I had recently come to think that A Cut Above the Rest might not be a very good school. My classroom experiences didn’t tell me that - I loved my Mitsubishi students even without Ichikawa Yuki, and my Takashimaya group could now deal with the widest variety of greeting circumstances. But when Melinda decided to stay in the States after her grandfather’s death, resigning from the school in a heartfelt letter, Mr. Sugiyama, who couldn’t understand what anyone said, took over her classes. So by the final week of the semester things began to fall apart. On our last night we had a farewell party, but then everyone headed off into the evening, many of our students never to return.
I went into the teachers’ room after the party, in order to read the two letters that came that day in response to the only two I had written since I got there. One, from Ichikawa Yuki, allowed that my understanding of her drawing hadn’t exactly been wrong, that she could now see how it resembled me. She apologized for my embarrassment, but she didn’t mention firefly weekend, so I feared she wouldn’t come, and didn’t want to have to deal with telling me. I put her letter aside, for I needed a clear head to read the one from Natasha. Here it is in its entirety.
Dear Cornelius,
Thank you for wishing me a happy life. I hope you have one, too, though I admit to wishing a rather serious unhappiness upon you previously. By that I mean I wished you dead… Is that a serious unhappiness? Maybe not, in your case, for death may provide the only actual happiness you will ever know. Not to be harsh, but maybe.
I live in Oxford now, under an actual Don. Yes, I mean that statement to be crude. He’s a professor of English literature, but doesn’t feel the need to talk about it all the time. He likes sex better than you did, he’s better at it, and he’s writing a book on Trollope and Dickens, in which he argues that Trollope is funnier than Dickens, Dickens sillier than Trollope, and that Trollope’s novel, He Knew He Was Right, is better than Great Expectations. I’m telling you this in order to say that he is funnier than you are, and you were sillier than him. I also want you to know that I would have kept you if I could, but I must live in the ‘now’ and do not think that trying again would offer up a better result. I know you didn’t ask to try again, but I let Oxford Don read your letter and he said that that was its subtext. And who knows better than a literature professor what you really meant? If it irritates you that I did such a thing… let him read your letter… it means that you can feel something, so that’s good news. And, okay, the sex with him is actually about the same as it was with you.
Wishing you a happy life in earnest…
Sincerely,
Natasha B.
My first impulse was to think that nothing in the letter irritated me more than that “Natasha B.”, put there to separate herself from all the other Natashas I had known, or, more hurtfully, to increase the distance between us from one-time lovers to people on the verge of using surnames. But that wasn’t the most irritating. For a while she wished me dead, believing that only death could give me happiness? Who says such a thing to anyone, let alone to someone they had loved? Did she get it from her ridiculous Don, professing that my note contained a subtext? If I’d had occasional bouts of depression when we were together, how could I have simultaneously been sillier than a guy who puts Great Expectations beneath any book by Trollope, fine as Trollope is?
I opened Ichikawa Yuki’s letter again, then read them both four or five more times. Ichikawa Yuki signed her letter ‘Ichikawa Yuki,’ which was fine since that was what everyone called her, while ‘Natasha B,’ each time I read it, felt like a cigarette burn on my heart.
I put the letters back in their envelopes. Bill had said he was going to Mountain Cabin, but I wanted what I always wanted on such occasions, which was to walk the streets with my hands in my pockets. I would have done it, too, but upon leaving the building I found Mr. Sugiyama standing on the sidewalk with the manila envelope I had returned to him earlier. I’d forgotten that I’d said I would be glad to talk to him about it if he had any questions, but I deeply hoped he didn’t have those questions now.
“Cornelius, I am worried about our enrollment,” he said. “I have just been told that we’ve lost Takashimaya - they say their knowledge of greetings is complete - and our ‘impulse enrollment’ is also down.”
Mr. Sugiyama claimed to have invented “impulse enrollment,” both as a phrase and as a technique. He shook the manila envelope, as if it might contain a solution to our problem.
“What about Mitsubishi?” I asked, as slowly as I could manage.
“Oh, Mitsubishi is our mainstay, they have paid for another year. Even with Mr. Nomura and his lovesickness, without Mitsubishi we’d be sunk. By the way, I want you to help me manage that situation during firefly weekend. He and his ex-paramour have both signed up.”
Wait, what? Ichikawa Yuki was coming? But wouldn’t Mr. Nomura showing up at firefly weekend be a lot like me showing up in Oxford, to throw a copy of He Knew He Was Right through the window of a man I knew to be wrong?
“I’d be glad to help,” I said, but when I turned away he matched me stride for stride.
“There is something else that nags at me, and though it may seem odd, I am helped with nagging issues by putting them into English, do you mind?”
I said, “I - do - not - mind,” though I did mind if it meant I had to talk about his manuscript.
“Good,” he said, “this is about my wife, whose surname has been Sugiyama since she was born, while mine, before our marriage, was ‘Yamada.’”
He waited for me to show surprise so I raised my eyebrows, leaving them that way until we found our way to Crazy Horse, the bar Mr. Nomura and I went to on the other ‘confession’ night.
“Let’s drink,” said Mr. Sugiyama. “My story is short but I can only tell it if I’m fortified.”
This time the bar was packed. Most of my Takashimaya students sat at a table near its center.
“Welcome to the Sports Department,” one man said when he saw us.
Mr. Sugiyama wore glasses and an earnest expression. His general affect was that of an academic or a mathematician on the verge of solving a complex equation. He ordered beer, then pulled his manuscript from its envelope, placing it on the table - was it possible I had misunderstood? When he went to chat with the Takashimaya group I fingered the letters in my pocket. I wanted to read them again, but the chapter of Mr. Sugiyama’s book that faced me was one I hadn’t seen. He must have added it after I gave him back his envelope.
There were drawings of Ken at the beginning of each chapter, and in the one Ken looked disheveled, sitting in a bar not unlike Crazy Horse beside a young man I would have said looked like me had I not learned my lesson in Ichikawa Yuki’s dormitory. The young man had the same haircut I did, the same dimpled chin and vacuous expression, and Ken looked like Mr. Sugiyama probably did during his own years as an exchange student. I knew he’d been hurt, that his textbooks weren’t so much treatises on generic cultural misunderstandings, as an attempt to heal the wounds America had given him.
Some of those at the Takashimaya table were calling me over, so I ambled across the room to them, along with a waiter bearing our drinks. I took the manuscript, too, but told Mr. Sugiyama that I thought he wanted to talk about his wife.
“I do want to talk about my wife,” he said, “and don’t worry, Cornelius, if we speak English among these particular students it will be the same as speaking alone.”
The group made room for me next to Mrs. Suzuki, my favorite member of that class, who sat in the front row and stayed keenly focused on whatever I was trying to teach.
“How do you do, Cornelius?” she said.
“I’m well, Mrs. Suzuki. I appreciated having you as my student.”
“How about we speak Japanese?” she said. “My English is terrible.”
Since she said it in Japanese, I used Japanese to ask her how long she’d worked at Takashimaya, and if that was where she met her husband.
I nodded at her wedding ring, a big one that often gleamed at me during class, while she craned her neck to look at the new drawing of Ken, which I had placed on the table.
“I’ve been at Takashimaya for twenty years,” she said. “I am an elevator supervisor. But I didn’t meet my husband there. I met him through a nakodo… what you call a ‘marriage arranger.’”
She said ‘marriage arranger’ in English, while I said I remembered she was an elevator supervisor from the phrases she most often wanted to learn, “Elevator Supervisor,” chief among them. That made her blush, and stab a slender finger at Ken.
“I see that you are friends now. I hope you straighten him out, teach him not to be such a dummkopf. It’s embarrassing, the things he says and does. We Japanese are a sophisticated lot.”
When I laughed at “dummkopf,” she said it was the English word for “baka”. That Ken wasn’t a dummkopf, but Mr. Sugiyama during his age of innocence, I didn’t say.
“Now listen to me,” said Mr. Sugiyama from my other side. “My father recently told me I must put my foot down concerning my wife, either that or I must move back home. When I say ‘my father,’ I mean my father, Mr. Yamada, not Etsuko’s father, whose name I use now.”
At the start of the new chapter the phrase “Put one’s foot down,” topped a list of idioms that the chapter would deal with in its dialogues.
“Why do you have to put your foot down?” I asked, lightly tapping the phrase.
“Because Etsuko loves another. My father says I must tell her to forego him, and if she doesn’t I must leave her to a fate worse than believing that my love is not enough.”
“A fate worse than…” was second on the idiom list.
“Mr. Sugiyama, that’s impossible,” I said, though Etsuko’s etherial Satie dance told me that it wasn’t. “Who else knows about this?” I asked.
“Her lover, herself, myself, her father, my father, and now you. Emi doesn’t know about it, but if I move to my father’s house he insists that I bring her with me. He says her mother’s illicit love will infect her with those same urges when she grows up. This pains me greatly, Cornelius.”
“Pain, you say?” said Mrs. Suzuki. “Pharmacy, second basement!”
She smiled and raised her glass.
“Are you sure about this? I’m sorry to hear it, Mr. Sugiyama.”
“I’m sorry!” said Mrs. Suzuki. “Greeting cards. Ground floor!”
She picked up the new chapter to read the various idioms, their Japanese translations next to them.
“So now that I have told you my dilemma, what I should do?” asked Mr. Sugiyama, “I need a foreigner’s perspective. I would have asked Melinda, but she is gone.”
Even if I knew what he should do, he wouldn’t understand me if I told him. So I asked the one-word question, “Who?” instead, since “Who is her lover?” would have been too much for us both.
“Fritz Stolz, of course,” he said. “They have loved each other since they were children.”
Fritz’s name echoed around in my head like a yodel. Though I’d suspected that the children in the photo Etsuko’d danced with were herself and Fritz, now everything came into focus. Fritz was no revisionist historian, but a man who’d loved the girl next door. The lakes on his pockmarked face were no more deep than that, yet they were also as deep as any emotion in the world.
“So should I put my foot down?” asked Mr. Sugiyama. “I may be weak, but I’d like to keep my foot to myself.”
“What is the meaning of ‘foot to myself?’” Mrs. Suzuki asked. “Does it mean that he needs the shoe department?”
“It does not, Mrs. Suzuki. It has the sense of getting tough, of not allowing something wrong to continue,” said Mr. Sugiyama. “It is a firmness of mind that requires the sort of courage I don't have.”
He reached across me to point at idiom number one. Mrs. Suzuki read the translation, then said, “Ah! Like I must put my foot down regarding echi behavior in the elevators.”
I knew echi meant “naughty” like when men pressed themselves against women in a crowded subway, or, indeed, in an elevator.
“As a matter of fact, exactly like that,” said Mr. Sugiyama. “You have a good sense of how things work in this world, Mrs. Suzuki. I should take a page from your book.”
“No books in Takashimaya,” said Mr. Watanabe. “For books you must go to Kinokuniya.”
He never spoke in class, but he said the whole thing in English now.
We spent the next half hour listening to Mr. Sugiyama tell a funny story about getting lost in Hannibal, Missouri, and stopping to rest in Mark Twain’s childhood home. When he finished he asked if I would have a word with Fritz for him, before he decided what to do about his wife.
“If not let’s continue drinking, but if so, let’s go do it now,” he said. “My father has given me until the day after firefly weekend to correct things in my marriage.”
I should have refused but did not, so Mr. Sugiyama paid the Takashimaya bill as well as ours.
Mrs. Suzuki walked us outside, so she could bow from the Crazy Horse entrance like she did at her bank of elevators, whenever anyone had shopping to do at Takashimaya.
—
When we got to Fritz’s room it was after eleven. I had told Mr. Sugiyama on our way home that we should wait until morning, but he made a fist and pounded three times on Fritz’s the door -“Boom! Boom! Boom!”
“Huh?” said a voice inside.
“Fritz, it’s me,” I said. “I know it’s late but I need to have a word.”
He hadn’t liked the pounding, maybe, so I used an anti-pounding voice.
Mr. Sugiyama took off his jacket, folded it, placed it on the floor and squared his shoulders. When Fritz opened the door and saw who was with me, he said quite calmly, “This is below you, Cornelius. I never figured you for trying to ambush someone.”
I said, “What is your intention with this man’s wife?”
I felt like the ‘second’ at a duel, but I could also still sense Mrs. Suzuki bowing to us, like we were about to take an elevator into unknown territory.
“My intention is to love her. Etsuko and I knew thirty-five years ago that we were meant for each other,” said Fritz. “The war stood between us then, but nothing will stand between us now. Our reenactment will have a different outcome than yours and Junichiro’s, Cornelius, and I am sorry, Mr. Sugiyama, for the hurt this has caused you.”
It was a long speech, and when Mr. Sugiyama said, “What?” Fritz opened his door widely enough to reveal Etsuko, wearing only a tailored white shirt with his initials on its breast pocket - FS - as if she truly did belong to him. Though the shirt was pristine, new lipstick had been hurriedly applied.
“I must go to Emi,” she said. “If she’s awake she will want to tell me about her day. We mustn’t deny her that.”
She spoke to her husband who agreed, though he surely smelled the musky odor of sex in the room. When she walked past him he let his fighting stance go, picked up his jacket, and followed her down the stairs, Emi the only medicine strong enough to stop, for this moment anyway, the death of their marriage.
Endnotes…
Years ago I read a half dozen Anthony Trollope novels. I remember best He Knew He Was Right, though I also remember Phineus Redux, The Last Chronicle of Barset, and The Small House at Allington. I loved them all, but if I tried to read them now I’m not sure I could do it. My not-so-secret shame is that I did like Trollope better than Dickens then, though previously novels such as David Copperfield and Great Expectations easily won my heart. A month or so ago, when I tried rereading Bleak House, I stopped after barely one hundred pages. That is a reflection on me, of course, not on the great C. D., but I also suspect that great verbosity has an “age-induced” half-life, and that I, during my septuagenarian years, may have reached it.
The word echi (エッチ) comes from the letter ‘h’, the first letter of the word ‘hentai’ (変態) meaning sexual abnormality or deviation.
I asked about Etsuko’s etherial dance in an endnote to last week’s episode. I hadn’t known whether to include it or not. This week, however, her lifelong love of Fritz no longer relies on an Oxford Don-like subtext, but is plainly stated, thus making Etsuko’s earlier dance a requirement. All of this is in service to my decision, before I started these episodes, to have the events in them echo those in the (as yet) unnamed book that Cornelius is reading. The final scene of this episode, however, owes its existence to more modern times.
I read the last few posts back to back and yes, the affair scene without the dance would have been a hard sell for me, but with the dance and the details about F and E growing up together and F standing between E and C male a lot of sense to me.
A Romaji suggestion, although I don't know how these things are in English publications. In Japanese ecchi would be spelled with two "c"s due to the glottal stop.
Dickens was paid by the word....