A Woman's Nails (42 page)

Shortly after noon on the twelfth, many of the mom-and-pop shops and the small family-run diners in my neighborhood close up shop. Their shutters are lowered and locked, hand-written notices taped up apologizing for the inconvenience. Considering that most shopkeepers hardly sneak any bre
aks in throughout the year, you’d think they wouldn’
t have to beg for a measly three days off as if they were panhandling, cap in hand, for spare change from passersby.

In the evening for want of anything better to do, I find myself savoring the hospitality of
Umie
again, barstool up my arse and an
Asahi
resting on my lip. All day, I contemplated what to do with my tenuous sobriety only to decide to
let it go, let it go, let it go . . .

“
You were really messed
up the other night,”
Shô says.

I needn’
t be reminded. As soon as the Urara and her friend left, all the alcohol I had consumed hit me like a bulldozer.

“
That I was,” I say salut
ing the bartender. “That I was.”

Shô smiles wryly as h
e takes the empty bottle away. “You want another?”

I nod and say, “
You have to put up with a lot, don't you
? Drunks like myself, and . . .”

“It's no problem.”

“You’re far too generous.”

“It’s my job to be so.”

“I realize I’
ve been nothing but trouble for you guys
, but, um, thanks all the same.”

Shô hands me another
Asahi
.

“Quiet tonight, isn’t it?”
I say.

“
O-Bon
,” he replies. “Hiro’
s grandfathe
r died earlier this year, so he’
s gone back to his hometown."

The Hiro
Shô is referring to
is the bartender I’ve been calling Jaggerlips all this time. “
His hometown?” I
say. “Hiro’
s not from Fukuoka?”

“No, no, he’
s from Kagoshima,”
Shô says. Kagoshima is the southern-most prefecture in Kyûshû.

“Kagoshima City?”

“
That
hick
? Nah, he's from the sticks, a miserable little shithole
called Sata. It’s so small they’
ve only got one traffic signal. You kn
ow, one of those flashing jobs.”

There are so few customers tonight that Shô and I chew the fat for a couple of hours, the first time in all
my months coming here that we’ve ever done so. I can’
t help but mention it to the bartender.

“To be honest,” Shô tells me, “I didn’t like you very much at first.”

“I didn’t like you, either,”
I say.

“
I though
t you were an arrogant bastard.”

“
I thought you we
re, too!”

We share a good belly laugh over this.

“Your Japanese is really getting good, Peador.”

“Nonsense.”

“I'm serious.”

“So am I.”

Listen: I still study everyday, have private lessons two or three times a week. I review my notes like a zealot studies his Bible and on top of all that I spend a good thirty minutes each morning writing
kanji
into a notebook just like the elementary school kids
here
do. I read
manga
, albeit at a tortoise's pace, and watch Japanese TV dramas and movies with a Japanese-English dictionary always clo
se at hand. Nevertheless, I don’t feel like I’
m getting anywhere near where I want t
o be with this damned language.

“
Can you read
katakana
?”
Shô asks. He’s referring to the angular phonetic syllabary used to write foreign loan words
,
such as beer, toilet, and so on.

“Wha’? Y'think I'm an idiot?”

“No, no, no. It's just . . .”

“
Of course I can read
katakana
.”
I learned
both
katakana
and
hiragana
a
few weeks
after arriving in
Japan.
Piece of cake, really.

“
Wow. How about
kanji
, then?”

Now, the trouble with those pesky little Chinese characters known as
kanji
is not t
hat there are so many of them—t
here are 1945
different ones used commonly—b
ut that they have so many goddamn different ways of being read. In Chinese, from which the characters originally came some fifteen hundred years ago, there is usually a single reading for each pictogram. For exam
ple, the character which means “to go”
, for example, is
read as “
xíng
”
in Chinese. In Japane
se, however, it can be read as “
iku
”, “
okonau
”, “
yuku
”, “
an
”, “
gy
ô”, “
k
ô”, “
g
ô”,
and so on depending on its usage, meaning and pairing with other
kanji
.

“I'm getting there,”
I tell him with a shrug.

“Incredible,” he says. “
The reason I ask is, another foreigner
came in here the other day. He’
s been living in Fukuoka, I
don’
t know, maybe six years now, and, well, I don't mean to be rude, bu
t . . . his Japanese was awful.”

“Six years?”

“
Yeah, six years. Maybe more. I mean, I sho
wed him the menu, but he couldn’
t even read
katakana.
”

“Well, he’
s either a lazy bastard, or just a fool. And, Shô, I
really do hope you told him so.”

“I couldn’t possibly do such a thing,”
he replies wagging his head.

“
So, what did you tell h
im? That his Japanese was good?”

“Of course,” he says with a grimace. “
I am Japanese after
all.”

We've all got our crosses to bear
.

“
Well, thanks to you, Shô, that
gaijin
will
never learn your language now.”

And just as I’
m saying this, who other than Urara should come through the front door? She's wearing a simple beige suit with a white blouse. Her long hair falls in soft curls on her shoulders. She looks absolutely gorgeous.

Walking directly towards me, Urara places her hand on my back and, much to my surprise and deligh
t, kisses me on the cheek.

Jesus, when was the last time a woman did that to me?

She turns to the man next to me and asks if he would move over a bit. Naturally, he obliges. I am genuinely flattered. So much attention and kindness from someone as lovely as Urara; I don't feel worthy.

“
I thought a
bout calling you today,”
I say.

It’s the God’s
truth. Every time I looked at the phone, my heart filled with a gnawing pain
. In another lifetime, I wouldn’
t have wasted a second worrying. I would have picked up the
receiver and, assuring myself I’
d ha
d nothing to lose, dialed Urara’
s number and asked her out.

“Why didn’
t you?”

Yeah, good question: why didn’
t I?

Well, for starters, after almost a-year-and-a-half-long run of disappointments, I am so decorticated of self-confidence that it is becoming difficult to conceal the stark naked weakness of my character. Had I called Urara only to be let down, I might very well have thrown in the towel, retiring from the maddening sport altogether.

“
I, uh . . . Well, . . . What with
Bon
starting tomorrow and all, it jus
t seemed better to wait . . .”

“
That’
s very thoughtful of you,
Peador, but, really, you needn’t be so careful with me.”

Earlier when I was chatting with Shô, it occurred to me that the reason my Japanese seems to have improved, allowing me to finally maintain conversations beyond all the insipid self-introduction I have been chagrined to give, is that I have finally broken through the dialect barrier. In the first several months since moving to Fukuoka, the local dialect had been keeping me shut out, peering in and wondering what the devil everyone was talking about.

I doubt most Anglophones appreciate how dramatically regional dialects can vary. Mind you, it's not just a matter of
accents, which betray a speaker’s origin like “shibboleth”
did in Biblica
l times, and
mark my Dad as having hailed from Dub
lin, my mother from Cork. No, I’
m talking about huge variations from region to region in grammar, phrasing, and vocabulary that make the dialects sound as if they are distinct languages in their own right.

It was frustrating enough when I first began studying Japanese to discover that the phrases in my textbook
,
which
I had gone to
great
trouble memorizing
, were seldom used in daily life.

Listen: A simple question like “What are you doing?” ought to be straight-
forward, right? Well, my good-for-nothing textbook taught me to
utter the following mouthful: “
Anata wa nani o shite imasuka
?”
Had I ever managed to get that doosie to roll properly off my tongue, my curiosity might have been du
ly answered. The trouble is, it’
d be as natural as
walking
on the beach in
a three-piece
wool
suit
. Your average Tarô, after a
ll, usually rattles off a curt “
Nani shiteru no
?”
or something close to it.

When I figured this out, I wasted little time taking my
s
ensei
aside and telling her to please, please,
please
throw politeness out the window and
start teaching me real, living and
breathing
Nihongo
rather than the embalmed and entombed Japanese she h
ad been inflicting on me. I don’
t care what the old Japan hands say; a little confrontation can go a long way.

With time and encouragement, my very square
s
ensei
mended her stubbornly proper ways, but, even then, she took great pains to warn against using casual Japanese too lightly. You must never cause offence by saying something inappropriate,
she’
d instruct sternly as if her very reputation were
on the line
. I'd remind
s
ensei
to let
her hair down because this wasn’
t the Edo Period
[18]
anymore. A
samurai
wasn’
t going to lop off my head b
ecause I’
d showed him because I’d “disse
d
”
him
with casual Japanese
.

No
sooner had I got phrases like “
Nani shiteru no
?”
under my belt than I moved to Fukuoka and slammed up against an unexpected brick wall:
a
local dialect known as
Hakata-ben
. Suddenly, it was as if everyone around me were speaking in tongues. If a Fukuokan wanted to know what I was doing, he didn'
t ask, “
Nani shiteru no
?” He said, “
Nan shiyoh to
?”
or “
Nanba shiyotto
?” or even “
Nan shon
?”

In a matter of six months, I’d gone from “
Anata wa nani o shite imasuka
?” to “
Nan shiyoh to
?” Italian and Portuguese couldn’
t be more different from each other.

Something clicked sometime during
the past few months when I wasn’
t paying attention, and the next thing I knew, I'd got one leg over the wall and was shimmying
myself
up. Yumi and Reina
’s chat
,
the
idle banter
of
my students,
and
the repartee
between bartenders like Shô and
his
customers started to make sense.