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 as the months and then years went by, Naomi and I only grew closer. She knew 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.

CASEY

Etsuko’s mother Kazue made Casey nervous. First of all, she looked remarkably like an older version of Etsuko with her smooth, pale skin, sleek hair and graceful bearing.  But it wasn’t only that: she had the habit of watching him.

When Etsuko had first introduced them, Casey had felt her mother’s calm, careful assessment of him all too keenly. In the middle of answering a question someone had posed or forking spaghetti into his mouth, he would look up and catch her eyes on him, always with that cool, speculative look. He had found it unnerving. ‘I don’t think your mother likes me,’ he had joked once as they were on their way back from her parents’ house. 

‘She thinks you’re really sweet,’ Etsuko had assured him. But he had his doubts. He’d heard other mother-in-law stories that made Etsuko’s mother look positively benign. She wasn’t like any of the mothers-in-law he’d seen. She looked so youthful, for one thing, and she was so quiet, so self-contained. You got the feeling that nothing fazed her or made her angry. She didn’t nag him, put him down in front of Kenji or accuse him of wrecking her daughter’s life. It was just little things she did, subtle ways she had of undermining his confidence.

Unlike her daughter, Kazue spoke almost no English. Casey knew that his Japanese was accented, but understandable. He still made plenty of mistakes – he was all too aware of that – but he could get his point across. And yet whenever he talked to Kazue, she had the irritating habit of studying his mouth as though she needed to lip-read in order to catch the drift of what he was saying. As though she found his words or the way he was expressing himself bizarre or confusing. And whenever he did make a mistake – got a word wrong, say, or used the wrong register – she had a profoundly annoying look that would flit over her face, a half-smile that she flashed on for the merest fraction of a second, like she had remembered a private joke she had no intention of sharing with him. She reminded him of a bully he’d known in high school, a popular girl with sneaky, subtle ways of getting at others, of undermining their confidence. Part of him hated having to ask for her help, but who else could he turn to?

One thing he was grateful for: she hadn’t spoken to him about Etsuko other than to murmur some banality about them eventually sorting things out. She knew about Etsuko’s new living arrangements, obviously knew about Paolo. What she thought about it all he could only guess: Kazue kept her own counsel. There were times that her self-contained discretion drove him wild, made him want to bring it up himself. What sort of woman abandoned her only child to go off and have a fling? But he always caught himself. The answer to that question seemed to come with another:  What sort of man lets that happen?

...

The train screeched to a stop and Casey fought his way through the crowd of commuters to the door. Mainly students at this hour, all yakking away at top volume, the girls shrieking with laughter, the boys feigning indifference but obviously paying attention to what the girls said and did. Casey remembered himself as a teenager, the zits, the angst, the horrible insecurity. No matter how bad it was now, he could still feel a rush of relief to be out of high school.

One of the boys, a tall gangly kid with bumpy skin and a foreign look about him, struck Casey as exceptionally sad. As they left the station, the boys formed rowdy huddles and the girls all bunched together in small noisy groups. This boy walked alone, slightly hunched over. Casey was seized by a sudden urge to grab him by the shoulders and tell him to cheer up, that his life would improve.  He remembered the misery of his own adolescence, the feeling that things would always be awful, that he would never have friends, never have the respect of his peers. And look at you now, he thought to himself. A single father in a foreign country with one friend to your name.

It was going to take some getting used to, he could see – this new work schedule. It was strange to be getting home at this hour, and it had felt strange leaving for work in the morning instead of the afternoon. But this way he would get to see Kenji in the morning and the evening, and in time their relationship would improve. Kenji had started wetting the bed again for the first time in almost a year:  it could hardly get any worse.