by Tracy Slater
At times this left me alienated and lonely, and I wondered how I would cope if I actually moved to Japan. But tucked within the folds of this concern, I found unexpected freedom and relief. This is not my country. These are not my problems to solve.
• • •
ONE DAY, we headed to Kyoto, about forty minutes away by train, to visit the Kinkaku-ji, the famous golden pavilion. Covered in gold leaf and rising out of a pond, the site was once a shogun’s villa and then a Zen temple. I’d never seen it but had read about it. “Very famous. Very beautiful,” Toru told me. “Kind of big, golden temple,” he said, and for a second I flashed back to the Chinese restaurant my mother and stepfather loved in Brookline, the Golden Temple. I pictured plump fried chicken fingers and glossy, ruby-colored spareribs, but I didn’t mention this to Toru.
Waiting on the platform for our train to Kyoto, we were flanked on one side by a white-gloved station attendant tasked with ensuring no one strayed too close to the edge. On our other side stood a young man dressed in khaki trousers and a plain white button-down, the sleeves pushed up to reveal thin arms. He stretched one limb aloft, straining to lift some sort of device above his head, angling the apparatus toward the tunnel’s mouth.
“What’s he doing?” I asked Toru.
“He’s densha-otaku,” Toru said, his voice suggesting a minimum of interest. “Train nerd. Obsessed with trains.” Toru explained that Japan bred otaku of every stripe, fanatics passionate about one phenomenon or another: manga, anime, even cosplay, where adults dress up and walk around as characters from video games, movies, and comic books.
Densha-otaku study schedules and ride trains, sometimes all day. Then at home, they replay the sound of trains rushing in and out of stations. I imagined the man next to us sitting in his house alone, listening to his recordings while a frisson of locomotive-inspired delight surged through him.
“It’s so dumb,” Toru said, his laugh dismissive. But I was fascinated, a little thrill of my own shivering through me at the weirdness and surprise this country constantly offered up.
“Tof,” I said, “I know the U.S. is odd and crazy in its own way, but this country is just totally bizarre.” Toru emitted a small huh, somewhere between begrudging amusement and utter disinterest, and then we turned to watch as the train approached. The densha-otaku held his device even higher while the uniformed station attendant stood still and stick-straight until the cars slid into the station.
Then the attendant bowed to the similarly white-gloved conductor, who in turn bowed back, his head leaning out the window as he slowed the train until it reached a thin white line on the platform marking the exact spot at which the front end should stop. The conductor pointed to the line with a quick two-fingered flourish, nodded his head again, and proclaimed “Hai!” (“Yes!”). On the wall, the clock confirmed the cars’ presence at the precise time printed on the hanging timetable. Our train had arrived.
In Kyoto, Toru and I walked the grounds of the golden pavilion, staring up at its gilded walls, a soft gloaming in the pale afternoon. Like so much in Japan, the temple stood tranquil, stately, and in stunning contrast to the bizarre hypermodernity of the densha-otaku we’d seen earlier.
Another weekend toward the end of my stay, Toru took me to Kyoto again so I could see a Japanese tea ceremony. We rode through the flatlands of Kansai, houses of white, beige, and gray with dark-shingled roofs swooping by our window while mountains rimmed the distance with dusty blue. In Kyoto, we followed the Philosopher’s Path, a grass-bordered walkway along a small stream. The ground was damp, the famed cherry-blossom trees lining the path now well past bloom, rising in a green canopy under a wet sky. Little stores and restaurants flanked the path. Fat gray and orange carp broke the stream’s surface, gaping their mouths in awkward yawns before slipping back under the waterline.
At a small house advertising an abbreviated form of tea ceremony, we removed our shoes and stepped onto a platform of straw tatami mats. Instead of whisking the green matcha tea in one communal bowl and then passing it for each person to sip—as in a traditional ceremony—this teahouse offered individual bowls, served on a porch overlooking a Japanese garden. A white couple was already there, and from the brown sandals they had left at the entryway and the socks pulled up along their shins, I guessed they were European, maybe German. While we waited for our tea, the woman whispered something to the man, her accent guttural, while I asked Toru quiet questions about the tea ceremonies he had told me his grandmother had taught, all of us hushed for no clear reason.
I felt a sudden wave of conceit go through me. I grabbed Toru’s fingers, pride surging that I was there with a Japanese man who held my hand, unlike the obvious tourists sitting next to us, those poor souls lacking any real access to this mysterious world. I glanced pityingly at their tube socks and fanny packs, my compassion feeling generous. Then my knees began to ache from kneeling. I shifted uncomfortably, letting go of Toru’s hand. Apparently, my short skirt did not lend itself to a demure, cross-legged position on the tatami.
From across the hallway came a woman in a kimono. She held a tray with four small bowls and plates bearing tiny domed sweets. Removing her thonged slippers, she padded silently across the mats in white tabi socks, sewed with a separate compartment for her big toe. She held the tray perfectly immobile, balanced so it never betrayed a hint of movement. When she reached us, she bent fluidly to her knees, tray still in hand, and set the dishes down in utter silence.
“Irasshaimase,” she said softly. She placed a bowl in front of each of us, turning them forty-five degrees until they were positioned exactly as protocol demanded, then setting the small plates with sweets alongside our tea. She moved unhurriedly yet with complete economy, as if any extra motion would be an affront to tradition, an inexcusable sloppiness. The loose sleeves of her kimono dipped and rose as she served, and I caught my breath as they waved close to the tea, but they hovered perfectly, never grazing anything but air.
We sipped the frothy drink, its rich, dark green sediment washing across the bottom of the bowl. Toru cut a piece of bean-paste sweet for me, wielding the tiny wooden knife balanced along the lip of my plate. I rolled the confection around on my tongue, grainy and too sweet but a right balance to the bitterness of the tea.
“Tof, I’m kind of fascinated by this country,” I admitted. We stared together through the wall-length open window, the garden lush and still. “I even think I could consider spending more time here.” Inside, with all the newness and mystery crowding me, I was starting to feel like a new person myself, as if the bizarre but mesmerizing world around me had started to seep through my pores and reorganize the molecules of my body, opening me up to places and experiences I had never before known how to imagine.
“I’m happy,” Toru said, still staring out at the garden. And then, because he wasn’t like me and didn’t need to analyze every possibility at the moment of its conception or prod every happiness for signs of future demise, he looked at me with a contented smile, grabbed my hand, and left it at that.
• • •
BEFORE I LEFT TORU ten days later at the airport, we went one night to an Italian restaurant. The room was flushed with candlelight, the jacketed waiters hovering just past earshot. Toru read the menu, Japanese with Italian subtitles, while I flipped vaguely through it, looking for words that resembled English ones, wondering in half interest if the waiters might mistake me for European, if my gauzy tank top and strappy sandals might project Continental chic. Before Toru began translating from the parchment page, I put aside my menu, clasped my hands along the table’s edge, and leaned in. “Tof,” I said.
Then we hunkered down to address in detail what options remained for our bicontinental bond.
Toru had a week off in October, and he suggested coming to Boston for a four-day visit—what would be left of his vacation after the two and a half days of travel the trip would devour. We agreed. I took a breat
h.
“What if I came back in December for a month or so, and then again next spring for longer? Like, three or four months?” I said. I could take the spring off from teaching or come toward the end of the semester and stay through the summer. In the meantime, I could try to pick up some freelance writing work to do from overseas.
Toru smiled wide, then nodded more than once. “Of course, I’m happy if you can do that.”
We discussed the plan over the multicourse meal. If the pattern worked, I might even continue going back and forth, spending part of the year in Boston, the rest in Japan. “If you feel too hard, moving to Osaka for full-time,” Toru suggested, “maybe we can build life together this way, and you can go home whenever you need. And if we want to, we can marry.” He nodded his head again, this time a graver gesture.
“Do you want to get married?” I asked, one fingertip running nervous arcs along the bottom of my wineglass.
“I want to stay together. Married or not married is not so big deal to me. But stay together, yes.” He looked straight at me. Then, looking down, he added, “If we can.”
I exhaled a little wisp of relief. But my mouth still felt dry and tight. I picked up my wine and sipped. I looked at Toru.
Despite my fears about marriage and becoming dependent on someone, I’d grown to long for an enduring, hope-to-last-forever bond with Toru. I still didn’t necessarily need a piece of paper as much as I needed to trust that he wanted to stay together, grow old in each other’s presence. Knowing that he did, I felt stung with joy. But how to fit, long-term, both Osaka and Boston into the equation? The question terrified me.
“So, do you think, if we got married, we could move to Boston . . . or at least the U.S., in the next couple of years? Would your company ever transfer us?”
“Maybe, sometime in next few years,” Toru said. “Maybe to the U.S. To California, San Diego. Or else, could be Kansas City.” He held my gaze. “But to Boston, or even East Coast, probably not,” he said, shaking his head, his eyes still locked on mine. “To Boston, no.”
“Kansas City?” I gasped. Then, more quietly, as if I needed to get used to the words themselves, I repeated, “Kansas City.”
I had never been there. But I had my ideas. It was far from the Northeast. It was not Chicago or San Francisco, or even Seattle. It contained the word “Kansas” in its name.
“We have an office there. There and San Diego.”
I knew that in Japan, and especially in traditional jobs like Toru’s, most men stayed with one company for life. Switching jobs signified a failure of loyalty, and loyalty was one of the culture’s most fundamental values. Looking for a position at another Japanese corporation—one with offices in New York or Boston—could hurt Toru’s career. I also recognized the slim likelihood of his succeeding as a nonnative English-speaking manager in an American company. Or of my supporting us both in Boston, even if I quit teaching in prisons and taught business writing full-time.
I’d already done the math. If I lived in Japan and worked as a freelance writer, I could go back to Boston when I wanted, as long as I could continue to afford the flights, and, I supposed, we remained childless. If Toru lived in the U.S. with a corporate job, he’d have a few weeks a year, at most, to go home.
And, of course, Toru was his family’s eldest son. He—and eventually his wife—would be expected to stay in Osaka and care for his father now that his mother was gone. Unless his father agreed to move with us, too.
I both loved and hated Toru’s honesty about our dismal prospects for life together in my hometown. It made me trust him more to know he’d never offer hollow promises. But at the same time, a piece of me longed for him to hold out some tiny sliver of hope, or at least soften the blow. To admit a little less forthrightly that if we built a home together the closest we’d probably ever get to Boston, until he retired in thirty years, was Missouri.
Ultimately, though, I knew as I set my teacup down on its bone-china saucer, there was only one thought whose relief matched the intensity of my worry: when I leave Toru again at the airport, at least it won’t be for good.
• • •
WHEN SHE CAUGHT wind of the plan a few days later by phone, my mother reacted with considerably less relief. She baldly assured me that I was getting deeper and deeper into an “unsustainable arrangement.” I didn’t tell her we had discussed marriage, but I admitted I was planning to return to Osaka in December, and then again in the spring to give living in Japan an earnest try. “Oh, for God’s sakes,” she chided me, the long-distance line sounding tinny, “are you really going to prolong this situation even further? Unless you really are considering moving to that country.” She paused. “Where you’ll be a foreigner for the rest of your life,” she helpfully elaborated.
But surprisingly the idea of being a foreigner, at least part-time, was no longer so awful. After all, Toru had made me feel so protected in the past month. Never before as an adult had I been so unable to do things for myself; the flip side revealed the sheer comfort of having someone take care of everything for me. Instead of feeling helpless, most of the time I felt safe. I was ashamed to admit it, but in Japan, I found a delicious release in the unexpected taste of utter dependence.
I thought about my Boston-bound hunger for social challenges: writing my dissertation on violence and gender, teaching in prisons, hoping the classes might encourage my students to think about masculinity and power in new ways, that their degrees might help them get jobs when they got out of lockup so they could return to their own children and break the cycle of recidivism. But now I began to question whether passion or some confused mix of guilt and ego fueled my motivations. What if I lived in a world where I couldn’t confront these challenges? Sure, I’d be more limited, less useful. I’d also be playing into some gender stereotypes of my own: a woman dependent on a man to take care of her. But wouldn’t I also be absolved of the responsibilities accompanying both the privilege and potential of my American life? That absolution, that freedom, felt terribly seductive.
FIVE
I DIDN’T FEEL THE SHIFT, THE particular Americanness, of the space around me until halfway through my layover in Chicago. At first, the specifics of my surroundings blurred together. I was so obliterated by exhaustion after the fourteen-hour flight from Osaka, with another two-and-a-half-hour leg to Boston in front of me, that I still have only a vague memory of passing through passport control and customs. I hazily recollect lugging bags from a metal carousel, crossing broad hallways and wide wings to domestic departures, and shuffling once more through security.
What eventually brought me to sharp attention, cut clean through the fog of my fatigue, was the woman on the cell phone. Her voice. Her volume. And most of all, her apparent—and complete—lack of impact on almost everyone around us.
She waited in front of me at the gate for Boston, her scuffed, overstuffed backpack slung loosely over one shoulder, long hair in a dark brown mutiny, blue jeans barely containing her backside. “The plane is delayed!” she shouted into the phone. “This fucking flight isn’t going to take off for at least another hour!” Then silence, followed by “I know! The airlines suck,” before she slapped the handset closed.
Now it hit me: I was home.
For the first few seconds, the shift jarred me physically, as if my body were still inhabiting a world where politeness and self-possession were premium, rather than one prizing self-expression above all. Doesn’t she know she’s screaming into the phone and annoying everyone around her? I felt embarrassed by her lack of restraint.
But everyone else appeared to take her yelling in stride. The man behind me rolled his eyes, but otherwise, no one even noticed. Then, as the space around her absorbed her emphatic style with a minimum of concern, my own annoyance began to dissolve. I felt myself slipping from stern disapproval into grudging tolerance, buoyed by a low expectation of politeness that I realized had always permeated t
he American air I breathed: a barometric pressure utterly foreign to Japan.
I was too bleary-eyed to muse for long over my first stage of reimmersion, though. As I reached the counter, I confirmed that my seat was, in fact, on the aisle and that the flight was, in fact, delayed, then slumped into the thin cushioning of a blue vinyl seat in the waiting area. As I sat with my eyes closed, my brain felt grainy, barely able to grasp that I still had hours more to go before reaching Boston and my soft bed in my South End studio.
I was asleep somewhere over Ohio when a flight attendant announced that we had to turn back to O’Hare. One of the toilets in the back was clogged, it was close to overflowing, and with most of the flight still ahead, the captain didn’t like the risks. “We’ll have you on the ground and transferred to another plane as soon as possible,” her monotone assured, an implicit injunction not to react with any sort of gumption.
No luck. Groans of protest rose across the plane. “We don’t want to turn back!” a man yelled. “Let’s just keep going and not use that bathroom!” He seemed incredulous that such an obvious solution hadn’t already been arrived at by the uniformed people in charge. A few others roused themselves to action, jamming plastic trays into position, stuffing bagged nuts into seatback pockets, propelling upward to their feet, their brusque determination belying the undignified state of their wrinkled laps as they prepared to advance upon the galley.
Then the captain came on. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, his voice like a stern uncle’s. “Please return to your seats.” He allowed a soft pause, adding, “I’m captain of this craft, and I’ve determined that turning her around is our safest option.”