by Tracy Slater
I didn’t know exactly how much Toru made, but I offered an estimate, then immediately mentioned his place on a managerial track. I explained that full-time Japanese corporate employees earn considerably less and work substantially more than their American counterparts, but their jobs are much more secure, given the country’s ethos of lifetime employment. “His company even sent him to the U.S., funded his exec MBA,” I said, “so they must have faith in his future, his leadership potential.” I felt hot, annoyed, both at myself and my interrogators, despite their good intentions. My brother-in-law’s blue eyes stared evenly at me for a moment, his face like a placid lake. I wondered if he was mentally comparing Toru’s one graduate degree with his own multiple Ivy League diplomas.
“Well,” he said, his gaze still straight, almost tranquil, “that’s less than even my secretary makes.”
I sat back and blanched, wondering for a split second why I hadn’t ever thought of getting a job as an admin in a private-equity firm. Then I thought, God, I hope none of the waiters here are listening to this, looking around quickly, embarrassed.
My sister jumped in. “I know you love Toru,” she said, “and he really is a good person, a really good person. We can all tell . . . even though he doesn’t talk that much.” But the airfare going back and forth, she pointed out, would build up quickly. Would I really be happy long-term in such a tiny apartment in Japan? How would I keep up with my rent in Boston? Would I really be okay never being able to hire help if I needed it, not even if we had a baby? “Sometimes,” she said, “you need more than just to love someone to make it work out.”
I tried to point out that millions—billions—of people lived just fine on way less than Toru and I would earn. “Compared to normal people,” I said snarkily, a subtle critique of their own wealth, “Toru and I are incredibly lucky, and we are doing just fine. We have way more money than the average person.”
“Well, that’s true,” my brother-in-law said, gesturing to the waiter to put lunch on his tab, checking his watch for his upcoming golf game. “But you just need to be sure you’re going to be happy being average.”
• • •
I WAS ANGRY after our country-club lunch, but at what specifically I couldn’t tell. I knew there was an inherent snobbery in my dismissal of my sister and her husband simply because they had money, liked nice things, and thought I would, too. My brother-in-law had made his fortune, not inherited it, and he and my sister gave more money to charity and so accomplished more good than I probably ever would teaching gender studies and writing in a prison or to homeless people. Shouldn’t that make me less judgmental of them, less disbelieving of my brother-in-law’s insights about the tie between finances and contentment? Plus, part of me agreed with my sister. Sometimes you do need more than just love to build a life. Did Toru and I have enough between us to make it work? And even deeper, another question pricked, a nagging sense that I really didn’t want to be average, however much I might disdain the hubris of this admission.
Then I felt annoyed at myself all over again. If I had valued or needed a life of wealth, I could have tried harder to earn it myself, could have forgone the English Ph.D. and gone to law school—or at least not chosen a job teaching inmates. Why blame Toru for a financial future I had already basically settled for myself?
I called my brother. He was now a doctor (much to my mother’s exuberant delight) married to a woman who had converted to Judaism (much to my mother’s delayed approval) and living on Cape Cod with their two young children. He had gone to medical school in Israel, and he pointed out the difficulties of living overseas, far from family and friends. “Are you sure you’ll really be able to maintain a life, a job, and two apartments on either side of the world?” he asked.
“I know I’ll regret it forever if I don’t at least try to make this relationship, this life with Toru, work,” I told him.
“I’m not sure how, or whether, it will work out,” he told me. But still, he had no real reason for me not to try.
The only member of my family who embraced the plan fully was my father. “Living on another continent, so far away from everyone? Sounds heavenly, Trebs!” he assured me brightly, using his nickname for me. “What a life! What an adventure!” I didn’t dwell on the economics. Starting with the market crash in ’87, my father’s family real estate business had downsized considerably. He’d never really wanted to run it anyway, and now he’d finally managed to escape it after decades of profit-dwindling deals. So I didn’t want him to think I was angling for cash. Anyway, I’d been totally financially independent for years, a point of pride for me. But I did mention my greatest fear: how I’d manage to come home for any extended period of time if we lived in Osaka and had kids.
“Kids!” my father blurted out. “What would you want to do something like that for?” Then he lowered his voice a notch. “Kids. Kids are a life sentence,” he confided. On one hand, he sounded like he might be joking; partly, on the other, he sounded like a man pressed to truth by a triple purpose: one part earnest reporting from the trenches, one part filial duty to set me straight, and one part delight that I was finally old enough to have these kinds of father-daughter heart-to-hearts.
A few nights later, I stayed late at my office at the university, then stopped at an Indian restaurant near campus, where I had taken Toru when he had lived in Boston. A regular, I knew the staff, and sometimes we would chat while I was waiting for takeout. A middle-aged man—dark-suited, generously mustached, and round about the torso—was presiding over the dining room that night. His white shirt strained slightly under his black jacket to cover the small rotunda of his middle. He spoke with the flint-edged rhythm of Indian-accented English, commenting that he hadn’t seen me in a while.
I explained my new bicontinental lifestyle, mentioned Toru, with whom he had surely seen me the year before. I explained Toru was now my fiancé, surprising myself by feeling a little blip of excitement uttering such an old-fashioned term.
“But what will you do when you marry?” the man asked.
“Oh,” I answered, tossing my head to suggest a carefree, renegade nature, “I’ll just keep going back and forth. We’ll live together part-time and apart part-time. If we have kids, maybe his father will help take care of them, or they’ll come back and forth with me,” I added, proving how well thought out the whole thing was.
“Oh, no, no, no, no, no,” the man clucked softly. Then he told me in no uncertain terms how terrible our plan was. He stood behind the restaurant’s small bar, cashier machine in the corner, and spread his palms wide under the stained-glass lamps. “You cannot marry and live apart!” he claimed, his tone a rising musical staccato. “You must choose one country or the other!” He had brought his wife and both her parents over from India when he moved here, he insisted, and no other family configuration made sense. Or was even conceivable.
I took my saag paneer and naan, clutching the take-out bag, and fled into the night. Driving home through Boston’s Kenmore Square, then past Symphony Hall and finally into the South End, I couldn’t shake the anxiety his words had stoked inside me, pricking at me like a pin. Now not only my family, but even the take-out Indian guy is predicting the failure of our bihemispheric marriage, I brooded. And he’s even from another country, so he must know what he’s talking about.
After a hasty dinner, I waited impatiently for eleven p.m., when it would be noon in Osaka and Toru’s lunch break would begin. We talked three times a day: in the morning my time, before he went to bed; in Boston’s early evening, when he was waking in Japan; and just before I went to bed, when he was stopping for lunch on his side of the planet. As is customary in traditional Japanese companies, his lunchtime was fixed, precise: noon on the dot until twelve-forty-five, not a minute later or earlier. He ate in the company canteen, where uniformed servers would lay out small dishes from which to choose: various types of meat, fish, and vegetables, plus white rice and m
iso soup.
At exactly eleven p.m., I dialed. “Tof,” I said immediately, “I’m kind of freaking out.”
I explained how no one thought our marriage was a good idea: not my family, not the Indian take-out guy. “You remember him, right?” I said. “From India Quality, the restaurant in Kenmore Square. With the really good saag.”
I gave him the rough outline of my family’s financial concerns. “They say we won’t be able to afford the kind of life we’ll need for me to come back and forth, and maybe they’re right,” I told him. “They pointed out how expensive it is to own a house or apartment, or to have kids. You know, schooling and stuff like that. Only my father thinks it’s a good idea,” I said, pausing for a moment. “But he also told me that he thinks having kids is like a life sentence.”
Toru ignored my father’s take on parenthood, instead countering with the observation that we didn’t even know if we wanted to have kids, and we were managing just fine with me going back and forth. That the top schools in Japan were public ones, unlike in the U.S., and not expensive, although very hard to get into. I continued to lob my worries at him, and he continued to serve back measured, rational assurances. Finally, he puffed out a little sigh, a mixture of confusion and forced patience. I pressed the phone closer to my cheek, gripping it forcefully, and its heat began to make my cheek sweat. Outside my window, the hum of city traffic played on, car tires traversing smooth asphalt, syncopating out into the night.
Then, “I’m sorry,” Toru said, his tone suddenly cheerful, belying the apology of his words.
Sorry?
“I’m sorry, but I can’t be getting too worried about this,” he continued, his voice almost melodic. “You know, your family probably would worry even if I made a million dollars in each year.”
Huh, I thought. I had no ready retort.
“Maybe even two,” he added, pronouncing it “eben,” replacing the v his lexicon functions just fine without.
I stayed silent a moment longer, and I felt not just my moist cheek but my whole face hot and my body sweating from the heat of both the cell phone and our conversation, from the exertion of trying to prove all the ways our marriage was doomed.
“Well, what about the India Quality guy?” I staked one final attempt at impending calamity. “He’s from another country, moved here with his wife, so maybe he really knows what he’s talking about!”
“Oh, him,” Toru said, his voice a swatter dispatching a fly. “Well, he should just shut up his smelly mouth!”
A laugh shot out of me, releasing all the tension I’d been holding. I’d never heard a slight like that before, and certainly not from Toru. It was base, cutting, foul. And totally hilarious. It became my new favorite insult.
• • •
CAREERWISE, Japan continued to be both a challenge and a boon. When I e-mailed my Osaka food article to the newspaper editor in Boston—leaving out the parts about my being unable to stomach anything 1) slimy, 2) raw, or 3) all that unique—she rejected it. More precisely, she failed to respond. When I tried to resend it, I got an automatic response that she’d moved on. Later, I heard that before she left her post she’d had a tendency to encourage new writers on articles she wasn’t necessarily planning to run.
I already knew my success as a food writer was dubious, though. With my two teaching jobs, my Boston life in full swing around me, and the likelihood the university would continue to funnel me freelance writing, the closure of this career door failed to rankle much.
My literary series continued to grow as well. I scheduled three more events for that winter and spring, and now had a waiting list of writers wanting to read. The Boston Globe and other local media began reporting that people were being turned away at the door because the events were so popular, calling Four Stories the city’s hippest reading series. Some people began referring to me as the bicontinental writer (with, one reporter even wrote, “the glitter eye shadow”!) who founded it. Suddenly, I had an identity known in public—albeit to a very modest circle—and it involved both Japan and Boston. My new image, on paper at least, made my multihemispheric relationship sound kind of cool, not just, or even necessarily, a doomed arrangement. Well, I began to assure myself, if the cultural editor for the Bostonist blog doesn’t bat an eye at my living half the year in the U.S. and half in Osaka, why should I?
At the prison that semester, I was leading a course in the American modern novel, a senior seminar with students who’d made it almost all the way through the college-behind-bars program. The men sat in an uneven semicircle in front of me, stuffed into little chairs that looked like donations from an elementary school. Most of them wore faded jeans and old sweatshirts, although a few boasted prison-issue short-sleeved tops, denying the late fall air the power to make them shiver. Some sat back in their small seats, legs splayed out in front, arms crossed over chests; others hunched forward, elbows on desks, feet tapping to some internal beat.
I perched behind a scarred wooden desk, clasping fingers to fists as a cold wind seeped through the classroom’s rickety panes. Every few minutes, a guard—or CO, “corrections officer,” we were instructed to call them—circled the hallway, peeking through the door’s cut-out window to ensure order prevailed. For the most part, the students policed themselves, knowing any serious infraction would doom the entire college program: no one wanted to face the pool of inmates who would be deprived of the chance to earn a free university degree if one troublemaker ruined everything.
We were focusing on the theme of the fallen hero in Hemingway, Ellison, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald. I placed my hands palms down on the scratched desktop, the sleeves of my floppy sweater reaching past my thumbs. Planting my scuffed flats on the old linoleum floor, I leaned forward toward the class.
“What about the theme of independence?” I asked. “The lone wolf, the hero impervious to his surroundings?” I glanced quickly at one of the short-sleeved inmates, biceps denuded, arms crossed over his chest to suggest an insouciance born of strength, not an effort to keep warm. Keeping my expression mild, I moved my eyes along the circle of men.
Students began raising hands, offering observations, and so we began a discussion one might have in any college classroom, minus the barbed wire outside our windows: of the American dream, the individual, and the ways our novels both affirmed and undermined these concepts. I rarely disclosed personal information in the prison program other than the broad outlines of my background: the region of the country where I grew up and went to college, my major, how many years I’d been teaching on traditional university campuses and in the prison system. But the students tended to talk frequently about prison culture and their lives before lockup and how what they saw in literature either reflected or seemed irrelevant to their own experiences. They also knew I was going overseas soon, that this was why we had to double up on classes for the first part of the semester, and, no, they couldn’t finish their final papers late and mail them to me at my university office, because I would be gone. So today I mentioned my Japanese soon-to-be in-laws, and the East Asian view of independence as suspect, where loyalty to the group was the real test of strength and success.
“Wait, you’re marrying a Japanese dude?” one of the men blurted out. A handful nodded sagely, as they always did whenever I said anything confirming their view of me as a radical leftist—such as questioning traditional representations of masculinity, arguing for gay rights, and now, apparently, marrying a man of another ethnicity.
At break later that day, the men milled about, some loitering around their seats, others pouring into the hallway to trade insults with students from the ESL and GED classes. Heading to the office for xeroxes, I noticed a former student coming my way. He was slight, with a fuzz mustache and a Vietnamese name I remembered from my gender-theory seminar the year before. He made a beeline for me, then stopped abruptly a foot or so away. He looked as if he had something important to say, but also as if
he were bereft of either memory or speech. Settling instead on a silent grin, he turned to the men who had crowded up behind him. “Aw, shit,” he said, punching his neighbor lightly on the arm before pivoting fully from me. Then, all bases apparently either covered or forfeited, he took his leave.
• • •
BY MID-APRIL, 2006, I was back in Japan for a four-month stay. Toru and I planned to spend the rest of the year researching and gathering the legal documents we’d need to marry in Osaka: a notarized Affidavit of Competency to Marry, written in English, which all foreigners marrying in Japan must use to certify their status as free and able to wed according to the laws of their own country; a second copy of this affidavit translated into Japanese; a municipal form called a Kon-in Todoke bearing the signature of two witnesses; and an official copy of Toru’s Japanese family register, or Koseki Tohon, documenting household members.
That spring, Toru and I rented another studio in the same building as before. Once we were legally married, Toru’s company would pay the realtor’s fee for a long-term apartment, as well as the “key money” (an initial charge of three or so months’ rent). They’d also cover our moving costs, the purchase of many of our appliances, and half of our rent for almost ten years: the Japanese corporate version of support for family values, a deal we would forfeit if we cohabitated before marriage. Until then, we’d make do squeezing into a tiny weekly mansion.
• • •
THAT SPRING AND SUMMER, I began spending more time with my new friend Jodi. After Lea had introduced us the winter before, we had kept in touch, making plans for when we’d be in Osaka at the same time. It didn’t take long once we were both back in Japan for a close friendship to cement. Like many expat relationships, our bond came fast and strengthened quickly. Our shared sense of fascination, isolation, and at times complete discombobulation in Japan intensified our friendship, especially since we didn’t know anyone else attempting to live half in Osaka, half in the U.S.