A Woman's Nails Page 16

  Once my data has been beamed to 7-11's GHQ, I head to the subway station where Tatami is waiting for me, overdressed as always. Today, she is wearing an odd-looking dirndl reminiscent of a Tyrolean fraulein. It wouldn’t surprise me if she were to jump up, slap the heels of her feet, and yodel.

  2

  After Reina and I split up for the nth and final time, I was at a loss what to do with myself. Not that I was melancholy about the break up, but I wasn’t exactly dancing a jig on the grave of our relationship either.

  I was missing out on more than just the kinky sex. For one, I never did get to see any fireflies, or hotaru as they’re called here. It was like trying to pry state secrets from hardened spies to obtain any relevant information about the damned bugs. Oh, I did learn that Auld Lang Syne was known as Hotaru no Hikari, or The Glimmer of Fireflies in Japanese, that Ken Takakura who had starred in my primer on Japan, Black Rain, had also starred in the Kamikaze classic film, Hotaru. I also learned that there was an anti-war animated film by Hayao Miyazaki called Hotaru no Haka (Grave of the Fireflies). But no one could offer me any advice on where to see them, other than to schlepp up some river after sunset. In a city with hundreds of rivers, streams, creeks and brooks, that was no help at all.

  No longer spending time with Reina after work or at weekends also brought home once again how utterly alone I was. It wasn’t Reina I missed, or the crazed animal sex we had, for that matter. What I missed hadn’t changed: having someone I cared for in my life, someone to fill the gaping hole Mie had tore open in me.

  With nowhere in particular to go and no one in particular to see, I started wandering around town alone, exploring on foot whenever the weather permitted. Since we were apparently having one of the dreariest rainy seasons on record, my excursions were few and far between, but when I did get out, the things I discovered—the architecture, the gardens, the hidden parks, the historical buildings—provided the distraction I was starved for, and encouraged further perambulation.

  Many of the more interesting sites in Fukuoka are fortunately within a short walk from my apartment: the castle ruins with its maze of stone ramparts, and Ôhori Park, which has a beautiful Japanese garden. A Noh theatre and art museum are also located in the area, as is Gokoku Jinja and a martial arts center called Budôkan.[9]

  Gokoku Jinja, like Tokyo's infamous Yasukuni, is a shrine dedicated to those who died defending Japan. Had I known this little fact before visiting the shrine, I may have been moved in an altogether different way. Instead, I was inspired with a deep sense of awe, the very awe which was sorely absent when my father would drag his unwilling brood at an ungodly hour every Sunday morning and stuff it into the first two pews of our dimly lit, dusty old house of worship where we’d reluctantly take part in that hebdomadal morose pageant, Mass.

  No, if the divine and mysterious were to be felt anywhere, it was in shrines such as Gokoku, a serene island of ancient trees, expansive lawns and painstakingly raked gravel. It’s a spiritual oasis in the heart of a frenetically bustling desert of asphalt and condominiums and if you’re not moved to the core when visiting the shrine, then you have no core. With the Catholic church, the nearest I ever got to appreciating the power of the Almighty was at the coffee and donuts bonanza after Mass when dutifully sitting-standing-genuflecting automatons were resurrected with copious amounts of caffeine and sugar.

  After a purifying ablution of my hands, I passed between a pair of komainu statues and through a towering wooden torii gate, entering the shrine. At the end of a long the broad path of combed gravel was the shinden, a long, one storey golden structure with a gracefully sloping roof at the edge of a lush and verdant woods. Iron lanterns and straw braiding hung along the eves, and a young woman, her black parasol leaning against the offertory box, bowed her head in prayer. Drawn by both curiosity and a spontaneous reverence, I made my way along the gravel path, ascended the short flight of steps and offered up a pray, myself.

  One day my father will ask cynically, “So, now you’re a Shintôist, are ye?”

  I'll reply, “When was I never one?”

  What did I pray for? Happiness, of course.

  With the change in my pocket, I bought an o-mikuji, a small folded strip of white paper with my fortune written in Japanese on one side, and, to my surprise, in English on the other.

  “Your flower is heather,” the o-mikuji told me. “It means lonely.”

  Wonderful.

  “You are introverted and like to be alone,” the prognostication continued.

  Not really.

  “But man cannot live on without others.”

  Hah! No man is an island! Plagiarism!

  “Let people into your heart, and you'll be happy.”

  Bingo!

  Regarding my hopes and ambitions, I was told to “make efforts, and try to be friendly with a lot of people.”

  By gum, try I will!

  “You studies will be all right, if you keep calm.” I took a deep breath, and exhaled slowly, releasing a small fart, redolent of sour milk.

  Any more relaxed and I'd be dead.

  I was advised to be cheerful, but to not aim too high when looking for a job. It was also suggested that being quiet on dates wasn’t always the wisest thing to do, and, because I was, again, too introverted I must “behave cheerfully.”

  Dutifully noted!

  Not particularly impressed with this fortune—it was only shokichi, a four out a scale of about six—I tied it onto a narrow branch of a nearby tree and left the shrine.

  3

  It was around this time in my life when I was wandering aimlessly around Fukuoka in the constant drizzle that Tatami entered my life. Of the seventy or so people I taught each week, Tatami was the only one near my age. This was an entirely and regrettably different situation to what I’d been used to in godforsaken Kitakyûshû where the vast majority of my students were young women. Granted they had been, for the most part, what the Japanese call potato girls—small town girls with small town ambitions—but I would have gladly settled for those potatoes over the old yams and tatter tots I was currently teaching.

  It may have been nothing more than this sustained dearth of nubile women within my proximity, but Tatami charmed my socks off when we first met. So much so that after our first lesson together, I made the mistake of mentioning to that sour puss Yumi what a nice girl I thought Tatami was.

  “She's not just some nice girl,” Yumi chastised me. “She's an o-jô-san.[10]”

  “Oh?”

  “She's from one of the richest families in Fukuoka!”

  I suppose that was meant to impress me, but I couldn’t give a sour milk fart. So much is made, not only in Japan, of an individual’s status vis-à-vis what their parents or grandparents have achieved as to overlook the fact that the person in question is often a profligate, underachieving arse.

  I wasted little time and slipped Tatami a simple note inviting her out for lunch after only her second lesson. It wasn’t that I found the thirty-year-old “girl” particularly attractive—screwing the o-jô-san hadn't even entered my mind—but, for some reason or another I was drawn towards her. Something about her gentle innocence, the delicacy of her mannerisms and words made me want to know her better. The fact that her father was a professor of architecture at Kyûshû University also had nothing to do with it.

  Honest. No really, I mean it. Okay, it did. A little.

  Tatami replied by post a few days later, sending me a short letter written on beautiful summer stationery with a gold fish motif. After apologizing effusively for writing, rather than phoning, she confessed that she’d been surprised, but happy with my invitation and was looking forward to having lunch with me the following Tuesday after the lesson.

  4

  My long walks continued. I’d been coming down with such a severe case of cabin fever that even the heaviest of showers was no longer enough to keep me inside. I’d even traded in my flimsy convenience store umbrella for one from Paul Smith costing ten
times as much, just so that I could get out of my apartment and out of my head, as often as possible. Call me Thoreau; Fukuoka, my Walden.

  One afternoon, as I was returning from one of my longest walks yet that had my shins and arches aching with a dull, throbbing pain, I dropped in at the Budôkan to see what kind of martial arts were taught there.

  At the entrance was a bulletin board with a schedule of classes. On Saturday evenings, big boys in diapers pushed themselves around a clay circle. Sumô wasn’t really my cup of tea, which is just as well; of all my blessings, girth is not one of them. Three evenings a week, the kendô members met to whack each other senseless with bamboo sticks. That wasn’t quite what I was looking for either.

  I walked over to a small window, stuck my head in, and said excuse me in Japanese, disturbing three elderly men from their naps.

  “You really gave my heart a start,” said one of the men as he approached the window.

  “Um, sorry about that.”

  “Wow! You're Japanese is excellent.”

  “Tondemonai,” I replied reflexively. Nonsense! “My Japanese is awful. I’ve still got a lot to learn.”

  “Oi, Satô-sensei. This gaijin here says his Japanese's awful, then goes and uses a word like, ‘Tondemonai!’”

  Satô rubs the sleep from his eyes says, “Heh?”

  “How can I help you?”

  “I'm, um, looking for a kick boxing class. You got any?”

  “Kick boxing? No, I'm sorry we don't. We do have karate, though. Tuesday and Thursday evenings. And there's Aikido on Wednesday and Friday evenings.”

  “Nothing in the afternoons?”

  “No, only in the evenings.”

  “Well, what about jûdô?”

  The man's eyes lit up. I was in luck, there was a class in session now, he said pointing to a separate building across the driveway.

  “That building?” I said. I had my doubts.

  “Yes, yes. Just go right over there. Tell them you're an observer.”

  I wasn't sure the old man had heard me correctly, but I went to the adjacent building all the same, and removed my shoes at the entrance. As I stepped into the hall, two women in their fifties wearing what looked like long, black pleated skirts and heavy white cotton tops minced past me, their white tabi'ed feet[11] sliding quietly across the black hardwood floor. A similarly dressed raisin of a man, upon seeing me bowed gracefully, then glided off to the right from which the silence was broken with the occasional “shui-pap!”

  “Anô,” I called out nervously. “I was told to come here. I'm, um, interested in learning jûdô.”

  “Jûdô?” the elderly man asked.

  “Yes, jûdô.”

  “This isn't jûdô,” he said, eyeing me warily. “It's kyûdô.”

  “Kyûdô?” What the hell is kyûdô?

  He gestured nobly in the direction the “shui-pap!” sound had emanated from and encouraged me to follow him to a platform of sorts overlooking a lawn at the end of which was a wall with black and white targets.

  “Kyûdô,” the man told me again. The Way of the Bow.

  He instructed me to watch an old woman who had just entered the platform carrying a bow as long as she was short. She bowed before a small Shintô household altar, called a kamidana, then minced with prescribed steps to her place on the platform. Her posture was unnaturally rigid: her arse jutted out, spine curved back. Her head was held high. With her arms bent slightly at the elbows she raised the bow upward, bringing her arms nearly parallel to the floor. She then adjusted the arrow, stabilizing the shaft with her left hand and fitting the nock onto the string with her right hand. She turned her head ever so slowly, and, fixing her gaze on the target some thirty yards away, raised her arms, bringing the bow to a point above her head.

  Inhaling slowly and deeply, she extended her arms elegantly, pulling the bowstring back with her right hand, and pushing the bow forward with her left, such that the shaft of the arrow now rested against her right cheek. The old woman paused momentarily before releasing the arrow. The string snapped against the bow with the “shui-pap” I had heard before, and the arrow was sent flying majestically right on target. It fell ten yards short, landing in the grass with a miserably anticlimactic “puh, sut!”

  A small, nervous laugh snuck out before I could stop it. The old man at my side gave me a nasty look then went over to the woman who had just delivered the lawn a fatal shot and praised her effusively. She remained gravely serious, bowed deeply, then bellowed: “Hai, ganbarimasu!” I'll do my best! All the other geriatrics there suddenly came to life and also shouted: “Hai, ganbarimasu!”

  When the old woman had minced away, another man came out onto the platform and went through the very same stringent ritual. He ended up shooting his arrow into the bull’s-eye of the target . . . two lanes away. He, too, was lavished with compliments by the old man, whom I’d only just realized was the sensei, the “Lobin Hood” to these somber “Melly Men and Women”, if you will.

  A third man walked onto the platform with the very same gingerly steps and bowed as the others had in front of the kamidana. Standing with a similarly unnatural posture, he went through the movements before releasing his arrow. To my surprise, the arrow actually hit the target. No bull’s-eye, mind you, but close enough for a cigar. And just as I was thinking, “Now here’s someone who finally shows a bit of promise,” the sensei marched over and ripped the man a new arsehole. His form was apparently all-wrong. The poor bastard looked thoroughly dejected as he slinked off the platform.

  5

  “You know, it’s my patron saint’s feast day today,” I said to Tatami as our bus approached.

  “Your patron saint?”

  “Yes, Saint Peter. The twenty-ninth is his feast day.”

  “Feast day?”

  “Yeah, it's a kind of memorial day.”

  “For whom?”

  “For Saint Peter.”

  “Saint Peter? Who’s that?”

  “My patron saint.”

  “Your patron saint?”

  “Ugh, never mind, it’s not that important."”

  “Are you religious, Peador?”

  “Ha! Does the Pope poop in the woods?”

  “I’m sorry? Poop?”

  “No, no I’m not. Not at all,” I said. If my strict Catholic upbringing succeeded in anything it was this: it had turned me completely off the faith. To this day, I remain a gleefully recalcitrant, devout apostate. “I just thought you’d find it interesting is all.”

  “I don't understand.”

  “And neither do my parents.”

  We had lunch in a small Malaysian restaurant in Nishijin, and, when we were finished dining on beef satay with a deliciously sweet peanut sauce, spicy chicken tomato curry and nasi goreng, Tatami asked me why I had written her the letter.

  Letter, what letter, I thought. All I did was slip the girl a simple note inviting her out for lunch. Why had I written? Because I didn’t want to have lunch alone is why.

  Before I could answer that I hadn't really put that much thought into it, she began to dribble on melodramatically about how happy the letter had made her. She’d been going through a difficult, sad period in her life, she explained but gave no details. Then, once more she asked me why I had written her.

  I still didn’t have much of an answer to give her and was beginning to feel guilty for unwittingly leading her to believe differently. I had met a nice girl I was interested in becoming friends with. I wrote her a simple not telling her so. What was there to explain?

  “I don't know, Tatami. I guess I just felt . . .”

  “But of all people, you wrote me. Have you written anyone else? No? See! So, why did you write me?”

  “I, uh . . . I, just . . .” All I could do was look at my reflection in the tabletop and smile defeatedly.

  6

  I went back to the Budôkan the following day to begin kyûdô lessons in earnest, not so much out of a burning passion for the martial art itself
as a consequence of an adherence to the Taoist doctrine of wu wei—the art of letting be, going with the flow: I'd got this far, and was curious where it might take me. It was a mistake, but I didn't know it at the time.

  With Tatami, it wasn’t much different. She phoned one night and launch into a series of apologies for the rudeness of calling.

  “This is why people have phones, Tatami.” I’d only had mine installed a few weeks earlier after buying the line from an America who needed cash—quick. He didn't say so, but I got the impression that he’d knocked someone up and had to pay for the abortion.

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “Tatami, it’s quite all right. I'm just . . .”

  “But, surely, you must be busy . . .”

  “I’m not busy. And don't call me ‘Shirley’.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Tatami, I am not, I repeat, not busy.”

  “You're not studying?”

  “Studying? No, no, no. I’m just watching TV . . .”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry to disturb you.”

  “Tatami, you’re not disturbing anything. It’s just the news and I can barely understand it at that.”

  “I can call back later if you like.”

  “No, no, no! What is it?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said with a nervous laugh, then started drilling with questions me about work, the situation with my co-workers, and so on. Then, just as I expected, she started in with the letter business again: “Peador?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why did you write me?”

  I banged the receiver against my head. “Why are you making such a big deal out of nothing, Tatami? I liked you, so I wrote you a letter. End of story.”

  “Yes, but why do you like me? I think I'm just an ordinary, a very, very, typical Japanese woman. Why do you like me?”