日本には四季があります (Nihon ni wa shiki ga arimasu)
“Do you remember Aki?”
He said it over beers at the izakaya. I nodded quickly before taking a sip from my mug. “Sure.”
His eyes widened. “Get this...”
***
Of course I remembered Aki. We’d only been in town about two months then. He’d been in Japan longer, but I’d just started working here. We were out with a cluster of friends at a hole-in-the-wall bar near the big station. It was dark and narrow, but it was still an actual, honest-to-god bar — a precious rarity in our rural prefecture. We were drinking big fat bottles of Heartland, which seemed to be Canadian beer. Occasionally someone would get a Jack and Coke (which we jokingly called “Jack and Splash” given the heavy hand of the bar’s owner) or a drink my friend had concocted with help from the bartender — a neon green thing they’d named The Incredible Hulk.
Two girls were talking and laughing at the end of the bar, and he’d been chatting them up. I wandered over and they’d introduced themselves: Aki and Natsuko. When you’re a moderately tall, broad, bald American in rural Japan, appearance tends to be an easy topic of conversation. My Japanese was crap, but Natsuko knew some English, and asked about my earrings. By the end of the evening, he and I were waiting for the ramen truck and Natsuko had walked out wearing one of my earrings. I’d gotten her keitai email and planned to contact her the next day... I needed that earring back after all.
***
He sipped his Coke-hai. “So I was at the bar the other day and damned if she wasn’t there!”
I nodded again and drank more beer. My eyes were heavy-lidded. I felt like I knew what he was going to say, like I’d scripted it out months ago, drunk, on the back of a supermarket receipt and then lost it, and found it again by accident when I was cleaning out the pockets of my jacket — surprised, but familiar.
“What was the name of her friend?”
***
Natsuko answered the phone. He and I were at the yakitoriyasan eating chicken on a stick and drinking beers. She laughed as she recognized my voice, then his in the background, coaching me through the Japanese I needed to say to finalize the plans. She and Aki would meet us in two weeks at the sushiya across from the bar.
We’d met the master of the sushi place at the bar, but forgotten him at first. The memories washed back, though — a young guy, face far younger than his actual age. Short, in a black shirt and black jeans. Stylish hair. He could have been a hairdresser or an art student. He’d invited us to eat at his shop after I’d told him of my love for sushi. He knew Aki and Natsuko well, and was eager to get more foreign business.
I thought two weeks was ridiculously distant. He explained that Japanese girls, especially in their mid- to late-20’s and working full time, often had plans lined up two months in advance. I shook my head. I actually did want my earring back, on the one hand, but I thought, through the drunken haze, that I remembered Natsuko as having particularly glistening pink lips and a cute grin. I wanted to see her again to be sure. He’d said he was willing to be the wingman if she wanted to bring Aki, too. A date was made. We decided to meet about three weeks before Christmas, right before he went home for the holidays.
***
I took another long, deep drink from my beer, then set the mug down. I didn’t let go of the handle, but I let out a false sigh of satisfaction, as if at the flavor of the beer. “Ahhhh.” I looked into the glass mug, watching the foam of the head slide down the sides of the glass slowly, collapsing on itself and once again becoming amber. I looked up at him slowly.
“You mean Natsuko?”
***
The sushi dinner went well, but he’d told me on the train that he didn’t plan to contact Aki again. I understood. She was friendly and sweet, but a little stuffy and not particularly cute, though not unattractive. I, on the other hand, was caught. I was hopelessly smitten. I’d been right — her lips glistened with a liquid pearlescence, and her eyes were large and lively. She had a surprisingly deep voice, especially her laugh, which was more like a wry chuckle. Her hair was feathery like something from a 1970’s magazine. She dressed simply but stylishly. Ultimately, she made my teeth hurt.
We made plans to go out together, then, just the two of us, to see a movie. I took the train to the station and she picked me up in her car. On the way to the shopping mall, she’d run a red light and we’d laughed when I called her “abunai-chan” — “Little Miss Dangerous.” The line for the purikura booths were too long, so we didn’t take cute pictures together, though she’d wanted to. We had pizza and I nursed a glass of wine, then we went to the movie theater. The movie we’d wanted was sold out, so instead we got tickets for a Japanese-only political drama. It was somewhat overwhelming and not at all a good date movie, and afterward she apologized. I smiled and told her that I’d look on the Internet and see if I could understand it better later.
When she dropped me off at my apartment, I kissed her. She was surprised, but I asked then if it was ok, and when she said yes I kissed her again. Then I said good night and went inside. In email, she told me that she thought foreign guys thought that “Japanese girls are so easy,” and she had hoped that I wasn’t like that. I tried to assure her that I wasn’t, and apologized if I’d given her that idea.
***
“Natsuko! Yeah, that’s it.” He finished his Coke-hai and flagged the vapid high school kid whose part-time job was waiting tables. After a few attempts, the kid understood that he wanted a wheat shochu with water. “She was the one you were ga-ga over for like six months, right?”
I ordered another beer, even though my mug was still full. “Yeah. That’s her.”
***
I didn’t really hear from her that regularly after that. She’d occasionally email. I’d send a flurry of messages. I ran into her at the bar just after the New Year and she’d been drunk and really friendly. I didn’t hear much else until I’d sent a message asking, very simply, “Are you there?” She responded right away, surprisingly. We met for lunch at the beginning of summer. She was staggeringly gorgeous that day. I’d dated other women, and I held no practical illusions that she was ever going to really stop being flakey, but that day she was the perfectly striking vision I’d built her up to be in my mind. Then silence for weeks. She was looking for a new English teacher and emailed me. At the end of the summer, I stopped by the hospital where she worked and loitered around outside for 40 minutes until she was free again and came downstairs to talk to me for ten minutes. She went to Italy and brought me a wine stopper. Went to Fujisan and brought me the towel I had slung around my neck to mop the sweat off my face.
Finally, she agreed to meet me for a drink one autumn evening. I knew that this was it... I was fed up and I was also far more confident than I’d been for quite some time. We went to the same bar where we’d originally met, and we started talking. I ordered the drinks. The bartender caught on quickly to leave us be, even though we were the only three people in the bar. I asked her if she had a boyfriend. She paused, then said, “Yes” in English. I asked how long she’d been dating him, and she told me that it had been around 11 months or so.
“You mean... around the same time you met me?”
She nodded.
“So... why didn’t you tell me?”
Her eyes grew wide and she suddenly seemed like a little girl caught sneaking candy before dinner. “I didn’t lie,” she said. “You never asked.”
A tsunami of understanding crashed over me with those words. I gave her hell about the kiss, about all the unanswered emails, about the way she seemed to only contact me when it was convenient for her. It was cathartic, as if a huge weight could finally be taken off my back and I could rest and stretch and flex again. We were both drunk by then, but she seemed almost as relieved as I felt. I had to catch the last train, so we left the bar around 11. I told her that if she wanted to be my friend then she’d have to respond to email within a day, and she’d have to try, too. Over the course of the next six months we exchanged messages three or four times. I hadn’t even thought about her for a couple of months.
***
“Dude, get this — she’s getting married!” His eyes were wide and he seemed shocked. “I didn’t even know she’d had a boyfriend that serious!”
I nodded and finished my beer. “Yeah. She’s been seeing him at least a year and a half, I think...”
The dopey high schooler came back with our drinks. I raised my mug. He stopped mid-drink and raised his glass to meet my toast.
“To Natsuko. Omedetou gozaimasu.”
“Omedetou. Indeed.”
I licked the glisten from my lips, smiled with just the corner of my mouth, and took another drink. I looked into my mug and pondered the bubbles in the foam, then wiped the sweat from my face with a towel from Mt. Fuji.
