sublingua

(Be present.)

(It's past.)

(Go there now.)

This part is real:
Even at this early hour, the streets are filled with people. I dread the unfamiliar station because I know it will be a madhouse rush of men and women in business dress flowing like water into Tokyo. It’s my day off, but I am also in a business suit—black skirt and blazer, black hose and heels. This is what I wore to work yesterday and what I left work in to go drinking last night. The young man beside me started out the evening in a brown suit—brown in the sophisticated color in Tokyo this season—but is now in jeans, a t-shirt and sneakers.
He has walked me to the station against this tide of business suits and as we walk, he says in English, “I feel ashamed.”
I am startled by this admission, and ask, “Ashamed? Why?”
He says, “All people are going to work but me. I am not going to work.”
I laugh. He is coming off a long haul of intense work overseas and has been rewarded by his company with a month-long holiday—meaning, minimal duties—in Tokyo.
I say, “You are on holiday. Your job is to relax.”
He smiles. “So, so,” he says. “My job is to relax. Now I am happy.”
At the station, he shows me where to buy a ticket—the ride isn’t covered by my travel pass from work—and walks with me to the correct gate. On a sign above us, I can see the familiar golden circle of the Tokyo Metro Ginza line and I do a quick mental calculation: Ginza to Asakusa and from there my usual train home.
Just outside the gate, we say our goodbyes. Without thinking, I step forward and put my arms around him. He immediately stiffens, unyielding, straightening his back and arms, barely touching me. It is like hugging a surfboard. This is not the same man I was in a clinch with an hour ago. I will have to apologize later.
“Goodbye, Christina-san,” he says when I let go. He bows very solemnly and I laugh and return the bow, less solemn.
“Goodbye, Kiyoshi.”
When I walk away, I don’t look back. I trust that he is still bowing when I go through the gate, bowing until I disappear down the steps to the platform. That would only be polite.

In my head the story goes like this:
We are sitting at the table. Our oldest son Kiyonao is eleven and is starting to develop a bit of skepticism towards our family situation. I know that despite his popularity at school, he faces some consequences because I am not Japanese. He has to try harder all the time because of it, but his father shrugs off my concerns about this. Our younger son Rensuke also faces some of the same consequences, but he is much more favored by others because he has a sunny, open disposition. I know I have babied Run a bit too much, just has I have held the line a bit too unyieldingly with Kiyo, the way his father’s family does and the way I have long been instructed to do.
This morning, Kiyo has taken the stance that I am not really his mother—this is true—and though he is not openly defiant, he wonders how his mother, his real mother, would react to his request (denied, not by me) to go with his friends to the aquarium on a day when he has promised his father that he would help us clean his grandparents’ house.
I say, in English, “It’s true. I am not your mother, but I am doing my best.” Ren looks up from his picture book. I say again, “I am doing my best. And you are doing your best. And your father and brother are also doing their best.”
None of this appeases Kiyo, but he keeps his face carefully arranged. Even so long among Japanese, I still struggle to interpret facial expressions and I know that my own poker face is useless here. Kiyo’s expression is not neutral, which I only realize when his father walks into the room and says, “What’s wrong?”
Kiyo will not openly question is father, so I answer for him. “He would like to go to the aquarium.”
My husband pulls his neck back and says, not unkindly, “ Not possible. It is not possible.” This means no, of course. I don’t disagree, but I am also not finished making a point about the boys’ mother.
I say to my husband, “I was about to tell them something about Fumie.”
“Eh?” This tack confuses him.
I know Fumie from the photograph on the butsudan, our altar. It is a sweet photo of a dark haired, round-faced woman, neither beautiful nor stylish. I know her from the carefully revealed details from my husband and his family. It took a year before he would consent to let me see the video taken at their wedding, saying later that he thought it would make me jealous. I know her from the comments made by our neighbors and the few friends she made in our village. She was quiet, polite and innocent, exemplary qualities in this place. She came from a good family in a nearby village and was chosen by Kiyoshi’s family because she seemed well-suited to life as a wife, mother, and—most importantly—daughter-in-law, an exacting position in a traditional family. I am a poor replacement for Fumie but replace her I did, a year after she died.
“What are you going to tell them?” my husband asks me.
“I was going to explain how she helps me.”
He looks at me steadily, his eyes meeting and holding mine. It is very direct, almost a warning. Then his gaze shifts to my mouth, looking for any movement, any clue. He is curious. I am used to this scrutiny by now. I try to keep my face as blank as possible, even knowing how hopeless this is.
“What do you say?” His way of asking what I mean.
“I talk to her every day,” I answer.
“Really?” Disbelief.
“Yes, really.” It’s true. I greet her each day and I address her every time her photo catches my eye. If there are others around, our conversations stay in my head. If we are alone, I address her out loud.
“What do you say?” He is asking for specifics now.
The boys are silent and perfectly still. They want their father and me, but mostly their father, to forget that they are in the room.
“I say, ‘Ohayo, Fumie-san,’ and ‘tadaima.’ Things like that.” My husband tilts his head very slightly and waits. “I say, ‘How are you, Fumie-san?’ And sometimes I ask for her help.”
“How does she answer?” Indulgent for the moment. Patient, always.
“I know you think I’m crazy, Kiyoshi,” I tell him.
“No, no,” he says. “Curious. I am only curious.”
“So before Kiyonao started school, I asked Fumie-san to help me prepare.”
“What is her answer?” He asks, evenly.
The boys are barely breathing now, not even blinking.
“Do you remember? Mrs. Sanae, Ken-chan’s mother, and told me what I needed to do. Fumie-san heard me and sent her friend to explain everything to me.” Kiyoshi relaxes. It’s just more of my nonsense. “I think everything was okay after that and, remember? I brought home imagawa-yaki”—her favorite—“the next day and gave some to Mrs. Sanae, too? That was to thank her for sending Mrs. Sanae.”
Kiyoshi shakes his head slightly. I hope my expression conveys the truthfulness of my story.
Ren breaks through the tension. “Can we have imagawa-yaki?”
I look at Kiyoshi, his decision. “Tomorrow,” he says. “Today, we clean. Tonight, dinner with grandma and grandpa. Tomorrow you can have.”
I nod, adding buying the cakes to the running list of things to do that I keep in my head. I would have offered the boys an easier to obtain treat—ice cream or even curry rice for dinner—not because I don’t want to honor their mother, but because they really don’t care as long as they get a treat. And the baker who sells the cakes doesn’t like me. Going to his bakery is an exhausting exercise in tight-lipped politeness on both our parts. This has been going on for years and I am happy to go out of my way to avoid patronizing his business, but now that is out of the question.
“How about breakfast?” Everything has been ready. We’ve just been waiting for Kiyoshi. The boys would be happy with cereal, but my husband would shake his head in disapproval—too American, even for me—so they get rice, miso soup with tofu and wakame, and grilled salted salmon. I have a bowl of yogurt.
“Only yogurt?” My husband always asks this. “It is not enough, I don’t think.”
“Maybe I will have rice and natto, also.” He hates the smell of the fermented soybeans and every time I eat it the way they do in the Kanto region (mixed with hot rice and a raw egg) he wrinkles his nose with disgust. He is not from the Kanto region.

Some of this is real, some of it not:
For our second date, we meet at Tokyo station and take the train to Yokohama. I don’t know what Yokohama has to offer that Tokyo doesn’t, but I am a bit of a snob about living in Tokyo. When we are together, I relax, letting him and the day decide where to take me. Right now, I am content to be on a train going anywhere and happy to be with him. It was early when we met, only 9:30, but Kiyoshi comes from a nautical family so in his mind the day is half over. It is almost an hour to Yokohama and we sit and chat in English. “Weather is good today, I think,” he says. “Low pressure but no rain.”
“That’s good.” I find it charming that he always knows the weather, day or night, without realizing that it is part of his job to have this information at hand.
“Good, yes,”
In Yokohama, we get off the train at Sakuragicho station and he leads me very purposefully to Minato Mirai where the Nippon Maru is docked. I have never been so close to any ship, much less been aboard one. This ship is what we are here to see.
On the pier, there is a little booth with a middle-aged, grumpy looking man inside. He looks me over, disapprovingly. This is a familiar response from strangers. I am not yet immune to it.
Kiyoshi says, “I will talk to him. Maybe get in for free.”
But before he can do this, I step up and pay for two admissions and take a brochure in English. I do it because I don’t like the way the man is looking at me. Kiyoshi nods at me, quickly bows to the man, and we go aboard.
Even with its sails furled, the ship is beautiful, with its pristine white hull and four stately masts rising high above the deck. Everything I can see is immaculate, all of the work done to impossible Japanese standards. The English brochure says that the ship was built in the 1930, as a training ship, but I am skeptical. I suspect that this is a bit of post-war fiction that allowed the Japanese to keep the ship when all its other little destructive toys were wrenched out of its hands. Docked, the ship is a museum, but it isn’t always docked. Two-and-a-half years ago, Kiyoshi graduated from marine college and he and the other graduates sailed the ship around Japan, visiting all the major ports as they went. He knows this ship intimately.
He makes me laugh by plucking things from the exhibit to give me a closer look. The other museum-goers don’t quite know what to make of this. He takes a coconut husk brush from a display and, for stooping, shows me how they are used to scrub the deck. In another part of the ship, he uncoils a rope and shows me how to coil it back up again. We move on and he shifts a velvet rope off to one side and grabs a harness from where they are hanging. He straps himself into it. One of the passersby goggles at this, looking as though he might be inclined to say something but then he thinks better of it. Kiyoshi ignores him completely. Instead, he points up to one of the ship’s masts and the ropes that run to and from its apex.
“You cannot use the harness until you reach there,” he says, pointing at a place that seems dizzyingly high above our heads. I am afraid of heights. He explains that below that point, there is the danger of becoming tangled in the ropes. “Very scary,” he says.
I ask him what the scariest thing that happened to him on the ship was. He tells me that normally they try to avoid rainstorms at sea because the wind is unpredictable in a rainstorm. “The ship cannot be navigated easily in such wind,” he says. Once, they could not avoid a storm and he and the others had to climb the masts to take down the sails. “We wore raincoats that catch the wind,” he says. “We were barefoot to climb. Boots are no good. The ropes are very slippery in the rain.” He points to the uppermost part of the mast. “I had to climb to there,” he says.
“No way.” I shake my head. I can’t imagine.
He laughs. “You would not be a good sailor.” He takes off the harness and replaces it in the display, repositioning the velvet rope.
He is comfortable on the ship, his life spent in and on the water. I come from a dry land,. Big sky and terrifying desert is how I always explain it to anyone who asks about my hometown. Kiyoshi laughed in disbelief when I told him I didn’t learn how to swim until I was twenty-seven years old. “When you are a child, there was no swimming pool in your school?” he asked. Further disbelief when I told him that the largest bodies of water I regularly encountered as a child were big puddles after infrequent but heavy summer rainstorms. It was only partly true. There were also narrow irrigation ditches crisscrossing my neighborhood and I could catch crawdads and watch the skinny-legged water skimmers ride the surface near the pipe outlets. Once a year, my father would want to go fishing and we would drive for hours to the nearest lake where he would drop a line baited with fluorescent colored fish eggs in the water and get drunk on shore.
“But where do the fish you eat come from from?” Kiyoshi’s sister asked the first time she met me and saw from the map I showed his family that my hometown was completely landlocked.
“There are lakes and river fish,” Kiyoshi explained to her. The answer seemed to satisfy his family, that the fish I ate came from those sources. Even people who eat fish from lakes and rivers might possibly be trusted. But the truth was that if I had fish three times a year growing up, that it was a lot of fish for me. When I did eat fish, I ate tuna from cans mixed with copious amounts of mayonnaise and chopped up dill pickles, spread on flabby white bread. And sometimes for dinner, there might be frozen fish sticks or, if my mother were really feeling inspired, a slim block of haddock fillets, frozen solid, and cooked in a pan with a stick of margarine and a lemon juice.squeezed from a plastic lemon with a screw on cap.
Small bodies of water don’t bother me too much. As long as I can see shore and touch the bottom, I’m fine. But the minute I can’t see shore and my feet don’t have anything but water beneath them, I start to fall apart a little bit. I’m okay here now though on this docked ship, safe with Kiyoshi.
We go below deck, following the red “ROUTE” signs posted on the walls. Kiyoshi points out where he and the other graduates slept, bunk beds crowding in on each side of the narrow room. Later, there will be stories about genial circle jerks, but now we file past the window that overlooks the engine room and the mess hall and the infirmary.
“So you were only twenty-one years old when you graduated?” I ask.
He nods, explains that he left school after the eighth grade to attend the marine college and lived on the small island where the school is located until he was twenty-one.
At twenty-one, what was I doing? Drinking mostly. I was also laboriously waitressing my way through a useless liberal arts associates’ degree from community college. It feels like less responsibility than he must have had, but I was living on my own then, too, holding down a full-time job and paying my own rent and tuition and had been since graduating from high school at sixteen. There was no family business, no family money for me to fall back on.
A decade separates us in age—I can’t focus on this fact without guilt washing over me—but we are evenly matched in some ways. He has lived and worked in Japan and around the world, held positions of tremendous responsibility, but he has always been very much under his family’s thumb, his future decided for him before he was born. And I have until coming to Japan, lived my life in one place, but I was responsible for myself and no decisions were made about my future until I made them.

This part is just a diversion:
We are together later that night. It is dark in his room and he is whispering something close in my ear. I don’t know the words, but I understand their meaning.
I have been too aggressive, but at this moment it doesn’t matter. I have what I want. We are together and I have lost sight of the shore.
In awhile the frenetic moments will be over and everything will slowly become still again. Our breathing will slow and we will be completely enveloped in a comfortable silence.
The sleeping mat we are sharing would be almost too small for either of us alone. Laying side by side, we barely fit. He holds me very close to him for a long time.
Breaking the silence, he says, “You have two men you like equally. One is American. One is Japanese. Which would you go with?”
I consider.
Earlier on the train, we sat across from a couple, a tall, blonde woman in her 30s and her Japanese boyfriend. I could feel Kiyoshi’s attention shift away from me to them. They had held hands, which a Japanese couple will not do in public. They had gazed into each other’s eyes.
Kiyoshi’s attention shifted back to me. I pretended not to notice any of this, instead asking if he wanted to have dinner in Ginza.
Now, laying in the dark beside him, I answer, “I would choose the Japanese.”
“Really?” Disbelief.
“I did not come to Japan to meet American men,” I say.
“That is just you, I think,” he says. “You like adventure.”
I agree, “Maybe it is just me. But the woman we saw on the train earlier also had a Japanese boyfriend,” I reply.
“You noticed this?”
I laugh. “Of course. She was very happy, don’t you think?”
I can’t say what I want to say—or at least I don’t say it. I don’t know the words in his language or in mine. I feel safe with him. I love the feeling of his arms around me. I never want that feeling to end. I don’t understand why it’s different with him than with any other man I’ve been with.
He replies, “Mmmm.” Noncommittal.
He is not just a bit of adventure to me. I don’t want to know that I am just a bit of adventure to him. I do not think then to ask him the question in reverse. “You have two women you like equally, one American, one Japanese. Which do you go with?” I did not want to know the answer.

In my head, the story reels out like this:
Kiyoshi has left the shopping bags with the cleaning supplies from the hyaku-en shop in the genkan, the entryway to our small house. I would prefer to load them into the car again for the drive to his parents’ house but Kiyoshi has decided that we need the exercise and can walk.
“Isn’t cleaning exercise enough?” I ask him.
“Cleaning is not exercise,” he says.
“It is the way Japanese people do it,” I reply.
He shakes his head. Americans are lazy or I am lazy. Both are true. This is going to be a grueling afternoon for me.
“Walk. We will walk,” he says. “And no taxis. Ganbatte.”
“Gambatimas!” I say, feigning resignation, bowing. He smiles, shaking his head, his “ehhhh” almost a laugh. The boys laugh, too. They like when we tease each other.
It’s been a joke between us for a long time, since our earliest dates in Tokyo a decade ago, that I would rather pay for a taxi than walk even the shortest city block. It started when we went drinking at the end of the workday. We were both still in business dress, he, handsome in his his gray suit, and me in my customary black suit and heels. I had a pair of more sensible walking shoes in the office closet, but I had perversely not changed into them because the heels made my legs look better. I had suggested a taxi as soon as we hit the street and Kiyoshi had laughed at this display of my laziness. I had laughed, too, and played it like a joke, but thought: Let’s trade shoes then. You wear these heels and I’ll take those loafers. Then I’m fine with walking.
But I always agreed with him that we should walk and we always walked.
The boys don’t mind walking. They’ve already picked up the bags and marched out the door, ready to get going. I am left standing there holding sunscreen and hats. Kiyoshi shakes his head again, leans out the door and calls the boys back Japanese. The rule is English inside, Japanese outside. Kiyoshi considers the genkan to be outside. The boys march back in and stand in the entryway, still holding the bags, shifting impatiently from side to side as I quickly cover their faces, arms and hand with sunscreen and put their hats on.
“Shades?” I ask them. Kiyo quickly shakes his head, no. His brother nods and I perch the sunglasses at the very end of his nose. He giggles and scrunches up his nose over and over, trying to get the glasses to wriggle upwards. Kiyo changes his mind. “Shades, please, mama.” I put the sunglasses at his forehead and he nods down and up vigorously, trying to get them to fall into the right place.
“Daddy, too,” Ren says, and I turn to Kiyoshi. “I already have,” he says, meaning he’s already put on sunscreen. He won’t wear sunglasses if he’s not on the boat and even then only rarely. A Japanese thing, I think. It makes people uncomfortable when you hide your eyes. I put his hat on his head. He hates it, thinks his head is too big for hats, but agrees to wear it because the boys are watching.
“Mommy, too,” Kiyo says. I put on my hat and sunglasses.
“Now we are ready,” Kiyoshi announces.
On the narrow road to Kiyoshi’s parents’ house, we are surprised when they drive by us. The boys see them and call out to them happily, “Ojiisan! Obaasan!” Ren turns to me and says, “Look, mama! Grandma and grandpa!” They are headed in the same direction we are, so they stop and greet us and a short conversation reveals that they have gone to restock their cleaning supplies. The boys show them our full bags. This is going to be an all day affair.
Kiyoshi’s younger sister is in the backseat. She does not look at us. Kiyoshi ignores her and the boys follow suit.

This part is true:
We have been out drinking, just the two of us, and I missed the last train from Ginza. Kiyoshi asked how I will get home.
“Oh,” I replied, “by taxi.” A taxi from Ginza to my neighborhood will cost about 5,000 yen, which is fine. It wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last time I spent 5,000 yen that way.
Kiyoshi said, “You can stay in Shimbash’ at my place. I will make you dinner.”
It was an interesting offer, but I was wary.
A couple of weeks before I met Kiyoshi, my Australian coworker Will had asked if I wanted to come up to his place and watch some rugby. We had lived in the same building for three and a half months and he had never invited me up to his place. I wondered why he was asking me now, but figured that he had finally gotten to know me a little bit better from the days we had spent working together and the nights we had spent out drinking with others. I assumed, somewhat hopefully, that “watch some rugby” was an Aussie euphemism for something more interesting. We agreed on a time to meet and I prepared accordingly. When I arrived at Will’s place at the appointed time, he had invited me in and happily accepted my gift of a couple of cans of grapefruit chu-hi and a bag of seaweed and salt chips. Then much to my disappointment, he switched on a rugby game, and exclaimed, “Can you believe it? All I do is pay a little extra for a satellite dish and I can watch all the rugby I want!”
We sat at opposite ends of his small sofa and watched rugby. I had never seen a rugby game before and I didn’t know the teams or players or any of the rules. I feared that it might be like American football and that I was in for hours of torture, complete with plays and slow-motion replays, a halftime show, the whole nine yards. I had been very happy to find out that rugby matches are mercifully short. By the time it was finished, just shy of two hours later, I actually had gotten into the game a bit (the muscular players in shorts helped) so that tempered my disappointment somewhat. But it all came back when at the end of the game, I looked over at Will to see that he was fast asleep on the small sofa beside me, his head tilted back, snoring softly.
The whole experience had knocked my confidence down a peg or two. So when Kiyoshi invited me to stay at his place in Shimbashi, the most I was expecting was dinner and a place to wait out the handful of hours until first train. Still, 5,000 yen is 5,000 yen, so I accepted.
On the walk to his place we stopped at a small, all-night grocery store and Kiyoshi bought pork belly and cabbage and a few other things to make nabe.
His apartment was in the center of Tokyo, close to where I worked in Ginza. It was the type that the Japanese call a “mansion,” not a mansion the way Americans see them, but rather a condominium-style apartment. “Mansion” was the word real estate agents had adopted to convey a sense of luxury. I had never been in an apartment in Japan besides my own and Will’s (which was the exact same apartment I had, only three floors higher).
We took the elevator to the third floor and he noted my surprise when he opened the door. From what I could see from the genkan, it was four or five times larger than my tiny, expensive, one-room rental at the far eastern edge of the city.
“This is a big place,” I said.
“My grandfather’s,” he said, by way of explanation.
He had told me little about his grandfather. From what I gathered, he was quite elderly (though who knows since Kiyoshi was only twenty-three and at twenty-three even fifty can seem quite elderly). He lived on an island and brought his boat to the company’s offices every day. In response to my asking what his grandfather did at the office, Kiyoshi had laughed. “Sleeps,” he answered. “Mostly he sleeps.”
His grandfather had bought the apartment so that he had a place to stay when he came to Tokyo on business. Kiyoshi and his younger brother—“my two-years younger brother,” as he called him—had been sharing the apartment while his brother was at university and Kiyoshi was working in Tokyo. Because he was the oldest son Kiyoshi had the larger bedroom. His younger brother slept in a smaller room off the living room. Even with Kiyoshi gone most of the time, the younger brother did not try to muscle in on the larger room.
Clearly, two twenty-something bachelors had been living there. That impression started at the genkan where I stepped out of my heels and left them amidst a jumble of sneakers and leather loafers, a couple of gym bags, a backpack, and a briefcase. Kiyoshi took my coat and hung it up next to one of his plain, brown suit jackets. Brown was the elegant color that season in Japan, which I, being no fashionista, did not understand. I caught a glimpse of the label in the jacket. My entire wardrobe wasn’t worth what the suit cost.
Kiyoshi turned down my offer to help cook and instead he handed me a small glass of pale beer and left me in the living room, where I perched uneasily on a small, blue sofa. I looked around at the large television set and the game console which had been left out, the controllers in a jumble of wires and games stacked around. There were collectible manga (or anime, maybe, I didn’t know) figures on the bookshelves. There was a guitar on a stand near the sofa.
The door to the brother’s room was open and through it I could see an unmade bed with rumpled clothes piled at one end and a desk stacked with books and papers. A laptop sat open in the center of the desk surrounded by several empty green tea bottles, the detritus of a twenty-year-old university student.
Kiyoshi was an efficient cook and we were soon seated on zabuton at his low dining table. He served rice into a small bowl and handed it to me. Only then did he think to ask, “Do you like nabe?”
My only experience with nabe had been in a restaurant with a handful of coworkers. Eight of us had squeezed around a table in a small, private room. A waitress in a kimono had brought in a large, squat earthenware pot and set it on a burner in the middle of the table. She went out and returned with a small jug filled with broth and a plate of uncooked sliced pork, chunks of tofu, slices of pale-fleshed fish, some type of large shellfish with rocky-looking shells, enoki and matsutake mushrooms, slices of large green onion, bits of cabbage, and a few other things I did not recognize. One of my Japanese coworkers, Jun, had arranged everything in the pot and poured in the broth. He turned on the burner and put the lid on the pot. While the food cooked, we drank and chatted. Every few minutes, Jun would lift the lid and nudge a few things around gently with a pair of long cooking chopsticks. Sometimes he would skim the top of the broth. When Jun finally decided that the nabe was ready, he removed the lid and all eight of us ate from the same pot, dipping the things we fished out of the pot into small bowls of a thin, dark sauce. Everyone had concentrated on the food and conversation stalled. Until the nabe was gone, I was surrounded by my Japanese coworkers’ appreciative exclamations—“Oishii!” and “Umai!” and “m-mmm, m-mmm’s.” Over the next year, I would come to be very familiar with these noises from sharing the breakroom table and restaurant meals.
Now I said to Kiyoshi, “Yes, I do like nabe.”
He watched me closely, as he often did.
“Itadakimasu,” I said. I picked up my chopsticks and dipped into the pot for a slice of pork. I dipped it into my sauce and ate it. “This is good.”
Kiyoshi looked concerned. ”You don’t like it.” It was not a question.
“No, Kiyoshi, I like it. It’s good.”
He was unconvinced. “I can make something else,” he said. “I can make an omelette.” He started to stand up.
I was confused as to how we got to this point and thought that it might be because I had not made enough appreciative noises. “Oishii!” I said. “M-mmm.” I took a piece of a mushroom and ate it, again enthusiastically exclaiming, “Oishii!” It was embarrassing for me to make noise while I ate, but now I did. I thought it might help if I had more beer, so I did that too. “M-mm-mmm.”
Kiyoshi relaxed and began to eat.
We finished most of the small pot of food and I helped him clear the table and wash dishes. I was fairly drunk by then, so mostly I stood and watched him wash the dishes. He put the remaining food in a bowl and I offered to put it in the refrigerator. Accidentally opening the freezer door, I saw a box of Morinaga chocolate ice cream bars. I would have killed for one—sweets are my weakness—but I didn’t say anything and he, not realizing, didn’t offer.
After cleaning up, we were both at a loss as to what to do. I returned to the sofa and he sat next to me, but on the floor, leaning back against the sofa. I wondered if I should also sit on the floor, but decided that I didn’t want to. My apartment did not have a sofa to sit on, only a chair with no legs. If nothing else, I thought, at least I could enjoy sitting on a sofa for awhile.
Kiyoshi reached for his guitar and began to play, not in a show off, playing to me kind of way, but just playing. When he finished the song, I asked, “Where did you learn to play guitar?”
“On the ship,” he said. “On there I have time to practice.”
Ah. It was one of the things he had picked up to pass the time. He had revealed a few of these things to me on our dates, including a small repertoire of sleight-of-hand tricks using hundred yen and five-hundred yen coins. If we were out with others, he would sometimes catch my eye and without drawing anyone else’s attention to himself, he would hold a coin at table level and while I watched, would make it disappear and then reappear with a subdued version of a magician’s flourish.
Now he sat forward to put the guitar back on its stand. When he leaned back against the couch, I reached down and rested my hand on his shoulder. He jumped away from my touch, was on his feet in an instant.
Rejection.
“I’m sorry,” I said, immediately.
“No, no,” he said. “Daijobu. It’s okay.” Be careful, one of my coworkers had warned me when I had asked her what daijobu meant. “Daijobu,” she said, “means okay and it is often a lie.”
Kiyoshi and I were both flustered now, flushed from drink and embarrassment. I was drunk, yes, but some part of my brain was still coherent enough to begin to plan an exit. How as I going to get home? There were no trains running at this hour, so I would need a taxi. This was a quiet, out-of-the-way street. It was unlikely that I would be able to hail a taxi here. Where would I need to go to find a taxi?
I stood up.
I thought I could I ask him to call me a taxi, but I quickly rejected that idea. I didn’t want to ask him for anything. If I could find the nearby station, I could wait out the hours there until first train.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “I should go home.”
“Daijobu,” he repeated. Still a lie. “Christina-san, okay. It’s okay.”
It’s my turn now to say that it’s okay. Can we each lie our way out of this? My humiliation was too big, the apartment suddenly too small. “It’s okay. Can you show me where to find a taxi?”
“You should stay.” He doesn’t touch me, doesn’t get near me.
The same coworker who had told me that daijobu is often a lie had also told me to reject all first and all second offers in Japan.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I can find a taxi.” The idea of being lost in Tokyo in the middle of the night is not appealing, but I need to get out of this room. I have been in tighter places. There will be a koban somewhere and I can ask a policeman. Tokyo is a safer city than most and this is a swank area. I tell myself that I will be fine.
“You should stay.” A second offer.
I smile and shake my head, moving toward the genkan, my shoes, my coat, the door. I wonder how much bowing will it take to extract myself from this situation.
“Please,” he says. “Only, I am surprised. Only surprise.”
I nod, trying to convey that everything is fine. Already forgotten. A breach in etiquette. My poor manners. A misunderstanding.
Then he moved toward me with purpose and kissed me. It was a strange kiss, with too little yielding by either of us, but it’s more than before. I don’t exactly like it, but I am desperate for the contact.

I dread returning to this story.
I dread returning to this story, but I do return. I always come back. Some parts are well-worn, shifting a bit as I go over them again and again. I think briefly of Kiyoshi as he was at twenty-two, the day I met him, and at twenty-three, when we started dating. Then thirty and married to someone else. Then forty and married to me. So much changed in that time—hair greyed, bellies thickened, thoughts shifted and experience narrowed some opinions and widened others. But in my heart, he was always the tall, handsome, strong young man I fell in love with.
I was teaching in a tiny English school in Ginza. My students were adults, most in their thirties and forties. The youngest was a cute, young, high school-aged girl with braces (unusual in Japan) and a Sanrio branded soul who came in after school. She was whipsmart and fun and giggled her way through lessons. There were handfuls of businessmen and OL—“office ladies”—in their thirties and forties who came looking haggard after a day of work. A few students were retired and came on the afternoons when they weren’t playing golf or shopping.
One night after classes were finished, most of the students had gone and since it was the rare night that I hadn’t been invited to go out drinking, I was planning to go to the gym after work. Before that, I wanted to ransack a closet in one of the classrooms. Halloween was coming up and I had heard rumors of a costumes stash.
I walked into the classroom and he was standing there, alone. He was taller than I was, and heavier, a surprise to me since I was three inches taller and, though at my thinnest, generally heavier than the average Japanese man. I was taken aback—who was this person? Was he one of the new part-time teachers I had been told to expect?
I greeted him, “Hi, I’m Christina. What’s your name?” and held out my hand to shake. Shaking hands was one of the ways I separated the upper level students from the lower level. The upper level students would not hesitate to shake hands—they seemed to desire as much contact with Westerners as they could get—but the lower level students weren’t so sure. They would often hesitate and I could see the wheels turning as they tried to decide how to or if they had to combine a bow with a handshake. It was not a practiced gesture, nor, for many, a desirable one.
He did not hesitate to shake my hand. His reply in English was smooth, without hesitation. In fact, it was me who stumbled as he reeled out his full name quickly, putting his family name first then his given name, then, at my confused look, shortening it. “Kiyo,” he said. “I go by Kiyo in English.”
His name was not familiar, so he was not one of the teachers. “What do you do, Kiyo?” I asked.
“My job?” he said. “You mean my job?”
“Yes.”
“I am a trainee at my company.” Vague.
I pressed for details. “Oh? What company?” Again, a Japanese name reeled out too quickly for me to catch. But nothing I recognized. Some of our students worked for American or European companies like Tiffany & Co. or Apple. I said, “I don’t know it. What kind of business is it?”
“Shipping,” he replied. “Shipping company.”
I pressed further. “Do you like your job?”
“No, I don’t like.” An unusual admission, but not unheard of. Many of the businessmen came to learn English so they could change their jobs or move up in their companies.
“Then why do you stay?”
“It is my family’s company,” he said. “I am the oldest son.” Ah, he had no choice. Then a startling bit of bluntness from him: “That stupid Japanese way of thinking.”
I started to ask another question, but his phone rang and he reached into his inner pocket for it and checked the caller ID. He had to answer so he made a chopping gesture, excusing himself and dismissing me. I nodded and went into the closet.
There was a pile of costumes in the closet, but they were mostly pretty lame and so disheveled that I wouldn’t have worn any of them anyway. Finally, at the bottom of a pile I found a tall, peaked witches’ hat. I would make the perfect witch. The students had often commented on my habit of wearing all black (the only time Japanese do is for funerals). I had brought only black business clothes with me to Japan, having read that finding my size was going to be an impossibility even in a city the size of Tokyo and I wanted everything to match with everything else in my wardrobe.
When I came out of the closet, Kiyoshi was talking to one of my coworkers, Kano. She was speaking to him in Japanese in her annoying, high-pitched, chirpy voice, too cutesy for a woman in her late forties. From the bit I could understand of their conversation, she had been sent to interview him, to gauge his level so that he could join the school. I didn’t bother to interrupt them to say goodby.
I gathered my things and took the train home where I had dinner before going to the gym. By the time I got home from the gym, I had forgotten all about him.
A couple of days later, the manager of the school came to me and asked, “Do you remember Kiyoshi? From tonight he will be your student.”
“Oh, great!” I replied, as genki as I could manage. “That will be fun.” I had no idea who he was talking about—who was Kiyoshi again?—but when I printed out my student lists, there was his name. He had signed up for my last class of the evening, a discussion group I taught of high level students, the men and women who I often went out drinking with after class. I still could not remember him.
At class time, no Kiyoshi showed up. I thought, oh, right, this guy. He sauntered in about ten minutes into class, red faced but not from embarrassment. He took an empty desk, making something of a production of it as he had to excuse himself to get past a couple of other students. I had stopped the class and we sat in silence while he got settled. Then I said, “We have a new student. Please stand up and introduce yourself.”
He stood up, said, “My name is Kiyo and I am drunk.” Then he sat down again. It was hard to hold in my laughter. From that point onward, I found it hard to hold in my laughter.
“Welcome, Kiyo.”
After class, he consented to come out and continue drinking with me and a few other students. He had purposefully sat next to me in the bar and I took the opportunity to continue prying into his life. He was twenty-two years old and after graduating from a marine college, he had studied English in Australia for a year. Then he had moved to America to work for a company affiliated with his family’s company. He had lived in New Jersey and gone often into New York City. His English had not improved while living in America, he told me, because everyone in the company spoke Japanese.
I had only been in Tokyo for four months and still had few friends. Most of my training group had been sent to other parts of Japan. Two other women had been posted to Tokyo. I had shared a room with one during our week of training and she had stumbled in half-drunk one morning after staying out all night. She had a story about going to a love hotel with a Japanese man she had picked up in a nightclub. She said she had insulted him by insisting on reciprocal oral sex and, she said, in retaliation he had stolen her wallet after she passed out. He had left sen-en, ten dollars, on the nightstand which she used to get the train home. Later, she had asked to borrow my deodorant. She quit after her first week on the job, when she thought it was unfair that she got in trouble for going out shoe shopping on her lunch hour and failing to come back to the school in time for her next class. The other woman who had been posted to Tokyo was very young. She had also gone out nightclubbing with the training group and had her coat stolen from the club. On her third day in Japan, she had been stopped by the police on her way back to our shared house from the conbini. They suspected from her dress and demeanor that she was a prostitute and were shocked to find out that she was an English teacher. She would do well in Japan, I thought. She worked in Ikebukuro and we never, ever spoke with one another after training was finished. We had hardly spoken to each other during training.
So, I had no friends in Japan. My coworkers were friendly, but they were adults and busy with their own lives and families. I went out drinking with many people, but otherwise I spent time alone, traveling around Tokyo and other parts of Japan. Every once in awhile, I would meet a student my own age who had lived abroad and I would an extend an invitation, saying that I would love to meet up and hear about their experiences. My direct approach scared off the Japanese. Kiyoshi was the only one who ever took me up on my offer.
He was so much younger than I was that I didn’t think of it as a date. That was my first mistake. I showed up with no makeup and my hair pulled back into a ponytail. I wore jeans and boots, the usual things I would wear on my day off. We had arranged to meet in Ginza, near the school. He rode up on his bicycle and he did not apologize for being late, possibly speechless from the shock or disappointment of my appearance. He left his bike parked next to some railing on the street in front of the school and this being Japan, it was still there when we returned later.
In my mind it was just another Saturday, my day off, and I had things to do. I was going to meet this kid for coffee then I was going to go back to my neighborhood via the supermarket in the station in Ueno where they sold things I could not find in my little neighborhood grocery store. I would have time after that to do some laundry and then hit the gym.
We met early, around ten, and Ginza was relatively quiet. Later, the streets would be packed with people. The true Tokyoites didn’t like to get rolling until later in the day. We went to a large coffee place in the center of Ginza. I was familiar with the place from spending time there on my mid-afternoon break from work. I would get a coffee and pastry and sit at the counter in the second story window, watching the people on the street below. I had tried sitting downstairs, but then I became the thing to be watched. The scrutiny was too much for me sometimes.
I ordered a coffee and he did too. We took a small table near the front door and I immediately excused myself and went to the bathroom. I took down my hair and ran a brush through it. At the bottom of my bag, I found a rarely used lipstick and a stubby eyeliner pencil. I put both on. I couldn’t do anything about the jeans and boots, so I unbuttoned a few of the top buttons of my shirt, enough to make things interesting.
When I returned to the table, he looked…something. Relieved? Pleased? I was a girl after all.
The conversation was forgettable, but I remember that I was uncomfortable and he was so nervous that his hands were shaking. His cup clattered against the saucer each time he lifted it or put it down.
The cups of coffee were mercifully small and there were no refills. That meant the

retreat or surrender

More lies:
- - Tuesday, Aug. 24, 2021
- - Tuesday, Aug. 24, 2021
- - Friday, Aug. 20, 2021
- - Thursday, Aug. 19, 2021
Tokyo Story II - Friday, Aug. 13, 2021