Fly Me to the Moon
by Marilyn Abildskov
I want to start with romance. With Marco and how we met. I want to stay in Scotty’s, the bar where we met, eavesdropping on him as he talked to a friend.
I saw him point to the walls of the bar where Scotty had taped posters of models in red bikinis.
“Of course I like beauty,” he said. “But these—they’re not real.”
Above his right lip, I could see a small mole.
He was thirty. By then he had lived in Matsumoto for two years. He had come to Japan for practical reasons as many Japanese-Brazilians had. Engineering jobs were hard to come by in Sao Paulo. Now he worked in an electronics factory in Matsumoto doing mundane work alongside other Japanese-Brazilians. He was saving money, he said, hoping to return to Brazil within six months—maybe sooner—no matter what.
Was I studying Japanese when I met Marco? I want to say yes. But maybe by then, I’d already quit. I had started off taking lessons once a week from a Japanese woman, the wife of an Australian man I'd met who was also teaching English at Shinmei Junior High School. But soon, it seemed pointless.
Once, after my failure to make progress, she said, not unkindly, “I don’t understand it. You study. You come to class every week. You seem smart but—”
But what?
I want to say this is a story about romance. But maybe it's not. If not romance, what?
The next time I met Marco, we cordoned ourselves off at the back of the bar. His friends came and went and I listened as Marco moved between three languages, each with ease—Portuguese, English, and Japanese.
Was Sonia there that night? Sonia became important later. But if she was there that night, I didn’t notice her. Or anyone else. Only him.
I was thirty-one years old. I had come to Japan because I was tired of being alone. Now that I had lived in Japan for a year and a half, I was still tired of being alone.
A few days later, he knocked on my door. I was throwing a birthday party for Ann, who’d just arrived in Matsumoto.
Marco wore faded Levis, a plain white T-shirt, and soft leather sandals. He had just run five miles, he whispered, standing in the entrance as he took off his shoes. He smelled of soap.
The others at the party, a mix of people I knew well and those I barely knew at all, clustered around my kitchen table, talking loudly, eating roasted green peas.
The party continued and I continued filling guests’ red plastic cups with wine, all while keeping my eye on Marco.
When I stood next to the window, Marco sat on the floor, stroking my bare ankle.
In my wallet in those days I carried a card I’d bought years before, one I liked so much I never sent it to anyone, keeping it for myself. On the front, a drawing featured a row of six mismatched feet, each foot trying to fit itself into a glass slipper. One foot was too fat, another too small, each a misfit in a slightly different way.
What happened next happened easily. The party ended naturally. People began leaving one by one. Only Marco remained.
I began cleaning up, carrying dishes to the sink. Marco helped.
When I bumped into the kitchen table, knocking over what was left of Ann’s birthday cake, I shrieked. What had been left of the cake—its thick chocolate middle and vanilla frosting on top—was ruined now, stranded in the middle of the kitchen floor.
Marco laughed and then I did, too, and then we weren’t laughing, we were dancing. Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys sang from the boom box on the windowsill’s distant shore, urging us to stay a little longer. Then we stopped. We were barely moving now, just rocking back and forth, shipwrecked on this tiny island of a room.
The next weekend I would replay all the details to Ann when we met up at Scotty’s, tell her how he’d stroked my ankle, how he’d cleaned up the cake, how he’d lingered after everyone left, including her.
I left a few things out. Like his brown sandals—not the kind of sandals a Japanese man would wear, not the kind most American men might wear, either, though I couldn’t say precisely how. That night, I’d decided I loved them, his sandals, and because I loved them, I would also love Brazil.
That’s how simple I was then. Sandals equaled love. Love equaled the future. I could imagine myself into a new place, could already conjure up Brazil and its terra roxa of its Parana Plateau, its red earth close to the sea, its land where coffee grew, its dry red dust turning slippery and sticky when wet—and that was that. I could make the leap easily. I loved Marco now. I loved Brazil. Because I loved his shoes.
Another night. Another party. Another wash of languages, movement in and out of varying degrees of fluency. This one was at Café Santista, a place specializing in imported goods: Brazilian coffee, Spanish-language magazines, delicacies you couldn’t find in Japanese supermarkets like marinated artichoke hearts.
I was happy that night, Marco next to me, when someone I’d never seen before, an older Japanese man, introduced himself in English and said he was having a party next weekend at his home.
Would I like to come? he asked. His house, he said, was large by Japanese standards.
“Sure,” I said. I thought nothing of it. I was on my second Corona, feeling good. It was all good. Another party? Of course.
“Feel free to bring someone,” the man said.
I turned to Marco. “I’ll bring you,” I said, touching his arm.
Marco smiled.
As Marco turned, I could see the man’s face change. He stopped smiling. Just like that.
“It’s a party for gaijin,” he said.
“But Marco is a gaijin,” I said, my face turning hot. “He’s from Brazil.”
Marco didn’t say a word. Instead, he took my hand and led me away as if to warn me not to make a bad situation worse.
“Anyway,” he told me, “next weekend I have to work.”
If Japan, for me, was lovely, for Marco it must have felt like something else altogether: a funhouse mirror that distorted him.
Marco worked six days a week while I worked five. He also worked much longer hours than I, or any of us who were teaching English, did. Five or six hours a day—that’s all I worked, easy hours, all of them.
I asked him once what he did at the electronics factory, and he said it was too boring to talk about.
It did not occur to me to ask again.
Once, after a night at Scotty’s, Marco and I wandered the streets of Matsumoto at daybreak, neither of us eager to go home.
When an old man from across the street shouted at us something in Japanese, I turned to Marco to translate.
“He said, ‘Why are you two holding hands? Why don’t you two stop holding hands.’”
Had the man assumed Marco was Japanese? If he’d seen us both as gaijin, would he have dismissed our immodesty as the craziness of foreigners, something to be expected? Because Marco looked Japanese, had the old man expected him—and us—to follow unspoken Japanese rules?
We laughed at the silliness and continued walking hand-in-hand.
He dropped my full name into conversations—first, middle and last—and we both laughed when he did this, my name of many syllables.
When he danced at Scotty’s, he danced like a Muppet, head flopping about while his body, arms down to the side, remained stiff.
He had a runner’s body. He walked slowly. When he asked what was on my mind, he sounded as if he genuinely wanted to know.
He loved Stevie Ray Vaughan and skydiving and thought Stevie Ray and skydiving were both underrated, while the U.S. (with the exception of New Orleans, a city he wanted to visit) and Sarah Vaughan (to some extent) were overrated.
He spoke fondly of his mother.
He was a vegetarian who occasionally ate meat. An engineer with a bent toward philosophy. A Brazilian who’d made clear to me that first night he planned to go home. To Brazil.
But lately, he didn’t talk about leaving. Lately, he started saying maybe there were good reasons to stay a little longer in Japan.
I loved the cadence of his voice, the way his voice went up and then down before he turned the tables back on me, something few people did, asking, “And you?”
A question and a statement all at once.
One Saturday, after meeting at Scotty’s, he came home with me. The next weekend, the same. Tender. Easy. So natural it did not occur to me to worry when, one Saturday night, he did not accompany me home. He must be tired, I reasoned. He worked so much.
But then another Saturday. And another.
When we saw each other at Scotty’s, we talked late into the night but it ended there. I missed the way he’d left orange peelings on Sunday mornings on my blue-and-white plates.
“Is he is or isn’t he?” Ann whispered one night in a sing-songy voice. Marco that night had lingered close all night, then abruptly got up to leave.
“There’s your answer,” I said, gesturing toward the man who was doing what everyone would eventually do—leave the party; escape the escape plan that had originally featured escaping to Japan.
In the months that followed, the push-pull continued. We’d see each other at Scotty’s on Saturday nights, ignoring each other one week, then talking for hours the next.
On these nights, I did not think about the bigger picture, what Marco might be going through, what it meant for him to be a Japanese-Brazilian man living in Japan, someone whose fluency, for instance, was expected, whose tiny mistakes, if he made any at all, got called out, while I and other foreigners like me were cheered for paltry attempts at ordering beer. I did not think about what it must feel like to be stuck in a place he hated, doing factory work for which he was overqualified, earning half of what English-speaking foreigners like me made teaching a language we’d been handed at birth. I did not think about issues of race or inequality—not really—because, well, I didn’t have to.
Instead, I thought about whether he was rejecting me or choosing me.
Also, I learned to lie to myself. On our good nights, the ones when we talked easily, I told myself this was good, that I was learning stay in the moment, that I wanted for nothing beyond this, that I was not only OK with the temporary quality of our relationship but beginning to understand the truth. Nothing lasts!
Some nights, we’d leave Scotty’s together and walk through town in the dark and kiss at Matsumoto Castle at dawn and I’d tell myself I enjoyed it. Why yearn for more?
But it’s also true that when, one night at the castle, he said we needed to stop, that we should go home, I felt crushed.
One night, we ran into each other at party. These were the days and nights of endless parties. The usual mix of foreigners and Japanese. The usual flow of Sapporo beer. The usual push-pull. We lived in the land of push, the city of pull, the prefecture of in-betweenness. Casual. No commitment. Platonic but not quite platonic. It was a place where anything might be possible but nothing was likely to change. A place which, as anyone who has lived here will tell you, can be—if you are, like me, the kind who’s searching for home—a tender, bruising place.
A Japanese man struck up a conversation, asking me if Marco was my boyfriend. Also, was he a gaijin?
Marco was nearby, talking to someone else at the time. We had not spoken yet at all. I turned and stared at him, his black hair, the mole on his face. Then my mind went blank, stuck in some in-between space, neither awake nor asleep, as I tried to figure out in English or Japanese or some mix of both how to say it all. That Marco and I had a relationship but he wasn’t my boyfriend. That he was a foreigner—his grandparents had emigrated from Japan to Brazil two generations before, then his family had stayed, making him Brazilian and Japanese. So a gaijin. Yes, Japanese.
“He’s Marco,” I finally blurted out.
Before moving to Japan, what had I imagined? That I would become a woman who would stand at an outdoor market, buy an orange, and eat it, subsisting on little else? Did I imagine I would become content in my solitary skin? That something in a Buddhist country would rub off, freeing me of unruly desires? Did I understand that my yearning to be free of desire suggested I had already missed the point? The reality was, I’d been hungry then. I remained hungry now.
When there were no parties to go to and we tired of Scotty’s, sometimes we’d meet up in other places. Buena Vista was a swanky hotel with a ballroom-size dance floor on its ground level, featuring colorful lights, loud techno music, and pricey, garish drinks. Upstairs was a quiet bar overlooking city lights.
One night, I arrived at Buena Vista late, looking around for people I knew, keeping an eye open for Marco. That’s the night when Sonia approached me. I knew Sonia only in passing. She was part of the Japanese-Brazilian crowd but never showed up to Scotty’s. She was someone Marco had tutored, helping her with her English. He said he worried about her sometimes, because she was young, because she could be reckless, because she was, he told me, like his little sister. That was the phrase he used: little sister. Sonia made small talk at first, asking me if I liked Japan, and when I said yes, I did—very much, in fact—she quickly dispensed with the politeness and launched in.
“Has Marco talked to you?” she asked. “About what he wants?”
My face flushed. Her question caught me off guard. I looked around, hoping to see Marco but he was nowhere in sight.
“Has he told you how he feels?” Sonia pressed.
I had no idea how to answer her questions. I wasn’t sure what she was getting at.
Was Marco the one who had told me Sonia was eighteen? I couldn’t remember now. But tonight, dressed in shiny mini skirt and a silky black sleeveless top that revealed perfect eighteen-year-old cleavage, she looked a lot older.
“Has he let you know that he can’t have anything serious while he’s here because he’s determined to go home?”
She smiled as she spoke, then took a long sip from a red drink in a martini glass. The lights of the dance floor hit her face, illuminating flawless eighteen-year-old skin.
Oh right.
Her aim, I understood now, was to eliminate me, to make me feel stupid, and to wrap her questions as if she were looking out for me. Poor stupid me, twelve years older than Sonia, someone past her prime, someone who couldn’t look out for herself.
“Yes,” I told her. “Marco and I have talked.”
Later I would admire the next part, how she delivered her final blow.
“I care about him,” she said. “He’s like my bodyguard.”
Here she paused. I wondered what she was drinking.
Had I seen it? she asked. The movie?
“No,” I said, though I had.
I was stunned. I must have looked stunned, too, because she added, in case it was still unclear, that she had feelings for him. That’s exactly how she put it. “I have feelings for him. Strong feelings.”
She smiled. She took another sip of her bright drink.
I was holding a Diet Coke. I felt like I was the twelve-year-old talking to someone twenty-five. The twelve-year old wanted to tell Sonia she was living in a fantasyland, that Marco wouldn’t—I was sure of it—be seduced. I wanted to say that whatever I had with Marco was real, a relationship between equals, between grown-ups, while what she had was a ridiculous, adolescent crush. I knew something of ridiculous crushes.
But I didn’t.
I had no idea what she had with Marco. I had no idea what I had with Marco, either, or what the true nature of his feelings were. In any case, I was too hurt to continue the conversation. For this much was clear: He’d been talking to Sonia about me, about us.
So I nodded and said, “I need to use the restroom,” and I left the hotel, riding my bike through the dark streets of Matsumoto, holding onto the thought of what would come—a hot bath, a bottle of wine, a private place to cry.
You seem smart, but--
If Marco had feelings for Sonia, I never found out. He never mentioned her after that. I would not see her for another six months. Meanwhile, Marco and I continued our push-pull dynamic, a familiar one to me now as we circled each other at Scotty’s, then drifted up to barstools next to one another before closing time.
One night I’d be furious, successfully refusing to even glance his way, but then Marco would wander over, lean in and say, “I think we have mental telepathy. Isn't it amazing?” and I would soften, knowing I shouldn’t, but feeling incapable of stopping myself.
Marco left Japan, just as he said he would. The night before his departure, we walked through town as we had so often before. He hummed “Fly Me to the Moon,” a song he loved.
He kissed me on a street corner. He pulled back and said, “We should stop,” pronouncing “stop” as two syllables, “stopped,” instead of one, and the word contained that prick of pleasure and pain—pleasure because the rhythm of his voice was so familiar; pain because even now, on our last night together, there would be no lingering.
In the weeks to follow, I went to Scotty’s as usual on Saturday nights, ordering the same Diet Coke I always ordered. And in the early hours of morning, I rode my bike home and slept alone.
During the week, I went to the same schools and taught the same classes I had always taught, using the same textbook I had always used, and the students, when asked to repeat after me, repeated after me as they always had.
What are you doing this weekend, Yumi?
I’m going to Tokyo to visit my aunt.
When Miss Kiryū asked me to serve as a last-minute coach for an English-language school play at Meizen, I agreed, spending two days working with students on their pronunciation.
Here, the students’ translation of “Cinderella” was called “The Princess and the Shoe.”
Here, Cinderella’s glass slipper was a “high-heeled shoe.”
Miss Kiryū had brought skirts and scarves from her closet for the girls to wear. Horiuchi-kun played the Prince. All the girls, she said, had crushes on Horiuchi.
I watched Horiuchi from backstage, behind a curtain. He hit all his lines perfectly. The audience went wild, applauding when the play was done. And I thought of what else Miss Kiryū had said: that she wished the girls who had crushes on Horiuchi-kun knew he was still immature.
One night, long before he left, Marco had led me out of the bar and we had walked to the castle, arriving just before dawn.
“This is not my beautiful life,” he’d said that night.
We’d sat at the edge of the moat, dangling our legs, talking about the swans. He had not been able to think of the word “swans” so he’d called them long-necked ducks that night.
He’d worn his black leather coat. I was cold in my pea coat.
He’d apologized. I’d said there was no need. But he’d said yes, there was. He was sorry for his strange behavior. He’d come to Japan on the heels of a breakup. He’d hoped to sort himself out, synch his heart with head, somehow. For two years, he’d had no problem avoiding ties.
“Until you,” he said.
After he left, I replayed that scene while bicycling past the castle, never stopping to notice that swans' feathers looked dirty in daylight, not pristine, and you would, if you looked carefully, see just under the surface of water their ungainly webbed feet, furiously pedaling.
Instinctively, I’d kept that conversation with Marco to myself, knowing if I told any of my friends at Scotty’s, they’d dismiss it, saying he'd fed me a line.
Maybe they’d have been right. Maybe it was a line. Maybe it was stupid to think otherwise.
You seem smart, but--
Or maybe there was more than one way to describe a swan.
December went by. Then January. Then February. Once, while waiting for the train, I ran into a Japanese-Brazilian woman, an acquaintance I’d met once at Café Santista. We made small talk. I asked her about her job in Japan and she asked, “And you?”
Her voice went high, then low, just as Marco’s had, wounding in its familiarity.
Felipe was the one who asked me if I’d heard the news.
“Heard what?” I asked.
“About Marco.” He looked surprised. “That Marco’s coming back to Japan,” he said. Returning to his old factory job. He’d had trouble finding work in Sao Paulo.
Didn’t I know? he asked. “Hasn’t he been writing you?”
No, I said, he was not. I tried to keep my voice even, to hide how disappointed I’d been these last three months.
Felipe shook his head and said he didn’t understand. He knew Marco liked me. Why hadn’t he written? It was strange.
I shrugged. “People have their reasons.”
All spring I watched for him. Riding my bike past the factory where he’d worked, walking past the apartment where he’d lived, stopping in at Eonta where we’d gone on his last night in town, before he made the rounds to say goodbye to his friends—I hoped I would see him.
Sometimes I would see a man walking with a slower gait and I was sure I’d found him. He was back! But each time, I was wrong. It wasn’t Marco. Now I understood the cliché of looking for a needle in a haystack. After each sighting, after each realization it was not him, that it would never be him, the needle stung.
In April, Felipe stopped in at Scotty’s and didn’t mention Marco. Instead, in passing, he told a bunch of us that Sonia’s birthday the following day. He invited us to stop by Café Santista where Sonia worked part-time.
The next morning, I set out to run errands and then, on a whim, decided what to do. I bought a bouquet of flowers—a mix of roses and lilies—then stopped at Café Santista.
When I handed her the flowers, whatever plan I’d devised disappeared. My motive seemed painfully clear. Why else would I suddenly take an interest in Sonia but for some connection, however tenuous, to Marco?
If she suspected, she did not show it. Instead, she thanked me for the flowers. After exchanging awkward small talk—“Have you been to Buena Vista recently?” “Can you believe how much a drink costs there?”—she brought the bouquet to her face and inhaled.
“They’re beautiful,” she said.
She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and white running shoes. One of the laces on her shoe looked like it was coming loose. I had the urge to kneel down and tie it tight.
I asked her how she would celebrate her birthday. Her nineteenth, right?
“Well, I have to work today but my mother called this morning. So that was nice.”
She sounded young. Like she missed her mother.
I wondered what it felt like to be nineteen and living so far from home.
At Meizen, Miss Kiryū asked me to smooth out her English for the school’s end-of-the-year theme, which revolved around creating a new tradition, keeping a dream and hope alive.
“A dreamy reformation will break out in Meizen Junior High School student assembly,” she’d written. “Having a dream of fresh reformation.”
I translated it to “A Fresh Start.”
In the end, Marco and I would each do the expected thing: I would move back to the U.S., rent a basement apartment in Iowa City, and go to graduate school to study writing. He would live with his mother in Sao Paulo and study theosophy, which I would later learn is an esoteric religious movement founded in the late 19th century by the Russian émigré Helena Blavatsky, drawing on the occult.
I tried, once, to read Blavatsky’s work but got lost. Something about the pictures and scenes we see in sleep. Something about the years in our dreams. Something about a flash of lightning and a return to full consciousness. But what did it mean?
Not a story about romance, then. But what? Romance and reality? Here as well as there? Push as well as pull? Should I stay or should I go now? Or is there a way to do both?
You seem smart, but--
But what?
I wish I’d taken more Japanese language lessons. Not for any aspiration of fluency. Not because I yearn for more evidence of my failures. But for the vast terrain in between the poles that requires a sharp tongue and smart pair of shoes.
What I mean to say is that I know now realism isn’t the opposite of romance but a bedfellow. That there is more than one way to study the mystical.
These days, when I hear the song, “Fly Me to the Moon,” a song originally called “In Other Words,” and a song that plays regularly at banks, in elevators, and in grocery stores, I do not think of him or that island of youth, which disappeared a long time ago. I do not think of the night in the rooftop bar at Buena Vista or how he told me he preferred Frank Sinatra’s version to Sinead O’Connor’s.
That was a good night, a night when everyone else had gone dancing in the club below but we snuck away and took the elevator upstairs and sat at a booth that overlooked our city, drinking our garish neon drinks. We talked about skydiving, which he had done and recommended. We talked about the future.
When he said, out of the blue, “I just can’t get married now,” I laughed and said I appreciated his honesty but had I missed something? Had anyone proposed?
On that night, I didn’t feel hope or despair. For once our in-between space seemed an honest place to be.
Now when I hear that song, I might enjoy humming along momentarily, appreciating its flight of fancy, its whimsical lyrics, its timeless sounds, but only barely do I remember who I used to be. Do you? Really? You as you go about your business, running errands, looking for low-fat Greek yogurt in the dairy aisle, wearing, as you did, as you do now, that uniform of the well-traveled and invisible, jeans and sweaters and a pair of ever-practical boots.
I saw him point to the walls of the bar where Scotty had taped posters of models in red bikinis.
“Of course I like beauty,” he said. “But these—they’re not real.”
Above his right lip, I could see a small mole.
He was thirty. By then he had lived in Matsumoto for two years. He had come to Japan for practical reasons as many Japanese-Brazilians had. Engineering jobs were hard to come by in Sao Paulo. Now he worked in an electronics factory in Matsumoto doing mundane work alongside other Japanese-Brazilians. He was saving money, he said, hoping to return to Brazil within six months—maybe sooner—no matter what.
Was I studying Japanese when I met Marco? I want to say yes. But maybe by then, I’d already quit. I had started off taking lessons once a week from a Japanese woman, the wife of an Australian man I'd met who was also teaching English at Shinmei Junior High School. But soon, it seemed pointless.
Once, after my failure to make progress, she said, not unkindly, “I don’t understand it. You study. You come to class every week. You seem smart but—”
But what?
I want to say this is a story about romance. But maybe it's not. If not romance, what?
The next time I met Marco, we cordoned ourselves off at the back of the bar. His friends came and went and I listened as Marco moved between three languages, each with ease—Portuguese, English, and Japanese.
Was Sonia there that night? Sonia became important later. But if she was there that night, I didn’t notice her. Or anyone else. Only him.
I was thirty-one years old. I had come to Japan because I was tired of being alone. Now that I had lived in Japan for a year and a half, I was still tired of being alone.
A few days later, he knocked on my door. I was throwing a birthday party for Ann, who’d just arrived in Matsumoto.
Marco wore faded Levis, a plain white T-shirt, and soft leather sandals. He had just run five miles, he whispered, standing in the entrance as he took off his shoes. He smelled of soap.
The others at the party, a mix of people I knew well and those I barely knew at all, clustered around my kitchen table, talking loudly, eating roasted green peas.
The party continued and I continued filling guests’ red plastic cups with wine, all while keeping my eye on Marco.
When I stood next to the window, Marco sat on the floor, stroking my bare ankle.
In my wallet in those days I carried a card I’d bought years before, one I liked so much I never sent it to anyone, keeping it for myself. On the front, a drawing featured a row of six mismatched feet, each foot trying to fit itself into a glass slipper. One foot was too fat, another too small, each a misfit in a slightly different way.
What happened next happened easily. The party ended naturally. People began leaving one by one. Only Marco remained.
I began cleaning up, carrying dishes to the sink. Marco helped.
When I bumped into the kitchen table, knocking over what was left of Ann’s birthday cake, I shrieked. What had been left of the cake—its thick chocolate middle and vanilla frosting on top—was ruined now, stranded in the middle of the kitchen floor.
Marco laughed and then I did, too, and then we weren’t laughing, we were dancing. Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys sang from the boom box on the windowsill’s distant shore, urging us to stay a little longer. Then we stopped. We were barely moving now, just rocking back and forth, shipwrecked on this tiny island of a room.
The next weekend I would replay all the details to Ann when we met up at Scotty’s, tell her how he’d stroked my ankle, how he’d cleaned up the cake, how he’d lingered after everyone left, including her.
I left a few things out. Like his brown sandals—not the kind of sandals a Japanese man would wear, not the kind most American men might wear, either, though I couldn’t say precisely how. That night, I’d decided I loved them, his sandals, and because I loved them, I would also love Brazil.
That’s how simple I was then. Sandals equaled love. Love equaled the future. I could imagine myself into a new place, could already conjure up Brazil and its terra roxa of its Parana Plateau, its red earth close to the sea, its land where coffee grew, its dry red dust turning slippery and sticky when wet—and that was that. I could make the leap easily. I loved Marco now. I loved Brazil. Because I loved his shoes.
Another night. Another party. Another wash of languages, movement in and out of varying degrees of fluency. This one was at Café Santista, a place specializing in imported goods: Brazilian coffee, Spanish-language magazines, delicacies you couldn’t find in Japanese supermarkets like marinated artichoke hearts.
I was happy that night, Marco next to me, when someone I’d never seen before, an older Japanese man, introduced himself in English and said he was having a party next weekend at his home.
Would I like to come? he asked. His house, he said, was large by Japanese standards.
“Sure,” I said. I thought nothing of it. I was on my second Corona, feeling good. It was all good. Another party? Of course.
“Feel free to bring someone,” the man said.
I turned to Marco. “I’ll bring you,” I said, touching his arm.
Marco smiled.
As Marco turned, I could see the man’s face change. He stopped smiling. Just like that.
“It’s a party for gaijin,” he said.
“But Marco is a gaijin,” I said, my face turning hot. “He’s from Brazil.”
Marco didn’t say a word. Instead, he took my hand and led me away as if to warn me not to make a bad situation worse.
“Anyway,” he told me, “next weekend I have to work.”
If Japan, for me, was lovely, for Marco it must have felt like something else altogether: a funhouse mirror that distorted him.
Marco worked six days a week while I worked five. He also worked much longer hours than I, or any of us who were teaching English, did. Five or six hours a day—that’s all I worked, easy hours, all of them.
I asked him once what he did at the electronics factory, and he said it was too boring to talk about.
It did not occur to me to ask again.
Once, after a night at Scotty’s, Marco and I wandered the streets of Matsumoto at daybreak, neither of us eager to go home.
When an old man from across the street shouted at us something in Japanese, I turned to Marco to translate.
“He said, ‘Why are you two holding hands? Why don’t you two stop holding hands.’”
Had the man assumed Marco was Japanese? If he’d seen us both as gaijin, would he have dismissed our immodesty as the craziness of foreigners, something to be expected? Because Marco looked Japanese, had the old man expected him—and us—to follow unspoken Japanese rules?
We laughed at the silliness and continued walking hand-in-hand.
He dropped my full name into conversations—first, middle and last—and we both laughed when he did this, my name of many syllables.
When he danced at Scotty’s, he danced like a Muppet, head flopping about while his body, arms down to the side, remained stiff.
He had a runner’s body. He walked slowly. When he asked what was on my mind, he sounded as if he genuinely wanted to know.
He loved Stevie Ray Vaughan and skydiving and thought Stevie Ray and skydiving were both underrated, while the U.S. (with the exception of New Orleans, a city he wanted to visit) and Sarah Vaughan (to some extent) were overrated.
He spoke fondly of his mother.
He was a vegetarian who occasionally ate meat. An engineer with a bent toward philosophy. A Brazilian who’d made clear to me that first night he planned to go home. To Brazil.
But lately, he didn’t talk about leaving. Lately, he started saying maybe there were good reasons to stay a little longer in Japan.
I loved the cadence of his voice, the way his voice went up and then down before he turned the tables back on me, something few people did, asking, “And you?”
A question and a statement all at once.
One Saturday, after meeting at Scotty’s, he came home with me. The next weekend, the same. Tender. Easy. So natural it did not occur to me to worry when, one Saturday night, he did not accompany me home. He must be tired, I reasoned. He worked so much.
But then another Saturday. And another.
When we saw each other at Scotty’s, we talked late into the night but it ended there. I missed the way he’d left orange peelings on Sunday mornings on my blue-and-white plates.
“Is he is or isn’t he?” Ann whispered one night in a sing-songy voice. Marco that night had lingered close all night, then abruptly got up to leave.
“There’s your answer,” I said, gesturing toward the man who was doing what everyone would eventually do—leave the party; escape the escape plan that had originally featured escaping to Japan.
In the months that followed, the push-pull continued. We’d see each other at Scotty’s on Saturday nights, ignoring each other one week, then talking for hours the next.
On these nights, I did not think about the bigger picture, what Marco might be going through, what it meant for him to be a Japanese-Brazilian man living in Japan, someone whose fluency, for instance, was expected, whose tiny mistakes, if he made any at all, got called out, while I and other foreigners like me were cheered for paltry attempts at ordering beer. I did not think about what it must feel like to be stuck in a place he hated, doing factory work for which he was overqualified, earning half of what English-speaking foreigners like me made teaching a language we’d been handed at birth. I did not think about issues of race or inequality—not really—because, well, I didn’t have to.
Instead, I thought about whether he was rejecting me or choosing me.
Also, I learned to lie to myself. On our good nights, the ones when we talked easily, I told myself this was good, that I was learning stay in the moment, that I wanted for nothing beyond this, that I was not only OK with the temporary quality of our relationship but beginning to understand the truth. Nothing lasts!
Some nights, we’d leave Scotty’s together and walk through town in the dark and kiss at Matsumoto Castle at dawn and I’d tell myself I enjoyed it. Why yearn for more?
But it’s also true that when, one night at the castle, he said we needed to stop, that we should go home, I felt crushed.
One night, we ran into each other at party. These were the days and nights of endless parties. The usual mix of foreigners and Japanese. The usual flow of Sapporo beer. The usual push-pull. We lived in the land of push, the city of pull, the prefecture of in-betweenness. Casual. No commitment. Platonic but not quite platonic. It was a place where anything might be possible but nothing was likely to change. A place which, as anyone who has lived here will tell you, can be—if you are, like me, the kind who’s searching for home—a tender, bruising place.
A Japanese man struck up a conversation, asking me if Marco was my boyfriend. Also, was he a gaijin?
Marco was nearby, talking to someone else at the time. We had not spoken yet at all. I turned and stared at him, his black hair, the mole on his face. Then my mind went blank, stuck in some in-between space, neither awake nor asleep, as I tried to figure out in English or Japanese or some mix of both how to say it all. That Marco and I had a relationship but he wasn’t my boyfriend. That he was a foreigner—his grandparents had emigrated from Japan to Brazil two generations before, then his family had stayed, making him Brazilian and Japanese. So a gaijin. Yes, Japanese.
“He’s Marco,” I finally blurted out.
Before moving to Japan, what had I imagined? That I would become a woman who would stand at an outdoor market, buy an orange, and eat it, subsisting on little else? Did I imagine I would become content in my solitary skin? That something in a Buddhist country would rub off, freeing me of unruly desires? Did I understand that my yearning to be free of desire suggested I had already missed the point? The reality was, I’d been hungry then. I remained hungry now.
When there were no parties to go to and we tired of Scotty’s, sometimes we’d meet up in other places. Buena Vista was a swanky hotel with a ballroom-size dance floor on its ground level, featuring colorful lights, loud techno music, and pricey, garish drinks. Upstairs was a quiet bar overlooking city lights.
One night, I arrived at Buena Vista late, looking around for people I knew, keeping an eye open for Marco. That’s the night when Sonia approached me. I knew Sonia only in passing. She was part of the Japanese-Brazilian crowd but never showed up to Scotty’s. She was someone Marco had tutored, helping her with her English. He said he worried about her sometimes, because she was young, because she could be reckless, because she was, he told me, like his little sister. That was the phrase he used: little sister. Sonia made small talk at first, asking me if I liked Japan, and when I said yes, I did—very much, in fact—she quickly dispensed with the politeness and launched in.
“Has Marco talked to you?” she asked. “About what he wants?”
My face flushed. Her question caught me off guard. I looked around, hoping to see Marco but he was nowhere in sight.
“Has he told you how he feels?” Sonia pressed.
I had no idea how to answer her questions. I wasn’t sure what she was getting at.
Was Marco the one who had told me Sonia was eighteen? I couldn’t remember now. But tonight, dressed in shiny mini skirt and a silky black sleeveless top that revealed perfect eighteen-year-old cleavage, she looked a lot older.
“Has he let you know that he can’t have anything serious while he’s here because he’s determined to go home?”
She smiled as she spoke, then took a long sip from a red drink in a martini glass. The lights of the dance floor hit her face, illuminating flawless eighteen-year-old skin.
Oh right.
Her aim, I understood now, was to eliminate me, to make me feel stupid, and to wrap her questions as if she were looking out for me. Poor stupid me, twelve years older than Sonia, someone past her prime, someone who couldn’t look out for herself.
“Yes,” I told her. “Marco and I have talked.”
Later I would admire the next part, how she delivered her final blow.
“I care about him,” she said. “He’s like my bodyguard.”
Here she paused. I wondered what she was drinking.
Had I seen it? she asked. The movie?
“No,” I said, though I had.
I was stunned. I must have looked stunned, too, because she added, in case it was still unclear, that she had feelings for him. That’s exactly how she put it. “I have feelings for him. Strong feelings.”
She smiled. She took another sip of her bright drink.
I was holding a Diet Coke. I felt like I was the twelve-year-old talking to someone twenty-five. The twelve-year old wanted to tell Sonia she was living in a fantasyland, that Marco wouldn’t—I was sure of it—be seduced. I wanted to say that whatever I had with Marco was real, a relationship between equals, between grown-ups, while what she had was a ridiculous, adolescent crush. I knew something of ridiculous crushes.
But I didn’t.
I had no idea what she had with Marco. I had no idea what I had with Marco, either, or what the true nature of his feelings were. In any case, I was too hurt to continue the conversation. For this much was clear: He’d been talking to Sonia about me, about us.
So I nodded and said, “I need to use the restroom,” and I left the hotel, riding my bike through the dark streets of Matsumoto, holding onto the thought of what would come—a hot bath, a bottle of wine, a private place to cry.
You seem smart, but--
If Marco had feelings for Sonia, I never found out. He never mentioned her after that. I would not see her for another six months. Meanwhile, Marco and I continued our push-pull dynamic, a familiar one to me now as we circled each other at Scotty’s, then drifted up to barstools next to one another before closing time.
One night I’d be furious, successfully refusing to even glance his way, but then Marco would wander over, lean in and say, “I think we have mental telepathy. Isn't it amazing?” and I would soften, knowing I shouldn’t, but feeling incapable of stopping myself.
Marco left Japan, just as he said he would. The night before his departure, we walked through town as we had so often before. He hummed “Fly Me to the Moon,” a song he loved.
He kissed me on a street corner. He pulled back and said, “We should stop,” pronouncing “stop” as two syllables, “stopped,” instead of one, and the word contained that prick of pleasure and pain—pleasure because the rhythm of his voice was so familiar; pain because even now, on our last night together, there would be no lingering.
In the weeks to follow, I went to Scotty’s as usual on Saturday nights, ordering the same Diet Coke I always ordered. And in the early hours of morning, I rode my bike home and slept alone.
During the week, I went to the same schools and taught the same classes I had always taught, using the same textbook I had always used, and the students, when asked to repeat after me, repeated after me as they always had.
What are you doing this weekend, Yumi?
I’m going to Tokyo to visit my aunt.
When Miss Kiryū asked me to serve as a last-minute coach for an English-language school play at Meizen, I agreed, spending two days working with students on their pronunciation.
Here, the students’ translation of “Cinderella” was called “The Princess and the Shoe.”
Here, Cinderella’s glass slipper was a “high-heeled shoe.”
Miss Kiryū had brought skirts and scarves from her closet for the girls to wear. Horiuchi-kun played the Prince. All the girls, she said, had crushes on Horiuchi.
I watched Horiuchi from backstage, behind a curtain. He hit all his lines perfectly. The audience went wild, applauding when the play was done. And I thought of what else Miss Kiryū had said: that she wished the girls who had crushes on Horiuchi-kun knew he was still immature.
One night, long before he left, Marco had led me out of the bar and we had walked to the castle, arriving just before dawn.
“This is not my beautiful life,” he’d said that night.
We’d sat at the edge of the moat, dangling our legs, talking about the swans. He had not been able to think of the word “swans” so he’d called them long-necked ducks that night.
He’d worn his black leather coat. I was cold in my pea coat.
He’d apologized. I’d said there was no need. But he’d said yes, there was. He was sorry for his strange behavior. He’d come to Japan on the heels of a breakup. He’d hoped to sort himself out, synch his heart with head, somehow. For two years, he’d had no problem avoiding ties.
“Until you,” he said.
After he left, I replayed that scene while bicycling past the castle, never stopping to notice that swans' feathers looked dirty in daylight, not pristine, and you would, if you looked carefully, see just under the surface of water their ungainly webbed feet, furiously pedaling.
Instinctively, I’d kept that conversation with Marco to myself, knowing if I told any of my friends at Scotty’s, they’d dismiss it, saying he'd fed me a line.
Maybe they’d have been right. Maybe it was a line. Maybe it was stupid to think otherwise.
You seem smart, but--
Or maybe there was more than one way to describe a swan.
December went by. Then January. Then February. Once, while waiting for the train, I ran into a Japanese-Brazilian woman, an acquaintance I’d met once at Café Santista. We made small talk. I asked her about her job in Japan and she asked, “And you?”
Her voice went high, then low, just as Marco’s had, wounding in its familiarity.
Felipe was the one who asked me if I’d heard the news.
“Heard what?” I asked.
“About Marco.” He looked surprised. “That Marco’s coming back to Japan,” he said. Returning to his old factory job. He’d had trouble finding work in Sao Paulo.
Didn’t I know? he asked. “Hasn’t he been writing you?”
No, I said, he was not. I tried to keep my voice even, to hide how disappointed I’d been these last three months.
Felipe shook his head and said he didn’t understand. He knew Marco liked me. Why hadn’t he written? It was strange.
I shrugged. “People have their reasons.”
All spring I watched for him. Riding my bike past the factory where he’d worked, walking past the apartment where he’d lived, stopping in at Eonta where we’d gone on his last night in town, before he made the rounds to say goodbye to his friends—I hoped I would see him.
Sometimes I would see a man walking with a slower gait and I was sure I’d found him. He was back! But each time, I was wrong. It wasn’t Marco. Now I understood the cliché of looking for a needle in a haystack. After each sighting, after each realization it was not him, that it would never be him, the needle stung.
In April, Felipe stopped in at Scotty’s and didn’t mention Marco. Instead, in passing, he told a bunch of us that Sonia’s birthday the following day. He invited us to stop by Café Santista where Sonia worked part-time.
The next morning, I set out to run errands and then, on a whim, decided what to do. I bought a bouquet of flowers—a mix of roses and lilies—then stopped at Café Santista.
When I handed her the flowers, whatever plan I’d devised disappeared. My motive seemed painfully clear. Why else would I suddenly take an interest in Sonia but for some connection, however tenuous, to Marco?
If she suspected, she did not show it. Instead, she thanked me for the flowers. After exchanging awkward small talk—“Have you been to Buena Vista recently?” “Can you believe how much a drink costs there?”—she brought the bouquet to her face and inhaled.
“They’re beautiful,” she said.
She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and white running shoes. One of the laces on her shoe looked like it was coming loose. I had the urge to kneel down and tie it tight.
I asked her how she would celebrate her birthday. Her nineteenth, right?
“Well, I have to work today but my mother called this morning. So that was nice.”
She sounded young. Like she missed her mother.
I wondered what it felt like to be nineteen and living so far from home.
At Meizen, Miss Kiryū asked me to smooth out her English for the school’s end-of-the-year theme, which revolved around creating a new tradition, keeping a dream and hope alive.
“A dreamy reformation will break out in Meizen Junior High School student assembly,” she’d written. “Having a dream of fresh reformation.”
I translated it to “A Fresh Start.”
In the end, Marco and I would each do the expected thing: I would move back to the U.S., rent a basement apartment in Iowa City, and go to graduate school to study writing. He would live with his mother in Sao Paulo and study theosophy, which I would later learn is an esoteric religious movement founded in the late 19th century by the Russian émigré Helena Blavatsky, drawing on the occult.
I tried, once, to read Blavatsky’s work but got lost. Something about the pictures and scenes we see in sleep. Something about the years in our dreams. Something about a flash of lightning and a return to full consciousness. But what did it mean?
Not a story about romance, then. But what? Romance and reality? Here as well as there? Push as well as pull? Should I stay or should I go now? Or is there a way to do both?
You seem smart, but--
But what?
I wish I’d taken more Japanese language lessons. Not for any aspiration of fluency. Not because I yearn for more evidence of my failures. But for the vast terrain in between the poles that requires a sharp tongue and smart pair of shoes.
What I mean to say is that I know now realism isn’t the opposite of romance but a bedfellow. That there is more than one way to study the mystical.
These days, when I hear the song, “Fly Me to the Moon,” a song originally called “In Other Words,” and a song that plays regularly at banks, in elevators, and in grocery stores, I do not think of him or that island of youth, which disappeared a long time ago. I do not think of the night in the rooftop bar at Buena Vista or how he told me he preferred Frank Sinatra’s version to Sinead O’Connor’s.
That was a good night, a night when everyone else had gone dancing in the club below but we snuck away and took the elevator upstairs and sat at a booth that overlooked our city, drinking our garish neon drinks. We talked about skydiving, which he had done and recommended. We talked about the future.
When he said, out of the blue, “I just can’t get married now,” I laughed and said I appreciated his honesty but had I missed something? Had anyone proposed?
On that night, I didn’t feel hope or despair. For once our in-between space seemed an honest place to be.
Now when I hear that song, I might enjoy humming along momentarily, appreciating its flight of fancy, its whimsical lyrics, its timeless sounds, but only barely do I remember who I used to be. Do you? Really? You as you go about your business, running errands, looking for low-fat Greek yogurt in the dairy aisle, wearing, as you did, as you do now, that uniform of the well-traveled and invisible, jeans and sweaters and a pair of ever-practical boots.