by Bruno Noble
‘Me?’ replied Taka dreamily. ‘I was the landscape.’ It occurred to me then that he had won our competition. He was a greater anglophile than me. Everything he liked, he liked for good reason but, principally, he liked it because it was English. Me, it was the language I loved; him, it was the culture, the country, the image, the look, no matter that it was ever-changing.
I contemplated Keiko, dressed as a rather tame punk, with nothing that couldn’t be removed so that she could be presentable in minutes, and I was certain that her embracing this latest English export was her way of endearing herself to Taka.
‘Describe to us your stereotypical Englishman,’ I challenged my friends, in echo of a question Margaret had asked us in class.
‘Courteous, pin-striped suit, bowler hat and umbrella,’ laughed Taka, record still in hand. This was the type of reply Margaret had received, after which she’d asked us why the violence at football grounds and the skinhead look that were reported in Japan’s media did nothing to challenge that old stereotype we persisted in carrying with us.
‘Rude, pins in trousers – and nose! – Mohican haircut and bulldog,’ countered Keiko. ‘Aren’t you going to play that thing?’ she asked, indicating the record that Taka had dropped on to the turntable. He switched the turntable speed from 45 rpm to 33, lifted the arm, blew on the stylus and dropped it onto the record and we looked at each other in wonder and incomprehension as Johnny Rotten declined a holiday in the sun.
*
Michi flounced into my bedroom one exceptionally hot day, carrying a pitcher of iced tea and two porcelain beakers my mother had handed her on her way up. Spilling it and apologising only perfunctorily, she placed the pitcher and beakers on a low table on the tatami in the centre of the room and flopped onto my bed, losing a sandal and shrugging her handbag off her shoulder as she did so. Beads of sweat decorated her arms, legs, neck and face. She resembled a pixelated version of herself; once cooled, she’d be covered in pockmarks of white salt. She raised the back of one hand to her forehead and groaned, ‘Why is it so hot?’ I could see droplets of perspiration in her armpit hair and had an urge to lean forward and look for what I knew would be reflections of me and of the window behind me in each droplet, in an echo of multiple universes in the least likely of places. She smelled sweet, of a perfume that had been applied excessively because, I suspected resignedly, without resentment, she was visiting a butcher’s daughter in a butcher’s house in which the smells of meat and cleaning agents waged a particularly brutal war in the summer. ‘Ouf! At least it’s cooler here than in my room.’ Suddenly uncomfortable, she reached behind her and extracted from among the bed covers a bra I had ambitiously purloined from my mother. ‘Don’t pretend to me you fill this!’ she exclaimed and threw it across the room. ‘Ha, ha,’ she added to show she had only been teasing.
I sat down heavily next to her and pushed her leg with mine. ‘Go on. Budge up.’
‘Hot pants,’ she observed. ‘I didn’t think you were allowed to wear them.’
‘Not outside the house.’
‘I bet that poor old Takumi-san can’t keep his hands off you. How did he lose those fingers exactly?’ Michi sniggered.
My father’s assistant had always treated me with the greatest respect and consideration, and I told Michi as much. She jiggled her leg and foot against mine in a successful attempt to dislodge one of my sandals. ‘Well, he has more sense, I suppose, than to proposition the boss’s daughter. With me, he’s just an old letch. Anyway,’ she said, propping herself up on her elbows, ‘Guess what?’ Her wide, manga eyes were inches away from mine; in them were reflected the open window and the rooftops and blue sky beyond. There was some news she was clearly desperate to share. ‘You know Taka has been going to Keiko’s a lot recently?’
‘Yes.’ The sudden thought that Keiko and Taka were going out together was like a stab. I felt foolish for not having suspected it, and immediately jealous of Keiko at the same time as doubly foolish, for I didn’t think I was interested in Taka myself.
‘Ha! How do you know that? Surely, you can only know if you’ve been going a lot yourself! And to see who, exactly?’
‘To see Keiko, of course.’ No more or less than for the last fifteen years or so, I wanted to add. Michi’s delighted insinuation confused me. It was too much to take in in one go, so I simply said, ‘I never suspected!’
‘Hold on, hold on, not so fast!’ Michi sat up and held my hand and patted it, and my leg felt intensely hot against hers. ‘Apparently, Taka said to Keiko the other day when they were, you know, hanging out together, drinking lemonade in Keiko’s back yard, “Where’s Mie?” and Keiko got really stroppy and said something like, “Oh, for God’s sake, Taka, why do you keep on asking after Mie? Every time you come here, the first thing you do is ask when she’s coming over!”’ Michi squeezed my hand and paused in order to gauge the effect of her words. She delivered Taka’s line with glee: ‘And Taka said, “Why do you think I come here?” Then he realised how rude that sounded and had to apologise, of course.’
I managed to ask, ‘How do you know all this?’
‘Oh, from my mother. She was outside; you know how she likes to sit out for a while once she’s closed the shop. Poor old Keiko.’ Michi hugged herself and then me with delight. ‘Come on, don’t play the innocent. Why are you going around there so much if not to see Taka?’ She tickled me gently.
I got up and limped, with just one sandal on, to the window. ‘I feel sorry for Keiko.’ I tried to explain to Michi that I enjoyed my friendship with Taka very much, but hadn’t wanted a relationship with him for fear that it might have made things difficult for all three of us – Keiko, Taka and me. I allowed Michi to take my hand and pull me back onto the bed where we lay hand in hand on our backs. ‘And you… You are such a gossip!’
Michi giggled with joy. ‘If you look out of the window for a while, and then up at the ceiling, you get these kind of reverse, negative images of the window on the ceiling,’ she said.
Somehow, this seemed a good metaphor for the situation I found myself in: my friendships turned inside out and slowly fading.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Michi. ‘You’ll be okay,’ though whether she meant me or Taka and me or Keiko and me, I didn’t know. ‘Remember, you’re friends and you like each other – just don’t lose sight of that.’
I squeezed her hand and turned to admire her. Her energy and sense of mischief had faded with the heat of the day. I had been right: I saw on her arms and shoulders miniscule dried salt lakes that glittered dully in the evening light. I sensed that if we looked west from my window we would see, above the multiplying telephone wires, a sensational sunset.
*
I remained friends with Keiko, who chose to study business with a view to eventually managing her parents’ expanding regional chain of electrical supplies shops, and with Michi, whose food-related issues – which I learnt about once she had successfully overcome them – had made her want to study psychology. In the weeks in which we readied ourselves for university, Michi, Keiko and I saw each other little; when we did, Taka wasn’t mentioned once; and in Keiko’s conventional clothing, I saw no hint that she was still pursuing a strategy of winning Taka over by adopting what she considered the new ‘in’ English look.
I was proud of Keiko for having what seemed to be business acumen and vision, but it didn’t interest me; however, it did make me wonder if my parents might be expecting me to join the family business. I raised this with them one Sunday afternoon. They were completing the shop’s accounts and I was preparing for my first term of study by reading Sense and Sensibility, which was on my first-year reading list. In a moment that I rather self-consciously thought of as my Elinor Dashwood moment in my seeming readiness to place my parents’ interests above my own, I closed the book and looked up.
‘Ahem. Otoo-san, can I ask you a question? I have never asked you if you’d rather I join you in the family business than go to university. Or if you’d like
me to join it after university, in which case I should consider studying something more practical than English.’ At this, I bowed my head and waited for the reply. When my father said nothing, I looked up.
He had removed his glasses and was looking at me incredulously; my mother was staring at me too. She uncrossed her legs and padded across the tatami to kneel by me. My father’s shoulders shook with suppressed laughter and my mother put one arm around mine as they looked at me in wonder.
‘Absolutely not!’
‘We forbid it!’
‘We wouldn’t wish this on anyone, least of all on our daughter!’
‘Actually, that’s not quite right,’ said my father more reflectively. ‘We have not had an unhappy life and our expectations were never that high, but this job is not one I would want my daughter to aspire to. Fly! Fly away! Be who you want to be!’ he exhorted, waving his glasses. ‘Early mornings spent taking deliveries, afternoons spent with suppliers and early evenings spent arranging and cleaning – and weekends spent doing this’ – he indicated the sheaves of paper that covered the low table – ‘leave you no time for much else, as you know.’
‘What if my aspirations are to… go away?’ I asked with a lump in my throat.
My mother squeezed my hand as my father said, ‘Then you must go. Our contentment will lie in seeing you fulfilled.’
‘Mie, you’re not telling us anything new. It’s not as though you’ve never said that you want to study English in order to travel and see the world. We’ve known this all along.’
‘Thank you,’ I sniffed. ‘Actually, it’s not so much the world I want to see as England, to begin with, anyway. I just want to go somewhere where I can feel really me, you know – well, I can’t explain it exactly.’
‘You can and you have and we understand. You are our daughter after all. Permit us to live vicariously through you,’ said my father generously.
*
My university days were to be like my school ones, on the whole: unremarkable, as though I were going through a long gestation, just waiting for my real life to begin.
I sat waiting for my first lecture at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, one in over a hundred English language and literature students, the majority of them young women. I eventually saw Taka who, I guessed by the way he was also looking around the lecture hall, was searching for me. He didn’t see me and I wondered if he ever really had; if what he saw when he looked at me was what I saw when I looked at myself in the mirror, if he knew just how different I was (or thought I was, he might say) to the other assembled students.
I tried to explain my thoughts to him some weeks later, as we walked, books in hand, to Tampopo, a noodle bar that was filling with solitary commuters who dined alone ahead of long train journeys home. We found a table for two and set our two piles of books down beside its two tea cups, two soup bowls and condiments.
‘So, you really think yourself so very different to others,’ Taka said matter-of-factly, once we had placed our orders and poured our teas. He had grown his hair and wore it with a centre parting that had the effect of making him more feminine and, curiously, more handsome.
‘Not superior,’ I wanted to make clear. ‘Just different. I want different things.’
Taka nodded. ‘What makes you think you’re different? In what way are you different? What do you want that others don’t want?’
‘All these questions!’ My impulse was to laugh, but Taka had asked me over a cup of tea he had brought to his lips and I could see that his hands were shaking. My body language mirrored his as, elbows on the table, I blew over my steaming tea, so that he blinked. ‘What do I want? You know. I mean, we’ve talked about it often enough, listening to all those English records and walking back from those English films. I had thought that you wanted the same thing? You know – England. I thought you wanted that too.’ My voice tailed off and I waved our immediate surroundings away, intending to indicate that I wanted away and fearing that what I had just said might suggest that I hoped Taka would go to England with me. I tried again. ‘To be clear, what I want is to study English such that it is good enough to enable me to find a job in England, so that I can live there.’
‘Forever?’
I didn’t know the answer to that question. ‘For some time, at least.’
‘Easier said than done. Finding a job there, I mean.’
‘You may be right. I don’t yet know. I intend to apply for jobs with companies that have offices in England and then secure a transfer.’
‘That could take a long time! But it’s not a bad strategy,’ conceded Taka, who seemed suddenly bored by the subject and sat back to accommodate the bowl of steaming noodles in broth placed in front of him. ‘Tell me instead about your idea that you’re so different from everyone else. How can you know? You can’t read anyone else’s mind.’
‘I know, but look around you.’ I waved my chopsticks just as he leant forward to slurp his soup from his chirirenge. ‘Sorry.’
‘You’re not telling me how they’re different,’ replied Taka. ‘We’ve all spent a day at work or in college and here we are all eating noodles and soup before we go home.’
‘Yes, but their – our – mental lives are so different.’
‘But, Mie, how do you know? How do you know that not everyone wishes to do something else or to be somewhere else?’
‘Because they never do it and they never go there.’
‘Maybe it’s out of consideration to others, to family, to loved ones; not everyone can up sticks and live in a foreign country. Maybe they can’t afford to.’
‘Look at it this way, Taka, it may seem that we two are having the same, a shared, experience – we’re here together, eating in the same place at the same table at the same time – but, really, that’s far from the case. You are facing the noodle bar, the chefs, some other customers while I look out onto a street with cars, mopeds and pedestrians. And we’re not even eating the same thing – udon for you, ramen for me. So we are eating, seeing, saying and hearing – thinking – quite different things.’
‘Mie the solipsist.’ Taka slurped his noodles and reflected for a moment. ‘We probably hear the same things. But I guess you’re right for the rest. In fact, do we even hear the same thing? I mean, we may understand different things by them. For example, when you say that both you and I want to go to England, do you mean me to understand that you want me to go with you – which is what I used to think – or, simply, that I should understand your need to get away?’
I placed my hands in my lap and looked into my bowl.
‘It’s okay,’ said Taka gently. ‘I think I get it now.’
As I had grown older and boys had become bolder, I had been propositioned, squeezed, fondled and petted by a number of young men, typically before an attempted, unsuccessful kiss. I had never enjoyed the encounters. Desiring Taka insufficiently to want to repeat those experiences and yet liking him too much to want to upset him placed me in the difficult position of wanting to demonstrate my gratitude to him without leading him on. I followed my instinct and squeezed his hand, hoping that it would be taken as a sign of friendship rather than of encouragement.
Taka withdrew it as though it had been scalded. ‘Do you even know what you want?’
Taka and I stood shoulder to shoulder on the train platform, talking haltingly about our course, our reading list, our fellow pupils and our lecturers. Railway lines in echo of parallel lives underscored the silences in our conversation. Tipsy salarymen on their way home spoke loudly, as though to overcome their anxiety that the obscenities they were uttering were overstepping the mark.
If I wasn’t going to make a go of things with Taka, who was intelligent, courteous and good-looking, and who shared many of the same interests as me, who could I have a relationship with? Loose, general ideas, the germs of which I realised I had carried for years, began to coalesce in my mind. I recalled the drops of blood in my father’s butcher’s shop prep room and the manner in whic
h, when two of them touched and their surface tension broke, they were each obliterated and combined to become one bigger droplet of blood, and I shuddered at the thought of eliminating myself in another. I thought of Takumi-san’s excellent, thick black stylised silhouette of a man on the prep room wall, and again wore its contours like a suit of armour, a strange, unorthodox comfort blanket that defined and contained me.
‘Are you okay?’ asked Taka.
I wasn’t. Adolescent, that bold outline had seemed to me perfect, closed and impenetrable. A young woman now, I had become aware of that suit of armour’s chink, of its hidden flaw, of my sex’s weakness, of that indistinguishable slit where the legs meet and the outline must at some point be split, penetrated and violated as it admits of some other. The sensation of men’s tongues seeking mine was bad enough, but the idea of this gross act of trespass, this intrusive union with another’s body, nauseated me, and the railway lines rocked and the wolfish salarymen were alternately above, below, behind and in front of me. I realised, from the pressure to one elbow, that it was only Taka’s hold that was keeping me from keeling over and yet I wanted to withdraw from it, from him, in abrupt conviction that everything he did, like all men’s calculated activities, was with the intention of inveigling his way in.
As if from a distance, I could make out the distress on Taka’s face that was yet pressed close to mine. His voice mingled with that of the intoxicated salarymen who made crude remarks about my inability to hold my drink and about the success Taka was likely to have with me once he got me home. Torn between having me regain my senses on a platform bench and on the train that was pulling in as I wobbled, Taka opted for the latter, maybe as much for him, because he wanted to go home and discharge his unexpected responsibility, as for me. He offered to walk me home but I declined.
I turned a corner on my walk home that evening. I gave voice to the kernel of a sentiment that I had carried with me as a child and planted when Michi had visited me that hot summer day. By the time I had arrived home, inserted my hand through the letterbox and fished out the string with the front door key on it, I had made a decision. I had my parents and my friends, my ambitions to travel, to learn and to remain true to myself; I felt no need to follow form, no need for romance and the possible disappointment it involved, for marriage and compromise, no need for children. How different a kernel of an idea, that develops in one’s mind into a life philosophy, from a parasitic seed, that grows inside one’s womb, ruptures one and continues to suck on one’s emotional, physical and financial resources, on one’s reserves of personhood. I leant with my back against the door waiting for my second dizzy spell of the night to pass.
