by Tracy Slater
Then he mentioned a huge “hand.”
“Wait . . . wait,” I stopped him, “are we talking about a club?”
“Ya, ya, crub,” Toru insisted, and it went back and forth until he mimed pincers and I realized we were discussing a crustacean.
But we had our usual gestures and jokes we knew by heart, and these became a fluency we shared. “Saiaku-te!” was my fallback, which technically means “worst” in Japanese, although I co-opted it as an all-purpose protest, as in “That’s the worst!” Toru, for his part, liked to say “That’s so suck” after hearing me complain, “Well, that sucks.” In homage to our verbal games of Twister and to Ji-na from the summer before, who had once mistakenly called him “Tofu,” I gave him the nickname “Tof.”
When we had disagreements or moments of confusion that really mattered, we tried to keep clarifying, repeating back what we thought the other meant, to avoid a more profound misunderstanding like we’d had in Beijing. This sometimes made conversation slower, but it also helped keep things simple and encouraged us to be careful, ensuring we’d think through what we needed to say before blurting it out.
Of all the everyday interactions we had, my favorite was also one of the most mundane. In Boston, as he’d always done in Asia, when we stepped off a sidewalk, even along a barely trafficked road, Toru would ensure he was on the outside, shuttling me away from potential cars, blocking my body from the street with his compact but solid presence.
Despite my passion for self-reliance, when Toru shielded me, even from my own world, I felt safe and at home in a way I’d never imagined. I felt, quite simply, cocooned.
I decided it was time he met my mother.
• • •
THAT FALL, I introduced Toru twice to my mother and stepfather. The first time was soon after he got to Boston, before they went to spend the fall and winter in Palm Beach. We both felt nervous about the meeting, but we loved each other, and I couldn’t imagine him not knowing my family, despite the potential culture clash between my quiet but strong-willed Japanese boyfriend and my loud and strong-willed Jewish-American parents. Toru bought a new jacket, and we went to dinner at Aquitaine, a French bistro in the South End.
My mother, then in her late sixties, swooped in with her Ferragamo handbag and heels, her honeybee pink lipstick and matching manicure, and her twice-a-week salon-styled hair sprayed to such perfection that it seemed not even a Boston nor’easter could disturb a strand. She shook Toru’s hand, kissed my cheek, and then settled down with her martini—Smirnoff, twist, stemmed glass only—to interrogate Toru as to why “your countrymen are so hard on the empress for failing to produce a male heir.”
For his part, Toru nodded earnestly, then agreed, “Hmm, yes, makes no sense, doesn’t it?”
My mother repeated this same question immediately upon meeting Toru the second time, when my parents came back to Boston for Thanksgiving. Toru again agreed graciously, this time adding “poor empress” for emphasis.
My stepfather, a retired banker in his early seventies with an expansive laugh and Gucci loafers, smiled frequently despite responding “What was that?” to almost everything Toru said. Then he patted Toru warmly on the back and generously picked up the bill, waving his hand when Toru reached for his wallet.
My parents had taken us to dinner at their country club this time, and my stepfather even called over David Shwartz, who had fought in the South Pacific and then started a successful postwar business with offices in Tokyo. “We bought up half of Japan!” Shwartz fondly recalled. Toru paused for a beat, tilted his head a few degrees above his jacket and tie. Then he smiled politely and said, “Oh, great!” They grinned expectantly at each other for a moment longer, and finally, all conversation apparently exhausted, Shwartz gave Toru’s hand a robust pump, then turned to my stepfather to discuss the markets.
Through it all, Toru was unflappable. He sat a little stiffly, propped upright by the tension of English conversation in an entirely new environment. But he was unfailingly courteous and persistently unruffled, interested in the scene but also removed from it, like a director on someone else’s set. I held his hand under the table, and he told me both times before my parents arrived that as long as I stayed next to him, he’d be fine. And he was.
“Good practice for English!” he told me after we left my parents at the restaurant and then again at the country club. His strongest impression was that both my mother and the club were “kind of too gorgeous,” an adjective I later learned the Japanese use to mean “fancy.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him of her calling me in my office at the university a few days after Thanksgiving, when she realized that Toru and I were not breaking up anytime soon, and trying to fix me up with the son of one of her Palm Beach friends. “He’s a fine person. An investment banker in New York,” she told me. “He’s getting divorced, but his parents are fine, fine people. Very close friends.” She left the “Jewish” part unspoken, although eminently clear, but she couldn’t help adding, as if I hadn’t picked up on the Palm-Beach-investment-banker part of the equation, “Very wealthy.” Pointing out that I wouldn’t be teaching in a prison if I cared about money—and conveniently ignoring my cash-driven work at the business school—I told her I wasn’t interested. I loved Toru and knew that he loved me. I had to believe we would find a way to make our relationship last when he went back to Japan.
• • •
ALTHOUGH I FELT a unique sense of completeness with Toru in Boston, he didn’t necessarily take to American culture. While some might assume the lack of shared fluency would present the greatest challenge in a relationship such as ours, I found the difference in our customs a harder gulf to cross. Where once I’d hoped that Toru, like some people I’d met from abroad, would find America and its casualness a relief—as if they could finally exhale a breath they hadn’t realized they’d been holding—now I saw Toru was not likely to embrace my world as some sort of long-lost beacon of his soul.
Out for lunch one day, we went to a bakery in Cambridge. Toru raised his eyebrows in anticipation as we waited to order, watching plates pass by, sliced meats and cheeses bursting from thick slabs of homemade bread. But the line moved slowly, sometimes in no particular fashion, and when we got to the front, the cashier was chatting away, first with another customer who was well past ordering, then with a coworker. Her nose ring glinted in the light from the windows, and then she turned suddenly and disappeared into the kitchen.
Behind us, a man complained loudly to no one in particular, while a teenager popped her gum. A woman interrogated someone over her cell phone about their desired sandwich choice. When the cashier returned, Toru and I stepped up. He opened his mouth to order. She turned to chat some more with a young woman who had abruptly poked her head through an opening from the kitchen. Then she laughed, her back to us. “You know it, girl!” she called to the white-coated pastry chef. Toru’s face turned darker.
After we finally ordered, we went to get seats at the bakery’s communal center table. Toru was removing his coat when a woman in pressed jeans and leather driving shoes burst through the door, a scarf knotted neatly at her neck, a trio of fresh-scrubbed children trailing behind. She took an imperious look around, stepped through the crowd, and made a beeline toward our seats. Drawing near, she clucked her tongue at Toru, shooing him to the end of the bench to make room for her oxford-shirted offspring.
A protest arose in my chest, but I stifled it as it reached my tongue. She’s shooing him like she would a puppy, I thought in disgust. Would she be so dismissive if he were some big white guy? I glared at her, but confounded as to a proper response, I said nothing. I felt chagrin at myself rise alongside the mute objection in my throat.
“I don’t like,” Toru said, irritation cutting through each syllable, his eyes slanting toward the woman. He shook his head in one fierce motion, then turned away from her, and he seemed to shrink into his own skin, h
unching his shoulders, pressing his lips together in a closed line as if insulating himself from the rude disorder around him. The clucking woman stuffed her children into seats, oblivious.
An image of the white-gloved train attendant we had seen in Kobe flashed through my mind. The stiff formality, the insistence on bowing at each end of the car—despite whether anyone was looking. It was the conductor’s role to be polite. It was unthinkable not to do so. But in Boston, no one even noticed when decorum failed or order unraveled. I tried to stifle the disconcerting thought that, if Toru were to build a life here with me, this cultural chasm would alienate him on every level, both personally and professionally—even more than the actual language barrier.
Toru’s inner distance from my world emerged in other ways, too. The most surprising was his lack of interest in being with my friends. In Japan, Toru told me, couples rarely socialize together. Husbands and wives go to dinner in lone pairs but rarely in a group of couples. Double dates and even mixed-gender outings are uncommon, especially for adults.
Toru couldn’t understand why, just because he was my boyfriend, he would necessarily spend time with my friends. He wasn’t opposed to them—he appreciated their kindness, their humor, and especially their warmth for me—but he didn’t get the concept of being friends merely because you loved someone in common. He was also quite shy. Where I was boisterous and social, Toru, even at home, preferred being alone when he wasn’t at work.
One night in Boston, we went with five of my friends to Pho Republique, a funky French-Vietnamese place on Washington Street in the South End. Sitting at our long, rough-hewn table, swilling a lychee martini, I sprinted from one topic to the next: giving Robert a cultural analysis of the gender politics in men’s prisons, where the weak are labeled women; complaining to Jenna about the tragedy of having to teach writing to MBA students for income. The other end of the table was laughing about Rod’s miserable first date, while Louise anguished over her upcoming tenure application, everyone popping fried wonton strips into their mouths and leaning forward to gossip more closely, elbows splayed.
Toru sat quietly beside me at the end of a bench sipping his Sam Adams beer, politely trying to listen, throwing back his head to laugh when the conversation deemed it appropriate, but clearly not in the spirit of the moment. From time to time, I squeezed his hand and smiled at him. Occasionally, I tried to draw him into the conversation.
“Tof, tell them how Makoto kept mistaking police cars for taxis. How he spent his first week in Boston hailing cops at every corner,” I urged.
“They couldn’t understand, why this skinny Japanese guy waving at them all the time?” Toru told the table, and we all laughed. But once the hilarity faded, Toru leaned back, looking more relieved for a chance to escape the spotlight than eager to continue the conversation.
Still, my friends all liked Toru, admired his quiet humility, his down-to-earth aura, his bravery at pursuing an MBA in English when he clearly wasn’t fluent—and at pursuing a relationship with me when I couldn’t speak his language at all. Most of all, my friends liked how grounded and happy I was with Toru. It felt as if for years I’d had a motor spinning in too high a gear somewhere deep inside, its calibration skewed, and now with Toru next to me, the revving slowed to a smooth and even hum. My friends noticed. After all, they were the people who’d supported me through years of boyfriends with high ambitions, top degrees, and prestigious jobs, all of which had still left these men ill equipped for simple intimacy—or for my own not-so-simple neuroses.
Toru’s distance from my social circle made me feel a little lonely in a different way, like I had two halves of my life that I couldn’t bring together. But as consolation, I considered there might be wisdom in the Japanese tradition of not combining a romantic partner with friends. After all, one person can’t be everything at all times. I turned the idea around in my mind for a while. Maybe it’s healthy to find some fundamental social sustenance outside your relationship. As long as I was home, ensconced in the place I knew so well—and the people who knew me—I felt rooted and content enough, especially with Toru by my side, his love adding heft to the gravity holding my world in place.
What unnerved me even more than questions about my compatibility with a man so different from me socially, was Toru’s inevitable return to Japan in May. Lately, I’d been silently mulling over moving to Osaka. Then I would think, How did I become this person? This woman, the one who would consider forfeiting her way of life, her home, her world for a man’s? And for a country like Japan, where women hold so little power?
I tried to justify my deep reluctance to leave the U.S. as a form of political resistance. Like my suspicion of marriage as an institution created long ago to codify female servitude—both historically accurate and handily consoling every time a previous romance failed—my refusal to change my life for a man felt central to my identity as an independent, modern woman. But, in truth, my reluctance went deeper than the intellectual or political, dipping down into a place of plain, bald terror.
The world I had created for myself in Boston, so perfectly planned and shaped, was built upon that promise I had made myself in early adulthood when I swore never to sacrifice too much for someone or something else. I’d seen where dependence led and I was loath to lose myself in another situation I couldn’t control or navigate on my own. Now I wondered if building a life with Toru in Osaka could possibly guarantee anything other than the very loss of self and home I’d sworn never again to relinquish.
2.
THE HONEYMOON STAGE
The typical description of [culture shock’s] progression . . . starts at a higher stage of fascination, adventure, optimism, or excitement called the honeymoon stage. [But] this is followed by feelings of inadequacy, disappointment, disillusion, alienation, and self-blame.
• Paul Pedersen, The Five Stages of Culture Shock
Please enjoy your time in the pocket park in a city.
• Advertisement for my morning café in Osaka
FOUR
THE DAWN was bright through Logan Airport’s tall windows. It was late spring 2005, about a month after Toru had returned to Japan, and I arrived at five-fifteen a.m. to check in for my early flight to Chicago and then on to Osaka’s Kansai Airport. My bags were overstuffed, my hair in a loose ponytail still damp from the shower. A line had already formed despite the inhumane hour, and in it stood a clutch of women with Japanese passports bound for my same itinerary. Most stood stick-straight and impeccably coiffed, their makeup subtle but flawless, their bags compact and neatly arranged, gliding forward on perfect, tiny wheels.
They waited patiently to check in while I tapped my foot nervously, trying to straighten my unruly ponytail, lugging my bags awkwardly as the line inched forward, my suitcase scraping the floor in a minor cacophony. Still waiting, I called Toru to tell him I had made it to Logan on time. At just past six p.m. in Japan—hours before traditional salarymen like him leave work—he couldn’t talk for long, but he urged me to call from my layover in Chicago, telling me he loved me, reminding me he would be waiting on the other side of customs at Kansai Airport. “Thank you for coming to here,” he said.
In the weeks before he had left Boston, we had decided I would visit him in Japan from mid-June through mid-July. This would take the edge off his May departure from the U.S. without interrupting my fall teaching schedule, still leaving me plenty of time to prepare my September syllabi. Toru had convinced me that even though I couldn’t imagine actually living so far from Boston, I might as well explore Osaka a bit before I insisted on the impossibility of making a life there. “Why not just come, see what it’s like?”
“Well, maybe I could,” I had tentatively agreed. I let the idea take form in my head, solidifying slowly like liquid hardening into shape. Given the intensity of Japanese corporate life, Toru wouldn’t be able to take more than a day or two off from work, but there was a national holiday (Mar
ine Day, which he termed “respect for the sea” day) in mid-July that provided one long weekend. Plus, it would be the rainy season and airfares would be cheap.
As I approached Logan’s ticket counter, I felt a sudden pressure behind my eyes and in my throat. This is going to be our life from now on, I thought. This is how we’ll live, with me returning a few times a year to this early-morning line, calling him thirteen time zones and half a world away, then boarding a plane for a twenty-four-hour trip across the planet. Unless I agreed to move to Japan or we decided to break up.
When Toru had arrived home in May, he had confirmed my fears about his sure place in Osaka. His father was spending whole days in front of the TV, his weight dropping as he declined food during daylight either because of mourning or apathy. Tremors had begun to shake his hand.
Grasping the phone in my studio in Boston, listening to Toru’s report of life back home, I hadn’t mentioned the possibility of his being transferred to America. Instead, I stared off into space and clutched the handset hard as, silently, we both agreed he needed to be in Japan, at least for the foreseeable future.
Now, standing at Logan Airport, I was swallowing back tears. Then a uniformed woman at the counter called, “Next!” and I shuffled forward. The rush of activity pushed back the burning in my eyes and throat: handing over my passport, removing my shoes and unloading my laptop at security, buying water and a paper near the gate, boarding the plane to my tiny economy seat.