A Woman's Nails (4 page)

I have often heard from the woman I have contacted through the International Center that I am the only person who has bothered to call them, so I don’t expect much of a response from my own card. Boy, am I ever wrong!

The day after my card is up, calls start pouring in. It takes several minutes to get through all the messages that have accumulated on the answering machine at the condominium while I was away at work. Three days later, letters written on adorable stationery start to arrive. By week’s end, I’ve got over a dozen women eager to meet me, and so like a starving man standing before buffet, I pencil in as many of them as I can into my Saturday and Sunday.

2

Shortly after work Saturday evening, I hurry downtown where I meet with Bachelorette Number One, a plain-looking young woman in her early twenties who leads me with a string of “please, please, please’s” to a coffee shop in a maze-like underground shopping arcade. As soon as we sit down, she produces several sheets of paper from her handbag and starts to read from it.

“My name is
Hitomi. It’s nice to meet you.”

She looks up at me, smiles broadly and pauses. I take this as my cue to tell
her that the pleasure is mine.

“Pleasure?” she asks.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I say.

“Pleasure?” She says with a puzzled look.

“Nice to meet you, too.”

“Oh, I see. Thank you.” Studying her crib sheet, she says, “Please forgive my poor English.”

“It is forgiven!”

“Pardon me?”

“Never mind.”

“Mind?”

“Please, go ahead.
Dôzo
.”

“Please forgive my poor English,” she repeats after checking her notes. “I want to be your friend.”

“Okay.”

She looks at the paper, mouths the words as she reads them silently, and asks, “Will you be my friend?”

“Well, it’s gonna cost ya!
”

“Pardon?”

“Okay.”

“May I ask you some questions?”

“Shoot!”

“Pardon?”

“Sure, go ahead.
Dôzo
.”

“What is your hobby?”

What the hell is it with the Japanese and these stupid questions? I can count the times on one hand I was asked this before coming to Japan, but here it’s the most pressing thing that needs to be addressed. Ridiculous questions deserve ridiculous answers: “I enjoy groping strangers on crowded trains.”

“Trains?”

“Yes, trains. Groping.”

“
Guroappu
?”

“Er, I like
traveling
by train.”

“Trouble?”

“Not,
trouble
.
Travel
. I like
traveling
by train.”

“Oh, I see. I like to travel, too.”

“You do? Where have you been? Have you been abroad?”

“Next question,” she says looking down at her sheet. “Can you eat
sushi
?”

Good grief.
“Yeah, it’s okay, I suppose.”

“Okay? You can eat
sushi
? Let’s have
sushi
next time!”

We whiz through her questionnaire in no time then sit in awkward silence until it’s time for me t
o meet Bachelorette Number Two.

3

Mika is an attractive 24-year-old woman, who asks me what my dream is. The question itself is not as surprising as, say, the complete lack of context in which it’s asked: our order has just been taken by the waitress. But then, many Japanese mistakenly believe, like Bachelorette Number One, that rattling off a random list of questions in English amounts to
communication
.

“My dream? Huh.”

I’ve often asked the same of women and am usually disappointed by the replies.

“I want to master English,” one girl told me.

“Okay, then what?”

“What do you mean?”

“What are you going to do
after
you
master
English?”

“I don’t know. I just . . .”

“English is a tool, nothing more. A hammer, if you will. If you haven’t got any idea of what you want to build with that hammer, then it’s just going to sit on a shelf in the shed and get rusty.”

“Oh.”

“Oh, is right. If you don’t know what you’ll do with the English once you’ve mastered it--sorry to burst your bubble--you probably never will master it.”

When I asked a young college student the same question, she replied that she had never really thought about it. I was flabbergasted. “How the hell can you not have a dream? I mean, how the hell can you even get up in the morning?” The poor girl. She fell silent and stared at the table after that.

Mika’s English is pretty damn good, so I can indulge myself: “Most people are like flotsam drifting on the surface of the ocean their whole lives. They make no impact on life. Life, on the other hand, has a huge impact on them. They’re tossed about, they flow this way and that. You follow me?”

“I think so.”

“They don’t change the
sea
in any way. They don’t have much of an influence on the others around them. I mean, I suppose that from time to time they might bump into other flotsam, see? Or, what? Get tangled up in
discarded bits of fishing net?”

She eyes me warily.

“I don’t want to be like that,” I tell her. “Not at all. No, I want to be like a tanker plowing its way along a river. Everything that is caught in its wake gets overturned and tossed about. Even people who don’t see the tanker go by still feel its impa
ct and influence, good or bad.”

“You
want to be a sailor?” she asks.

“A sailor! Nice one, hah! No, I don’t want to be a sailor.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“No problem.” I tell her of the megalomania, which fuels me, my interest in Japanese architecture and design, in the pop art here, particularly
manga
and
anime
, Japanese comics and animation. I talk about how I want to learn from it and use it in my own art and designs.

“Peador, are you an
otaku
?”

“
Otaku
? No, I’m not a nerd. I’m a maniac. So, how about
you, Mika? What’s your dream?”

“I want to travel.”

“Yeah? Where to?”

“Everywhere. Europe, Africa, Asia . .
. Mars.”

“Mars?” I ask, not sure I heard her correctly.

“Yes Mars,” she repeats.

“Mars,” I ask aga
in pointing toward the ceiling.

“Yes, Mars,” she replies, pointing to the same point in the ceiling.

“
Rotsa ruck!”

Mika is attractive enough, speaks English well enough, and has a sense of humor that accommodates my nonsense. There is even something, which resembles
chemistry
between us, but I get the distinct impression that I’d have to join the Realian’s Cult just to get to first base.

4

I dash over to the Nishitetsu Grand Hotel where I’ve promised to meet a young woman named
Kumiko.

Of all the women I’ve set up “dates” with, it is this Kumiko I’ve been looking forward to meeting the most for the simple reason that we share similar tastes in music. Not saying it’s necessarily bad, but far too many Japanese women have their short attention spans captivated by flavor-of-the-month Japanese pop stars. They get all worked up over the one or two-hit wonders that are cranked out of production machines like burgers at Mickey Dees. I’m not into fast food, and am even less of a fan of fast art. This Kumiko, however, is different: she is gaga about British rock and what she calls “
guranji
”.

I imagined Kumiko to be cool, pretty in her own way, but when I get a load of how she looks, a reassessment of my musical preferences is in order.

Kumiko has thrown herself whole-heartedly into the grunge look: baggy, soiled pants with holes in the knees, sweatshirt in tatters, and a loose-fitting flannel shirt. When I arrive at the hotel I find her sitting in the most un-ladylike manner, slouched and legs spread apart with a practiced indifference to the world and an unforgivable contempt for the five-thousand-dollar Arne Jacobsen leather swan chairs she has planted her filthy arse in. I have the urge to race back to Mika and hop on the mother ship before it leaves for Mars.

Kumiko introduces me to a pug-nosed, overweight and slovenly friend named Kazuko. Dressed in tattered fatigues, this Kazuko has been asked to join us because of her fluency in English. Normally, I would welcome tagalongs with “The more, the merrier!” but in this little piggy’s case, three’s a crowd
.

Before I can recover from the disappointment they lead me out of the hotel towards an entertainment district a few blocks away called Oyafukô-dôri. As we make our way there, Kumiko asks, in Japanese, if I’ve ever been there, but just as I’m going to reply, in Japanese, Kazuko butts in with a heavily accented translation, “Oyafukô, you know? Been to?”

“I, I can’t say that I have.”

Kazuko translates my reply for the benefit of Kumiko who lets out such an expression of surprise it makes me wonder if the dog’s got it right.

“You know
oyafukô
mean?” Kazuko barks.

I shrug. I couldn’t care less. I just want to go home.

“You don’t know?
Why?
Why you don’t know?” Kazuko says with theatrical disbelief. I feel like whacking the girl.

Kumiko says that she and her friend are
oyafukô
, causing the two of them to split their sides laughing. It’s highly unattractive and I want to escape. Kumiko, well, I could manage spending time with her, perhaps even enjoy being with her, but this Kazuko? Let’s face it, Kazuko’s a pig and standing next to her is an embarrassment--p
eople might think that we are, G
od help me, actually friends.

“I haven’t the slightest clue what the two of you are talking about.”

Kazuko leaps at the opportunity to inflict her Engrish onto me: “
Oya
mean mamma, pappa. Okay? You got that, Mistah Peador?”

“Parents? You mean parents, right?’”

“So, so, so,” Kumiko replies, “pahrento.”

Kazuko continues, “So,
fukô
mean ‘fee-ree-ah-ru pie-ah-chee . . . want of.’”

“Huh?”

She repeats the same gibberish a few times, then digs a dictionary out of a large army surplus canvas bag that’s slung around her shoulder. After thumbing through it, she passes i
t to me, pointing at the entry.

Incidentally, even though it’s evening, it’s so brightly illuminated downtown with glaring street lights, building facades bathed in the glow of flood lights and massive neon billboards, you could read a newspaper, or, in this case, an entry in
a dictionary.

After crossing the street, I pause to read. “
Fukô
: unfilial behavior; disobedience towards one’s parents; treat one’s parent’s disrespectfully.”

“You got it, Mistah Peador-san?” Kazuko asks loudly.

“I, I guess so?”

“We are
oyafukô
!” Kumiko tells me again. The two of them point to their noses saying, “
Oyafukô
”, then burst into laughter.

“Ah, you make your parents cry, don’t you?”

“So, so, so,” replies Kumiko. “Pahrento. Wah! Wah! Wah!”

I take it this is how parents cry in Japan. No boohoo-hoos in the Land of the Rising Sun.

“So, so, so,” adds Kazuko. “My parents, too. Crying ohru za taimu.”

“
All the time
? Why do you make your parents so unhappy?”

Kazuko answers, “We still don’t marriage.”

I would prefer to speak with them in Japanese than endure this woman butchering of the English language, but the pug-nosed brute is relentless.

“You haven’t got
married
yet
?”

“No, still not marriage.”

Ah! “But, the two of you are still young. I mean, what’s the hurry?”

They get a kick out of that. “Oh, we love you, Mistah Peador. You gentleman!”

“Don’t get too excited.
You haven’t seen me drunk yet.”

Kumiko
asks me how old I think she is.

I guess she’s a few years younger than myself, but say “Thirteen?” which causes her let out a shriek. She turns to her friend and says in Japanese, “I can’t believe it, he thinks I’m thirty.”