She pulled up each card and placed down a new sentence. I flipped ’em. “Japan Akemi country.” I smiled. Picking up the cards, I asked her, “Where sold?” I placed two word cards down so she would understand.
She answered, “go,” which she always said when she meant come. I knew she was offering to take me to whatever location or person she had sold her luggage to.
“Chotte Matte,” I told her in Japanese, asking her to wait.
“Hai,” she said softly, watching me stand up. I held out my hand to her. She placed her hand in mine and I pulled her up to her feet.
“This dress,” I said. “It’s for Mayonaka.” I touched the cloth of her dress and gently pulled it some. When I released the material, it lay back down over her now raised-up nipples. I took everything out of my pockets and laid it out on the desk.
“This face”—I touched her skin—“is for Mayonaka.” I squeezed her lips until they puckered. “These lips are for Mayonaka.” Gently, I kissed her. She exhaled. Her lips parted and our warm tongues welcomed each other, our kissing and licking and sucking expressing our deepest emotions.
Soon I ran my hands down the length of her body until I was squatted with my hands wrapped around each of her ankles. I loosened my grip and stroked her feet with my fingers, then moved my touch over her ankles, then calves, and brushed her knees and pulled up into the inside of her thighs. “These legs are only for Mayonaka.” My fingertips could now feel the moisture spreading and soaking the lace of her petite panties. Her eyes turned into pools of boiling oil and her breathing picked up and our hearts raced.
When I removed the soft silk dress with the costume jewelry that flooded her neckline and ran down her back, I could see that her breasts were swollen. When I touched them lightly with my tongue, she bit her lip and stepped up and walked backward onto the mattress. She walked backward until she hit the wall. Then she eased her body down to a sitting position. She held her legs with her hands and laid her chin on top of her knees, watching intensely and waiting. I came out of my clothes and she studied my erection. I took two steps and picked up the oil elixir. I sat on the bed facing her. I began massaging the oil onto her body, beginning with her pretty toes. She eased one hand down and began stroking my erection with a light touch, creating an urge that was multiplying rapidly. The scent of Sudanese oils perfumed the air. Akemi released her hands, and her legs cocked open revealing her pretty pussy. I liked her pussy hairs, didn’t want her to shave them away. I pulled her closer, then lifted her. I positioned her there and she wiggled until her opening gave way and grabbed me like a tight surgeon’s glove. With only the tip at the entrance, pushing against her clitoris, she threw her head back and let out a sound that could only be released this way. I helped her bounce softly until I eased all in.
We rocked slowly at first, in a rhythm that was as natural as the soaring movement of the wings of the white-tailed eagle I saw in the fields of Hokkaido. Her pussy felt fatter and more juicy. As her walls massaged me, and my muscle moved in it, my mind left and only feelings and sensations remained. When her walls began to flutter and she turned into a waterfall, she fell against me, holding me as tight as she could. I eased my back against the sheets. Her body was pressed against me, sealed by her syrup.
I began licking her outer ear. I was not finished. She began wiggling again. I gripped her hips and we were back to grinding. Only the sound of our breathing and the mixing of moisture could be heard. It felt good to her, I knew. She was digging her nails into my flesh. When I flipped her so that she now lay on the bottom, and I eased one of her legs over her head and began thrusting inside her from a side angle, she began purring and moaning all over again. With my eyes closed and my feelings stirring and escalating, and my heart pounding, I saw scenes of myself climbing the Hidaka to find her and suddenly my emotions shifted from longing and desire and pure pleasure to insult and anger that we had ever been separated. Soon I realized that I was fucking her hard. I began sucking her neck and passion-marking her body, same as an animal marks his territory. I could hear her heavy breathing and light voice in my ear. As she cried out repeatedly, “Uuhh, uuhh, uuhn …,” I remembered that she was my wife, the mother to my twins, and I spilled all my seeds and swinging emotions inside her until my body weight crushed her.
I rolled to my side, both of us breathing like we had climbed one thousand stairs. Her face was flushed and her eyes filled with tears. Then a smile eased across her lips and she said, “Aishiteru.”
I grabbed her up and we remained in an embrace. My feelings were still furious. “I fucking love you, girl. I fucking love you like crazy. You belong to me and I belong to you.” I knew she didn’t know what I said. But I knew she understood.
* * *
At 9:15 p.m. a new hunger aroused me. I showered and put on fresh wears. As I looked through Akemi’s clothes, I called out her name.
“Pekko pekko da,” I told her in Japanese, meaning “I’m hungry.” She smiled and stretched her limbs like a cat. Her movements were slow as though she had only needed to satisfy one hunger.
“Come on,” I rushed her as I laid out what I wanted her to wear. She saw. There was no resistance in her. She showered. When she emerged in her yukata, a beautiful, long, colorful Japanese dress with amazing sleeves, a kind of summer kimono, I was moved in a real big way by how incredible she looked. Now she was covered—arms, legs, shoulders, hips, thighs, and calves. But she seemed even more seductive to me.
She went through her LV Cruiser bag and pulled out some Japanese socks with slots to divide her toes. She slid into a pair of wooden shoes with the socks on. She took small steps toward me. I slipknotted her hair. When she glanced down at the desk, I lifted the passports and Pan Star ship tickets and said, “Ashita Busan, Korea,” letting her know we would travel tomorrow. She smiled brightly and clapped her hands together twice. She swept up the 350,000 yen with her fingertips and then embraced me. I felt her ease the folded stack of bills into my back pocket. She kept holding on to me as though she never wanted to let go.
“Akemi, should I eat you for dinner?” I asked her. She released her hands and smiled a smile that made me wonder if she understood what I had just said. I grabbed her hand and said, “Come on. No more for you.”
“Chotto matte,” she said softly. She walked over to her handbag and opened it. She pulled out a small box and lifted the top. She began speaking in Japanese to me while walking my way with something concealed inside her small hand. As I leaned against the wall, she touched my hand and placed a band of gold on my married finger. She scolded me. I imagined she was asking, Where is your wedding ring? Have you lost it or is it off for some other reason? But I couldn’t be sure. Besides, I didn’t mind the way she went about loving and claiming me. I checked out the ring. It was engraved in kanji. When I kissed her on her cheek and acknowledged, “Arigato gozaimasu,” she smiled.
“And where are your bangles?” I asked her. She looked puzzled. I gestured, holding her wrist in my hand. She rushed back to her bag and dived in and placed the two diamond bracelets that I gifted her for our wedding over her fingers. I grabbed my Jansport and pulled the two gold bangles out that she had given to her friend to attract my attention. I slid them over her fingers and onto her wrist.
“We good now?” I asked her. She leaned against my body. The silk of her yukata aroused me, but I told myself to move. A man gotta eat, and if I gave in to her seduction every time it moved me, I would be living inside and between her thighs unable to do anything else.
* * *
Purposely, I avoided returning to the Lebanese restaurant where I had made prayer and broken my fast with a cup of water and two dates. My curious wife and I strolled down the side streets of Osaka, her dressed in her beautiful yukata, no head covering, yet concealed behind an exotic umbrella, in the cloudless, rainless night. I enjoyed the silence this time because of our mutual mood. We were in a kind of war, but we were at peace.
Easily, as we walked by, my wife pointed
out her red Epi leather LV trunk and suitcase. They were positioned front and center in the window in a now closed and darkened shop that featured used expensive designer goods, from the tiniest purses to the heaviest handbags and even luggage. She didn’t have to show me. I trusted her. But it was good that she did. I needed my wife and me to become closer and even tighter than we were so far. This was the only real way for us to protect our marriage. She had to really know me, my thoughts and all. She had to follow what I told her to do, without even a slight change here and there. She had to get in a perfect rhythm with me. If she couldn’t, I knew that any outsider could exploit the weakness and attack our love.
Cooks from Kashmir prepared our extra-spicy meal. It was a small dinner place that gave off the feeling that we were eating in a good friend’s brick-oven kitchen. There were four other female customers who were also wrapped up in their traditional clothing and eating alongside their husbands. Kashmir is an Islamic country also. The restaurant owner had a unique style of wallpaper plastered across one wall of his intimate setting. It was actual photography of revealing scenes of the beautiful mountain lands of Kashmir. As Akemi and I observed it, the waiter said to me, “You are looking at a piece of heaven, my country.”
The dark-skinned Kashmiri waiter, while pouring water into my wife’s glass, also became distracted as he glanced at my pretty wife. Apparently he was looking at a piece of heaven also. Even with her body well covered, she needed her long dark hair wrapped. I knew that. I told myself, one step at a time, inshallah.
In between dinner and dessert, I slid Akemi the green study cards with the kanji explanation of Ramadan, so that she would understand why I would only be sharing meals with her after sunset each evening. She laid each card out and read it, following the kanji with her pretty painted black fingernails. She looked up at me.
“Hai! Wakarimashta,” she said, meaning that she understood.
The waiter brought over some honey-laced fruits.
“Who?” Akemi said in English.
“What?” I asked her.
She pointed to the kanji on the cards. “Who?” she repeated and held out her hand. I gave her the other cards, knowing she wanted to ask me something.
“Who Japanese write?” she spelled out with my study cards.
“Tsuwakeshya,” I told her in Japanese, meaning translator.
“Woman?” she asked.
“Hai!” I told her.
“Chiasa.” “Chiasa,” she repeated softly.
On the way back to our hotel, I copped a duffel bag at a uniform store. Japan was so big on hard work that worker’s clothes and accessories could be purchased at all hours of the night. Akemi wanted the pink duffel. But I knew that I would be the one carrying it, of course. So I chose brown.
* * *
Seated on the floor back at our hotel room late night, both Akemi and I listened to some music on her antique handheld battery-operated radio. We sat it in the corner as we read the books that we had purchased from an impressive bookstore that took up an entire building and was packed with books from all around the world and plenty of curious customers, night readers. She was reading a book on pregnancy and childbirth. I was reading a travel guide about Korea.
It seemed she liked my study cards. She positioned her version of an English sentence on the bamboo floor using them. “Two boy, two girl,” were the words on the cards she laid down. I smiled. She was asking about our twins, inshallah.
I answered with the cards: “Son good, daughter good also.” She laid down her promise, “Akemi, Mayonaka, one daughter, one son.”
Around midnight, she and I were stuffed inside a phone booth together. She leaned her body against mine as I followed up with Haki and let him know I had secured the tickets. He wished me a safe trip, apologized for earlier, and then said, “I am here until I achieve my PhD. So remember, brother, you have a friend in Japan.”
“Chiasa, are you good?” I asked Chiasa when she picked up.
“So good. You called!” she said with soft-spoken excitement.
“I told you I would.”
“I know,” she said even softer.
“Is everything okay with your grandfather?”
“Perfect.”
“What did he say?”
“He asked me how was ninja camp,” she said. “I had told him that I would visit my sensei in Osaka. That’s why I left Kyoto that afternoon. I had to make sure I did it, since I told grandfather that I would.”
“I want you to introduce yourself to my wife. Say anything that you would like to say.”
“Anything?” she repeated.
“Anything,” I assured her, and handed Akemi the phone.
Umma answered the phone excited. “Say salaam alaikum.” I pronounced the Arabic greeting for my wife slowly as I held the phone to her ear. “Salaam alaikum,” she said softly. “Akemi, Umma love!” she added with great joy.
Holding my wife from behind while talking to my umi on the phone was a simple but high moment for me. I am most at ease when I am pleasing the women I love. If I have come up short, or disappointed or failed them, I say nothing. I just keep on pushing and working and fighting until I get it right and a smile spreads across their faces the way I was certain it was on Umma’s pretty face, and the way it was on my wife’s pretty face right then.
Chapter 1
ANYONGHASEYO
A yolk-yellow sun, a white sky; the bluest sea, mounds of gold sand, and an aggressive, warm, and moist wind: it’s Busan, Korea. More fishing boats and barges, ships, cruisers, and yachts than you could imagine. Cargo containers were carrying everything from every corner of the world. The scenery made more unusual by the green mountains, the buildings and homes were unevenly stacked and woven around the boats and the water, not vice versa.
Crooked and curved alleys flossed privately owned small businesses, hundreds of them, with thousands of outdoor vendors. Every Korean was at work, it seemed—the grandfather, the grandmother, the mother, the father along with running toddlers and babies clinging on breasts, backs, and butts. It felt like they all knew one another well. Maybe block by block they were all related. What’s for sale? Everything! A nation of hustlers, not even an insect or snail was safe.
As Akemi and me moved around on foot, our eyes were equally filled with curiosity and amazement at these new images. Even the feeling here was different and special. Korean people were staring, not ignoring. Some seemed in awe of Akemi separately, and of me individually as well. They seemed even more stunned by the two of us together.
Maybe it was the colorful explosion on her yukata, the third beautiful one she had worn and I had seen. Maybe it was because she walked slowly as they hurried. She was dressed for leisure and luxury. They were dressed for labor. Or maybe it was because she was with an African man in the narrow streets ram-packed only by Koreans. Or maybe it wasn’t none of that. Perhaps it was the pressure of sixty vendors positioned in a row, all selling the same products. All of them were trying to capture the attention of the same customers to secure a sale. I was puzzled over how exactly that could ever be profitable. I even wondered how one man explained to his business neighbor. “Yes, I am opening my spot right next door to yours and selling the exact same things!” The only way for one vendor to gain an edge on his competitor was with his display style.
This is a place that looked and felt fully lived in. They were unable to keep it clean, neat, and tightly organized as every street was in Japan. In fact, here in Busan I saw a grandmother out in the street dressed in lime-green gauchos and a pink and purple blouse, sporting a mean black afro while squatting on her couch, which she had parked on the curb. Her legs were cocked open as she was cutting and cleaning fish as swiftly as me and Cho. She rocked an orange visor and had a baby strapped to her lower back. She brought a smile to my face naturally.
On the next block, the product changed, but the number of dealers didn’t. I finally figured out there were entire alleys dedicated to only one category of goods
. For example, all seafood and meats, or thirty noodle stores in a row, or exclusively fruits and vegetables and nuts. There was even a block dedicated to the red pepper and other powerful spices.
The Korean everyday greeting was a long leap from a simple American “hi.” Instead they called out “Anyonghaseyo” to one another. There were no blank faces here, no lack of emotion, and no strange silences. Everyone was expressing something and voices were both raised and lowered and the language filled with musical melodies.
We lined up for the bus, stood there for five minutes before we realized they didn’t believe in lining up. Casually people cut in front of us or jumped in the line behind us but in front of some other people who had been there first. I wasn’t stressed about it, more in observation mode than anything else.
When the bus swung into the curb, the people piled up and the problem was the bus driver never stopped the line even after every space was stuffed, every step in use, every seat filled, three squeezed in two spaces. I switched places with Akemi so that she was pressed against a teenaged girl instead of a male. I held her close but everybody was holding somebody even if they didn’t arrive together and were complete strangers. It was different than Tokyo, where buses and trains and places could be and usually were packed with people, but there was no touching, or in New York, where if you accidentally touched or bumped somebody, you might get forcefully shoved back by a stranger yelling, “Get the fuck off of me.”
The bus driver pulled out. Better yet, he yanked out. As soon as he caught up with the traffic, he slammed on the brakes, causing everyone to fall forward. Except there was nowhere to fall, so we just mashed onto one another. When the traffic advanced, the driver yanked again.
He swept around the corner, bogarting the oncoming traffic’s lane. We all leaned leftward, my hand on the window to my left held us in place, my arm extended over the heads of the three guys seated there. When four got off, five got on. The driver drove like he had a vendetta against his passengers. Someone dropped a bag of fruit. Oranges rolled down the narrow aisle. Some got picked up and passed to the back like batons handed off during a relay race. Two tangerines got crushed beneath scuffling feet. For many minutes we got swung and smacked around. A bag fell from a luggage rack and tagged six heads before someone stopped it and tossed it back to its place like in a volleyball match.
Midnight and the Meaning of Love Page 49