A Woman's Nails (25 page)

No longer spending time with Reina after work or at weekends also brought home once again h
ow utterly alone I was. It wasn’
t Reina I missed, or the crazed animal sex we had, for
that matter. What I missed hadn’
t changed: having someone I cared for in my life, someone to fill the gaping hole Mie had tore open in me.

With nowhere in particular to go and no one in particular to see, I started wandering around town alone, exploring on foot whenever the weather permitted. Since we were apparently having one of the dreariest rainy seasons on record, my excursions were few and far between, but when I did get
out, the things I discovered—t
he architecture, the gardens, the hidden pa
rks, the historical buildings—p
rovided the distraction I was starved for, and encouraged further perambulation.

Many of the more interesting sites in Fukuoka are fortunately within a short walk from my apartment: the castle ruins with its maze of stone ramparts, and Ôhori Park, which has a beautiful Japanese garden. A Noh theatre and art museum are also located in the area, as is
Gokoku Jinja
and a martial arts center called
Budôkan
.
[9]

Gokoku
Jinja
, like Tokyo's infamous Yasukuni, is a shrine dedicated to those who died
defending
Japan. Had I known this little fact before visiting the shrine, I may have been moved in an altogether different way. Instead, I was inspired with a deep sense of awe, the very awe which was sorely absent when my father would drag his unwilling brood at an ungodly hour every Sunday morning and stuff it into the first two pews of our dimly lit, dust
y old house of worship where we’
d reluctantly take part in that hebdomadal
morose pageant, Mass.

No, if the divine and mysterious were to be felt anywhere, it was in shrines such as Gokoku, a serene island of ancient trees, expansive lawns and
painstakingly raked gravel. It’
s a spiritual oasis in the heart of a frenetically bustling desert of asph
alt and condominiums and if you’
re not moved to the core when visiting the shrine, then you have no core. With the Catholic church, the nearest I ever got to appreciating the power of the Almighty was at the coffee and donuts bonanza after Mass when dutifully sitting-standing-genuflecting automatons were resurrected with copious
amounts of caffeine and sugar.

After a purifying ablution of my hands, I passed between a pair of
komainu
statues and through a towering wooden
torii
gate, entering the shrine. At the end of a long the broad path of combed gravel was the
shinden
, a long, one storey golden structure with a gracefully sloping roof at the edge of a lush and verdant woods. Iron lanterns and straw braiding hung along the eves, and a young woman, her black parasol leaning against the offertory box, bowed her head in prayer. Drawn by both curiosity and a spontaneous reverence, I made my way along the gravel path, ascended the short flight of steps and offered up a pray, myself.

One day
my father will ask cynically, “
So,
now you’
re a
Shintô
ist, are ye?”

I'l
l reply, “When was I never one?”

What did I pray for? Happiness, of course.

With the change in my pocket, I bought an
o-mikuji
, a small folded strip of white paper with my fortune written in Japanese on one side, and, to my surprise, in English on the other.

“Your flower is heather,”
the
o-mikuji
told me. “It means lonely.”

Wonderful
.

“
You are int
rove
rted and like to be alone,” the prognostication continued.

Not really
.

“
But man
cannot live on without others.”

Hah!
No man is an island! Plagiarism
!

“
Let people into yo
ur heart, and you'll be happy.”

Bingo!

Regarding my hope
s and ambitions, I was told to “
make efforts, and try to be fr
iendly with a lot of people.”

By gum, try I will!

“
You studies will
be all right, if you keep calm.”
I took a deep breath, and exhaled slowly, releasing a small fart, redolent of sour milk.

Any more relaxed and I'd be dead.

I was advised to be cheerful, but to not aim too high when looking for a job. It was also suggested
that being quiet on dates wasn’
t always the wisest thing to do, and, because I was,
again, too introverted I must “behave cheerfully.”

Dutifully noted!

Not particularly impressed with this
fortune—i
t was only
shokichi
, a
four out a scale of about six—I
tied it onto a narrow branch of a nearby tree and left the shrine.

3

It was around this time in my life when I was wandering aimlessly around Fukuoka in the constant drizzle that Tatami entered my life. Of the seventy or so people I taught each week, Tatami was the only one near my age. This was an entirely and regrettabl
y different situation to what I’
d been used to in godforsaken Kitakyûshû where the vast majority of my students were young women. Granted they had been, for the most part, what the Japanese call
potato
girls—s
mall town gi
rls with small town ambitions—b
ut I would have gladly settled for those potatoes over the old yams and tatter tots I was currently teaching.

It may have been nothing more than this sustained dearth of nubile women within my proximity, but Tatami charmed my socks off when we first met. So much so that after our first lesson together, I made the mistake of mentioning to that sour puss Yumi what a nice girl I thought Tatami was.

“
She's not just some
nice girl
,” Yumi chastised me. “
She's an
o-jô-sa
n
.
[10]
”

“Oh?”

“
She's from one of t
he richest families in Fukuoka!”

I suppose that was me
ant to impress me, but I couldn’
t give a sour milk fart. So much is made, not
only in Japan, of an individual’
s status vis-à-vis what their parents or grandparents have achieved as to overlook the fact that the person in question is often a
profligate, underachieving arse.

I wasted little time and slipped Tatami a simple note inviting her out for lunch after
only her second lesson. It wasn’
t th
at I found the thirty-year-old “girl” particularly attractive—s
crewing the
o-jô-s
an
hadn't even entered my mind—b
ut, for some reason or another I was drawn towards her. Something about her gentle innocence, the delicacy of her mannerisms and words made me want to know her better. The fact that her father was a professor of architecture at Kyûshû University also had nothing to do with it.

Honest. No really, I mean it. Okay, it did. A little.

Tatami replied by post a few days later, sending me a short letter written on beautiful summer stationery with a gold fish motif. After apologizing effusively for writing
,
rather t
han phoning, she confessed that she’
d been surprised, but happy with my invitation and was looking forward to having lunch with me the following Tuesday after the lesson.

4

My long walks continued. I’
d been coming down with such a severe case of cabin fever that even the heaviest of showers was no longer enough to keep me insid
e. I’
d even traded in my flimsy convenience store umbrella for one from
Paul Smith
costing ten times as much, just so that I could get out of my apartment and out of my head, as often as possible. Call me Thoreau; Fukuoka, my
Walden
.

One afternoon, as I was returning from one of my longest walks yet that had my shins and arches aching with a dull, throbbing pain, I dropped in at the
Budôkan
to see what kind of
martial arts were taught there.

At the entrance was a bulletin board with a schedule of classes. On Saturday evenings, big boys in diapers pushed themselves around a clay circle.
Sumô
wasn’t really my cup of tea, which is just as well; of all my blessings, girth is not one of them. Three evenings a week, the
kendô
members met to whack each other senseless with bamboo
sticks. That wasn’
t quite what I was looking for either.

I walked over to a small window, stuck my head in, and said excuse me
in Japanese
, disturbing three elderly men from their naps.

“
Yo
u really gave my heart a start,”
said one of the men as he approached the window.

“Um, sorry about that.”

“
Wow
! You're Japanese is excellent.”

“
Tondemonai
,”
I replied reflexively.
Nonsense!
“My Japanese is awful. I’ve still got a lot to learn.”

“
Oi, Satô-
sensei
. This
gaijin
here says his Japanese's awful, t
hen goes and uses a word like, ‘
Tondemonai
!’”

Satô rubs
the sleep from his eyes says, “Heh?”

“How can I help you?”

“
I'm, um, looking for a
kick boxing class. You got any?”

“
Kick boxing? No, I'm sorry we don't. We do have
karate
, though. Tuesday and Thursday evenings. And there's Aikido on Wednesda
y and Friday evenings.”

“Nothing in the afternoons?”

“No, only in the evenings.”

“
Well, what about
jûdô
?”

The man's eyes lit up. I was in luck, there was a class in session now, he said pointing to a separate building across the driveway.

“
That
building?”
I said. I had my doubts.

“
Yes, yes. Just go right over there
. Tell them you're an observer.”

I wasn't sure the old man had heard me correctly, but I went to the adjacent building all the same, and removed my shoes at the entrance. As I stepped into the hall, two women in their fifties wearing what looked like long, black pleated skirts and heavy white cotton tops minced past me, their white
tabi
'ed feet
[11]
sliding quietly across the black hardwood floor. A similarly dressed raisin of a man, upon seeing me bowed gracefully, then glided off to the right from which the silence
was broken with the occasional “
shui-pap!
”

“
Anô
,” I called out nervously. “
I was told to come here. I'm, um, interested in learning
jûdô
.”

“
Jûdô
?”
the elderly man asked.

“
Yes,
jûdô
.”

“
This isn't
jûdô
,” he said, eyeing me warily. “
It's
k
yûdô
.”

“
Kyûdô
?”
What the hell is
k
yûdô
?

He gestu
red nobly in the direction the “
shui-pap!
” sound
had emanated from and encouraged me to follow him to a platform of sorts overlooking a lawn at the end of which was a wall with black and white targets.

“
Kyûdô
,”
the man told me again.
The Way of the Bow
.

He instructed me to watch an old woman who had just entered the platform carrying a bow as long as she was short. She bowed before a small
Shintô
household altar, called a
kamidana
, then minced with prescribed steps to her place on the platform. Her posture was unnaturally rigid: her arse jutted out, spine curved back. Her head was held high. With her arms bent slightly at the elbows she raised the bow upward, bringing her arms nearly parallel to the floor. She then adjusted the arrow, stabilizing the shaft with her left hand and fitting the nock onto the string with her right
hand
. She turned her head ever so slowly, and, fixing her gaze on the target some thirty yards away, raised her arms, bringing the
bow to a point above her head.