A Woman's Nails

by Aonghas Crowe

  God help me.

  The woman was impervious. No matter what I said, no matter how I tried to explain that I'd found her amusing was interested in being friends, it always came back to:

  “But, I'm afraid I don't have a confidence to be your ‘special’ friend.”

  There was a pause, a silence which conveyed more than all the words she’d uttered in Japanese and English until then. I sighed a long “ahhh” like a tire gradually losing its air when it finally dawned me what she was trying to get at in that irritatingly circumlocutory manner of hers.

  Before I could step on the breaks and bring this careening jalopy of ours to a screeching halt and tell her in no uncertain terms that I was not interested in her in that way at all, she began to repeat what she had said at the Malaysian restaurant about how happy my letter had made her.

  “I have another ‘special friend’, he is so gentle and kindly. I told you about him. I told you he is a gay . . . When he first told me, I felt so dirty and I cried for many, many months. I didn't want to see him again . . . But gradually, little by little, I came to accept him. I accepted that he is a gay . . .”

  “Gay.”

  “He is a gay.”

  “He’s gay. I’m gay. We’re all gay.”

  “Oh no! You’re a gay, too?”

  “No! I’m just trying to correct your English, Tatami. It's not ‘a gay’, it’s just ‘gay’.”

  “Oh, I see, thank you. I accepted that he is a just gay.”

  Somebody stop me before I go and strangle the girl.

  “And we have become good friends,” she continued. “You know, after he told me, I was very sad. I thought I could never have a chance to marry. I gave up and decided to open my own, very small, flower arrangement class and not marry . . . But then you wrote me and it made me so happy . . .”

  Dear Lord in heaven! No, no, no!

  “I would like to be a ‘special friend’ for you but I don't have a confidence.”

  “I don't have confidence,” I corrected out of habit again.

  “Oh, you, too?”

  “No, no, no. ‘Have confidence’. ‘Confidence’ is an uncountable noun so you don’t need the indefinite article ‘a’.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Just ‘confidence’.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said. “I would like to be a ‘special friend’ for you but I don’t have a just confidence.”

  Agh!

  Tatami went on and the more she spoke, the more I felt I was being drawn into playing the part of a frustrated suitor. No matter how absurdly remote from the truth that was, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise to unravel the myth she had so painstakingly spun like a cocoon around herself.

  The truth was far more prosaic than her elaborate, but cozy homespun fiction. All I’d wanted was to meet people and make friends who could distract me from all the punishing gauntlet of anniversaries of my time with Mie lined up. I didn’t want to keep spending my days alone, brooding over past mistakes and contemplating all the “what if’s” that made me clutch like a drowning man at the impossible wish of going back in time and undoing all my mistakes—saying yes when I had said no, turning left where I had turned right, breathing in when I had breathed out.

  Yes, I wanted a girlfriend, wanted one so desperately I could barely see straight, but I never even toyed with the idea of Tatami becoming the one. Why did I write her? Because she was . . . available. Close to my age, somewhat fluent in a just English and, being a good girl from a good family, she didn’t have to fiddle with bourgeoisie things like a job, so she had oodles of time on her hands. Love or sexual attraction had nothing to do with it, yet here I was being told like a naughty lap dog to behave.

  “Tatami, you . . . don’t . . . quite understand,” I interrupted in vain. No, she was determined to make sure that what might have been should never be allowed to happen. She explained further how her father would never understand; he would rip the plant out by the roots rather than wait for any buds of a romance to appear on its branches.

  “So,” Tatami concluded, “I'm afraid I cannot give you my phone number. You mustn’t call me because my parents would never understand.”

  I was forced into a corner, and the only way out was to accept that the two of us could never be anything more than casual friends. For Tatami’s benefit, I ended up pretending to search within myself the strength to acquiesce, and then feigned disappointment. It was the least I could do.

  When she finally hung up, two goddamn hours later, I realized that I hadn’t managed to communicate a genuine and honest thought to her. So, I tried again. I sat down and wrote in the simplest, unambiguous way that my original desire to ‘just be friends’ had meant precisely that and nothing more, that she had been mistaken in thinking I had been interested in her in any other way.

  A day later, she replied in kind with an apologetic letter promising me that she would “try her best” to be a good friend to me. I didn’t know if I should be happy or not.

  7

  I didn’t want the other members at the Budôkan to think of me as a mikka bôzu, that is a-three day monk, which is what they called quitters here, but of all the martial arts I could have ended up doing, kyûdô must have been the worst. Being pushed around by big boys in diapers in the sumô ring would have been a vastly more entertaining.

  My training progressed with unnervingly small baby steps with each visit to the dôjô. During the first several lessons, I was not allowed to even touch a bow. Instead, I was made to practice how to step properly into and then walk within the staging area. Oh yes, and how to bow reverently before the goddamn kamidana.

  After weeks of mincing effeminately, I was allowed to move on to the next stage which involved going through the elaborate ritual of holding the bow, threading the nock with the bow string, aiming and releasing the arrow. Problem was, I had neither bow nor arrow and was asked, rather, to rely on my fertile imagination. Several days of this humiliation were followed by at last the opportunity to hold a bow and practice releasing imaginary arrows at an imaginary target. After the hour-long practice, I would have tea with my imaginary friends.

  In the meantime, Tatami still had reservations about dating me, so we ended up using our mutual studies as a ruse to meet regularly. Not at my place, of course—that was unthinkable—but, at coffee shops or in the Mister Donut near the park. Though I couldn’t have been happier with this arrangement—I needed more friends like her who’d patiently listen to me as I butchered the Japanese language—Tatami continued to fret about her inability to be there the way she had convinced herself I wanted her to be and worried that she was wasting my time.

  I couldn’t understand what Tatami was carrying on about half the time. And, to be honest, I didn’t really care. I just figured she would eventually come to her senses and accept our relationship free of any troubling nuances. In the meantime, I fell into an odd habit of encouraging and assuring Tatami that I appreciated her friendship, however constrained, exactly as it was. And each time when the poor girl faltered, I would raise her up, by reminding her, “I need your friendship, your companionship, and your help.” But you know, the funny thing is the more I told her this, the more I started believing it myself.

  8

  One rainy afternoon we went to a wonderful coffee shop near the park. Like many of the better restaurants and bars in the city, you could easy miss this coffee shop if you weren’t led by the hand and pushed through the door.

  I fell in love with the place as soon as I entered. There was a long counter covered with black straw mats, running the length of the narrow coffee shop. The interior walls were made of dark mud with specks of straw and the wall behind the counter was made with Japanese roof tiles with water trickling down through them.

  “I love this place,” I enthused as I looked over the hand-written menu. “Not crazy about the prices, though. Ouch!”

  “Do you have coffee shops like this in America?”

  “Ha ha . . . No.”<
br />
  “No?”

  “No. For one, I don’t think you’d find many Americans who’re as fussy about details as you Japanese are, or Americans capable of appreciating the attention paid such details. And, two, there’d be a riot when they saw how much the coffee cost.”

  “Oh, is this expensive?”

  “My dear Tatami, eight bucks a cup ain’t what you’d call cheap.”

  Speaking of “three-day monks”, Tatami had worked a sum total of two days her entire life. She had entered a major Japanese company upon graduating from college but was so disgusted with the men in her office that she quit. There was no way she could possibly relate about money. I ordered a caffé con frecce, a kind of Vienna coffee made with brandy. It was excellent, and, well, at twelve bucks a pop, it damn well better have been.

  Though we usually spent our afternoons together chatting, we actually did get down to studying from time to time. On this particular day, Tatami had brought a pile of assignments from the translation school she was also attending every week, and I’d taken my kanji drill book and several grammar worksheets along that I needed to prepare before my next lesson at the YWCA.

  As I scribbled down kanji in the drill book, Tatami worked on her homework, occasionally interrupting me to ask what this word or that word meant or whether her choice of words was correct, and so on.

  When she wanted to know what “hard-of-hearing” meant, I asked her whether her grandparents were still alive. They weren’t, she answered, and reached for her Genius English-Japanese dictionary. It was the size of a honey-roasted ham. I, too, had brought my set of Takahashi Pocket dictionaries. A bit of a misnomer as so many things are in Japan, the set was so large that the only pockets they could have possibly fit in were those of the pants of a rodeo clown.

  Did she have any elderly aunts and uncles? Yes, but she’d go on to tell me that they all could hear fine. Then, I asked if she knew what ‘deaf’ meant. She did. “Right, ‘hard-of-hearing’ is when you’re not quite deaf, but you’re getting there.” She said she thought she understood, but continued looking up the entry in her honey-roasted ham all the same.

  “Atta. atta! Hard-of-hearing is mimi ga tôi in Japanese.”

  “I think I’ve heard that before. ‘With distant ears’.”

  “Can you also say ‘hard-of-seeing’?”

  “Nah, I don't think you’ll find are any other ‘hard-of-somethings’ in your dictionary.”

  “Hmm,” she said looking at the entries in her dictionary. “A hard nut to crack; hard-of-hearing; hard-on . . . Oh dear!”

  When I noticed how red Tatami’s face had become, I almost lost it, but then it dawned on me that this may have been the closest the o-jô-san had ever gotten to an actual erection. Had I laughed, she would have scurried out of the coffee shop tormented with shame.

  The dictionary, I discovered that afternoon, was a minefield of sorts that needed to be trod with care. If you ran in carelessly after a “hung jury” as Tatami also did that afternoon, you’d step on the explosively lascivious phrase “hung like a horse”. “Cunning” is never far from “cunnilingus”, a “fellow” always chases after “fellatio”, and “fuchsia” is colored by the word “fuck”.

  When it was getting time for me to return to work, I settled the bill, which left me about fifty dollars poorer.

  “Sheesh! Remind me the next time to only have one cup of coffee.”

  “I’m awfully sorry about that.”

  “Ah, don’t be. It’s a great place, Tatami. I’m really glad we came. Thanks.”

  “Here,” she said holding some bills out. “Please. I insist.”

  “It’s okay, Tatami. It’s my treat.”

  “But, I insist.”

  “So do I.”

  “But I feel bad.”

  “Tell you what, Tatami, you get the bill the next time we meet.”

  “Okay. But promise you’ll let me pay.”

  “I promise.”

  “No. Promise like this,” she said, holding out her pinky and hooking it around mine. “Yakusoku?”

  “Hai, yakusoku shimasu,” I promised.

  9

  When Tatami called a few days later, I suggested having dinner the following Wednesday.

  “Wednesday?”

  “Yes, Wednesday evening,” I said looking at the sumô calendar a student had given me. It featured the Hawaiian yokozuna[12] Akebono striking a menacing pose. “Wednesday. Wednesday, the seventh.”

  “The seventh?”

  “Yes, the seventh of July.”

  “But, I don't think it's . . .”

  “If it’s the time you're worried about, I’ll finish earlier than usual next Wednesday, so it’s not . . .”

  “No, no, it’s not that. It’s just that . . . I think that . . . maybe it’s not such a good idea to meet in the evening. Especially, on the seventh.”

  What was the deal with the seventh, I wondered. I knew I’d have to ask half a dozen people before I could get something resembling a straight answer, so I didn’t press the issue with Tatami.

  “But . . . I can meet you in the afternoon,” she added brightly.

  “The afternoon, huh? Yeah, that's fine, but I won't have as much time as I usually do. See, the schedule's a bit different next week.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. That was very inconsiderate of me . . . I didn’t know you were busy.”

  “Tatami! Give it a rest, will you! I am not busy, but I'll only have about two hours off.”

  “I’ll tell you what! I'll prepare bentô for us.”

  So, we meet at half past noon at the station, and, like I’ve said, she’s wearing an odd Alpine dirndl dress of sorts.

  “Guten Tag, Fräulein,” I say.

  “Pardon?”

  “Wie geht’s?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Roll out the barrels, we'll have a barrel of fun?”

  “Peador, are you feeling unwell?”

  “Yeah. Sorry, I’m just teasing you.”

  “Moh! You’re always teasing poor Tatami.”

  “I can't help it. You bring out the worst in me.”

  Tatami leads me out of the station, saying there’s something she wants me to see.

  “We’ve got lucky with the weather,” I say once we are outside. Not the sunniest of days, but at least it isn’t raining.

  “If we're lucky we’ll be able to see the stars tonight.”

  “Stars?”

  “Orihime and Hikoboshi.”

  “Ah, right, those stars.” I have no idea what she's talking about.

  Tatami opens her parasol and we begin walking along Meiji Boulevard toward Ôtemon where the main gate of the former castle stands across the moat at the end of a tree-lined causeway. The moat itself is teeming with lotus plants, huge, floppy leaves the size of sombreros sticking a good five feet above the surface of the moss covered water. Here and there, white lotus flowers as large as cabbages tower on long narrow stalks above the leaves. Dragonflies rest on the flowers.

  We sit down on a bench near the causeway overlooking a small pond bordered on the far side by the Ôtemon Gate, one of the four remaining structures of the ancient castle. Half of the pond is covered with low-lying lily pads and a different kind of lotus flower, deep yellow in color and floating on the water. A family of ducks waddles across a grassy bank towards us when Tatami removes the bentô from her basket. She's wrapped the urushi lunch boxes in a furoshiki cloth which has a simple design of purple morning glories.

  “What did you bring?” she asks me.

  “Oh, just some drinks and snacks,” I reply, taking the contents of my 7-11 bag and placing them onto the furoshiki. “I didn't know what you liked, so I just bought a little bit of everything.”

  Between us on the furoshiki are cans of Asahi beer and bottles of Pocari Sweat, oolong tea and Calpis. There's a Woody candy bar, sugarless Titles breath mints, Baked Chunk cheesy puffs, Men's Pocky and . . .[13]

  “Pecker!” Tatami says.

  “
You like Pecker?”

  “I love Pecker!”

  “I bet you do.”

  She makes a go at it, but I grab my Pecker first.

  “Tsk, tsk, Tatami. This is my Pecker, and you can't have it.”

  “But, I want your Pecker! I want your Pecker! I want your Pecker!”

  “Tatami!”

  “Give me your Pecker, Peador!”

  So I give it to her. When a woman begs for your Pecker as shamelessly as Tatami does, what’re you gonna to do? You gotta give it to her.

  “Are you happy now?”

  She nods happily as she opens the box and starts nibbling like a rabbit on the pretzel sticks.

  Tatami, exceeding my expectations, has prepared a small, delicate feast packed so neatly into the urushi bentô boxes that it almost a shame to disturb it.

  She has prepared onigiri rice balls, some wrapped in nori others sprinkled with black sesame, another with a big pink kishû umeboshi pickled plum in the middle. She has packed the bentô with fried chicken, sausages, edamamé, cubes of tôfu and stewed pumpkin. There are also slices of peach and melon and a small basket of cherries.

  “Boy, Tatami, you’ve really gone all out. Thanks!” I say. She lowers her head and smiles.

  After an hour of gorging myself, the bentô boxes are empty shells, most of the snacks, too, are gone.

  “You want some ‘Baked Chunk’?” I ask Tatami.

  “No thank you.”

  “I don't blame you, Tatami. I don't know what I was thinking when I bought it.”

  “You want some mugi cha?” she says, taking a small thermos of barley tea from her bag.

  “Already had some,” I answer showing her the crushed cans of Asahi beer, making her laugh.

  “You'll take the Japanese proficiency exam, won't you?” she asks.

  “Yes, but I don’t expect to do well. I’ve still got so much to learn.”

  “I think you already study very much now. I respect you for that. Shizuko-san says we should all study English as hard as you study Japanese.”

  Shizuko is one of the other students in Tatami’s class.