On the first Sunday of October in 1988, Mr. and Mrs. Suzuki drove my suitcases to the next homestay family, the Yashiros; I followed behind on my 50cc Honda Tact. Mr. Yashiro— a busier carpenter than Mr. Suzuki, judging by his absence— had built a home for his family with amenities like climate control in every room. In the front hall bathroom, he had also installed a washlet: an evolved toilet that directed a jet of cleansing water in the direction of my butt at the tap of a remote control. The Yashiro home constituted a homestay upgrade, and I wondered if the Suzukis shared not only relief at my departure from their home, but also envy.
A single table sat low in the center of the Yashiros’ formal sitting room, now my bedroom, with cushions around it on the tatami mats. Mrs. Yashiro closed the room’s sliding doors for me that evening, isolating my space from that of the living room, before moving that table and the cushions aside. From a corner closet, she removed the bedding and spread a small futon, the shikibuton, on the tatami before covering it with a sheet. A larger futon, the kakebuton, had a fitted sheet, and served as a duvet. Buckwheat chaff filled the pillows, traditional, she said, but I found them much more comfortable— on par with the foam pillow the Suzukis had placed on my cot— than the words buckwheat chaff had led me to believe.
Quiet filled the room. My libido screamed for attention, but my larger brain overruled it. As had been true at the Suzukis’, masturbation incurred too many risks.
My two suitcases still served as a closet and as a bookshelf for my paperbacks. I cracked open The Name of the Rose for the fourth time since arriving in Japan at the end of July.
Mrs. Yashiro, as Mrs. Suzuki had done, asked after my likes and dislikes. Her older son attended a university prep high school, far fancier than Okegawa Senior High, the school I taught at, but her daughter studied in her second year there and I had seen her in classes. Her younger son attended middle school. I assumed the children spent all their free time studying; I rarely saw them. Mr. Yashiro, however, remained utterly absent from view.
My new host mother began to whittle away at my privacy by asking after my parents at dinner on Monday. Remarriage didn’t happen as frequently in Japan as it did in the United States and although I found a word for stepfather in my English to Japanese dictionary, use of it met with blank stares. The longer explanation— my father had died when I was fourteen and my mother had remarried, so now I have a different father— drove the point across, even though Mrs. Yashiro’s face crumpled to learn of my father’s death. She asked me to elaborate, but all I needed to mention was shinzō mahi, the Japanese term for a heart attack, for her to nod and fall silent.
She asked after siblings the next night.
The next subject of her inquisition the night after that? My hobbies.
She asked about my favorite color and then she asked what I had studied at college. She looked shocked after hearing that I hadn’t majored in Japanese. “You speak so well!” Her sincerity, however, exceeded the gush of any strangers. Merely saying konnichi wa or arigatō gozaimasu startled compliments out of everyone in Japan.
At breakfast one morning, a week after I had moved in, she asked if I had a girlfriend.
I panicked and christened Ann-Marie, a college friend, my girlfriend who lives in America.
Mrs. Yashiro clucked, “Ā, sō desu ka.” Disappointment echoed as relief washed through me, aware, suddenly, that I had likely dodged her matchmaking bullets.
Efforts at heterosexuality intensified in early 1985, midway through my freshman year. Pheromones surrounded me in my all-male entry, but they had shifted from the first semester’s acrid desperation to a novel, mellower contentment as some of my entry-mates began dating.
Some of those women brought their friends to hang out in our entry, too. One in particular stood out: a woman with long black hair and celadon eyes. Ann-Marie laughed as easily as I did and my admiration for her grew as I noted my conversational attempts at matching her intelligence drew her attention. She had attended my first Choral Society performance when I sang as a baritone for Handel’s Solomon in the fall. She had perched at the front of the chapel, too, when the Society sang for Lessons and Carols in December.
One snowy February afternoon, I stopped in at the resident advisors’ suite. Paul, a tall, lanky junior with a face overwhelmed by angles— brows, cheekbones, nose, and chin— sat sprawled on a sofa, Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax on the turntable. “How do you ask a girl out?”
Paul held my gaze. “Which girl are we talking about?”
“Ann-Marie. Friends with Kathy? Ian’s girlfriend?”
“Long, black hair?”
I nodded.
“Do you have feelings for her?”
“F-feelings?”
He gestured for me to sit. “Why do you want to ask her out?”
“She’s smart. Funny. I think she might like me.”
Paul’s eyebrow arched. Another angle. “Have you ever asked anyone out before?”
I flinched. “The girl I took to CYO prom? Does that count?”
“Probably not.” Paul laughed.
I joined him, nervously.
“There’s really no one way to ask someone out.”
I sighed and returned to my room, thanking him as I left.
The following Monday, I trekked to her entry. She asked me in, we sat down, but incoherence overwhelmed me for several long minutes until, at last: “Will you go out with me?”
Her smile flickered, her words grew softer. “I think we’ll work better as friends.”
I mumbled an apology before standing, flushed with embarrassment. I slowly rewound my scarf before backing out into the stairway. Another emotion arose as I walked back to my entry: relief.
The second Monday in October, Mr. Tsunoda, one of my English-teaching colleagues, stood waiting at the door to the teachers’ room. “We’re going out for lunch. You want to come?” I nodded, smiling.
The restaurant specialized in unagi,grilled eel served in lacquer boxes atop steaming hot rice. The other diners— Mr. Tsunoda, Mr. Hamatsu, and my teachers’ lounge friend Mr. Nishizawa— taught me to sprinkle sanshō, Sichuanese pepper, on top. The now zingier unagi went better with our Sapporo beers— one glass each— that way.
Mr. Nishizawa caught my eye as we ate. “I have a niece, you know. A lovely girl. She would like to meet you.”
“Oh?” I dragged the syllables of that sentence— sō desu ka— into an uncertainty far slower than Mrs. Yashiro’s voiced disappointment from a few nights back.
Within the austere efficiency of spoken Japanese, context informs everything. Speakers rely on listeners to paint in the details within a conversation. Challenges abound, however, if the subject of a sentence is simply a relative pronoun like sō, meaning “that thing.” The implied meaning could hover closer to “that thing I am thinking of which I hope you remember but I don’t want to spell it out in case there was any awkwardness.”
In drawling my sō desu ka, I had hoped that Mr. Nishikawa would notice my lack of interest in potential dates without his forcing me to directly say that.
“It’s not important. Let me know if you have any free time.”
Bingo. “I will, sir.”
That night, Mrs. Yashiro asked about the lunch. (She made no secret of the fact that she kept tabs on my whereabouts via the school secretary.)
I smiled. “The eel was delicious.”
“That restaurant is very good. How is Mr. Nishizawa?”
“Fine, I think. He did ask me a difficult question, though.”
Her eyebrows flew into her bangs. “Oh? And what was that?”
“He asked if I would meet his niece. It seemed like he was setting me up for a date.”
“I’m sure that’s not what he meant.” She frowned.
At dinner two days later, Mrs. Yashiro had news. “I spoke with a few PTA members, and we decided to ask Mr. Nishizawa to not pursue any talk of dates anymore.”
I dropped my chopsticks. “What?”
“I let them know all about Ann-Marie.”
Despite my freshman year mistake, by sophomore year Ann-Marie and I had become fast friends. As a sophomore, I also started working for Dr. Drickamer, an animal behavior professor in the biology department. Racks of different species of mice crowded his basement lab. Each specimen occupied their own white plastic bin. The metal-slatted tops had reservoirs both for water bottles and for food. When kibble didn’t need to be topped up or water bottles replaced with freshly cleaned ones, I had one research task to complete: I checked juvenile female mice to see if they had reached estrus and were therefore old enough to conceive.
Ann-Marie grimaced as I reviewed my lab routine, including the pipettes and slides and cages upon cages of mice, at lunch. “Did you want to be performing pap smears on mice?”
I exhaled a slow laugh. “Not particularly. I’m thinking about a biology major, though.”
“What for?”
“I was really good at it in high school and my teacher encouraged me to keep going.” I speared a cucumber slice in my salad. “Did I ever tell you that I took extra science classes at Columbia during my junior and senior years?”
Her smile intensified as she rested her chin in her hand, ready for a story. “You never did.”
“My biology teacher recommended that. He sent in the application for me.”
“He thought highly of you.”
I returned her smile. “I was lucky to be in a small school. All of my teachers liked me.”
“Is that why you want to major in bio? For that teacher?”
“Maybe. But I’m also thinking about pre-med.”
Her smile waned. “Don’t you need chemistry and physics classes, too?”
“I can take them next year.”
“As a junior? That sounds intense. Does your family want you to be a doctor?”
“I don’t know. My father was in banking.”
“Before his heart attacks?”
I changed the topic as we walked our empty lunch trays to the dish drop and flume.
After lunch on the second Thursday of October— Mr. Hamatsu had led Mr. Tsunoda and me to his favorite Chinese restaurant for shrimp in chili sauce— Mr. Nishizawa beckoned to me in the teachers’ lounge.
“I have a gift for you.”
“Sir?”
From within his front jacket pocket, he withdrew a small book, placing it in my hands. “Go ahead. Open it.”
The cover’s surface might once have been leather, but it felt dry and cracked, thin against the cardboard within. A faint cross, its gilt long gone, adorned its center. An inscription waited on the front endpaper: “To the brave men actively engaged in the Pacific Theater, may this collection of the Psalms and the Gospels comfort you during the intense fighting I know you must endure.” The signature of President Franklin D. Roosevelt followed below.
Mr. Nishizawa asked me to read that inscription to him. “In English, please.”
He smiled when I finished, and placed his hands over the book, pressing it into my hands.
“I was a boy when the war ended, you know, when the Americans came for the Occupation.”
Our eyes met and I nodded.
“Most of us asked the soldiers for chocolate, but I saw this book in the hands of a GI. I asked him, in my terrible English, what it was, and he gave it to me. Maybe he thought I would study more English.”
I smiled with him.
“I’ve kept the book all these years, but I want you to have it. I regret embarrassing you the other day.”
My eyes snapped wide. “Oh, sir, I can’t accept this. And you needn’t apologize. I was wrong to have said anything to Mrs. Yashiro, especially since”— I lied— “I wasn’t at all embarrassed.”
His smile remained. “Please. I’m asking you to take it. I don’t need a book to remember those times. It was meant for an American after all.”
“But, sir, I can’t.”
“I insist.”
“Are you certain? I don’t know what to say.”
“Please. Consider it yours. It’s old and dusty, nothing at all.”
I bowed; half with gratitude, half with regret.
Ann-Marie opened her door to me, my head bowed on a Sunday morning early in September of our senior year. “Your radio show was great today. I love how your voice changes when you pull out the classical music. And that Mozart symphony?”
I shared her smile. “The Jupiter? I love the Bernstein recording. Did you know it was one of the last pieces Mozart composed? Three years before he died. It was his longest symphony, too.”
She invited me to sit. And suddenly the modicum of confidence with which I had knocked at her door faded. I scrambled, panicking, forgetting all the coming-out scenarios I had studied within The Joy of Gay Sex. I cleared my throat.
“I have something to tell you, but I don’t know how.”
She smiled, curious.
“I’ve been longing to tell you this for a long time.” My words tripped over each other and I flushed.
“Take it slow.”
“I’ve kept this secret from you.”
An eyebrow raised. “Really?”
“Yes, and…” I faltered.
She stood and sat on the arm of my chair, then lifted my chin and looked me in the eye. “It’s okay. You can tell me anything.”
I gulped and held her gaze. “I’m gay.”
Her sudden peal of laughter, bright and sparkling, surprised me.
“I don’t understand. Is that funny?”
“It’s not funny that you’re gay. Not at all. I was just thinking you were going to ask me out again. I’ve known you were gay since freshman year.”
“You knew?”
“You’re not like most boys.” She squeezed my hand “You’re kind. Gentle. Special.”
My laughter now mingled with tears.
Ann-Marie grew quieter. “Thank you for not making that awkward.”
My laughter accelerated. “Isn’t that my line?”
I cheered along with the other teachers as students lined up on the dusty field in front of Okegawa Senior High, performing synchronized athletic displays and competitions, class by class, on the Friday after Sports Day, mid-October. The English faculty huddled beside the principal’s platform.
Mr. Hamatsu reviewed his weekend plans with Mr. Tsunoda: the two of them wanted to bring me to Akihabara. Mr. Someya tapped me on the shoulder.
“Am I interrupting?”
“No, sir.” I bowed to my supervisor.
“I was wondering whether you still wanted to live on your own.”
My hai echoed, the affirmative earning a surprised glance from Principal Honma. I ducked my head in apology.
Mr. Someya continued, drawing a hiss of concern backwards through his teeth. “Most of the real estate and apartment agents I’ve spoken to were nervous about working with foreigners and they said that landlords would be hesitant, too.”
I echoed his hiss.
“Your Japanese abilities are a big help, though, and Vice-Principal Kikuchi knows an agent near the train station that can help.”
I brightened. “Really?”
Mr. Someya nodded. “There’s an apartment in a new building near the station that’s available. Mr. Kikuchi sent a letter of guarantee to the landlord.”
“A letter of guarantee?”
“He let the landlord know that you work for the board of education, and that Okegawa High School can vouch for you.” Another hiss. “Rent is expensive, though.”
“How much?”
“Fifty thousand yen per month.”
Roughly five hundred dollars, one-sixth of my salary. “It’s not that expensive.”
“It’s also big. Maybe too big for just one person.”
I lowered my gaze. “How big is it?”
“It’s a 3DK.”
Three rooms with a dining/kitchen area. Big enough for an entire Japanese family. Opulent for just me. But if independence came in the form of a $500/month 3DK apartment, I’d take it. I bowed deeply. “Thank you, sir.”
The leasing agent showed Mr. Someya, Mr. Kikuchi, and me the apartment over the weekend. Akihabara could wait. The three rooms, accessible from the central dining/kitchen area, all had similar dimensions (room sizes in Japan are calculated by the number of tatami mats that can fit— six mats’ worth of space for each room, just over one hundred square feet). Tatami mats covered the floors of two of the rooms; traditional sliding doors opened on to the dining/kitchen area. Carpeting covered the third room’s floor.
The toilet had its own small room. The sink, shower, and tub— a deep, square soaking tub— occupied a larger room called a unit bath, where everything from the ceiling to the floor, the walls, sink, shower mount, and tub, were all molded units of fiber-reinforced plastic.
Mr. Someya and Mr. Kikuchi hissed in tandem. “So big!”
At the Suzukis, I had had no complaints for six mats of air-conditioned space where my cot sat. At the Yashiros, I had twice that amount, snuggling on buckwheat chaff pillows each night. But the apartment offered a total of thirty mats worth of space, five-hundred and twenty square feet, and all that room bewitched me. I walked through, shoes left near the door, wondering where to sleep, where to watch television.
Mr. Kikuchi caught me mid-daydream. “Are American apartments this big?”
“Some apartments, yes. I know I can afford it, sir.” I bowed reverentially. “Thank you so much for helping me find this.”
My fawning had the desired effect. Mr. Kikuchi straightened and said, “Mr. Someya? Let’s go sign the papers.”
I chose the last Sunday in October, the 30th, for the move. With fifteen days to prepare, my teacher colleagues scoured their homes for items to furnish my new apartment with. Each day, another of them came by my desk to ask if I needed a rice cooker, or pots and pans, or dishes, or curtains— their generosity astounded me.
Mr. Tsunoda donated a used wall-mounted air-conditioner/heater unit. Mr. Hashimoto, another English teacher, had a kerosene heater for my kitchen— “Keep the windows cracked when you use it!” Mr. Hamatsu had an old desk and chair. Mrs. Igarashi, an English teacher with a fondness for Rick Astley, had an old hot water heater for my kitchen (a separate heater had already been installed for the shower and tub). Mr. Fukumoto— an English teacher who had taken to echoing my “oh, my God” interjections with an “oh, my Buddha”— had an old television.
Mrs. Tanaka, a PE teacher, outdid them all. “I have an old washing machine you can use. And a big futon set, sized for newlyweds!” She smiled, her eyes glimmering. “Maybe Ann-Marie will come for a visit?” I blushed at the reminder of my closet’s necessities.
Mr. Someya brought new questions every day. “Do you know how to cook?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been to a Japanese supermarket before?”
“Yes.”
“Can you wash your own clothes?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know how to make rice?”
“No, but I can learn.”
I bowed to Mrs. Yashiro as Mr. Tsunoda pulled up in his Nissan Homy van. Vice-Principal Kikuchi had received the key and awaited me at the apartment with the small cadre of teachers who had come to put all the donations in place under Mrs. Tanaka’s direction.
Mr. Tsunoda pulled into the apartment’s parking lot and I pulled my two suitcases from the back. Mr. Kikuchi approached with a smile, his voice suddenly stentorian: “You must be a considerate neighbor!” I caught the implication: any bad behavior would reflect on Okegawa Senior High, but I basked in the applause after he handed me my key. It turned in the lock.
Home.
I turned to bow in thanks— deeply, slowly, eyes lowered— to all my colleagues. Mr. Kikuchi stepped forward once more. “In Japan, we give gifts to our new neighbors. Let me introduce you to them.”
He led me to the second floor, knocking, in turn, on all three doors. To each neighbor he handed a trim paper bag of gifts and his business card. I bowed, intoning yoroshiku onegai shimasu, a greeting mixed with the hope for a smooth relationship.
We repeated the process on my floor, stopping at the apartments on either side of me. The gifts, I learned, combined the traditional and the practical. A package of udon noodles symbolized a wish for long stretches of unbroken luck. A hand towel? You can never have too many hand towels. The gifts had each been wrapped with a band of white paper. A knot of red cording— more good luck— kept the bands in place.
The teachers each waited to shake my hands. I thanked Mr. Tsunoda in English to see him chuckle— his handsome features reminded me of kabuki actors in woodblock prints, elegant within his long face, especially when he smiled. Mr. Kikuchi received my deepest, longest bow as I voiced my most formal expression of gratitude: “Taihen tasukarimashita. Dōmo arigatō gozaimashita. Thank you so much for everything you’ve done to help me.”
I closed my front door, sighing for my long-awaited solitude. The futons sat folded inside the bedroom closet. Sunshine streamed in through the curtains, warming the tatami. Brand new, their grassy scent comforted me. I fought the temptation to lie down and imagine myself in a field.
The television rested on a low table in the other tatami room, my living room, I had decided, with the air conditioner/heater installed high on the wall above it. A remote for that unit sat beside the television; Mr. Tsunoda had written out instructions in English, complete with hand-drawn pictures of each of the buttons.
The hot water heater gleamed in the kitchen, mounted to the wall, ready for use. I washed my hands with a push of a button and hot water danced from the tap immediately. A two-burner stove had been connected to the gas line and a kettle awaited me there. Mrs. Tanaka had taped a note above the gas line’s cutoff valve: “turn me off if there’s an earthquake!”
Handwritten instructions had been placed by the bath, too. I filled the tub after closing the living room curtains. Mrs. Yashiro had sent along a small bag of soaps and shampoos. Once the hot water filled the tub, I bathed as the Suzukis had taught me when I first arrived in Okegawa: shower and scrub outside the tub, and, once clean, slip into the tub for a long, hot soak. I gave my balls a tug, promising them that I would end the three-months of masturbatory abstinence shortly.
The rice cooker waited, plugged in, on the donated kitchen table. It too had instructions courtesy of Mrs. Tanaka. I opened the bag of rice she had stowed under the sink and measured out a portion. As it cooked, I walked across the street in the twilight to a supermarket, where the uniformed clerks addressed me as sensei— word had spread that the neighborhood now hosted Okegawa Senior High’s new English teacher.
Crisp tempura, on sale in the hour before the supermarket’s closing, now nestled on my bowl of rice. I sat down to watch the Sunday night movie on television, smiling when the program’s host, Nagaharu Yodogawa, bid me goodnight with his trademark sayonara, sayonara, sayonara.
Brian Watson has been a queer leader and mentor for more than 35 years. They currently review nonfiction for Hippocampus magazine. Their craft essays appear in the BREVITY blog. White Enso selected one of their essays, “Bending Time,” for a nonfiction award. Cutbank and Columbia Journal named “Unfolding,” one of Brian’s braided essays, as a finalist for their respective 2023 non-fiction contests. Brian writes about the intersections of Japan and queerness in their Substack, Out of Japan, which has more than 500 subscribers. Follow their Substack here.
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Susan L. Lin is a Taiwanese American storyteller who hails from southeast Texas. She has an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. Her novella GOODBYE TO THE OCEAN won the 2022 Etchings Press novella prize, and her short prose and poetry have appeared in over fifty different publications. Find more at her website.