Sometimes you get to see on Facebook
how a group of Toukyou people who all met each other in Canada got
together and had a party or something, but you just kind of nod,
wistfully imagine the scene, and move on. For the most part, you
tacitly acknowledge to yourself that your goodbye was probably the
final goodbye. You learn to accept that length of time and depth of
feeling don't always experience a direct relationship. So when one
time at the airport (a place that contains more mixed emotions for me
than anywhere else in the world), I bid a friend of mine 「さようなら」and
he breezily came back with “See you again,” I thought it was a
really cool thing to say, but it never occurred to me that I actually
might.
Until he sent me a message out of
nowhere.
“Rude Boy,” he said, in English –
never a good way to approach me, but at least his English is better
than my Japanese. “Remember me?”
Of goddamn course. People I used to
hang out with on a daily basis don't usually just slip my mind.
“I'm thinking about hitchhiking down
to Kyoto or Osaka next week. Do you have time to hang out?”
Osaka, I tell him. Let's do Osaka. For
one thing, fuck Kyouto. I can tool around Kyouto whenever the hell I
want. I need a reason to go
to Oosaka, and I love having one. Plus, if we do it there, we can add
a couple of other familiar faces to the proceedings.
We manage to wrangle two. The first is
a tiny, quiet girl whom I mainly remember for rarely saying more than
three words back-to-back. But she must have a couple years of
university under her belt by now; that's always good for pulling
people out of their shells, whether they want to stay there or not.
Anyway she's very sweet and I'm looking forward to seeing her again.
The second, however, I'm a little more
leery of. She's probably the sluttiest girl I know – except like,
in a bad way though, and she always did have a thing for poking fun
at my lack of luck in love. The fact that I actually had a pretty
huge crush on her definitely
didn't help my feelings of resentment over these comments. Thank God
I have better taste now. The only thing she has going for her is that
she's gyaru, which, admittedly, is
a pretty huge plus. We had some fun times together, no doubt about
that, but we had some very antagonistic ones as well. I've talked to
her a handful of times since I've been here, mostly to have her call
me “still shit at Japanese” for writing 「７－１１」instead
of 「セブンイレブン」、or
tell me that we should hang out together in Ibaraki-shi, which I
promptly did not do. Because I just know I'm not coming out of that
feeling good about myself. This has all the potential for a
full-blown encounter, so I make a few rules for myself:
- Don't start anything. If she plays nice, you play nice.
- Even if she does start anything, try not to react. It's not worth it.
- If you can't resist, respond with wit, not venom...and recognize the thin line between the two.
- The first one to get angry loses. (Don't worry. She's quick to anger. You're slow to it.)
Finally, of course, there was our MC.
When I knew the man back in high school, he was a soccer nut, and
later he studied at the University of Baltimore. He was never the
type who would have hitchhiked anywhere, but I can see how he could
have transformed into one. I picture him as some kind of road scholar
now, The Communist Manifesto
stored in the cavity of his acoustic guitar as he randomly travels
Japan in search of thought-provoking conversation. I have a robust
imagination.
*
Yokohama is exactly
as he was the last time I saw him. He doesn't even appear to have
aged a day. He looks like the guy from Sukima Switch. The one without
the afro.
The last time I saw
Hyougo, she was a 16-year-old girl; the person standing in front of
me is a 21-year-old woman. She couldn't have undergone a heavier
metamorphosis if she'd spent the intervening time in a chrysalis. I
remember her wearing this sort of pseudo-emo all-black ensemble
before, but now she's decked out in one of those sort of frumpy, yet
somehow appealing look that less flashy Japanese girls sometimes do.
Her face is completely different. I don't even recognize her.
She's...she's kind of hot, now.
We head for an udon
shop and reminisce about the old days. Though Yokohama's goal in
coming down was mainly to see me, specifically (since he'd seen most
of the others more recently), in fact we are all veterans of the ESL
Room at our old high school back in Canada, where they ryuugaku'd.
There were others, but of course the Japan Group was pretty
close-knit, and I got in on that. There were Canadians there too, a
little group of us, and I made a couple of precious friendships that
I am lucky enough to still have today. It was sort of a second home.
We congregated there every lunch, every break, every day both before
and after school. I spread my textbooks and other scholastic
paraphernalia across the top of the TV. I got up extra-early so I
wouldn't miss any happenings. They were momentous fucking times, as
far as high school goes.
Yokohama
and I took Art 12 together, too. One time at the end of class he
presented me with my project, which he'd just straight-up done for
me. I think I got like a B on it. I helped him puzzle through To
Kill a Mockingbird, too. Hyougo
and I TA'd a Grade 11 Japanese class together. We communicated, in
our way, with her not really speaking any English and me managing to
at least make myself halfway understood in Japanese.
We wander around
Umeda with no particular goal in mind, settling on a bench in an
atrium high above street level. A cool breeze takes the edge off the
humidity. We relax and talk about nothing. It's like High School
Days: Redux. Exactly the same sensation.
Unfortunately,
Hyougo has to leave for work, but now that we've reconnected, we can
probably hang out again anytime. Maybe. You know how these things
work. Yokohama and I kill some time waiting for Ibaraki to get off
her ass and come meet us, and we end up cruising through Joyopolis.
We have to pass through the medal games part, and a couple of girls
are standing out front, yelling things at passersby with microphones.
“Oosaka! Oosaka!
Yay, Oosaka! Oosaka! Yay, Oosaka!”
Yokohama gets a
kick out of that, since Hyougo and I have just spent the last few
hours making fun of him for not being from Kansai. He thus decides
that it would be a good idea to draw their attention to me. One asks
me in English where I'm from, I respond in Japanese, and now I'm
running my usual set. As a foreigner in Japan, you get asked the same
questions so often you'd have a good chance of offering an
appropriate answer without even listening (to be fair, this is by no
means particular to Japan). I leave feeling pretty good, which is
when I realise that they're probably there to pump people up, causing
them to spend more money. Pretty clever actually. Ibaraki eventually
makes her way to our vicinity, and Yokohama makes me answer the
phone.
“Hello?”
“Yes, hello, are
you here?”
“Hello? Who is
this? Is this Rude Boy?!”
“That's right,
this is Rude Boy.”
“Holy shit, Rude
Boy, your Japanese got better.”
When she comes in
she looks ready to paint the walls in an explosion of excitement.
Immediately she goes in for a hug and – ok, so this is a thing that
is happening now. I had no idea she was so fond of me. She warns us
that she thinks she has influenza, but she sure the hell doesn't look
it. She embarks on a stream-of-consciousness conversation, as if
trying to speak on every possible topic simultaneously. Yokohama and
I can barely get a word in edgewise. I wonder if she even needs us
there.
She hasn't changed
a bit. No, not one bit.
She
grabs and swipes at both of us, gets me to feel how hot her neck is,
intentionally coughs in my face while laughing. Amazingly, she went
to a joshikou, and she's going to a joshidai. Truly, she needs male
attention like she needs oxygen, and she's gotten it, too, every day
for the last twenty years. I wonder idly what her life's going to
look like in another twenty. I'm starting to remember why I liked her
in the first place. Not just because she's hot, although damn but is
she, and gyaru to boot. But there's more. She's fun. She's loud.
She's indomitable. She's got this boundless, directionless,
irrational energy that somehow just oh god damn it it's
happening again isn't it.
She's feeling lousy
enough that she wants to go in and sit down somewhere. Where? “Here.”
This is a cake shop. “I want to eat cake.” Uh, ok. But it looks
expensive as piss. “Whatever, I'll treat you.” If you say so.
It's a cafe type place with an Indian theme, but no Indian food.
Ibaraki orders something that isn't cake. How long has it been,
anyway? So Yokohama, you've been living in America? Seriously, Rude
Boy, your Japanese got way better.
Then she starts
with the bullying. She's held it in for a good twenty minutes but now
she lets loose. Like I goddamn knew she would. She asks:
“So, are your
numbers any less awful than the last time I saw you?”
And she brings me
to my knees just like that. It's strange, I literally feel like I've
been stabbed in the chest, straight through the ribs, just below my
heart, and it's her that's holding the knife. Shock and pain echo
down my stomach. She's asked basically the one question that I can't
just shrug off, and she doesn't even know it. She's like a cat,
torturing a mouse. It's just fun for her. She doesn't even know she's
hurting anything. That makes it so much worse.
“Who knows,” I
shrug.
As a
matter of fact, they have
gotten slightly better, but I'm not about to discuss it with someone
whose numbers are as enviable as hers.
“He's a playboy,”
Yokohama interjects, perhaps reading my discomfort.
“Rude Boy, a
playboy?!”
“Only in my
heart. I'd be a playboy, if I could.”
“Hahahahaha, if
you could.”
“Ibaraki, you
should introduce Rude Boy to some girls at your school.”
“I don't think I
have anybody who'd go for him. What kind of girls you into?”
“Lots. Gyaru, I
guess.”
“Ah, like me!”
She cracks up.
“Impossible! No,
of course not. Definitely, Japanese girls don't like guys like you.
If you're not Japanese, you have to be either super-stylish, or,
like, huge or something. You're just not good-looking enough. Like
when you're around, do you hear like 'oh my god, foreigners are so
cool!' You don't, right? You don't have any appeal.” I fucking know
that already, Ibaraki. Stop talking about it.
“Marry me, then.
Then I can immigrate.”
“Ah, sorry,
there's no way I could have children with you.”
“That's ok, I
don't want children.” And if I did I don't think I'd want a mother
like you raising them.
“Go build up a
ton more muscle and come back.”
My
attraction to her is boiling into resentment, and hard.
I try to make it stop, because holy shit. I'm
the picture of emotional health, hey? She smokes, now. I'm not even
surprised. Except that Mother Russia at least turns her head; Ibaraki
blows it straight in my face, and laughs when I frown and lean away.
She tells me,
later, that she wouldn't make fun of me if she didn't like me. I want
to believe it, and do. Maybe she's just gaming me. If so, well
played.
Ibaraki's condition
continues to deteriorate over the course of the stop, and after a few
phone calls she decides she's calling in sick to work and going
straight home. We agree that she should probably do that sooner
rather than later. She perks up enough to start walking, but she has
me carry her bag. Ordinarily, I'd have shoved it back at her. A girl
like that, you don't do what she wants. You push her away, she'll
push harder; try to reel her in, and she'll back the fuck out. But if
you let her know that she's got you by the balls, she'll squeeze just
as hard as she goddamn wants and you'll never, ever see that roll
into anything. Besides which, what the hell kind of Beta male shit is
that anyway?
But
I'm not trying to sleep with her (not because I wouldn't, mind you,
but because I know it's not going to happen), and she really does
look sick. I'm starting to get genuinely worried for her, so I suck
it up and sling the thing over my shoulder. It's kind of fun, anyway,
doing a favour like that for a woman, and probably there's something
in that but holy shit I have absolutely no desire to explore it. I
realise, in a flash of repressed montage, that I used to do this
literally all the time for her – carry her bag, I mean. And I
remember pretty well how that worked out. See, it's stuff like this
that I'm talking about when I say that I used to be a different
person. Within minutes she's got an arm entwined around one of ours
each, barely able to support herself or walk in a straight line; we
lurch dangerously into the paths of opposing foot traffic. If it were
a few hours later everyone around us would assume she was drunk.
“Call your
boyfriend,” Yokohama suggests.
“He doesn't have
a car. I'm breaking up with him soon, anyway.”
She starts to feel
even worse amid the sway of the crowded train. She takes hold of my
sleeve and entrusts a significant portion of her weight to my
safekeeping. “I'm sick. God, my head hurts. I think I'm going to
throw up. My head's going to explode.” Finally she swoons forward
and buries her head in my chest. I reach up and stroke her head.
“You're just
being nice because you want me to marry you,” she mumbles.
When a bunch of
people get off, an older lady clears some people away and tells us to
sit together. I laugh. I'm carrying her bag, she's clinging to me,
she's mentioning marriage, she's momentarily stopped verbally abusing
me. The lady must think we're dating.
I can
totally see us hatefucking. Not tomorrow, but at some point. You're
all gonna say that's just wishful thinking. But there's a difference.
I feel like I want to
all the time; here I feel like we will.
I will certainly let you know if this happens.
Yokohama and I wile
away the last hour or so in the vicinity of Kyouto Eki. We find a
small arcade and I kick his ass at Initial D. We stop in at a cafe
and he treats me. Finally we just stand around waiting for his bus,
debriefing on the day's events. I feel like I've been reminded why I
came to this country in the first place, and why I want to stay. And
I hate to admit it...but I kind of like these people better than my
current group of friends. Is shared experience just that powerful?
“Let's meet up
again,” he says.
“Definitely,” I
reply. “Hopefully before another four years passes.”
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