Trip to Japan I Caught Her Looking

¶ … Trip to Japan

I caught her looking at me the way a child stares at a dead animal, all scared and bashful -- but somehow magnetized by the image, unable to look away from the carnage. I couldn't blame her for eyeing me up that way. At the time, I was unsightly. A mess, really. I was dressing like a rock star on a budget -- black Wranglers, black T, white gold chain (that certainly wasn't gold) and a black pleather jacket replete with fur aviator collar. I looked, by all accounts, stupid. But I had one thing going for me; I was an American in Japan. And I wasn't going to be denied.

The exact setting or place we met at is inconsequential as is the total amount of time we spent, as they say in poorly written adult novels, "exchanging furtive glances." All I will tell you is that she eventually came up to me with her Dora-the-Explorer haircut (board-straight bangs with hair cropped above the shoulder in helmet like fashion) and her elfishly small hands and tapped me on the shoulder. A light, non-threatening, tap-tap.

"Hey, there," I said.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," I said.

"Hi," she said.

"My name is Lo-la," she said. "I from Tokyo."

"Great," I said.

"You from American?"

"Yes, ma'am, I am" I said, trying to sound cool.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi?" I said.

I won't bore you with the details of our first 30 minutes (or so) of conversation. But I will tell you that despite her English being as broken as a back-country road and my Japanese being almost completely non-existent, we managed to learn enough about each other to want to know more about one another. So we went for an extended walk. And during that walk we did learn even more about each other.

Like, for example, she initially said she was from Tokyo, but she wasn't really from Tokyo, she was from some other city near Tokyo (one I can't quite recall) but she often told people she was from Tokyo because it provided a concise answer to which no explication was required. It was predicated on the belief that, in general, everyone knew where Tokyo was (or they had at least heard of it), so no one would ask silly follow-up questions as to "where exactly that was?" Or "is it near such-and-such?" And all the other small-talk nonsense she would have to deal with if she told someone where exactly she was from. By and large, she preferred the efficient answer to the elaborate explanation, but that night she gave me both.