A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding

by Jackie Copleton

  I smiled. ‘You make it sound as if I’m trying to escape.’

  ‘Well, aren’t you?’ I could not reply and he nodded as if he understood my caution. ‘I’d like to think that outside this place there is a handsome lover waiting for you. I see you both walking around a park, the sun on your face, or the rain, whatever you prefer. You are on your way to a concert, or a restaurant. He has bought you a small gift, but you cherish it.’

  I shook my head playfully. ‘You have a poet’s tongue for a man of science.’

  ‘I am not a sentimental man, I promise you. I’m a new customer here, I know, but it’s impossible not to care for you girls.’ He looked at me as if I were the only object in the room. ‘I just wonder what happens when you are no longer girls?’

  Even if I could have answered him I did not get the chance. The captain walked through the door and Sato, aware of my sudden alarm, turned to look. The two men exchanged some silent understanding and the doctor gathered up his cigarettes. ‘Thank you for your company.’ Mama-san went up to Sakamoto to alleviate any potential embarrassment, and Sato turned to me, the picture of relaxation. ‘Tell me, Amaterasu. Can you see yourself walking in a park one day?’ He paused. ‘With me?’

  I could not say what I truly thought. ‘Mama-san does not allow private meetings.’

  Sato tutted. ‘How cruel. I imagine you look very different in sunlight. I’d like to see that.’ He bowed, but before he left, he teased me once more. ‘Kazagashira Park is lovely this time of year. Tuesdays at noon are particularly pleasant, I hear.’

  He brushed shoulders with the captain as they passed one another. If Sakamoto was angry he did not show his displeasure. He asked Mika to join us, but she only stayed a few minutes before he whispered some words in her ear and sent her away. We left the bar soon after. Later, when I finally thought him done with me, there was a knock at the door. In that lost light between night and day, a woman entered the room and as she drew closer I saw it was Mika. I went to stand up but Sakamoto held my arm.

  ‘If you can make new friends, Amaterasu, so can I. That’s only fair, don’t you think? Are we still friends?’ He smiled first at me and then Mika and moved the sheet from our bodies. ‘Well, little one, why don’t you prove it?’

  A Foolish Parent

  Oyabaka: This term refers to a parent who is so fond of his/her own child as to do a foolish thing for its sake. For example, some may buy their children every toy they show interest in, however difficult it might be financially. Many are willing to sacrifice themselves in their own way for the well-being of their children. Neither can those parents punish their children for any misbehaviour, although they often know that they should.

  The first Tuesday passed and I did not go to the park, the second came and went and one more, but still I stayed away. Then one night at the bar a face from the not too distant past paid us a visit as Mika regaled the captain with some dirty joke that made her forehead shine with the telling of it. She stopped seconds from the punchline when a woman walked up to our table drunk and unsteady on her feet. It took me a while to realise this was Kimiko. The loss of the captain’s patronage had taken a toll. Gone were the golden silk kimonos, replaced instead by cheap blue cotton. Her skin seemed pitted with dirt. Sakamoto said nothing but indicated that she should sit down. She fell into the seat next to me and all I could smell was stale alcohol and sweat. Mama-san was watching from her usual spot at the bar and the captain looked at her for a moment, some message sent and received.

  The captain twirled his cigarette case on the table. ‘This is a pleasure, Kimiko.’

  She snorted and poured herself a drink. ‘I’m sure it is.’

  ‘What brings you here?’

  ‘That’s rich. I brought you here, or have you forgotten, little Tetsu? Little, little Tetsu.’ She sang his name as she held up a finger and waved it in front of his face.

  ‘You should go home.’

  She laughed at this. ‘Home? Home, you say. Where’s home, Tetsu? Where’s home, little, lying, little Tetsu?’ She turned to me. ‘Is this why I’m homeless?’ She shook her head and studied my face and laughed. ‘I know you. Little moth with the clogs. My, look at you now.’ She took a drink and shook her head sadly. ‘I wonder who he has lined up to replace you?’ She made an exaggerated survey of the bar. ‘Let me see, oh, what about her, Tetsu? No, you’re right, too old. Who else?’ She smiled at Mika, whistled and slapped her knee. ‘My, aren’t you a big one?’ She pointed at Sakamoto. ‘I never knew you liked them so large, Tetsu.’

  Mama-san walked up to our table, her voice as melodic as a wood chime. ‘Dear Kimiko, so good to see you. It’s been too long. We have had so many requests for your company. You’ve disappointed our customers with your absence.’

  Kimiko closed one eye and looked at the captain. ‘Have you missed me, Tetsu?’ She started to sob. ‘We had a pact, didn’t we? We made promises, didn’t we?’

  Sakamoto stood up and gestured that Mika and I should do so too. Kimiko leaned back on the chair and drank, liquid dribbling down her chin. He bent down so their heads were close but I could hear what he said. ‘Come to this bar again and I’ll make sure you lose everything. You’ll be so desperate you’ll be spreading your legs for any diseased trash down the docks, if you haven’t already.’ He started to walk away and then stopped, spoke loud enough so everyone could hear. ‘You disgust me.’

  He offered me his arm and, as we headed to the door, I looked back. I could see Mama-san sitting next to Kimiko, a hand on her shoulder. Outside, the captain signalled for his driver to fetch the car but I could not move. Sakamoto turned to me. ‘Amaterasu?’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  His irritation flared up. ‘She expected too much, made too many demands. She grew tiresome. That’s all.’

  ‘I see.’ I found the courage to speak. ‘Will you grow tired of me too?’

  He walked up to me, took my elbow. ‘Sweet thing, how could I tire of you?’ His grip tightened but I did not move. ‘Amaterasu?’ His voice was low, more a warning than a question.

  ‘Mika can entertain you tonight since you enjoy her company so much.’

  He looked surprised and then angry. He grabbed my neck and pushed me against a wall. ‘Don’t be so ungrateful. Let’s go.’ I rubbed my neck and a man caught my attention as he moved toward us. His face came into view under a street lamp. I thought for a moment to shake my head as a warning to keep walking but it was too late.

  ‘Amaterasu, what a pleasure. May I accompany you inside?’

  The captain did not look round. ‘We’re fine.’

  Sato stood next to Sakamoto. ‘Here, the cobbles are a little slippery. Take my arm.’

  I looked at both men and there in that dark corner of the city I made my decision. I squeezed past the captain, and returned to the bar with the doctor. If Sakamoto complained to Mama-san I knew I would be fired but in that moment, next to Sato, I did not care. I allowed myself to believe that he would be worth this recklessness. I went to find Mama-san but Karin said she had left with Kimiko, having taken a roll of banknotes from her money box. I turned to look at Sato, sitting in the seat the captain had just left. I felt relieved and nervous as I joined him. We sat cloaked in a silence thick with the unsaid words that bounced between us. The particles of air around our table seemed to have shifted, this atmosphere drawing us closer than the distance between our bodies suggested. He smiled, and I prayed he would not talk of the captain.

  ‘So, you must be famished?’ I realised that yes, I was. ‘Well, let’s drink up here and go for some food. We can eat and talk without –’ he raised a hand and gestured at the bar – ‘all this pretence. Would you like that, Amaterasu?’

  During our late supper, he asked me about my childhood and my guard almost down I hinted at the truth, testing him perhaps to see his reaction. At the end of the night he hailed a taxi and arranged to m
eet me the following week at the botanical gardens. This first visit to a park turned to many. I adored those days. I had never spent time with a man before nightfall. We strolled past children as they played with beanbags or tried to tickle pearl koi hiding under water-lily leaves. Sato and I had not so much as kissed but I took this coy courtship as a sincerity of intent, a depth of attachment. All it indicated was patience. One day, while sitting on a stone bench, a picnic of bean curd and octopus laid out between us, he presented me with a box, smaller than my palm. Inside I found a brass key.

  ‘It opens a door to an apartment, well, more a couple of rooms, clean enough and discreet.’ He looked around the park and just for a moment it seemed as if he might blush. ‘I thought it would be good to have somewhere private to go.’ I picked up the key, held the lightness of it in my hand. ‘It’s not far from here.’

  Maybe Kimiko, Mika and Karin would have understood what the brass key meant. I chose to see it as an unspoken promise. As I slipped the box into my purse, I dared to imagine its worth was more than small grams of metal. Fate had brought him to the bar, had it not? How could he not be mine? We took a rickshaw to Chinatown past stalls selling steamed dumplings to a restaurant lined with a mural of swallows. The apartment was in the building above. A Western-style iron bed with a bare blue-and-white-striped mattress dominated the space next to a bamboo desk placed under the window with a pine chair. The kitchen was in the next room with a square table, scratched with use, and another chair. Sato watched me as I walked around. ‘It’s basic, I know.’

  ‘The bathroom?’

  ‘Shared, down the hall.’

  I nodded and that seemed to be all the reaction he needed. He walked up to me, put his hands on my waist where my obi was tied and laughed. ‘I have no idea how to get this off you.’

  And so Sato became my new Sakamoto.

  My nights at work, and Jomei’s rounds during the morning, meant we could often only spend time together in the afternoon. I counted down the hours until we could be alone. Those rooms were my escape from the bar and from my mother, a place, finally, to call my own, even if we only spent a few hours there a week. I could not help myself. I filled the apartment with cream roses in crystal vases, found two framed pictures of a horse and a heron at an antique shop, bought fine white cotton bedcovers and a lamp made of stained glass. I was trying to create a home. For two months I felt as if I was succeeding. But then Sato arrived one afternoon as I was standing on a chair, trying to hang blinds in the bedroom. They were the palest blue with a print of pink blossoms covered in snow. I asked without thinking, ‘Can you help me?’

  He looked at the blinds and then took in the rest of the room as if seeing it for the first time. He seemed annoyed and a chisel of worry tapped at my heart. ‘Leave it for now.’

  I stepped down from the chair, walked toward him and kissed him on the cheek. He picked up a small carriage clock from the desk, a gift from Karin, and then put it down. Next to the clock, on a piece of scrap paper, I had written my name next to his surname and my heart pounded with shame. Had he seen it? He smiled absent-mindedly and seemed to remember something. ‘I forgot to say. I can’t come on Friday. I have a lunch.’

  ‘Can’t I come?’ I smiled coquettishly. ‘I’ll be on my best behaviour.’

  He grabbed my waist and spun me around until I felt giddy. ‘What would be the point of that? I don’t want you on your best behaviour.’

  He stepped backwards as he led me to the bed. I pulled free from his grasp, not out of petulance but worry. ‘Why can’t I come? I know how to behave.’

  He sighed. ‘The lunch is with a surgeon and his family. It’s a formal invite. It will be boring.’ He sat down on the bed and patted the mattress. ‘We only have two hours. Let’s not spoil it.’

  ‘When can we go to lunch then?’

  He groaned. ‘Soon. Isn’t this place enough for us?’

  I gestured at the room, testing him, perhaps. ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘Very pretty, like you.’ He patted the bed again, smiled. ‘Come join me.’

  I glanced at the clock, Karin’s sweet gift. ‘Why don’t I live here all the time?’

  ‘What’s wrong with you today?’

  ‘The rent’s paid after all.’

  He looked around the room again. ‘I don’t think it’s suitable to live here.’

  Perhaps I should have kept my own counsel but I suddenly, stupidly, had the need to explain why I bought those blinds, why I filled that tiny apartment, why I needed more than a brass key, why I cherished Karin’s gift, and lastly, why I imagined what it would be like to be called Amaterasu Sato. ‘There’s something I must tell you.’

  He looked alarmed, as if he sensed what was coming. ‘Don’t say it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s no need. Don’t you see that, Amaterasu? Just being here is what matters. Come here, let me show you how much being here matters.’

  Did he know what I wanted to whisper to him? As I undressed for him, did he know the words I repeated in my head? I had practised them at home in the mirror, blushing even when alone. I clung to him, felt the hardness of his body against mine and promised myself that I would find the courage to say my secret incantation out loud to him soon. I love you, Jomei Sato. I love you, Jomei Sato. I love you, Jomei Sato. This is the truth I ached to tell him.

  Disownment

  Kando: In the Edo period when the family system was wholly patriarchal, the parent could disinherit a disobedient, prodigal, or delinquent son. The disinherited son was to be dressed in a kimono made of paper (kamiko) and turned out of the house. Kando generally involved a moral as well as an economic sanction, for the disinherited son was branded as a disgrace to the family and cut off from it.

  During those six months I spent with Sato, Karin had found her own companion, a politician from City Hall. He had not visited the bar for some weeks. I asked her why one morning after our shift as we walked through the deserted streets. Karin broke down in tears and confessed his vanishing act was a response to her predicament. She told me she had already made up her mind about what she would do. She was too young to be a mother, and too poor. Would I go with her?

  Perhaps I had been more fortunate than Karin. Not long after that first night with the captain, he sent me to a doctor, who explained he was going to fit me with an object that would help stop pregnancy. He called it a womb veil. Karin would cajole her politician into buying condoms but often he refused to open up his pack of Heart Beauty. Instead, she would devour pomegranate seeds after one of the girls spoke of their contraceptive qualities. We would talk about other methods at the bathhouses. But the truth was abortion, despite being illegal, was often the chosen method of birth control among the girls, even if they risked prison and their health. When Karin realised what was wrong she tried home remedies: sponges soaked in alcohol, an aloe purgative, water so hot it was near boiling, but in the end she found a retired midwife, who ran her illegal business in a part of town the city officials tended to avoid.

  We held hands as we made our way down cobbled paths, past houses made of little more than sheets of rotting wood and blackened metal. Children playing in the dirt, old women throwing cooking water into streets and a blond gaijin on a creaking bicycle looked up as if they knew what we were doing. Even cloaked, we stood out as girls from Maruyama. We carried the scent of the bars and rooms for rent. The house when we arrived was no different from the shacks that had lined our journey. A girl of seven or eight answered our knocks. Inside, the room had a low ceiling with a sunken hearth in the middle and an oil lamp placed on a wooden stool. The girl disappeared into a back room and returned with an elderly woman, dressed in a grey apron. Karin clung to me and then followed the woman and the door closed behind them. I took off my shawl and sat beside the girl as she played with a rag doll, soiled with grease.

  When the operation was over, Karin winced as w
e made our way back to her lodgings. By the time I helped her onto the futon, she was feverish and bleeding. I stroked her damp hair and placed a cool towel around the back of her neck and every so often I would glance underneath the blanket. She told me the woman had said to expect some blood. When the bleeding did not stop, I said we had to call the bar’s doctor. She tried to sit up and reached for my hand. ‘Please, no, no. Mama-san will throw me out.’ Come morning, she was barely conscious. I had no choice. Sato had told me in an emergency he could be contacted at the medical hospital and so I wrote a note and paid a boy to deliver my request. If he was angry when he arrived, he did not show it. He examined Karin, told me she had an infection and explained what medicines were needed. He would wait with her until I returned.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jomei. I didn’t know who else to ask. If Mama-san found out, Karin would be gone. And she has nowhere to go.’

  ‘Why can’t the man who did this look after her?’

  ‘Hostess girls are only here to entertain. We’re not paid to be an inconvenience.’

  When I returned he stayed until Karin’s fever broke and then I walked with him to the exit of her lodgings. The landlady peered out of her room but I shooed the witch away as I opened the door. The last of the afternoon sun bled into the hallway and we stood bathed in the orange light. I told him how grateful I was, how I could never repay him this kindness. He raised his hand as if he were about to touch me but seemed to think better of it. ‘Sometimes I can almost forget what you do, what you are, what I am to you.’ He looked back to Karin’s door. ‘And then I remember.’

  I watched him leave and said nothing. I should have spoken. I should have told him he was more than a customer, so much more. I love you, Jomei Sato. Why were those words so hard to say? Why did I hesitate? Would the sincerity of those words have mattered?