by Tracy Slater
“Okay, but what about after quarter year? We’ll still need to clean house then!”
I had to concede he had a point.
As for our washing machine, microwave, air conditioner, and other large appliances, Toru approached these purchases with similar gravity. He spent a startling amount of time on his computer with an Excel file, listing each big expenditure and the different prices offered at every major store and Web vendor. He’d check and recheck the list with each new shop we visited or place he researched online, then recombine and recalculate the items according to different sales, purchase packages, delivery charges, and “frequent-shopper-point” offerings. He even color-coded the thing according to some obscure schematic.
His enthusiasm for his Excel file caused me both vague annoyance and grudging respect for his thriftiness. If he wants to spend hours in deep communion with his color-coded appliance list, what’s it to me? But the copious amount of time he wanted to devote over a series of weekends dragging me through actual appliance stores: a different matter altogether.
For one, Japan is an incredibly crowded country, especially in its main cities. Although strangers rarely touch or make eye contact, navigating the sheer human onslaught of weekend shoppers was grueling. Moreover, although the big electronics and appliance vendors differed in their names, branding styles, and marketing strategies—all of which I was sure was thoroughly accounted for in Toru’s color-coded list—their stores all shared one distressing tendency: nonstop noise over diabolically loud sound systems. Since I’d arrived in Osaka, I’d been unnerved by the platform-shoed, miniskirted young girls standing outside hipster clothing shops, yelling at inhumanly high frequencies “Irasshaimase!” “Welcome!” But now in these mammoth appliance places, I was flat-out alarmed by the sound system backdrop. Blaring musical interludes alternated with rapid-fire announcements in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and a clipped British English. Salespeople dressed as wobbly-headed cartoon characters clutched megaphones and hollered about special deals. Adolescent women in white polyester minidresses and shiny go-go boots stood on carpeted blocks holding model cell phones and screeching about, I assumed, their latest dialing plans. The effect was like fingernails down a blackboard—in IMAX surround sound.
Then, as if the cacophony was not bad enough, Toru wanted to spend hours in the actual presence of every available appliance model, taking notes, pulling out his tape measure, double-checking the little pad of paper where he had carefully recorded the dimensions of each bathroom corner or kitchen counter. “Um, love,” I tried, “it’s great that you are being so conscientious about stuff for our new apartment, but why don’t we just pick the store with the best general prices and buy everything there all at once?”
He scoffed at my woeful lack of strategy. Next, I tried pointing out that if I was to add up all the time we were spending comparing appliances and instead devote that time to working, I’d probably earn more as a freelancer billing hourly than we’d save through his complicated purchasing plan. But Toru remained impervious to my logic.
I managed to tamp down my growing frustration and keep my voice mostly even until he steered us toward our fourth appliance place in one day, our second visit that weekend to a superstore called Yodobashi Camera. “Tof,” I said, my tone creeping higher as he ushered me through the electric doors, shoppers whipping past, a raucous Muzak version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” torturing the air around us. “You. Are. Kidding me.” Then, hysteria on the horizon, my voice pitched higher still: “Again with Yodobashi Camera? Seriously?”
Toru turned to me. He grabbed my hand, stopped, and searched my face as if gauging the likelihood of spousal meltdown. Then he gave one of his definitive nods, stroked the wedge between my thumb and forefinger, and prodded me toward the escalator. I followed dumbly, wallowing in private misery.
Silently, when we had gone a few floors up, Toru turned the corner and led me to a theater of model massage chairs. The gaudy faux-leather recliners were displayed in long rows and tipped back at various angles. Some had matching foot massagers at their base, and many had capped retirees or suited salarymen in full repose, eyes closed, mouths thrown open, ties aslant, a few emitting little bleeps of slumber.
“Sit,” Toru said. I obeyed.
He picked up the control console attached to my chair and pressed a series of keys. Then he motioned for me to lie back, and I swung my legs up along the smooth Naugahyde cushioning, trying not to think about how often these sample recliners got wiped down. “Okay,” he said, leaning over me. “I program chair for thirty minutes. Stay here. Don’t move.”
A half hour later, I was floating in semisleep: drowsy, soothed, and feeling such renewed respect for my husband’s striking wisdom that even “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” failed to rile me. When Toru returned, he held a receipt for all our new appliances, bought in bulk and bargained down to the best available rate.
• • •
A FEW DAYS LATER, we moved into our apartment. It was tiny, ovenless, and big enough only for a washing machine without a separate dryer, with a kitchen sink—made for a Japanese-sized woman—so low I had to bend over it. But it was ours.
I toured our neighborhood looking for a new favorite café, settling on a Starbucks just two blocks away when I couldn’t find a unique alternative. There was something appealing about sitting at the table I claimed for my regular perch just inside the wall-length windows, the display shelves full of mugs and thermoses with the American Starbucks logo and a swish of Japanese text below. The staff wore Starbucks aprons but they bowed when you entered and again when you left. The menu had familiar pictures but the descriptions were in Japanese, and some of the items were unique to Japan: cherry-blossom cookies, roasted-tea lattes. When I ordered a soy cappuccino, the cashier handed me a card to give to the barista in exchange for my drink. Under a line in Japanese, it said in English, WE SINCERELY SERVE OUR SOYMILK BEVERAGES TO OUR CUSTOMERS BY USING THIS CARD TO PREVENT MILK ALLERGY INCIDENT.
The entire scene felt like my quirky bicontinental life in miniature. I was still nervous about how I’d afford my rent at home if I ran dry on subletters, whether I’d have enough energy to maintain two lives in two hemispheres. But at least now I had an official address in two places. Maybe a real sense of rootedness in both would follow.
4.
THE REINTEGRATION STAGE
The third stage is both the beginning of recovery . . . and also the most volatile stage in the culture shock process. . . . It is ironic that persons in the early reintegration stage will display a strong rejection of the host culture . . . [and] will perceive herself or himself to be vulnerable or under attack.
• Paul Pedersen, The Five Stages of Culture Shock
No one loves Japan, my dear.
• Donald Richie, long-term American expat and distinguished Tokyo author
TWELVE
FOR MUCH OF THE WINTER and spring of 2007, I felt suspended in limbo. On one hand, I welcomed the easy harmony Toru and I shared, the relaxed pace of my life in Japan. On the other, I’d go through periods where I’d obsess again over how I could have ended up in a lifestyle and identity I could barely recognize. The memory of Jessica’s quiz about foreign women’s longevity in Japan kept shuffling behind my eyes. My U.S. freelance writing work had winnowed to part-time, and it was hard to drum up new business from across the globe. My conscience sometimes prickled as I thought about my official Japanese bank account and health insurance papers listing me as shufu, since I kept what little money I now earned in my Boston bank account and contributed no income to our Osaka household.
One day from my Starbucks roost, I put down my International Herald Tribune, pushed back my soy latte, and tried objectively to evaluate my regrets. When you live overseas, it becomes easy to mythologize your native life: all the things you imagine you’d be doing if you weren’t an expat in a foreign land, all the ways you could be thriving
. Maybe I’d have a tenure-track job as a literature professor in an English department, not a half-year lectureship teaching communication strategy to MBA students supplemented by some freelance writing gigs. Maybe I’d be making a name for myself in the prison education world, coauthoring a book with a gifted inmate.
A hazy fantasy filled my mind of my work making such a splash it moved Congress to fund more college-behind-bars programs. I’d yet to fill in the details, but it sounded fantastic in my head. My coauthor would secure a promising job waiting for him upon his release; I’d give quick but eloquent interviews tastefully plugging the book while lauding some new study proving college education in prisons reduces recidivism—and, of course, my outfit would be perfect.
But the truth was, I’d had basically the same amount of anxiety, longing, and regret in my “real” American life as I did in Japan. Boston, after all, was where I’d given up trying to get a tenure-track job. My South End apartment was where I’d spent semesters wondering if teaching gender studies to men behind bars really made a difference, or if it was mostly just a way to assuage my guilt about my own easy access to education while providing a convenient ruse for my students to rack up points for good behavior. At home, I’d brooded over whether I should be making more money, succeeding more spectacularly, dressing better. There were lots of times when I’d felt alienated, discouraged, or like I didn’t quite fit in. It’s called being human, I suddenly thought, not necessarily a human overseas.
You make sacrifices and admit failures no matter where you live; but for expats, sometimes it’s too easy to believe the grass was actually greener on the side you’d already left. In your new country, feelings of longing and regret magnify easily, but are they really just falsely sharpened by the occasional isolation of being a foreigner? From the other side of the world, it becomes all too easy to let slip your gimlet-eyed view of home.
Now, in the Osaka Starbucks, Johnny Cash’s song “Ring of Fire” began playing over the café’s sound system. “I went down, down, down and the flames went higher,” Cash crooned, while the kilted Japanese schoolgirl next to me slumped over, asleep atop her table, head bent until her forehead rested next to her half-full mug of coffee, sequined cell phone glittering beside her. As my mind tried to parse my own two contrasting worlds of fantasies and disappointments, I thought, Sure, my life in Boston was easier: no getting around that. But was ease my ultimate goal?
I pulled a spiral notebook out of my bag and began making a list of What I Really Wanted in Life. Some kind of lasting, familylike bond or bonds. An existence where I wasn’t unduly suffering or lonely, with close friends who mattered. Fulfilling work. Time to read and travel, to exercise and stay healthy. Enough money to eat out a few times a week and buy sweaters at the Gap. The chance always to be learning, never losing my curiosity about the world. Great shoes.
So, yes, ease would be nice. But was it most important? Wasn’t a life of wonder more rare than one of comfort? Surely, meaning held more value than simple convenience—or even happiness.
Could I really claim Osaka was stopping me from achieving my most cherished goals? I wasn’t getting anywhere anguishing over how much my current setup looked—or didn’t look—like the existence I’d always imagined. Instead, it was time to figure out how to make my actual life into the best one possible.
I started in on specific objectives: Check out more of the expat literary scene in Japan. Try writing for some of the English-language magazines and newspapers. Run some Four Stories events in Tokyo. Accept that life as an expat was going to be uncomfortable and alienating at times and then accept that this didn’t make it wrong—or even necessarily worse.
The Starbucks soundtrack changed to a Bob Dylan song I didn’t know, but I recognized the voice, its raspy twang a smoky contrast to the sharp shapes of the kanji, hiragana, and katakana letters on the café signboards around me. I committed to one final plan: despite my dismal track record with the YWCA language classes, it was time to sign up for another semester of Japanese.
• • •
THE MOVE to our new apartment behind us, our kitchen shelves stocked with basic pots, plates, and cutlery, I started cooking three nights a week for Toru and Otosan at our place. I made pastas, grilled fish or small steaks on the fish grill, or served dishes I could cook in a wok, looking up recipes online. Otosan would come over at eight, always neatly dressed, in cooler weather wearing a sweater vest or cardigan, his graying hair tidily combed. If Toru wasn’t home from work yet, I’d pour his father a beer and turn on the Japanese news. Sometimes, Toru would text saying he’d be later than nine and we should start without him.
Otosan didn’t talk much, a man whose disdain of waste encompassed unnecessary conversation. Even when Toru had dinner with us, the two of them ate mostly in silence, his father approaching each dish separately, finishing his meat or pasta before he’d move on to the salad or vegetables. Toru ate with more energy, his cheeks puffing out as he chewed. If either of them wanted more beer or something from the refrigerator, I got up to pour or fetch it, and sometimes for a moment, I’d think of Toru’s aunt and how, when she made dinner for us at her house, she served while everyone else just sat and ate.
Occasionally, Toru would say something in Japanese to his father, who would grunt in assent or acknowledgment. But after he finished everything on his plate, Otosan always smiled and said, “Gochisosamadeshita,” to me: “Thank you for the good meal.” Then he’d sit back in his chair and wait calmly for Toru to finish and me to serve green tea. If I’d actually managed to avoid overcooking the cashew chicken or burning the steak, his eyes would light up and he’d flash me a grin that fell somewhere between surprise and delight. “Mmm, tori-niku wa umai!” “The chicken is tasty!”
Sometimes the stoicism between Toru and his father was too much for me to bear, and I piped up with conversation. “Otosan, I’m thinking of making a new fish dish next time,” I offered, showing him a recipe I’d printed out. “Do you like salmon?”
“Of course!” Otosan nodded. After a few times of his replying “Of course!” to food-related questions, I realized he was using the phrase to mean “Yes, very much.”
I knew it was rude for Americans in Japan to broach the topic of World War II, but I was curious about Otosan’s experience as a young boy then, and I asked Toru if he thought his father would mind my queries. “Probably okay,” Toru said.
So sometimes at dinner, I asked Otosan directly about that era, or other times it would come up in a roundabout way. “Otosan,” I said one night, “did you have ice cream in Japan when you were little?” He told me he hadn’t really tried ice cream until he was almost a teenager, although the war had ended when he was just six, because food was so scarce for many years after the armistice. “Really?” I said. I hadn’t realized that the food shortages had lasted so long or would have affected families with sufficient money. But Otosan explained that money wasn’t the issue: there was no food to buy.
“How about chewing gum?” I asked, and he told me how the first time he’d tried gum, he’d been given it by an American soldier handing out candy on a train. I tried to call up the image: a khaki-suited late adolescent, colored pins on his lapel, light brown hair waved to the side, his capped head inches higher than the car full of wary passengers around him, his fist full of pink Bazooka bubble gum. “Did you like it?” I finally asked.
“Of course!”
When I inquired if his family and neighbors felt weird or threatened by the presence of American soldiers, Otosan told me that, really, people were just relieved the war was over.
After Toru finally finished his food, I cleared the dishes, stacked them by the sink to wash later, and boiled water for tea. The men sat at the table, silence alternating with brief staccato comments or more soft grunting, neither of which I could decipher, and then I brought the cast-iron pot full of sencha and poured them each a cup. When Otosan had finished his tea, he ca
refully pushed back his chair with a “Sore, jaa,” “Well, then,” and finally another “Gochiso sama deshita,” inclining his head to me.
We both walked his father to the door, where he steadied himself and slipped into his shoes waiting in the foyer, a black pair of those thick-soled loafers designed for senior citizens. In my new semester at the YWCA, I’d just started learning keigo, the most formal set of honorifics, and now I tried to bid him farewell in proper fashion befitting a daughter-in-law. “Itte kudasatte arigato!” I called out, bowing palm to thigh. Otosan stopped mid-turn toward the door, Toru shooting me a wide-eyed look. Then his father let burst a toothy laugh, his smile spanning rosy cheeks.
“What?” I asked, pivoting to face Toru. “What did I do? I tried to say, ‘Thank you very much for honoring us by coming!’ You know, ‘Itte kudasatte arigato!’”
“‘Kite kudasatte’ is ‘You’ve honored us by coming,’” Toru said slowly. “‘Itte kudasatte’ is ‘You honor us by leaving.’”
My brother called on Skype later that night while I was washing the dishes. It was early morning on the East Coast, and he was driving to work at the hospital, his voice sounding muffled, the noise of the highway throbbing in the background. “Well, I just served dinner and tea, and now I’m washing the dishes,” I said, the cord of my headset wobbling as I bent over the sink. “No dishwasher. It sucks. Or I guess the dishwasher is me, the good Japanese wife,” I quipped.
“What’s Toru doing?” Scott asked.
“He’s watching TV. He offered to help clean up once his father left. When his father is here, though, they sit at the table and I serve.”