A Woman's Nails (7 page)

I used to stare out of Mie's eighth floor apartment in the eastern suburbs of the city and watch planes fly over that bleakly uniform cityscape wondering why there weren't any skyscrapers. I asked Mie, but she didn't know. I ask Aya now, and she says there are plenty of tall buildings in Tenjin, the golden phallus to name one. She doesn't call IMS that, of course. I tell her that fifteen stories do not a skyscraper make, adding that I haven’t found any buildings in town that are over fifteen stories tall. She says, really? I say, yes really. When she tells me she has never thought about it, I tell her, this is why I am here, Aya: to make you think about these kinds of things. She says, oh. I say, oh, indeed.

Aya is in high school, by the way. An American girl might hide her young age when talking to a man older than herself, but in Japan the girls seem to wear their youth like a badge of honor. A few months ago, I asked a group of high school girls that I had been teaching if they were happy to be graduating. A few were, but most weren't. Personally, I couldn't wait for the day I was finally paroled from that all male correctional institution of a Catholic high school I attended. So, it struck me as odd that anyone could be ambivalent about graduation. Their answer: we don't want to grow up. Who does? But if growing up was the price to pay for being done with high school, many can afford it.

Aya has just started her second year, making her fifteen, I guess.

“I'm sixteen,”
she corrects.

She doesn't look or act it. Not only is she assertive for her age, but she's got a woman's body, too.

She tells me men always think she's older.

Men
?

When I hear that she goes to the exclusive Catholic girls' school in town, I say she must be an
ojô-san
, that is, a girl from a good family.

She replies that she isn't, that it's just the image. Most of the girls going there, she tells me, are the daughters of
pachinko
shop owners, Koreans,
yakuza
and other
nouveau riche
.

Aya's own father is a doctor, but only because her mother who runs a couple of hostess bars and a
mahjong
parlor happened to fuck a doctor the day she was ovulating. Aya has a younger sister, she says. This second girl is the product of a lawyer who happened to squirt his sperm into her mother's vagina, like a law clerk serving a subpoena. "She's ugly and stupid," Aya says of her younger sister. "She's an embarrassment to me."

I'm not particularly interested in this Aya. When you're twenty-six, high school girls just aren't quite the turn-on I imagine they must be for middle-aged Japanese men. Salarymen are seemingly tortured with lust every time they see a girl sashay by in her sailor uniform. Still, this Aya is funny in a jaded kind of way, so we meet again a few days later during my afternoon break.

We walk through Maizuru Park to the castle ruins. The
momoji
trees have stretched out new leaves like the open hands of an infants waiting for the sunlight to pour over them. The ground below the
sakura
trees, which have lost all their blossoms to the wind and rain of the past weeks, is speckled with soft pink petals. Under the cool shade of centuries-old oaks, sculptured azaleas are starting to bloom.

Of the former castle grounds only the stone foundation and a few wooden gates remain. At the center and highest level where the dungeon was, a steel observation deck has been constructed offering a view of the city far more attractive than that from the IMS building.

When I tell Aya that I come up here a lot, she asks me why on earth for. To think, to look at the sky, to make sketches, to write, even to study. She tells me that she can do all that in her bedroom. So, you can. So, you can. She calls me a romantic. I tell her that's just another way of saying someone's a hopeless fool. She says she knows that.

She's wearing her school uniform today, a navy blue pinafore dress with the schools badge above her left breast, a white blouse with rounded collars under it, white socks with the school initial and black patent leather loafers. She hates it, she tells me, wishes she had a simple sailor uniform like the girls at the Buddhist girls high school have. I ask her why, and she says this uniform makes her look like a child. With those large breasts of hers pressed against the bib of the uniform
, a child is the last thing Aya
resembles.

Aya tells me a friend of hers met an American who then took h
er to a love hotel and had sex.

“Oh?”

“
I couldn't believe i
t.”

“Why?”

“Because he was too old.”

“How old?”

“
In his thirties. And h
e was a college professor, too.”

I can't help but laugh. What a country. I tell her he could be put in jail for that in America.

“Whatever for?”

That evening after work, my co-worker Reina says that she saw me walking near Ôhori
Park with a high school girl. “
She
's not your girlfriend, is she?”

“
No, no,
no. That's just someone I know.”

“
That's
hanzai
, you know,”
she says with a playful smirk.

“
Hanzai?
What's that?”

“A crime.”

“Is it?”

“
No, I'm only kidding. It's not technically a crime, but this is a small t
own and people will talk . . .”

“
Small town? The popu
lation's, what, over a million.”

“
It's a small town. Trust me. Everyo
ne knows everyone in this town.”

“Whatever.”

“
You can do what you like, Peador. I don't care. Have sex with high school girls
. . .”

“I haven't . . .”

“
It doesn't matter what you do or don't do
. What matters is how it looks.”

“And how is that?”

“
Loli-kon
.”

“Loli-what?”

“
Loli-kon
. Oh, what's the word in
English. Loli . . . Loli . . .”

“Lolita complex?”

“
So, so, so, so. Lolita
complex.”

“I don't . . .”

“
Like I said, it doesn't matter. Just don't let our
boss or Yumi find out about it.”

2

Aya calls late the following Wednesday evening. When I ask if her mother minds her phoning men at such a time, she replies that her mother doesn't know what she does because the woman's never home. Despite my oppressively conservative upbringing I've managed to emerge surprisingly liberal, and yet, I can't help but feel something's wrong with this picture and tell Aya that I'm sorry to hear about it.

“Don't be,” she says. “
I can't stand the bitch. The
less I see of her, the better.”

On Friday night while I am alone in the condominium, Aya phones again. She sounds impatient, and right off the bat she asks what I think of her. I answer that I find her funny, but she isn't interested in what I think of her personality, she wants to
know if I find her attractive.

To be honest, she's no knock
out. I know, of course, that I could do far, far worse than Aya. I need look no further than the past weekend to be reminded of that. What Aya lacks in appearance, though, she makes up with her youthfulness and a bust line that most women would envy. For the evangelical Christian, Jesus saves; Aya, however, is redeemed by those glorious tits. But then, this is the awesome power the breasts have over me. Your average girl sporting F cups will easily turn my head, but when she's as beautiful as she is stacked, she'll break my heart the way that Mie did. I tell Aya that she's a very pretty young woman. It's obvious that’s wh
at she was hoping to hear and, fortunately, she ha
s found me in an obliging mood.

Aya asks if I would mind her coming over on Sunday.
Mind
? Not at all. Do come. Do come.

3

Aya calls me from a pay phone as soon as she arrives, so I walk down to the weathered station to meet her. She's sitting alone on an old wooden bench, looking beat. I ask he
r if she's tired and she says, “
Of course, I'm tire
d, it took forever to get here.”
She's not exaggerating. With some luck, you might be able to get a train that will take you all the way from downtown Tenjin to this neglected little station in the middle of nowhere, but more often than not you have to transfer one or two times, as I suspect Aya has, making the trip even longer.

“Sorry ‘bout that.”

I take her knapsack, which is surprisingly heavy, and lead her around the station, over the single rusting railroad track, down a gravel path that runs between two untilled rice fiel
ds and over to the condominium.

The building I am living in looks rather impressive from the station. At ten stories high, it's the tallest building throughout the otherwise undeveloped countryside. It's not only huge by any standard, but beautiful and modern, as well. But like a Mayan pyramid rising out of the jungle, it makes you wonder what the hell it's doing here. This is a mystery that needn't keep me up at night much longer; with Reina's help I've found a modest apartment two blocks away from work that I'll move into next Sunday. Convenience in the end has won out over comfort.

I give Aya a quick tour of the apartment.
She asks if I live here alone. “
I guess you could say that, yes. Rumor has it that I have roommates, bu
t I’ll be damned if I ever see them.”

“
Must be nice to have su
ch a big place all to yourself.”

“
I don't know. It's so quiet and lonely here. The size just
makes it feel all the more so.”

She sits down on one of the horrible recliners in the
living room before I can say, “
You
don't really want to sit . . .”

They're large and boxy abominations, covered with a broad piss yellow and shit brown tartan fabric. I am often appalled by other's interior decorating choices, but the furniture in the condominium left me speechless when I first laid my eyes on it. Granted it isn't as bad as what was in
my apartment back in Kitakyûshû
. It had been furnished with whatever my boss could scrounge up during his rounds through the neighborhood on that monthly festival of profligacy: Non-burnable Garbage Day. Where my old apartment was a grab bag of miserably dilapidated second-hand furniture, there seems to actually be a theme to the horror in the con
dominium: Scottish Proletarian.

I bring can of Kirin and two glasses from the kitchen and sit down on a woolly throw rug on the floor. I pour some beer into Aya's glass. She leans over, takes the can of beer from me and pours beer into my glass. It foams up, running over the edge of the glass, beer drips onto the carpet. She apologizes, but she needn't do so. She's only sixteen for chrissakes. I couldn't pour a beer myself when I was that young.

“
Kampai
,”
we chime, clinking our glasses together.

“
I'm no
t supposed to be drinking beer,”
she says.

“
Yeah, not for another four years, but ain't t
hat the beauty of this country?”

“
No, no, it's not that. I'm not supposed to drink because I've become a
Mormon.”

“
You
what
?”

Although the first Christian mission in Japan was set up four hundred and forty-four years ago by the Francis Xavier, for all the trouble he and countless missionaries after him went through, ninety-nine percent of the country has had the sense to turn a deaf ear to the Christian message. The Catholics, who were the first to come with good tidings for all, have all but stopped proselytizing and now keep quietly to themselves. A little repression at the hands of a brutal shogun goes a long way, indeed. Since the end of the war, however, armies of Bible-totting dimwits have come to Japan to give converting the pagans another shot. And now, the Japanese housewife is bothered by dowdy women who knock on closed doors until their knuckles bleed and stand like abandoned pets in the draughty hallways, waiting for unsuspecting people to open the door and accepts a copy of
The Watchtower
. Other Christians, tired of having doors slammed in their faces, have resorted ingeniously to opening private secondary schools where they have a steady flow of impressionable youths with no choice but listen, take notes and regurgitate the Gospels on tests. Even though this subtle brainwashing of naïve youths only succeeds in producing a handful of converts a year, the schools have become cash cows keeping coffers in America’s
Bible Belt filled. It also fund
s missions to countries more receptive to Christianity's loving message that if you're not one of them you'll burn for all eternity in Hell, countries like Korea where as many as fifty percent have succumbed.