Midnight and the Meaning of Love

by Sister Souljah

  “I’ll wait out here for Akemi,” I said solemnly. But when I looked back toward her door, she was gone.

  “Akemi left these for you.” She reappeared holding a pair of black and gold embroidered men’s house shoes. By now I was accustomed to removing my shoes, a habit that I had previously fallen out of while living in New York, when entering friends’ or customers’ houses or anyone’s apartment beside my own.

  I removed my shoes and put on the ones Akemi left for me, I entered the igloo and surprisingly had to take five steps down into her sunken home. The inside curved walls of her igloo were covered with colorful, expertly cut and placed and decorated ceramic tiles. There was a dull lime light on the ceiling that cast a glow on two indentations in the wall where small potted plants in ceramic flowerpots posed. I felt like a leopard, trapped in a small but exquisite, exotic cave. The stairs that led down to the igloo were made of expensive, high-quality marble.

  As soon as I entered the rectangular portion of the house, the marble floors gave way to floors of simple gray cement. The climate of spring warmth outside switched to complete coolness inside the rectangle, which appeared to be a wide-open gallery. Instead of a living room with a soft feeling and comfortable furniture, there was a workshop with a huge metal tabletop work station. On the table were three fifty-pound mounds of earth-colored clay loosely wrapped in a thick, soiled plastic. Besides the mounds of clay there were soiled tools made from metal and wood, as well as a two-foot-long sturdy piece of wire cable. Off to the side and behind the work station was an incomplete, moist clay, loosely wrapped sculpture of a female. On the side wall were shelves sectioned into cubes. Every other cube held a pot or vase of various designs. The cubes between were shelves of oversized books on art, art history, culture, and religion.

  Josna excused herself and then tiptoed into the triangle situated at the back of the house behind a dark purple velvet curtain.

  I stood motionless, yet my eyes were surveying all the handmade creations with wonder. The curious layout of this place, where unlike things were all merged together, was bizarre but exciting.

  When the girl that my wife called Jo returned, she was not jingling anymore. She had switched into blue denim shorts with the threads shredded around each of her thighs. Both breasts, full like mangoes, pressed against a tight blue tee that was cut above her diamond belly ring, oh Allah. Honestly, I wanted to tell her to go back and put on some proper clothes. But I was standing inside her place and was more grateful toward her than anything else.

  She handed me a nicely cut, sturdy cloth shopping bag marked “Takashimaya.” I took it and looked inside. There was a huge white box, the kind that something brand-new and expensive would sit inside. Josna smiled at me politely and said, “Your wife’s crocodiles.” So I knew they were the 500,000 yen sandals Akemi had instructed Jo to wear to grab and assure my attention.

  “If they stay here with me, I’ll keep them. They’re so tempting, isn’t it? But Akemi has the handbag that matches them perfectly,” Josna boasted for her best friend. “Chai? Panni, mizu, or water?” Josna offered, showing off her command and ease with the English, Hindi, and Japanese languages.

  “None” was all I responded.

  She seemed surprised and said, “Honto!” meaning really in Japanese.

  “Hai, arigato,” I confirmed.

  “Are you going to stand there the entire time?” she asked. “Come in, you can sit down there if you’d like,” she offered.

  “Do you live alone?” I asked her.

  She smiled. “Yes, this is my art palace, where I create. I really need this place. It’s three minutes away from my college. Akemi loves it in here also because she can also do her art work here peacefully and it’s far enough away from her home. It’s like our getaway place. You know that she likes to paint in the nude and stays up late into the night till early morning like me. When she’s in her art world, she doesn’t want to be interrupted.”

  My mind was swirling now with exotic images of my naked wife drawing and painting passionate pictures with her erotic Nepali girlfriend in a peculiar art palace. I took some steps further inside. “Would you mind if I looked around your place?”

  “I don’t mind if you don’t mind if I do some work while you’re here waiting. I have so much homework and not enough time, and a big art show coming up.” She shifted from her peaceful posture into a reflective panic.

  “I stayed up all night speaking with Akemi and couldn’t resist helping her to meet with you. Now I’m a bit behind my work schedule. Look around. Akemi’s drawings and paintings are over there, and my sculptures and such are right here. Are you sure you didn’t want tea or water?” she asked again.

  “I’m good,” I assured her.

  Barefooted, Josna evolved from being a gracious host and best friend into a “mud princess.” Clutching a fistful of clay, she wiggled toward her art throne, a hand-crafted stool with legs wrapped in thick purple yarn and a carefully cushioned colorful cloth seat. She sat softly, spread her legs around her potter’s wheel, stared into the center of the wheel, and tossed the clay right in the middle. Her turquoise, gold-tipped toes tapped a button and the wheel began to turn between her thighs. She leaned over the wheel a bit and placed both hands lightly around the clay, guiding it into a shape. I walked to the other side of the room, where my wife’s work was displayed over a serene salmon-colored wall.

  I questioned myself. My footsteps became heavy. My heart became heavy. My mind became heavy. As a Muslim man, I was out of balance and I knew it for certain. Even if it were not Ramadan, the images that my eyes had been concentrating on, and the desires that were flooding my physical and the thoughts that were tempting my mind, were not right. In the Holy Quran, in a sura titled Al Nur, meaning, “The Light,” there is an ayat which says

  Say to the believing men that they lower their gaze and restrain their sexual passions. That is purer for them surely Allah is aware of what they do.

  I had not been reading my Quran in Japan, although Ramadan is a holy month when Muslims read the Quran even more than on an average day. Instead I had been flipping my Japanese vocabulary cards in my attempt to learn and memorize and communicate. I had been reading history books on my wife’s father and family. I had been focused on getting my wife back. Yet the spiritual cost was high.

  Facing the first drawing on the salmon-colored wall, I saw the sort of image that had been flooding my sight and mind all day. It was a detailed drawing of a naked teenaged girl with her legs spread open. Her bush of pussy hairs brushed against the cushion where she was seated on a stool with head hanging low and her three feet of hair hiding her face. The way her legs were drawn so shapely and perfectly, the way both her feet were raised a bit as she balanced on her toes was an incredible display of Akemi’s talented fingers and eyes. Yet as I looked even more closely at the drawing, I felt a heat rising up within me. It wasn’t passion. It was anger. The stunning girl in the drawing could easily be my wife.

  Murder moved to the middle of my mind again. Who really drew the pictures as Akemi posed? Then I was questioning: how could she draw a perfect picture of herself, down to the shape of her vagina and the lengthiness of her clitoris? She is a great artist, I know. Others had told me confidently that in her art world, she is in fact a genius, but what I was seeing was impossible, right?

  Each drawing mounted beside the first drawing pictured the same alluring, nude, beautiful teenaged girl, in an array of intensely sexual and seductive positions. So engrossed, Josna stood behind me now. I had not heard her shut off the wheel or her approaching bare footsteps. She tapped me. I didn’t turn toward her.

  “It’s not what it seems,” she said softly. “It looks just like Akemi, I know. But it’s not her. This exhibit is the winning exhibit that earned your wife a first-prize scholarship to study art in the United States. I guess you could say that if Akemi had not drawn these pictures so passionately, you would never have met her in New York. Because she would never have gott
en there for any other reason,” Josna confided.

  “Look.” She pointed at the carefully formed letters around the perimeter of each drawing. “These letters are hangul. It’s the Korean language. They are not kanji. I am sure that you noticed that the Korean style of writing is much neater, tighter, and more precise.” She dragged one finger across the letters. “This one says, One Womb.”

  I kept my back to Josna as she narrated. Her voice helped to soothe the fire in me. When the smoke in my mind finally cleared, I realized that I was seeing Joo Eun Lee, Akemi’s mother. They were redrawings of the covers of the underground political pamphlets that Akemi’s mom and best friend had produced and distributed anonymously. Once I came to understand their meaning, hearing once again the titles—One Womb, Virgin Oil, Revolutionary Passion—the drawings shifted from pornography to purpose. But they were still provocative and powerful. Although I understood, such representations would not be acceptable to me if they were of my mother or wife. I wondered what drove Akemi to draw these intimate pictures of her then-teenaged mother, and to place them in the public eye? I turned my face to Josna, calm now. I wondered if she knew the details of Akemi’s mother’s life. My temper was checked.

  “Oh, I see now,” she said.

  “You see what?” I asked.

  “I see now what Akemi was saying about you—about your eyes,” Josna said slowly. I looked away from her. She laughed a short, light laugh. “Akemi told me not to even look into those eyes of yours for more than three seconds.” She emphasized every other word musically and then laughed again.

  “What’s happening now? Where is Akemi?” I asked solemnly.

  “She should’ve been here already. She said she would be. She always does what she says.” Josna walked over to the phone. She lifted the receiver and got clay on the buttons as she pressed them. She held the phone and waited. Seconds later, she had not spoken even one word before hanging up.

  “Of course she’s not at home,” Josna said aloud to herself. “Akemi told me she would come here straightaway from her doctor’s office. I don’t know what could’ve kept her.”

  “Did she say that she was feeling sick?” I asked.

  “No, she’s fine actually. She simply pretended to be ill so that her father would allow her to remain at her house in Roppongi. Mr. Nakamura wanted her to return to Kyoto to begin school right after Golden Week ended. But she said that she was sure that you would show up there in Tokyo.”

  Even as I was becoming more concerned, it felt good to hear that my wife was completely certain that I would come to Japan to get her. Even as I had doubted her, she was one hundred percent. She had given me that Roppongi address to write a letter to her father before we were married. She remembered, of course. She knew I would show up there. And as certain as she was about Tokyo, she would be just as certain about my arriving in Kyoto, I now knew. I had given Iwa Ikeda and everyone who was against our love too much credit and consideration. I felt a little more at ease. Further, I figured that right at this moment, even though Akemi wasn’t here yet, it was the best place to gather the most information.

  “When was the last time that you saw Akemi?” I began.

  “Last night was both the first and the last time I’ve seen Akemi in almost a year. Of course you know she was studying in New York. I was still here in Japan. She was sending me letters every week since she was away. I feel like I saw you at the same time that she first saw you.” Josna smiled.

  “I have a stack of letters from her at my cottage and even some over there,” she said, gesturing to show me how tall the stack was. Akemi was so cute when she had this crush on you. She watched you closely for three months without ever saying one word to you. It was her first time becoming excited about possibly learning English, and her first time becoming frustrated because she found the language difficult and displeasing. We sat on the phone chatting for more than an hour once. She wanted me to teach her the one perfect English sentence to say to you. It was so funny. She was shy and wanted you to approach her but admitted she was hiding from you. I’d give her something to say and she would think it was too much or too bold or not enough. Akemi said the English words did not sound like they matched her “true feelings.”

  I was surprised to hear that Akemi had true feelings for me, before we had ever met face-to-face or even exchanged any words. But I didn’t express that to Josna.

  “Well, anyway, I went home to Nepal for Golden Week. I didn’t even know that Akemi had returned to Japan. The last time we spoke before I went to Nepal, the two of you were married and inseparable and so in love … I wish!” she said.

  “Did Akemi go to the doctor’s alone?” I asked.

  “No, actually, she can’t go anywhere alone these days. Her father won’t allow it. He hired Shota to be Akemi’s driver. We’ve known him since forever. Akemi can’t go anywhere without him. She was so annoyed about losing her freedom that last night she made Shota stay in the car outside the whole time she was here talking with me—from evening until about two in the morning. At first she had told him to go back home and that she’d call him when she wanted to be picked up, but he refused. So I had Shota sitting outside my front door for eight hours and Makoto guarding outside my side door for eight hours.

  Josna took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, bending over and resting both of her hands on her knees. As she stood back up, I asked, “Makoto?”

  “Oh, he’s one of Nakamura’s men. He usually secures Mr. Nakamura. Now he’s assigned to Akemi around the clock. I can tell she hates it.” Josna tried to soothe me. My jaw tightened.

  “Mr. Nakamura is a really great guy if he’s on your side. I certainly would never want to be his enemy.”

  “So why did the ‘great guy’ give his permission for our marriage and then snatch it back?” I asked her, hoping to hear one reasonable answer to the question that had been irking me for so long.

  “You really don’t know why?” Josna asked.

  “Tell me,” I responded.

  “Mr. Nakamura never wanted to give Akemi his approval. The father and daughter were having hankouki months before she left to study in New York. Hankouki is something that I and probably you will never understand. Japanese teenagers—sometimes they go through this thing where they don’t speak to their parents at all. They ignore them completely. Both the parents and the child stop talking with one another until they are buried in complete silence. Hankouki can go on for months or even longer. Japanese teenagers are much closer to their friends than to their parents anyway.”

  “You’re right, I don’t understand,” I admitted.

  “I knew you wouldn’t. I love my parents so much. I would do absolutely anything for either of them. And if there was ever a misunderstanding between us, even if I thought I was right, I would drop on my knees down to the floor and beg their forgiveness.” I was watching Josna’s painful expression at imagining any type of disagreement with her parents.

  “The split between Akemi and her father is a great secret between them. All I can say is it has something to do with her mom. She and her mom were extremely close, like twin sisters instead of mother and daughter. Shiori-san, Akemi’s mom, was an amazing mother. She was a mother to me also. Their family seemed happy together. A great sadness came only after she passed away, brain cancer. I am sure you already knew.

  “When Akemi entered these drawings into the competition, everyone was shocked. But no one seemed more shocked than Mr. Nakamura. The skill of her art was so great; Nakamura-san felt he would lose face with his young daughter drawing such revealing artwork. Besides, the first prize was an all-expense-paid trip to New York and scholarship to that New York art school. Mr. Nakamura hates America and American culture. So of course he was against his daughter going there. I mean, he hates it so much that he says, ‘English is not a language.’ He told us that he refused to speak it when he was in college even though it was required, and he refused for Akemi to learn or speak it as well. When Akemi won the exhibit
ion competition and was selected to represent not only Japan but the entire artistic Asian continent, she was featured in several newspapers. Mr. Nakamura never admitted to the press that he and his daughter were having hankouki. Instead, when the press wanted his comments, he accepted interviews and spoke only on how proud he was of his daughter and how high his expectations were of her. He denied any suggestion that the nude drawings resembled his daughter. Akemi also never publicly explained who the model was in her drawings or the motivation or meaning behind them. When her artwork received more and more exposure, she simply announced that she wanted to address through art ‘the controversial issue of the presence of seven hundred thousand Koreans living in Japan, many of them born in Japan, but still not accepted and treated as fairly as Japanese.’ That silenced everyone and confused a lot of people as well. Although they wanted to understand her, they were afraid to ask. No one in Japan wants to discuss these kinds of topics, not the elders or the youth. Japan is unlike anyplace in the world!” Josna said, inhaling and exhaling exasperation.

  “I have been living here since I was six. I grew up here with Akemi. Really, I should be angry with you for taking her away from me. But I can’t be. Akemi loves you. So I love you too,” she said warmly but without flirtation. Her words “I love you” made my heart shift some, as those words always do.

  Josna looked at the ceramic clock on the wall. Then she dashed across the room and through the velvet curtain to the triangular rear of the house. I followed her, walking slowly. An Indian statue of a shapely woman stood guard on the side of the curtain entrance. Her hands were slim and pretty and she held her fingers in a peculiar position. Pausing, I wondered if Josna had sculpted her. My thought was interrupted by the sound of running water.