, different society could mean changing – a liberating, thrilling prospect of reinventing not my essential self but my superficies, similar to the identical modern steel structures that I witnessed rising all around Tokyo, which appeared so different on completion once their facades were clad in disparate materials. I, that inner nucleus of me, had an integrity that persisted, despite the fact that every day, I learnt something new and, probably, forgot something old. I made the distinction between that core, that essential meness and the social coatings, postures and attitudes that I adopted but could discard like a raincoat, a glove or a hat.
While university had broadened not so much my horizons as my self-awareness, my new workplace would increase my appreciation of just how atypical and non-conformist my parents were. Yumimoto was to open my eyes as wide as they could, and to reaffirm my decision to leave Japan for a society that would be non-judgemental and allow me to be myself. I had made friends at university but had never moved past the level of acquaintance, principally because we lived too far away from each other to socialise off-campus, but partly because sexual politics managed to get in the way: the boys didn’t understand that you wanted to keep a friendship at just that level, and the girls didn’t believe that you weren’t in competition with them. I made no attempt to dispel a reputation for being cold and aloof after I learnt that being interested in people could label you a tease, a flirt who reneged on implicit promises.
I stood at my open window and angled it at 45 degrees so that the reflection of the setting sun lay superimposed on Michi’s and Keiko’s bedroom windows, and I reflected on the fact that university had brought me no new, lasting friendships, no friends that I would value as much as I did Keiko, Michi, Taka and, unexpectedly, as if out of nowhere, Margaret.
I didn’t have the degree of intimacy with Margaret that I had with the others, which made for a different quality of friendship – none of the children’s history that tied Keiko, Michi and me, none of the courtship and relationship issues that had hung over Taka and me – but one that grew out of mutual respect, admiration and, I sensed, a recognition of each other’s self-containment, detachment and independence. That Margaret never seemed to care what others thought of her and what impression she made on others influenced me greatly; I attributed this to her Englishness and assumed it was a quality all English people possessed. I considered her a kindred spirit, but never said as much to her; the irony of distinctive and independent spirits being kindred was not lost on me. No longer seeing me at school, Margaret took to visiting me at home and would dine with my family regularly, seemingly unaware that she was the only guest my parents ever entertained to dinner. She amused them by introducing herself as from ‘the nation of shopkeepers’, an image of England that did not match any of the images they had of glorious battlefields, misty moors, empire-line dresses, horse-drawn carriages and miniskirts, some of which they’d got from me. The facility with which my English friend appeared to have assimilated our etiquette – the way she kicked off her shoes and slipped on her slippers on entering our house, and kicked those off in turn before sitting seiza style for long periods on our tatamis, having unassumingly accepted her place in front of the tokonoma – made me proud of her.
Taka had accepted we’d be just friends, best friends, and was no longer David Copperfield to my Dora Spenlow. He had created a circle of friends of his own around which I orbited elliptically, occasionally bringing to his attention girls that I thought he might fancy or that I had heard had a soft spot for him. This, I got the impression, pained him, perhaps because it suggested that I needed to see him established in a relationship in order to consider myself safe from his affections, so I desisted. Taka may have had a fling with Keiko, either that summer after school or later; whichever, I detected a slight tension between them whenever we met in a group, but whether that was because of Taka’s faux pas, as recounted to me so blithely by Michi, or because of a more recent affair between them, I never learnt. If I was extreme in my complete abstention from sex, Keiko was the opposite, reacting, I thought, against the strictness of her upbringing. Had I not known her so well, I would have assumed her to be making a political statement of sorts, but that would have been to give more significance than she did to the string of one-night stands that, to her, were just the scratching of an itch. She would go to rock concerts far from home and, with other like-minded girls, hang about major road junctions where she’d be picked up by men who would offer her a bed for the night. No money changed hands, but Taka would reprimand her all the same. Keiko would just reply, ‘Who’s using whom?’