On Valentine’s Day, the custom in Japan is that men get presents from women. God knows how this came about, but there it is. The male teachers at our school all got chocolates from girl students who had crushes on them, and the secretaries told me that in many work places in Japan it was de rigueur for female employees to give  their male co-workers small gifts of chocolate whether they liked them or not. These were called 'giri choco,' literally 'obligation chocolate.'  I had no intention of giving any of the men in at our school chocolate either from affection or obligation, and found all the men's shameless bragging about the ditzy schoolgirls who had crushes on them pretty disgusting.  On Valentine's Day, it was all that I could do to watch as girl after girl came tittering into the staffroom and placed prettily wrapped parcels on the men's  desks. At one point, watching Todd rip into a small box of rum truffles,  I commented that he was lucky to be in Japan, as it was hardly likely that he would warrant such adulation in American. He took offense, of course.

Marjorie leapt to his defense. 'Well, you might not think much of Todd, Mary, but I certainly do!' She gave Todd a playful punch. 'I'd give him chocolates if I were a Japanese girl!'

I should have known better, but I felt I had to elaborate. 'It's just that foreign men here seem to get a lot more attention than they would back home.'  When it comes to saying exactly the wrong thing, I have a special talent. At Sony School, I exceeded myself. 

On this occasion, the men in the office immediately denied any preferential treatment.

'Foreign women get more attention here than they would back home, too!' Todd retorted, slumped gracelessly at his desk with his legs stretched out in front of him, his mouth full of white chocolate. I watched as the men discussed the various qualities of the girls who had lavished them with candy: they discussed at length  the girls' looks, their figures, and their English-speaking ability as they gobbled up their chocolate-covered almonds, their glazed  chestnuts and nut fudge.

Maybe it was true that foreign women got more attention in Japan than they did back home.  A month later, in March, came ‘White Day,’ a holiday created strictly for commercial purposes, when girls theoretically got presents from boys. But the only chocolates I got that year were from my mother.

Just after Valentine's Day,  Marjorie announced to everyone in the staffroom that her husband had given all of the women he worked with, secretaries and teachers alike, Valentine’s Day chocolate. ‘Wasn’t that nice of him?’ she gushed. Everyone said that it certainly was:  what a generous thing to do. ‘Don’t you think that was sweet of my husband?’ she asked me specifically a few moments later; my answer must not have been loud or emphatic enough for her.  Whenever Marjorie said anything to me that wasn’t work related, it was almost always to do with her husband: the fun they’d had over the weekend, the delights of being married, the interesting holiday they’d been on together, the lovely friends they’d entertained or visited the night before. I nodded now, feeling like a fool, and said that the women he worked with must have been very pleased. ‘Oh yes, they were. He’s such a sweetheart, really, my husband, they all really think he’s just wonderful.’ And she simpered like a girl who’s just been asked to the prom by the captain of the football team.  I kept planning my lessons, but I thought to myself that I could be married to the captain of the football team, but God forbid I would ever bore another woman with assurances of his superiority.

A few days later, I happened to be talking to Carol about something entirely different and she mentioned Marjorie’s husband. I asked her about the Valentine chocolates he had given all the women in the office, and she laughed and said that Marjorie’s husband certainly seemed to like the ladies. That started me thinking that Marjorie’s tales of wedded bliss might be exactly that:  tales.

I started to think that Marjorie, who knew that I might hear of her husband’s chocolate-giving spree from Carol, wanted to make her husband’s actions look generous and chivalrous instead of flirtatious, and that is why she bragged so loudly about his gifts to his women co-workers.  I only met Marjorie’s husband once very briefly when all of us were at a Sony party, but although he seemed a reasonably nice man, I never got close enough to talk to him. Frankly, with Marjorie around, I wouldn’t have dared.

I’m not sure how long Marjorie and her husband had been in Japan, but their contract with Sony School ran out in April. They had the option of renewing it, but to my endless relief, they chose to go back to the States instead of remaining in Japan. About the time Marjorie and her husband were packing up to leave, the flu swept through Yokohama and I caught it.

The day I came down with this, I had felt perfectly fine to begin with.  So fine, in fact, that I had just given blood for the first time in Japan, in a bus with a big red cross on it in front of Shibuya Station.  As I climbed the stairs to the train tracks afterwards, I started to feel a little weak, but I put it down to the blood loss and the fact that I had been to my Japanese school earlier and taken a quiz there. In San Francisco, I used to give blood, then cycle back home through Golden Gate Park and go to work for four hours. So all I needed to do was rest a little and I'd be fine, I told myself.

The train was fairly full and I was standing up, hanging onto a strap. Two American servicemen were sitting in front of me, deeply engrossed in conversation. One minute I was staring out of the window, looking at the fields and houses as we raced passed them, thinking to myself that perhaps giving blood had been a mistake, as I was feeling more than a little light-headed.  The next minute I went from feeling light-headed to feeling queasy. Then a rushing, whirring noise began to fill my head and I had the sickening feeling that I might faint. The next moment, I found that I was sitting down, staring at my knees, and the rushing, whirring sound had receded into the background, but it was still there. And one of the servicemen was bending down, asking me in English ‘Are you alright, miss? Are you okay?’ over and over. And no, I wasn’t.

One of the Americans walked with me to the top of the stairs in Shinagawa station, obviously worrying that I was going to faint again. I felt awful, but I somehow managed to get home without incident.

Once I reached my apartment, I was burning up and sick to my stomach. I had the night off work, but I was expected to go in the next morning. I called the school and warned everyone that I might be ill. Then I went to bed. I tried not to think about whoever might be getting my blood transfused into them, complete with my flu germs.

All that night I was deathly ill. When I could drag myself into the kitchen, I drank glass after glass of water, supporting myself, weak and shivering, against the sink as I did. I also ended up crawling to the toilet, where I spent an inordinate amount of time. Japanese squat toilets are easier to clean than western-style loos, but when you are ill, you either have to stand or sit down on the floor. I am afraid that I had to sit on the floor; I can remember feeling glad that I'd cleaned it a few days earlier. 

I was in a very bad way. I had little food in the house as I had been due to go shopping. Fortunately, I wasn’t very hungry: I got through the week eating small amounts of stale cereal and bread, rounding them off with shrivelled apples and a few dry oranges I’d been meaning to throw away. Most of the time I just slept, and I had dreams that were so vivid and disturbing that I remember them to this day.

In one dream, I stood outside a clearing in a forest. In the middle of the clearing, there were a ring of men, perhaps twenty or thirty, surrounding an elderly man in a blue and grey kimono. He sat on the ground in the packed-earth clearing, frowning, refusing to look at the people surrounding him. One of the men asked him if he was prepared to make a statement or retract something – I could not follow what – and he said no, frowning and glaring at the ground. I watched him and thought to myself This is a stubborn man and his stubbornness is going to be his undoing.  Just after this, I saw one of the men in the ring pick something off the ground:  a piece of wood. He held the tip of it in a blazing fire, then approached the man in the blue and grey kimono. No sooner had he picked up the burning stick, than I knew exactly what was going to happen. I tried to warn the man, but the scream tangled in my throat. He saw what was coming, but remained staring at the ground, scowling, resolute.  The man with the stick held it to the seated man’s blue-and-grey kimono and it immediately exploded into a blazing flower of fire. The man’s screams were deafening, and no wonder:  he was literally burning up, the flames searing his skin, congealing the blood in his veins.  I was still screaming when I woke up, but I was only figuratively on fire. I don’t normally sweat much, but I was soaked.

The first night of my illness, I’d had the presence of mind to put my Sony first-aid kit next to my futon, and I fumbled around in it now for the thermometer, one of the old-fashioned mercury types. My temperature was 104 degrees. I was shivering, both hot and cold, but too weak to get up and light my gas fire. I’m not sure that was a bad thing at all:   I still think that the super-chilled air in my uninsulated, unheated apartment might have saved me a good number of brain cells at the very least.  When I got up later on to get some water, I knelt on the thermometer and broke it; I had a hell of a time trying to scoop the beads of mercury off the tatami afterwards and I didn't know how to dispose of them properly.

It was a week before I felt well enough to drag on some clothes, step into my shoes, and go visit the shopping center some twenty minutes away from my apartment. I bought packaged corn soup, spinach salad (God knows why) and apple juice. The corn soup and apple juice tasted as good as anything had ever tasted to me, but I had to throw away the spinach salad:  I found it too hard to chew after my exhausting trip to the store and back.  The next day, I called work and let them know that I was better and would be back in a few days’ time. Just before I was due to go back to work, however, I was surprised to receive a telephone call from Marjorie.   

‘Hello, Mary. I was sorry to hear about your flu. Are you better now?’

‘Yes, quite a lot better, thank you.’

‘Well, I just wanted to say goodbye. I’d planned to say goodbye when you came back to work, but since you’re going to be off tomorrow, it looks like I won’t see you again.’

I mumbled something formulaic about hoping that she and her husband would have a safe journey home.

There was a brief silence, then Marjorie began again. ‘So, well, I just wanted to say that it’s been a real pleasure working with you, and I wish you all the best.’

What could I say?  Any number of satisfying rejoinders went through my mind, and almost thirty years later, I still wonder why I didn’t manage to say any of them. Was it because I was still feeling weak from the flu, or was it just my usual cowardice? Sentences half formed in my mind as I sat there:  A pleasure working with me, eh? Well, you’ve had a funny way of showing it, you mean-spirited bitch; or If you’re ever treated as badly as you treated me, Marjorie, I hope you reflect on your own behavior to me.  I sat there, clutching the phone, completely at a loss. After Marjorie’s dishonest platitude, there was a pregnant pause which I knew I was expected to fill with some similar commonplace such as Same here, Marjorie – I wish you all the best.  

But although I can be deeply obsequious, lies and insults generally don’t come easy to me. I tried to think of something innocuous to say, something that would fill that embarrassing pause and yet not be a lie. Nothing came to mind.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Okay. Have a safe trip home, Marjorie. Goodbye.’  And we hung up. I have often wondered if she told the people around her how rude I was on that occasion. I’ll bet she did.

I now think Marjorie was terribly insecure. All her references to her happy marriage, how wonderful and considerate her husband was, their numerous friends and the fun they had together – surely a woman who really was really secure and happy in her marriage would not have needed to advertise it so?  At the time, she struck me as remarkably complacent and satisfied with her life, but it is quite likely that she felt threatened by me.  My giddy naiveté, my fast popularity with the students, the fact that I spoke a little Japanese, my comparative youth – and, it has to be said, my appearance, all brought out the worst in Marjorie and made her determined to secure the upper hand in our relationship. I wonder what her childhood was like, what experiences she had in high school, how she got along with other women in college. One thing I did notice was that Marjorie didn’t seem to have many women friends.

It is unfortunate that women – and of course men – judge women by their looks. We rate men by their looks, too, but the cruellest, strictest judgments of outward appearances are reserved for women. Youthfulness, beauty and charm will stand any woman in good stead, even if she is stupid, mean-spirited, and untalented. Marjorie wasn’t pretty – not even close. I was no model of perfect beauty either, but by most people's standards, I would have come out okay next to Marjorie – and I was almost ten years younger.  I am neither ashamed nor proud of the fact that I registered her plainness when we first met; we all notice each other's looks. I certainly noticed that Mr Minamide was short and small; I noticed that my friends Carol and Mark were tall and good-looking. Perhaps this is ingrained in us -- running others through a mental checklist: Strong? Healthy? Good-looking? Well proportioned? Then we do the same thing for their other attributes: Smart? Kind? Hardworking?  Sensitive?  As we get to know people, of course, what they look like becomes a lot less important than how they act and how we get along with them. So while I noticed that Marjorie was no beauty, I know that if she’d been friendly to me, I would have become indifferent to her looks in no time, just as I’ve become indifferent to the looks of friends who are more beautiful than me.  Marjorie may have seen me as a rival; she certainly judged me more severely than I judged her. If I could go back in time and work with Marjorie as my post-childbirth, middle-aged self, I’ll bet she’d like me just fine.  Or who knows? I may be wrong about everything here. It may have been that Marjorie was just a bitch.