Anyway, I did go on one picnic with my local AFWJ group. It was a disaster. Right from the start it was pretty obvious that this was not a cheerful group. One of the women seemed especially down-in-the-dumps. She’d been involved in a dispute with her mother-in-law over a kitchen fire, and she was devastated that her husband had taken his mother’s side. She’d managed to put the fire out herself, this woman, and it wasn’t her fault: something had gone wrong with her toaster oven and it had burst into flames and ruined half her kitchen. There’d been smoke damage to her next-door neighbor’s kitchen, too. Anyway, this woman had wanted to get on the phone and complain to the manufacturers of the toaster oven straight away. As one would. But of course, this being Japan, and the woman being foreign (Danish, I seem to remember), she was doing the Wrong Thing. The mother-in-law and the husband both saw this, of course, but she just couldn’t. Neither could all of us other foreign wives, of course. It was the toaster’s manufacturer’s fault, after all, not hers! I remember that we were all amazed by the rationale of the woman’s husband and mother-in-law: that because it had been their toaster oven that caught on fire, the fire was their fault. End of Story. The husband went next door and apologized profusely to the neighbors, this woman reported, took them an expensive gift of designer towels and bowed humbly many times, while she, the wife, looked on aghast. And then her mother-in-law commenced scolding ‘That was what you were supposed to do! You shouldn’t leave that for your husband to do, that’s a wife’s job!’ And so on. This poor Danish wife had been in the next room at the time the fire started, watching a soap opera (or “home drama” as they call them here), trying to beef up her Japanese. Not in the kitchen where she was supposed to be, monitoring her broiling fish, watching out for stray fires.  

I listened to her story and the similar stories of the other women – and God, they all had them, too – and my heart just sank. I knew I couldn’t contribute. I heard them bitching about their husbands, about how they often sided with their mothers or, if they didn’t, took the coward’s way out and just washed their hands of the whole thing and left their wives and mothers to battle away – and I knew that my own situation was somehow just too different. I could bitch about Hajime, but show me anyone who can’t bitch about her husband for something. Naomi didn’t see me as a rival, Makoto didn’t get drunk and try to grope me or make offensive comments about foreigners in general, no one in the family ever criticized me for coming from the country that nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no one ever attempted to lecture me about the fire-bombing of Tokyo or the deficiencies of Japan’s post-war constitution. Sure, Hajime was a pain, but for the most part he treated me with respect. Indifferent respect, yes, but respect. Anyway, it was never me and him against the rest of the family. But for some of my fellow AFWJ members that’s how it was. They’d married their husbands out of love, but ended up also acquiring a family that wanted to play tug of war over him. So comparatively speaking, I had nothing to complain about.

When we were leaving Suidobashi, where we’d had our picnic, the six of us foreign wives got cat-called by a bunch of construction workers, and very obnoxiously too. Now this is something that happens to different-looking foreigners in Japan all the time, of course. So much so that it is really a ho-hum thing to even mention. But everything was still pretty new to me after only a few months in Japan (which is the only reason I even remember it), and on this particular day their rude gestures and taunting just sank our spirits – mine in particular – to the lowest depths. ‘Just ignore them,’ said Anna, a Polish woman – the one out of the group that I liked the best, who ended up moving up to Hokkaido, sadly – ‘just stare straight ahead – like this – and ignore them.’ And she stuck her nose up in the air and made this really prissy face. ‘Here we come all the way to these foreign shores to improve their gene pool,’ she murmured under her breath, ‘and this is how they thank us! Hmpff!’  

I stuck it out for a few months. We met for coffee two or three times, just a few of us, usually, and I called Anna, or she called me, and we talked. Her English was superb and we’d just gotten to the point where we were getting to know each other well enough to complain about our jobs, about life in Japan and how difficult it was at times. Anna taught German at a university and her husband was a scholar of German and Polish poetry, fluent in both languages, a real intellectual, like Anna, and every bit as accomplished and amazing as she was, too. They were both so unlike the common run of expatriates, well-travelled, with good, though distinctly different, senses of humor and a marvellous stock of interesting stories and experiences, both shared and individual. I wish that we had all gotten to know each other better, but that was not to be. Shortly after I joined the AFWJ, Anna and her husband moved up to Hokkaido after he got a job as a lecturer there.

After Anna left I just stopped going to the meetings. ‘You’re still practically on your honeymoon, after all,’ one of the AFWJ ladies told me, when I finally had to admit that Ruth and I were really more friends than we were mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. ‘You just have to wait until the novelty’s worn off. Your mother-in-law and you haven’t had enough time to get to know each other properly.’ We were walking along a crowded street, she and I, past shops bulging with electric goods and giant cardboard displays, amplified advertisements blasting from shop entrances and flashy hawkers with slicked-back hair standing out in front shouting their lungs out, telling us all to buy, buy, buy.  She had to raise her voice to a scream practically, to make herself heard. ‘You just wait,’ she hollered, her face grim. ‘I hate to have to tell you this, but your time will come too.’

But the thing was, my time never came. As the months and then years went by, I came to find that Naomi was a lot easier for me to get along with than my own mother had been. I know she was aware that Hajime and I weren’t in perfect harmony, but she wisely refused to get involved. When he and I would start to quarrel, she’d retreat – she’d start bustling in the kitchen, or quickly exclaim that she had to do laundry, or she’d pretend to want to show the kids something outside – just to give us space. None of the AFWJ ladies could actually believe that a Japanese mother-in-law wouldn’t use conjugal disharmony between her son and daughter-in-law to her own advantage, or make a concerted effort not to get involved. Two or three of them said, rather sourly, that Naomi was too good to be true. Which she was, damn it. In fact, there were times I used to feel that she was so good she practically made it impossible for me to bond with the other foreign wives, who at least had their mothers-in-law as common enemies.

Gradually, though, I made other friends.  I went to a local Japanese school run by volunteers and met a few of the other students there. Two Thai women, Pet and Miaow, who’d married Japanese men, a Korean woman called Sue who was married to a Japanese man of Korean origin, and whose baby boy was Mari’s age, Lee, a Chinese fellow who was studying physics at a Japanese university and teaching Chinese cooking (he wasn’t in our class as his level was much higher, but we got to know him anyway) and Julia, an English woman with a Japanese girlfriend. My students were pleasant, my children were a handful, but endlessly interesting, and the years went by in relative harmony, especially after Makoto died.

Hajime went to work and came home. He liked the kids well enough when they were really little, but once they got big enough to start asserting themselves (which didn’t take long, of course), he seemed to grow more and more distant from them. From me, too, and Naomi. In fact, well before he upped sticks and left us, I have to say that he wasn’t really with us. I suspect there are a lot of husbands and fathers like him, sitting there in the bosom of their homes, warm bodies in chairs, physically present, yes, but with minds elsewhere, leagues away. Dreaming their dreams – straight out of a Hemingway story, in Hajime’s case, or maybe Jack Kerouac or someone similar, an easy rider, on the road again, a ramblin’ man.

We’d moved out of his family’s house, up to Chiba, to be closer to our jobs by the time Mari was born, but Naomi would come over and stay with us on occasion, and quite frequently we’d go down to Tokyo to visit and stay overnight or for the entire weekend.  At mealtimes, there we would be, ostensibly a Big Happy Family, all of us sitting at the table, kids prattling away, Naomi and I spooning cereal and mashed carrots into their mouths, baby-talking them out of putting their hands in their rice and rubbing it into their hair. And Hajime – he’d be sitting there with this vacant look in his eye. Far, far away. If we’d been in a cartoon, the thought bubble over Hajime’s head would’ve read Here I am, Hajime, misunderstood man and would-be great ,adventurer of the American West, temporarily delayed by boring, domestically inclined females. But not for long, oh not for long…

I’ll bet you’ve heard this before, but those years when the kids were little – they just flew by. You hear people saying that all the time, of course, but until you actually have kids, the reality of it is something you just can’t imagine; it’s just another hackneyed phrase. Now I look at the kids and I can’t get over it – every day I’ve seen these kids, seen my own face in the mirror, and yet somehow the changes – tiny, insidious little changes – have just snuck up on me. The kids grew, I aged – and yet when and how did all of this happen? One day I had a baby that couldn’t hold its head up, but soon enough that baby was sitting up fine, then standing, then walking, then running – away from me. Soon there were two babies – then children, and the next thing I knew they both had their own friends, their own secret worlds, their own schedules, ideas, idiosyncrasies. And all along, I was ageing, and I was too busy (thank God) to notice that – or to care about it much.

No, I don’t wish that my kids had stayed babies – I’d just like, once in a while, to be able to indulge in that lost babyhood that went by so fast. I wish I could have bottled up a day or two, back when they were tiny and my schedule was wild and hectic, hellish, really, to the extent that I could barely even appreciate how cute my kids were – and I could siphon off a few minutes of their babyhood here and there, now that I’ve got these two teenagers.