I watched for expensive cars pulling up and for limos. I imagined that she might be driven by a driver who was instructed to deliver her to the front door of the yoga dojo and to pick her up immediately afterward. Or she might be casually accompanied by a “friend,” who would report back to her father, the same way Pink Pumps or Iwa Ikeda did. Akemi had been stripped of her marriage, money, and mobility by a mogul who owned a mountain and only Allah knows what else.
Empty-handed after clocking arriving cars and all yoga student faces and waiting for an hour even after students stopped arriving, I left. I grabbed a taxi and said one word to the driver, “Arashiyama.” I knew it was a long shot, but maybe not. I had no idea exactly where I was going or where I should look, yet I didn’t like the idea of my wife strolling around, possibly alone in some public place, looking for peace and privacy and filled with heavy emotions.
The beautiful waterfall in Arashiyama reminded me of Akemi. As I stepped out of the taxi at the edge of a river, I understood why she would come here for peace. She was like the river, and ever since I’d met her, there had been water beneath my feet. The Arashiyama area was on the water, with wide, open spaces, nature, mountains, and sky. It was not crowded. In fact it seemed that as I arrived, many groups were leaving on tour buses. Surprisingly, they were not foreign visitors from America and Europe or Africa or Australia. They were Japanese people touring their own sights and land.
Seated at the side of the river, watching the waterfall, were local people, mothers and daughters and sons patiently playing, picnicking, and admiring. A few fathers were off strolling on the boardwalk. The mothers had the comfort of locals as their one- and two-years young wandered toward and close to the edge of the water playfully, unafraid as only people familiar with a place could be. I could see their small houses nestled at riverside. They were the kinds of houses that people blessed with awesome surroundings could be happy living in, because their real home was outdoors just like in my Southern Sudanese grandfather’s village.
Some women wore yukatas, the summer version of the kimono. The colors were striking and the wide sleeves stylish and sensual. Their faces were natural though, which was pretty to me. There wasn’t a trace of that white powder that I had seen smeared all over the faces in drawings of the traditional geisha. I thought that white geisha makeup and those drawn-on little red lips were the definition of ugly.
The Japanese yukata, a summer kimono.
The sun was no longer at full power, yet it still spread light. I knew it would set a half an hour or more after the early sunset times in Tokyo, just by looking at its current position in the sky. I was cool with that. I had to race the sunset and get a look around.
I crossed over a small footbridge, which led to a series of craft shops. They were for tourists, I figured, so I kept going. I reached a small inlet where a man sat silently on a modest narrow boat. One or two pushes of his paddle and he would be thrust out into the body of the main river.
Soon I reached a wooded area, although I could still hear the water gushing and pushing and streaming. I was drawn to a series of stairs that seemed to create a path through and up into the woods, yet the stairs went on forever, as though when you reached the top, you could even touch a cloud. No one was around. I thought maybe my wife would go where no one else was going. I thought she might be in those woods with her easel and brushes and pencils and paints. So I went.
The wide cement stairs were not a straight walk up. Every twenty or so steps, the stairs would switch direction as though they were placed by someone with a wicked sense of humor. I climbed. Suddenly, the wide cement stairs narrowed and soon there were only stairs made of logs. Even though I was climbing high toward the sky, there were no protective barriers to keep a walker from falling down below. Soon the set of narrow wooden stairs turned to stairs made from mud and stones. As I advanced, I was still surrounded by beautiful trees of every color as though it were autumn, not spring. There was a breeze within the woods. As I peered between plants and branches and trees, I didn’t see her or anyone else for that matter. There were directional signs, but they were all written in Japanese kanji. There were a few wooden stands lodged into the soil, pamphlet dispensers. I assumed that normally they would offer a map of this specific area for the lost, or translations for foreigners, but there were no more pamphlets left anywhere.
After climbing forty sets of stairs with twenty steps a set, on the eight-hundredth stair I reached the pavilion of a small mountain. As I looked around happy to see a clearing, there was no one up there except me, and about thirty medium-sized monkeys. Instantly I threw my hands up to guard my face, recalling how baboons would swing down suddenly and attack uninvited guests for play. But these weren’t baboons and they didn’t attack. In fact they glanced at me like, “What the fuck you looking at?” I smiled and withdrew my guard. They were tan long-haired monkeys with red faces and funny fingers. They had mouth pockets where they were obviously storing food for themselves and their little ones. As I checked out their details, I could distinguish the males from the females. The male ones had two long and sharp canine teeth. Some of the mothers lay flat on their backs with their little ones arranged on their bellies. Some were swinging, some picking insects out of the next one’s coat, some eating, some just chilling and grabbing and pulling and playing with their groins. A group of them were dropping shit from their red-colored assholes like chestnuts. As I looked back, I could see now how there were monkeys in trees that I had already walked past. If this had been the ghetto, I would’ve gotten got! I just had not seen them camouflaged there, brown fur on brown branches. Still, I knew there was no excuse for my oversight. Although I felt slack for missing them, I respected them damn monkeys for being so easy that they could actually go undetected by the unpredictable predator, the human.
I walked toward the edge and looked down over Kyoto. It was amazing to see the town from the sky down, a kaleidoscope of treetops and hundreds of houses and rooftops, not situated on flat land but riddled through the hills and hidden in the valleys and surrounding the waters, all different shapes and sizes and colors. Amazed, I took a deep breath, then turned my face toward the bluing sky. Akemi, where are you?
It took me three-quarters less time to get down those steps than it did to climb up. I rushed across the same footbridge that brought me over and asked a vender, “Do you have a map of Arashiyama?” After answering my evening greeting, he answered one word, “Closed.” Then he pulled out a worn map of Arashiyama from his own pocket. “You are here,” he said in a way that let me know he didn’t know many other English words to use. He circled the location where he and I were both standing, although it had been circled a few times already, and said, “Monkey Park.”
I had to laugh at myself. I had been searching for my wife unknowingly in a monkey forest.
I made my prayer by the water at dusk. Before I closed my eyes, the sky was light gray. The sun was orange. The moon was white. When I opened my eyes, the sky was black. The sun had escaped. The moon was yellow.
* * *
Using my new phone card, I called Chiasa to check her. Instead of my on-point sentinel, my lucky charm, the one who had my wife’s diary and all the information completed by now, I reached a recording.
“Ryoshi, wait for me. I’m coming. Meet me at the station at seven p.m. Don’t eat without me!” she said in English, and then her voice mail began speaking in Japanese, I presumed for all other callers. I put the phone down. I should have known that Chiasa would follow me even though I told her to remain in Tokyo. I had thought about it, in fact. I had thought that the $300 roundtrip bullet train ticket, Tokyo to Kyoto, would separate her from her enthusiasm and determination. But it didn’t.
As I moved toward the station at 7:15 p.m., already past her meet-up time, I speculated on what she had told her grandfather for him to allow her to travel here. Or if she had spoken with her own father on the phone before leaving Tokyo, and how much had she explained to him? Or had she kept e
very detail a secret, like I preferred her to do? Also, where would she sleep when I didn’t even choose a place to stay for myself? And what was her reason for coming?
Black Birkenstocks, black cargo pants, and a tight black tee. She had her pretty silver eyes outlined in black eyeliner and something else on her was also switched, but I broke my stare.
On her back she carried a purple backpack stuffed with two weeks’ worth of items, it seemed. Her sterling silver belt buckle was embossed with two clashing swords modeled after the patch I got from Yuka. She smiled as soon as she saw me. I smiled too.
“What’s happening?” I asked her, my curiosity very elevated.
“Did you eat?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“Good, let’s go,” she said, bumping me with her elbow.
“Let me take that from you,” I said, with my hand already on one of her backpack straps.
“Where’s your backpack?” she asked.
“Here in a locker. I didn’t get a room yet,” I told her.
“We got a room. I have a lot to report to you,” she said with serious excitement.
Everything moved ten times faster with Chiasa here. We picked up my backpack and jumped on the bus to what she said was the Kyoto downtown area. Rocking two backpacks, one on my back, the other in my hand, we pressed ourselves further into the packed bus.
The night breeze was warm, a rush of heated air massaging our faces. We walked among medium-sized continuous crowds on a main strip of shops of every imaginable kind. Some boasted 500,000 yen silk kimonos that could not have been more perfect unless designed by my Umma! There were stores exclusively selling wooden shoes of every style. There were restaurants of sushi and sashimi, yakitori and taki yaki, sake bars, teahouses, and even burger joints. Most canopies, awnings, and signs were written in kanji. I began to recognize and distinguish the food places by their flags, which for some reason they displayed right outside their restaurant doors.
A red flag with the crescent and the star appeared. I knew it was Turkish. We dipped down on some black-iron narrow stairs into a basement. Both of us needed a good meal. I knew we would find some spicy soups, hot bread, and well-seasoned meats on rice there. I ordered for us both.
“You know what I hate?” Chiasa asked, as she separated her bread into smaller slices. I just looked up from my water glass, acknowledging her.
“When somebody tries to stick their hand in something and change someone else’s fate. You know, someone who tries to block natural things from happening. That’s what Akemi’s family is trying to do to you two. I’m on your side one hundred percent. I put my heart and my life on that.” She dipped her bread into her spinach.
Her words kicked me in my chest and played again in my mind. “I put my heart and my life on that” Chiasa had just said.
“You know, I used to like one boy named—”
“Don’t tell me his name,” I interrupted her.
“Oh, sorry. Well, I liked him—”
“Why?” I asked.
She smiled. “I was going to tell you. I liked him because he could fight better than the other boys in our dojo. So when I realized that I liked him, I told Yuka.”
“Why did you tell her?” I asked.
“Because at the time we were best friends. Besides, we had both sworn to one another that we didn’t like boys. We agreed that they were all stupid and slow. We promised one another we wouldn’t act ridiculous over the boys the way other girls did. But then I began to feel something right here.” She placed her hand over her left breast. “So I went to Yuka first and told her the truth and asked her, What did she think? She said it didn’t matter as long as I didn’t start acting dumb about the boy like the other girls do. So I was like cool.”
Then Chiasa suddenly stopped telling her story. We ate in silence with only the sounds of our chewing and the fast-paced Turkish music playing in the background.
“So what did you do?” I asked her five minutes later.
“I was waiting to see if you cared. I don’t want to bore you with my silly story, when I already know your story is so deep and true and important,” she confessed. But there was no real reason for her to worry about boring me. Dinner is a time when I try to relax, especially my mind.
“What did you do about it?” I asked her again.
“I didn’t do anything. Japanese girls wait for the guy to make the first gesture,” she said.
“Oh yeah?” It didn’t sound true to me. I pictured Akemi waiting for me on the side wall of my job in Chinatown, with her English-speaking cousin there to introduce us. I smiled at the memory.
“So did he make the first move?” I asked her, because it seemed like she wanted to tell me.
“Well, he chose me to be his sparring partner at one of the sessions. That was the first time he did that,” she said proudly.
“Did you two fight?”
“Yes, I let him win. I could’ve beaten him.”
I laughed, naturally. I was thinking, How could she choose a guy because he was the best fighter in her dojo, but she could whip him? It meant she could defeat all the boys in her dojo. None of it was a good look for young samurais. But I didn’t say shit.
“Seriously, I could have,” she pushed.
“If he liked you, he wouldn’t have fought you,” I told her. Then I thought about what I had just said.
“Japanese boys will fight girls. We spar one another often. They hit hard too. They’re not the same as you,” she added swiftly.
“So after he beat you, what happened?” I followed up.
“Well, in our dojo, if you lose a fight, you have mop duty. So I had to stay after everyone else except the sensei had gone, and mop the whole floor. I was on my knees drying it with a special cloth when he came back alone and actually helped me. We dried the floor together. I was so excited. Afterward, he gave me a ride on his bicycle, to my grandfather’s house. I didn’t invite him to come inside because my grandfather wasn’t home. But I was still happy that at least he knew where I lived and it was so close to our dojo.” She paused like she was seeing it all in her mind.
“On White Day, all the girls were secretly giving guys who they liked chocolates,” she began again.
“White Day?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s like the American Valentine’s Day, but here in Japan the girls give chocolates to the guys,” she explained. I thought it sounded crazy, girls giving men sweets instead of the other way around.
“I didn’t, though. I thought it was corny, all the girls giving the same thing. So I made a gift for him instead and left it in his sneaker.” She paused. I just looked at her and waited. “It was a slingshot,” she said. I smiled. I thought it was a dope gift.
“I left a note with it saying, ‘After class, I can show you how to shoot it. Let me know if you want to.’ ”
The waiter arrived with our tea. He placed the small hot cups on the table. Chiasa held the tiny cup with both hands. Her nails were clipped and clean, without polish. “I waited for him on the steps after dojo. He walked right out with his friends. I thought he didn’t see me. But then he looked back. We just stared at each other for some seconds. He kept going with his friends. I was disappointed. As I walked home, I heard someone behind me. I turned and it was him. He had the slingshot in his hand and was smiling at me. So I walked toward him to show him how to shoot it. He said he already knew how.” Chiasa laughed as though she was laughing at him.
“I bet he didn’t” was all I said.
“You’re right! He was setting up targets and snatching up rocks. He would shoot and miss. I tried not to laugh, but I did laugh just a little. So he challenged me. He said that I couldn’t do it any better. Well, that was it! I forgot that I liked him. You know Aunt Tasha says if you don’t play dumb and let boys win at everything, they won’t like you. But I wasn’t thinking about that. I was just thinking about the challenge. So I told him if he didn’t believe that I was better than him at it, he should run and I w
ould shoot him and I wouldn’t miss. Well, he ran. I let him get far away. I took aim and the rock sped through the air like crazy and caught him on his calf and he fell!” She laughed. “I ran over to help him. He didn’t want any help. Just like Aunt Tasha taught me, he was angry. So he hopped home,” Chiasa said softly, before looking up at me to check my reaction. I just started cracking up, a rare good laugh at the punk she had chosen. So she began laughing also.
“I put a note in his sneaker like three days later. “Sorry about the bruise. If you don’t like me anymore, you can give me back the White Day gift and I will understand.”
“What happened?” I followed up.
“Waiting for a Japanese guy is like waiting for spring to come again during the summer season. So I asked Yuka what I should say to him or do. Yuka said, ‘Let’s plan a gokan party,’ ” Chiasa explained.
“‘Gokan,’ I repeated. Does that have anything to do with the Japanese chess game?” I asked, thinking that couldn’t be a real way to hook up.
“No, not the chess game. A gokan party or a go party is when Japanese girls and guys all meet in a restaurant or place together. And everybody talks and laughs and shares eats and drinks. You know like to take the pressure off of the real couples from being alone face to face with one another.”
It sounded strange to me. Were the two people who liked each other afraid to be alone in the same public place? I could understand if they were trying to avoid being alone in a private place. Maybe they had some rule like the Muslims and wouldn’t have sex before marriage, therefore they didn’t trust themselves to be alone in a private space. Chiasa must have realized my confusion just by looking at my expression.
“It is very difficult for Japanese people to express their true feelings to one another. There is a shyness that is shared and expected. For a Japanese girl to just come out and boldly say to a guy what she is feeling or wanting or thinking would be taken the wrong way,” she said as I listened intently.