Skinned

Genki J-Girl

The new Japanese teacher, Kaz, just moved from Canada where he has lived for the last ten years. Walking into the teacher prep room, he sees me and New Guy.

“Where are all the JP?” Kaz asks.

I laugh. “Don’t be talkin’ like you ain’t Jap!” I tell him.

He and New Guy laugh.

One day I offered to kick Kaz's ass because he called me “Genki J-Girl.”

Notes To Self

Notes I’ve sent to myself by keitai (cell phone):

black boss coffee

Boss coffee is one of the most popular brands of canned coffee in Japan. Their new product is a no sugar, no cream or milk coffee called, of course, “Black Boss.”

ueno br mopped w
old urine

I walk into the bathroom in Ueno station and nearly gag from the smell. The floors have just been mopped and it smells like they’ve been mopped with old urine.

god i love dumb hunks

I write this to myself as I’m leaving the gym. Like any gym, the boys who work there are young, hunky, and not too bright.

nayb 3am fight

I am surfing the net at three in the morning and I hear something I’ve never heard before in Tokyo: My neighbors are having a fight. A woman is screaming at her boyfriend. I don’t understand what the fight is about, but the conversational pattern is exactly the same as any other screaming neighbor couple fight I’ve ever heard. “What?” she yells in Japanese, “Do you think--?” she continues in a volley of Japanese I don't understand. I don’t hear his answer. They continue.

I step out onto my balcony for a smoke and see that the fighting couple live in the building next door. The light is on and the curtains are open and I can see the woman smoking a cigarette and moving around the tiny apartment. The man stays away from her. I watch for a minute or two. They talk for a bit, then go into the bedroom.

yo-chan: he loves sex, u seem/are innocent

I am having dinner and drinks with a friend, Yo-chan, in Ginza. We are talking about the Handsome Businessman. I tell her that he met his wife when she was sixteen and he was almost thirty. They married the next year. “He likes sex,” she says, matter-of-fact. She continues, “He likes you because you’re innocent.” I ask what she means. She tries to explain. “Not innocent, but--you know what I mean. Not experienced.”

ai-chan ju-kun handsome

Ai-chan has never met Ju-kun. Ju-kun is a former Japanese teacher who is, quite frankly, one of the best-looking men on the planet. He stops traffic. One night, Ai-chan goes out drinking with her students and one of the students invites Ju-kun along. She tells me later that the first time she saw him, she told him, “You’re really handsome.” I laughed. She says, “I just kept telling him, ‘You’re really handsome. You’re really handsome.’” I know the effect his looks have on women. We turn into babbling idiots around men like Ju-kun. “You’re married!” I say. She says, “I know! That’s why it’s okay for me to tell him I think he’s handsome!”

pepti dragon

I see an ad on the train for something called “Pepti Dragon.” I assume it’s some kind of stomachache remedy like Pepto-Bismol. But I’m not really able to tell from the ad which shows a wind-blown businessman in front of a stylized, manga-like dragon.


shoes off, mom tucks them under the bench

A little girl, perhaps four years old, sits next to me on the subway. She is with her mother. The little girl wants to stand on the seat, so she kicks off her little red shoes. (No one here will ever stand on a chair or bench with their shoes on. Honestly, even the guys who change the advertisements in the subway cars kick off their shoes, stand on the bench, change the ad, then put their shoes back on. They move down a few feet and kick off their shoes, stand on the bench...repeat, repeat, repeat, until all fifteen or twenty ads in the car have been replaced. Their shoes are shot at the back from being kicked off and put back on so many times.) Her mother primly lines up the shoes and puts them under the bench. The little girl watches out the window until we pull out of the station and enter the subway tunnel. Then there is nothing to see, so the little girl turns around and sits down. Her mother reaches under the bench and brings out the shoes and the little girl puts them on.

u can't go against ur principles, or ur nature

Something I want not to forget.


O-bake--Ghosts, Phantoms, Monsters

It is night.

It is dark and I am walking down the street my grandmother lived on until she died. I am looking for the train station but I am lost.

I ask a man, a weathered old man, for directions. He is going that way and will show me.

The man has a dog with him, a big black Rottweiller. She is calm until someone approaches then she goes crazy. The man holds her collar, holding her back until the other person goes away. As we walk, the dog inches toward me and I am afraid but won’t show it. I force myself to be calm. The dog calmly inches toward me until she just reaches my hand and then she walks beside me, the soft fur on top of her head just under my fingertips.

I look over and see that I am walking beside my niece. She is eleven years old. She says we should go see her father. I agree.

The house is old, falling down. To the right of the entry is a kitchen. It is an old-fashioned kitchen, the kind where nothing is built in. The stove is an old-fashioned stove, solid iron on curlicued feet. Everything in the kitchen is covered with an inch-thick layer of steel gray ash or dust. My brother is standing there and he is the same steel gray color. I know he is dead. I know he is dead.

He turns to me and I see that he is brushing his teeth and can’t speak.

My mother steps forward and puts her arms around him and then she steps away. I step forward and put my arms around him.

He is solid, real.

Bake no kawa--The Skin Of The Monster

The dream is a net and I struggle against it trying to wake.

I am aware. I am aware that I am on my back. I can feel the futon beneath me. I know that it is my own futon and I know that I am in my own apartment. I know that I am on my own futon in my own apartment in Tokyo. The darkness and the dream are sitting on my legs and holding down my arms. I can’t move. I am aware of all this and I am aware too that I am not solid. I realize that all this time my chest has been covered with a skin that is nothing more than a kind of surface tension. The dream has broken that surface tension and I look down at my body and I see that my heart has risen to the surace of my body. The heart is a mouth, gaping wide and gasping for air at the interface between dream and reality.

I struggle and pull and pull at my heart until it closes again and resubmerges. My chest closes up again and I am awake again.

Only then am I solid again.

Bake no kawa o higareru--Literally: To strip the skin from the monster. It means: To reveal something for what it really is.

The Heart aches from its unexpected journey to the surface and I cry as I write the dream down. The Heart writes:

I miss you and I have no one to tell that to.

I miss my brother.

Coming back to Japan so soon after the funeral was only so much me being Japanese. I had a job to do and I did it, am doing it. There was no time for grief. There is never any time for grief. This is me being Japanese and it is me being my father too.

When my father’s mother died, I was six or seven years old. I cried. My father, seeing, said, “Why are you crying? It wasn’t your mother.”

There is nothing that hurts enough for me to have permission to cry about it. I rarely cry. But now, as I plan my homecoming, my heart reminds me of the backlog of feelings that will come.