A Woman's Nails Read online

  The apartment itself is unremarkable. Shaped like an L, with a kitchen nook and an adjacent utility room/bathroom just off the long and narrow living room area, but is redeemed by an exceptionally large balcony that overlooks an oasis of green: the vast garden belonging to one of the few houses remaining in the neighborhood.

  My new apartment, though not as comfortable as the condominium I've just given up, comes with enough amenities--a washer and dryer, a small fridge, an air conditioner and even a toilet equipped with a heated seat and bidet--that I don't feel as if I'm sliding back into the same kind of impoverished squalor I had to endure the year I lived in Kitakyûshû City.

  Even Reina thinks I was lucky to get it. She would say so: it was her, after all, who found the apartment for me.

  4

  Reina and I end up spending the whole day together; precisely what I hoped would happen when she first offered to help me move. At a time when loneliness has been suffocating, the half hour I spend alone with her at the end of each workday has been like pure oxygen.

  My desire to be with Mie aside, I might even have asked Reina out if it weren't for the fact that I was standing at the very end of a discouragingly long queue, hands dug deep into my pockets and looking stupid just like all the other men who were infatuated with her.

  Reina locks up her Mitsubishi Jerk-off as I carry the last of my things up the four flights of stairs. She checks my mailbox and then follows behind me. Once in the apartment, she hands me a pile of flyers.

  I sit down on the hardwood floor, back against one of the sliding glass doors that open on to the balcony. She takes the place next to me, sitting close enough that our sweaty arms and legs touch.

  There's a menu from a pizza delivery company called, God only knows why, Pizza Pockets.

  “I hope they don't actually carry the pizza their pockets,” I say.

  “Maybe they stay warmer that way.”

  “The pizza? Or the delivery boy?”

  Reina laughs and her head comes to rest against my shoulder.

  I ask her if you have to pay extra for the lint.

  “The what?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” I say. “You feeling hungry?”

  She nods. I’d offer to cook for her if I'd had a scrap of food, let alone any pots or pans, in the apartment. She says I needn't bother, that it would be easier to eat out at a restaurant in the neighborhood or have something delivered.

  I continue sifting through the junk mail for other restaurants that deliver and come across a small sheet of paper with some kind of list printed on both sides. At the top of the page is a starburst with the boldfaced message: 5 videos for only 10,000 yen!!! With all the Chinese characters, I can hardly read it. Still, I don’t need to tax my imagination to figure it out: it’s a list of porn titles.

  “I think I'll keep this one,” I say.

  “Here's one you might like,” Reina says, pointing at the flyer. “Lolicon Deluxe. Six Dô Sukebe High School Girls.”

  “I know sukebe what means, but dô sukebe?”

  “Very, very sukebe.”

  “Six Very, Very Horny High School Girls. I see. And what about this one?” I ask pointing at a porn title written entirely in Chinese characters.

  Reina tilts her head for a moment, then translates: “Sexually Frustrated, Explosion Breasts Step-Mother.”

  “Explosion Breast Step-Mother? Hmm, intriguing, but I think I'll pass. How about this?”

  “Midara-na Te OL. Hmmm. Lascivious Hand Office Ladies?”

  “What on earth is the lascivious hand?”

  “Onanî,” she replies matter-of-factly.

  I get the impression that I'm supposed to understand what onanî means and feel stupid that I don't. “Onanî?”

  “Yes, onanî. That's English, right?”

  “Does onanî sound like English to you?”

  “No, now that you say so, it doesn't, but . . . I just assumed it was English because it's always written in katakana.”

  “What does it mean, anyways? Curious minds want to know!”

  “Pajero.”

  “Good Lord!” And then it comes to me like a flash of inspiration. “Oh, now I get it. Onanî is onanism!”

  “I told you it was English.”

  “Yeah, but nobody says onanism. Masturbating Office Ladies. Very classy.”

  Among other things, there is a pamphlet for something called “Blue Juice,” a nauseating concoction of herbs and wild grasses that is supposed to be good for you, a menu from an udon restaurant, and several full-colored flyers from a “Delivery Health” service advertising call girls.

  Reina asks me if I know what the postcard-sized flyers are called.

  I take a stab in the dark, “The Good News?”

  “No, they're called pinku chirashi.”[3]

  “Why pink?”

  Because, I’m told, the color pink has long been associated with pornography, prostitution, and such.

  “Interesting,” I say. “In the US, the color blue is.”

  “They're called blue flyers in America?”

  “No, no, no. Not the flyers, the industry. As far as I know, we don't have these in the States. You put something like this in the wrong person's mailbox and you're liable to get arrested or sued by some nutty Christian.”

  “Sued? Whatever for?”

  “Because he'll claim he'd been emotionally traumatized just finding it in.”

  “Americans are stupid,” Reina concludes.

  One of the pinku chirashi features a dozen girls posing in a variety of lingerie or costumes, such as a stewardess and policewoman. Most of them have hidden their identity by covering their faces with their hands.

  The vitals of each are given, including their “name,” age, height, proportions and the size of their breasts, along with a short comment. 19 year old Momo here with the E-cups is “Very Good!!!” 172cm-tall Sumire is “Dynamite!” Aya is a “New Face!” Eighteen-year-old Nana might be a little needy in the chest department, but the flyer assures me that she is “Very, Very Popular!” And oh, yes, you can “AF” the 23-year-old Natsu, if you like! AF? Why anal fuck, of course. The girls will come to your home, hotel room, anywhere you like. But wait there’s more! All of the girls are “Amateurs.”

  Yeah, right!

  I place the pinku chirashi on the “keep” pile, telling Reina that I never know when they might come in handy.

  “Have you ever done it?” Reina asks.

  “Done what?”

  She points to the pinku chirashi.

  “With a prostitute? No, never.”

  “Really? Why not? A friend of mine went after winning seventy thousand yen at the boat races. He spent it all at a Soapland.”

  “Seventy thousand yen! Just to get laid? What a waste!”

  “Not to him. He said it was like he had died and gone to heaven.”

  I don't know about Reina, but with all this talk of Soaplands, “delivery health” and adult videos, I tempted to give into the Lascivious Hand myself.

  “Your gas is switched on, isn't it?” Reina asks, getting off the floor.

  “Yeah, I think so. Why?”

  “Well, I'm really sweaty and would like to take a shower. If you don't mind, that is.”

  “Mind? No, not at all. I was thinking of taking one myself.”

  My heart is racing like a hummingbird's, my head is light with the titillating possibilities suddenly arrayed before me. “W-w-why don't you go ahead and h-h-hop into the shower first. I'll get you a towel.”

  Reina disappears behind the half curtain in the entrance to the utility room where she starts to undress. As I open a box looking for my towels, I catch a glimpse of her jeans dropping to her ankles, then her panties. My heart is in my throat, pounding away mercilessly. My hands shake. After I hear her enter the bathroom and turn on the water, I enter the utility room, dizzy with excitement, and place the towels atop the washing machine. The shower door hasn't been completely shut offering me a long slice of her slim
body. I can't help but look. I stare shamelessly at her right leg and soft right buttock, her narrow waist and back, the light brown curls that fall on her square shoulder. She suddenly turns around, sending me scrambling clumsily out of the utility room and knocking the curtain down.

  “Peador?”

  I try to answer, but lust has made my mouth go dry.

  The water is turned off, the shower door opens abruptly, and Reina pokes her head out of the utility room.

  “Peador, there's no hot water.”

  She emerges from the utility room wrapped in a towel, and after hanging the curtain back up, walks into the kitchen, where a moment later exclaims, “Atta, atta! Here it is.”

  I'm moved by curiosity to follow her wet footprints into the kitchen where I find her crouched down and turning a valve under the sink. Her pale bottom peeks out from beneath the towel. Turning her head, she notices me gawking down at her, and says, “What you looking at?”

  “N-n-nothing.”

  She closes the cabinet door, then stands and presses a button on the wall making a small green light come on. A second red light turns on when she lets water in the kitchen sink run.

  “Yosh,” she says, turning around. “You've got hot water now.”

  “So that's how you turn me . . . er, it on.”

  Reina’s maddeningly gorgeous, and I can barely keep myself from ripping the thin terrycloth towel off, and burying my face in her crotch.

  The only thing stopping me, however, is tomorrow night's date with Mie.

  Nevertheless, I’m like a volatile gas. All that is needed is one tiny spark—an inviting touch, or a half step that would bring our bodies closer—then, I wouldn't have an excuse to keep from pulling her into my arms. I wouldn't have to hold back the kisses. All it would take is one small caress to ignite me. One kiss, and I'd burn this apartment building to the ground.

  Reina takes that precious half step forward, her body just brushes mine and my erection is peering out of the front left pocket of my Levis like a periscope. But nothing happens. I'm frozen, unable to move. Paralyzed with indecision, all I manage to do is let a pathetic little gasp of air out as she passes.

  I'm a buffoon, an impotent buffoon!

  I should grab Reina’s arm, tug at the towel so it falls to the floor, and do exactly what I've had a mind to do all day. My hand rises. It's an involuntary reaction; my instincts, God love 'em, are finally kicking in! But just as my finger grazes her arm, I catch a glimpse of Mie's pajamas in the clear plastic container.

  Reina pauses before the curtain. “Yes?” she asks.

  “I, I'm just going to get some beer at the 7-11. You want anything?”

  She says she doesn't need anything, and ducks under the curtain.

  Go after her! Follow her, you feckin’ idiot. Now or never!

  I see the towel drop to the floor, hear the shower door close and the water start to run. I can't stand it anymore. I back step it quickly into the kitchen, unbutton my jeans and start to pajero over the sink.

  What little remained of my dignity has been completely forfeited.

  7

  MIE

  1

  8:30pm. I’m waiting in front of the Oyafukô Dôri Mister Donut, bathed in garish neon light and serenaded by Nat King Cole: “Roll . . . out . . . those . . . lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer! Those days of soda . . . and pretzels . . . and beer . . .”

  For a Monday night, there's a fair amount of pedestrian traffic moving up and down Oyafukô.

  Anticipation of the long-awaited reunion with Mie had me as restless as a child on Christmas Eve. Waking before dawn, I laid on my futon, staring sleeplessly at the ceiling for an hour and a half before giving up on sleep and getting ready for work.

  I left my apartment early enough to catch the members of the local fire station lackadaisically performing their morning radio calisthenics and got to the office where the cleaning lady was sloshing a mop around.

  The morning lesson was interminable. The students' uncharacteristic reticence didn't help. On the clock above the dusty chalkboard, the second hand moved as if it were weighed down with lead sinkers. The minute hand needed regular coaxing and encouragement to help it get through the hour. My afternoon break was hardly better. Nothing I did helped push the stalled day forward.

  I went for a five-kilometer run around Ôhori Park, then took a leisurely walk through the usually quiet and deserted castle ruins which I discovered were now alive with the pink and purple azalea blossoms. I doubled back, walking along the moat, its dark green still water dotted with plate-sized lily pads. The diversion didn't have much of an appetite; hardly an hour was gobbled up.

  Back at my apartment, I began unpacking my things and putting my apartment in order. I removed Mie's articles. Her yellow toothbrush joined mine in a stainless cup by the sink, her pajamas took priority position in the top drawer of the wardrobe. I also went to some lengths to erase any sign of Reina having been in my apartment, picking up the occasional hair, putting the empty cans of chu-hi[4] and beer in a bag for non-burnable garbage on the balcony. Last but by far not least, I tossed the package of Whisper sanitary napkins Reina had, for Lord knows what reason, left behind. In the remaining hours, I studied Japanese, looking up all the things I'd been wanting to say to Mie for the past six months, all the things I'd been wanting to ask her every day that passed since she closed the door on me.

  Back at work in the afternoon, I went to the lobby and sat on a bench butted up against the tinted windows and looked out at the still life below. White compacts and delivery vans were stopped at a red light. An old woman hunched all the way over like a candy cane paused for an eternity before attempting to cross the four-lane avenue. Arthritic, knobby hands clutching for dear life onto the handle of a small stroller-like shopping cart. Without it, she probably would have toppled right over. She took a step, a small one, bringing her closer to the shopping cart, then pushed the cart an arm-length away and stepped slowly towards it again, making her way across the avenue like an ancient inchworm.

  Every time the phone rang in the office, I got a case of the jitters, worried that Mie was calling to cancel, that something preventing us from meeting had come up. Will she be held up at work and be forced to postpone the date for kondo, for another time?

  Japanese often chime “let's do it another time,” but you soon realize this “other time” is just another way of saying “never in a million years, buster.”

  It was the last words Mie had spoken to me when she left my apartment seven months earlier. “Kondo,” she said and drove off never to return.

  Anxiety filled my thoughts, crowding out any of the elation I should have been feeling about seeing Mie again. It was to be expected, after what I'd gone through. Six months on, I'm still shell-shocked from the bomb she dropped on me.

  2

  8:40 and still no sign of Mie.

  The air is cooler than I expected and the longer I wait the more I wish I'd dressed for warmth rather than The Sell. My inability to exaggerate or embellish upon my own accomplishments, let alone mention them, is one reason, I suppose, that I am so fussy about how I dress. I don't dress for success so much as I dress to avoid the almost certain failure that my modesty invites. Clothes make the man, the lesser the man, the more he depends on them to help him along.

  What is it I wanted my linen suit to communicate to Mie? That I'm too broke to buy something warmer? Nah, that wasn't it. That, somehow, despite all the crap that happened last year, in spite of my former boss's attempts to bury me, that everything has managed to work out all right in the end; that I'm not a complete failure; that I still have a fighting chance to get through this life with my dignity intact; that, more than anything, I deserve another chance with Mie. And so, in my effort to impress Mie, I now shiver in the chill of an early spring night.

  A half block down the street a young man in a crisp white shirt and a black apron tied around his waist passes out discount tickets for a karaoke bar.

  A
cross the street on the corner, two young women, who are dressed to kill, fuss over a middle-aged businessman. He scratches his balding scalp, vacillating between options: going home to a frigid wife, or blowing money he doesn't have drinking with the hostesses. He scratches his head again, and then nods. The women cheer and lead him away by hand.

  Several men and women, company freshmen judging by the uniformity of their simple black suits, huddle around a fallen co-worker, who's splayed out and unconscious on the sidewalk. They try to lift him, but he's gone all rubbery from the drink.

  And then there’s a darling girl in a ponytail and a tight fitting red and white outfit emblazoned with the CABIN logo across her chest. She stands in front of a cigarette vending machine attempting to dissuade customers from buying other brands. Hell, it works for me. I'd give up Hope—my Hope cigarettes, that is—to share a cabin with her any day. And I mean it. She looks my way and waves. I look around to see who's she's waving at but find no one. She waves again. I wave tentatively back and she smiles.

  A customized van with tinted windows, spoilers and bright blue lights under its low-riding chassis rumbles by shaking my fillings loose. The angry music blasting from the van competes noisily with Mister Donut’s cheerful playlist of Golden Oldies. As the van turns off of Oyafukô, a bôsôzoku motorcycle gang rumbles into the narrow street, zigzagging recklessly and revving their engines until they caterwaul like tigers in heat. A patrol car follows lackadaisically behind, protecting and serving none.

  Some minutes later, a clapped-out pick-up makes its way down the street. A miserable ditty crackles out from a dirty speaker lamenting, “Warabi mochi . . .Warabi mochi.”

  The first time I ever heard this mournful song, I was moved by curiosity to look up the meaning of its enigmatic lyrics in a dictionary only to be further confounded by what I found: bracken-starch dumplings. What the hell is bracken and why is the song selling them so depressing?

  I check my watch again. 8:45.