RUTH

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, with grandparents from Cuba, Canada, The Navajo Nation, and Poland, by marrying a Japanese guy you can see that I was pretty much following the family tradition.

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 mold. 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 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. 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, it was 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!’

CASEY

The whole business with the wedding should have tipped him off: their irreconcilable differences had really started right there.

Etsuko wanted a big church wedding. She wasn’t Christian and Casey was only nominally so, but nevertheless she had to have it all: the ceremony, the dress, the cake, the guest list that went way over one hundred, the reception in a trendy hotel in the Japanese Alps. Her parents were funding this, she kept insisting, and what was wrong with them going along with it? What harm was there in pleasing them?  She was so persistent that she finally wore him down, but once he had given in, a fresh source of dispute emerged: Etsuko was adamant that his parents had to come too.

It was all Casey could do not to call everything off at this point. His parents at their wedding? His 5-foot 2-inch 180-lb mother with her wild, hennaed hair, her clumsy hand-crafted macramé trouser suits and Birkenstock sandals? His father with his corny string ties, pale blue polyester suits and white shoes? Please no. Etuko’s parents were an elegant, sophisticated-looking couple in their mid fifties. His parents were both in their late sixties and had ‘hick’ written all over them. He cringed to picture the four of them together: the language problems, the age difference, the embarrassment of posed photographs.  And that was just the externals. His father had spent over three years of his childhood in an Internment Camp in Arizona and had lost a beloved uncle fighting in Italy in World War Two. Like a lot of Japanese-Americans, Casey’s father resented the internment, but Casey knew all too well that he also nurtured a grievance towards Japan for Pearl Harbor. Get a couple of bottles of sake into him – as they most certainly would – and there was no telling what he might say.

Casey and Etsuko took to quarrelling so much about the attendance of his parents at the wedding that they would go to bed too exhausted to make love. At some point during the night, they would wake up and forget their dispute – he would find her arm slung across his chest or one hand nestled in his groin – but no sooner had they quenched their passion than it all started up again.

‘My folks will barely have the money for the flight,’ he finally told her. This was something of an exaggeration, but with this declaration of parental poverty Casey felt that he was finally beginning to make some headway: Etsuko wasn’t crazy about the idea of admitting that she was marrying a man whose parents lacked the wherewithal for a two-week trip to Japan to attend their only son’s wedding. But when he was at work one evening, his mother had called and gotten to talking to Etsuko. Of course they would come to the wedding, she had said. How exciting! What wonderful news! So that was that.

In fact the wedding had all gone a lot better than he had dared hope. His parents’ foreignness had distracted everyone from their rustic manners and appearance, and the language problems never became too great an issue: Etsuko spoke good English, and there was so much going on that there were relatively few chances for embarrassing tête-à-têtes between the in-laws. Their mothers had discovered a shared passion for bird-watching that didn’t require a great knowledge of the other’s language, and their fathers had managed to get through many bottles of beer and sake without any references to the War. The young Australian minister had conducted the service with a certain degree of dignity and looking at their wedding pictures you would never guess that the two of them had spent much of the past six months quarrelling about whether or not to have a wedding and who to invite.

When had it all started crumbling? Shortly after they got back from their honeymoon and discovered a wasps’ nest over the door of their new apartment? The following Christmas when he’d gotten the shingles and had to miss two months of work? Two years after Kenji was born, when Etsuko had started talking about her new private student and his wonderful sense of humor? Casey could never decide when the turning point had been – when he had realized that they had more to fight over than they did to talk about.

One day towards the end of their first year of marriage, he remembered looking at Etsuko and seeing a stranger – a woman positively oozing dissatisfaction. Every gesture, every expression seemed charged with it, from the way she dried her hands to the look she gave him as she watched him chopping vegetables into a pot. ‘Not like that,’ she said, frowning. ‘Slice them on a chopping board. Properly.’ But even if he started doing things her way – using a chopping board to cut vegetables, hanging his coat on the peg instead of over a chair, making sure that his shoes were side-by-side in the entrance-way – it was never enough:  ‘Casey, you leave your pubic hairs on the soap; it’s disgusting.’ And once he stopped doing that: ‘Casey, when you use chopsticks, you hold them too far down, like a kid.’ There was always something.

RUTH

Hajime’s dad, Makoto, was another story. I didn’t like him. Why not? He made himself as agreeable as he could, he asked me pertinent 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 hot beverages on the plane, so I said no. Later, she forgot I’d said no and asked me again. And Makoto rebuked her so sharply 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 properly 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 fluent 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. But her communication skills 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 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 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 and I showed up unannounced on their doorstep.

CASEY

His oldest sister Wanda did her best to encourage him. She and her husband were hardened veterans of marriage who’d weathered a variety of marital storms and come out the stronger for it.

‘I’m not going to say it’s easy,’ she told him when he confided in her about their problems. ‘No marriage is easy. Wayne still does things that drive me crazy, and he used to complain about the way I chewed. The way a certain muscle moves in my temple – can you beat that?’ 

Talking to Wanda about Etsuko and himself cheered him up at first. Wayne and Wanda were so close that they even looked alike with their deep suntans, stringy necks and salt-and-pepper shoulder-length hair. When they watched television together, Wayne would drape his legs over Wanda’s lap. Wanda would start a sentence and Wayne would finish it, or vice versa, and they weren’t even aware that they were doing it. According to Wanda, they spent half their time quarrelling for the first few years of their marriage. ‘Before we finally lightened up and mellowed out,’ Wanda said. But Wanda and Wayne lived in Albuquerque and you could only discuss so much over the telephone. And Casey got the feeling that his and Etsuko’s marriage was a far cry from Wayne and Wanda’s.

Then Etsuko got pregnant and had a terrible time of it, bleeding so much in her third month that they were sure she had lost the baby. Every day that she remained pregnant was a triumph, and when Kenji was born, Casey had felt that nothing in his life was wanting. They had a son now: a healthy, beautiful boy. Etsuko seemed genuinely happy and grateful, too, and everything seemed to have sorted itself out. Ko wa kasugai, Etsuko had agreed:  children hold a marriage together. If so, they were doubly blessed by the birth of Kenji. But holding the two of them together was a big job for such a little boy, and by the time Kenji was two, they were quarrelling non-stop again and the dissatisfied look on Etsuko’s face was there all the time.

Imagining that his evening job would be unsuitable given his new status as father,
Casey quit working at Tensai English School and took up a slightly better-paid job in a less convenient location shortly after Kenji’s first birthday.  He missed his old school and the schedule and colleagues he had become comfortable with over the years, but his new hours were nine to five and he told himself that the sacrifice was well worth the time it created to see more of his family. Etsuko was happy about the higher salary, but he got the distinct impression she was not thrilled to have him home so much earlier in the evening. ‘Don’t they ever want you to do overtime?’ she asked him bluntly one day. Casey, who routinely turned down all chances to do stay late at work, was amazed by her attitude.

His friend Carl, now living in Yokohama and enjoying his single lifestyle, claimed that this was a common problem with Japanese women. ‘She wants you to get promoted,’ he said. ‘You’re obviously not going anywhere with your career if you keep coming home before 7:00 every evening. What will the neighbors think, after all? Look around you:  all the other guys in the neighborhood are getting home after midnight. They’ve all been climbing the corporate ladder, doing overtime. Which is what you’re supposed to do.’

‘What corporate ladder do I have to climb, for God’s sake? I’m a teacher!’

Carl shrugged. ‘So build your own.’

‘I figured she’d be happy that I wanted to come home on time. That she’d be glad to know I wanted to be with her and Kenji. Or to know I wasn’t playing around.’

‘Well, that’s not how it works here, buddy. The more overtime you do, the more important you must be.  So if you get home every evening at 6:45 sharp, you’re broadcasting an entirely different message to the entire neighborhood. You’re saying I’m the kind of schnook who’s so dispensable they can send him home right on time every night. Poor Etsuko.’

‘What do the neighbors have to do with it, anyway?’ Casey had queried. ‘Since when is it anything to do with them?’ But Carl had put on a knowing smile and shaken his head: ‘Jeez, Casey. And you’ve been in Japan how long?’

When Kenji was two and Etsuko mentioned going back to work, Casey was vastly relieved. No wonder Etsuko had seemed so dissatisfied:  she was bored out of her mind! At first, things did improve after Etsuko resumed her job teaching Japanese. She seemed happier and more interested in getting up every morning, and Kenji liked going to nursery school. Unfortunately, though, with both of them working, their unwashed laundry began to pile up and they relied more and more on instant meals. Their weekends were largely spent catching up on housework. 

‘I’m sick and tired of holding this family together!’ Etsuko would cry. Casey would counter that he was working, he was doing his bit, and how did she get off saying that she was the one who was holding them together? ‘You only do the bare minimum!’ Etsuko told him. ‘You take every shortcut and leave all the details to me!’ ‘What else do you want me to do?’ he asked her, and Etsuko replied that if he had to ask he’d never know.

RUTH

Mari was born a year after we arrived in Japan; Kei came along two years later, by which time Hajime and I had moved out to the suburbs. Naomi and I got even closer after the babies were born, while my relationship with Hajime began its long, slow decline.

Makoto died very suddenly just after Mari had turned three; Naomi grieved – and to a lesser extent so did Hajime and his brother and sister –  but the awful truth is we also breathed a sigh of relief.  I quit my job and got caught up in raising the kids – pretty much single-handedly, though of course, Naomi did what she could when she came to visit. Hajime started spending more and more time at the office and I can’t say I was unduly bothered. Just as Mari hit adolescence and the going started getting tough, he began to develop an obsession with caravans. Mobile homes. Winnebagos, King of the Road, Route 66. Trailers for sale or rent.

 I don’t know how this happened, where he got it, but Hajime got this idea that mobile home sales was the last frontier opened to young Japanese people with guts and drive and English language skills. Somewhere this must have coincided big-time with a middle-age crisis; Hajime had passed the 40-year mark by this time and he’d been itching for a change. Whatever the case, he suddenly decided to go back to the States and buy a trailer with some of the pittance he got from Makoto’s will. He never once asked me if we wanted to come too, and I suppose I could have insisted, but I didn’t. He had his own green card, after all, partly courtesy of yours truly, and he covered the whole scheme nicely by claiming that he was going to develop mobile homes for adventurous, youthful Japanese retirees. After all, space is at such a premium in Japan, and if wealthy Japanese grandpas and grannies are snapping up condominiums in Hawaii, who’s to say the less well-heeled won’t  start buying mobile homes in Arizona? Maybe we could all come out and join him some time, he’d vaguely suggested, but somehow we all knew this wasn’t sincere. And with that, he was out of our lives. Still is. I know he is in fact doing something business-related over there which involves trailers, for all that he is virtually incommunicado. But business isn’t his aim, I suspected that from that start, I know it now: he just wanted out.

Naomi wasn’t fooled, not one bit. Given her upbeat, positive nature and her inability to lie or dissemble, she did a pretty good job of trying to act as though it didn’t matter, but I know how upset she was and how disappointed. Hajime was her eldest, and she once confided to me that she never had been able to understand any of her children.  She had loved Hajime, encouraged him, tried not to keep him back or coddle him, protected him from his father’s wrath, praised him for his achievements. And yet look what happened!

Money stopped coming in on a regular basis, and I had to go back to work teaching, once again at a conversation school. The kids and I moved back down to Tokyo to live with Naomi. This arrangement suited us all just fine; in fact, we were all happier not having a sulking, irritable man sitting around all the time.  Did I miss him? I should have, right? But the awful truth is, I didn’t.  He’d already distanced himself from us in so many ways.

I went out to work, Naomi stayed home and kept house. The kids loved Naomi and Naomi thought they were the cutest, smartest, finest, most morally advanced kids ever born. We had a comfortable routine. I’d get up and pack my sports bag, wake up the kids and make their breakfast. Naomi always had a hard time getting up in the morning, but she’d kick in just before I left, start the business of getting the kids’ lunches together, remind them to take their completed homework assignments to school, help them find the last-minute ‘if-I-don’t-have-it-I’m-done-for’ stuff. She’d be walking the kids to school while I was right in the middle of my morning swim at the YWCA pool. My joining the Y was her idea: she said I needed my daily swim for stress control.

Sometimes even now when I’m on my way home from work and I catch the whiff of onions frying, or broiling fish, or rice steaming – and I can still see Naomi there in our little kitchen. I can still feel that warm, secure feeling you get when you know that there is someone at home, someone who really wants to hear about your day, who is cooking dinner for you. Bustling and banging around in that little kitchen, an apron tied around her little dumpling figure, just about where you knew her waist ought to be. Three good giant steps across the room and you’d gone from one end to the other, that was how small it was, our kitchen, but Naomi reigned in it like a queen.

She’s gone now. We lost her last year.  No one saw it coming, either. This is a woman who just didn’t get sick, you see. Never off with a headache or a sore throat or a cold – nothing. Once I remember she had trouble with one of her feet, but that’s it. ‘Oh you make her out to be such a paragon,’ says Vanessa at work, who’s mortal enemies with her own mother-in-law and would love to be able to trade Don’t you just hate ‘em mother-in-law stories with me. But the thing is, I don’t.  I’ve never embellished anything about Naomi, she just was the way she was. Intrinsically good, without any side to her.

CASEY

‘Got any homework to do, Kenji?’

No answer.

‘Kenji, I asked if you had any homework.’

‘Nmm.’

‘Come on, give me a break. Does that mean yes or no?’ 

Kenji gave a non-committal shrug. ‘Yes.’

‘So what is it?’

Another shrug.

Casey was never entirely sure if Kenji fully understood his patois of English and Japanese. After Etsuko left, he’d had been trying to stick to English instead of mixing the two languages like she often did, but there were times he slipped up.

‘Come on Kenji,’ he pursued, ‘what’s your homework?’ Christ, this was like pulling teeth.

‘Sansu,’ Kenji said finally, tracing a pattern on the table with his finger. Arithmetic.

Thank God it wasn’t Japanese homework tonight. Casey knew the terms for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, but that was about it. He dreaded the appearance of fractions, graphs and exponential numbers. ‘Okay, well you get started on your math and I’ll unwrap our dinner. Okay?’

‘Nmm.’

‘Croquettes okay for you?’

Kenji shrugged.

‘You know, your Grandma Mochizuki is going to be picking you up right after school starting next week when my work schedule changes. And I’ll be home a lot earlier all the time so we can have dinner together. That’ll be cool, won’t it?’

Kenji screwed his face up briefly, but made no reply.

‘Your Grandma Mochizuki will be able to help you with your Japanese homework too, okay?’

Kenji merely stared at him for a few moments, then opened his notebook.

Casey went into their kitchen and found a knife. He took the still-warm plastic cases of croquettes out of the bag and slit open the tape that sealed them shut. One day at a time. One foot ahead of the other.

RUTH

When we first got here, Hajime and I, it was difficult, like I said, what with the tension between Hajime and Makoto. Sometimes it got to me. I’d think that if I had to listen to any more of Makoto’s careful, insidious, erudite-sounding arguments and Hajime’s sullen come-backs, I’d go crazy. Naomi had a way of kind of tuning it out – she’d go into the kitchen and hum to herself. Hymns, usually: ‘Abide with Me,’ or ‘Break Thou the Bread of Life.’ The men would be bitching back and forth at each other and she’d be in the kitchen preparing a meal, bustling around with those pots and pans not in an angry way, but cheerfully nervous – that’s the only way I can describe it. Later I found out how tense their endless bickering really made her, how all their mutual animosity saddened her, but at the time I thought she was a little like the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand, just trying to ignore it all and smile through it, pretend it wasn’t happening.

The tension between Hajime and his father really got to me those first few months. That and loneliness. I didn’t know anyone in Japan other than Hajime and his family at the time, and he and I didn’t have much of a social life at all at first. I got so desperate I actually went to church with Makoto and Naomi a couple of times, just on the off-chance that I’d meet someone there I could talk to, someone I’d have something in common with. Some of the ladies there were nice, but they were all a lot older, and obviously I couldn’t understand the Japanese sermons. I am told that Makoto was a brilliant orator, but at the time he just looked silly to me up there behind the pulpit, gesturing wildly, his eyes flashing, scanning the room as if for stray sinners he thought weren’t getting the point he was making. 

Shortly after we arrived, I started teaching English at a depressing little conversation school out in Chiba, but I couldn’t find any friends among my colleagues either, who all seemed a silly bunch. There were three men (two Americans and a Canadian) who were heavily into the night-club scene, picking up Japanese girls who were gaga for any guy as long as he was foreign, two other married women who were best buddies and in a mutual – and exclusive – admiration society, and a Hawaiian fellow who I think was gay, but who wouldn’t talk to any of us, ever. 

One of the married women, Beverly, in a moment of rare camaraderie, told me about the Foreign Wives’ Association. Her husband wasn’t Japanese, but she knew about it through some friend who’d married a Japanese man. I was thrilled. Straight away I joined my local chapter of the AFWJ and went off to my first meeting in a state of real excitement. I’m not knocking the AFWJ – I know a lot of women who belong to this group and it’s been a real life-saver to them. But it just wasn’t for me. That first little group – my local chapter –  was just a bunch of women bickering about their mothers-in-law. Who sounded atrocious. I just listened to their stories and thought how awful those women – the mothers-in-law – sounded, how petty and mean and back-biting and bitchy.  But I couldn’t join in, really, could I? What could I say that wouldn’t have sounded ridiculous? ‘Actually, my mother-in-law, Naomi, is pretty much my best friend just now, a really lovely woman.’ Yeah, sure.

That was early days, when I really didn’t know Naomi all that well. Frankly sometimes I even mistrusted her almost overwhelming kindness and affection. I just couldn’t believe that someone could really be like she was, that natural, that trusting and friendly and open. Always interested in other people, listening attentively to their problems or their stories or whatever.  So on the surface, during that first year or so, I was reasonably friendly to her, gave every appearance of trying to get to know her and being friendly. But deep inside, I remained aloof, unconvinced. Some part of me would look at her and mentally ask Who are you, really? Why do you pretend to be like that? What are you trying to sell me? Because of course, Naomi was a Christian, and everyone knows that Christians want to spread the word.  I’m not sure when I finally figured out that she wasn’t selling anything or trying to spread the word, that she really was the way she seemed. I think her goodness just grew on me, gradually. But even when I wasn’t completely sure of her, there was no trouble between Naomi and me. She didn’t push me, she didn’t boss me, she didn’t lord it over me. And she never tried to hog Hajime’s affection. What there was of it.

Unlike those other awful mothers-in-law and their unfortunate daughter-in-law victims, Naomi never berated me or patronized me for not being able to understand how things worked, for doing the wrong thing or misunderstanding a situation because of my foreignness. For instance, I referred to ‘oshinko,’ (pickles) as ‘oshikko’ (pee) quite a few times before I finally got it straight, and Naomi would always giggle and lean over at some point and say, kind of conspiratorially, ‘Remember pronounce N Ru-su!! Or you are talking oshikko, and that is  pee-pee!’ Never to embarrass me, never to humiliate me or show that she was superior.  Whenever she corrected me, in fact, it was always fun. I never felt like I’d done something stupid – she just acted as though my learning Japanese was endlessly interesting and amusing, a great source of fun. And she’d work in some story about her English (which she was, it has to be said, inordinately proud of), some huge gaffe she’d made (she called them ‘boo-boos’). ‘Oh Ru-usu,’ she’d say, after I’d just committed some Japanese verbal blunder, ‘You don’t feel bad about that boo-boo. I remember first teacher tell me when I ask English word ‘what?’ sound a lot like I saying bad word “fart” instead! Make me embarrass to ask question!’

I did go on one picnic with my local AFWJ group. Right from the start it was pretty obvious that this was not a cheerful group. One of the women, a Canadian called Elinore,  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. Elinore 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!’