A Woman's Nails (33 page)

“
W-what f
rightfully n-nasty weather we’
ve been ha
ving lately.”

“Yes, well, it’
s sup
posed to clear up this weekend.”

And so it did. On Saturday morning, I could hear the song of the cicada, long and steady, signaling that the ra
iny season was finally coming an
end.

Grumble as I did about not hav
ing week
nights free, the trut
h is when the weekends do come
round, I am, more often than not, at a loss for
what to do with myself. It isn’
t the wo
rk that’s killing my social life: it’s me. It is as if I am attempting to
commit suicide one bleakly unfulfilled day at a time.

2

Crawling
out
from mossy darkness beneath the small shrine in front of my apartment building was the bob-tailed stray cat I saw Reina petting that night so many months ago when I staggered home, drunk and
dejected
.

“Here, kitty-kitty,” I called.

T
he cat
stopped
in its tracks. I kneeled down and called
out
again. To my delight, the cat seemed to understand the
blessed
Mother Tongue and
hesitantly
approached me, pausing a few feet away
,
before coming
closer
and rubbing his arched back against my leg. I scratched it between his ears, eliciting a happy purr.

“Why don’
t yo
u come up to my apartment, huh?”
I said.

The cat stiffened, the purring stalled.

“
What, you wou
ldn’t like that?”

The cat looked at me and ever so slightly, yet unmistakably, shook his head,
“
N
o
.
”

“Well, I can’t blame you. I’
m not all that keen on hanging out at
my place, either. Besides, you’
r
e a stray. Move in with me, you’d lose your identity.”

The cat
closed his eyes and nodded.

“You’
d lose y
our freedom, too, I guess. That’
s pretty mu
ch what it comes down to, doesn’t it: freedom?
Out here, you can come and go as you like, drink with the boys, get a pussy so hot she screams all night. Granted, you a
ren’
t really the wild, wandering type now, are you? Always
lolling about this shrine here.”

The cat hissed and moved stiffly away from me towards the small shrine.

“I know. I know. It’s the principle.”

He turned slightly to look at me, bowed his head gracefully, and ducked back into the mossy shadows below.

“It’s the principle,” I said to myself. “
Or, a deep attachment to those marvelous balls of yours
. Move into someone’
s home and,
the next thing
you know
, it’
s snip-snip an
d a gay collar around the neck.”

As I stood up, a rapid succession of distant explosions coming from the west echoed heavily off the walls
of the
apartment tower
s
, silencing the
cicada
in my neighbor’s garden
.

“What the hell was that?”

Turning, I found a
bevy
of pretty, young girls dressed in colorful
yukata
. As they
walk
ed
by, their wooden
geta
[15]
scraped
against
the asphalt, making the following sound:
karan k
oro
n,
karan, koro
n
.

I
called out to the girls and asked
if there was some kind of
matsuri
going on, a festival I
didn’t know
about. Being in the doghous
e
ever
since Reina and
my break
up, I ha
d
been left
completely
out of the loop.
Murahachibu
’ed—
ostraciz
ed from the village, as it were—
I did
n’t know what’
s going on half of the time
anymore
.

One of the girls replied that there would be
hanabi
at Seaside Momochi. Fireworks at the beach. I would
have loved
to ask the girls if I could join them, but I just stood silently in their wake, watching them mince away.

As I have said, I had no plans for
the night, no one to meet. It was
a pathetic state of affairs when
on a Saturday night all I had to look forward to wa
s the writing of vapid letters, the study of arcane
kanji
, and the reading of pulp fiction. Sadly, ever since Reina had said
sayonara
to me, that was pre
tty much all my weekends had amounted
to.

Well, now I had something to do.

Like tributaries flowing towards the sea, thousands of
matsuri
-goers walked, drove or pedaled down any road or path available. I made my own way in the slowly gathering dusk towards Seaside Momochi via the normally quiet neighborhood of Tôjin Machi, which had come alive with a festive entrepreneurial spirit. Food stalls selling beer and other refreshments had been set up and were manned with gravel voiced barkers trying to drum up business. The rows of red lanterns hanging from the eaves of
izakaya
had been turned on,
noren
curtains placed above their entrances
,
and the appetizing smell of
yakitori
was now wafting from the pubs. Most people, however, just kept on moving towards the beach.

Interestingly, this neighborhood was once an enclave of Chinese and foreign residents during the Heian Period (794-1192) over a millennium ago. Besides the name, literally Chinese Town, the onl
y hints that remain of the area’
s historical past are the impossibly narrow, barely navigable streets which meander like a warren among modest, tightly packed houses and
old
wooden temples.

As I squeez
ed
myself down one of
these constricted arteries
, I noticed that the tarpaulin and scaffolding around one of the larger temples had been taken down, unveiling a garish, vermilion-colored five-storied pagoda. In this post-bubble economy, it seems the only industry
that is thriving anymore is the business of d
eath: funeral parlors, Buddhist altar retailers, cemeteries and charnel houses like the one this red eye-sore was supposedly advertising.

I passed through a narrow alley overgrown with ivy and purple morning glories that opened onto the main boulevard running parallel the coast. Traffic in both directions of the thoroughfare had been brought to a standstill, with pedestrians overflowing the banks of the sidewalks and moving between the cars like water over and
between pebbles. It served the drivers
right for being silly
enough to take their cars.

A convenience store had recruited a small army of high school girls, dressed in
coloful
yukata
and
jimbei
[16]
, to sell drinks and snacks to passersby. The girls, however, were whipped up into such a frenzy, screaming like banshees at the pedestrians, that they were doing more harm than good.
Most of the pedestrians high-tailed it past the convenience store to escape the noise.
My boss before I came to Japan often
told me that
the worst kind of employee you coul
d have was a hard-working idiot and I could see that he was right.

Risking permanent
hearing loss, I approached the S
irens and scooped out three cans of
Kirin Lager
f
rom a kiddy pool filled with ice and
water. Then,
after
pa
ying
an inflated
matsuri
price, I drifted back into the unstoppable river of sweating bodies flowing towards Momochi.

It was amazing how many other people were doing exactly
what I was
trying to do, and
the
following
day
I would learn
that several hundred thousand people had descended upon the beach and its environs that evening. Many of them, stuck in gridlock, would end up watching
the fireworks from their cars.

After walking for thirty minutes through the bustling crowd, I found a clearing on the promenade encircling the Dome, and with beer in hand, watched
the ninety-minute-long fireworks
and laser light show run its impressive course.

As good as it was, and it was admittedly far better than anything fireworks display I had ever seen before, the thing that I found most intriguing was the hundreds upon hundreds of beautiful young women
who were
dressed up like dolls in their colorful
yukata
. With their dark hair pinned up and lovely necks exposed I
wanted
to kiss them all. And yet, I couldn’t help feel like Coleridge’s Ancient Mar
iner who lamented
:

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.

Women, women, women
every where
,
nor a single one to call my own.

Oh, w
hat I would have given to have one of them on my arm, fanning me with her
uchiwa
and helping me laugh away the insufferable loneliness that had accompanied me to
this,
my first Japanese fireworks display. All I had to do was reach o
ut and try to speak to one, but
the
shyness that I
had been wearing like sackcloth and ashes silenced me.

3

After the sh
ow, I returned to my apartmen
t
where I paced my small apartment like a caged tiger. With nothing to do, I tried to reconcile myself to another night alone with a bottle of
Glenfiddich
and some individually wrapped, bite-sized chocolate
baumkuchen
a student had given me as an
omiage
, a souvenir
,
from a tri
p she ha
d taken to the city of Kô
be.

I drank the scotch straight, one warm glass after another, until the alcohol seeped like ether into every cell of my body.
And yet
, the itch remained. Saturday nights weren't
supposed
to be sp
ent like this
.

I took another
baumkuchen
out of the bag and looked at the wrapping. Like most sweets, it carrie
d a cheery message
written
in English: “
You get the feeling that the
Bluebird of H
appiness
is going to bring a little yo
ur way, too.”

Whatever
.

Checki
ng the contents of my wallet,
I was
disheartened
to
discover
that I
only had a few thousand yen left, hardly enough
for
a wild time
on a Saturday night. More alarmingly, it wouldn’
t
be nearly
enough to keep my belly full throug
h to payday. But, i
n the end, future hunger pangs yielded to the itch
to go out
, and so with a quick change of clothes, I was out the door
,
heading
once again
for Oyafukô.

I went to the only place that promised the slim cha
nce of running, if not into my Bluebird of H
appiness, then
at least
into an acquaintance
, someone I could talk to
:
Umie
. However closely my life may have resembled death, that
thin
sense of familiarity between myself and the other patrons of
Umie
provided me with the modest reassurance that I
could still, though tenuously,
be counted among the living.