A Woman's Nails Read online

  With the move only a day away, it makes sense to stop moping and start getting my things together, to pack up my clothes and belongings. I never quite settled into the condominium. Lacking the resignation to a life in the countryside, I have lived for the most part out of a suitcase, unpacking things as necessity required and hanging them up in the closet or putting them away in a drawer when I was finished. It doesn't take long.

  My "roommates" are in town and probably won't return until Sunday evening, meaning I'll have vacated the condo by the time they return. I’ve heard stories of Japanese families digging themselves so deep into debt that they're left with only two options: packing up what they can and moving out of their homes surreptitiously in the middle of the night, so-called yonige, or committing ikka shinjû, or a family suicide. Considering that I haven’t mentioned my move to the “roommates,” I kind of feel like I'm yonige-ing myself.

  You think they'll miss me? Think they'll even notice that I'm gone?

  4

  I take a small box containing Mie's pajamas, her yellow toothbrush and overnight kit, what she called her o-tomari setto, from one of the drawers and place it in the clear plastic container where I keep photo albums and souvenirs from my first year in Japan.

  It’s been months since I last opened the albums. Fear of an emotional onslaught has prevented me from summoning Lazarus out of his tomb, from taking the albums out and reviving the past.

  I take them out now, one for nearly every month shared with Mie, with the exception of October. I still can't bring myself to have the film from that month developed. They remain tucked away in a tin can, interned like dry bones and ashes.

  Some of the happiest memories of my life are recorded on the pages of the albums. I can't help myself, can't keep myself from taking the first album out, from cracking it open, and diving headfirst before checking the depth.

  My twenty-sixth birthday: there’s Mie sitting among a group of some two dozen of my students who've crammed into one of the six-tatami mat rooms at my old apartment. She's beaming at me—so beautiful, so vibrant, so engaging. She didn't know if she would be able to make it, if she would be able to get away from work. I told her thirty people would be coming to the party. She was the only person, though, that I really wanted to celebrate with. “Wakatta. Gambarimasu,” she said. Okay, I'll try to be there.

  I was on tenterhooks the whole party, my eyes turning expectantly towards the front door every time I heard footsteps coming up the stairwell. When she did come, I could barely contain my happiness. I shouted “Mie-chan” as she walked in through the door. That night after everyone had left we made love for the second time.

  On the following page, Mie and I are at the izakaya near the apartment we sometimes went to. In the first snapshot, Mie is pouring saké for me from a small earthenware tokkuri bottle into the tiny choko cup I'm holding. Before us on the counters is a small plate of grilled mackerel with daikon oroshi (grated radish) before us. It was my first time to try it. There were also dishes with a beef and potatoes nimono, and tempura on white paper. In the next photo, I'm pouring soy sauce into the choko of the man next to me. Mie's laughing, but the man doesn't quite know what to make of my little American jokku.

  On the next page, is an adorable letter Mie sent to me after returning from a trip she took with all of her co-workers to the island of Hokkaidô. She included several photos of herself taken while there. The letter mentions how mild the summer in Hokkaidô is compared to Kyûshû, the places visited and sights seen, the wonderful seafood she ate so much of that she's afraid she has put on weight . . . again. It closes with a few lines that reassured me when I had already started to fall in love with her:

  “I've been thinking a lot about you recently. I don't quite understand how I'm feeling, but I miss you so much and want to see you. Call me.”

  When my eyes start to mist up, I put the photo album back into the storage container, clamp it shut, and then finish packing up my things. After a meal of tom yum gai soup, I sit down in front of the television and flip through the channels for something to get my mind off Mie. Without satellite or cable, flipping through the channels is like jogging around a short track. Around and around and around. A variety show featuring pop music, a variety show featuring a manzai comedy duo, a dry documentary on NHK, the humorless state-run broadcaster, an English language instruction program featuring sad excuses for foreigners hamming it up on NHK's education channel, another variety show featuring manzai comedians and pop music, and finally rounding up the lap, an old Schwarzenegger film dubbed in Japanese.

  The phone rings.

  5

  “Moshi-moshi?”

  “Hello. Is Chris there?” asks a soft, barely audible voice.

  “No, he isn’t,” I reply, turning the TV’s volume down.

  “Is this Peador?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Machiko.” It’s Chris’s girlfriend.

  “Oh, hi, Machiko.”

  “Do you know where Chris is?” she asks timidly.

  “No.”

  My roommate is an affable enough person, but seldom has much to say to me whenever we happen to find ourselves at the condominium at the same time.

  She asks if I am alone, what I’m doing, what my plans are for the weekend. Why the sudden interest in old Peador, I wonder. Is this Machiko a player? Is the quiet demeanor just a ruse?

  “Yes,” I reply.

  “I don’t believe you,” she says.

  “I really am alone, regardless of whether you believe it or not.”

  “You have a lot of girlfriends, don’t you?”

  I’ve been getting this a lot. I tell her I’m not seeing anyone in particular.

  “Chris and I, we saw you Saturday evening with two girls. You were holding hands with both of them.”

  Saturday night? Holding hands?

  “Oh, them,” I say. “They’re just friends.”

  Two former students of mine had come down from Kitakyûshû to see me. Sweet girls, both of them, terribly kind, but not what I’d call my cup of tea.

  “We were drunk,” I offer as an explanation. I had completely forgotten about that.

  “And I saw you with a high school girl near the park before that. You were holding her hand, too.”

  Holding hands with Aya? Now that I definitely did not do, but there’s no use in protesting; Machiko has convinced herself.

  “Chris tells me you’re a playboy, a real lady-killer. Are you? Are you a lady-killer?”

  This gives me a nice and long overdue laugh.

  “Please be nice to them,” she says.

  “Okay, I promise. Cross my heart.”

  “I mean it,” she insists and then I can hear the gravity in her soft voice. “Peador, please be nice to them.”

  “I’ll try,” I say.

  “Do you know when Chris will come home?”

  “To tell you the truth, I have no idea,” I say, adding that he sometimes doesn’t come back at all. Oops!

  The silence on the other end of the phone speaks volumes. It was a simple mistake; I was under the assumption that Chris had been spending the nights with Machiko. Now that I realize that hasn’t been the case, I whip up a nice and fluffy white lie.

  “Chris is busy, as I’m sure he’s told you, Machiko, lots of overtime. And he’s also helping a friend which . . .” I have to pull these fluffy white lies out of my arse because I don’t know Jack shit about Chris’s private life. “He told me he sometimes stayed at a co-worker’s place in town, a Tony-something, whenever he misses the last train . . .”

  The last bit has the merit of being based on more than the threadbare fabric of my imagination: it stems from hearsay.

  Machiko remains silent. I can’t tell whether she has bought any of it, or whether she was able to understand what I told her.

  After a long, pain-filled sigh, she speaks up. “I want you to give him a message.”

  “Sure.”

  “Tell him: ‘I love
him . . . I miss him . . .’”

  I can hear her sniffing on the other end.

  “I want to see him . . .”

  Her voice grows ever more quiet, and with all the sniffing, it’s hard to catch what she’s saying. Even so, I know the message she wants me to convey.

  “Tell him . . . I love him.”

  I write the simple words down on the only piece of paper available, a mauve napkin with a picnic basket and squirrels in one corner, write her words verbatim with ellipsis indicating the pauses each time she’s too overcome by emotion to continue. When I look at what she has had me write, I realize they are the very same words Mie spoke to me.

  Mie and I spent a quiet weekend together at her apartment in Fukuoka, rarely leaving her bed. We made love, rested, made love again, and then after taking a shower together, fell into each other’s arms and did it one more time before falling asleep.

  When I had returned to Kitakyûshû, I took a long walk by myself along the bank of the slow-moving Onga River, listening to a cassette Mie had made for me with some of her favorite songs. I couldn’t stop thinking about her, and felt vulnerable and weak because of it. I was lost in that painfully comfortable limbo, having fallen in love but distressed that the sentiment might not be mutual. That evening I walked up the hill to the cluster of mom-and-pop shops where the only public telephone in the neighborhood was to be found. The booth was alive with mosquitoes, moths, gnats and ticks, every kind of bug imaginable. Braving the insects, I dialed her number. That’s how badly I wanted to hear her voice, wanted to hear her say, “I love you . . . I miss you . . . I want to see you.”

  “I miss you, too, Mie.” I told her, with my throat taunt. “I want to see you, too.”

  “I’ll tell him,” I promise.

  “Peador?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I talk to you?”

  “Of course.”

  Machiko speaks for an hour, describing how she first met Chris. She had been walking along a street in town a month ago when she noticed him. Just like that, she went right up to him and asked if he were American. He said, yes, and the two of them started talking. They ended up spending the afternoon together chatting in a coffee shop.

  “I was so sad and lonely before I met Chris,” she says sniffing. “But, he’s made me so happy.”

  I start to cry. Mie had made me happy, too, at a time when I was desperately homesick and missing all of my friends back in Portland. I tell Machiko a little about Mie, only a little because to tell her the extent of what has been weighing on my heart all these months would be unbearable.

  “Do you still love her?”

  “Yes,” I answer, tears flowing down my face, my nose running.

  “Then call her.”

  “She’ll just hang up on me.”

  “Try,” she encourages. “Give her one more chance.”

  6

  I stare at the phone for more than half an hour, before finally dialing Mie's number.

  How many times did I try to call Mie? How many times did I linger by the phone, wanting to make this very call, but was held back by fear, the fear that the relationship was dead, the fear that Mie was gone and would never come back no matter what I did or said? How many times? I should have moved on and found someone else, anyone, if only to fuck away the memories, if only to mend my heart by breaking others’.

  Machiko is right, I have nothing to lose by calling, so I dial Mie’s number.

  “Moshi-moshi?”

  Mie's familiar deep voice breaks the silence that has enveloped me since Machiko hung up.

  “Hi.”

  “Who is it?” she asks.

  “It's me . . .”

  “Peador?”

  “Yes,” I say painfully, my throat was dry and tight. “Yes, it's me, Peador.”

  Mie sounds genuinely happy to hear from me, which catches me off guard.

  We exchange bland pleasantries like two old middle-aged women. She mentions the warm weather we've been having asks if I had a chance to drink under the sakura blossoms. I tell her I did, that I'm now working near West Park, one of the best places to see the cherry blossoms.

  “I'm glad to hear that,” she says. “Do you like the your new job?”

  “It's not bad,” I tell her. “A million times better than working for that idiot last year in Kitakyûshû but then just about anything would be better than another year with him.”

  She speaks of her own hatred for the tiring and boring routine at the pachinko parlor, then brightens up when she tells me that she got a new puppy.

  “He likes to drink beer,” she adds.

  Six months may have passed since we last spoke, but she is still the Mie I fell in love with and have been missing all these months.

  Mie asks how I look, whether I've grown my hair out or have kept it short, and so on. Finally, she asks me if I have a girlfriend.

  I tell her I don’t.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “I don't believe you.”

  I have no idea why everyone is finding this so hard to accept. Am I missing something here? Am I better looking, more charming than I believe myself to be?

  “I don't have a girlfriend,” I say. “Haven't had one since you . . .”

  “I'm sorry.”

  The tears begin to fall, betraying me again. Women will tell you that they want their men to express their emotions, but nothing turns a woman off faster than a man blubbering pathetically into the receiver of the phone and that's exactly what I begin to do. And I’ve never hated myself more than I do now.

  “I'm so lonely, Mie . . . I miss you . . . I want to see you.”

  6

  REINA

  1

  “You should have called me earlier,” Mie says brightly. “We could have met.”

  I did, but you kept hanging up on me, remember?

  “I wanted to . . .”

  “Say, what are you doing Monday? If you're free, how about getting together?”

  The invitation is made so casually that I can hardly believe my ears. Six months earlier Mie was talking to me through the slit of a chained door and now she acts as if a reset button has been pressed. It's the spring of 1992 all over again.

  Can we go back to zero? Can we meet as if for the first time like we did one year ago? Can we get drunk in your bedroom and fall into each other's arms again? Can we wake up the next morning, half undressed and a little embarrassed—but happy, too—about what had happened?

  “Monday?” I said. “This Monday?”

  “Yes, this Monday. Are you free?”

  My nose is running and my eyes are filled with tears, and yet I’m smiling. It feels like ages since I last managed a genuine one.

  “Yeah, Mie, I'll be free after eight-thirty.”

  “Alrighty then. Let's meet in front of the Oyafukô Dôri Mister Donut. Okay? You know where that is, don't you?”

  Of course I know where it is. We went there on Father's Day last year, the day after you left Tetsu . . .

  I let the receiver fall from my hand onto my lap as soon as she hangs up. I don't know what to make of what has just happened or what Mie’s intentions are. She made no mention of Tetsu.

  Have the two of them broken up? Has she been waiting all these months for me to contact her?

  I go to my room and lie on my futon where I am overcome by a rare peace of mind, and, for the first time in months, I sleep like the dead.

  2

  All day Sunday, my co-worker Reina helps me move out of the condo into the new apartment closer to work, an effort taking most of the day because of the size of her car necessitates two trips.

  Reina drives a Mitsubishi Pajero Mini. When I ask her if she knows what pajero means, she says she doesn't, that she loves the car so much she wouldn't care if it meant dust box. She means trashcan, but after schlepping the last of my belongings from the eighth floor condominium I don't really feel l
ike correcting her English.

  “I'm only going to tell you because you said it wouldn't affect the way you feel about your wonderful little car here, but pajero means masturbate in Spanish.”

  “No!”

  “Yes!”

  “How embarrassing.”

  “I'm sorry to be the one to have told you,” I say, laughing. “Why, of all the things on this bountiful earth of ours, why would they ever name a car that?”

  “Maybe they liked the sound of it.”

  3

  My new apartment is on the fourth and top floor of a medium-sized concrete-and-tile building. It's representative of the crap that was thrown up during the bubble economy. The real estate boom of the 1980’s had every knucklehead with a bit of cash burning a hole in his pocket build on any old plot of land he could get his hands on with the expectation that prices would keep going up and up and up.

  The apartment building was apparently built on land that used to be the landlord's mother's garden. Her dilapidated wooden house remains, uninhabited and leaning, as if from fatigue, against the apartment building. Thanks to the condominiums towering fifteen-stories high to the southeast, south and west, most the sunlight is blocked. The whole house languishes in a damp and perpetual shade with the exception of one northern wall that gets a flash of sun in the afternoon. The wall is covered with a thick coat of ivy that has invaded the slats of wood and worked its way to the clay beneath it. The tiled roof, black with slime, is slowly disintegrating, the shattered remains of tiles and mortar litter the ground below the eves in a narrow mossy ditch, like dandruff on an old man's boney shoulders.

  Near the house and sharing the same sliver of noonday sun is a small Shintô shrine. A stray black and white cat with bobbed tail passes through the miniature red torii gate and crawls into a space under the shrine, disappearing into the darkness underneath.