Actually, the whole business of why you end up linking your destiny, or your DNA, or your heart or whatever, with someone else’s is pretty damn weird, if you ask me.  Take my family.(Yeah, go on – if you’re crazy enough.) My father’s mother was a Jew from Krakow, and my father’s father was German and Navajo, from Phoenix, Arizona.  My mother’s mother was a Jew who hailed from Havana, Cuba, whereas her father was a Jew from Montreal. God knows why my parents married each other: my father was so shy and reclusive he used to hole up in one of the bedrooms when we had guests over. My mother, on the other hand, is the sort of person who will make friends with people at bus stops, in the toilets of Greyhound Bus Stations, sitting in the bleachers at baseball games. If you sit next to my mother and she doesn’t try to chat you up, something’s wrong.  Is it opposites attracting? Is it some strange genetic balancing phenomenon that if you happen to be a reclusive, introverted little schnook you end up seeking out a lively, frisky, extrovert? Do mindless chatterboxes gravitate towards strong, silent types to even out the gene pool? Whatever the reason, though, I think you’ll agree that with grandparents from Cuba, Canada, The Navajo Nation, and Poland, by marrying a Japanese guy I was pretty much following the family tradition.

I can remember a girl in my sister’s dormitory, in Philadelphia, who was Jewish but converted to Islam and married a fellow Muslim convert who was a dead ringer for Malcolm X. Her parents, as you can well imagine, went halfway insane. I’m sure that knowing how badly they’d react was part of the attraction that marrying a Muslim – a black Muslim – held for her. Or my friend Jenny, from the dorms. She was Jewish too: she had relatives on both sides of her family who’d died in Auschwitz. So who does she get married to? A Polish exchange student – a gentile – whose parents were born about ten miles from Auschwitz. Sometimes people who don’t know me or my background assume that I’m like that, that I must have married Hajime, a Japanese Christian, to break out of the mould. What a load of hooey! My parents wouldn’t have batted an eye if I’d gotten hitched with a Hottentot. 

 When I look back over the whole time we’ve spent together, starting from our courtship to a couple of years ago, when Hajime left us, the whole thing is like some kind of a joke. I don’t know what he and I were thinking of, really, to get married and have kids. All my friends at the time wondered why we were doing it. Only a few actually had the guts to voice their doubts, but I remember a lot of them looking kind of quizzical when I told them my good news.

So anyway, we married. At the registry office in San Francisco. He wore a tie-dye shirt and jeans, I had on one of those Indian skirts you twist around a broom handle. Both of us had on earrings and wore our hair loose. A couple of years later we were on our way to Tokyo. I’d gotten a job at a language school in Chiba, Hajime was going to be working in his uncle’s architectural office not far away, in Matsudo. End of courtship story. Beginning of married life saga.

Where did things go wrong? Hard to say, but after careful reflection I’m pretty sure it was on the train from Narita International Airport to Tokyo, when I found out that Hajime hadn’t even called his parents to let them know that we were coming. I’m pretty sure he wanted to spring me on them as a complete surprise. My parents wouldn’t have taken it well, but, as it turned out, Hajime’s Mom was fine. Her name was Naomi. Isn’t that a kick? If you don’t get it, don’t worry:  we weren’t really practicing Jews in my family, and I was ignorant enough about religion not to get it straight away myself.

Hajime and I went directly from the airport to Hajime’s home in downtown Tokyo, a real hovel, and standing there on the cracked linoleum of their kitchen, he introduced me to her. ‘Ka-san, this is Ruth. Ruth, this is my mother.’ Hajime’s mother was a round, dumpily-made little woman with a bad perm and a broad smile. Her smile would start slowly and then stretch wider and wider until it came close to dividing her face in two, but it was the most genuine smile you’ve ever seen in your life. Naomi was not the sort of woman who stood in front of mirrors and practiced, I’ll tell you that. She looked manic with that smile – ridiculous, even –  but it was 100% natural.

 Anyway, she stood there that day we met and started in with that smile, and it was, well, pretty weird. ‘Ru-usu?’ she said (which is how you say Ruth if you’re Japanese and haven’t mastered the ‘th’ sound yet, which Naomi sure hadn’t). The smile got wider. ‘Ru-usu? Really? You are Ru-usu? Well!  I am Naomi!’ and she grabbed my hand and pumped for all she was worth, with that smile right up in my face. Like I say, I hadn’t twigged about the biblical connection between our names, my family being about as non-religious as you can get, so I just stood there and smiled foolishly and let her squeeze my hand and pump my arm. And Hajime, who’d been standing there next to me monitoring the whole thing says, rather tersely, ‘Ruth – Naomi, you know, like in the Bible. Naomi is the mother-in-law and Ruth is the daughter-in-law.’  Duh.

You hear these things about the Japanese, about how they’re all stand-offish and they hold back their emotions and keep you at arm’s length, etc. I’d studied all that, read up on it, knew what to expect. So imagine:  I’m all prepared to do my formal little bow, make polite chit-chat, sit and play the new bride, the humble, careful, ever-so-respectful daughter-in-law, but I’ve got this funny little woman grinning away at me, she won’t let go of my hand, and the next thing she does is give me this massive bear hug. ‘Ru-usu and Naomi, we are,’ she says joyfully. ‘I am so happy. Hajime tell me you Jew-ish, but he not say you are Ru-usu!’

Makoto, Hajime’s dad, was another story. I didn’t like him. From the very first time we met, I just did not like him. Why not? He made himself as agreeable as he could, he asked me questions, expressed interest, was polite and considerate. There was just something about him that was so different from Naomi. Studied. Conceited. Proud. I got the feeling right away that Naomi, with her effortless, genuine good cheer, her unrefined friendliness and boundless charity – irritated and embarrassed him. For instance, on that first day she asked me if I wanted tea. I’d just had a gallon of tea and coffee on the plane, so I said no. Shortly after, she forgot I’d said no and asked me again. And Makoto rebuked her so sharply, so crossly, for that one little slip-up, I couldn’t help but start to dislike him then and there.

He was a minister, Hajime’s dad. Not just a Christian, but a proper ordained minister with a congregation and everything.  I think that when I found that out, I started to understand what Hajime had seen in me. Makoto took the whole Jewish non-Christian thing very much in stride, as it turned out. In fact, he always seemed rather pleased with me. He invariably introduced me to friends or members of the congregation, on the rare occasions that I met them, as ‘Ruth, my daughter-in-law.’ Proudly, too, as if it was a big deal. Makoto’s English was good, really impressive. He had a strong accent, but it was almost as good as Hajime’s, and leaps and bounds better than Naomi’s. And yet, for all that he spoke English so well and Naomi didn’t, and considering that back then my Japanese was of the ‘Run Spot, Run’ variety, I never felt as though we were communicating, he and I, when we talked. With Naomi, I felt instant rapport. I would start a sentence, she could finish it. She’d say something and more often than not, I knew just what she’d meant. No matter how clumsily she expressed herself in English, I understood her. Naomi butchered English grammar, she made fast and free with English syntax, and her pronunciation – well, that’s my specialty, but I could do nothing for her, nothing at all:  she was hopeless. But her communication skills:  they were formidable.

That first year we were in Japan was hard. Before the babies were born, we lived with Naomi and Makoto. And Hajime and Makoto did not get along, which is putting it mildly. On a purely surface level, you could say that they had different ways of thinking, different philosophies of life. But deep down, it all boiled down to power. Makoto and Hajime were actually very much alike. When they believed in something, they were determined that everyone around them should believe in it too. So Makoto could not stop pushing Christianity on Hajime, who, of course, was bound to reject it. You could always walk into a room the two of them were in and practically slice the atmosphere, it was that bad. And Hajime would be so angry afterwards, just seething, fuming. Wasn’t his father an idiot? Could anyone be so stupid, so pig-headed, so full of himself? Why couldn’t he accept it that everyone had his own way of getting through life and that was that?

At first I was sympathetic. After all, I didn’t like Makoto myself, as I’ve said; he was stubborn and persistent, and he just talked over Hajime all the time, or anyone that didn’t agree with him, for that matter. But gradually, as I got to know Hajime better, I saw that he wasn’t all that different from his father. For instance, Hajime is a big Hemingway fan. I am not. No big deal, right? It is inevitable that even someone you love and admire will have tastes and habits that are different from yours – no sense getting upset over it, is there? Well, it drove Hajime wild. He was sure – positive! – that if I only thought about it enough, if I only tried, I’d realize Hemingway’s greatness and repent the error of my ways. And to that end, he kept shoving Hemingway short stories in my face, asking me to re-read his novels, quoting him to me. I love Jane Austen, Kazuo Ishiguro, Gunther Grass, all of whom I happen to know bore Hajime to tears. Do I ever try to sell him on them? Are you kidding?

So how is his insistence that I learn to like Hemingway so terribly different from his father’s insistence that Hajime embrace Christianity? And Hemingway – well, that’s just one example. Once we got to know each other really well, Hajime and I, there wasn’t enough time in the day to explore all the things we disagreed over. Which movies to watch, whether summer was better than winter, sweet wine versus dry, science fiction versus fantasy, walking versus taking the train, draft beer or bottled lager, which is better, calculator or abacus, you name it.

And always, I was the first one to give in. Going against Hajime all the time, it just wasn’t worth it. I was sneaky about it: I never actually went over to his side, I merely capitulated. I never said, ‘Hey, you’re right – Hemingway’s great,’ or ‘Let’s have the sweet wine, I don’t like the dry stuff,’ or ‘Let’s take the train, I don’t need to walk,’ I just said, ‘Yeah, whatever,’ and sullenly did whatever it was that had to be done. Went along with the program for the sake of peace. Deep inside I was mutinous, fuming even, but I just didn’t argue. I take after my father: that was the way he always got through the day, through the marriage. He just gave up – to a certain degree.

Naomi never did this – never insisted, never tried to sell, never ‘witnessed’ overtly, in the way that Makoto did. Naomi’s way of converting people was entirely by example: she lived Christianity in so many ways. All of this took a toll on Naomi, whose role as family peacemaker was well established even before Hajime showed up unannounced with a new wife.