naka ni dasanai

The girl’s apartment is cramped and dark.  Read: charming.  When I say dark I don’t mean dirty.  It’s a square-meter counter/sink area connected to two stalls, one for the toilet and one for the shower and sink.  This pseudo-room is also connected to a tiny bedroom that you couldn’t fit a bed in.  That’s why there’s a roll-out futon.

You get all this for about six-fifty a month in American dollars.  For me it would be ideal, but Haruko is nevertheless embarrassed living in such a small apaato.  We’re not even in her room for a minute before she not only apologizes for its smallness but kisses me, putting her tongue all the way in my mouth and leaving it to the mercy of my teeth.  I’m not relinquishing it without a fight.

The next step is to pull her as close as I can, applying pressure as I run my fingers up her spine and down to her ketsu.  I didn’t want it to be all about sex, but refusing it was never something specifically mentioned in my mental mission statement when I got involved in this relationship.

She taps me on the shoulder, making me freeze in my posture for a second while I watch her and await further instruction.  Haruko sits in front of her tiny table and lights a cigarette in one jouzu, dainty motion.  She then turns on the radio, to an Osaka station that is playing some obscure live song by The Pillows.

My empress motions for me to join her and I do, smoking one of the Lucky Strike Menthol Lights I was so excited to discover today in a vending machine.  She’s opened the window and I can see twilight and the tops of neighboring buildings.  Somewhere in the neighborhood a dog is barking, sending its cries of wanwan to the moon.

I look at a wisp of smoke as it curls off my cigarette.  If time only existed for me for this one second, and if it were stretched out so that it seemed like a million years, would I have any reason to believe that these fingers of gray spinning through the air would soon dissipate?

Everything is just a temporary situation, no matter how you define the duration.  I wonder if Haruko is thinking something comparable to this in Japanese as she puffs away, pausing to look at me and smile every time she ashes.

Once we’ve both crushed out our cancer sticks, she pounces on me and I’m on my back, my lips fighting hers for dominance. 

Her skin is so smooth as my fingers crawl up her backbones that I can feel an individual grain of sand that I’m moving around while I angle for the best way to remove her shirt.  We collapse on the rug with a plop and I decide that the best method will be to use my teeth.  Haruko laughs at this and lets me pull her light blue t-shirt over her head.

My skillfulness ends here, the painful demonstration being when I try for a full three minutes to unclasp her leopard-printed bra and I cannot do it.  She’s still smiling with those enormous brown eyes and she tells me she will do it herself and she does, with one hand.  The second her bra is off she has her breasts covered before I can see them, two mounds in a sea of mocha-colored skin being hidden by a pair of skinny arms.

“Misete kudasai,” I request.

“Hazukashii.”

What she means is she’s embarrassed.  What she wants me to do is turn the light off.  I know this not because I’m psychic, but because she is motioning to it with her head.  All I can do is comply.  I am lucky in that it’s not completely dark in here after the light overhead has been switched off.

***

And we leave her apartment to walk home, my left hand in her right hand and our fingers tangled in knots.  She’s wearing a white kasuketto hat and black dress pants that make obvious her petite, hourglass figure.  A tight, light blue shirt hides under a thicker black one that buttons up, with a neck that descends to her navel in a huge V. 

Every few steps one of us will glance over at the other’s eyes, each of us trying to catch the other one looking.  She thinks she’s so cute with that usonaki (fake crying) nonsense she’s pulling as we get closer to the subway station.  The sad thing is that she is, and I’m half convinced the saline building up in her eyes is due to genuine sadness at our parting.

All I want is to revoke my membership in society and elope to an uninhabited island with this girl.  We would eat fruit all day and hide from the sun in a hut made of giant banana leaves.  Haruko and I could pass idyllic weeks kissing and lounging and taking survival tips from the dolphins and small animals that crawl underfoot.

That’s all I want.  Is it impossible?  Is it too much to ask?

There was a point when people really lived like that.  For all I know, there are places where they still do.  The advantage that our life would have over theirs is the benefit of forsaking a polluted, overly technological society instead of lacking the power to imagine it. 

But reality is that in ten minutes I’m going to get on a subway car and leave Haruko standing by the ticket machines all alone.  She asked me yesterday if I dream about her.  I told her the truth, that I haven’t yet.  She said she dreams about me. 

The dimness, coupled with the chill in the wind, makes me sad, like two alternating diminished chords on an acoustic guitar being played in arpeggio.  Maybe one of them is in the key of D. We will all at some point exist in the key of D.

And we’ve arrived at the subway station, but we pause outside to sit on a ledge and smoke together.  She really does look like she’s going to cry now, and if she does then I probably will too.  Such is the way of usonaki.

“Zyuu-senchi ni nattara, koko ni hairitai,” she says with her hand in my jacket pocket.

This is complicated to translate, but here goes.  She said she wants to become ten centimeters tall so I can put her in my pocket and take her with me.  Her eyes are huge.  She means it. 

She always means it.

***

Her breasts are fantastic.  They’re big enough that they have shadows underneath but not so big as to droop to any degree.  A perky handful of cleavage is how I would describe them.

Haruko’s perky hands are now taking off my shirt, but I won’t bore you with a description of my pale, hairy chest.  What I’d much rather describe are her nipples, darker than the surrounding skin, the color of coffee that starts out black but ends up lighter after the addition of cream.  Each one is about the size of a gohyakuendama.

The second my lips touch one of these nippular objects they both become pointy and aroused.  A Japanese girl’s voice is already a few octaves too high, but when she moans it’s a note that could break glass if there were enough volume behind it.

Noises like that could make a man’s head explode with desire.

It’s my good fortune that I’m still alive, because now I’m de-belting this girl and de-buttoning her jeans.  They slide off in much the same way one might remove a straw from a plastic wrapper.  It’s not too dark for me to recognize the matching leopard-skin panties only inches from my nose.

I kiss her omeko through said panties, trying not to draw attention to the fact that I’m smelling her nappy dugout.  She smells of the sex of older women (slightly older than I am, anyway), the way a room smells after skilled sex-addicts have been sweating and wrestling inside it for the duration of an entire languid afternoon.  After a few seconds I use my teeth to slide these off too and the smell becomes stronger.

I’m confronted with an immaculate tuft of curly black hairs.  It’s a cruel twist that she can have such a beautiful bush without ever having to worry about trimming or shaving it, for it simply wouldn’t meet the Asian aesthetic if she did anything to modify it.  American women would kill for such snatches.

The taste is something to remember.  My tongue glides over the dampness like it’s fingering her through silk.  She loves the attention and she’s running her digits through my hair almost as a warning that I’d better not stop for awhile. 

My nose and mouth are pressed into her muff, rubbing and licking with ferocity while my cheeks can feel the sweat build up between her thighs.  I wish there were a way I could make money by doing this all the time, because those squeaky sighs are enough to make me almost stain my khakis before she even touches my trouser snake.

I don’t do this, but it brings to mind memories of something that happened just a few weeks ago in front of an office building downtown.  It was 2am and the wind was making trees wave like hands at a hip-hop concert. Gingko nuts and bikes were blowing down the street and we were oblivious to it, making out on a concrete ledge that served as a bench.

After dozens of minutes of grinding and kissing and pressing and writhing under her, I lost it and spewed a dark spot on my thigh.  It was a disgusting and shameful and beautiful moment.

But I got a little off track just now, didn’t I?  So I’m tonguing this sweaty, pungent puff of hair and skin, using my patented kanji study method.  What I do is picture a kanji in my head, (i.e. the ‘ryo’ from ryokan) and then lick out the strokes that make up the kanji.  It’s much more complicated than Kinison’s alphabet method, and you have thousands of kanji to choose from.

***

It’s time to go home again.  We take our ceremonial walk to the subway station, arms a-swinging, me being sneaky and tapping her butt with my umbrella in a covert way that makes her spin around looking for the chikan that did it.  She catches on to my game and playfully hits my shoulder.

“Watashi wa dansei dattara, nani o shimasu ka?”

Her question is: ‘If I were really a boy, what would you do?’  And my answer is, “Nigeru deshou…” which means, ‘I’d probably run away.’  This is not the right answer to the question, which I realize with her reply.

“Kimi ga hontou ni josei dattara, watashi wa otoko ni naru opereisyan shimasu.”

She said if it turned out that I were actually a girl she would go to the hospital and get an operation so she could be a boy and we could still be together.  It’s another hypothetical-love-situation question, one that I should have answered correctly.  I lose 5 hypothetical sweetness points here.

***

After kanji practice, she’s ready.  She almost ripped my pants off and I’m getting ready to put the condom on and she says no.  And I’m confused.

“Nan de?”

She just shakes her head. “Naka ni dasanai de,” she says.

I guess I can handle that, and my response is obvious.  I won’t go into descriptions of the positions or the repetitions or the thousands of spent tissues, but I will say that after this moment and moments like this there were many weeks spent eagerly waiting for her seiri to come.

***

I wake up to an alarm clock, a cell phone ringer of ‘This Love,’ and the television coming to life at full volume.  She later tells me this is because she has trouble waking up in the morning.  No shit.  It’s not a regular alarm clock, but one of the old dials with loud bells that schools used to use as fire alarms.  I turn everything off and try to go back to sleep, but the snooze function on the phone makes it ring again five short minutes later and I can’t get it to stay off because it’s all in Japanese and I don’t know what the hell it says.

She doesn’t wake up and I try to fall back asleep.  Haruko kicks me, steals the blanket, and almost pushes me off the futon, a mattress you can roll up.  The other day she told me that when she moves she’s just going to throw it out, since we made such a mess of it.

It’s only eight-thirty, but it seems like hours later before she finally wakes up.  After a throw and some black coffee, we smoke and strategize.  The day will consist of lunch and packing, of cleaning the bathroom and cleaning the kitchen.  Haruko and her girlfriend from work already cleaned out the Crown Royal and the tequila one night last week.

The supermarket is two blocks away, and now we’re back in this top-floor apartment with the windows open and the sun shining on light brown rooftops as far as we can see.  Eating inari, listening to the radio, this moment is my heaven, a bubble of space-time I will wear like a bathrobe to keep me warm during the next year and a half.

We start cleaning.  She laughs at me because I tell her the best way to clean the bathroom (it really is a bathroom, there’s only a bath and a sink) is to just get naked and start scrubbing everything with bleach.  

After a few hours of intense scrubbing, taking apart all the drains, and turning the ceiling and corners from dingy yellow to white, I’m exhausted.

There’s nothing like sharing an ofuro built for .75 people in a nice clean bathroom.

It’s when we’re half-wet, wrestling around in her empty bedroom when I glance up at her posters and they’re not there.  Just patches of white where her posters used to be and I lose it.  Maybe I never quite regain my composure.

(c) 2005 Jordan Baugher