“I wanted to clean it up myself,” I said.
“Yes,” commented Fubuki, “You might at least have been capable of that.”
“I imagine you’re thinking about the expense reports. You’re right. It’s beyond my abilities. I can solemnly announce that I renounce the task.”
“You took your time,” she observed snidely.
So that’s what it was, I thought. She wanted me to say it. Obviously. It’s much more humiliating.
“The deadline is end of day,” I continued.
“Give me the files.”
Two hours later, she had finished the entire stack.
I SPENT THE day like a zombie. I was hung over. My desk was smothered in wads of crumpled paper covered in erroneous sums. I threw them away one by one.
I found it hard not to giggle when I saw Fubuki working at her computer. I pictured myself the night before, sitting naked on the keyboard, my arms and legs wrapped around the machine. And now there she was, placing her delicate fingers on the keys. It was the first time I’d felt any interest in computing.
The few hours sleep I had had under the trash had not been enough to extricate my brain from the fog of numbers. I was wading through the wastes, looking for the ruins of my mental landmarks. Meanwhile, I was already feeling a relief that was almost miraculous: for the first time in weeks, I was not tapping away at a calculator.
I was rediscovering a numberless world. I was coming back down to earth. It seemed strange that after my night of madness, things continued as if nothing serious had happened. Granted, no one had seen me hopping naked from desk to desk on my hands, or French kissing a computer. But I had after all been found asleep under the contents of a wastebasket. In many other countries I might have been thrown out for that kind of behavior.
There is a singular logic to this. You find the most outrageous deviants in the countries with the most authoritarian systems. These countries also show relative tolerance toward staggeringly bizarre behavior. No one knows what “eccentric” truly means until they’ve met a Japanese eccentric. I slept under the trash in the offices of a major corporation? So what. Japan is a country that knows the meaning of “losing it.”
I started playing my little bit parts again. It would be difficult to describe the pleasure with which I served tea and coffee. These simple gestures, which posed absolutely no challenge to my poor brain, helped me put myself back together.
As discreetly as possible, I started updating the calendars again. I forced myself to look busy the whole time, so afraid was I of being sent back to the numbers.
A great event crept up on me before I knew what had happened. I met God. The loathsome vice-president had asked me for a beer, probably thinking that he wasn’t fat enough as it was. I brought it to him with an air of polite disgust. I was just leaving the Obese One’s lair when the door to the neighboring office opened. I was face to face with none other than the president himself of the Import-Export Division of the Yumimoto Corporation.
We looked at each other in amazement. My dumb-foundedness was understandable; there I was, face to face with the lord of Yumimoto. His was less easy to explain. Did he even know I existed?
“You must be Amélie-san,” he said, in a voice that was extraordinarily beautiful and refined.
He smiled and extended his hand. I was so amazed that I couldn’t produce a sound. Mister Haneda was a man of about fifty, with a slim body and an exceptionally elegant face. An aura of profound goodness and harmony emanated from him. He looked at me with such genuine goodwill that I lost what little composure I still had.
He left. I stood alone in the corridor, incapable of moving. The president of this place of torture—in which each and every day I was subjected to humiliations each more absurd than the one before—the master of this Gehenna was this magnificent entity!
It surpassed understanding. A company managed by a man of such manifest nobility should have been a paradise of refinement, a place of fulfillment and gentleness. Could it be possible that God reigned over hell?
I was still frozen in stupor when the answer to my question was delivered unto me. The door to Mister Omochi’s office opened.
“What the hell are you doing there? You’re not being paid to hang around in the hallways!”
All was explained. At Yumimoto, God was president, and the Devil vice-president.
_______
FUBUKI, ON THE other hand, was neither God nor the Devil; she was Japanese.
Not all Japanese women are beautiful. But when one of them sets out to be beautiful, anyone else had better stand back.
All forms of beauty are poignant, Japanese beauty particularly so. That lily-white complexion, those mellow eyes, the inimitable shape of the nose, the well-defined contours of the mouth, and the complicated sweetness of the features are enough, by themselves, to eclipse the most perfectly assembled faces.
Then there is her comportment, so stylized that it transforms her into a moving work of art.
Finally, and most importantly, beauty that has resisted so many physical and mental corsets, so many constraints, crushing denials, absurd restrictions, dogmas, heartbreaks, such sadism and asphyxiation, and such conspiracies of silence and humiliation—that sort of beauty is a miracle of heroic survival.
Not that the Japanese woman is a victim; far from it. Among the women on this planet, she hasn’t actually drawn the shortest straw. She has considerable power. I should know.
No, if the Japanese woman is to be admired—and she is—it is because she doesn’t commit suicide. Society conspires against her from her earliest infancy. Her brain is steadily filled with plaster until it sets: “If you’re not married by the time you’re twenty-five, you’ll have good reason to be ashamed”; “if you laugh, you won’t look dignified”; “if your face betrays your feelings, you’ll look coarse”; “if you mention the existence of a single body-hair, you’re repulsive”; “if a boy kisses you on the cheek in public, you’re a whore”; “if you enjoy eating, you’re a pig”; “if you take pleasure in sleeping, you’re no better than a cow”; and so on. These precepts would be merely anecdotal if they weren’t taken so much to heart.
These are the messages that these incongruous dogmas bully into the Japanese woman:
“Do not dare hope for anything beautiful. Do not expect to feel any sort of pleasure, because it will destroy you. Do not hope for love, because you’re not worthy of it. Those who love you will love you for the illusion of you, not for the real you. Do not hope that you will get anything out of life, because each passing year will take something from you. Do not even hope for anything as simple as a peaceful life, because you don’t have a single reason to be at peace.
“Wish for work. There is little hope, given your sex, that you will get far up the ladder, but perhaps you will serve your employer. Working will earn you money, which will give you no pleasure, but might be of some advantage to you—such as when it comes to marriage. Because you should not be so foolish as to suppose that anyone could want you for yourself.
“Apart from that, you can hope to live to a ripe old age, although that should be of little interest to you, and to live without dishonor, which is an end in itself. There ends the list of your legitimate hopes.
“Here begins the list of duties:
“You must be irreproachable, for the simple reason that that is the least you can be. Being irreproachable will have no other reward than being irreproachable, which must be neither a source of pride nor a pleasure.
“Not a moment of your life will be ungoverned by at least one of these duties. For example, even when you are in the bathroom for the humble purpose of relieving your bladder, you are constrained to ensure that no one will hear the trill of your stream. You should therefore flush continuously.
“If even these intimate and insignificant aspects of your existence are subject to commandments, remember what sort of constraints weigh on the truly important ones.
“Don’t eat much, because
you have to stay slim, not for the pleasure of seeing people turn to admire you in the street—they won’t—but because it is shameful to be plump.
“It is your duty to be beautiful, though your beauty will afford you no joy. The only compliments you receive will be from Westerners, and we know how short they are on good taste. If you admire yourself in the mirror, let it be in fear and not delight, because the only thing that beauty will bring to you is terror of losing it. If you are pretty, you won’t amount to much; if you are not, you will amount to nothing.
“It is your duty to marry, preferably before your twenty-fifth birthday, which is your date of expiration. Your husband will not love you, unless he’s a half-wit, and there is no joy in being loved by a half-wit. You will never see him anyway. At two in the morning an exhausted—and often drunk—man will collapse in a heap onto the conjugal bed, which he will leave at six o’clock without a word.
“It is your duty to bear children, whom you will treat like gods until they turn three, when, with one clean blow, you will expel them from paradise and enlist them for military service, which lasts until they are eighteen, and then from twenty-five until death. You will bring into the world creatures that will be all the more miserable because during the first three years of their lives you imbued them with a notion of happiness.
“You think that’s horrible? You are not the first to think that. People like you have been thinking that since 1960. And yet it has done little good. Some have rebelled, and you too may well rebel during the only free period of your life, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. The instant you turn twenty-five, you will realize that you are not married, and you will be ashamed. You will exchange your eccentric clothes for a tidy little blazer, white tights, and grotesque pumps. You will subject your magnificent glossy hair to excessive blow-drying, and you will feel relief when someone—a husband or an employer—wants anything whatever to do with you.
“In the unlikely event of your marrying for love, you will be even more miserable, because you will see your husband suffer. It is better not to love him. This will allow you to be indifferent to the collapse of his ideals (your husband may still have some even if you don’t). For example, he has been permitted the illusion that he will be loved by a woman. He will quickly realize that you don’t love him. How can you love someone when your heart is set in a plaster cast? You’ve been too weighed down by duties, too bound by limits, to be capable of love. If you love someone, you must have been badly brought up. For the first few days of your marriage, you will fake all sorts of things. It has to be said that no other woman in the world can fake quite the way you do.
“Your duty is to make sacrifices for others. But do not let yourself think that your sacrifices will make those for whom you make them happy. Those sacrifices will only allow them not to be ashamed of you. You have no hope of either being happy or of making others happy.
“And if by some extraordinary chance you manage to escape one of these prescriptions, do not take this to mean you have triumphed. Take it to mean that you must have gone wrong somewhere. Actually, you will very soon come to realize any illusion of victory can only ever be fleeting. Do not attempt to enjoy the moment. Leave that sort of error in judgment to Westerners. The moment means nothing, your life means nothing. No period of time less than ten thousand years counts for anything.
“If it is any consolation, no one considers you less intelligent than a man. If you are brilliant, everyone will know, even those who treat you like dirt. And yet, if you think about it, is that really so comforting? If they thought of you as inferior at least that would provide some explanation for the private hell in which you live, and offer you hope of escape—by demonstrating how wonderful your mind truly is. If you are seen as an equal, or even superior, your Gehenna, your living hell, is absurd. That means there is no way out.
“Ah, but there is one! Just one. One to which you have every right to avail yourself—unless you have been stupid enough to convert to Christianity. You have the right to commit suicide. Suicide is a very honorable act. Do not deceive yourself into believing that the hereafter will be anything like the jovial paradise Westerners describe. There’s nothing like that on the other side. What makes suicide worthwhile is its effect on your posthumous reputation, which will be dazzling, a source of family pride. You will hold a cherished place in the family vault. And that is the highest honor any human being can hope to attain.
“Granted, you can choose not to commit suicide. But then, sooner or later, you will find you can no longer cope, and slip into some form or other of dishonor: take a lover, indulge gluttony, grow lazy. It has been observed that humans in general, and women in particular, find it hard to exist for any length of time without succumbing to one of these carnal pleasures. If we are wary, it will not be out of Puritanism. That is an American obsession.
“It is best to avoid any kind of physical pleasure, because it is apt to make you sweat. There is nothing more shameful than sweat. If you gobble up a steaming bowl of noodles, if you give in to sexual craving, if you spend the winter dozing in front of the fire, you will sweat. And no one will be in any doubt that you are coarse.
“The choice between sweat and suicide isn’t a choice. Spilling one’s blood is as admirable as spilling sweat is unspeakable. Take your life, and you will never sweat again. Your anxiety will be over for all eternity.”
THE EATE OF the Japanese man isn’t that much more enviable. Japanese women at least have the chance to leave the hell that is their work by getting married. Not working for a Japanese company, I began to see, might be an end in and of itself.
But the Japanese man has not been asphyxiated. He has not had all traces of his ideals destroyed from earliest childhood. He has been allowed to retain one of the most fundamental of human rights: that of dreaming and hoping. He has been allowed to conjure an imaginary world over which he is the master.
A Japanese woman does not have recourse to this if she is well brought up—as is the case with the majority. Her imagination has been amputated. That is why I proclaim my profound admiration for any Japanese woman who has not committed suicide. Staying alive is an act of resistance and courage both selfless and sublime.
ALL THIS IS what I thought of when I contemplated Fubuki.
“What you are doing?” she asked me in an acerbic voice.
“I’m dreaming. Don’t you ever do that?”
“Never.”
I smiled. Mister Saito had just become the father of a second child, a son. One of the wonders of the Japanese language is that you can create an infinite number of names, drawn from all the parts of speech. By one of those bizarre quirks of which Japanese culture offers abundant examples, those who have no right to dream bear names that solicit dreaming, such as “Fubuki.” Parents indulge in the most delicate lyricism when it comes to naming a girl. When it comes to naming a boy, on the other hand, the results are often hilariously mundane.
Thus, as it was perfectly acceptable to select a verb in the infinitive as a name, Mister Saito had named his son Tsutomeru, which means “to work.” The thought of a child burdened with an agenda disguised as a name was sadly funny.
I imagined the poor kid coming home from school in a few years, his mother waiting by the door. “So you’re home, Work. Do your homework!” What if later he went on unemployment?
Fubuki was irreproachable. Her only flaw was that at age twenty-nine she still didn’t have a husband. There was no doubt it was a source of shame to her. If a young woman as beautiful as she had not yet found a husband, it was precisely because she had so zealously applied the same supreme rule that served as a name for Mister Saito’s son. For the last seven years she had submerged her entire existence in work. And successfully so, since she had achieved a professional standing rare for a woman.
Such devotion had made it absolutely impossible for her to wed. She could not, however, be reproached for working too hard because, in the eyes of the Japanese, you can never work too
hard. There was therefore something contradictory in the rules laid down for women: irreproachable assiduity in their work habits meant that they might reach twenty-five without marrying and, consequently, make themselves open to reproach. The core of the system’s sadism lay contained in this contradiction: obeying the rules eventually meant disobeying the rules.
I was fairly sure Fubuki was ashamed of being a spinster. She was too obsessed with perfection to permit the least omission in her compliance with the supreme instructions. I wondered whether she’d had casual lovers. Perhaps she had. What is beyond doubt is that she would never have flaunted jeopardizing her nadeshiko, her aura of virginity. Besides, given her schedule, I couldn’t see how she would have even found the time for a banal affair.
I watched the way she behaved in the presence of an unmarried man—handsome or ugly, young or old, affable or loathsome, intelligent or dim-witted, it didn’t matter, so long as he was not inferior to her in the corporate hierarchy of our company or his own. She would suddenly become so studiously sweet that it almost veered toward aggression. Hopelessly flustered, her hands fluttered toward her wide belt, nervously adjusting the buckle back around to the middle (her belt was too large for her tiny waist and tended to slip). Her voice became so tender it sounded like a sob.
I called this “Miss Mori’s nuptial display.” There was something nearly comic about watching her succumb to these antics, which I felt demeaned both her beauty and her position. There was something sad about it all, especially as the males for whose benefit she was deploying her seduction strategies didn’t even seem to notice, and were therefore perfectly indifferent to them. I sometimes felt like shaking them and saying:
“How about showing a bit more chivalry? Can’t you see all the trouble she’s going to for you? Look, I know she’s not doing herself any favors, but if you only knew how beautiful she is when she isn’t trying so hard. Far too beautiful for you. You should weep with joy to be coveted by a pearl like her.”