A Shot In The Dark

“Can I tell you something?” the Handsome Businessman asks. He is seated next to me, facing the table. He turns his upper body slightly and looks at me, almost over his shoulder.

We are drinking in the Spanish bar in Ginza, the same bar where David and I drank with the students. We are, in fact, sitting at the same table. It is just after one in the morning. Everyone else has gone. Only he and I remain. We have both made an unspoken decision to miss our last trains and stay out all night together.

In answer to his question, I say, “Of course.”

“It’s kind of personal,” he adds.

I nod. It's okay.

This is his story:

One of the things that the Handsome Businessman always talks about when I ask him to introduce himself is that he loves to go camping. He mentions it again and says that he would be happiest living in the country. I point out that he lives in one of the three largest cities in the world--and I tease that maybe when he retires...i say, "That's in twelve or thirteen years, right?" He is forty-seven. Retirement in Japan is usually at the age of sixty. He explains that this is true of his company, but that he won’t retire at his age. He asks if mortgage is the right word, and I ask him what he wants to say. He explains that he just bought his condominium and will pay for it over the next 35 years. Yes, I say, mortgage is the right word. He does the math on the palm of his hand with a pen and comes up with the number eighty-one. He can retire at the earliest when he is eighty-one years old. He goes on to explain that the reason he bought the condominium is that he and his wife lived with his family and his wife and his mother did not get along. Things between them were so bad, he says, that three years ago his wife had a nervous breakdown--excuse me, nearly had a nervous breakdown.

I am at a bit of a loss, so I ask him how he met his wife. He was teaching and she used to come in with one of his students. He tells me that they met when she was sixteen and married when she was seventeen. I ask how old he was. He was twenty-nine. His friends told him he was crazy to marry someone twelve years younger than him, they told him they would have nothing to talk about. He said he thought they were wrong, that the age difference meant nothing to him.

I think about this.

The first thing I think about is the legendary immaturity of the average Japanese male. Yes, I do realize how that sounds. But, honto, a twenty-nine-year-old man and a sixteen-year-old woman? Come on. But maybe that's not so strange when you consider that the men here children themselves and also that they are used to being babied by women. Yes, in the public sector, men work really hard. Incredibly hard. Some of them work themselves to death. But at home, they are children who are waited on hand and foot by their wives in a way that would make most Western women gag and most Western men green with envy. So, yeah, the men here are incredibly immature. And then too, there’s the legendary immaturity of the women here. As a further example of something that I've given numerable examples of already: Sanrio sells pre-printed Hello Kitty cards for thirty-year-old women. And they are bought and given with absolutely no trace of irony. So, yes, an age difference means nothing when everyone involved is still immature.

Okay, so. I'm a bit ethnocentric about the maturity levels of your average Japanese. But even if we toss my own ethnocentric eccentricities out the window, really, how much does a man nearly thirty have in common with a teenager? In the West, we’d look down on a twenty-nine-year-old man who dated a sixteen-year-old woman. Or at least we’d recognize the relationship for what it is--a one-sided sexually predatory relationship--right?

And all I mean by that question is: Am I still the sane one in this picture?

The Handsome Businessman's wife is now in her mid-thirties, about a year older than I am. I happen to know very intimately the ground that a woman covers--has to cover if she is going to be worth anything--from seventeen to thirty-four. I know that there are some hard years in there. I think about trying to cross that ground as she has tried to, with an immature husband and three children in tow. Yes, that's right: Now my age, she has a husband (who feels perfectly free to stay out all night drinking) and three children (two teenagers and a four-year-old). My mother covered the same ground with a similar load so I know it can be done and I am sympathetic toward women who have tried it. And ever respectful of women who have done it.

The Handsome Businessman then tells me that his wife has never worked--and my sympathy toward her takes a hit. Okay, so raising three children is work--especially when you consider that it was done under the watchful eye of a mother-in-law who perhaps wasn’t the most understanding woman in the world. (And here, I’m going by the cultural stereotype of Japanese--and perhaps all--mothers-in-law.) But I have worked or gone to school (or both) since I was fifteen. My mother raised a family, went to school, and worked from the time she was the same age. Women who don’t work--regardless of their family situation--have to work overtime to earn my respect. That’s just the way it is with me. That one I won't apologize for or explain away.

As he speaks, I think of a conversation I had earlier in the week with a woman, a gaijin (not a gaijin like me but a gaijin who is fluent in Japanese, Chinese, and English, and who has lived and worked in Tokyo for over thirteen years) who said, when I asked what she thought of Japanese women, “They never say anything true.” She went on to explain further that most Japanese women don’t want to work, they want to stay home and have children and complain about having to stay home and raise children. I have this same attitude toward many Japanese women and I have had some trouble accepting this attitude in myself, but I know that it is there. I know I have it and that it is a problem. I also know that the women here in Tokyo (in Ginza anyway) seem to be polarized into women who work and have no families and women who have families but no jobs and who shop for a hobby. The latter women complain that their husbands work too much. They complain to me, a childless working woman, that their husbands work too much and this leaves them essentially husbandless and their children fatherless. And as they speak, I look at them sitting there in my classroom that overlooks one of the most expensive shopping streets in the world, look at them all cozily wrapped up in their shopping addiction and their expensive brand-name lifestyles and I think: Yes, and who bears some of the responsibility for that situation?

The Handsome Businessman tells me that since they moved, his wife is happier. I say, “Happier?” Yes, he says, but not one hundred percent. I ask if his mother is happy. He says nothing. I ask if he is happy. He says that he is happy. I say, “Really?” “Maybe,” he says, “I am happy eighty percent.” I ask why. He says, “My mother goes to bed alone.”

He has told me before that his father died seven years ago. Until then, seven of them had lived together in his father’s house. I know he has three children and if you add three more (him, his wife, his mother), that is not seven. I point this out and he tells me that his grandmother also lived with them until she died a couple of years ago. The eldest son, he was left the head of the family at his father’s death. He tells me now that the best thing is for people to live together, as a group. This is his belief and I understand this belief because one of the reasons I don’t have children is because I couldn’t raise them the way I was raised, in a large extended family, as a part of a group.

Because he is led (not only by his upbringing, but by an entire culture) to believe that people are happy in a group, I wonder what it must have been like for him to have to make the decision to split up the group, to move his own family from his father’s house into some modern, anonymous Tokyo high rise apaato. He explains that his father’s house is large, and his mother, he says again, goes to bed alone. Of his mother, he says, she has hobbies. He says this quickly. And just as quickly, he catalogues her hobbies. She does a kind of exercise that is a cross between yoga and tai-chi. She paints. She does other things, too...

He suddenly tells me that his daughter plays the piano but that there is no piano at his new house. His wife had wanted him to buy a piano for their daughter, but he had refused because now the only piano his daughter has access to is the one at his mother’s house. If he bought a piano, there wouldn’t be a reason for his daughter to go visit his mother three times a week. It sounds like his wife wants to cut off all contact with his mother (he does not say this explicitly) and after he says this, I have even less sympathy for his wife.

But I wonder. Of course I wonder if I am being manipulated, if I am getting the ol' "my wife doesn't understand me" line that leads so many straight into infidelity. I will say though that the sexual tension between us has abated somewhat and he and I have worked our way through some of the disappointment over that. Because we’ve weathered some of the intensity of the initial attraction, what is left is a situation that is more comfortable but equally close as the possibility of sexual contact ever was. Only a few times--perhaps three--over the night do I feel some force of desire emanating from him. I ignore it.

Our conversation about his home life continues. He tells me that for a time his wife was so depressed that he took her to the doctor. She’s been going to the doctor every couple of weeks for the last couple of years. “I always take her,” he says. I ask if it was the doctor’s idea for him to buy another home. He says, no, it was his idea. He would call home from the office before he left work for the day and his wife would sound depressed and he wouldn’t want to come home.

Yes of course I think about the years that I have spent depressed. I think about all the years I wanted to be different and about how much energy I put into hating my life. I put so much energy into hating my life and myself that I didn’t have any energy left over to actually change anything about myself or my life. Instead, I thought it might work to hound David to change, so I did so for years. I thought that if I could change him then I would change and then my life would change and then I would be happy. I didn't realize then that happiness is a self-generated quality. That it comes from within, not from some external source. It won't help my mental state, I learned, to try to get someone else to change. So even though I thought I'd be happy if I could change David, instead all I did was make both of us miserable--and that depressed me even more. The whole situation was sort of like testing out the efficacy of a new gun--the power of changing the wrong situation, I mean--by using it to shoot myself in the foot.

Does that make sense even? Let me explain the line of thinking like this: A new gun? I know I'll be happy if it works! Let me test it out. Bang. Ouch. Yeah, it works. I'm depressed but if I nag David into changing something, I'll be happy. That's a new gun. Bang. Maybe if I eat something I'll be happy. That's a new gun. Bang.

It’s worth mentioning that the Handsome Businessman and his wife have a four-year-old. Think about that: Why would an unhappy woman choose to have a child in her thirties, especially when her other children were teenagers and getting ready to head off to college? (A new gun? I wonder if it works?) I have some idea about why, but that idea thrives on a heady mixture of sympathy and cynicism. Yes, she had another child. No, it didn’t change anything.

I'm sure I'll be happy if we have a new child.

Bang.

I wonder about the role of postpartum depression as it intersects with your everyday garden-variety depression.

Bang.

Oh, I know: I'm sure I'll be happy if we move away from your mother.

Bang.

Asking a man responsible for the group to leave his widowed mother alone in a society where being part of a group means happiness and comfort for everyone involved?

Bang.

Oh I know. How about a new house?

Bang.

Asking your husband--who wants to live in the country--to assume the responsibility to work until he's eighty-one (in a society where everyone else gets to retire at sixty) for a thirty-five year mortage on a house in the city?

Bang.

Bang.

Bang.

After a bit, he tells me about studying martial arts. (He had been teaching martial arts when he met his wife.) He shows me the power points on one’s hands and uses this as a pretext to hold my hand and stroke my fingers. It’s just the slightest touch, almost noncommital. I let him do it. I look across at him, at his angular, handsome face and the scar that intersects his upper lip on the left side of his mouth. it's an old scar. He took a hit during practice one day and it had to be stiched up. It exists now only to be touched very lightly with gentle fingers. It is an invitation--old and permanent--to a kiss. If I did it, if I kissed his scar, it wouldn't be kissing him, a married man. The scar predates his marriage, so--

No, if I kissed it, I would be providing some comfort to an injury, an old injury, and that is not the same as cheating with a married man.

As he strokes my fingers, I can see past his dark eyes into the thinly veiled plea for some comfort, some sympathy, a little bit of petting that he thinks wouldn't mean anything to me--but which he believes would mean everything to him at this moment.

He touches me very gently and I let him do it but I don’t return the favor. After a bit he lets go and I let him let go even though I know that in his mind all he is asking for is something very small. But I also know enough about myself to keep my gun holstered. I've shot enough people in my lifetime. I've caused and weathered enough misery and, so yes, at the top of my list of people not to shoot is myself. But the next person on the list is not the Handsome Businessman, it's his wife. And below that are her children. And you know what? I've never met any of most of those people--and that is one reason that Japanese keep their families so incredibly well-hidden--so it would be easy to unholster my gun and take a few shots in the dark. But I'm not the kind of person who believes that a little bit of badly-misplaced comfort can abate a whole lifetime of misery. In fact, badly misplaced comfort is sometimes worse than the constant din of misery.

And if that doesn't make any sense, just accept that there is no way that I can justify wreaking havoc on a family--a woman and children--that I've never met.

After a moment, he lets go of my hand and I let him let go and and he is well-trained and very Japanese in that he doesn't show but the slightest, almost imperceptilbe trace of disappointment.

Later, we talk about his English studies. He thanks me for letting him practice his English with me on this night.

It’s nothing, I tell him.

I tell him nothing.