Tokyo Stories

New York Waitress

2009-11-13T03:46:00.001+09:00

The talent she has creates distance at work. There are other women with concerns in the locker room and they make their own faces when they see mirrors. Complaints relieve us chocolate relieves us changing clothes and shoes relieves us a drink of water to be taken up the stairs will refresh. Aprons paper crisp at three are down about our knees in specks of wine or noodles.

2009-02-15T03:14:00.006+09:00

How will I explain to your mother when your remains are shipped home but there are no brains included because we couldn't collect them from the road? Should I tell her that it was your choice to ride on the back of this bicycle down route 246 at 2 am?

Differences not loved

2009-02-05T04:42:00.017+09:00

A guy and a girl were noiselessly feeling each other up and down at a cafe table next to which my student and I were having a lesson when the shoe slid off my foot.

The student told me a hot girl shouldn't wear a sock with a hole in it. I told him he shouldn't wear a suit and tie if he liked so much the feeling of freedom he gets from taking a shit in the woods. (He had said that was the case.)

I poured the remains of my tea onto the table. He poured the rest of his latte into mine and the liquids mixed. He acted as though he found it sexy that they were mixing. My insides convulsed. He put his fingers into the mixture and then licked them.

He said he didn't have time for a lesson next week. I told him I didn't either.

Clairvoyant Kotaro

2009-01-23T01:25:00.016+09:00

When Kotaro told me his Bose speakers used to talk to him late at night, I knew our friendship would last.

"Kotaro, what are you doing?" the speakers would say.

"I'm just making curry," he would reply to them.

He is pale and thin but always knows which cafes serve good desserts. He used to order two, then eat them both himself.

2009-01-22T01:48:00.002+09:00

Tokyo is my dearest friend. She is nameless in street and sliding in door. She screams without speaking and will for ever more.

Love

2008-11-15T01:03:00.022+09:00

I had entire solar systems in my head today, spinning stale pincushions and mistaken tomatoes skirted with rings of grinding notebook paper revolving around me, a solar fetus, when I stopped to notice that there were millions of copies of me everywhere, all of us quietly heaving in black. I imagined the untold horrors and ecstasies that soared through the galactic spaces inside each of us. How we pass lithely by one another and exist quietly together while straining to hold up the ever-heavier worlds inside our beings. I watched all of us, carrying on in infinite combinations of what were the same notes played on different instruments and barely perceptibly, I squeaked and I droned.

And lustily sighing I worshiped those who were swirling around me wearing black headphones and blinking like paintings, or standing stoically in long black coats reading soft-cover books curled back upon themselves.

There was an all-awakening, metal clanging on a thousand flag poles, wind sweeping across golden prairies, jump off a cliff because Jenny did LOVE for quiet strangers.

I regret that I never went with you to South Dakota.

Chandeliers

2008-11-12T23:43:00.004+09:00

Erection エレクション　and Election　選挙

2008-11-11T11:13:00.027+09:00

On the other side of the world, we were stark and austere as ever, our socks pulled up higher and higher still. There had been a monumental erection back home, and we knew we were missing something good.

We went out searching for it in an overtrumped Parisian nightclub. The winner of the erection (waving) and the loser of it (coughing) were coloring the walls as projections. We got ready to feel free and brave.

But who are you? Near the bar, a bully from New York was squinting out at me from behind all the white skin that puffed forward around his eyes. His mouth was moving quickly and it asked me who I was again and then mimicked my name, smiling hugely like something was funny. In his paw was a mobile phone containing a photo he'd just taken of David Hasselhoff.

David's left the club, they said. Too many people had been fighting over a chance to take his picture.

I went outside and saw him standing on the blue overpass with his chin on the railing, looking down at the river of cars passing under him.

When I got home my roommates were watching the tea pot boil. It was starting to make ticking noises but the water wasn't moving yet.

How to be Rich / How to Act Like a Bear

2008-10-30T10:44:00.007+09:00

Eat something that is still twitching.

Grateful for the experience, humbled by my host's profound material wealth, I thought I was going to throw up as the still-dying body of a shrimp spasmed its way around my teeth. Dodging for a safe escape it burrowed its way into my esophagus and into the pit of my stomach where I've been pregnant with it ever since.

Elaborate Plate 女体盛り

2008-10-19T22:17:00.016+09:00

Are her breasts real? Minnesota Ryan asks hypothetically.

Don't question it, I reply, they're performing beautifully! Pointing upward and multiplying in tongue-colored fleshes of various market-fresh animals, the breasts have supplied us with a party's worth of conversation as well as dinner.

In a glimmer of Midwestern friendliness, I try to feed a piece to the girl to whom we owe this bounty but she politely refuses. Right, that would be strange. I go back to talking to Ryan, who has just dripped soy sauce onto her wrist.

This is incredible, we marvel, The children here grow up eating like this every day.

What were you raised on? I ask my countryman.

Spam hot dish. You know, with the macaroni?

Yeah, I know. Did you ever have an Eat-Spam-Hot-Dish-Off-A-Naked-Woman's-Body party?

Naw.

Me neither.

We share a smile, a common story. A heritage.

Ping Pong

2008-10-19T21:32:00.013+09:00

I'm catching ping pong balls all day and throwing them back with check marks and teardrops on them, both going unnoticed when a little stone [a boulder] hurtles in from the unknown and, shredding through the waistband of my stupid skirt and tights, manages to scrape the base of my lungs and leave a gasping crater the size of a young man's fiery cranium in the middle of me. Where my intestines used to be, I could say, but that's not the worst of it: I am reduced to pulmonary ash on the very week that I'm scheduled to give blood.

My First Trip To the Eye Doctor 　初めて眼科に行くこと

2008-10-10T01:32:00.015+09:00

I fell down on my bike in September and the wound got infected and came out my eye. A redness there distracted everyone I spoke to. I had to go to the eye doctor.

She had me look at a picture of a hot air balloon in a field. She adjusted the focus in and out, observing the reaction in my eyes.

She put me in a dark corner and shone a flashlight into my face. I watched her silhouette while she peered like an elf into my eyeball.

She washed both my eyes with clear liquid, and together we gazed at my mascara spilling into a tiny silver bowl.

九月に自転車で転んちゃった。その傷は感染になって、目から出てきました。相手は目の赤さに気を取られていたから、眼科に行かなくちゃいけないようになった。

眼科の先生に畑の上に飛んでいる熱気球の写真を見された。フォーカスを少しずつ調節して、目の反応を見澄ました。暗い片隅に座らせてフラッシュライトで顔を照らした。先生の妖精のように目玉に覗き込んでいる影像を見とれた。

両目を清水で洗って、一緒に滴々なマスカラを見つめた。

August Lonely Passes

2008-08-31T01:49:00.011+09:00

Steeped in liquid sugar from disposable pails, this month bled through slowly like melting ice, sticky and half awake. Being, as it was, too hot to turn on my computer or do anything besides sleep in my sunny second floor bedroom, insects screaming into my smoldering windows warned I was sliding out of contact with loved ones and roommates.

Kanji characters: my only comfort in the air conditioned restaurant at midnight. I hold them while listening to an old lady having a conversation with the people inside her heart. I know I belong there, next to her, reading words like 解放 (liberation) and 放送 (broadcasting) under my breath while smokers stare at me through the glass partitions. It doesn't matter what they think; they are the ones who are wasting their time.

Monday Night in Kichijoji

2008-08-05T00:21:00.009+09:00

A cockroach climbed dangerously close to my bare ass on the tile entryway to the department store as a man stooped down to hand us a foil wrapped slop of yakisoba. My stomach, aroused, peered inside at the fat slimy noodles. It was sticky summer and the lights had halos. The soba was perfect, coating my palette with savory brownth. Dan watched me eat politely, skinny and pale and dainty, and when I was finished we sang for another 30 minutes. A chef with a towel on his head came out to squat near us. We sat up taller now that we had an audience member. When we were done I got on my bike. A man from a passionate country whistled and yelled at me to come back but it was too late. I was already riding past the banana store lunatic who was inside a phone booth tonight, listening with painful beauty at the dial tone.

One Day in Seoul

2008-07-29T02:11:00.011+09:00

A minty lady with a fake purse is laughing at the trees with me. The curves of the natural world come through here and the bushes extend beyond their visual limit. Back home in Tokyo they would have snipped these off and angled them into humorless planes. The land of sour plums and mild monotone teas won't stand for boundary crossing. But Seoul is full of cookies and biscuits to match a more aromatic and novel assortment of brews. They let birds fly sweetly about your head and the branches grow long against the evening sky, red with garlic. Where Tokyo tucks its shirt in and spit shines its manhole covers, Seoul drops papers in the street, robustly. The men have a casual thickness and height where Tokyo's convex young men practice the art of skin and nail care at full price. It was only one day, but a first impression left me wanting more. While Tokyo's beauty unfolds with time, Seoul's reached up and kissed me on the hand.

A Tour You Gave

2008-07-09T00:41:00.014+09:00

I stared at my ghosts in white vinyl chairs while you floated past the doorway. And this is where you'll become fluent in English, you were declaring. You'll have teachers like this wholesome American girl you said as you gestured toward me in my aquarium. Do you hear how my heels click on the glossy pine floor? We are always this cheerful, you were telling the wide-eyed client. Your white hairs shimmered in the British Library light. Your body was quivering like a toy poodle near an ice cream cone.

Man from Kyushu

2008-07-08T09:44:00.008+09:00

On a stone table in the dead of summer where we repeat these words together, you're an old man and I'm a girl. The mauve sky is silent and your hands are near your mouth, always coughing, always singing. I don't want to touch you, but I want to be inside you, strumming. When the rain stops in the morning, I wonder how long you've been awake.

Being Japanese

2008-07-08T09:30:00.008+09:00

“I don’t know what it is to be Japanese.” Soutarou gazed up at me like a deer in a white collared shirt and loosened necktie. He seemed to be asking me a question. I wanted to feed him dried corn from my hand.

Mr. Hara just smiled with his river otter sheen. His eyes were round and his lips pink, in danger. “All I know is fireworks.” He sizzled.

"What about kimonos?" squawked Masayo, the crane girl with her diamond bra strap and glitter-flecked cheeks.

We wrote some things on the board. Kimonos. Bowing. Sushi. We were out of time.

Black Tar, Light Hope

2008-06-21T23:45:00.024+09:00

Standing on the street corner in Shimokitazawa, a powerful terror came over me: we might as well not exist. We only exist because we know we exist, and if we didn't realize we existed, who would? Nobody. If the earth exploded tomorrow, even the concept of a God would cease to be known.

Just outside the South Exit of Shimokitazawa station, there was once a quaint landscaped area where mimes and hacky sackers would perform. As I stood there I realized that feature was gone, pasted over with black tar. This was the departure point of my thoughts that evening.

The universe is a meaningless place and even if aliens come and attack us and crack our bodies open and drink our blood, it can only possibly be to ensure their own survival. For what? So they can continue to exist? For what? For the simple sake of existing. And we would naturally fight with everything for our right to exist. The precious realization that came to me then (which I have felt thousands of times but perhaps never more than in that instant) was one of utter possibility and pure resolution: it's up to us to make our tiny moment in the universe the best it can be. Life, in its meaninglessness, is a profound treasure.

I felt like kissing the skinny boy with the bowl cut who I'd been watching while he strummed his guitar and wailed into the night because I wanted him to know that I realized how amazing he was, a human being! And so were all the other useless human beings walking around in man-made light on concrete, wearing belts made of metal mined from the ground. What was the point? How it electrified my mind to see that they'd each taken the time to accessorize. I wanted to share my elation with everyone.

If we hold in our consciousness the absurdity of our presence here, and keep in perspective the inconsequential choices we make every day, then what's important will stay in view. And what's important? Nothing, and that's why each individual may decide for himself, without fear. So let's decide and give everything to that.

This awakening occurred almost three weeks ago and I've been concerned since then about how to maintain the fresh perspective that evening afforded me. One solution has been to picture myself as a mealworm on a plate with thousands of other squiggling mealworms. We're delicate; we could be smashed at any moment without warning. We speak to one another, we love each other and in our fragility we're divine.

World Collision!

2008-05-23T22:04:00.028+09:00

It felt like Christmas to know that my big sister had at last come all the way from Minnesota and was waiting for me down the street. I spotted her easily and galloped up to her, ready for a week of sisterly laughs. But she looked right through me until I was 25 paces from her, and while she smiled broadly there was something peculiar and incomplete in her hug. She was distracted, digging in her purse for a belated birthday present...she said.

But it wasn't inside her purse at all. It was peering out from behind me, impossibly beautiful: the faces of the two people who taught me to be nice to everyone, and not to swallow my toothpaste, and to use a fork and knife, and who always sounded excited to hear my voice on the phone.

My shrieks in front of Shibuya station were raucous and unabashed. They had seamlessly pulled off the surprise of a lifetime. My ears were ringing, the whole intersection was spinning. The universe had warped into a Möbius strip, twisting and inverting upon itself and I couldn't see the top or bottom.

I held both my parents' hands while the dense population threatened to swallow their airplane-weary bodies. I would do my best to show them an explanation as to why I had chosen to live so far away from them for two years. All the plans I had made in anticipation of my sister's visit suddenly expanded to include these two precious people. I wanted to spoon feed them morsels of seared mackerel and invigorate them with the clean sweetness of plum wine in the depths of a bamboo-partitioned izakaya while yakuza gangsters with scars on their faces smoked cigars with tea-serving geishas playing the shamisen all while taking a hotspring bath inside a bullet train. I would do everything possible to make them love the place I about which I felt so distinctly ambivalent.

2008-05-14T13:50:00.004+09:00

On the way home from band practice at 1 am, I needed a banana. A massive nest of matted black hair full of chewed gum and dandelions blocked the entrance to the banana store. The face belonging to this life's worth of hair stared saucer-eyed at the floor with one hand down her pants and the other in her mouth. She was about my age. Everyone walked around her, buying bananas and pretending that it's fine that Japan doesn't have proper facilities for the mentally ill.

If You're Friends With Jesus...

2008-05-14T11:50:00.011+09:00

A middle-aged Japanese lady with angelic white hair approached me in front of the vitamin stand at Kichijoji station to ask if I was a Christian. She said her church was nearby and looked as though she would wait a hundred years for me to invite myself there. She glowed with satisfaction just to have spoken to me as I left her and her faith posed there, feeding wholesomely off one another in the rainy afternoon.

I was reminded of my heartbroken sophomore year in college, when a medical student, whose initials also happened to be LL, tried to show me Jesus Christ. Sobbing in a gray sweatshirt on my dormitory floor, I asked him if he’d ever been in love. He said he’d only been in love with JC. He would write me heartfelt letters from his medical school in Milwaukee, suggesting all the ways that JC could infuse my life with joys untold, asking me to please write back with my progress in finding Jesus.

My mind was too innocent at the time to realize it but just now, thinking about the ways that the intelligent, articulate LL inadvertently turned me off from believing that Jesus could help me, I feel quite sure that what he wanted most was to fuck me, and converting me to Christianity and then marrying me was the only way he could do it.

The End.

Mornings with Richard and Kaori

2008-05-07T09:06:00.006+09:00

Two pairs of slippers are flopping like dead fish in the hallway. Last night's tea leaves are peering up from a hand-held strainer on a floral tray. A massage chair is relaxing unfolded with its remote control dangling from sleepy hips.

My coffee is french-pressed and pale with soy milk. My laptop is full of fresh kanji flashcards and I am looking nerdily forward to breaking into them in these few quiet minutes before the house wakes up.

I can hear the 8 am garbage truck outside, playing its nostalgic ice-cream truck song into the sleepy crowd of houses. How sweet that the garbage truck has its own morningtime song.

SUDDENLY!! FROM ABOVE ME!!!
Their bedroom door slides open in panic and their bodies are tumbling down the stairs, crusty-eyed. Where did you put the garbage Kaori??? It's combustibles day!!! NO that piece of plastic wrap is NOT combustible!!! I can imagine that they both have morning breath as they yell in each others' faces. They are apologizing to the garbage man who has come to our front door to personally claim the trash which he notices is not in its usual place.

This is only funny for me. I am smiling at them but their eyes are still half shut and they can't see. They turn on the hot pot and water is boiling. Toast is spinning in the microwave-toaster and their computers are booting up. Their hair looks great. They're stretching and purring like cats.

Life with Kaori and Richard

2008-04-29T23:44:00.003+09:00

Cold and hungry after work, there is a cup of soba noodles and a note, and further instruction in person on the many ways they could be consumed, please choose the best way for you! I do.

They turn on the electric space heater and he dashes in and out of the room like a teen avoiding homework. She sits on her knees at the table with me and opens packages of spiced sesame seeds and seaweed. We watch TV together.

She looks beautiful. She's just come back from yoga class and her hair is in a ponytail.

He emerges again, asks her to make her another cup of tea and corrects her use of articles, then goes back into his office. She brings in the laundry.

Being Beautiful

2008-04-08T01:30:00.019+09:00

She was looking adoringly around at the world, but maybe that was just the shape of her face. Her mouth was a little rosebud and her eyes were seductively retro black pearls drawn onto porcelain. She posed in clean grace, holding onto every chance at elevating our experience of what a human can be.

And beneath her lips, hidden in skin-colored makeup, I could see why she'd been to the dermatologist. She looked at me in sad self-awareness. You must know about this problem, she thought she could ask me.

My skin is uncomfortably dry, I offered in sympathy.

She suggested lightheartedly that I visit her doctor but there was a weight in her expression. A soft pain.

She knew how to close her eyes, throw her head back and laugh in order to keep us gently spellbound, but I couldn't see the kid in her. She was full, instead, of the empty idle smoke of a woman who has never been pressed to consider what she is besides beautiful.

Rising Sun

2008-04-04T11:28:00.005+09:00

yukie
Originally uploaded by LindsayLiters.

A bunch of drunkers and I rented a black Honda station wagon to drive to the Izu peninsula for a night. We relished the stampy cartilage of a raw octopus tenticle and they prodded at shellfish with long sticks.

Taking a hot spring bath together is a good chance to talk about boys. Eating potato chips with chopsticks is a learned method for keeping your hands clean.

Waking up at 5:45 to catch the train back to Tokyo is a fine chance to see the red rising sun you always hear about. It's the one on the flag. It looks best tumbling boldly over the sea on the shoulders of mountains.

Foreign Language Therapy

2008-03-25T01:17:00.023+09:00

"Is she ever coming back?" he pleaded with me. He was about to cry. I poured my student a cup of coffee and asked him to tell me what happened. This was our first class together.

"I took her for granted. I cheated on her. But I want to be better."

Language teachers are good listeners. In a society with such a profound shortage of therapists, it's a good thing there are so many English teachers. The girl in this picture is thinking that very thing: "The person who listens to me best is my Gaba English teacher."

You can tell us anything.

Spring's Shiseido Cosmetics Day

2008-03-23T23:11:00.002+09:00

MG 5

2008-03-23T23:06:00.000+09:00

Vitamin Whiskey

2008-03-22T19:20:00.021+09:00

I missed my train tonight and decided to walk home via Route 246.

I saw this man in a sidewalk garden between two orange cones. He had built a little house of paper sturdy enough to leave his neck exposed.

Cold and dizzy, I asked if there was any extra room in his house. He welcomed me with clear eyes. We drank vitamin whiskeys and he told me about the time he was bitten by a squirrel.

I sang a song for him about the price of coffee and how I can't find any shoes my size. He sang back about the cracks in his toilet (the wall). He touched my face in the searing light of oncoming traffic and asked me what fashions we can be expecting this autumn.

Tokyo Fashion Week

2008-03-20T18:07:00.014+09:00

The woman from the Klimt painting kept her word, and two geometrically misshapen cardboard invitations arrived in the mail addressed in Japanese to "The Venerable Lindsay" and "Our Goddess Tanya." For a moment I wondered what I should wear.

Swarms of men with lenses for eyeballs were expensively arranged at the foot of the stage. Tiny notebooks were open to pens on laps under conversational slouches.

The garments entered: a celebration of decency, evolved from fig leaves (in purple, gold and green for autumn). A flutter of shutters flattered the Russian teenagers, mail-ordered in proportion and nourished on tobacco; waxen hands at the ends of sleeves.

Would there be an answer inside that black room? The kind of thing that gently shifts the course of history or daily life?

All My Children

2008-03-12T00:43:00.008+09:00

Recently I've felt that everyone is my child and I'm watching them grow up. Even people who are older than me.

My students have at least one gray hair apiece. I have found two so far on my own head. I wish we could all pull the silver hairs out and lay them on our polished wooden table. I wish we could talk about our gray hairs instead of the news topic. I wish I could stroke their glossy black corporate consultant heads. Their Tokyo University heads. Their top fashion photographer heads. Their graphic designer heads. I wish they could speak to me more honestly. I like it when they complain. I don't like it when they overuse the word "convenient." Convenience might be the worst disease we've ever suffered.

My flatmate, Nori

2008-03-11T23:34:00.015+09:00

Nori! My first Otaku! I am the bane of your existence.

Your life is fluorescent lights and vinyl backpacks. Laminated notes and grunts are your voice. Rice cakes and electrical bills sustain you. You probably peer into computer hard drives wearing goggles and sleep on a digital bed. You have never smiled. When you were a baby you had fun eating grapes once. Occasionally, a grape delivery man brings a box to our house. Do you eat them? Do you have teeth? I've never seen them. When I fail to lock the door you draw a dot in my "mistakes" chart (Tokyo is not so safe anymore, as you once penned to me). Nori, my wordless, small-mouthed inventor, you show me what life can be.

Seven months have passed us quickly by. I will carry the glow of your monitor screen in my sunny heart forever, locking every door I see and putting irons back into the cupboard the moment they are cool. Cleanliness is beauty. Beauty is godliness. God lives in your computer and Nori will coax him out. Nori fixes dinner for God and they enjoy it alone together in Nori's room. Nori has to look professional at his professional job in his bedroom, so he does laundry three times a week.

Nori is one of the reasons I am moving across town. His relationship with God makes me uncomfortable. I don't know what they're doing next door to my bedroom, but they do it in silence for seemingly endless stretches of time. I heard Nori cough once and it startled me. Suddenly, I knew that "Nori and God can surely hear me when I so much as turn the page..."

And Then We Wore Her Strange Hats or Headdresses

2008-03-06T02:16:00.002+09:00

We will let the fashions speak for themselves.

What I learned in the last 24 hours

2008-03-06T01:46:00.008+09:00

Sweet potato shochu (芋焼酎）: Four glasses on an empty stomach at the rate of the Scotsman seated before you will leave you throwing up until 3 pm the next day, stupid.

Cannibis (大麻): Grows wild in Hokkaido. The fairy-like owner of the retro-psychedelic clothing shop across the highway will draw you a map to it if you're going.

Wasabi potato chips (山葵ポテトチップ）: Delectable. Confectious. Good with cottage cheese.

"Now, i concentrate on making some strange hat or head dress."

2008-02-21T22:43:00.015+09:00

She made chocolates for Valentine's Day and invited the man she likes to a stage interpretation of "Cinderella." He said yes but had to back out when his elderly mother fell ill. She stiffened to my embrace when I could see that she was sad.

I took his seat at the performance, a decidedly sultry adaptation: Cinderella's feathery bust piece was bright red as she danced to music by Tom Waits. How would they have sat next to one another through this?

She was nervous before the actors entered. She said she was always nervous before other people had to perform. She said it's about time she cuts her hair again. Her bob is getting long.　She made the hat she's wearing in this picture.

Gustav Klimt paints Erykah Badu: drunk, miniature, and Japanese

2008-02-14T02:29:00.011+09:00

It's cocktails after class and I can sense a hive of curls buzzing next to me. I look into her face and we're inside a Klimt painting. She tells me I'd be better off with my hair swept away from my face; I am at her complete mercy. She asks me on a date, and I say yes. She is putting my hair behind my ears for me, asking everyone for their approval. She pushes her glass up to the bar and they pour more white wine over her round, enormous rocks of ice. I eat an olive out of her martini glass. There are too many to count (but where are the martinis they came with)? Her card says "President" and she promises to send me an invitation to her show.

The student who brought me there, Ken, is drooling agape and telling her how much we both love fashion, while I apologize for him with my eyes, knowing I'd just told her otherwise. She smiles back. I can see now that she looks like a tiny rendering of Erykah Badu. Ken orders me another undrinkable cocktail. This one is orange in color. Ken has no idea what I like, I realize. Erykah Badu probably does.

I'm Michi!

2008-02-12T01:50:00.001+09:00

I'm Michi! he said when I met him at the ticket gate, and after that we spoke in Japanese. How old are you, Michi? Three. We went to the bank so his mother could make a transfer. We looked at an animal book. He made the baby whales say "I love you" to their mothers. What do giraffes eat, Michi? Leaves. Do you eat leaves too? No, I like grape juice. When the book grew stale Michi took to throwing himself headfirst into the chairs in the waiting area. Doesn't that hurt you? No, it's really soft. We went to his house and he asked me to draw him a road for the car stickers he'd received in the mail. He was pleased with my work. He said something I didn't understand and I asked him to say it again. He looked at me funny and I explained that my Japanese wasn't very good. America! he exclaimed, and I completely agreed. I'm Michi! he said.

I Saw a Show the Other Night

2008-02-04T01:50:00.002+09:00

Watching the skinny man in nothing but suspenders shake his egg while the second female cop of the evening seduced us into buying her a drink after the show was a rather empowering experience for me. If this clean-shaven adult can take such romantic pride in egg-shaking with his nipples showing, what is there for any of us to be afraid of?

The Truth About Sunday

2008-01-22T12:53:00.001+09:00

Tanya and I dressed up like characters from a Doctor Seuss book and took pictures of one another with our cell phones. She read Oscar Wilde's De Profundis while I was videotaped having a cigarette over makeup. The stereo wasn't working but everyone sang along. We paid each other substantially and spent it on bread rolls.

Seventy More Years

2008-01-17T10:26:00.001+09:00

My silver hair looked into me from the mirror and asked me questions about men. I held it up in the fluorescent light and listened. May I spend my life gently, with a gentle man? Can we agree to this? I ironed my skirt while wearing it and wasn't late for work. What will I care about after I'm dead?

Thank You For Taking Care of Me this Year

2008-01-02T01:46:00.001+09:00

On New Years' Eve I watched our steaming pot of blowfish and clams while they simmered in rice wine and felt thankful for Megumi. I can whisper to her and she whispers back.

Tsuji arrived in the waning minutes of the year of Heisei 19, having taken a six hour walk from his workplace to Megumi's house. He was tired. He held the bottle of champagne he'd brought away from the TV screen and loosened the cork as the symphony came to a close.

Thank you for taking care of me this year, we said to each other. This is what they say in Japan. For the first time in many years, it was New Years' Eve and I was happy.

Forget the Year, Forget Yourself

2007-12-29T00:59:00.002+09:00

I vacuumed the office today. Sian stopped by with Krispie Kreme donuts for everyone. Two dozen. The mood was home-improvement. I learned that a Phillips-head screwdriver is called a plus-driver in Japan because it's shaped like a plus sign.

Around seven thirty pm, no one had e-mailed my telephone. I asked my boss what I could do to help around the office. She said I could help Sato-san fix dinner.

Nabe is a wintertime stew good for keeping warm together. Everyone huddles and cuddles around the pot while it cooks in the middle of the table. The ingredients of tonight's nabe included leeks, cabbage, tofu, mushrooms, mochi, udon, clear noodles, and Kobe beef, sent from Kyoto by the parents of the owner of the school.

This owner refilled my wine glass and asked if I'd ever done drugs. He told me about the time he watched the sunlight enter the barrel of a gun pointed at his face in the middle of the dead calm of the sea. It was a fight about soy sauce.

There were flakes of gold in the sake. Everyone's eyes were melting into tiny movie screens.

The demure girl who sits at the front desk most days was now wearing expressions I'd never seen on her, and pointing her fingers at her coworkers in a slow-motion dream voice. I couldn't understand what she was saying but it was causing a squinty-eyed, open-mouthed uproar.

And then there was crying. There were no explanations.

By the time I had folded the accumulation of shoes and sweaters from my office cupboard into a Sony robot bag, a different staff member was crying. I tried to hug her but she pulled away involuntarily. It must have looked embarrassing.

Tokyo Stories is a non-fiction blog.

Blank Fury

2007-12-22T23:01:00.000+09:00

She was a beautiful, fine-boned woman with black hair down to her thighs. She stood enchantingly before my seated companions and in her elaborate American folk cottons delivered a soliloquy which might have seemed full of praise had I not understood the lexicon.

The message in her delicate hands was airy and passive and her face was a blanket. Yet she was telling us that she was irate. Our promise to arrive at half past three had been worth nothing. It was nearly four thirty.

She didn't want to be introduced to me. She didn't look at me. I stared at her hands, and then at the oranges on the table. This was the first time I had ever witnessed the anger of a Japanese person, and I was finding it to be an entirely impressive experience. I checked it numbly off the list as Yuusuke asserted quiet excuses to his elder sister.

She went away and I was invited to try on the clothes she had designed, but I was too scared to touch them. Her brother bought me some short cake and turned on the juke box. We all acted like nothing had happened.

The next time I went to her studio, she smiled but didn't say anything. Her brother told me that she'd been embarrassed and apologized for her behavior, but it was too late. I already knew that she was insane.

Christmas at the New Sanno Hotel

2007-12-22T18:56:00.001+09:00

I tumbled fast asleep wearing my party dress and dreamed that I was sleeping in the house of my childhood. It was deserted and full of lonely creaks. My only comfort was a tiny dog, physically unlike any of the substantial yellow canines I grew up with. His eagerness filled every corner of me and I knew nothing but gratitude for him.

Please Wish Me a Merry

2007-12-20T00:24:00.002+09:00

The water trickled over my damaged tongue and I was back. My legs erupted in freshly-shaved goosebumps, and I could hear the quietude of bodies surrounding me. We were in the center of a living being, standing at the mellow eye of its heartbeat and the vehicles were gliding eerily by in luxurious whispers. I boarded an elevator filled with strings wishing us a merry little something and inhaled a flutter of sentiment which reached deep into my belly and poured out of my eyes. The other frames crowded against mine were hearing the same music but with what equipment, I didn't know. Their lack of a date on Christmas eve was not about to rouse my sympathy.

I missed my sister in a green velvet dress and my curly baby brother in a clip-on tie. The elevator doors opened and a black paper three-year-old screamed out at us in Baby Gap Christmas ecstasy. The white layout flattered her rich chocolate skin and I wondered what black babies meant to the people around me. Ashamed at the self-centered sense of relative ownership I felt for this chocolate girl simply because I had ridden the bus to kindergarten with others like her, I realized Christmas was no different. It wasn't mine.

Hobby English: Cooking

2007-12-18T01:15:00.003+09:00

Everyone looks rich in a rented cooking studio. Infinitely rich people have a mysterious glaze in their eyes. Maybe it comes from too much massage. The illusion entered them and they were nine queens in aprons plus one fretful king without. Their cook ordered the potatoes julienned and cooperation ensued. They sat down along the sides of a table for twelve with me at the head. I raised my champagne glass and toasted their culinary fantasies, all their dreams of liquid English, of success abroad, and with foreign lovers. The salmon was encrusted with hazelnuts. I was being paid to eat it and teach them how to talk about it. Did life get better than that? It didn't seem possible.

A Pleasure Farm

2007-12-05T22:18:00.000+09:00

I asked him where he worked before this and he said a pleasure farm.

I excused myself to the company toilet and felt the whole city mocking me through the glass exterior wall. Did he really say a pleasure farm? The automatic foam ejaculated into my marker-board hands. A beautiful woman was applying lipstick in the south wing of the ladies' room. I pictured her working on a pleasure farm, too, with hooves and a bell around her neck, my student strolling by in his overalls to milk her.

The white board printed all my notes in color at the push of a button. The elevator was sleek, metallic, and utterly radiant. I was bowed deeply to upon my departure from the marble lobby. This place was not fucking around. People didn't get jobs here with things like "pleasure farmer" on their resumes.

I almost don't want to write it, or know it, or face the disappointment so typically forced upon us by reality, but the truth is--as we all might have guessed--that my student didn't work on a pleasure farm at all. The truth is far more innocuous, but much closer in line with my student's hair cut and golf habit; he was a real estate appraiser, and worked at an appraisal firm.

Maybe someday when my work is done and he can finally speak English, I'll share the joke with this student. "You know, the first time I met you, I thought you were trying to tell me you'd worked on a pleasure farm! HAH--I don't know what I thought went on at a pleasure farm, but I sure wasn't about to ask--I barely knew you!"

My student will have sensational control over his Rs and his Ls by then. His pronunciation will be more native-like than mine. Together we will have reaped all the pleasures offered by a wholesome education in a foreign language. We will have been pleasure farmers.

How I Remember New Words Best:

2007-12-03T10:57:00.000+09:00

痒い (itchy) is Aki and Makoto getting bitten by mosquitos while trying to read.
爽やか（refreshing) is Megumi taking a sip of her first margarita.
濃い (dense) is Atsushi describing how he likes his coffee.
シール　(cable) is Muffin setting up her bass guitar.
自動販売機　(vending machine) is Hitomi trying to convince me that Coca-cola is popular in Japan.
演奏　(musical performance) is Nishimura-san in white shoes, asking what time the show starts.
居心地がいい (cozy) is Ken asking if we should sit closer to the space heater.
旬　(in season) is Hirose eating raw sanma.
弱い　(weak) is Maki wrapped up in the cold evening.
実際　(reality) is Takamatsu-san on the telephone.
男前 (handsome man) is Mizuki looking at Jamon's picture.
素直 (docile, meek) is Rumiko explaining my new student's atmosphere.
盛り上がる (the spirit rises) is Chio and Tomo laughing uncontrollably.

The Japanese Proficiency Test

2007-12-02T23:14:00.000+09:00

For this test, it's yes or no; pass or fail; proficient or worthless; you can stay or you're deported; you can live or you will be killed.

Is this a joke? We'll find out when our scores arrive in February.

Whatever our fates, it felt festive to be part of such a diverse gathering this morning. We rolled our international eyes when the somber young proctors walked down the aisles with photographs of our faces to check off our identities on their lists for a third time. My Canadian boss likened them to synchronized swimmers. When one Filipino man rose from his seat, declaring a need to use the men's room before the official end tone had sounded, he had representatives from myriad nations behind him. Had the 5'5" Japanese proctor in a black suit not backed down, he would have seen trouble. So unifying was the experience that the Bangladeshi guy who sat behind me asked for my number after the test, even though he was six inches shorter than me and maybe 15 years older.

Next year I will take the test again, when my brain is bigger.

Persimmon People

2007-11-28T22:57:00.001+09:00

Today I asked a student what he was afraid of. I told him I'm afraid of ghosts and he said, "I'm afraid of homo." I checked, and that was really what he meant.

The persimmons at my grocery store have become rotten. I should have eaten them all before winter arrived. Now it's too late and there's nothing I can do.

The one pictured here is inside my belly since last night. I like to eat them with the skin intact, like apples. They taste better that way and I'm afraid the Japanese bodies all around me don't know what they're missing.

L'Arc-en-Ciel

2007-11-28T00:28:00.000+09:00

Every time I walk past this poster, young men and women are taking photos of it. I wonder what they like about it, but feel pretty sure it's the homoeroticism. And the bigness. It can't be that they like the band.

Gatsby

2007-11-27T14:22:00.000+09:00

I had tea with my friend Ken last night. He was busily showing me photos of the Maserati he's going to give himself for Christmas when he pulled out a small white package of what looked like baby wipes.

"I get sweaty sometimes and these refresh my skin," He explained, "but they're a little spicy around my eyes."

Minty things do seem spicy. It's the same sensation, but sweeter and colder, don't you think, reader my reader? My little brother used to say that mint gum is spicy, and we all knew what he meant, so what was the difference? Would you have corrected him? I didn't. It's too cute a mistake.

I didn't correct Ken, either. Instead I asked if I could try one (they're made by Gatsby), and kept it away from my eyes. Is anyone else startled by the existence of a mentholated tissue made for men of fashion to dab refreshingly about their faces and slender necks?

Gatsby, you blur the lines further.

Are you Jonile Tonight?

2007-11-19T23:28:00.001+09:00

Because it had the word "MAN" (男) boldly slashed into its lid, Otokomae tofu intimidated and taunted me for months from its arrogant perch on my grocer's cooler shelf. It was over a tofu-supported dinner with my two female bosses last night that I finally divulged my shame over being unable to ever bring the masculine package to the register, even though my urge to devour it bordered on the perverse. Voicing this dilemma aloud clarified its pettiness.

Tonight, shaking off fears that the delicate young lady at the supermarket counter was repulsed by my baseness, I bought the tofu with exact change. I took it home, undressed it, and will never look back. I will devotedly purchase Otokomae tofu from this day forward, knowing that I have as much right to enjoy it as any Handsome Man. Maybe it was all the built-up emotion surrounding the experience that made this textured, loose variety of bean curd seem like the best I'd ever eaten, or maybe it really was.

The website is dizzying and excessively confident, but I was heartened to see a couple of women on it. I think they're supposed to be aerobics instructors.

フルーツ　パフェ　（Fruits Parfait)

2007-11-12T23:44:00.000+09:00

He's telling me about the time his hairdresser failed at seducing him on the couch and the waitress has stopped on the carpeted stairs to touch her bouffant in the mirror. I'm stroking the hair that now covers my ears but which just grazed them when you were here. Tomorrow I'll have it cut so I can stop measuring how long you've been away.

No one is alone in the woods

2007-11-06T12:24:00.000+09:00

Dear Anyone,

Want to climb an easy and cheerful type of mountain? Let Mount Hinode be your smart choice.

Start with a train ride west out of Tokyo, and watch the signs change from metal to wood. Eat roasted mochi on a stick with chestnut soy sauce in the nostalgic mountain-climbing machine while you change into hiking shoes. Marvel at all the old people around you. You will see layers and layers of elegant, straight cedar trees. Don't wonder where all the underbrush went; just be glad someone is keeping the place tidy (is it God?).

Arrive late in the day, so that when you reach the top of the mountain, no one will be there. Hold still and you won't hear a sound, nor feel any wind. Look all around you. There's Tokyo, and over there are some handsome charcoal mountains. The cedar trees are marching stiffly below you in uniform. Realize you're neither warm nor cool, and that there are no creatures in sight. But see a crow.

Evening will descend around 4:30 pm in the mountains, and the cedars will block out what light remains. Be on the lookout for 12th-century bandits as you strain your eyes for wayward roots.

Land safely nude in a hotspring bath, and see for the first time a toddler with a blue bottom--the kind you'd always heard about. Watch her stare at you while her mother splashes her with a fake-wooden bucket. Examine the pieces of skin and hair floating just visible on the surface of the water.

Back in Tokyo, receive your Japanese lesson over a wholesome dinner of boiled vegetables, fresh sashimi, fried lotus root, cod testicles, and warm sake. Learn that in one manner of speaking, men make love （だく）, and women are made love to （だかれる). Don't let this bother you, whoever you are.

Go to sleep satisfied, with a mellow heart and a clean, grateful mind,

Suggests L.L.

Goodbye Brooke Lueders

2007-10-21T10:32:00.002+09:00

My sister's wedding reception was the Bavarian-themed party of the century. She was a calla-lily in satin. We bid a hearty farewell to Brooke Lueders, and drank a joyous welcome to Brooke Doring, with Oktoberfest beers, schweinsbraten, sauerkraut, dumplings, a polka band, strings of lights, hanging wreaths, uncles, cousins, old babysitters, high school math teachers, and apple strudel. There was merrymaking throughout every corner of my parents' 1970's hilltop estate. The now-grown-up children of First Street Southeast had their photo taken together on the lawn. My mom and dad made the polka look easy, and I received my bi-yearly lesson in polka dancing. My two grandmothers, age 89 and 95, held hands and Violet said to Lorena, "I can feel your heart beating."

Jamon and I drove Grandma Vi home to St. Peter, Minnesota the next afternoon. She sat with her legs up on the seat, dressed all in pink and holding my bridesmaid's bouquet. The countryside was golden.

A Journey Homesick

2007-10-19T20:53:00.000+09:00

My dad watches from behind the roped-off security area as I am asked whether my shoes contain metal shanks. I don't know the answer. I remove them and walk through the metal detector again.

"Yes, they do. Huge ones." The strawberry-nosed officer turns the monitor informatively toward me so I can see them.

Gary Lueders waits pink-faced and tearful until I am all the way through, and I turn around to wave. He already looks far away.

Inside, the Minnesotans all around me are smiling at each other and saying "that's ok" after colliding with their rolling luggage. One of them notices my blotchy, tear-stained face and gives me a sympathetic "hi." I turn around to see who she is talking to but it really is me. She's blond and looks like a churchgoer. I say "hi" and go back to looking at fridge magnets.

At gate E6, a soldier is returning home from Iraq. His arrival is announced and the Minnesotan waiting room erupts in an applause warm, sincere, and full of love for this one young curly American. He is given a standing ovation, and people are crying at the return of the youth, who is a stranger to them. I cry harder than anyone.

Drying our eyes, my fellow Midwesterners and I watch the KARE-11 news together while we wait for our departure to Chicago. The staph outbreak is becoming more serious, and actress Deborah Kerr has died. We watch as she famously kisses Burt Lancaster on the beach. Most of us are drinking Caribou coffees. I don't have a tissue so I go to the restroom to blow my nose. I sob at length to the tiled walls and floor, dizzy with homesickness. I'm not even gone yet.

I sleep hard on the plane. It feels like morning when we arrive. The train carries us briskly toward Tokyo. Outside, swarms of small black birds scatter and collect above concrete blocks of architecture. The navy-blue railway worker is completing his checks now. I am thanking him fervently with my eyes but he would never look there; his every gesture, dripping with decorum, seems to further revive my infatuation with his culture. He turns before exiting car #4 of the Ueno-bound locomotive and bows deeply. He would never cry in public.

Render Your Gender

2007-10-03T09:21:00.000+09:00

On the scale of who is manliest, it's widely understood that with my 26 cm feet, foreboding appetite and hairy neck, I surpass your average Japanese gentleman (and I'm a woman, if you're just joining us). Of course there are those who are bigger, hungrier and hairier, but allow me to make a generalization: I have most male Tokyoites my age beat when it comes to masculinity.

For example, I spent the other afternoon helping a straight male friend select an organic lip cream while he fretted self-consciously about the puffiness under his eyes. Then he showed me the best places to buy lightly used designer-label fashions. Then, over espressos and macrobiotic sweets, we talked about how to maintain a slender figure (he likes to take his French bulldog for walks). I could barely keep up with his refinement.

If these are typical interests for straight guys in Tokyo--they certainly don't appear to be atypical--then it's no wonder that Japanese women are pushed that much further to the high-pitched, vulnerable extremes of girliness.

Do you see the adorable necklace pictured above? I think there's a pink telephone woven into it, a purple strawberry, and a yellow choo-choo train, too. I wore it to a bar (because my friend made it for me) and was complimented endlessly on my neckwear, in a very sincere and reverent (and high-pitched) way. It's only one small example, but it reiterated for me Japanese womens' unique interest in the painfully cute. It once baffled me, but when offering a girl a facial is a way of hitting on her, it's clear to which side of the gender spectrum it's more popular for both sexes to gravitate. And if young Tokyo men already rival the average American woman in knowledge of skin care products, then I guess there's nowhere for young Tokyo women to go except toward child-like sweetness. This is all making a tiny bit more sense.

Spoon Market

2007-09-25T02:52:00.000+09:00

How does your typical grimy, dark, monotonously beat-driven club become charming, artistic, and genuinely danceable (with warm, understated lighting to boot)? Leave it to the magic of the Tokyo girls' pop community. The heroic Tokyo Pinsalocks are three futuristic-hippie styled rock-and-roll superstars who (with an overtly huggable man named Holly) organized a night of female-fronted performance, food, and art last weekend at Ebisu Milk. The result was refreshing.

If you wanted to have an organic vegetable-based cupcake custom-decorated, you had only to choose which colors. If you wanted your hair trimmed at 3 am, a mere 500 yen would have you looking better than usual at such an hour. If you wanted to buy handmade yarn monsters or spoon-and-fork earrings for your girlfriend, it was all there on proud display by its creators.

And the music, OH, the music and the sass. Falsies on Heat showed us all who was boss. What a relief to watch women so utterly in charge of their sex appeal use their bodies to color the music. Chocolat and Akito invited us back to the funky 1970's in a tiger-striped beret and candy-flavored vocals. The Tokyo Pinsalocks delivered their nostalgic future-Tokyo sound with characteristic "I'm a sexy robot" head jerks. Perhaps most unexpectedly, DJ Daniel Robson (an exception to the female theme, but certainly not unfriendly to it) had me dancing as if my Volvic bottle were full of something else entirely.

My bandmate Kate and I were honored to wear the whimsical designs of our friend Hirose Megumi for our two short sets.

A night like that one reminds me why I put up with living in Tokyo.

Code-switching and voice-changing

2007-09-12T00:44:00.000+09:00

There are a lot of phenomenal things in the world. Compost, seahorses, and lightning are three. But try wrapping your senses around a person whose velvety, medium-bodied voice rises from a B-flat in Japanese to an F-sharp when they switch to English.

It's very typical for people to speak in higher, sweeter, politer tones when they use Japanese. This is hardly a phenomenon (it's banal, even), and I am talking about the opposite effect. In speakers living with this phenomenon, it's as if the strain of verbalizing thoughts in English squeezes out everything reasonable in his/her voice, and creates an otherworldly tone and pitch better suited to art than to a straight-faced conversation.

My friend Sohhei is one of these speakers. Indeed, he makes commendable use of his built-in vocal effects through song. Based on how he speaks English versus Japanese, I am sincerely guessing that he wouldn't be able to reach such a soprano in his mother tongue. (If you choose to follow the link, please select the track entitled "cosmic love" and listen all the way through. I find this song very beautiful, especially when he wails in the middle. Can you feel every saccharine cent of his androgynous pain?)

Tokiko is another example. She is a student of mine who works with mergers, acquisitions, and corporate restructuring. Tomorrow, she will interview with an American executive for a position as manager of the Japanese subsidiary. She knows exactly what Japanese executives are thinking when they interview her ("Can I really hire a woman?"), but she is unsure how her femaleness will be received by an American interviewer. I told her not to worry about that. She is a brilliant and strong person; an excellent candidate for any managerial role, regardless of her gender.

What I didn't tell her was that it's difficult to focus on her flawless grammar when it's presented on distractingly birdlike emissions fluttering through her throat and nose and it's only possible to catch every other sentence because the other half of the time, the listener is trying to look somewhere besides into the black hole of her mouth in order to imagine the source of these unearthly patterns of sound. Where does this world end and Tokiko's English-speaking voice begin? And Sohhei's? Who sent them, and how long will their presence grace our unworthy planet?

Shinjuku Grows Up Fast

2007-09-09T12:27:00.001+09:00

Come on, Toshi!

2007-09-09T10:16:00.000+09:00

Nobody could stop laughing at Yohei's blunder. What kind of preposterously rude person takes a swig from the teacher's bottle of tea in front of the entire class? It was clearly mine, in its usual position to the right of my clipboard. Yohei fumbled for a hundred yen coin, saying he'd get me another one, but hey don't worry, Yohei, I crooned, we can share it! (Neither of us took another germy sip; his boy germs and my girl germs were probably already making new baby germs.) He wrote down the Unit 5 homework, left the classroom bowing apologies while I brushed them away, and Aki entered. Aki, you're not wearing your glasses today! It's like a whole new you! Nice to meet you, too, New Aki! And then class started and then class was finished and New Aki was standing up, and can you guess what he was doing? He was casually sipping from my bottle of green tea. Barely able to contain my amusement at this dazzling coincidence, I approached him delicately and shared the joke with him. He erupted in embarrassment, started speaking Japanese, and spilled the beverage all over his T-shirt, which read "Come on people! Don't hold back!"

Later that night, Aki impressed me further at the school party, where he candidly told me about his desire to quit his job at IBM while slowly devouring a cheeseburger (someone cleverly brought McDonald's to the potluck). He was there with two friends who he called his "24 hour party people," and they backed up every word of his story. Yeah, Aki hates his job. It's not where his heart is. And they patted Aki's chest, where his heart actually was, if memory serves. I excused myself to the ladies' room, where my wine-lipped coworker Francesca began divulging her Secrets of Teaching Businessmen. You have to let them know who is boss. Don't let them stand too close to you. If they cross a line, notify their wives. I don't know what kind of businessmen she has been working with. Mine are all more like Aki.

Unrelated:

Transformers

2007-08-29T01:26:00.000+09:00

If there hadn't been wiry black pubic hair blatantly escaping from the top of her jeans, the makeup artist would have looked fourteen. She was idly curling the loose ends of a strawberry blond afro-clown wig and asking the photographer how her English got so good. I clasped a sweating glass of tea and let CNN absorb me, feeling hungover.

The stylist arrived and made an accusatory comment about my atmosphere, saying she could tell I was a musician. They would change that.

They coaxed me into plaid tights with a silky white dress and the stylist's own enormous yellow high tops, which were just snug. The poufy wig was well suited to my drawn-on complexion--everyone agreed. I rode side saddle on the back of the photographer's bike to a gravel parking lot. They handed me a bottle of blue imported mineral water as a prop and the doe-eyed makeup girl delicately wiped the sweat from my upper lip with her index finger. The photographer was waiting for the sun to go behind a cloud. They fanned me from either side. I told them they really didn't have to do that, but they disagreed. Knowing they probably didn't want the stars melting off my face, I let them continue fanning me like a queen, too groggy and hot to protest.

Turn your head this way.

Oh my GOD that's cute.

Pretend you're sad.

Cute, Cute, Cuuuuute!

I was barely there. I was a scarecrow clothes hanger. I didn't say very much, nor could I listen hard. I wanted to be in bed. I was supposed to be glowing with vitality today, but as a result of my condition, I was the weak element in this four-person charade. I felt guilty and told myself to try harder.

You know, you really act like a Japanese person.

Yeah, most Americans we work with complain a lot more.

I was happy to hear this, but wondered if it meant they could sense the extent to which I was holding in my discomfort. The stylist knew. I could tell by the critical way she was looking at me--the way someone looks at her own face in the mirror. It made sense; I was wearing all her Work. I was her body. She probably wanted me to look happier in her clothes, or at least thinner.

After five artful combinations of clothing and face-drawings, everyone ate Thai curry and spring rolls together. We talked about our burgeoning careers in fashion and fantasized about publication in So-En. It was all so romantic that my food rumbled from within the stylist's high waisted woolen skirt, climbed up past the Oklahoma style crocheted vest she'd chosen, through the plastic seashell necklace and into the toilet. The painted-on freckles fell off and were flushed down as well, and I threw in the false eyelashes for luck. The whole outfit somehow found its way into the toilet bowl and I didn't stop it.

I emerged from the lavatory without their Work; an empty palette. I don't think they could see me anymore after that, because nobody said I looked cute. I mentioned that I was a little bit hot and they gazed blankly. Sweat dripped and smeared my mascara and nobody flinched. They just blew smoke into the early night and chuckled about something the makeup artist's fiance had said. I wondered where I should put my hands but no one instructed me. It was several hours later, after I'd gone home, cleaned out my medicine cabinet, and scrubbed the entryway that I was able to regain control of my body.

It's a Fool Who Dances

2007-08-28T01:20:00.000+09:00

I turned to the blue-eyed waitress and confided that watching People do their Dances makes me sad. On the street in front of us, other people's dads were tip-toeing and grinning like tree spirits in summer blue. I bet her that if my dad were there, he would dress in one of those little blue outfits, too, and celebrate the 1587 opening of Tokushima Castle with just as much sprightly agility as those small-kneed fathers could.

My father's knees are bigger than theirs were. My dad's were made for polka, and that's our dance, but in the end, everyone's knees are the same at their core. That's the important thing.

Some people dance in street festivals with their daughters and sons, and others save it for weddings. Some people practice their dances from the time they are little, and others have to fake it with their dads after three Oktoberfest beers. Both ways are OK, and in the end, there's not much to be sad about.

Fireworks

2007-08-24T00:51:00.000+09:00

The Tama river: two weeks later. The Perseids might take a cue from the fireworks display and try some advertising. I didn't count, but I think more people showed up than the two dorks on their bikes who came to the meteor shower.

The Perseid Meteor Shower, from Central Tokyo

2007-08-12T11:01:00.000+09:00

It took about 35 minutes to ride bikes to the Tama river. We laid stargazing with two heads on two backpacks and wondered what aliens use for money. The Perseids took pity on us and we were given six chances each to make wishes come true. The cake I requested never arrived, but the cared-for people on whose behalves I spent my other five wishes have all sent thank-you cards. You are welcome. Thank the Perseids.

My First Love is Pregnant in America

2007-08-12T00:17:00.000+09:00

Darling I saw you on the train tonight. You were looking up at an advertisement on the ceiling the way you used to look at me in the grocery store. You were dressed for work.

You appeared to be the type of person who gets his B.A. in history. British. Your hair was getting long in the back and you would have asked me to cut it outside in your mother's garden. I could remember why I loved you.

I almost held both your hands and told you what a wonderful dada you'll be, but millions of workers in suits and watches stood between us. They were holding onto the silver bars, half asleep and probably pregnant, too.

Where's My Stag Beetle?

2007-08-06T00:56:00.000+09:00

He arrived sixteen minutes late, looking like he'd just woken up under a railroad car. He'd thrown on an army green muscle tee with a stretched-out neck advertising "Alternative Rock," and the skin was peeling off his sun-browned arms. The child had whitish sleepy-dirt around his mouth, and if his hair hadn't been shaved down to half an inch, I know he'd have caught some breakfast in it. It was 1:00 in the afternoon.

According to the file, the boy's first name was Ryotaro, and in parentheses, (Chris). Rumors of his identity crisis had reached me, so when I asked "What's your name?" and he looked at the floor, I decided not to press the matter. Instead, I went on to inquire about the contents of his pink-handled jar.

He hadn't let go of the pink handle since entering the classroom. His clear black eyes regarded it mischievously now. Slowly, slowly he turned the lid and we looked half-smilingly at each other in worldless anticipation. A grubby fist reached in and produced the answer.

"It's my stag beetle." He was awfully proud.

I praised the enormous, antlered beetle in every way I thought possible and discovered that Ryotaro (Chris) feeds it watermelon three times a day. We both clung to the comfortably non-academic atmosphere brought about by the insect, but the time for covert, "back-door" learning had arrived. We played "Where's my Stag Beetle?" It was a lesson on prepositions.

"Close your eyes. OK, open them! Where's my stag beetle?"

"It's under the table!"
"It's in my mouth!"
"It's next to the sticker box!"
"It's between the body parts poster and the dinosaur!"
"It's on my head!"
"It's at the door!"
"It's by the plastic tomato!"

For what seemed like several minutes (and probably was), we placed the commendably tolerant stag beetle in things, between them, and on, next to, by, and under them. It was the lesson of a lifetime, and the stag beetle knew it. His black shell gleamed a healthy watermelon sheen and his ever-sarcastic eyes rang out with the joy of being useful. His owner, too, was filled with a sense of purpose, having supplied the only material necessary for an entire lesson on prepositions of place.

We said goodbye like old friends. Ryotaro (Chris) took an extra jelly snack for the stag beetle. I laid down on the cot in the teacher's lounge and softly cried myself to sleep.

Sighted: A Blind Man Behaving as though He Can't See

2007-08-03T23:24:00.000+09:00

I saw a blind man on the street today running into every person, dog, moped, and wall in sight. Because he couldn't see them. It shouldn't have surprised me.

Alone

2007-07-29T20:19:00.001+09:00

The lonely rain can wet the driest of hearts when there's an accordian in the room. You start thinking you're an old man serenading a bowl of pasta over wine, and your cigarette is never unlit. You wander into thoughts about your Mama and the way she used to cook without a conscience. You get hungry for lovers you never thought you needed. With an accordian, you can waltz all over the house. Play it in the shower, for the baby next door. Read the notes on the principal's fridge while the instrument mourns from your chest. Watch your hair curl in the mirror while the meatballs cook; there will be garlic tonight.

Mister Silver, Mister Gold

2007-07-29T19:52:00.000+09:00

We were waiting for the bus to the stone forest when two baby brothers approached with loose teeth. They tried to pull them out for one another but couldn't get it. Their hands were beckoning for money the whole time. They picked a comical fight, but the light in their faces made them less piteous. Instead of yuan, we gave of our adult-sounding laughter and then got on the bus. We coughed up student fees for entrance into a 200-million-year-old geological labyrinth, where lovers used to hide. We hid there awhile, and could afford ice cream afterward, too.

We held hands and walked into the weeklong rainstorm, ready to buy our fill of bootlegged DVDs, five dollar T-shirts, two dollar cab rides, and free porn. We paid for everything that week, and we didn't need any money. It was like we were kings, and starving people begged us for coins underneath our generous bowls of Indian curry. There was nothing that we could do except eat the curry. We did nothing.

Lunch In China (A True Story)

2007-07-25T23:00:00.000+09:00

I recently had lunch in China. There was a rat running around in the restaurant. Usually you leave when you see a rat. My companion and I noticed we were having a fantasy the moment we didn't walk out of there. Soon there was tobacco bong water spilled on the floor next to us, and it began making a cigarette-scented pond at our feet. The people who were dressed as waitstaff were stepping around the pond but not cleaning it up. This only added to the novelty of the place--I'd never been to China before. One of these characters took our order angrily, leaving the companion and I charmingly irritated and hungry. The power went out and didn't come back. Meanwhile, the people dressed as waiters and waitresses settled in for a group nap at the table next to ours. Forty minutes later, our pumpkin and bean cakes arrived. We ate a few of them (rat-flavored! We should have known!) before giving up on the impending tofu dish and leaving. We whispered sweet manifestations to the napping teenagers and dropped a piping-hot pumpkin cake into each of their sleep-soft palms.

Sewage Incarnate

2007-07-25T10:07:00.000+09:00

Before leaving me in charge of his apartment for the month, the principal of the school warned me about his kitchen drain: "It exudes a vile stink."

I wish he hadn't also told me that "it's a result of the fact that my plumbing goes straight into the sludge river flowing beneath Tokyo, instead of bending somewhere first like a normal drainpipe does," because I just now heard a noise coming from his drain.

Perhaps it was the sludge monster who lives suspended there. Sludge monsters, I read, are born when you eat lots of fermented foods and wash their remains down the drain (the principal of the school does that). And they eat espresso grounds for breakfast, after soaking all night in goma-dunked soba noodles. They rustle and belch when you flush the toilet, and it stings their sagging orifices when you bleach the sink. But they never die.

I really did hear ours clawing for an escape. I don't want to walk past the kitchen sink to use the toilet. He's going to jump out, dark and slimy, and try to become part of my life. I'm going to reject him (he's married!), but it will be too late. His mucous will already have soiled my clothing and outlook.

Safety

2007-07-15T21:26:00.000+09:00

Twelve baby boomers fondle this construction site every morning. Three of them pound housing framework into the ground while the rest either supervise or direct traffic. They turn on their glowsticks in the oppressive sunshine, and usher me across the sleepy residential street with an eager concern for safety (the sign posted at their workspace confirms that, to them, being safe is priority number one--more important, even, than the house those other three are erecting). I know that they go home and dream of all the human lives they will protect tomorrow. No one else on this street would ever conceive of it, but I feel like benevolently stealing their little boots so I can write my name by holding a pencil between my toes while wearing shoes. I won't, though. That's no way to treat the guardians of my mortal life.

Sometimes I Quit My Job

2007-07-15T20:16:00.000+09:00

I took out the piece of paper where the resignation was typed and laid it on his broken desk. Like a cuckolded husband, he gazed in disbelief at the face he once trusted, and I begged myself to control the girlish smile that always dominates this type of discomfort. But I treated you so well, he was thinking, and this is where you take me? I answered honestly but my words grayed and wrapped my face and hands till I was completely plastic inside.

We both agreed that the various Tomos and Harukis at his school would learn to read consonant blends without my particular index finger on their progress trackers. That wasn't the point. The point, which we subtly strove to make clear, was that the piece of paper on his desk represented a short-sighted and selfish choice.

2007-07-05T00:04:00.000+09:00

2007-07-03T16:43:00.000+09:00

"Shall we drink Calpis sour with me? Maybe this is my confession for her."

The skeleton boy unbuttoned his shirt and began counting his tiny nipples, attached by threads to a gaping ribcage. The third one, he said, was a relic from the time they stuck a tube into his lung to prevent his young death.

I asked why he didn't try to live instead of trying to die. He declared that he didn't know how but he was certain my forehead could teach him.

We were all charmed. The corpse of Kotaro had us in an uproar, to be sure, our fleshy faces warm with his words and ewok eyes. He lit up the room, but his own spirit was dim. And while we basked in appreciation for a rare and precious humor, he sat alone in the center, begging me to join him. It was because he loved his mother, he said, that he was not already dead.

99 Yen, Again and Again

2007-06-28T22:57:00.000+09:00

They opened a new ￥99 shop across the street. It's like a dollar store, except they sell useful things and most of it is also edible. In celebration of the grand opening, they placed a man from Ghana out front in his traditional attire (he chose a pink gown and cap), eating 99 yen mangoes and cracking jokes for shoppers. Do you like cheap? He asked me this with a very humid smile. I said I LOVE cheap. I can take home two rice balls for a hundred yen and they're just as good as the kind that cost over a hundred and fifty yen apiece! Mr. Ghana, you cannot beat these prices! He really was getting paid to stand there. I asked him. Then I entered the store.

The floors reflected the feelings inside me. Immaculate, like virginal yen. From every corner, voices welcomed, then darted past to straighten errant packs of marshmallows. Stunned by the matchless efficiency, hygiene, selection, and courtesy of the place, I stumbled back to work, buzzing like a ripe cactus. I must tell everyone.

I Can Go Twice as High

2007-06-26T01:06:00.000+09:00

松岡享子's translation of Beverly Cleary's 1975 classic Ramona the Brave is just the thing to inspire nostalgia for a childhood of summer reading. It also contains a level of vocabulary perfectly suited to Japanese eight-year-olds (or adults with the vocabularies of eight-year-olds). So far, Ramona has embarrassed her older sister, Beezus, by trying to stick up for her when some bullies at the park call her "Jesus Beezus." It's a nice little book, which will teach you such useful phrases as "親指を耳に突っ込んで、あとの指を振りながら、舌出したのよ。"　
But you don't have to take my word for it.

Teach Me, Reiko

2007-06-18T20:10:00.000+09:00

It was the beginning of the rainy season. My stomach had just begun convulsing to memories of burning my skin off in a gas flame when I noticed my student Reiko was struggling with a conditional clause. I coaxed out of her the statement that if there were no speed limit, there would be more car crashes. Very good, Reiko. What would happen if there were no babies? If there were no babies, there’d be more old people. Really? What about if there were no music? If there were no music, there would be more ice hockey. No cosmetics? More ugly women. No umbrellas? More wet beds. No stomachs? More livers. Dear, sweet unwed Reiko with your cat and your evening bath, I understand what you’re trying to show me: with one spontaneous absence in the world, another thing rushes in lopsided to take its place.

bank romance

2007-06-09T22:44:00.001+09:00

Violins sweeten the paper we’re breathing. Vinyl covers shield delicate leaves of withdrawal receipt. He’s wearing a wedding ring, I’m embarrassed to notice, after disappointing him by not knowing the word for “reissue” in his language. But—our hero—he knows it in mine. His protective brow returns home in qualified bliss. The transaction is complete.

Quotation

2007-06-09T01:49:00.001+09:00

quotation
Originally uploaded by LindsayLiters.

Open Late

2007-06-03T00:21:00.001+09:00

At the 1:00 am conclusion of practice at Sound Studio Noah, a couple of bandmates like us often feel a nagging desire for the trying on of antique clothing. We ask the frizzy-haired shop owner what time he closes, and he says, decisively, "two." "Every night?" And he laughs like that's ridiculous, but this is the second time we've caught him sitting in his deserted shop with the Budweiser shoes, listening to Love Psychedelico after midnight.

Chicken from Newspaper

2007-06-02T22:56:00.001+09:00

Yuki sings Blondie songs like a cat. Ono is quiet until you ask him the words to the inflating-breasts cartoon theme song. His wife got her hair cut to look like Johnny Ramone. She joins him with assertions of "mun-e mun-e" and stylish chuckles. Tsuji orders one too many Korean rice wines and his girlfriend chides, but he tells her he loves her, because she is cute.

What the Wicker Woman Dropped

2007-05-27T01:36:00.000+09:00

In the caboose that afternoon, there were armpits everywhere. Someone's bottom was embracing my own, and a briefcase hung between my legs, invisible.

I looked out the back window to see a boy my age dressed as a train conductor. He had torn off his hat and was hurtling toward the front of the locomotive, his cheeks jolting with every frantic step. It wasn't so unusual, really. Perhaps he was supposed to be driving the train and it had fallen a few risky moments into tardiness.

But five others followed with equally vigorous speed, carrying the same unbridled panic in their mouths. I removed my headphones. An announcement calmly explained that something had fallen onto the tracks--a body or a cat, or someone's heart. A hushed suspension of fear and hope swallowed us sweetly.

Nothing was found, and we floated away from the station as routinely as a 5:03 train departing at 5:04 can. I gazed out the rear window as the station manager passed into view, squatting stout on the platform. He was gesturing professionally down to the tracks, pointing at the vacant black object which had fallen into the gap and set off the sensors. I pictured the man with the long hook trolling for the thing, and placing it back into the hands of the wicker woman who had dropped it.

We entered the sunlit overgrowth of the rails and they lengthened and crossed one another, glinting. I couldn't see anyone else's eyes, but I knew we were all alive. Imaginable horrors are always leagues more terrifying than reality.

Overstaffed

2007-05-27T01:24:00.001+09:00

There are two guardsmen at Shibuya station in royal blue uniforms. They avoid eye contact with grim confidence. One of them sticks out his lower lip, the way old people sometimes resemble bald babies. With all their might, these guards stand in front of a temporary wall which conceals a construction zone. Their gloved hands rise in defense of the wall as bodies trickle closer and closer to it during the rush hours. No one knows what might occur in the absence of these two priceless men, but most of us feel grateful that we'll never be given the chance to find out.

Morning in Sancha

2007-05-18T09:34:00.000+09:00

The village of Sancha is clicking with life this bright blue day. Pony girls have buttoned themselves into lacy office bibs smelling of designer stores and fruit gloss. Clowns are pounding steel in their big blue pants, toward conscientious pedestrian safety (not a laughing matter). Drivers of noseless white trucks are whirring and beeping to the melody of ramen noodles at noon.

There was a time when I cynically referred to these daily characters as "zombie fish." Perhaps that was harsh. There happen to be exceptionally specific categories of dress and behavior on this island but behind each lacy bib there surely lies a complex and inconceivable human heart. From now on, that is where I am looking.

How to Best Enjoy a Can of Beer

2007-05-17T07:56:00.000+09:00

The way to best enjoy a can of beer is in a karaoke studio. Order the can of beer through the service telephone, and have it delivered by a young man on his knees. Stand on the wrap-around couch while your companion (Kate Sikora, if you're me) types the song number into the control box. Hold your can of beer in one hand, the microphone in the other. Take sips from the can between lyrics, watch the muscle-bound foreigner on the screen drive his motorcycle, and let your belches be amplified through the flattering echo of the system. Sing with a Japanese accent. Let the can of beer mingle with your jet lag, pay the 2,700 yen, and fall asleep in the fluorescent light to the sound of a good friend talking to her mother.

Natto

2007-05-15T10:48:00.001+09:00

It tastes better than I remembered. Slimy and subtly nutty in flavor; pungently odorous. Always best eaten with a spoon, unless someone Japanese is watching.

Spying

2007-05-08T06:40:00.000+09:00

In that metropolis, it feels like you're invisible. It's only when old men appear out of the concrete to compliment your new haircut that you realize it's all an illusion. You thought you were a spy, but everyone else is simultaneously spying on you, and doing a much better job.