Kanazawa in the Rain

The tracks parallel the Japan Sea coast. On one side, a fishing boat’s lights on dark water, on the other, towns too small for a stop, fields and wooded hills, lights reflected off paddy water.

The train flashes past a Mobil gas station, the bright red and white sign and the architecture identical to a Mobil station in Greenwich, and Allen, still jetlagged and woozy with fatigue, has the disorienting sensation he’s never left Connecticut. He thought he could take a bullet train directly from Tokyo but had to change in Nagaoka. As he stood disoriented on the platform staring down the tracks for the Kanazawa express he felt chilled and feverish.

Kanazawa Station is bright and modern. The sign that directs him to the cab stand is in Japanese and English. Shivering in the taxi, he asks the driver in Japanese about the weather. The driver grunts and answers in Japanese, “Tomorrow clouds. Possible rain late. Kanazawa people say, always carry an umbrella.”

His tenth floor Western-style room in the Kanazawa Shiro Hotel is large and modern and clean and institutional. The bellman recites in English that the room overlooks the grounds of an Important Cultural Asset and Kanazawa Castle. Lit by floodlights, the castle’s donjon appears to float in a pool of darkness.

Allen is too chilled and too fragile to appreciate the view. Alone, he turns up the thermostat, retrieves the ibuprofen from his shaving kit, takes two pills and considers a third. As he drinks the tap water, he tries to recall his last liquid. Coffee at lunch? He’d bought a box dinner for the train, ignored the drinks in Nagaoka’s vending machines. He drinks another glass of water, then a third. He hangs his suit jacket over the desk chair, kicks off his shoes, and crawls between the covers in his dress shirt and suit pants, uncertain he’ll ever be warm again. But if I’m going to die, why not die in Kanazawa?

The bedside clock says 2:07. The room is too warm and too bright. He is as rested and refreshed as if he’d slept eight quality hours—ten. He lies motionless, takes inventory. No chills. No vague pains. No headache. Whatever attacked him had risen from his body like smoke from an extinguished candle. A virus? A germ? Dehydration? Stress? Delayed jet-lag? A malicious Japanese spirit? Whatever. It’s entirely gone.

He swings his stockinged feet to the carpet. No vertigo. No lightheadedness. He clicks off the harsh overhead light and leaves the soft bedside lamp glow. He pees and swallows two more ibuprofen with another glass of water in the too-bright bathroom. He changes into the hotel’s robe and stands for a long time at the window, staring at the dark castle.

This must be how old age arrives. Your friends die. Your teeth break. And you stand at a hotel room window halfway around the world thinking about the dead and wonder how much time you have left.

The day before he left the States, a friend called to say that Jack Flaherty, Allen’s former business partner, had died of a heart attack. Allen pressed the receiver against his ear and closed his eyes to the jumble of papers, reports, and binders on his desk. How could Jack, only fifty-seven—ten years younger than Allen for God’s sake!—be dead? How could Jack, so full of free-floating energy, be dead? How could Jack, who watched his diet and exercised rigorously, die? Allen could not recall when they’d last talked. A lunch around New Year’s? Jack had been unchanged. He talked about a new enterprise that sounded dicey. He sent the salad back because the dressing was not on the side then poured the dressing over the second salad. He took calls on his cell, and was all the time advising, advising, advising Allen how to run the business. That was Jack, so familiar Allen never realized he was a part of a whole until he wasn’t.

When he could control his voice, he called Jack’s wife and reached voicemail. He told the machine he was sorry for her loss, said he was available if she needed anything, apologized for having to leave the country. Allen leaned back in his ergonomically designed executive chair and stared at the picture of himself and Jack with the second President Bush. Jack dead. He wiped his eyes and blew his nose and canceled his three o’clock and four o’clock meetings.

That night, his packed bag waiting in the corner, his wife joined him in the bedroom. She sat heavily on the bed and began to work cream into her face. Allen watched impassively. At one time they’d make love the night before he left on a trip. Her way to send him off? To generate a loving memory should his plane crash? To remind him of what he had waiting back home? The pills she’d taken during menopause killed her desire. Allen didn’t mind. Married more than forty years, he and Lily didn’t need sex to be companionable. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“It’s not only Jack.” He waved his hand as if brushing away gnats. “It’s the trip. The speech. The Tokyo office. Taiheiyo Foods. The economy. Global warming. Everything.”

“You just worry about the speech. I’ll take care of global warming.” She smiled.

“Miyazaki helped with the translation.” Allen’s Japanese was not good enough to translate complex thoughts but good enough to read the speech’s transliteration. “I’m not worried about the speech.”

She touched his face gently with peach-scented fingers. “Then don’t worry. You did what you could for Jack as long as anyone could.”

He took her hand to kiss it. She was right, but it was small comfort.

He is able to sleep another six hours and walks into the hotel breakfast buffet as the service is about to end. He fills his tray with miso soup, rice, egg, grilled fish, pickles, finds an empty table, and is finishing when he addresses a hotel staff worker who is swabbing the next table. “Excuse me. From here, is Kenrokuen far?” It’s one of the three most famous gardens in Japan.

She looks at him in surprise. “You speak Japanese.”

“I have a smattering.” The idiomatic phrase implies fluency.

She tells him Kanazawa has many interesting sights. He tells her he’d heard people call Kanazawa “little Kyoto.” She says many people come for the garden, but there’s much more. He asks what other sites he should visit. She thinks for several seconds, then rattles off several names too rapidly for Allen to catch. “I’m sorry. I did not understand everything. Could you say again slowly?”

She gives him a look of appraisal. Seconds pass and then she says slowly and clearly, “If you would like, I can show you.”

He stares at her more intently. He cannot judge the ages of Japanese women, but she is at least 40. She has a flat, plain face, wears no makeup, and her hair is hidden under a kind of white bandanna. She wears a dull green sweater and blue jeans. A white apron with the hotel logo conceals her figure. He wonders what she wants from him.

“That would be very kind. How much do you charge?”

“No fee. No fee!” Her tone is emphatic, her words in English.

Then what? He asks in Japanese. “Would you like to practice English?” It would not be the first time a Japanese stranger has asked for English conversation practice. It is however the first time a woman has asked. Because he’s older and seems harmless?

In Japanese: “Yes, please. I’ll show you Kanazawa.”

Her name is Yuriko. She finishes work in an hour. She’ll meet him at the entrance to the temple grounds across from the hotel. They can walk through the Kanazawa Castle grounds to Kenrokuen. From the garden, they can visit the mansion the feudal lord had built for his mother.

Waiting outside the temple gate, Allen finds himself in a remarkably good humor. No one knows where he is and he has no place to be, no meeting to attend, no proposal to write. The sensation is liberating. The streets are wet, and the air is moist and clean; he can smell the ocean. The sky is overcast, and the TV weather lady forecasts showers throughout the day.

What does Yuriko want? Why is she willing to waste a day for nothing more than some English conversation? In Allen’s experience, everyone wanted something and not knowing what this Japanese woman wants makes Allen uneasy. He is about to walk into the temple grounds when Yuriko in tight jeans and snug green sweater greets him. Her hair is straight, black, and glossy. He would like to touch it. She’d put on lipstick.

Allen tries to classify her. She’s not an office lady or a matron. Not a college student or young mother. She’s a mature, confident woman. Almost attractive. Older than he first thought.

Yuriko leads him through the temple grounds, pointing out the historic noh stage, and into the grounds of Kanazawa Castle, chattering in simple Japanese the entire way. When he doesn’t understand, he stops her, asks her to repeat, and she tries to say the same thing in simpler language. English is a last resort.

  At the garden’s admission booth, Allen informs her he would pay the day’s expenses. If she were giving him her Saturday, it’s the least he can do. A notice in English says visitors over 65 are admitted free. “I am sixty-seven,” he tells the ticket seller, pushing a yen bill across the counter.

As they start up the gravel path into the garden, Yuriko says in a tone of amazement, “You are sixty-seven years old?”

Allen straightens his back, “Truly.”

“I cannot believe it.”

“How old did you think?”

She stops to inspect him carefully. “Maybe my age I think. Fifty-six. Fifty-seven.”

“You do not look fifty-six,” Even with the fine wrinkles around her eyes, he would have made her no more than forty-five.

She smiles without covering her mouth and he notices a gold tooth. What would it be like to kiss her? What would she taste like? Probably soy sauce and bonito flakes.

“You do not look sixty-seven,” she says.

They explore every corner of  Kenrokuen, which means “The Garden of the Six Sublimities”—spaciousness, seclusion, artificiality, antiquity, abundant water, and broad views—and Yuriko wants to ensure he appreciates every single one. She picks the ideal spot in which to stand to appreciate a vista’s full effect and they stand silent and motionless for minutes. The first couple times she does this, Allen wants to clear his throat or wander on the path without her, but he remains beside her. He wonders what she sees. Something different from or more than he sees. He tries to feel the twisted pine branches, the stone of the ancient lantern, the clear water of the artificial stream. He tries to still all thought and let the scene take him over.

The mansion the lord had built for his mother in a far corner of the garden could be a samurai movie set. Large rooms, tatami-covered floors, bare wood posts, plain sand-brown walls, artistic screens painted with flowers and birds, elaborate carvings in the elegant reception chamber’s frieze, a calligraphic scroll in one room’s alcove. Yuriko, padding around the rooms in her stocking feet, appears underwhelmed by the place.

“I wonder if Lord Maeda’s mother appreciated her son’s gesture, building her this beautiful mansion.” says Allen.

“Lord Maeda’s wife wanted her mother-in-law out of the castle,” says Yuriko with a wry smile.

She takes him to a tiny restaurant on a back street, where he asks her to order a local Kanazawa specialty for him. As he works his chopsticks to pick sweet white flesh off fish bones, he asks her about herself. It wasn’t Japanese to ask personal questions, certainly not after such short acquaintance, but then he isn’t Japanese, and she doesn't seem to mind.

She was born in Yokohama. Her parents owned a small tea shop. She was married, but she had not lived with or seen her husband for several years. He was a truck driver and had often been away from home until one day he never returned. She didn’t know where he was and wasn’t interested in finding out. She had two married daughters. One lived in Tokyo, the other up north in Chitose; she seldom saw them. She moved to Kanazawa because she was tired of Yokohama people.

He senses a deep sadness. “Are you lonely?”

She looks surprised because the question is so direct. She looks down at her own fish. “Sometimes.” She speaks so softly he is not sure he heard her above the restaurant’s canned music.

What if he were to live with her? Relieve her loneliness? Escape from their lives together. He could imagine scrubbing her back in the Japanese bath . . . water sluicing over her neat, trim body . . . her eager to receive him on the futon in their Japanese bedroom. He would teach her English and expose her to the wider world. She would teach him Japanese, and they would explore Japan.

It's possible. He’s already talked within the firm about cutting back to three days a week. A couple of the senior managers would be delighted if he were to step aside. He could still contribute via the internet. Japan isn’t a third world country. Lily could have the house and everything in it. He could not think of a single possession—the Lexus, the boat, the country house—he would not willingly abandon. Yuriko and he could live comfortably on his investments. How expensive could it be to live in Kanazawa? Yuriko already lives on what she earns as a hotel worker.

He imagines sitting on the tatami at their low table in their cozy, spare apartment. Yuriko will shop and cook their meals. He will support her lovingly, the difference between himself and the absent husband. He will love her and care for her. He would not abandon her. He will listen to her and indulge her. Can she tell by the way he looks at her how he feels? Conscious that he is staring, he looks away.

“Loneliness is painful,” he says. He wants to say more, but his Japanese is inadequate.

Yuriko, her eyes downcast, nods in agreement and picks up her cup. “This tea is very nice. The shop owner roasts the tea leaves himself.” Allen doesn’t catch the word “roast” and by the time she makes herself clear the mood has changed.

The Ishikawa Prefectural Art Museum is a short walk. Allen doesn’t know much about art and has the impression that Yuriko doesn’t know much either, but he enjoys the paintings, sculpture, hanging scrolls, and prints. They rest for coffee in the museum cafe, and Allen asks what she would do on an ordinary Saturday. She shops, cleans, washes clothes—nothing special.

He asks if she wants to practice English. She waves her hand in front of her mouth in a gesture of refusal, her eyes downcast, and says she is a very poor student.

They walk back down the hill, past the garden, the street filled with cars, commuters returning home. They stroll along a broad avenue lined with a government building, a girl’s school, and a European-style red brick building, originally a high school, now a Modern Literature Museum where they stop. It displays the works of local writers—samples of original manuscripts, pictures of the authors, even the reconstructed study of a nineteenth-century poet who grew up in Kanazawa. Allen is impressed that the city would create an entire building for local authors, but unable to read a thing his interest is limited. Perhaps—if he lived in Japan and studied diligently—he could learn to read.

Back on the avenue, he recognizes his hotel tower three blocks away and senses his tour is over. It has been one of his most enjoyable days in a long time. No client or staff meetings. No social obligations. No responsibilities. No demands on his time, on his attention. He doesn’t want it to end.

As they stand waiting for the traffic light to change, he blurts, “Please excuse my impoliteness. May I see your home?”

She looks bewildered and he wonders if he’s used improper language. She stares into the distance for what seems to be minutes. “We have to take a bus.”

They ride the bus for twenty minutes, then walk another ten. It seems to be a neighborhood of low apartment buildings with small shops at street level —sake, vegetables, tea, hardware, convenience store, travel agency. Yuriko’s apartment is a third-floor walkup. Allen automatically slips off his shoes in the tiny vestibule.

He stands at the entrance to take in everything, vaguely disappointed the apartment is not Japanese, not spare and empty like the mother’s mansion with bare plaster walls, exposed polished wood posts, a single hanging scroll. He is chagrined to realize he expected something different.

Yuriko’s living room is crammed with furniture including an oil-cloth covered kitchen table with two wooden chairs, a tall china cabinet, a big-screen TV on a stand that has space for DVD and CD players and shelves for disks, a floor-to-ceiling bookcase filled with books, single easy chair that is almost as big as the table is positioned to watch the television, and a small table beside the chair is covered with women’s magazines. An open book lies face down on the chair’s arm. Three or four cute stuffed animals peek out from bookshelves; he recognizes a popular Japanese cartoon bear. Yuriko had pinned a large photographic poster of a temple garden—an advertisement for Japan Railways West—to the closet’s sliding door. On his way into the toilet, he glances into her bedroom. The Western-style bed and small cabinet virtually fill it.

Returning, he threads his way to the kitchen chair she indicates. “Thank you,” he says. “I know I have disturbed you.” He uses the verb that means to hinder, obstruct, interrupt, interfere, be a nuisance.

Yuriko fills an electric kettle with water and spoons green tea into a small pot. She finds a package of rice crackers in a cupboard, shakes some onto a blue-and-white plate, and sets it on the table. Allen notices that for all the clutter, the apartment is clean—no dirty dishes in the sink, no dust on the TV, no dirt in the corners of the polished wooden floor.

She pours boiling water into the pot, sets out two small handleless cups and saucers, and pours the tea. “Please,” she says.

The crackers are crisp and salty. The tea is good, but, even in his unsophisticated mouth, he can tell it is not as good as the tea at lunch. “Thank you. It’s delicious,” he says, automatically bowing his head.

Having served tea and a snack, Yuriko seems at a loss. He realizes she doesn’t know what to do with him. He wants to reach across the table and hold her hand, to make contact, but she holds her cup with both hands as if they need warming. He tries to think of something ambiguous to say that will intimate his feelings. But his Japanese is hopelessly inadequate, and the English sounds brusque. “You make me feel young.”

“But you are young!” she exclaims.

“Today. With you.”

She covers her mouth to smile. “I am also young with you today.” She looks shy, almost girlish. “You are a good man. You have a kind face.”

Allen rubs his face. What does she see? He is hungry and wants a drink. He wonders if she has any beer in the little refrigerator. Now what? He’s seen her apartment. He looks at his watch. Using formal Japanese, he says, “Thank you for showing me your home. I must return to the hotel now.” He finishes his tea and takes another cracker.

Yuriko looks relieved. “I will take you to the bus.”

He tells her he remembers how to find the stop, but she insists. When they come down the stairs to the building’s miniscule lobby, it has begun to rain. Yuriko insists on returning back upstairs to fetch him an umbrella. She gives him a large, black, expensive one and takes a cheap, clear plastic one for herself. When he protests, she tells him to leave it at the hotel; she will retrieve it when she comes to work.

“Will I see you tomorrow?” he asks.

“Tomorrow? I am sorry but . . .” Her incomplete sentence means no. She will not see him.

What does he expect? She has a life. As they wait in the rain at the bus stop, he thinks to give her a business card. “If you come to America, please call me.” One of his stock Japanese phrases.

She treats the card respectfully, formally, inspecting his name and title on the Japanese side. She apologizes that she does not have a card of her own. He assures her it is all right. The bus lumbers out of the rainy dark and stops. “Thank you so much,” he says. He wants to hug her—even kiss her goodbye—but she is bowing, and the umbrellas are in the way and it would be profoundly inappropriate anyway. He returns her bow, turns, and boards the bus.

As he rides through the scruffy suburb, the bus’s interior too bright, he thinks about Yuriko . . . Jack . . . Lily. He should call Lily, ask about the funeral. They couldn’t have built the business without Jack. He’d never have come to Japan had Jack not signed Taiheiyo Foods as a client. Jack had given him more than he’d known. Now he’d never know.

Allen turns his face to the window so the other passengers cannot see his tears. If it’s still raining tomorrow, he’ll return to Tokyo.

About Wally Wood: I am a full-time writer and editor. I have self-published three novels, written three more. I earned my MA in creative writing from the City University of New York and my BA in philosophy from Columbia University. As a ghostwriter, I have written 23 commercially published business books. My short stories have been accepted by The Lakeshore Review and The Fish Magazine. I am translating a book of Japanese short stories into English. I have been a volunteer writing teacher in state and federal prisons for more than twenty years.

- 0 –