The Language of Love (Part 2)
Under the same sky
I was looking for love in Japan. I was in the “honeymoon phase” experienced by many Western men: All Japanese women seemed lovely, desirable, clean, and somehow uncomplicated. 40 years later, I no longer see Japanese women that way. With age, distance, and experience, my view has become more nuanced. But things were different when I was young. My journal from that time is a comical, at times tedious, recitation of breathless hopes and polite rejections.
I did not, however, expect attention from a married woman. Mariko lived a comfortable suburban life. Her neighborhood was quiet – except when the Shinkansen (“bullet train”) shot out from a nearby tunnel for a few violent seconds and disappeared instantly into the next tunnel. Like newer subdivisions anywhere, the residents depended wholly on their cars because there were no shops within walking distance. Mariko’s husband put in long hours at the steelworks built out into the Inland Sea about a 45-minute drive away. Typical of Japanese managers and engineers who came up through the boom times of the 1960s and 1970s, he worked hard and had little leisure time. What leisure time he had seemed taken up with tennis.
Mariko’s boys were young, perhaps five and seven years old. At 34, she was a little late in becoming a mother compared to the other women in the neighborhood, and she was self-conscious about being an “older mother.” Her sons were in school during the day. Mariko was bored and restless.
She and I had crossed a boundary. We had held hands and looked longingly at each other. I was confused and caught off guard. I knew it was wrong, and it troubled me, which is made clear by my journal. And yet I developed a kind of situational ethic and went along, telling myself that this was somehow OK.
I think what Mariko really wanted was attention. She told me several times that she loved her husband and implied that he simply was not available to her. Where I came from, a woman in such a situation might leave her husband and look for someone else. That’s not how things were done in Japan 40 years ago. Divorce represented a deep stain on a woman’s character. Short of being deemed a completely unfit mother, she would most likely get full custody of her children, but the drop in her economic status would likely be precipitous and permanent. I’m sure divorce did not even occur to Mariko.
We went from hand-holding to steamy rendezvous in my apartment with endless embracing and kissing. This excited both of us greatly, but it soon became clear that, for Mariko, there was a limit: she did not want to go all the way. All the way was certainly where I wanted to go. There was a language barrier between us, to be sure, but the disconnect between our emotional and sexual imperatives represented the tougher barrier. Would that I had Andrew Marvell’s eloquence –
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
– in Japanese. Alas, I did not. What I did have was a cheap, defective, and very limited English-to-Japanese pocket dictionary with a red vinyl cover.
For some weeks, I tried to persuade Mariko that she should satisfy my fondest and most urgent desire. “I cannot make love,” she said. In today’s more enlightened times, that might have been enough for me. But she kept coming to my apartment, sometimes unbidden, and we did make love, stopping short of all the way.
I wrote to tell her that we had to stop what we were doing. Her response (unedited):
Your letter made me so sad. I couldn’t read it without tears. Specially you wrote “Mrs. K_____.”
It’s true that we must say good bye but it’s suddenly, and too fast. If you were not here, I try to resignation, but you are here and spend everyday very near under the same sky in Kurashiki as I. How do I forget you? Every time I think of you. In the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening….
….you hold me, you gaze me, every time I’m with you, and I wish you, too. Don’t we have that happy time anymore?
….I loved you with my way. It seems different from your way. Is it the reason why you said good bye?
….You gave me a great happiness I never had before. Meet me once again.
A few days after that letter, we were talking on the telephone, I in my tiny kitchen, she from her house in the suburbs. She asked me if my girlfriend back home took the pill. I knew that the pill was unavailable in Japan, strictly contraband. In fact, my girlfriend used a diaphragm, but I had no idea how to say that. Hopelessly, I looked up “diaphragm” in the little red dictionary. Surprisingly, there was an entry: ōkakumaku (横隔膜). Mariko laughed. “You mean,” and she couldn’t stop laughing. She caught her breath: “…you laugh when you make love and you don’t have babies?!”
At last, Mariko relented. I overcame my embarrassment, looked up the right word, went to a drugstore, and settled the matter with birth control that works from the male side of the equation. The druggist handed me a small box of condoms, his face utterly impassive.
We did make love. She wanted to and did not want to. We should not have done it. We were both sad afterwards.
She knew I was keeping a journal and that it was my habit to record nearly everything. She assumed that I had written an account of our love-making, and she asked me to give her that page. I tore the page out, and over 40 years later, that page is long gone. Or is it? Perhaps she kept it.
We made love in late February. I knew I had to leave before the affair ended in catastrophe. Mariko knew it, too. It was she who drove me to Shin-Kurashiki Station where I boarded a Shinkansen express train to Tokyo. Unexpectedly, she went onto the train with me, knowing the train would close its doors at a precise moment before departure. She led me into a telephone booth in the vestibule of the car. We embraced for a minute or so, and then she got off the train as the signal that the doors were about to close sounded on the platform.
I left Mariko, left Kurashiki, and left Japan in March to return to the States.
O-series Shinkansen
