Mr. Sugiyama stood outside the school again when I got to work on Monday.
“Hi Cornelius,” he said. “Thank you for being nice to Emi.”
“Emi’s a force to reckon with.”
“What?”
I’d come a little early in order to see how Ken was doing at Mississippi State and form a lesson plan around it. No one had mentioned lesson plans to me, but it struck me as a good idea if I hoped to survive two more eighty-minute classes without having to rely on the kindness of my students. Three of those students arrived right after me, Ichikawa Yuki not among them, and when I followed them into the building I found Bill and Melinda already at their desks, Bill with his feet up again and Melinda on the phone. So I took a seat in the foyer and opened my textbook to a drawing of Ken in his classroom at George Washington Hall. A few of his classmates were slumped around him, while Ken sat up straight and smiled. There were ten volumes in the textbook series, each dealing with Ken and the foibles of American life. My Mitsubishi class was studying volume seven.
More students swept in, so I sat up like Ken did in the drawing. I hadn’t forgotten that before Kaori appeared beside me on that Kamogawa bench I’d been so taken with Ichikawa Yuki that I’d suggested she come to Mountain Cabin. Since then, however, she’d stood in hazy opposition to Kaori. Until, that is, her cadre of backup singers swept into the room, with Ichikawa Yuki behind them. This time she wore a white kimono with crimson cranes flying across her shoulders. She looked like she was on her way, not to meet a prospective husband, but to the wedding itself.
“Ichikawa Yuki!” I said.
My exclamation made her friends laugh and Ichikawa Yuki blush.
“Listen,” she said. “I’m a greeter at our corporate restaurant and have no chance to change before class. That is why I wear kimono. If I could I would dress casually, but I’m hampered by the demands of time.”
“Oh, don’t be fooled, she’s no greeter, she is our restaurant’s maitre’d!” said one of her friends. “Very powerful! We are only servers.”
Not a greeter but the maitre’d… I remembered Kaori’s speech about artificial greeters instead of artificial greetings. I said, “Sounds like a demanding job.”
“Demanding, but not powerful,” she said. “I show men to tables, then go away.”
“Very powerful!” said the friend who’d spoken before, whose name, I remembered, was Miss Arai. “Every man thinks of her as his own!”
Both friends laughed again until Ichikawa Yuki stopped them with a stare. Every man might think of her as his own, but this woman belonged to herself.
More arriving students pushed her and her cohort into the classroom, so when Melinda got off the phone and Bill took his feet down, I joined them in the office. “Hey,” said Bill. “Sorry we didn’t get to carouse on Saturday. Could have made up for Friday night.”
I hadn’t been able to pin down Bill’s manner, so busy was I with the women on my mind, but it was that of a mildly freaked out rooster, always about to crow.
“No worries,” I said. “Carousing and I aren’t that close.”
That made Melinda smile.
I sat down and tried to concentrate on my lessons. Since Ken’s first class was American History, I wrote out a substitution drill - “American history is complex,” “Japanese History is complex,” “Japanese people are complex,” “Japanese people are interesting,” and so on, back and forth between the interesting complexity of the citizens of both countries. Bill, meanwhile, prepared a lesson based on a later period in Ken’s life, while Melinda wrote out bullet points for a lecture on For Whom the Bell Tolls, for the school’s best class.
Before we knew it, Mr. Sugiyama pulled two small flags down from the foyer wall, one American and one Japanese, waving them to signal that it was time to begin.
*****
My Mitsubishi class went well after a rocky start. The students sat where they had on Friday, but this time showed me the courtesy of writing their names on strips of cardboard, hanging over the fronts of their desks. “Japanese people are interesting,” therefore became, “Japanese names are interesting,” which morphed into “Your name is interesting,” then “Your job is interesting,” until I got the sense that my drills were far too simple for them. Thus the rocky start.
“But what if your job isn’t interesting?” I asked. “Do you ever find yourself bored?”
A number of students sat up. “Find myself?” asked Ichikawa Yuki’s friend, Miss Arai, while Mr. Nomura, who sat in front, said, “I am bored. Sit at desk all day long, mind far off.”
“Oh yes, me too,” said Miss Arai. “I do find myself bored.”
“So do you daydream during those times?” I asked.
Miss Arai looked at Mr. Nomura, as if his daydream would be her own.
“I sit in a room with one hundred other men, all daydreaming,” he said. “Sometimes I imagine fishing, sometimes I think of my future wife.”
He chanced a look at Miss Arai, and then at Ichikawa Yuki beside her.
“At least you are sitting,” another woman said. “Women must daydream standing up. Japanese women lead unlucky lives.”
The women in the class all nodded until Mr. Nomura’s neighbor, Mr. Sato, said, “Hold your horses. You are lucky to work at Mitsubishi! Where is your company loyalty?”
“We learned ‘Hold Your Horses’ from Bill,” Ichikawa Yuki said.
Though she spoke loudly, I felt like she was whispering, her words coming right into my head. “Is your job interesting?” I asked her. “Do you daydream while you’re there?”
Mr. Nomura twisted around. He had the look of a man consumed by her. But Ichikawa Yuki said only, “Mr. Sato is right, we are lucky to work at Mitsubishi. We have smiles. We have bowing. We even have our company song. Luck is something that should not be sneezed at.”
She gave me a look that told me ‘Sneezed at’ was Bill again.
“But..?” asked Mr. Sato.
“But what? There is no but,” Mr. Nomura said. “Her answer was good.”
“But my job is the daydream,” she said. “I do it while waiting for my real life to begin.”
A befuddled Mr. Sato said, “A job cannot be a daydream! The daydream is never where we are, but the place we are thinking about! It is puffery of you to say such things, Miss Ichikawa.”
‘Puffery’, no less… I really needed to have a word with Bill.
“That’s not true!” said Mr. Nomura, half jumping out of his chair.
I put my hands up, but Miss Arai came to my aid by saying loudly, “What is true, is that this talk is more interesting than whatever stupid Ken is doing at Mississippi State.”
Mr. Sato and Mr. Nomura both agreed with that, while others told me in bursts of complex English just how much they disliked Ken, with his stereotypical Japanese earnestness, his poor representation of Japanese students abroad, even his unhandsome face.
*****
My Takashimaya class once again seemed never to end. I used my “Ken” drills with them, spoke of shopping at Takashimaya, asked them what they liked to buy when they went shopping, and did skits where half the class would enter a store and the other half would greet them. But anything beyond the basics confounded them.
Because I stood at my door until every student departed, Bill and Melinda left school before me, but I found Mr. Sugiyama waiting out on the street again. I’d had enough of saying things he didn’t understand, but when he said, “Cornelius, I have a note for you,” I stopped. The note was folded into a pentagon. My heart went into my throat, so sure was I who the sender was. But when I tried to take it from him he asked me to wait while he recited a poem:
Do not break a young girl’s heart,
for the young girl will soon be a woman.
Do not break a young girl’s heart,
let it remain unbroken.
Our hearts are pure when we are young,
our hearts are pure but can be stung.
O, do not break a young girl’s heart,
let it remain unbroken.
“Where did you find the poem?” I asked.
“What?”
“Where - did - you - find - the - poem?”
“I didn’t find it, I made it up. But thank you for calling it a poem. I hope you will follow its dictates with the same good heart that you have shown us all so far.”
I took the note, irritated and thinking, ‘What did he care if Ichikawa Yuki had feelings for me?’
A nearby streetlight laid the shadows of my hands on the sidewalk while I tried to unfold the note. My hands weren’t clumsy but their shadows were. The note said, “Will you be my boyfriend? Will you share your life with me? I love you, Signed Emi.”
Emi’s English was correct, her penmanship good, her decision to write out “Signed” like a miniature heartbreak right there on the page. But who had helped her with the note? Had she asked her mother or her grandfather? No, she had obviously asked her dad, who not only helped her, but fulfilled his promise to deliver it to me. I looked back, sorry for my earlier irritation, but Mr. Sugiyama was gone. So I pressed the note between the pages of my novel.
Do not break a young girl’s heart for the young girl will soon be a woman.
When I got to Mountain Cabin I nearly didn’t go in, so busy was I imagining Emi at home, wondering if I had read her note, not sleeping until her father came to tell her he’d delivered it. I told myself I would read it again … read it until I knew how to answer it, then answer it immediately. When I opened the door I saw that Bill and Melinda weren’t there and that most of the chairs and stools were empty.
Junichiro shouted “Irrashaimase!” then said, “Hey, what’ll you have?”
“Kirin,” I told him, “make it a large one.”
When I sat at the bar he brought my beer and said, “You’ve got a note,” he said.
I looked at him fast. Had Mr. Sugiyama come here while I was reading Emi’s note and told him? Surely not.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“What do you mean? I’ve got it here. She sent it over couple of hours ago. If you hadn’t come I would have delivered it to you tomorrow.”
He gave me an envelope that opened with the slightest pressure of my hand. “With thanks for your help the other day, join me at midnight for a nightcap,” said the note.
The “Oh!” woman’s signature was smaller than Emi’s, and with no little heart above each “i”. Her name, “Kikuya,” I thought meant “chrysanthemum.”
“‘Kiku’ means chrysanthemum, but the ‘ya’ part means ‘more.’ So her name is ‘chrysanthemum and more,’” Junichiro told me.
“Does she mean twelve o’clock tonight?”
His look said ‘I don’t answer stupid questions’, but it wouldn’t have been so stupid if he’d delivered the note to me tomorrow.
“I’ll be closed by then and take you on my bike,” he said.
His clock let me know that it was just before ten. So though my beer was still half full, I pushed it away. I would show up at Pontocho with a swagger in my step, not the stagger it would have if I sat there drinking until twelve.
*****
“He’s right, it does mean ‘chrysanthemum and more.’ ‘Kiku’ refers to music and dance, while ‘ya’ acknowledges occasional forays into prostitution. Our older patrons recognize the humor in it, for it was the name of Japan’s first geisha. I am not a geisha, nor do I make those forays, but I appreciate the power of the name. It helps me with my primary job, which is that of a conversationalist.”
“Conversationalist?” I said, perhaps too skeptically.
We were in a tiny bar at the end of Pontocho at 1 a.m. Junichiro dropped me off at midnight, but I waited outside her building while a dozen patrons stumbled into the night, Kikuya and some others seeing them off.
“It’s not easy for I must have knowledge of many subjects. Plus, as you know, the ability to sing esoteric songs.”
“What happened to your singing partner? She didn’t work tonight?” I asked.
She looked at me oddly, and then stared down at her drink.
There were six seats in the bar, all of them at the bar, and all of them taken by couples. Wooden tablets let us know the menu for the night, in stylized calligraphy. “Salted mackerel. Squid. Oden, and udon.” A sour-faced man worked the bar. I guessed that he wouldn’t have let me in if I’d been alone. “Sumo Digest” played on a muted TV, while shakuhachi music wound around the room like a snake. The other two couples touched each other under the lip of the bar.
“Such behavior should be engaged in privately,” said Kikuya, I thought as a warning that I should keep my hands to myself.
When I asked, “What was your name before you were Kikuya?” she said, “My parents named me Midori, which means ‘green,’ the condition of every young girl, especially if she is raised in a place like Hamamatsu.”
“I knew two Midoris in Tokyo,” I said, “Both of them bouncy.”
That didn’t come out right, but I left it alone.
“Well, if I ever was one, I’m not anymore. When I left home I left Japan’s faux kawaii culture behind. And now I never visit my parents. Do you think that’s unkind?”
If she wanted a serious reply I had one, for I hadn’t seen my parents since I joined the Marines. I hadn’t called them nor written them, nor started letters to them that I abandoned.
“I’m not the best person to ask,” I said. “I don’t visit anyone.”
We were drinking Kubota saké out of small ceramic cups filled from a larger ceramic bottle that sat amongst plates of pickled cabbage. The cups and bottle were Bizen yaki, recognizable by their dark glaze. On TV the American sumo wrestler, Takamiyama, won his match by shoving a smaller opponent out of the ring.
I had told Kikuya about my ruined relationship in England, even about my grandmother’s belief that she had once been a concubine in Kyoto, before she started her story. I’d told her my grandma’s story lightly, but she let me know that she believed such things.
“You asked what happened to my singing companion. Did it not strike you as odd that I didn’t answer? Why did you not ask again?”
“I guess I worried that you thought I was hinting that I wished she’d come with us tonight, or even that I would rather be with her than you.”
“But if I didn’t think you would rather be with her - and I assure you I did not - what reason might I have for not answering your question?”
“I don’t know, unless your companion asked you not to talk about her in my presence.”
“Again, I assure you… she was exactly as fond of you as I.”
“Are you angry with her? Did she betray you in some way?” I asked, but that turned her mood dark. Things were going wrong between us and I didn’t know why. So I stayed quiet, and soon found we ourselves picking at some salted mackerel and drinking the rest of our saké in silence. The saké was delicious and it didn’t lose its appeal toward the bottom of the bottle, which let me know that it was also dangerous. Still, I would have ordered more, in an attempt to set things right, if Kikuya hadn’t suddenly stood and said, “It is you who have betrayed me,” before going over to wait by the door. When I stood, too, the bartender handed me an astronomical bill - nearly $400! I had enough of my Marine Corps severance money with me to pay it, but she’d invited me, not the other way around! And I had betrayed her? I wanted her to tell me how.
Once outside, though it was two a.m., she surprised me by suggesting that we walk to that promenade along the river. In the darkest part of our journey she stopped to lean against me, then turned and slipped a cold and callused hand down inside the front of my pants. I could feel her icy fingers grab my penis, like the fingers of the first Kikuya’s ghost.
My impulse was to jerk her hand away, but I pushed her far enough from me first, so that I might see her face. Tears flowed down it like rain. “I had no answer regarding my singing companion because I had no companion,” she cried. “You know very well that I sang alone!”
She then twisted my penis hard, like she was closing the spigot that provided her tears, pulled her hand back and disappeared into the dark. I could feel her hand like it hadn’t yet departed, like it was about to take a firmer grip and twist again.
Endnotes…
The idea that the “Oh!” woman (Kikuya now) had no singing companion when Cornelius came upon her back in episode one, came to me as I was writing the scene you just read. I have found that in each novel I have written a surprise much like this one, that is to say, a surprise to me, contributes to the work’s emotional and psychological verisimilitude, and thus to its overall authenticity. Now, of course, I must rewrite episode one and find ways in later episodes for Cornelius to deal with such a strange new circumstance.
This marks the end of part one of this novel. My hope is that it has continued to be engaging to those who have read along with me each week, as well as to those who have read a few episodes, skipped some, then read again.
Part two, which complicates Cornelius’s Kyoto life significantly, starts next week.
"Oh!" Talk about a twist ending! Onward, Cornelius, and hopefully upward, despite the twist. Good writing.