by Tracy Slater
I enrolled in another Japanese class at the YWCA and joined a gym near the school. I could now very slowly sound out words that were written in the two alphabets we’d learned. This helped at cafés: I could recognize items like hotto cohee (hot coffee), ca-fe o-rei (café au lait), or butta toast-o (buttered toast) even when there were no pictures. But I quickly realized that learning Japanese would prove much harder than even I’d anticipated. For one, the writing system provides no separation between words, so whole sentences run together in one long string combining all elements, including kanji, the primary one I still didn’t know. To me, it felt similar to trying to read soMEthiNGLIkeThiSBUtwitHONeextRaunrEAdAbLeaLPHabeTTHRownin.
Even apart from reading, the language seemed like Japan’s phonological equivalent of China’s Great Wall: an impenetrable barricade barring foreigners. In addition to regular conjugations (different verb forms for past, present, etc.), the grammar encompasses up to five forms of honorifics, each dependent on both your role and that of your interlocutor. Understanding roles, in turn, requires extensive cultural knowledge about both hierarchy and the Japanese notions of groups and boundaries: elder relatives require different forms than both younger relatives and elder nonrelatives, but speaking to the latter about the first requires yet another variation. The word for “husband” changes depending on whether you are talking about your own spouse to a family member or stranger, about a stranger’s spouse in a formal setting, or about a stranger’s spouse in a casual situation. And that’s just the nouns.
“Why can’t I just learn the most polite form,” I asked Toru, “and use that all the time?”
“Actually, kind of rude to use most polite form in casual situation,” he said. Employing too formal a conjugation at the wrong time suggested snobbery and an uncouth mixing of boundaries, more hierarchical no-no’s, he explained.
Then there was the counting: well over a dozen different ways to say “one, two, three,” depending on the kind and shape of the object being counted. Flat objects, like plates, require one word, long items like bottles or pencils another, people a third, buildings yet another, and on and on.
In school, the verb forms we were learning were not the ones people used in everyday conversation. So after months and months of Japanese class, I could order a drink, ask for a bigger size at a store, or inquire formally about someone’s hobbies (which never did come in handy), but having a conversation remained well beyond my reach: once someone responded, it was usually all over.
The gym proved equally challenging. One week, I summoned the courage to try a yoga class—or what I thought was yoga. I knew which studio held the classes, and I looked on that room’s schedule to see which time slots contained notations. Where a time slot has writing, that must mean a class, I reasoned.
On the day in question, I arrived at the gym early. At the threshold to the locker room, I removed my “outdoor” sneakers, as required, and stored them in a cubby, then walked in stocking feet to my locker. After changing into yoga pants and a T-shirt, I carried my “inside” sneakers to the edge of the locker room before putting them on. I didn’t understand the logic of inside and outside sneakers, since we wore both up and down the stairs to the locker room, but I knew enough to follow protocol.
When I got to the yoga studio, a number of women were already lying on their mats, wispy hips encased in stretch pants and matching tops, indoor sneakers removed and set neatly beside. Some lay with their eyes closed, and two had their faces pointed toward each other, whispering softly. Lying down myself, I alternated gazing up at the ceiling and looking around the starkly tidy room: wooden floor shiny and dustless, mats and blocks stacked in their corners, edges aligned. I tried not to stare at the other women, but I wanted to keep watch, knowing I would need to follow their movements once the class started.
When the teacher entered exactly on the hour, sat lotus style in one fluid swoop, and began to talk in Japanese, everyone closed her eyes. Must be some kind of beginning meditation. I squeezed my eyelids together, then cracked them open to check for signs of stirring, maybe a transition to Downward Dog pose. No movement.
Fifteen minutes later, we were still prone on our mats. Sometimes the teacher murmured in Japanese, and sometimes she went silent. Straining to move soundlessly, I toggled my head from left to right and back again, anxious to catch the beginning of the first yoga posture. This is the longest intro meditation ever.
Twenty minutes in, and still no change. On the ceiling, I thought I noticed little puffs of steam or fog coming from tiny apertures, but their outlines were indistinct. Good God, is there a gas leak? And when is the damn yoga flow actually going to start?
By thirty minutes in, I was taut with exasperation. I wondered if the subtle puffs of vapor coming from the ceiling were meant to be part of the meditation. Or is this an aromatherapy class? I never did find out. After fifty minutes of quiet commentary from the instructor alternating with periods of silence, my head flopping right and left on my mat as I tried to peer through pinched eyelids at what was happening around me (which was always nothing), the other women began to stir, sitting up, rolling their mats, nodding thanks to the serenely smiling teacher.
My cheeks burned as I gathered my indoor sneakers and replaced my mat. I imagined the other women trying to discern if I was fluent in Japanese or just hopelessly confused about both the class schedule and what had occurred over the past hour.
“Poor my love!” Toru said, a laugh breaking through his frown, when I told him that night. He offered to get a copy of the schedule and translate it for me, but I declined. I’d had enough of group activities. I’d just exercise on my own, on the treadmill I knew how to program or the cross-trainer whose controls I’d figured out.
Still, I was hopeful that my world might expand once Toru and I were officially married, or at least that life in Osaka would become more normal. With a spouse visa, I could come and go from Japan as I pleased, not worrying about travel restrictions for tourists. I’d have health insurance through his company and could give up my U.S. coverage to save money. Plus, we’d move into a real apartment, and I might have a place in Osaka that felt like some kind of center.
• • •
AS PART OF my increasingly settled half-life in Osaka, I’d begun making a few more friends. I met Jessica, a poet, through a group called the Association of Foreign Wives. I’d known about the organization for a while but had resisted joining: the name sounded disturbingly like the TV show Desperate Housewives. Eventually, though, I gave in and signed up, knowing I’d need a community around me if I was ever going to have a quasi-normal life in Japan.
Jessica and her Japanese physician husband lived in Kobe, a twenty-minute train ride from Osaka. She was about my age and had striking red hair, gray-blue eyes, and a round, lovely face. She’d first come to Japan years ago when she’d decided to quit a Ph.D. program at Caltech and, not knowing what else to do, came overseas to teach English. As a kid, she’d grown up in a conservative Mormon family with seven siblings in Pennsylvania, but she had stopped going to church when she married her husband.
Jessica fascinated me: Who gets into a Ph.D. program at Caltech and quits midway? Who starts off as a Mormon and ends up a funky foreign wife in Japan? She had gravitas, I decided, and the integrity to make hard decisions. Plus, she’d gone to high school with a lot of Jewish kids, she’d told me, so she totally got my kvetching.
Like me, Jessica was ambivalent at best about living in Japan. She’d come here for her own reasons, but she’d stayed for her husband. She also felt much more comfortable in the U.S. and struggled with all she’d given up by marrying a Japanese man whose career was not transferable. Moreover, like Toru, Jessica’s husband was the eldest son and designated caretaker of a widowed parent.
At lunch one day at a Southeast Asian restaurant in Kobe, Jessica ordered us pho noodle soup from a Japanese waitress in a Vietnamese dress. She spoke quickly, even
adding little native-sounding fillers, quick pitter-patters of “ano” (“umm”) and “et-to” (“so . . .”), and her ease with the language made me momentarily wistful.
Bent over our soup, we gossiped about the expat scene, marveling at how different we felt from many of the foreigners we’d met. “Those gaijin who dress up in yukata robes, or who insist on only speaking Japanese? Like if someone speaks to them in English and they still respond in Japanese?” I rolled my eyes.
“I know!” Jessica shrilled. “As if it’s not totally, one hundred percent clear that they are not Japanese, as if everyone can’t see that they’re foreign. Um, hello, you’re white!”
“The thing that I find most incomprehensible is when people say they feel more at ease in Japan than in their own countries. I don’t get it! How, in Japan of all places, can any Westerner feel more at home than in their real home!”
“Especially,” Jessica said, leaning forward, “when Japanese people are constantly reacting to you like you’re some kind of bizarre alien?”
“Frankly, I really think you’ve got to be a little screwed up to move halfway around the world and make a home in a country as completely different as Japan,” I confided, as if both Jessica and I hadn’t ourselves done the same thing.
Then Jessica confided a revelation of her own. She’d read something—she wasn’t sure where: an online forum? an expat magazine?—that supposedly could predict perfectly whether a foreign woman would find contentment long-term in Japan. The answer depended on three criteria: “Whether she was unhappy in her own country and came to Japan as an escape,” Jessica said, counting the first item off on her forefinger. “Whether she came to Japan for her own reasons, and not for a man,” she ticked her middle digit, “and whether she’s fluent in Japanese.”
Jessica tapped her third finger as she listed the final requirement for, I realized, my own future happiness. The platinum band of her wedding ring caught the afternoon sunlight, and then as she lowered her fingers to her lap and nodded at me with her gray-blue eyes, I felt my chest sinking with her hands. Strikeout, I thought as I stared silently back at her, my heart boring into my stomach. I’ve failed on all three counts.
Jessica smiled at me, unaware of the panic her “gaijin-girl” quiz had shot through my torso. I didn’t bother considering the source of her information, didn’t question whether online forums or expat magazines always offered airtight information. Instead, it felt as if my failure of the future-happiness exercise confirmed my own hidden suspicions: I knew I’d been kidding myself that this whole arrangement could sustain itself. And now I have the test results to prove it.
• • •
WHEN THE END of December presented itself and the day arrived that Toru and I were to file our marriage contract, I woke with a slight sore throat, my skin oversensitive. Toru had taken the day off of work so we could get to the U.S. Consulate during business hours to retrieve and notarize my Affidavit of Competency to Marry. After the consulate, we would file the affidavit at the Osaka Central Ward Office, along with an official copy of Toru’s family register and a statement signed by two other witnesses (Tetsunobu-san and Michiko-san) acknowledging our nuptials. Once we’d filed these, we could fill out our license and have it processed that same day. Signed, stamped, wedded.
But at the door to the consulate, a Japanese guard stopped us. He wore a blue officer’s uniform, a gun in a black pouch snug at this side. He held up one hand.
He and Toru spoke in flat-sounding Japanese. Toru paused for a minute, looked down and examined his shoes, then raised his head and addressed the man once more. The guard responded, neutral-toned, disinterested.
Toru turned to me. “Terrible!” he said. “Document section is closed!”
The major New Year holiday wasn’t set to begin until two days later, when offices, stores, and government facilities would shut for a week or so. When we’d double-checked the consulate’s website that morning, it said they were open. But the guard now explained that the American staff in the document office had decided to start their holiday early. Toru nodded as he told me this, part emphasis of our misfortune, part confirmation of his countrymen’s stereotype about mine: when it comes to Americans’ work ethic, these slipups were bound to happen.
We stood on the sidewalk under a bony row of tree limbs and wondered what to do with our day now that we weren’t going to get married during it. We’d have to wait until after New Year’s before both the consulate and the Osaka Central Ward Office would be open again.
So we grabbed a bowl of hot noodles and went to the movies—some Hollywood blockbuster with Japanese subtitles and too much noise—and tried to enjoy our unexpectedly free day. In the darkened cinema, I shivered, my head feeling thick and cottony. My mood had slipped along with the theater lights as they’d dimmed. I felt weary, overwhelmed, and pricked raw by a realization I couldn’t shake: when I’d learned that morning that we couldn’t sign our marriage papers, my first feeling was disappointment; my second was relief.
TEN
I WOKE THE NEXT MORNING achy and low. Toru had gotten up earlier, and now he came to the side of our narrow bed and knelt. He stroked my forehead lightly: he’d sensed my anxious mood from my restless shifts throughout the night, tangling the sheets around his tranquil sleep.
We looked at each other silently for a few moments, neither one of us moving. “Poor my love,” he muttered.
“I feel low, Tof.”
“I know.”
“I think. I’m not sure.”
Toru’s gaze held: direct, steady, waiting.
“I feel kind of freaked out. And yesterday, after the consulate was closed and, and I felt relieved, and now I’m wondering what that means. Or if I can really go through with this.”
Toru looked down. Swallowed a moment.
“So you mean,” he said, his eyes rising back to mine, “you don’t want to marrying now?”
I felt stuck, bog-heavy.
“I don’t know,” I finally said. “I don’t know if I don’t want to get married. I mean, I do want to marry you. But now I don’t know if we should wait, or put it off for a while, or what. I mean, I know we have a week before we can do anything anyway, with the New Year holiday and all.”
Toru looked down again, his jaw clenching in tight little pulses.
“So I’m not saying we need to do anything, or rather not do anything right now because of the holiday.” My words came in a rush. “But I just feel like I need to tell you, to be up front, that I’m not a hundred percent positive that next week, when the consulate reopens, I can still go through with this.”
He shuddered then, a quiet shaking beneath the usual equipoise of his body, as if it might take all his strength to call that stillness back once more. Then he just exhaled slowly. “Okay,” he said finally. “But please just think on it.”
For the next few days, indecision plagued me, jabbing me like a bully. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to marry Toru. I just didn’t want to make a decision I was supposed to be sure about forever. I felt trapped, not by Toru, but rather by Japan. Like the country was a prison I could never fully escape if I married someone who called it his home. Our home.
Screwing up my brain, I tried to imagine if I’d ever fall in love with Osaka the way I’d fallen in love with him: the strange rhythms of the city, its rushing crowds and jigsaw buildings, its housewives and same-suited salarymen. Would this ever be a place where I felt at home? I couldn’t wrap my heart around the vision. I saw an endless sweep of days with unreadable signs and blank stares, smiles covering or conveying unreadable emotions. Doors with strange shapes printed above their handles. Is this PUSH? Is it PULL?
I tried next to imagine going back to Boston to build a life without Toru. I envisioned the safe, familiar sidewalks of the South End. Neighbors with broad, easy smiles offering greetings, trading expressions. Yet also a hollow space by my side, an e
mptiness even more gaping than the vacuum of life as a displaced American in Japan.
Something else nagged at me, too, a realization hidden beneath my struggle over Osaka versus Boston, pushed down even farther within my chest. When I tried to picture Toru moving to the U.S., my anxious indecision wouldn’t cease. Not because I couldn’t imagine Toru leaving his career, abandoning his father, and still remaining at peace, but because some things I most treasured in our relationship were tied to Japan. I loved how confident and fluent Toru was in Japan, not just linguistically, but professionally, culturally, logistically. I wanted to believe I was an independent woman, but deep down I wondered if, even more than autonomy, I prized how completely Toru took care of me, especially in his country.
Nothing had ever made me feel as safe and loved as Toru navigating me through an entire world both fascinating and impenetrable. I knew I would love him no matter where we were. I’d already loved him just as fiercely in Boston as I had in Kobe, Beijing, Seoul, or Osaka. But I had to admit: a part of me loved our relationship most when we were in Japan. If I was trapped by this country, it was a trap of my own construction.
I didn’t know how to solve this conundrum or even if a solution existed. But I knew what scared me most. It wasn’t even the dual reality of my desire for independence scraping up against the comfort I found in someone taking care of me; instead, what terrified me was the permanence both Japan and marriage would assume in my life if I became Toru’s wife. If I could just marry him for, like, three years or something. Just make a shorter-term commitment, I think I’d feel less freaked out.