The Mad Kyoto Shoe Swapper and Other Short Stories

by Rebecca Otowa

  So much work, and increasingly, so little reward.

  How does change happen?

  At what point do we decide we don’t have to ask permission? Between one bite of breakfast granola and the next, between one dish slotted into the dish rack and the next, between one sleeping breath and the next? Who knows?

  I’m changing. It’s like a flood that sneaks up on me unawares, so that before I know it I’m sitting up to my ankles in water. There’s no putting all that water back where it came from. The out-of-control time is coming.

  I sit in my “office,” the only room in the house I feel is truly mine. Glass above, glass on three sides, this is one room where I don’t have to burn lights all day. A nice big worktable and a comfy chair. Good vibrations of color and light and silence. Is it any wonder I spend most of my waking life in here? Yet I feel the chill of that water around my ankles, even in this beloved place.

  I need to take stock and figure out where I’ve been before I can tell where I’m going. But I’m going somewhere; I can’t stay here. My real self is pushing through the veneer of my life as wife and mother and neighbor. I feel myself coming to the surface—and that is a person whose existence is a mystery to everyone, including me.

  I came here as a wife. Even the first time I visited, I knew that this would be the place I would live as a wife—I actually wished for it so hard that I made it come true. And I got the whole package, including the parts I couldn’t know about beforehand. As well as the beauty of the countryside, I got the small-mindedness of the neighbors, who were so insulated in their tiny lives that they couldn’t reach out to a stranger. As well as the gorgeous old house, I got the carping lectures of my mother-in-law, who was secretly thrilled to have an unusual daughter-in-law to give her status among her friends, but who still tried with all her might to make me into a typical Japanese wife. (If she succeeded, the kudos would go to her, a Japanese Henry Higgins.) As well as the clean air and the good water and the quiet days, I got the insidious time-theft of school and neighborhood and temple, the incomprehensible expectations that bled the heart out of me and left a performing monkey, dancing desperately to rhythms I couldn’t feel, making one mistake after another and trying so hard to belong. Will this placate them? All right, how about this? The real me was driven deep underground and sedated into a Sleeping Beauty limbo.

  I’ve learned to act this way, and the people around me no longer see me as a threat to the precious security of their lives. They no longer see me at all. That’s why their lives are going to change too, when this flood that is coming finally breaks out. Not the insidious little tickling of the ankles but the raging tide.

  The first one to feel the force of the flood is going to be Naohiro.

  Saturday evening at the railway station. Rachel leaned against the timetable noticeboard, jingled her car keys in her pocket, and yawned. Tonight she was picking Naohiro up after another extended business trip. She always took him to the station and picked him up when he traveled, in order to have the use of his rented parking spot when he was away, but it did mean long drives to the station at all hours.

  They saw each other at the same moment. It was something that happened when you had been married over thirty years. He was one of the last to come out, struggling with his unruly, oversized bags, and his face was a combination of ecstasy and exhaustion. The ecstasy was for her, but so was the exhaustion. With his eyes turned sideways to see who would be looking, he accepted her hug reluctantly.

  Walking with him to the car, she glanced at his familiar face, drawn down and immobile with tiredness. He looked so old after these trips. He loved traveling and meeting people, loved navigating and poring over maps, loved taking photographs and picking up odd little souvenirs; but it was getting to be too much for him, he was almost sixty. Rachel was almost sixty as well, but lately she felt as if she would burst with all the life that was inside her. She had noticed that in spite of menopause, or perhaps because of it, at a certain age many women took on a new lease of life, while their men dwindled and sank into complaining helplessness. Men sometimes seemed to hate older women; perhaps it was because they were jealous of their strength.

  Home again, he came to her for his “real” hug in the kitchen while she made tea and looked over the things he had brought her, usually food items she had requested. They chatted about village news, while her mind grappled with the knowledge that yes, he was home for another few weeks, yes, he would require lunches packed at five a.m. before he left on his insanely long commute, yes, he would infuriate her with obliviousness and micro-management. Another time of adjustment to him had begun.

  That night Naohiro fell immediately into the sleep of profound exhaustion. Rachel shoved the cat over to give herself more room, and shoved his knee over onto his side for good measure, gazing at the dim gray square of window that was the only defining feature of the pitch-black room. Her sleep was always disturbed the first few nights after he came home.

  She knew that now she would slip once more into The Role: the sharp, wise-cracking “noisy wife” (his words), combined with the service—always, the service. What Naohiro wanted, in effect, was The Little Woman. Actually, he wanted two women. Because of his upbringing, at certain times he wanted a typical Japanese wife, someone he could take for granted, slumping in his chair as he waited for the meal to be prepared even when they had both been working hard—sometimes shoulder to shoulder—all day. At other times he wanted a colorful foreigner, whose outbursts he could enjoy watching as though she were a fireworks display. Someone he could try his sexist comments on, waiting for her explosive reaction to his little-boy misbehavior, although lately she couldn’t seem to summon the energy.

  Naohiro was a good husband. He brought home a nice paycheck, gave her carte blanche in money matters, didn’t drink, smoke or run around on her, often washed the dishes, obliged with every handyman project she suggested. She was sure there was a true relationship, true camaraderie and concern, under all these games of his, but sometimes it was difficult to find.

  Am I being too hard on him?

  Am I being too hard on my whole life?

  Should I just shut up and be satisfied with this? I know he’s satisfied, because I’m still physically here, which is mostly what he wants. If only I could sustain The Role, there would be nothing to rock the complacent little boat of his life. How much like all these other villagers he is, after all—how much like his mother he is! Brags about my strangeness to impress his friends, but also longs to make me over to his own specifications.

  He does brag, I know he does. He talks about me to his associates, who all say how eager they are to meet me. He doesn’t understand my creativity, my quirkiness, my inquiring mind, my insane productivity—so why does he get to parade them all over the place, while I stay here like a piece of furniture that he’s glad to sit on when he comes home? He brags about our marriage too. Says we never fight. Well, it’s true, but only because I can’t get him to engage. Anyway, I hate fighting, and so does he; we both had enough of family tumult as children, and we both swore that would not be the case with us. Only what am I supposed to do with my tumult now?

  If those people could see us as we really are, they’d know the truth, which is that he has had my reins in his hand, exactly like a horse’s bridle, for years, and he has been able to make me do anything by pulling on them. But my own participation in this is draining away. The acting persists, the “noisy wife” role, the wild animal tamed. But it’s becoming more and more of an act. Does he really not notice that? Does he not see that, lately, I am standing to the side, maybe even looking the other way?

  I lie and listen to his snores. Silently, I whisper: I’m someone else now. You don’t know me. You don’t know the person I’ve become.

  Rachel sat in her office in her pajamas, the early morning light washing over her, her coffee at her side, her cats on her lap, the space heater ticking gently beside her. The insights that had been swirling around were coming home
to roost, and she needed to sit still to let them land.

  This was what it came down to. She had married Japan, lock, stock, and barrel. Japan, in microcosm, was Naohiro. Japan had its own ideas about what was good and worthy of respect, and women and foreigners were far down on the list. Therefore, they were far down on the list for Naohiro as well, even though unconsciously. To go that far against his upbringing was beyond him. His mother had been an angry woman trapped in an arranged marriage, hemmed in on all sides by The Way Things Were; therefore it was natural to him that his own wife should feel angry and hemmed-in. It was his only experience of what being a wife meant. Perhaps inevitably, he saw only his own version of her, and whatever didn’t fit into that version was ignored, or subject to his manipulation. For him, she was ever and always Wife 1.0, constantly needing to be tinkered with. This thought produced a snort of laughter, even as she contemplated the bleak truths presenting themselves one by one.

  When they were first married, Naohiro loved her because they had good sex, and the surprising, foreign parts of her were fascinating; but now that he was older, he no longer had the energy for exoticism. He now put up with her in the hope that this high-maintenance woman, this unmanageable “noisy wife,” would finally become the supreme comfort dispenser that he, as a Japanese man, had the right to expect in his marriage. That would be his reward in old age for all his forbearance.

  In a way it was like the story of Rachel and Leah in the Bible. The guy, whatever his name was (interesting that her brain couldn’t cough up that detail), really wanted Rachel for his wife, but her folks wouldn’t allow it. So he married her sister Leah instead, as an interim measure, in hopes of getting his hands on Rachel later on. Naohiro had married Leah, hoping to get Rachel—except in this case, they were the same woman.

  Rachel considered this analogy. Had anyone ever asked the Rachel in the Bible if she even wanted to be married to what’shis-name? (Or Leah either, for that matter?) It seemed that Naohiro was getting to the age when he expected his lifelong dreams to start showing up. He wanted Leah to turn into Rachel. He was ready for the noisy wife he had endured all these years to morph into the soft, pliable, comforting Japanese wife he had always secretly wanted. Well, that wasn’t going to happen. Her name might be Rachel, but she was having none of it.

  If the truth be told, she didn’t want to be a noisy wife, or a pliable Japanese wife either. What she wanted, in her heart of hearts, was to be what she truly was, and to have that be all right. And, sadly, she didn’t think Naohiro was capable of seeing this. His dream wife, that mythical woman whose vision he had cherished all these years, was too etched in stone ever to change. But Rachel herself was now changing at a fantastic clip.

  With a sigh, Rachel finished her coffee, dumped the cats off her lap, and went to get dressed. She had now officially graduated from Japan and from her old life. The people around her, Naohiro included, could try to force her back; they could ask about dead-and-gone hobbies, or her children, or whatever they thought was currently occupying her mind. They could try to make her continue to be the person that she had abandoned around the latest corner of her life. But she couldn’t go backward, even for Naohiro. She had to move forward, wherever life took her.

  My name is Rachel.

  Once I was a crass, loud, ignorant foreigner. I had no idea of the infinite nuances of society in this place called Japan. Then, gradually, as I learned more, I started to wear the mask and actually to love it, to feel euphoria, when I edged toward Doing the Right Thing and earned a small, fragile feeling of belonging. I wore the mask with my husband too, and maybe that was a mistake, because it allowed him to dream about what might be.

  I found myself trapped between these two personas—the foreigner who could never fit in and the would-be Japanese who might one day, possibly, fit in. What I didn’t realize was that my fitting in was meaningless. The idea of it had no substance. That’s why I have, with stupefying suddenness, come to a place where I can throw off this need to fit in, as easily as a piece of clothing. My Guatemalan vest, for instance. No need any more to worry that it doesn’t fit and try to make it over. Chalk it up to experience and move on. There are a lot of other vests out there, waiting to be made.

  What’s ahead? I’m not sure. But one thing I know: there will be honesty there.

  The Mad Kyoto Shoe Swapper

  1

  Summer was the best time of year for shoe-swapping. In spring, Kyoto buzzed with beginnings—the first day of school, the first day of work; and autumn was alive with alert, sharp-eyed students and academics walking briskly through the precincts of the temples, stimulated by the fiery trees and the spanking clean, crisp air. But when the days sweltered and steamed, people trickled around in a daze, fanning themselves inattentively, until they could plunge into the next haven of air conditioning. Kyoto slept in summer, everyone knew that. It was too hot to do anything else.

  A huge hillside temple, drowsing at noonday, its slanted gray roofs shimmering. In the purplish shade of the portico, a sign with the message “No Shoes Allowed” stood at the foot of ancient wooden steps that had been polished slick by millions of stocking feet. Six or eight pairs of shoes were neatly lined up against the bottom step—their owners had left them here while they explored the high, cool rooms of the temple.

  Into this deserted space, enter Jiro, the Mad Kyoto Shoe Swapper. Youngish, black-haired, black-clad, unobtrusive as a beetle, he scuttled across the temple forecourt and ducked into the portico.

  Jiro gazed up with an interested air at the complicated joinery of the wooden ceiling high above. After a moment he turned his back to the steps and shuffled off his shoes so that they faced outward. He glanced nonchalantly down at the row of shoes, then mounted the steps and disappeared through the wide doorway. Five minutes later he returned and walked purposefully away without a backward glance. But this time the shoes he put on were not the ones he had taken off.

  Anyone who happened to notice Jiro would have said he was just a student, head full of equations and girls, taking in a temple on his lunch break from a summer job nearby. But Jiro was not a student, and no one could have imagined the contents of his head. At this moment his whole being was transfixed by the beautiful, mysterious otherness of the strange shoes, the places where they rubbed and the places where they yielded. He hardly spared a thought for the shoes he had left behind, which of course were not “his” shoes either—he had swapped them at another temple a couple of weeks previously. He strode on, sweating lightly, the sun scorching his black hair.

  2

  Jiro’s hobby had begun by accident. Three years before, on one of his solitary walks through the city, he had visited a temple with a storehouse converted into a minute art gallery. After taking in the exhibit of black-and-white photographs, he had absent-mindedly put on the wrong shoes at the exit. His own shoes had been rather uncomfortable anyway, so he was already a hundred paces down the path before he noticed his mistake. Retracing his steps, he heard raised voices, and peeped round the corner of the building to see a foreigner flapping his hands and fussing in English at a gaping young priest. Obviously he was complaining that his shoes were missing. Jiro was fascinated and terrified by the flamboyantly angry gestures of the foreigner. It was several minutes before he plucked up the courage to step forward.

  The foreigner had ranted at him, half angry and half relieved. This gave Jiro nightmares for a few days, but then the theatrical possibilities of the situation dawned on him. He began to visit temples frequently, and to look for shoes that resembled his own. If the coast was clear, he would put them on, walk briskly away around the nearest corner, and watch to see what his victim would do. He never returned the shoes again. The unfolding drama was just too thrilling to interrupt—the priceless “What now?” look on the faces, the dismayed conferring with friends, the scribbling of addresses, the apologies of the priests. Once the show was over, he just walked away.

  After a few successful swaps, and some very entertain
ing moments, Jiro’s enjoyment of the drama gave way to a more interior pleasure. He began to notice the feel of the shoes he had taken. He always walked everywhere—Kyoto was a splendid town to walk in—and there was an indescribable satisfaction in the way these strange shoes, weird and uncomfortable at first, gradually altered until they fitted him so perfectly that they were unnoticeable. He concentrated fiercely on this transition, from the moment his feet slid into the strange shoes until the moment he began to be bothered by their familiarity. It was then that he began to think about another swap.

  Jiro had fine-tuned his hobby over the three years he had been shoe-swapping. He was very good at it. He had never once been caught, and he saw no reason why he should not go on indefinitely, as long as he kept to his rules:

  (1) Concentrate on one style and color of shoe. Jiro always swapped black sports shoes, which were the most common of all, and he chose shoes that were approximately as worn as the ones he already had. Swapping for brand-new shoes was too risky, and what was the point of swapping for worse ones?

  (2) Don’t swap too frequently. Jiro limited his swaps to once every two or three weeks, and he never hit the same temple twice. This was easy to do, as temples and shrines in Kyoto numbered well over a thousand, and many of them had the same ad hoc arrangement—shoes were left outside, with no lockers or supervision of any kind.