Blind

These two entries are being posted one after the other because my internet connection (which has not been working for several days now) is suddenly working again. They are posted in the order I wrote them (that is, the one that follows is an earlier entry...

Blind

I am teaching a lesson on it and wh- clefts when the energy in the room shifts. The students--an older businessman and a much younger guy who is looking for work--suddenly both look off to their left at nothing. I pause. The older businessman speaks first. He says one word:

“Earthquake.”

Then I feel it.

The building is shaking and shaking and I think about another student, Shoko, who said of the last big earthquake, “I thought it would never stop.” The building is shaking and shaking and shaking. I sit down and reach behind me to open the door.

The doors across the hall are also open--one always opens a door during an earthquake as a means of securing an escape route--and through the other open doors, I can see Ben and Masashi in their respective classrooms. They are both standing. Ben makes a joke about how he shouldn’t have had all that beer at lunch and I joke back about how he has beer for lunch everyday and it doesn’t usually affect the rest of us. I hear his students laugh and the building is shaking and shaking.

It goes on and on and then stops. I close my door and talk for a minute with the two men about earthquakes. Neither of them worries about the big quake that’s coming to level Tokyo. We go on with our grammar practice.

I am blind to Tokyo now. I am blind to the wonders of this place. I read Hemingway writing about bullfighting on the train and I listen to Ozomatli on my iPod and I wonder about how I ever could become blind to this place.

The earthquake--the second large quake this week--doesn’t fill me with the panic that my first earthquakes did. I’m not quite to the point of taking them in stride, but I don’t panic. I don’t burst into tears when they happen as I did two quakes ago when the building shook and shook and shook. I think as the natives do now: If they happen, they happen. If it all goes down the tubes tomorrow, then so be it.

I stand out on the balcony of the third floor with Seth and we smoke and talk about this place that I used to call Real Life. Seth is leaving soon to rejoin the world. He is leaving to go to a place where he will ride his 10-speed and live with his parents until he can find a Real Job. I will miss him when he leaves.

Though I am blind, I still dream in color and I dream continuously. I dream my way from Higashi-Mukojima to Ginza. I dream my way home. I dream the hours at the gym and I dream the all-night drinking parties with handsome, married businessman. I don’t know who I am and despite the fact that I love not knowing who I am, I am still dreaming and dreaming and dreaming.

I bought the Hemingway book at the Tower Records in Shibuya. The seventh floor is foreign--English--books and magazines. The young man at the counter spoke Japanese and I paid him in yen and thanked him in Japanese. The store carries every book that Gabriel Garcia Marquez ever wrote, and the sight of them lined up neatly on the shelf nearly brings me to tears. I wanted, like the idolatress I am, to gently and lovingly kiss the spine of each text.

This month I drank away what I would estimate to be about sixty-thousand yen. Maybe more. Drinking here is an investment, a way to establish and bond newly formed friendships. Drinking here is not tainted any negative judgment. Getting absolutely stupidly falling down puking drunk the way frat boys do? Well, adults with jobs and families and responsibilities to that here. Not every night--not even often. But once in a while, once in while it happens, and that’s okay here. I have not been frat boy drunk in Japan.

Across from me on the train a man reads a newspaper that he has folded the way Japanese businessmen fold newspapers, in fourths, so that the newspaper becomes a long column. It works because the newspapers are printed from top to bottom. I tried folding my newspaper--the English-language Japan Times--this way and it looked terrific, like any salaryman’s origami, until I had to turn the page then the whole thing turned into a crumpled ball of newsprint. Even newspapers take practice here.

On the back of the man’s newspaper is a cartoon. The print is too far away for me to even attempt to read it but I can see, in one large drawing, a naked man with a samurai haircut sucking on the nipple of a woman whose kimono has fallen open.

I am coming out of the Ginza line exit into Shibuya station and already I know that, though I am not lost, I am turned around and heading in the wrong direction. I don’t stop walking or even slow my pace. Instead I turn my gaze upward and begin to quickly scan the station ceiling for signs in English. The Brain begins to search for two things: the word Hachiko and an arrow. I need the Hachiko exit out of Shibuya station because it’s the closest exit to Tokyo Hands, the big store where I am going to try to find a Halloween costume. I am still striding away and looking upward when man comes up beside me and asks if I am free. I don’t hear him quite or I do hear but don’t understand. I say, “I’m sorry?” He says again, “Are you free?” I think he must be asking if I am lost, so I say, “I’m okay. Thank you.” He says, “Will you have coffee with me? I will pay for your.” I keep walking, say, “I’m sorry.” He walks along beside me and asks, “Are you single?” I say no. He says, “Married?” I say no. He says, following me, “Are you single?” I tell him I have a boyfriend. I say this, then, purely out of curiosity, I agree to have coffee with him. “I only have a minute,” I say. “I have to meet a friend.” I spend less than ten minutes in arduous English conversation with this man in a Macu in Shibuya and find out that he is unemployed now though he used to work in marketing. He takes lessons at a competing English language school and has traveled to America. He is in his forties I’d guess and when he gives me his phone number, he explains that it’s to his home. He doesn’t have a cell phone, he says, because he lives with his father and his father is very strict. He hands me a sheet of paper torn from a red-covered Campus notebook and says, “Please write your number.” I give him a fake name and phone number and tell him I have to go.

Hiroshi, a retired former company president, sings a traditional Japanese song to me during his lesson. He explains that, during parties with geisha, he used to have to sing traditional Japanese songs. I think: I am sitting in a room with a man who has sung and danced with geisha. It is like having a lesson with an emu. By that, I mean that Hiroshi’s experiences are so far beyond my experiences that his life is almost out of the bounds of my comprehension. I am dreaming Hiroshi and his life too, his life of business meetings and geisha parties. Together Hiroshi and I translate the words to the poem he’s just sung: Like water, even though we are separated, our love will continue to flow together. Ah, chigao, I think. That is a poor translation. I can feel and hear the sentiment in the song when he sings it, but it is a poor translation that we are able to devise between us.

I am at dinner in Ginza with two students and two other teachers. One of the students is very dramatic and consequently a woman after my own heart. The waiter comes over and says it’s last order. He asks if we want dessert. We hmmm and haw a bit and the dramatic student picks up the menu. “Kore to kore to kore to kore,” she says, pointing to each dessert. This and this and this and this. She hands the menu to the waiter with a final, “Onegaishiamas’!”

The pachinko parlor near my gym is called DOPA.

Shop QQ’s baked goods section has a new selection. The package, in English, informs me that the bread before me (which looks somewhat like a croissant) is from the “cheese, cheese, and weiner series.”

I am in the bar with several businessmen. They ask my age. I never lie about my age, but I ask them first to guess. The guesses range from 29 to 33. All are too low and I tell them so. I push them up to my real age: 34. And they “uuuhhhhn.” Then I point to each of them and rattle off their ages. I hit every one of them dead on. They all “uuuhhhnnn!” again at how smart I am. I don’t tell them that their ages appear on a computer list that I have access to each day.


I bought the Hemingway--a book of articles he wrote as a reporter--in large part because I opened it up to the following quote: “In the ethics of shooting dangerous game is the premise that the trouble you shoot yourself into you must be prepared to shoot yourself out of.” When I read this quote to David during our nightly (his daily) phone call, he says, “You could also say that the trouble you write yourself into you must be prepared to write your way out of.” When he says this, it is like I’ve been struck by lightning.

This Evening

Tonight is The Kaisha Halloween party. I will dress as a witch.

Later That Evening

The party was a success. Pictures, which I would normally post, will be emailed to those who are interested. Sorry to be a stick in the mud, but with The Kaisha trainers monitoring the blog and flickr, it’s going to have to be that way from now on.