A Woman's Nails

by Aonghas Crowe

  “So, the fireflies . . .,” I say. “Know any good places I can see them around here?”

  “The problem with young people today,” Shizuko says with contempt, “is that they want to marry for love.”

  This surprises me enough to bring me back into the conversation, and I ask Shizuko if she loves her husband. The two women laugh at me, making me feel foolish for asking. I didn’t know the question was so silly.

  “Love,” Shizuko scoffs. “Tell me, Peador, why do half of all Americans get divorced?”

  I could offer her a number of reasons. Many really. But, I'm really not in the mood to go head to head with these two half-drunk, half-bitter housewives.

  “It's very important to know the person you're marrying,” Shizuko warns. “Love confuses you.”

  “Do you want to marry a Japanese girl?” Yoko asks me.

  “I haven't given it much thought, to be honest. Anyways, marriage isn't the object. It's the result. If I find someone I love, who also happens to be Japanese, who knows? Maybe I'll marry her.”

  “You'll never be able to marry one,” Yoko says refilling my choko. “You have to eat miso and rice and soy sauce as a child.”

  Maybe I'm blind or a sentimental dolt, but, somehow, I just cannot accept the idea that what went wrong between Mie and myself was rooted in my dislike of sashimi.

  “Everyone wants to marry someone funny and cheerful,” Yoko continues spilling a drop of wine onto her linen tablecloth. “Tsk, tsk . . . She’s cheerful but she couldn’t cook if her life depended upon it. She buys everything from the convenience store and puts it in the microwave. Ching! Boys want girls that are fun, but they don't understand that what they really need is a wife who can cook real food and take care of children. Young people these days!”

  It was almost as if she was speaking specifically about Mie. My Mie who woke early in one morning, and walked in her pajamas to the nearest convenience store to get something for our bento. She wasn’t as hopeless as Yoko might contend; she fried the chicken herself, then packed our lunches and bags before I had even gotten out of bed. When I finally stopped knitting my nightly dream, put down my needles and woke up everything for our day at the beach had been prepared.

  “It's a shame what some of the mothers fix for their children at the International School. My daughter used to trade her tempura that I woke early to make because she felt sorry for her friends. They were eating sandwiches!”

  It was an outrage.

  When I woke, Mie was gently stroking my head. I pulled her into my arms and kissed her soft lips. She laid down upon me, legs to each side of me, then punched the remote to invite Vivaldi into bed with us. As the hot morning sun began to brighten up the room, we made love, made love throughout the Four Seasons.

  Later that morning, we drove with the top of her car open, windows down and music blaring to Umi-no-Nakamichi, a long narrow strand of sand and pines that continued for several miles until it reached a small island forming the northern edge of the Hakata Bay. Pine sand and sea lay on either side of the derelict two-lane road. We arrived at a small inlet, which had been roped off to keep the jellyfish away and paid a few hundred yen to one of the old women running one of the umi-no-ie beach houses. Passing through the makeshift hut with old tatami floors and low folding tables we walked out to the beach which was crowded with hundreds of others who had came to do the same.

  By eleven the sun was burning down on us, burning indelible tans into the backs of children. The only refuge was either the crowded umi-no-ie hut or the sea, so Mie and I took a long swim, waded in each others’ arms or floated on our backs in the warm, shallow water.

  Although I’d eventually get such a severe sunburn that I’d lie awake at night trembling in agony, it was one of my happiest day in Japan. On the way back to Mie’s apartment with my lobster red hand resting between her tanned thighs, I sang along to the Chagé and Aska songs playing on her stereo, making her laugh the whole way.

  “I love you,” she’d tell me with a long kiss when we arrived.

  “What men need,” Yoko repeats, “is a woman who can cook and take care of the home. Someone like your Yu-chan in the office.”

  I’m slapped out of my reverie by the absurdity of what Yoko had just said. Yumi, grayest of gray, as cold and bitchy as they came, may make a suitable Eva Braun for an Al Hitler, but suggesting that she’d make a good wife for me, that was insulting.

  Yoko, reading the disagreement in my face, says, “See, Yu-chan’s gloomy and, well, she isn’t much to look at, but she really would make a very good wife for you, Peador. You just don't know it yet.”

  Good grief!

  12

  REINA

  1

  Reina is in one of her moods again when I get back to the office later in the afternoon. Something has obviously happened, but I don’t know what. When I try talking to her, she gives me the cold shoulder.

  There is nothing I’d rather do more after work than to lie down on my futon with the air conditioner blasting away and drift off to sleep, but I can’t. Earlier in the week I accepted an invitation to dinner by Kazu, a friend of Reina’s. A paper of his I rewrote for him has apparently been accepted by some scientific journal in the States and he is eager to show his appreciation. I wish he’d show his appreciation by letting me go home and sleep.

  Fortunately, this Kazu is a lot of fun. For a doctoral student in engineering at Kyûshû University, the prestigious national university in town, he is refreshingly down-to-earth, vastly different than the stuffy academic deadbeats I've met up to now. It was Kazu himself who once told me that in Japan, the better a university is, the worse the students. Kyûshû University, he said, was filled with otaku who were brilliant at taking tests, but didn't know shit from Shinola.

  Tall, handsome and gregarious, when Kazu enters a room, all eyes are on him, and, if you aren’t laughing soon, well then you probably just aren’t getting the jokes, because the guy’s a riot. Kazu, like Reina, has an infectious and enviable charisma making it difficult not to like or want to be with him. If I only I possessed a fraction of Kazu’s congeniality. It was Kazu, incidentally, that Reina was talking about when she told me a friend of hers had spent all his money at a soapland and felt as if he had died and gone to heaven.

  Kazu picks us up in his Mini Cooper and the three of us cram inside, me in the back, my chin resting on my knees, and drive off to a pub he frequents near the university.

  Something about the levity in Reina’s voice and demeanor as she speaks to Kazu reminds me of the warm spring evening when the two of us took a walk around Ôhori Park after work. I couldn’t have been at the company for more than a month, so it was only after we had just started dating or whatever it was that we'd been doing. We bought several cans of beer from a vending machine on the way, then wandered along the string of islands and arched bridges that divide the shallow black waters of the large pond in half until we had found an isolated bench to sit on. We opened one can of beer at a time and shared it, and talked and talked and talked. On the opposite shore someone was playing the Tennessee Waltz, badly, on a saxophone. A gentle breeze also rustled the young leaves carrying the occasional moan of young lovers screwing in the woods, making us titter like children.

  Reina often told me stories of the men in her life, men like Kazu, who had come right out and confessed his love to her. When she refused, he joked that he was willing to pay her for sex. Many others, though too shy to be as bold as Kazu, went to great efforts to get the point across. It never ceased to amuse her, and she loved them all, wanted to “eat the all up”, as she liked to say.

  I slept with her that night, the windows open to the sounds of cats in heat. She lay on her side with her face resting on my chest. Sweat beaded her upper lip, her shoulders and arms were flush. I thought about how so many men adored her, and yet, how she still managed to harbor a deep insecurity that could drive her from time to time to jealous apoplectic rages.

  I couldn’t deny that Reina
was a lovable person, but I couldn’t find it in myself to love her or to fall for her the way so many others had. I found it depressing to consider that I would eventually have to choose between confessing my love to her or ending the relationship outright.

  2

  We sit down at the counter of the yakitori-ya. Aside from a few dowdy men sorely in need of haircuts and a small group of rambunctious otaku playing drinking games at a low table in a tatami room in the back, the pub is empty. Seeing our expression, Kazu tells us not to worry. He assures us it’s great place.

  The master serves us tea in cups that are painted with irises and fireflies.

  “You know,” I say, “I've been seeing this kind of thing all day. I take it you can see fireflies now. Any idea where?”

  “Yeah,” Kazu replies. “Along pretty much any river that's clean.”

  “A clean river in Japan? All the rivers I've seen in them have got rusting bicycles and old washing machines and . . .”

  “Yu-chan told me everything,” says Reina abruptly.

  Everything, I think. What's everything? “W-what did she say?”

  “She said you tried to rape her.”

  I could almost laugh, half from embarrassment, half from the absurdity of such a claim. Though my recollection of the evening of that regretful evening remains fuzzy, one thing I do clearly remember is that I categorically did not want or try to have sex with that woman. Yes, my hands, inspired by the copious amount of alcohol I had consumed, did find their way into the sweating dank recesses of the girl’s reinforced panties, but, thank God, I had the good sense enough to pass out before things got out of control.

  “I don't remember,” I reply pathetically. “I blacked out. I don't even remember how I got home that night.”

  “That's not what she said,” Reina shoots back. It seems as if she has prepared what she is going to say, knowing beforehand the very kind of flimsy excuses I’d offer up in my defense and how exactly to blow them down. “Yu-chan said you didn’t look drunk.”

  “C'mon. You know better than that. If anyone should know that, it's you.”

  “I know, I know. I told her that you often get drunk, do stupid things and don’t remember the next day.”

  “Er, thanks a lot.”

  “You don’t even know the half of it, Peador. She wanted to go to Abazuré. She said she could have you fired just like that if she wanted to, but I talked her out of it.”

  “Have me fired? For what?”

  “She says you lead her back to your apartment . . .”

  “I didn’t! Look, if I remember anything, I do remember that she followed me back to my apartment.”

  “I thought you didn’t remember.”

  Oops, she does have me there.

  “I don't,” I protest. Relax. Breathe. Inhale, count to ten, exhale. “Look, I don't remember much. The whole night's a blur.”

  “She said you told her to come over. You invited her.”

  “Ah hell, I could have told her anything. I do that when I’m drunk. I could have asked her to marry me, for all I know. ‘You’re the most beautiful girl in the world, Yu-chan! You’re the only one for me, Yu-chan.’”

  “Do you remember kissing her?”

  “No!” I gasp, but it is with deep remorse that I do indeed remember kissing Yumi and I wish to God I could get that awful image out of my head.

  “Did you French kiss her?” Kazu interjects playfully.

  He’s been silent the whole time, but finding this opportunity to poke a little fun, proceeds to jab me with embarrassing questions. He asks if I copped a feel of her breasts, whether they were as big as he imagined, whether she had huge nipples or not. Kazu pretends to lick Yumi’s breasts, causing Reina howl with laughter.

  Much as I want him to give it a break, I can’t deny that if it weren’t for him, the atmosphere would be entirely unbearable, and I’d have to suffer the full brunt of Reina’s anger.

  “Did her nipples stand up?” he asks, sticking his thumbs out from his chest and making Reina nearly choke on her beer.

  Even after Reina has regained her composure, she continues laughing. It’s a searing, contemptuous laughter, one not so much responding to Kazu’s sense of humor, so much as to ridicule me and drive me back into the hole from which I’ve only started to emerge. And the longer she laughs, the more it starts to wear on my nerves.

  3

  In the mornings as the sun would break through the curtains and set the dust and cat fur into flight, Reina would be in the kitchen, the sound of her knife tapping rhythmically against the cutting board as she chopped vegetables up for our morning soup. It was that steady tapping and the smell of miso to which I often woke at her apartment. When breakfast was served, I’d extract myself from her bed and sit half awake at the small table near her balcony and lazily stuff my gob with food.

  She’d tell me how a boyfriend of hers had once proposed to her because he loved the mornings they had spent together. I’d reply that I could easily see why and kiss tenderly her on the cheek.

  After breakfast we would shower together where she would wash my back, chest arms and legs with a course cloth until my skin was red and sore, then rinse the thick lather from my body. And just as she had always made breakfast for me, she'd make love to me in that shower or, if she was having her period, would kneel before me and suck me off. She’d ask, “Don’t you love this?” and when I came into her mouth, I’d reply that, yes, yes, I did.

  Once dressed, she’d see me off at the door with a kiss on my cheek. And if I ever forgot, she’d remind me gently to kiss her in return. As I left she would then tell me to have a great day. And, thanks to her, I often would.

  I would hurry to the station, then take the subway into town and hope I didn’t bump into Yumi arriving from the other direction. She never did catch me sneaking back in the morning, nor did she ever know about the Sundays Reina and I had spent with each other, the dinners we had shared, or the videos we had watched together on her bed.

  In the early days of our affair, I thought it was almost possible for me to fall in love with Reina. To say the least, when so many men where chasing after her heart, I counted myself fortunate to be the one she was sleeping with.

  4

  Reina pushes herself away from the bar after she and Kazu have had yet another belly laugh at my expense and walks towards the toilets in the back. I excuse myself and follow after her and wait until she comes out.

  As soon as she emerges, I stick my face into hers and say, “Look I’m getting really fucking tired of you and Kazu laughing at me.”

  “I have nothing to say to you,” she snaps back with a tone I’ve never heard before. “You're like a goddamn dog! Who you gonna to try to fuck next, Peador? Huh? Our boss?”

  There isn’t anything I can say.

  “You know, you always tell me that you think Mie left you because of this reason or that, but you're wrong, Peador. The reason Mie left you is because you’re an arsehole!”

  13

  TATAMI

  1

  I don't know how Japanese businessman do it, slogging away at their kaisha[8] six days out of seven, week in, week out, with nary a holiday to break up the monotony.

  After three months of my own six-day week work routine, I’ve come to the quick conclusion that I’m not cut out to be a salaryman. If it weren’t for the long afternoon breaks, three to four lovely hours out of the crosshairs of Abazuré and my co-workers, I probably would have thrown in the towel a month ago.

  I punch out at a minute after twelve and as I’m leaving, Yumi takes a stab at sarcasm, saying it must be nice to always have the afternoons off. The bitch, dressed in black from horns to hooves, has to stay in the office until five.

  I say, “Yes. Yes, it is. Very much so,” and hurry out the door. I drop by my apartment and change into something more comfortable, then leave for the station where I’m supposed to meet Tatami at half past. On the way, I pop in the neighborhood kombini, the Sebun-Irebun (7-1
1) next to the fire station, to pick up some snacks and drinks.

  At the drinks cooler, a lovely girl stands next to me. She giggles when she sees the contents of my basket—full of snacks and beer. I have a look at the content of hers—a bentô, a bottle of oolong tea, and pantyhose, and have a laugh myself. Oh, how I’d love to blow Tatami off and take this girl back to my place for a proper Show-and-Tell, but, after weeks of being treated like a mangy dog by the girls at work, I haven’t got the confidence to do so. I smile, nod, mouth konnichiwa, and scurry off towards the register, itchy tail between my legs.

  Incidentally, a middle-aged student of mine who works part-time at one of these Sebun-Irebuns while her kids are away at school told me something that was surprising. The clerk punches in a variety of information about each customer before ringing up the sale—male or female, approximate age, and so on. This along with information about what has been bought and other data is immediately beamed to Sebun-Irebun’s headquarters where it is collected and analyzed by computers seeking to further increase the convenience store’s sales and, presumably, put the Lawson convenience store a block away out of business. The information by these mini-surveys is used to maximize the efficiency of the convenience store’s layout and display. Salty snacks are placed near the beer cooler so that the shopper unwittingly picks up a pack of potato chips when all he came in for was a can of beer. To get to the checkout counter, shoppers have to pass by the bentô where they will, more often than not, drop a small packet of prepared food into their basket. Gum and mints and other unnecessary, but inexpensive items compulsively bought are within easy reach before the register, and the cigarette rack tempt you at eye height as you pay for your stuff. No stones are left unturned in order to part the customer from his hard-earned yen. So, in the name of recalcitrant consumerism, I’ve considered trying to gum up the system by making irrelevant purchases, such as buying feminine hygiene products with beef jerky, condoms with Ribon, a manga for young girls, and a toothbrush with wasabi paste.