I've Been Wanting

This is an entry I wrote a few days before Grankle died. It's about another person I love.

The Ex-Student

The phone rings and I see from my caller ID that it’s the Ex-Student. He left Tokyo a month ago, and though we’ve emailed back and forth several times a week, I haven’t spoken to him since he returned to his hometown.

Because I know its him, I jokingly answer the phone Nihon-style, with a blithe, “Moshi-mosh.’”

He laughs, says, “Moshi-moSHI?!”

After our greetings, he asks me what I did today. “I’m just ridiculous,” he says. “No, no,” he says. “That’s not right. Nandaro? Nandaro?” He thinks for a few seconds then says, “Anyway, what did you do today?”

I turn the question around on him and find out that he’s spent the day shopping for a new language school. He went to the next town (there’s nothing, he says, in his hometown) to find out that only one foreign teacher was available for too much money and that the contract he would have to sign was going to conflict with his plans to go to sea next month. He says too that he’s forgetting all his English. To me, he sounds more fluent than ever. I tell him this, and he says, “No, no. I am forgetting.” It’s been his refrain since I met him, this feeling that he’s forgetting what he spent two years learning.

He asks what I did today.

Today...I think.

I ask him how work is going. He tells me that the “starting time” is too early: eight a.m. He is always late. I laugh. He says his father gets angry at him. I say, “But don’t you live with your father? Why doesn’t he get you up earlier?” He laughs and says, “It’s okay if my father is late. It’s his company.” He says the staff complains about the early starting time so I ask him about the staff. There are three employees, he tells me. There is an elderly man (I misunderstand his pronunciation of “elderly” which is an uphill climb pronunciation-wise for most Japanese, so he says, “Old. Old. And old man”) and two women that he calls “The Girls.” (I don’t correct him on this.)

Finally, I tell him what I did today. Today I went to Ueno, to Ameyoko, the open market. I bought coffee and shirasu (dried baby fish) and ikura (salmon roe). I had maguro-uni-don (tuna and sea urchin on rice) in a street stall-ish restaurant, then I came home and hit the market for fresh fruit and yogurt. I waited for New Guy and Ken to move into Ben’s apartment and then we went to Shop QQ down the road together. After, I came home and wrote. I tell him all this. He listens and comments that Ameyoko is cheap.

I will say this about the Ex-Student: His family owns a very successful international shipping business that weathered the bursting of the bubble economy. The Ex-Student was a boy when the bubble burst and his grandfather and father have trained him to be extraordinarily conservative with money when it comes to most things. (I say most things because he also knows that you have to spend money to make money. Consequently, he believes that money spent on suits and drinking are an investment, so he wears suits that cost three times my entire working wardrobe, and he easily spends more money each week drinking with businessmen than I make in a month.) Anyway, he appreciates that I don’t shop for a hobby and that I look for bargains everywhere. Because of this line of thinking, my shopping in Ameyoko for inexpensive groceries, fish and coffee, is a plus to him. In fact, he himself has been at the hyaku-en (hundred yen) shop that day looking for cleaning supplies. According to tradition, the family’s home will be cleaned for the New Year. In fact, he’s also going to spend the next day cleaning the temple where his father and grandfather and uncle go to pray for good fortune.

We chat and joke a while, talking about his office and the hours of golf he plays each day as part of his training to take over the family business. I ask him if his golf game is getting any better. The last I heard, he couldn’t hit the ball straight. He tells me that he is working hard at it. “Ganbatte!” he says to himself.

I tell him about my plans to visit Hiroshima over the holidays and he does a very neat and unobtrusive self-invitation. I say that it is unobtrusive because, based on the merest hint of his suggestion, I end up changing my plans so that he can join me for part of my trip. He tells me that will be in another prefecture until the 31st inspecting a ship in dock, but after that, he says, he will be free to join me in Hiroshima.

He is out walking and I ask him if he is coming home from work. No, he says, he’s walking for exercise. He’s gained two kilos in one month from his mother’s cooking, he says. I ask how he likes living with his parents. He says it’s about fifty-fifty. His mother cooks and cleans and does his laundry. “It is very easy for me to live,” he says. But the town where he lives is a big change from Tokyo. He is finding it difficult to find things to like in a town where the only place open past eight o’ clock is the nearby convenience store.

“I’ve been wanting to call you,” he says, “but the timing is not good.” He gets up early for work and so he has to go to bed early. I tell him it’s okay to call on the weekends and between ten and eleven at night. (It’s okay to call until ten generally, but after ten requires some kind of okay.)

He is home now, and I hear someone yelling in the background. He speaks Japanese to the person and I ask if it’s his mother. “Hai-hai-hai-hai-hai,” he says. “She is telling me to take a bath.” I ask, “Does she give you little bath toys like we bought in Odaiba?” (I had picked up a little set of bath toys, metal floats printed with cephalopods and crustaceans and a little plastic fishing pole with a magnet on the end.) “Yes,” he says, “My duck.” “Your rubber ducky?” I ask. “Yes!” He laughs. “Ducky. Ducky,” he says.

I will say this about the Ex-Student: He has a terrific sense of humor. Honto, we really laugh a lot together. It’s kind of strange, but he has a very playful and happy-go-lucky sense of humor in a place where everyone so often seems very straightlaced. I mean, he’s modern and hip and quick-witted and irreverent--and all that’s mixed with a very traditional Japanese outlook and discipline and empathy. I will also say that in my mind he is characterized by two things: One is that he doesn’t like ships and boats, doesn’t like being a sailor--and he will take over his family’s shipping business and be a sailor on a ship for the next ten or more years and spend his life dealing with ships. The other is that he loves Austin Powers and Spongebob Squarepants. He does a fabulous imitation of Spongebob’s pal, Patrick.