The Men in My Country

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ne afternoon, all the men in my country are all busy or away and I am free for the afternoon of my ABC School responsibilities. So I hop a train and go downtown. Downtown is pale and deserted and still —empty of schoolchildren who are still in school, empty of grownups who are all at work. Downtown-san, how very Zen you are today, I say, but Downtown-san is so Zen, it just looks back, cool and detached, a soul of stone gray. I wander around the shops in the train station, looking at the plastic food in restaurant windows, the plastic facsimiles so common here. They do not look real. That’s what makes them so compelling: that no one tries to pretend the plastic food is real. Then I duck into Midori, a large department store, where I find a pair of brown sandals that cost 10,000 yen or the equivalent of $70, which is twice as much as I am accustomed to paying for shoes and more than I can legitimately afford. Still, I buy them, and buying them feels good, a calm purchase of something that I know should belong to me. Next I go to a bookstore and buy a Japanese magazine and then I settle myself into a booth where I order chocolate cake and coffee and I eat and drink and feel generally pleased with myself, with the cake, with the coffee, with the thought of wearing these new sandals, which, on top of looking good also smell fine in the way only decent leather can. I thumb through my magazine without worrying about words I cannot read. Instead, I enjoy the pictures, including one I stare at for a long time, then tear out to save: a black-and-white photograph of a glass bottle in swirls and shades of gray, something subtle and theatrical going on all at once. A picture borne of solidity from a liquid rush. O ................................................................................ 98 I remember a couple standing in a small kitchen, making dinner one night. The season is summer. The air is thick. The man is Nozaki. The woman is me. What happens next I can see in a series of snapshots, click, click, click. After the lull, the fall begins. Not all at once but gradually. He cuts tomatoes. She watches the pasta cook. She has gone to a great deal of trouble to hunt down a jar of artichoke hearts and hopes he will like them, this delicacy he has never tried. But after one bite, he makes a face. Too sour, he says, and she eats the hearts alone that night. They take the length of his futons one night to watch The Big Blue, a French film based on a real-life diver who, compelled to keep going deeper and deeper, gives up everything, including the woman he loves, so he can swim with the dolphins, eventually diving to his death. What are your dolphins? she asks when the film is through. What is it that compels you? I don’t know, he says, mouth yawning, body folding, eyes closing. They go to an arts and crafts fair and walk around, looking but not touching all the dishes on display. Such perfect dishes—slick platters in blue and white; fine white bowls with crazy black calligraphy swirls; tumblers made of rough red clay, the imprint of the artist’s hands exposed. She wants to buy these tumblers that seem so philosophically complex , so curious, such a contradiction in terms: glasses made of clay. She has seen such a thing before but never like this and she likes the way the red clay contrasts with the smooth pale green surface inside the tumblers, a splash of green that spills over the lip of the rim, the rim where the mouth could comfortably live. She wants them but here he is beside her and she is too embarrassed to say: Here is something I desperately want. Here is something I cannot live without. She is a woman who should be traveling light in the world, after all, staying as she is in this country now, so temporarily. She does not need more dishes. She does not need anything more at all. Her desires would only be an embarrassment, she thinks, to the man who now walks several paces ahead. 99 Did you see anything interesting? he asks...