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ne night, all the bars in Matsumoto are full so we weave our way to the town’s sole expatriate bar. At Scotty’s I order beers in English while Nozaki waits. It’s different with me in charge. Usually Nozaki negotiates all our eating and drinking in Japanese. When our beers arrive, I forget where I am —the country of Japan—and drink straight from the bottle rather than pouring the beer into glasses—first for him, then for me—as I usually would. Nozaki watches, his eyes getting wide. What? I ask. It’s just very strange to see a woman drink beer like that. I ask Nozaki if he dislikes this, the sight of a woman drinking from the bottle as I am now and he says no and part of me believes him but part of me wonders, what does he see? On some level is he repelled? Aroused? Curious? Some combination of all three? He’s told me before that he does not take cultural habits too seriously, that he believes a person can be American or Japanese but have more in common with someone French, Brazilian or Sudanese. But it’s never the theoretical I care about with him; it’s always the personal, the naggingly personal. I don’t wonder right now about ideas. I wonder what he thinks of me. We continue drinking. I order two more beers. Nozaki tells me that he thinks the most honorable life is a life lived simply, that he has a fantasy of himself as a farmer in old age, and as this farmer he will —how do you say it?—cultivate fresh vegetables from the ground, and as he talks I realize I am loving this, loving the night, the conversation , the word “cultivate” —tagayasu—that saturates my sense of everything and now that I have heard Nozaki’s fantasy of old age, I am devising one of my own, thinking I want to be a farmer’s wife and I like this idea, secretly convincing myself that this is what I’ve always O ................................................................................ 71 longed to be, a farmer’s wife, fat and frumpy, happy with her stout radish legs, content to live a simple life that revolves around raising vegetables and making for herself at midday —for this is a time of day she relishes for its privacy—a strong cup of Japanese tea. And before all that? Before our lives on this farm begin? Before that, I imagine, we will live a life of ordinary joy, the kind that has always eluded me. First Nozaki will come to Iowa to visit. He will marvel at the sight of the prairie and sigh at the size of that wide Midwestern sky. He will smile when we walk past all those cheerful Iowa houses with their red geraniums growing in pots on wide front porches. And then he will return to his home in Japan and he will study English , and in Iowa I will get serious about tackling Japanese, learning to read the kanji beyond “man” and “woman” and “apple” and “child.” And eventually, I will return to Japan to be with Nozaki, to make our new home there—here—and he will continue working every day at the law practice underneath his apartment and I will go to work at the little ABC School that I love and we will have a little plot of land nearby where we will grow radishes, tomatoes, peppers and corn, and we will go along, happily, meeting up after work in his messy little apartment, his crazy place, as he calls it, only by then, I will have cleaned it up and imposed some sense of order, put the books onto tidy cedar bookshelves, organized his clothes, and put away mine, everything into its proper place, and then I will arrange red tulips on the table in a clear square vase. And in the kitchen at night we will cook dinners of fish with salad and rice and it’s here that in that crazy place, this little kitchen, this room that’s cleaned up in my mind’s eye, it’s here that we will raise a couple of kids, a red-haired, brown-eyed boy and a black-haired, blue-eyed girl, children who, because of their parents , will speak two languages or some beautiful and eccentric mix, pidgin-speak peppered by the kind of private vocabulary every family constructs. Apples wasuki desu...
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