by Tracy Slater
Instead, we began with hiragana, a letter-based alphabet like English of forty-eight units. Then we would move on to katakana, another forty-eight-unit syllabary, but one reserved for foreign words. As if in perfect expression of Japan’s insularity, no concept originating from another culture should sully the purity of hiragana. Words such as “coffee” (pronounced co-hee), “wine” (wiyn), “PC” (pasa-con, a kind of linguistic shorthand for “personal computer”), and “sexual harassment” (seku-hara) are all garrisoned securely within katakana.
Along with alphabets, we spent the first week practicing introductions. “Watashi-wa Tracy desu,” I learned to say, “I am Tracy.” “America kara kimashita,” “I came from America.” I tried at first to claim I came from the U.S., thinking that labeling my home simply “America” might be insulting to others from the far Western continents. “U.S. kara kimashita,” I offered, which resulted in a roomful of blank stares.
“America, desu-ne?” the teacher asked, a smile crinkling her eyes as her nod beckoned me on. “America, right?”
Unable to explain my political correctness in Japanese, I broke into English, the one language everyone in the room understood to some extent. “But isn’t that insulting?” I protested. “To call the United States just ‘America’?” I sat back, pleased to have proven myself one of my country’s more sensitive citizens in the age of George W. Bush. Everyone still stared blankly at me.
“You know,” I persisted, “wouldn’t that insult people from, let’s say Canada, or the rest of North or even South America or something?” Respected Teacher Fujita cocked her head at me, a look of utter incomprehension on her face, despite her ability to follow my words. The Korean woman stared around the room, as if searching for missing Canadians.
“Watashi-wa Fujita. Watashi-wa Nihon kara kimashita,” the teacher said, not unkindly, tapping her nose. “I am Fujita. I come from Japan.” Then she gestured to me. “Anata-wa To-ray-shee-san desu,” “You are To-ray-shee-san,” she said. “America kara kimashita,” her smile now a promise to guide me patiently through a lesson that had clearly confounded me.
Oy, I thought.
She gestured once more toward me, and I surrendered. “Watashi-wa Tracy desu,” I parroted. “Watashi-wa America kara kimashita.” Respected Teacher Fujita gave a little celebratory clap, then hugged her hands together as if savoring some small delight before she turned to the teenaged boy next to me.
He informed us that his name was Feng, which he pronounced Fung, and he was from Chu-gakkou. Before I could stop myself, I interrupted again. “Chu-gakkou?” I asked. “What’s Chu-ga-ko?”
Respected Teacher Fujita slid her eyes in my direction, a hint of patience possibly wearing thin on her eternally kind face. “China,” she said softly in English, nodding quickly in her own small surrender. Then she moved to the man in the suit. “Watashi-wa Chen,” he said. “Watashi-wa Taiwan kara-kimashita.”
Feng whipped around in his chair to face his neighbor. “Chu-gakkou!” he corrected.
“Taiwan,” Chen countered.
“Chu-gakkou!” the teenaged Feng said once again, and then he broke into a stream of what I assumed was either Mandarin or Cantonese.
I snapped my head around to see how Respected Teacher Fujita was going to handle the minor diplomatic showdown erupting in her classroom. She blinked a moment, then smiled wider, as if the conversation were all part of a polite nice-to-meet-you. I turned back to the China-Taiwan conflict.
Chen grumbled quietly under his breath, but then he began to laugh. He expostulated something in some language back to Feng: I guessed a gentle scolding from an elder. Then Feng began to laugh, too, a teenaged chortle followed by a quick swipe of long bangs from his eyes, and the moment passed. Respected Teacher Fujita happily clasped her hands together once more, looking almost beatific, and turned to the Thai wife.
A few weeks later, the class moved on to the topic of hobbies and jobs. I learned that Feng was here because his mother had married a Japanese man (a fact he had to explain to me in broken English, since the Japanese explanation was completely beyond me) and that he worked in a ramen restaurant. Chen was a Taiwanese businessman whose company had sent him to learn Japanese (also a fact learned through hushed English translation while Respected Teacher Fujita was busy at the blackboard). The Thai woman, named Bhuta-san, provided no end of mirth for the teenaged Feng, since the Japanese word for “pig” is bu-ta.
“Bhuta-san, shigoto-wa nan desuka?” “Mrs. Bhuta, what is your work?” the teacher asked while Feng sniggered. Bhuta-san looked at the Chinese teen with a tight, helpless smile, her dimpled cheeks reddening, and then she turned to Respected Teacher. “Watashi-wa shufu desu!” she answered.
“Shufu? What’s shufu?” I blurted out, as usual, in English. It was the first time I’d been introduced to the term.
“Shufu!” The teacher turned to me, as if I simply hadn’t heard, as if it were not possible not to know this word.
“Shufu!” Bhuta-san repeatedly kindly for me, this time a little louder.
“Shufu!” the Korean woman, An-san, echoed helpfully. Chen-san and Feng-san nodded knowingly.
I shrugged.
“Shufu! Housewife!” Respected Teacher explained.
“Oh,” I said. “Shufu. Housewife.”
“An-san wa?” the teacher asked, turning to the Korean woman.
“Watashi-mo wa shufu desu!” “I am also a housewife!”
“Watashi-mo, desu-ne!” Respected Teacher Fujita said happily, “I am, too, you know!” pointing to her nose again. Apparently, despite her part-time job teaching at the Y, she still defined herself by her primary identity as married to her house.
“To-ray-shee-san wa?” she asked me next, nodding. “To-ray-shee-san no shigoto wa nan desuka?” “What is To-ray-shee-san’s work?” “To-ray-shee-san wa shufu desuka?” “Is To-ray-shee-san a housewife?”
I thought about my years of university jobs in Boston, my work teaching inmates. I pictured myself at past faculty meetings, sitting forward at a table flush with academics, my blazer-suited forearm supporting my weight as I leaned in to expostulate, comment, challenge, or demur. Heads would nod. Jargon would be deployed, egos would plump up like a fat bird’s plumage in the knowledge that we spoke of learned things.
Now, I struggled to land a few simple words. “Oh, shufu, no,” I said, then dutifully added in Japanese, “iie, iie,” “no, no.” I shot a half-apologetic, half-I-hope-I-still-seem-respectful smile at Bhuta-san, nodded to An-san.
“Watashi wa . . . freelance writer,” I said, then added, “How do you say ‘freelance writer’ in Japanese?” I mimed holding a pen over an imaginary piece of paper, pinching together my index finger and thumb, and moving them back and forth, hoping to distract Respected Teacher Fujita from my persistent use of English.
“Ii, desu-ne! Furino raita!” she exclaimed. “Isn’t that great? A freelance writer!”
Bhuta-san smiled at me, her expression one of gentleness infused with perhaps a touch of pity, while An-san looked skeptical, as if, with all this freelance writing business, I was eventually bound to fail when my marriage became official and I graduated to shufu. Chen and Feng just nodded noncommittally. My classroom culture shock became complete a few days later when, moving on to the topic of favorite hobbies, Respected Teacher Fujita explained that hers was “cleaning house.”
When I brought my first quiz home—a line of wobbly katakana I had written mostly correctly, earning only a few swipes of Respected Teacher’s red pencil—Toru held it up for full view. “Oh, great!” he enthused, nodding in silent agreement with both the crimson corrections and the bright check mark at the paper’s corner. “That’s great!” he said again, and then he put the paper down and turned to me. He smiled wide, then drew his mouth together in a more serious aspect, as if he had important news to impart. “You know,” he said, nodding, “I have some inf
ormation: I feel proud you.” Then he nodded once more, more firmly this time, and I buried my face in his shoulder.
• • •
BEFORE KEI’S WEDDING in August, Toru told me that the event would include formal family introductions, common at Japanese marriages. The bride’s family would sit in one line, the groom’s facing them in another, and one by one, each member would rise and be introduced. This would happen after the main ceremony and have no witnesses outside direct relatives. “So,” Toru asked me, “are you okay with being my fiancée? With being announced?”
We were in Tetsunobu-san’s apartment picking up more clothes for Toru to bring to the weekly mansion. His father was in the living room watching a National Geographic–like show on TV, animals chasing each other with hot, quick strides or lounging sleepily in their habitats, the hushed, liquid voice of the announcer strangely similar to American animal-show narrators even though the language was different. Every once in a while, Tetsunobu-san would sip cold tea from a small green ceramic cup, his right hand shaking again as he brought it to his mouth.
Suddenly, I felt a small, fluttering anxiety inside at the idea of announcing our engagement formally. But nothing is irreversible, I thought.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.” Then, “What do I have to do? Do I have to say anything? In Japanese?” A new kind of nervousness pulsed.
Toru assured me that I only had to say one line of greeting, which he’d rehearse with me beforehand. He’d sit next to me and tell me when to rise, and then I’d stand up and do a little bow toward Funaki-san’s family and give my salutation, and then I could sit down again. “But how about ring?” he asked. “Do we need? Do you want it?”
“Ring?”
“Yeah, ring, like engagement ring. We don’t need, though,” Toru said. He’d already told me he hated wearing jewelry. I’d already told him I thought diamond rings were a waste of money and I had no desire to own one. But we still hadn’t decided whether or not I would get a different kind of ring or wear anything to signify our engagement or marriage.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Let’s just wait and see. I don’t really need a ring, but if we find one, a cheap one that we like, maybe we could buy it. We have a few weeks, right?”
That weekend, we went shopping in Osaka’s Umeda District, flush with upscale malls and underground boutiques. I’d seen a ring I’d loved a few weeks earlier in a store called Beams, a sort of Japanese cross between the American shops Madewell and Barneys with a touch of the more youthful Forever 21 thrown in. The ring bore no resemblance to anything bridal, but it had a chunky sliver band that managed to look both graceful and substantial, with a dangling glass piece cut like a sweetheart diamond but as black as night, so it flashed darkly and made a delicate tinkling sound when I moved my hand.
It was the sound of that tinkling I liked best. Within the chaos of Osaka, the bright noise felt like Toru’s love: like an anchor, a little aural tether securing me in place amidst a swirling world.
“Huh,” Toru said when I waved the ring at him from my right hand. Although neither one of us was superstitious and the piece was clearly not meant for an engagement, I was reluctant to place the band on my left hand while we stood in the store. A thin, lovely salesgirl watched us, her lips pursed, her hands held neatly at her front, and my cheeks felt hot under her stare. Does she know we’re thinking of this for our marriage? I wondered. Is she surprised that he’s engaged to a gaijin? Does she think the ring is stupid? Then, Does she think my hips seem big compared to a Japanese woman’s?
Inside, I felt the sting of disappointment at my own self-consciousness. I tried focusing on Toru’s expression, on his words rather than the useless chatter in my head. As I waved my hand back and forth, his look of concentration cracked into a smile. “Actually, kind of cool,” he said. He watched my hand toggle to and fro another moment. Then, “Kind of great.”
“It doesn’t look anything like an engagement ring, does it, Tof?” A surge of something light washed through me, along with a smug sense of invulnerability, thinking of how the salesgirl wouldn’t be able to follow our rapid English.
After we bought the ring, we went for lunch at a little Vietnamese stall tucked into a hallway of Umeda’s sprawling underground. Toru sat across the table from me, grasping the shiny dark blue bag with the wrapped ring. We ordered pad thai and satay and soup, and then Toru pushed some fried rice crackers out of the way, little swirls of pink and white in a rough wooden bowl, and removed the jewelry from its box.
“Could you,” he said, suddenly quiet and grave, his voice soft, his dark expression fixed and staring carefully into mine, “Could you still consider to marrying me?” He handed me the ring, and I grinned at his sudden formality amidst all our shunning of tradition. Then I took the ring and slipped my finger through its shiny silver hoop, and we listened to the bright tinkle lifting in the air around us.
NINE
THE WEEKEND OF KEI’S WEDDING, Tokyo was a furnace. The sky was steel blue, the sun clamping down like a vise. I stepped outside and within a minute my skin was slick: August in Japan. Osaka, when we’d left it a few days earlier, had been even hotter.
I’d brought a thin, sleeveless, V-neck black sheath with a little camisole to shorten the neckline’s plunge. But the morning of the wedding, I discovered I’d forgotten the right underwear. The ones I had were visible through the dress and pinched a bit at the waist, giving me a little fleshy swell at my hip that Toru thought was sexy and I thought was out of the question. My size-six frame, petite in the U.S., was already big by Japanese standards. I wasn’t inclined to further accentuate any curves.
Also out of the question were stockings. I never wore them, and I wasn’t starting in ninety-eight-degree weather. Besides, by the time my lingerie crisis became apparent, we had no time to buy either new underwear or hosiery.
Standing in our tiny hotel room, air-conditioning blasting, I said, “Well, I guess I’ll just go without underwear, Tof.”
“Oh, great . . . ,” he said, still captivated by the sheet he was studying that held directions to the restaurant and wedding space. He clasped the strong swoop of his jaw in one hand, eyes staring hard at the paper.
I held up a little compact mirror to try to see how the dress looked with me denuded underneath. We were staying in a business hotel, a no-frills place offering rooms not much bigger than our weekly mansion, but immaculately clean and about a quarter of the price of a regular hotel in Tokyo. I angled the hand mirror toward the small wall one they provided.
I moved the little mirror right, then left, then right again. The room had one night-table lamp and a fluorescent ceiling light, but I couldn’t tell if my dress would be see-through where Kei’s ceremony and party would be held. From one angle, it looked fine. But from another: How much is visible back there? I imagined standing up to be introduced as Toru’s fiancée to all of Kei’s new in-laws and hearing uncomfortable Japanese murmurs rippling through the room.
“Tof!” I yelled, even though he was only a few feet from me. “Is this see-through?”
“It’s fine,” he said, still not looking up from the printed directions.
“Seriously, Tof. I need to know.”
He glanced upward, nodded, and looked back down. “No problem!”
“Because you know how embarrassed I’d be if, like, Funaki-san’s grandmother noticed I was naked underneath?” I shifted the hand mirror some more, angling it high, then lower, then turning to face the wall mirror so I could study my reflection straight on.
“I don’t think grandmother will come,” Toru muttered, no more consumed with those directions than he could be if they held a map to Atlantis.
“Tof! Seriously! Won’t you be embarrassed, too, if someone notices?”
He sighed, put the directions down in his lap. “You’re enough sexy anyway,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“You know. Enough sexy!” he repeated.
I slanted my head and widened my eyes at him, giving him my best “in English, at least, that doesn’t clarify anything” stare.
He sighed again. “You can’t help but be sexy,” he said, forehead wrinkling under the black spikes of his hair. “Underwear or no underwear is no matter. Still sexy, either way.” Then he motioned for me to turn around so he could give my backside one final check. I wondered if the vision of Funaki-san’s grandmother, mother, whomever, noticing suspicious swells and valleys under my dress had finally unnerved him.
“It’s fine,” he said again, as I turned back to face him. “Looks good! And anyway,” he said, eyes now wandering back to that beloved direction sheet, “no one looks at your hip but me!”
• • •
ONCE WE HIT the sidewalk and were swaddled in humidity as thick as gauze, I stopped worrying about panty lines. The less I had on, the better. We walked the eight or nine blocks to the wedding venue, a restaurant in the upscale Ginza neighborhood with an extra room that could be transformed into a makeshift chapel. In the heavy, heat-blasting air, I was glad Toru had studied the directions so well. I had to wipe under my eyes to keep my mascara from running down my face.
As we entered the building, cold air-conditioning hit me, licking up my arms, legs, and face. Bliss, I thought. At the elevator, Toru’s older cousin Jiro-san joined us, along with his wife, Sachi-san. I’d never met them, but I’d heard they were funny and outgoing and, as Toru said, “a little wild.” At their wedding, Toru had told me, one of their friends had gotten drunk and hoisted himself onto a table—minus pants or underwear—and lay with his legs spread up into the air.