The Good Shufu

by Tracy Slater

  I thought back to our earlier decision to build a life both together and apart, to have me live in the U.S. and Japan. People said it couldn’t, shouldn’t be done. But we’d done it anyway. And so far we were happy. Why not make our own rules about marriage then? Why not try our own form? Try marrying on a three-year term?

  I wasn’t sure Toru would go for it. I didn’t want to get divorced, and I was loath to repeat a mistake similar to my parents’. But I was more loath not to give my relationship with Toru the most earnest attempt I could.

  I imagined being old and bent, and looking back—if I was lucky enough to survive to such an age—and feeling the deadweight of an avoidable regret. A life whose potential gifts I had shunned. Sometime during the next few days, a realization coalesced: becoming family with Toru was one of those gifts. So was our freedom both to wed and to make our own rules. In my mind, I nodded to that gnarled-handed woman. I was not necessarily prepared, but I was still willing to risk trying marriage, despite my confusion and ambivalence. At least for three years.

  When I presented the idea to Toru, he grinned, but to his credit he didn’t laugh. He smiled as if my zany mind was one of the things he might love most about me, as if he was thinking, Who else would suggest, in all seriousness, a three-year marriage—across two continents? I loved him for that, and even more for what I read in the steadiness of his grin: he felt compassionate about my fear, charmed by my neuroses, and completely unthreatened by either.

  • • •

  A WEEK LATER, we filed our marriage documents and were handed a paper at the Osaka Central Ward Office declaring us a legal unit. It was now early January 2007. Because we had created our own nuclear entity in Japan, we were required to make a new family register, removing Toru from the one he’d always shared with his parents. Toru showed me the form before he filed it: a white sheet of columns next to long vertical lines of Japanese characters. He pointed to his name and our address (or rather his father’s address, which we would list as our main domicile until we signed a lease on our own apartment). Along the bottom edge, in a field resembling one for footnotes, sat a space with letters in katakana, the Japanese alphabet reserved for foreign words. The letters looked just like the ones I’d learned to write my own name.

  “What’s that?” I asked Toru. “Down there?”

  “That’s you!”

  “Me? Why am I down there? Why aren’t I on the main part of the form if it’s our family register? Why aren’t I listed as your wife?”

  “You are listed. As wife,” he assured me. “But only listed in note field. Listed as wife down there.”

  Foreigners, Toru explained, were not permitted to appear in the main body of the family register. So although I was now legally Toru’s wife, I was also apparently the family footnote.

  When a little while later I obtained my official alien registration card (which I was ordered to carry at all times), I was heartened to see my name written prominently in English along with my nationality and place of birth: BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS. The latter was listed in both fields, as if my nationality extended down to my city and state.

  “What’s that?” I asked Toru, pointing to some Japanese characters that looked like his name on another part of the card.

  “That? That’s me.”

  “And what’s that line in Japanese above it, introducing your name? What does that say?”

  Toru peered closer at the tiny black font. “Oh that? That say ‘master of the house.’”

  • • •

  THE WEEKEND AFTER we married, we went to a hot-springs resort for an impromptu mini honeymoon. We stayed at a ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn with lacquer-wood furniture and shoji screens. We slept on soft futons rolled out each night over a floor of straw tatami mats bordered with silk stitching. During the day, we wore thin, patterned yukata robes, and in the evening we were served dinner in our room, course after course of tiny elaborate dishes. The only entertainment besides eating and lounging involved onsen: dipping into natural thermal waters bubbling up from underground.

  Except for rooms with private onsen baths—out of our budget—most hot springs in Japan are separated by gender, switching once a day. In the morning, women will use one side and men the other; in the afternoon, they switch. Toru and I chose our ryokan because although the baths were single sex, they shared a low wall on one end over which a bather could see the neck and face of someone sitting on the other side. We could soak separately in the steamy water and still see and talk to each other if we perched in just the right place.

  Entering an onsen is a detailed affair. After taking off your clothes and storing them—usually in little wooden baskets—you enter a shower room lined with individual handheld showerheads, each featuring a little stool and bucket in front of a tray of soaps and scrubs. Then you crouch on one of the tiny seats and scour every bodily plane and crevice. Arms and chest, face and neck, thighs, calves, and torso. In between each toe. Hair and scalp. A surreptitious rinse between the legs.

  Not until you are pink with careful scrubbing should you approach the actual onsen water, walking naked from the shower room to the thermal pool. At our ryokan, a good fifteen or twenty minutes had elapsed between the time Toru and I parted at our separate entrances and when I approached the hot spring on the women’s side. I’d dutifully lathered my body with soap, shampoo, and conditioner, then chosen among the different facial exfoliators, or what I figured were such by their varied cartoons of women rubbing circles on their cheeks.

  Entering the onsen itself, my skin felt rosy. I waded into the shallow pool, the hot water swirling slowly around my legs as I crossed the main expanse, then turned left slightly toward an alcove bordered by the low wall separating the gendered sides. I saw someone already sitting there, his head resting back, a small towel thrown over eyes and forehead, black hair sprouting from its edges. Toru’s already here! I thought happily.

  “Hi, kakoii!” I sang out, using one of my nicknames for him, a cross between “handsome” and “cool.” He didn’t answer, but I smiled hugely as I strode toward the little ledge, snug against the rough stone wall just inches from where he sat. “Was there anyone else in the men’s side?” I called out, as I waded forward.

  Still, no movement.

  He must be so relaxed he can barely move. “I was the only one in the women’s!” I didn’t bother crouching down to hide my torso in the water: his was the only figure visible.

  It wasn’t until he removed the washcloth and gave a little scream that I realized, no, this wasn’t Toru. It was another Japanese man, his face a mask of shock before the naked white woman striding, mid-conversation, toward him. Taking in the full scene, his jaw dropped even faster than I did, and by the time I had crouched under the waterline, his eyes had widened into horrified saucers.

  Like a synchronized swimmer on steroids, in one jerky movement he turned, half stood, and began hurling himself through the water to the exit, the hot spring leaving small tornadoes in his wake. I could still hear his antic swishing when Toru came into view, his head turned back to watch the fleeing bather.

  “Huh!” Toru said, as he approached me, turning for one more glance behind him. “Guy is in kind of rush.” Then he swiveled fully toward me. “Why’re you hiding so low in water?”

  • • •

  WE LEFT THE hot-springs resort the next day, our cheeks scrubbed smooth, limbs heavy, as if the onsen had leached all torsion from our bodies. Sitting side-by-side on the express train, watching the landscape rush by in streams of color, I felt a jolt of joy. Toru laid his hand over mine, warm as the water we’d just left. He made me laugh with jokes about the other passengers: a man dozing openmouthed like a soprano in mid aria, a grandmother chatting away while her oblivious husband, head buried in manga, emitted strategically timed grunts.

  My love for Toru is actually increasing, I thought, now that we’d signed our marriage papers. S
uch a simple feeling, such a common, unremarkable truth, but to me, it came as an utter surprise: that you could love someone even more after you married him than before you pledged to wed.

  Suddenly, the idea of marriage’s permanence felt safe, not threatening. Toru’s my partner, and I’m his. I couldn’t believe such a thing had happened to me. It was like having a perpetual buddy in one of those systems from summer camp where they pair you up so someone saves you if you start to drown. I’d always fretted as a child during these assignments: “What if my buddy is drowning, too?” I always asked the counselors, and they never had an answer beyond throwing up their hands or ordering, “Enough already. Just get into the lake.”

  But I knew Toru. He’d never drown unless human survival was impossible. He’d tread water for as long as it took to figure out a way to save us both. I’d been fortunate enough for the universe to assign him to me. And if luck held, I might even love him more and more, not less and less, now that we’d signed up to either sink or swim together.

  Then I realized, as Toru drummed his fingers against my palm and Japan rushed by outside the window, that maybe this wasn’t just great odds in a cosmic buddy system but something more basic. Maybe this was what it meant to find a home. Although Osaka would never be my home, it was Toru’s, and now, in addition to Boston, he was mine.

  ELEVEN

  AFTER OUR TRIP to the onsen, I fell into a rare spell of optimism. I was still relieved that my marriage had begun to represent security (at least so far), not a slippery slope toward disillusionment. Toru’s own approach to depression and anxiety also soothed me. His attitude diametrically opposed my native family’s. For us, depression was considered less a feeling than a dreaded guest whose very existence caused endless hand-wringing, actual arrival brought intense agitation, and occasional loitering spawned an all-out expectation of the end times.

  Once, soon after we were married and his father’s hand had been shaking again at dinner, Toru seemed down. I peered into his face. “Are you low, love?” I asked, carefully surveying the landscape of his cheeks and brow for hollows unduly deep. He admitted that he was, but then looked confused as I assaulted him with questions and potential avenues for analysis.

  “Low or not low is no matter,” he said, when I’d quieted. “It’s just that feelings go up, and then they come down.”

  I stopped and stared at him a moment, uncharacteristically speechless. But I kept his perspective wrapped inside, and it felt like a little shiny pebble of wisdom, all the more brilliant for its simplicity. Imagine that. Depression could be something you just feel, not something you end up choke-holding yourself with while trying to wrestle it away. Suddenly, my twenty-plus years of therapy seemed like . . . a lot?

  I started to focus on happier future plans. Now that we were married, Toru’s company would subsidize both our move to a new apartment and half our rent for ten years. We’d claim a place we could call our own, and later in the year, Toru would come to Boston for two weeks, bringing his father, sister, aunt, and uncle to meet my family. These prospects dangled like a perky promise: a fresh sense of completion to my life, a new symmetry to my two worlds.

  For our new apartment, Toru and I chose the third place we saw, an eighth-floor unit in an eleven-story building. A plaque carved into faux marble stood just outside the entranceway. In slanted katakana letters, it read RUI SHATORE: a Japanese approximation of Louis Châtelet, as if the property were a minor cousin of Versailles. Above the name, the tablet boasted the building’s confused monogram, two entwined, cursive Ls. Around the corner stood an art gallery marked with more English letters. GARRELY, its sign proclaimed.

  The apartment was just a few blocks from Osaka Castle Park and about a quarter mile from Tetsunobu-san’s. It was listed as a three-bedroom, but the place totaled around six hundred square feet, and one bedroom was so small you couldn’t fit a double bed into it, so we decided to use it for laundry and storage. The second bedroom was actually a sweet little tatami room with a shoji screen over the windows so hushed sunlight filtered through and straw mats with pretty stitched borders covered the floor. Toru explained that in traditional Japanese houses, the family would sleep in this room, pulling out their futons every night and during the day storing them in the large sliding-door closets at one end.

  Instead, we moved the TV along the wall facing the living/dining room, which had just enough room for a modest-sized table and a two-cushion couch. Over the next couple of months, I bought candles and small Japanese and Chinese paper-covered lamps as well as a yoga mat. Then I claimed the room—when Toru wasn’t watching soccer on TV—as my workout/relaxation/excuse-for-buying-knickknacks space.

  Purchasing our other household goods, however, was a more challenging affair. We tried to complete most of this task before our move-in date, and I was happy to shop for furniture and sheets, although I sensed some irritation on Toru’s part when I kept detouring off into clothing and shoe stores. “I’ll be just a sec!” I’d swear, and then Toru would grumble and start tapping out “one, two, three, four” with his foot at the threshold of the shop, as if in useful illustration of my tendency to use a “sec” nonliterally.

  When it came to buying dishes, I focused more successfully, at least eventually. At first, I’d been uninterested in acquiring the essentials for home-cooked meals. But then Toru’s father took most of his own dishes out of his listing kitchen cupboards, lining them up neatly on his small table, leaving only a lonely single set for himself. “Otosan!” I said. Now that Toru and I were married, I’d begun calling his father by the Japanese term “Respected Father” rather than his proper name, as tradition dictated for a daughter-in-law. Tetsunobu-san had told me I could call him whatever was most comfortable for me, but when I proclaimed I’d call him Otosan, he smiled really wide.

  Now, as he took his dishes out for us to have, my voice caught in my throat. He thinks Toru and I won’t be coming over for dinner anymore; that now that his son is officially moving out, he’ll be left alone. “Otosan,” I said again, “you can’t give these dishes away!” I tried to explain that we would still be coming over a few nights a week for dinner, that I’d still cook and we’d eat together. But I felt my heart squeeze with sadness. This man had never lived alone in all his sixty-seven years. He had lost his wife recently, and now he’d simply laid out his housewares for us to take as his son left, too.

  “Ah, but you may need!” he insisted, gesturing to the bowls he’d stacked for us, his hand shaking in a slight quiver. It would be another year or so before the tremors got much worse.

  “Oh, no, we’re fine,” I insisted. “We’re buying new dishes, and in the meantime, we’ll just eat here with you.” I searched his face to see if he understood. I’d begun putting the dishes back into the cabinets when Toru walked into the kitchen from his old bedroom, where he’d been packing clothes. “Tof!” I turned to him. “Your father is trying to give us his dishes! Can you please explain that he still needs them, that we won’t stop coming here for dinner altogether?”

  Toru spoke to his father, a quick string of sentences that sounded edged by irritation, and Otosan simply grunted. I couldn’t tell whether Toru was annoyed because he thought his father was being dramatic or impractical, or if his own guilt was feeding his agitation. I paused, thinking I’d ask him later, then cautioned myself not to indulge in my tendency to probe painful places in search of understanding when I knew Toru found more safety in silence. Disappointed to realize I’d probably never get a full translation of what had just transpired, I picked up another small pile of plates to return to their rightful cupboards and began planning time to buy at least three sets of dishes.

  Within a few days of our move, we still hadn’t finished purchasing our appliances: washing machine, dryer, air-conditioning units, vacuum cleaner, microwave, and toaster (our only means of cooking besides the stove and tiny fish grill since, like Otosan’s apartment, ours came without an oven).
The first hint of trouble arose with the vacuum cleaner.

  “Let’s just buy a cheapo one,” I’d said a few weeks earlier. We were in the Midori Denki—Green Electronics—superstore, where we passed a salaryman in a suit and an overcoat reading a book while he bucked up and down on a sample mechanical bull. “Tof,” I said, straining to block out the weirdness of the suit in the fake saddle, “I really hate vacuuming, and besides, we can hire a housekeeper to come in once a month or something to do the heavy cleaning.”

  “Housekeeper?”

  “Yeah, a housekeeper, you know, like a cleaning person or a maid service. What I have in Boston. They come in once a month and it’s great, only about fifty dollars to clean my whole studio.”

  “No, we don’t have this in Japan. Too expensive. Only very rich people has maid.”

  “Well, how expensive could it be, just for once a month? Like more than a hundred dollars an hour?”

  “More.” Toru’s rapid nod left no room for doubt. “Anyway, I don’t like housekeeper. Don’t want to having someone in house. Someone not family. Someone strange.”

  “Seriously?” Then, my voice going flatter, “Seriously, Tof, I really hate vacuuming.”

  “Not so bad. We’ll do together. It’s kind of what adults does, keeping own house clean.” He leveled his stare at me, raised his eyebrows slightly.

  On one hand, I figured he was right: if I was old enough to have my own place, I should be mature enough to handle occasional vacuuming. I wasn’t surprised that Japanese people avoided housekeepers, since privacy was so important here. On the other hand, I was still thinking that this was an argument we could save for later. So we buy a vacuum. That doesn’t mean we can’t also hire a housekeeper sometime.

  I couldn’t help sniping a bit, though, when, after much research, Toru picked out a brand costing thirty thousand yen. “Three hundred dollars, for a vacuum?” I still noted everything in dollars, just lopping off the last two zeros of yen, even though the exchange rate didn’t always line up neatly—just one more way to pretend I was still shopping in the U.S. “That could buy almost a quarter of a year of monthly housekeeping service,” I said, sulking.