A Woman's Nails (5 page)

“Thir
teen
,” I repeat. “Thir
teen
! Not
thirty
. Ah, never mind. I was just joking.”

“
Jokku
?” asks Kumiko. “American
jokku
?”

What the hell is an American joke?
“Yes, American joke.”
Whatever
.

Kumiko tells me she can’t understand “American jokes.” I reply that I don’t really understand Japanese jokes, which seems to consist primarily of one man slapping the other on the head and shouting, “Fool!”

“Oh, you just put us on, then Mistah Peador?” Kazuko said. “Don’t surprise us so. Bad for heart.”

It’s tempting to whack Kazuko on the head and shout, “Fool!”

We come to a second signal where food stalls, or
yatai
, serving
ramen
and
yakitori
, are lined up on the sidewalk. The steady stream of pedestrians coming and going are forced to pass through a narrow path between the
yatai
and the street, walking over an obstacle course
of electrical cords and hoses.

Looking across the street, towards what Kumiko indicates is
Oyafukô-dôri
, I am hit hard by the realization that I have been here before.
It’s all disturbingly familiar.

On the left is a
yakitori
restaurant, belching out black smoke from a massive vent blackened with oil and soot. Above that is an Indian restaurant run by Sikhs, beards and turbans and all. Across the street is another tall and narrow building with a Yoshinoya outlet on the first floor that serves,
gyûdon
, bowls of rice topped with a mystery beef. The two opposing buildings form a gate of sorts at the entrance of
Oyafukô
. A sea of bodies flow in from the main avenue attracted like moths towards the neon lights and bright signboards. The street itself is clogged with dozens upon dozens of taxis, the lights on top of their cabins forming a string of illumination that runs the length of the street, all the w
ay to a gazebo like police box.

Kôban
. Police box. It had been a new word for me when Mie said it. “You don’t have police boxes in America, do you?” We’d just got out of a cab. “I di
dn’t see any when I was there.”

I told Mie we didn’t, that we had police
stations
and
precincts
and police roaming around in cars like stalkers, but no police
boxes
.

It was Mie and my first time to get together and I had only been in Japan for about a month and a half. Mie would treat me to dinner at a noisy Japanese-style pub, an
izakaya
she’d teach me, where the staff was constantly yelling at the top of their lungs, “Two drafts, hey!,” or “Welcome, hoi!” or what the fuck ever. Later, we’d go to a hostess bar, called a
snack
, where she’d get jealous when a hostess tried to hit on me. Back at her place, we would sit on her bedroom floor drinking
sak
é
until there was no more left, and then we’d kiss for the first time. In the months that followed, Mie and I would go dancing at the discos or dri
nking in many of the bars here.

I can feel Mie’s presence as we cross the street and enter
Oyafukô-dôri
. I see her in the middle of the street on a Monday morning, wearing a simple, but tight-fitting orange dress with white polka dots, and smiling broadly, arms stretched out. I see myself ignoring the annoyed honking of a taxi driver to take her picture. It’ll become my favorite photo of her and will always remind me of everything that I loved about her, her vitality, her spontaneity, her smile and her body. I see us sitting at the Mister Donut where share a cup of coffee and an old-fashioned donut and talk about going to America together.
Oyafukô
is as haunted with memories as my old apar
tment in god
forsaken Kitakyûshû
was and being back after all this time, after six months, is unsettling to say the least.

“Peador, we’re here,” Kazuko says, tugging at my arm.

Is Mie out there somewhere? Is she having dinner with her roommate? Is she drinking with friends in a bar nearby? I look down the street beyond the milling mass of people towards the police box, at the passengers getting out of taxis. Is she there? I scan hundreds of faces but can’t find hers.

“Mistah Peador?”

“Huh? Oh, right,” I follow them into a modest little bar called
Umie
.

After the unexpected onslaught of memories, I’m not much of a companion to Kumiko and Kazuko. It’s difficult to put up with Kazuko’s incessant questions with my thoughts lost on events that are nearly a year old. God how I want to go back in time and relive that first night, that night which changed everything for me. I wish I could go back and undo the mistakes of last summer, so that it would be Mie I was with rather than these two. But I can’t. All I can do is try to chase after forgetfulness one cheap bottle of Heineken at a time.

“Is something the matter?” Kumiko asks later while Kazuko is off harassing someone else for a change.

“I’m sorry, I’m just feeling . . . “ I can’t remember the Japanese for
depressed
. “I’m just feeling
blah
.”

“Blah? The band? I love them.”

“Not Blur,
blah
. I’m feeling . . . depressed.”

“
Jipuresstoh?
”

“De-, depressed. Blah. Er, melancholy.”

“Ah, merankoree. Me, too!” She clinked her bottle of beer against mine.

“To melancholy. Cheers.”

Without Kazuko’s meddling Kumiko and I are able to talk for quite a while about our “
merankoree
”, our heartbreak and our loneliness. Seems she’s been suffering for two years (two whole goddamn years!) from unrequited love. She wants to know what to do about it. She wants to understand what men are thinking. I don’t have the heart to tell her that most guys are thinking much about anything, that they just want to get laid without too many complications.

“Why don’t you just ask him out?” I suggest.

It comes as a revelation to the poor girl. “
Me
? Ask
him
?” What are you? High? She doesn’t say this, but she must be thinking it.

“Yeah,
you
. Ask him out. If he accepts, hey great, you’re lucky. If he says no, well then you can move on. Find someone better.”

Despite Kumiko’s poor choice of clothing and friends, she is still a sweet girl, and even if I haven’t found what I was looking for this Saturday evening, I have at least found a friend. And that, I cannot deny, is better than nothing.

I have to leave
Umie
around eleven so I can catch the last train back to my condominium in the middle of nowhere. Kumiko’s jaw drops when I tell her where I’m living. I still find it hard to believe it myself. After silent commiseration, she tells me to move out of the
inaka
, the sticks, before I turn into an
imo otoko
, a
potato boy
, that is, a
hick
. Her advice is like a virus, which finds a willing host in my mind. It’ll spread quickly and before I know it, I have a full-blown case of dissatisfaction, the only cure for which will be to find a place closer to town.

I get to the station in time for the final train, which is packed shoulder to shoulder with red faced
salarymen
, reeking of whiskey, and
office ladies
, trembling like lambs among wolves, hoping they won’t have to silently endure another clumsy grope.

A drunk standing to my side looks up, and noticing with exaggerated surprise that I am a
gaijin
, a foreigner tries to speak to me.

“American?” He says teetering precariously on unsteady legs. Were it not for the fact that the train was as full as it is, his knees would surely buckle, he’d drop like a sack of shit to the floor.

I pretend to read the ads that dangle from the ceiling like laundry on a clothesline, but he taps me on the arm. “Hey! You American?” Aside from the high-pitched woman’s voice giving the passengers an unnecessarily long running commentary over the intercom system, this drunk is the only person among the hundreds crammed into
the carriage that is speaking.

Why me
?

The man is not easily discouraged. He’s got a foot long tuft of hair growing from his temple that’s been combed over an otherwise hairless crown. The Japanese call this the “bar code.” Do men actually think they’re fooling anyone when they do that? Give in to the ba
lding, I say, shave it all off.

He asks again more forcefully, some strands of hair cascade down his broad forehead to the bridge of his nose.

I want to move away, but with the wall of bodies around me, there’s no way out. I’m trapped, so I answer softly, “Y-yes, I’m American.”

Oh, what luck! You can see the delight in his eyes. I imagine he’ll boast for days to his co-workers and family that he can not only spot an American among
gaijin
, but
that he even had an honest to G
od conversation with one. What an international man he is! He slobbers and gushes about how much he loves the country of my birth. How lucky I am to be American. I wish I could share the sentiment, but my response to his or anyone’s enthusiasm over something so accidental
as nationality is lukewarm.

He spares me questions pertaining to Japanese cuisine and goes right to the meat of the conversation: “So, what do you think of Japan? You like it here?”

Do I like Japan? There have been times when I thought I did. Some of the happiest times I’ve ever known have been in this country, but how long has it been since I’ve really been happy here? How long has it been since I felt glad to be here? It’s been six months, six goddamn months. I’ve been traveling solely on the inertia s
ince then.

I tell him I do.

He gives a long-winded commentary on the sad state of his country. Japan’s tiny and weak, he says. The people are narrow-minded. They lack initiative, creativity. The young are stupid and lazy. He grumbles on and on like this
for several train stops.

Please, God! Kamisama! Buddha! Allah! Let the next stop be his!

The speech he gives me is one I’ve heard other drunks make many times before. Even that idiot I used to work for in Kitakyûshû said similar things. If you bothered to inquire what kind of country these inebriated malcontents wanted Japan to be, they end up describing a country suspiciously reminiscent of the one that got them into so much trouble half a century earlier. The drunk then asks what I am doing.

“I’m going home.”

“You’re going home, ha! Nice one! American joke.” His breath reeks of puke. “What are you doing in
Japan,
not on this train, in
Japan
?”

What the hell am I doing? All my friends--the one’s I leaned upon so heavily after Mie left me, the ones who made the time here tolerable, and occasionally fun, the ones who stumbled along with me and helped me laugh at my mistakes--will be gone by the end of next week. There was a reason why I came, but I was sidetracked by the initial disappointment and culture shock, the falling in love, the heartbreak, the loneliness that followed and then the move that I never really got to pursue it. To say I’m in Japan to learn something I haven’t yet bothered to start learning is disingenuous. Before I am able to come up with an answer that would satisfy myself, the train stops, doors whoosh open and the drunk staggers out, saying, “American, me and you, we’re the same!” The doors close, and he gives me two big, wobbly thumbs up as the train resumes its westerly creep tow
ard the middle of nowhere.

God help me if we really are the same
.

5

Let me tell you, after last night’s letdown I’m not as fired up about going into town to meet new women as I was yesterday. It’s tempting to just stay in, stand the chicks up, and veg out in front of the good
ol’ boob tube. Problem is, Chris
and Machiko are here and it doesn’t look like they are in a hurry to go
anywhere.

When I ask what their plans are, they giggle and say they don’t have any; that they’ll probably hang out all day in th
e condo. They giggle some more.

Wonderful
. The last thing I want to do is listen to the two of them fucking each other’s brains out all day.

I first met Machiko briefly shortly after I moved in to the condominium. She and one of my nominal roommates, an African-American from Texas named
Chris
, were l
eaving just as I returned home.