The Language of Love (Part 1)
Stairway to the Achi Shrine (阿知神社), Kurashiki, Okayama
I am at the postage stamp-sized table in my tiny apartment on the southern edge of Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture. It’s a “2DK”: two small tatami-mat rooms and an eat-in kitchen along with a toilet, washbasin, and bathtub. In those days (1982-83), I could just manage to fold myself into that bathtub when it was filled with hot water.
I am on the telephone with Mariko, struggling to find words she would understand. She and I had already crossed the line from English conversation teacher and student, to friends, and now to lovers.
Months before, I had been invited by her husband, an engineer at the steelworks where I taught evening classes in English, to lead an English conversation group made up of three housewives. I welcomed the extra under-the-table income to supplement my official earnings. I suspect that it was Mariko who asked her husband to send me her way. She did not know me, but she already spoke passable, if halting, English: when she was a girl, there was an American boy living in her neighborhood in a suburb of Fukuoka in Kyushu, a friendship that marked the beginning of her interest in speaking English.
Since it would not have been appropriate – or cost-effective – for Mariko, married with two young children, and me, a 24-year old single American male, to meet one-on-one, she asked two other women in her neighborhood to join the lessons. All three women lived in a new, upper middle-class subdivision to the north of downtown Kurashiki, an attractive town in Western Japan. The other two women had virtually no spoken English at all. All came from far distant parts of Japan: Mariko from Kyushu, Mrs. C from Chiba, and Mrs. H from Hokkaido, literally from one end of the country to the other. The steel company had brought their husbands in to work at Kawasaki Steel’s colossal Mizushima Works, a sprawling plant built on a landfill industrial zone jutting into the Inland Sea.
JFE Steel, Mizushima Works (formerly Kawasaki Steel), Okayama
I was an inept teacher: I talked too much. I was disorganized. I was earnest. Lessons typically devolved into monologue by me, with Mariko gamely interpreting into Japanese for the benefit of the smiling but uncomprehending Mrs. C and Mrs. H. I would often talk about what I believed were Urgent Social Issues: race and class in the U.S., the problem of guns, American versus Japanese culture, etc. I had little idea of what I was talking about, but that didn’t slow me down. We would meet at one or another woman’s house, usually around lunchtime. My hosts fed me well.
One day, we reached a point in a weighty talk (I was doing most of the talking) on something I must have thought was very important, when there was little left to say on the topic. We had all lapsed into an awkward silence. Breaking the tension, Mrs. C. smiled sweetly, proffered up a piece of fruit from a plate on the table, and said mikan dōzo! (“How about a mandarin orange?”). We peeled our oranges in pensive silence.
* * * * *
Old Kurashiki
A month or so into these improvised lessons in English conversation, Mariko called and invited me to go sightseeing. She picked me up in her tiny red car (I could barely fit) and took me to Tsurugatayama Park (鶴形山公園; “Crane-Shaped Mountain Park”), on a hill above Kurashiki’s market district, to see the Achi Shrine (阿知神社). On another occasion, she took me on a walking tour through Kurashiki’s famous “urban aesthetic district” (美観地区; bikan chiku), a sort of open-air museum of the city’s old commercial district. Famous for its warehouses (倉; the kura in “Kurashiki”), with their white plaster and dark ceramic-tiled walls, for the canal running through the center of the district, and for the Ohara Museum of Art (大原美術館), said to be Japan’s first museum of Western art. (Minor works by a few major masters. A small El Greco was the museum’s prized possession.) She took me to Washūzan (鷲羽山), a mountain overlooking the Inland Sea. In the early 1980’s, work had just begun on building the immense bridge system that would connect Honshū, the largest of Japan’s four main islands to Shikoku, the smallest. From Washūzan, we could see jutting out of the water the huge piers for the bridge that was to become the first link in the chain of bridges across the Inland Sea to Shikoku.
During our excursions, Mariko told me about growing up in Kyushu, far to the southwest of Kurashiki. She’d gone to university, where she’d studied home economics. She seemed drawn to American culture and was familiar with jazz, mostly through her jazz-loving husband. In her tiny car, she played tapes of American pop music. The song I most distinctly remember is Dionne Warwick’s Heartbreaker:
Why do you have to be a heartbreaker?
Is it a lesson that I never knew?
Got to get out of the spell that I'm under
My love for you
Mariko, 10 years older than I, was a suburban housewife with two young boys. But her energy was unmistakable, even to a naïve and serious young man like me. I think we were back at the Achi Shrine, with the city of Kurashiki spread out below us, when we first held hands, every cliché of infatuation coming thrillingly alive in the electricity of that moment. She wore a dark blue blazer and matching skirt. I thought she was beautiful, with a hint of sadness in her eyes.
We were falling in love.
(to be continued)
AMK, Kamakura, July 1982
