If You Follow Me Page 4

  I followed Miyoshi-sensei into a small movie theater where the burgundy velvet curtain parted as soon as we sat down. We watched a man in a white rabbit costume guide a Japanese girl, in yet another blue dress and pinafore, through the control room of the nuclear power plant. “Count Rabbit was played by Mister Joe,” Miyoshi sensei whispered, even though we were alone. “Arisu was Shika High School freshman, Ritsuko Ueno. Narrator is head of nuclear power plant. Now he explains how nuclear power works.”

  “I wish I could understand it,” I said.

  “Me too,” he said.

  At the end of the short film, he led me to a picnic area outside, where a vending machine stood next to the building. He banged a button twice, sending two cans of iced chrysanthemum tea down the chute. “You don’t need money here,” he pointed out. “Everything is sabisu. Meaning free. Including gomi collection.” He showed me a mesh bin heaped with trash bags and explained that this was where Haruki brought our trash.

  “He had to walk all the way up here?” I asked.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Haruki should move more. He has…how to say…spare tire?”

  I laughed, resisting the urge to joke that Haruki looked like the Michelin man. “But you are English teacher, not exercise teacher,” he went on soberly. “Everyone follows the gomi rules. If you make a mistake, your neighbors will know it’s you every time.”

  After leaving the museum, he took me to Shika’s “Beach Driveway,” a tunnel that ended on a stretch of sand rutted with tire tracks, littered with half-buried cans and bottles.

  “There’s a lot of trash on this beach,” I pointed out.

  “Mmm,” he agreed, “but it’s not Japanese.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. “How can it not be Japanese?”

  “Because it floats from Russian and Korean ships.”

  “Come on,” I scoff ed, no longer able to maintain a polite veneer. “I’m sure not all litter in Shika is foreign. That’s kind of racist, don’t you think?”

  “It’s fact,” he replied coolly. “You can see for yourself.”

  I rolled down my window and leaned out, trying to read the labels on the trash as we passed, but he was driving too fast, gunning the engine and making sand spray behind us. “Woo!” he yelled, taking his hands off the steering wheel as we sped toward the surf. He braked to a screeching halt, so close to the waves that they spat on his windshield. I could feel the wet sand sliding and shifting beneath the tires. Suddenly queasy, I pushed the door open and lunged out of the car, bending over to grip my knees and take a few ragged breaths. I felt upset and a little humiliated by my reaction to what had obviously been a harmless prank. What had I thought—that he was going to drive straight into the ocean? As a wave swept over my feet, soaking my shoes, I noticed an old Coca-Cola bottle. The writing on the glass was etched away, faded but still legible, printed in Cyrillic.

  “You were right,” I said, getting back into the car. “The trash is foreign.”

  I waited for him to say “I told you so,” or some Japanese equivalent, but instead he apologized. “I’m sorry if I frighten you,” he said. “I was only goofing about.”

  “I know,” I said. “I wasn’t scared.”

  He pulled out a pack of Mild Sevens and held it out to me before helping himself. As he lit a cigarette, I noticed that he had long narrow fingers, perfectly articulated, and that they were trembling slightly. My own hands always shake, so that people are constantly asking me if I’m okay when I feel perfectly fine. I wondered if he had the same problem, or if he was upset. I don’t know how he guessed that I wanted a smoke, but it was a relief not to have to ask. I took one and he lit it with his Zippo. Then he rolled down both car windows and we smoked in companionable silence, our arms extending into the sunlight, still facing the sea.

  At the end of my first week of teaching, Miyoshi-sensei offered to take me grocery shopping. “I had better teach you how to shop,” he said, which made Carolyn laugh. I’ve never had a hard time figuring out how to spend money. But the truth was we did need help decoding the Japanese supermarket, which still left us stumped after a month in Shika. We’d buy corn oil only to find out it was corn syrup, bring home fresh bamboo tips that remained woody after an hour of boiling, purchase a melon without doing the yen conversion and figure out too late that we’d spent twenty dollars on showpiece fruit.

  Carolyn was especially frustrated. When I told her about Miyoshi-sensei’s offer, naturally she assumed she’d be coming along. “Don’t do anything to give us away,” I said as the doorbell rang. She frowned and I shrugged. I sensed that Miyoshi-sensei and I were on the verge of becoming friends—we noticed the same things and found the same things funny—and I wanted this to happen. But I also wanted to keep my home and work life separate. He was perceptive, and I worried that he’d guess Carolyn and I were a couple.

  “It’s great to meet you,” she said. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  “Ah,” he said, blushing slightly. “I hope it’s good things.”

  “Of course,” she said. “M is always talking about what a fun young supervisor she got. I’m jealous!” Carolyn’s supervisor was a grandmotherly type with a subscription to Britain’s Royalty magazine, who couldn’t understand how Carolyn failed to share her single-minded fascination with the landed gentry of the world.

  “Ah,” he said. “Sorry, but you are…?”

  “This is Carolyn,” I said. “We both moved here from New York, remember?”

  “Of course,” he said. “That’s why you needed a house big enough to share.”

  “Thank you so much for helping us find this place,” Carolyn said, “and for offering to teach us how to grocery shop. I do most of the cooking, so I’m the one who needs help.”

  “Ah,” he said again, looking back and forth between us.

  In the car he offered me a cigarette and I asked Carolyn if it would bother her if I smoked. “Do whatever you want,” she said, sounding annoyed. More than the smell of smoke, she hates to police me, to come across as uptight. When I turned around, trying to catch her eye and share a private smile, she was staring out at the apartment buildings rising incongruously from the rice fields.

  “Who lives there?” she asked Miyoshi-sensei.

  “No one,” he replied. “They are vacancy.”

  “Vacant,” she corrected him. “I thought there were no apartments for rent.”

  I held my breath, waiting for him to blow my cover. No apartments big enough to share, is what he’d said. But instead he explained that these buildings had been erected during the real estate boom of the eighties, then abandoned when the investors went bankrupt.

  “It’s kind of a ghost town,” he said.

  “This whole place is,” Carolyn pronounced with characteristic bluntness. She is compulsively honest, almost physically incapable of bullshitting. I worried that he’d be off ended, but instead he agreed. He told us that the Noto Peninsula was depopulating rapidly as companies shut down their small town branches and young people left for the cities in Central Honshu where all the jobs were. In the past, kids had attended their neighborhood high schools—he himself had gone to Shika Koko before it became a vocational school—but now, those with entrance exam scores high enough to qualify traveled as far as two hours by bus to attend prestigious schools in Kanazawa City.

  “Shika is inaka,” he said. “Meaning hick town.” We laughed and he went on. “When I saw you were living on Manhattan’s Broadway before this, I worried for you. It’s true, there is not much here for tourists. But this is the real Japan, ne?”

  “That’s what I keep telling M,” Carolyn said, touching the back of my neck, pushing her fingers under my hair. And even though he could’ve seen in his rearview mirror, I leaned back for just a moment.

  As we entered the supermarket, Carolyn was almost giddy with excitement. She admires produce the way other people do flowers or jewelry. Inspired by an ingredient, she’ll create an ordinary weekday dinner for
just the two of us to rival the finest restaurant meal. But Miyoshi-sensei was pushing the cart, and every time she wanted to buy something, he had a good reason why we “had better not.” The enoki mushrooms were too expensive; the fresh tofu was not a good bargain; peaches had gone out of season, so we “had better” buy apple pears instead.

  In Tokyo, we’d been required to sit through a culture shock panel led by an ex-marine turned EFL teacher, who told us that the expression “you had better” was a direct translation of a Japanese idiom that didn’t have the same patronizing tone. “If my Japanese wife tells me that I ‘had better not’ go drinking with my buddies after work,” he said, “she’s not trying to be bossy, she’s just looking out for my best interests.” He winked. “And I don’t have to do what she says.” Every time Miyoshi-sensei rejected something that Carolyn chose, she looked at me expectantly and I felt trapped. He was only trying to help us, and we could always come back later. She picked out a package of fresh ramen noodles and he took it out of her hand, adding a dusty stack of Cup Noodles to the cart instead.

  “Let me guess,” she said flatly, “It’s a better bargain?”

  “Sodesune,” he agreed. “Also, I think Americans prefer this kind of ramen. Maybe real Japanese noodles are kind of so difficult to cook correctly.”

  “I used to work at a Japanese restaurant,” she said.

  “Ah,” he said. “But American Japanese food is so different. When I spent a summer in California, I could never find real Japanese food like home.”

  “Well you weren’t going to the right places then,” she said under her breath.

  He took us for lunch at Coco’s California Café, a family restaurant off the highway that we had already been to several times. There were color pictures of everything on the menu, but he proceeded to describe the specials in detail. The Japanese hambagu, he explained, was different from the American hambaga, because the patty came without buns, heaped with grated daikon. “You had better try it,” he said, and when the waitress came to our table he began to order three hambagu setto. A setto, or “set,” was a prix-fixe meal, with an appetizer, main dish, and dessert. Unlike at home, there weren’t different choices in each category, and substitutions were unheard of. You couldn’t even ask for mustard instead of mayonnaise on the chicken sandwich, when the photo quite clearly showed a white and not a yellow stripe. The menu was nonnegotiable, with no exceptions.

  “Actually,” Carolyn spoke up, “I’d like an omelet and a salad.” She waited for him to translate, but instead he inspected the menu. “Maybe you should order hambagu setto,” he said at last. “It’s a better value, ne? We always order setto.”

  “There is no omelet setto,” she said.

  “Exactly,” he said. “Don’t worry. Hambagu is not so different from hambaga.”

  Carolyn kicked me under the table. She hadn’t eaten meat since the fifth grade, when her class took a field trip to a farm. Sometimes her discipline impressed me, and sometimes I found it exhausting. I’d stopped eating meat—at least red meat, at least most of the time—when she told me that she could taste it on my breath when we kissed. But secretly I was looking forward to my hambagu.

  “Hambagu is a Japanese variation on an American theme,” Miyoshi-sensei said, “just like Miss Marina’s American variation on a Japanese theme. Midwest-o sushi.”

  This was a sore spot. On the application to teach in Japan, we had to answer the questions, “How does Japanese culture influence or inspire you?” and “How are you preparing for life in Japan?” At the time, I happened to be interning for a short-lived magazine called Midwestern Palate. My job was to come up with recipes to showcase the products of our advertisers. I wasn’t a very good cook, and most of my best ideas—including Midwest sushi—came from Carolyn. I’d stapled a copy of the recipe onto my application, to go with an essay about how I’d been trying to bring my love of Japanese cuisine to small town America.

  Carolyn and I were both enrolled in a Japanese crash course, but only she did the homework regularly. She wrote the Japanese words for every object in her dorm room on strips of paper that she taped to the things they named, while I only learned the words that sounded like English: foku, naifu, supoon, for fork, knife and spoon, waishiatsu, for white shirt, tabako, for cigarette and (my personal favorite) sukinshippu or “skinship,” for close physical contact. When I teased her for being such a nerd, she said that I’d be sorry when I didn’t know anything about the country, couldn’t utter a word except “skinship,” and didn’t have any money saved.

  “I’ll have you,” I said.

  So we were both upset when I got in on the first round and she was wait-listed. I told her that I didn’t want to come here without her, which made her even angrier. She said that I was putting too much pressure on her, that she didn’t want to be responsible for my happiness, that I shouldn’t make her the focus of my life. We were just twenty-two, after all. What were the odds of this lasting? I knew she was right, but I hated her honesty. When she did get in off the waiting list, just a few weeks later, it wasn’t quite the celebratory moment that it might have been.

  “I translated your sushi recipe for Shika’s newspaper,” Miyoshi-sensei said to me. “I called it ‘Miss Marina’s Sushi.’ I think so many people smeared Philadelphia on ham, arranged a pickle, and cut into pieces like a maki. Even I attempted, and I never cook!”

  “It was actually Carolyn’s recipe,” I said.

  “Did you like it?” she asked.

  “Well,” he said, “sushi means rice with vinegar. Your sushi had only meat and cheese. We couldn’t recognize. However, your photograph appeared next to the recipe, Miss Marina. So probably many people recognize you!”

  No wonder those boys at the beach had known my name. I was embarrassed, thinking of the picture that must have appeared in the newspaper, the passport photo I had taken on the day I cut off all my hair last spring. Carolyn swore that she liked my long hair, which was golden and streaky and almost as thick as my wrist when I wore it pulled back. But I wanted to look fierce and androgynous too, so I went to her barber down at Astor Place and paid five dollars to have it shorn off in less than five minutes. I had my picture taken that afternoon to document the change. But what I saw disappointed me. I didn’t look like Carolyn or her ex-girlfriends. My face was too round, my nose too prominent, my mouth too big. The blond scruff almost disappeared against my scalp and I looked naked and vulnerable. I looked like a big baby. I started to grow it out right away and suffered through months of puff y, feathered awkwardness, less fierce and androgynous from week to week and more like a suburban mom with a mushroom cut.

  “I really appreciate all that you’ve done for us,” Carolyn said, leaving her hambagu untouched. ‘But do you know if there are any other places for rent here?”

  “What?” I said. I knew our house had its share of problems, but she’d never mentioned wanting to move, with or without me. This felt like an ambush.

  “I kind of doubt it,” he said, looking at us both. “Like I told Miss Marina in my letter, the only apartments for rent are too small to share.”

  “You told her that,” Carolyn repeated, looking at me squarely.

  “I’m sorry,” I said quietly.

  “We could’ve rented studios in the same building,” she said. “We could still.”

  “Actually, now that you paid your key money, you couldn’t get it back again…” He trailed off, his eye twitching slightly. “I think you had better stay where you are. Anyhow, Japanese landlords are sort of reluctant to rent to a foreigner. It’s not racism exactly, only landlords want to rent to long-term tenant, not temporary person.”

  “We both signed contracts for a year,” Carolyn said.

  “But a year is kind of short,” he said. “You’ll see. It will pass quickly.”

  Once we were alone at home, she wasn’t as upset as I feared. She said that she understood why I’d hidden this detail from her, that it was sweet in a way, how much I wanted to
live together, even if she did wish I’d been more honest.

  “Miyoshi-sensei seemed uncomfortable around me,” she said. “He obviously wished I wasn’t there so that you two could have a blast as usual.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “And we don’t always have a blast.”

  “You’re always talking about how funny he is, what a good time you have joking around, and I’m sorry, but I just didn’t see it.”

  “I think you put him on edge,” I said.

  “He put me on edge! Talk about bossy. Why does he care about what we eat?”

  “He was just trying to be helpful.”

  “It’s weird how you’re still defending him.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re right. He was being annoying.”

  “You could’ve stood up for me.”

  “Defended your honor?” I said, but she didn’t laugh. I apologized again. “I felt caught between the two of you,” I tried to explain. “He was being annoying, but you were acting kind of aggressive. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.”

  “I felt like a third wheel on a bicycle.”

  “Isn’t that a tricycle?”

  “Ha ha,” she deadpanned. “He’s a good-looking guy.”

  “You think so?” I asked. I did too, in a way, although I was dying to mess up his hair, untuck his shirt, rough him up a little around the edges. Buttoned-up people have that effect on me. Carolyn was buttoned up too, in her own punk way. For all her body piercings and Manic Panic hair dye, she polished her boots on schedule, ironed her shirts, and never wore dirty underwear.

  “What I don’t get,” she said, “is why it’s so important for you that we live together, but you don’t want anyone to know that we’re a couple.” I shrugged and told her that I didn’t want to scare people away before they had a chance to get to know us. “Then you had better not do that,” she said in Miyoshi-sensei’s accent when I kissed her in front of our bedroom window. Our window upstairs looked directly into the bedroom window of Haruki Ogawa, and several times we’d caught the boy peering out at us, obviously spying. It was creepy. I didn’t know what he’d seen, but I figured that since he never spoke, our secret was safe with him at least.