A Woman's Nails

by Aonghas Crowe

  Urara and I continue to chat and knock back vodka until Hiromi says that it’s time to go. I look at my watch. It’s only twenty after eleven.

  “Last train?” I ask.

  “Yes, I’m afraid so,” says. “Peador?"

  “Yeah?”

  “Call me, will you?”

  She gives my hand a final squeeze. Lovely, slim fingers. I don’t want to let them go. I’ve zeroed on those fingers all evening, watching them twist around loose strands of hair, touching her face just between the chin and mouth, playing with her lower lip.

  God, what I’d give to bite that lower lip.

  I promise Urara that I will call her, and with that the two of them are gone.

  4

  Everything slows down in the city as the Buddhist festival of the dead, the Bon, nears. While most salarymen and OLs have at least three days off from the thirteenth to the fifteenth, giving them what amounts to a long weekend, the more generous of companies allow their employees to take the day before and the day following the three day festival off so that they might avoid the inevitable crowds at airports and train stations.

  Shortly after noon on the twelfth, many of the mom-and-pop shops and the small family-run diners in my neighborhood close up shop. Their shutters are lowered and locked, hand-written notices taped up apologizing for the inconvenience. Considering that most shopkeepers hardly sneak any breaks in throughout the year, you’d think they wouldn’t have to beg for a measly three days off as if they were panhandling, cap in hand, for spare change from passersby.

  In the evening for want of anything better to do, I find myself savoring the hospitality of Umie again, barstool up my arse and an Asahi resting on my lip. All day, I contemplated what to do with my tenuous sobriety only to decide to let it go, let it go, let it go . . .

  “You were really messed up the other night,” Shô says.

  I needn’t be reminded. As soon as the Urara and her friend left, all the alcohol I had consumed hit me like a bulldozer.

  “That I was,” I say saluting the bartender. “That I was.”

  Shô smiles wryly as he takes the empty bottle away. “You want another?”

  I nod and say, “You have to put up with a lot, don't you? Drunks like myself, and . . .”

  “It's no problem.”

  “You’re far too generous.”

  “It’s my job to be so.”

  “I realize I’ve been nothing but trouble for you guys, but, um, thanks all the same.”

  Shô hands me another Asahi.

  “Quiet tonight, isn’t it?” I say.

  “O-Bon,” he replies. “Hiro’s grandfather died earlier this year, so he’s gone back to his hometown."

  The Hiro Shô is referring to is the bartender I’ve been calling Jaggerlips all this time. “His hometown?” I say. “Hiro’s not from Fukuoka?”

  “No, no, he’s from Kagoshima,” Shô says. Kagoshima is the southern-most prefecture in Kyûshû.

  “Kagoshima City?”

  “That hick? Nah, he's from the sticks, a miserable little shithole called Sata. It’s so small they’ve only got one traffic signal. You know, one of those flashing jobs.”

  There are so few customers tonight that Shô and I chew the fat for a couple of hours, the first time in all my months coming here that we’ve ever done so. I can’t help but mention it to the bartender.

  “To be honest,” Shô tells me, “I didn’t like you very much at first.”

  “I didn’t like you, either,” I say.

  “I thought you were an arrogant bastard.”

  “I thought you were, too!”

  We share a good belly laugh over this.

  “Your Japanese is really getting good, Peador.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “I'm serious.”

  “So am I.”

  Listen: I still study everyday, have private lessons two or three times a week. I review my notes like a zealot studies his Bible and on top of all that I spend a good thirty minutes each morning writing kanji into a notebook just like the elementary school kids here do. I read manga, albeit at a tortoise's pace, and watch Japanese TV dramas and movies with a Japanese-English dictionary always close at hand. Nevertheless, I don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere near where I want to be with this damned language.

  “Can you read katakana?” Shô asks. He’s referring to the angular phonetic syllabary used to write foreign loan words, such as beer, toilet, and so on.

  “Wha’? Y'think I'm an idiot?”

  “No, no, no. It's just . . .”

  “Of course I can read katakana.” I learned both katakana and hiragana a few weeks after arriving in Japan. Piece of cake, really.

  “Wow. How about kanji, then?”

  Now, the trouble with those pesky little Chinese characters known as kanji is not that there are so many of them—there are 1945 different ones used commonly—but that they have so many goddamn different ways of being read. In Chinese, from which the characters originally came some fifteen hundred years ago, there is usually a single reading for each pictogram. For example, the character which means “to go”, for example, is read as “xíng” in Chinese. In Japanese, however, it can be read as “iku”, “okonau”, “yuku”, “an”, “gyô”, “kô”, “gô”, and so on depending on its usage, meaning and pairing with other kanji.

  “I'm getting there,” I tell him with a shrug.

  “Incredible,” he says. “The reason I ask is, another foreigner came in here the other day. He’s been living in Fukuoka, I don’t know, maybe six years now, and, well, I don't mean to be rude, but . . . his Japanese was awful.”

  “Six years?”

  “Yeah, six years. Maybe more. I mean, I showed him the menu, but he couldn’t even read katakana.”

  “Well, he’s either a lazy bastard, or just a fool. And, Shô, I really do hope you told him so.”

  “I couldn’t possibly do such a thing,” he replies wagging his head.

  “So, what did you tell him? That his Japanese was good?”

  “Of course,” he says with a grimace. “I am Japanese after all.”

  We've all got our crosses to bear.

  “Well, thanks to you, Shô, that gaijin will never learn your language now.”

  And just as I’m saying this, who other than Urara should come through the front door? She's wearing a simple beige suit with a white blouse. Her long hair falls in soft curls on her shoulders. She looks absolutely gorgeous.

  Walking directly towards me, Urara places her hand on my back and, much to my surprise and delight, kisses me on the cheek.

  Jesus, when was the last time a woman did that to me?

  She turns to the man next to me and asks if he would move over a bit. Naturally, he obliges. I am genuinely flattered. So much attention and kindness from someone as lovely as Urara; I don't feel worthy.

  “I thought about calling you today,” I say.

  It’s the God’s truth. Every time I looked at the phone, my heart filled with a gnawing pain. In another lifetime, I wouldn’t have wasted a second worrying. I would have picked up the receiver and, assuring myself I’d had nothing to lose, dialed Urara’s number and asked her out.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Yeah, good question: why didn’t I?

  Well, for starters, after almost a-year-and-a-half-long run of disappointments, I am so decorticated of self-confidence that it is becoming difficult to conceal the stark naked weakness of my character. Had I called Urara only to be let down, I might very well have thrown in the towel, retiring from the maddening sport altogether.

  “I, uh . . . Well, . . . What with Bon starting tomorrow and all, it just seemed better to wait . . .”

  “That’s very thoughtful of you, Peador, but, really, you needn’t be so careful with me.”

  Earlier when I was chatting with Shô, it occurred to me that the reason my Japanese seems to have improved, allowing me to finally maintain conversations beyond all the insipid self-intro
duction I have been chagrined to give, is that I have finally broken through the dialect barrier. In the first several months since moving to Fukuoka, the local dialect had been keeping me shut out, peering in and wondering what the devil everyone was talking about.

  I doubt most Anglophones appreciate how dramatically regional dialects can vary. Mind you, it's not just a matter of accents, which betray a speaker’s origin like “shibboleth” did in Biblical times, and mark my Dad as having hailed from Dublin, my mother from Cork. No, I’m talking about huge variations from region to region in grammar, phrasing, and vocabulary that make the dialects sound as if they are distinct languages in their own right.

  It was frustrating enough when I first began studying Japanese to discover that the phrases in my textbook, which I had gone to great trouble memorizing, were seldom used in daily life.

  Listen: A simple question like “What are you doing?” ought to be straight-forward, right? Well, my good-for-nothing textbook taught me to utter the following mouthful: “Anata wa nani o shite imasuka?” Had I ever managed to get that doosie to roll properly off my tongue, my curiosity might have been duly answered. The trouble is, it’d be as natural as walking on the beach in a three-piece wool suit. Your average Tarô, after all, usually rattles off a curt “Nani shiteru no?” or something close to it.

  When I figured this out, I wasted little time taking my sensei aside and telling her to please, please, please throw politeness out the window and start teaching me real, living and breathing Nihongo rather than the embalmed and entombed Japanese she had been inflicting on me. I don’t care what the old Japan hands say; a little confrontation can go a long way.

  With time and encouragement, my very square sensei mended her stubbornly proper ways, but, even then, she took great pains to warn against using casual Japanese too lightly. You must never cause offence by saying something inappropriate, she’d instruct sternly as if her very reputation were on the line. I'd remind sensei to let her hair down because this wasn’t the Edo Period[18] anymore. A samurai wasn’t going to lop off my head because I’d showed him because I’d “dissed” him with casual Japanese.

  No sooner had I got phrases like “Nani shiteru no?” under my belt than I moved to Fukuoka and slammed up against an unexpected brick wall: a local dialect known as Hakata-ben. Suddenly, it was as if everyone around me were speaking in tongues. If a Fukuokan wanted to know what I was doing, he didn't ask, “Nani shiteru no?” He said, “Nan shiyoh to?” or “Nanba shiyotto?” or even “Nan shon?”

  In a matter of six months, I’d gone from “Anata wa nani o shite imasuka?” to “Nan shiyoh to?” Italian and Portuguese couldn’t be more different from each other.

  Something clicked sometime during the past few months when I wasn’t paying attention, and the next thing I knew, I'd got one leg over the wall and was shimmying myself up. Yumi and Reina’s chat, the idle banter of my students, and the repartee between bartenders like Shô and his customers started to make sense.

  So, when Urara places her hand on my arm and says, “Suki yaken, sonna ki tsukawan dotte.” I didn’t have to translate it inside my head from Hakata-ben into standard Japanese, which would have sounded like, “Suki dakara, sonna ki-o tsukawa nai de.” I now understood her as having said that she liked me so I ought to stop tip-toeing so carefully around her.

  “Are you here alone tonight?” I ask.

  “No, Hiromi-chan will be here soon. And, what about you, Peador?”

  There are times the right words just flow from my mouth making me feel as if I had French-kissed the Blarney Stone, and then there are those that make me feel as though a bloody stone had been dropped on my head. Today I am in the blessed rock's good graces; I tell Urara I was waiting for someone special to show up.

  “Oh? And who might that be?”

  “You, of course.”

  That evokes a hug and a peck on the lips, which has the effect of putting me in a right sunny mood, Festival of the Dead notwithstanding.

  “I saw your commercial,” I tell Urara.

  “Did you like it?”

  It's hard to be diplomatic sometimes. In the commercial Urara is wearing a one-piece bathing suit with her hips exposed. The outfit—or lack of one depending on whether you are a glass half-full/glass half-empty kind of guy—flatters her narrow waist and long, slender legs, but makes her look even more wanting in the breast department than I suspect she really is. No, it isn’t the most attractive get-up she or any woman could wear in private, let alone on television, but then these hai-reggu get-ups (high-legged bathing suits) are all the flavor of the month, and young Japanese men just can’t seem to get enough of them.

  What Urara in a bathing suit has to do with selling used cars—this is what the commercial is pushing, after all—is a mystery to me, but then I don’t fit in with its target audience, do I? Perhaps the geeks that tune into late night TV to catch a bit of tit to jerk off to before hitting the sack are moved into a consumer frenzy like a drop of blood in a pool of sharks by that kind of advertising. Who knows? It was a stupid commercial and depressing to watch, but am I going to tell that to a lovely girl who’s sat down next to me, taken my hand and ordered a shot of vodka?

  “I liked your part,” I say.

  After several shots and a beer to keep it all down, it’s easy to forget where I am. I grow oblivious to the people around us—the men to Urara’s right, Shô behind the counter, Shinji in the DJ booth, the few customers below—as if the dimmer on my consciousness has been turned. In spite of all the people, I feel completely alone in the universe with Urara, a solitary star orbited by a single planet. We lean against one another, holding hands and touching as if we’ve known each other for years rather than six days.

  And we talk. Good God we talk! Urara has that rare ability to draw words and stories out of me, to coax me out of my cave and undress me of the itchy reticence I have been clothed in. She can do it, because she makes me feel that nothing else matters more than to listen to what old Peador has to tell her. She never lets herself be distracted, nor does she ever allow my attention to turn to something else either. If I look away, she touches my chin, bringing my face closer to hers. When I falter, she squeezes my hand, reminds me what I’ve just told her to keep the conversation moving. Why she does this for me, I have no idea. What could she find so interesting in a moody gaijin like myself? It’s time I stopped asking questions and start thanking my lucky stars that it is me she has her big dark brown on rather than someone else.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you have a girlfriend?” she says, taking a swig from my beer. Before I can reply, she answers the question for me. “Oh, I get it, you like to date many different girls, don’t you? You’re a playboy, aren't you?”

  “You’ve hit the nail right on its head,” Shô interjects with a smile in my direction.

  One of the perversions so common among women, and Japanese women in particular, is that they are attracted, often tragically so, to men who are already taken. A guy with a girlfriend is infinitely more appealing than one without. A divorced middle-aged man, or even one who is still locked in a sexless marriage, is far more preferable to one who at the age of thirty-eight has never wed. Boggles the male mind, it does.

  I’d ask Urara whether she has a boyfriend as if it actually matters. These girls, I was slow to understand, have a fluid notion of commitment. Mie made that clear by taking me along on her self-exploration although she was, for all intents and purposes, engaged to be married. I still don’t quite understand how I fit in her plan—that is, assuming she ever had one to begin with. No matter how much I’ve thought about that relationship and, believe me I have brooded over it, I am no closer to understanding what happened, or how I managed to fall into the gap between them, or what, if anything, I meant to Mie.

  All I am certain of is the pain I felt after she abandoned me, and the loneliness that has haunted me ever since. I don’t really know
what I want anymore, to tell you the truth. A year earlier, crying on the outside of Mie’s apartment I would have told you that all I wanted was to have Mie back in my life. Now, however, I suspect that her leaving me, as painful as it has been, was probably for the best. I doubt if I could ever be the kind of husband she was hoping to have. Listening to the way housewives carry on about their men has hammered that fact firmly into my usually impervious head.

  So, if Mie wasn’t the answer, then what is? Is it this Urara leaning into me, holding my hand in her lap?

  By the time Hiromi comes to pick Urara up, the two of us are beyond repair.

  “You have my number, right?” Urara slurs, hobbling off the barstool.

  “Yesh.”

  “Well then, call me, call me, call me.”

  “When?”

  “Anytime.”

  “You know, Urara, Japanese always say anytime, anywhere, but they, but they don't . . . "

  She looks into my eyes, and, with both hands cradling my face, kisses me slowly on the lips. “I mean it, Peador. Anytime.”

  The bar erupts in catcalls and if my face weren’t already pink from the booze, I’d be blushing.

  Hiromi, too, kisses me lightly on the cheek, and there they go, the two are gone, flitting away as full of jóie de vivre as they were when they first came into my life only a week ago.

  19

  MIE

  1

  O-Bon, the Buddhist Festival of the Dead, begins the following day, the thirteenth of August. Unlike other holidays, the Bon is greeted with weary ambivalence. You don’t ask people what they’ll be doing over the holiday, or wish them a Merry Bon, because for many Japanese it amounts to three days of somber rites conducted perfunctorily with the dreaded in-laws. It’s Thanksgiving without the turkey and parades.

  On the first day of Bon, I have been told, families go to the cemetery to greet the spirits of their ancestors who have returned from the after world. The tombs are cleaned and given simple arrangements of chrysanthemum and gladiolus. Sticks of sandalwood incense are lit, and silent prayers are offered to the souls of the departed.