Midnight and the Meaning of Love (47 page)

“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 would 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.

“So every five minutes—
go
means ‘five’ in Japan—we just switch partners and talk and get to know the next person a bit more. The idea is that after the
go
party is over, every girl tells her best friend who she really likes, and the guys tell their male friends. Then the best friend makes the call so the two who really like one another can meet up.” She was finished.

“Meet up alone?” I asked.

“Not necessarily. But maybe this time it’s less of a group than before, but the girl and the guy who really like each other are definitely there and the other friends are trying to help them to get together.”

“Okay” was all I said.

“Well, Yuka set up the
gokan
party. When I got there, there was only Yuka, me, and him, and that’s not how a
go
party is supposed to be. Then Yuka said to him “Chiasa likes you a lot.” I felt embarrassed. But truthfully, I was excited too and grateful to Yuka for saying what I had never clearly said to him. Then Yuka said, ‘I told Chiasa that you and I are dating already, but she insists that you should tell her that personally.’ ” Chiasa frowned and leaned back, her chopsticks loosely held in her fingers.

“What did the fool say?” I asked Chiasa, referring to the guy that they both liked.

“He didn’t even look at me. He turned the other way and said, ‘Yuka-san is right. Yuka is my girlfriend.’ So I just drank the glass of water that was in front of me and I left,” Chiasa said. “Later Yuka and all her friends, who just the day before had all been my friends too, gathered around me and watched while Yuka announced, ‘Chiasa is
konketsuji
.’ They all laughed. Then Yuka shouted, ‘
Hafu
, don’t you know that Japanese boys will always choose a Japanese girl?’ ”

“Did you fight her?” I asked.

“No. Yuka and I had promised one another that we would never
fight over boys. So I just walked away. I always keep my promises,” she said solemnly.

I didn’t know what
konketsuji
or
hafu
meant, yet Chiasa’s pronunciation of the words and her tone and expression of disgust made the insult in them clear.

“ ‘Half a person.’ That’s what
hafu
means, and
konketsuji
means, ‘child of unlike things put together.’ For me, Yuka was saying that the part of me that is Japanese from my mother is human. The part of me that is from my African-American father is not.”

Moments later Chiasa said, “I realized I never loved that boy anyway. I just liked him and was a bit impressed. But I did love Yuka. Anytime I thought about what happened with her, I would be shocked all over again. I cried. My whole body would hurt. It was difficult for me to accept that anyone could be so close to me, talking and laughing with me, sometimes sleeping over and us going out together, then could really have felt hatred for me all along. After a long time I realized that Yuka did not even like the boy at all. She just didn’t want me to like him. She was my best friend and didn’t even want me to be happy.”

“That boy wasn’t your fate,” I assured her. “If he was, he would have been with you, even now,
still
. He was a coward. It sounds like he allowed Yuka to control him, instead of being true to himself as a man.”

I paid for our meal, thanked the waiter, and tipped him. Chiasa opened the billfold, subtracted the tip, and laid it on my side of the table.

“Japan is a no-tip country,” she said. “Even in a Turkish restaurant, Japanese laws are the same.”

* * *

The completely booked Hyatt Hotel welcomed Chiasa and me as she checked in. We were escorted to her reserved room. I carried our belongings. She opened the door. There were two well-dressed beds with crisp white goose-down quilts and a wide window that led to a lighted garden. The lamps were shaded with rice paper and the drawings on the wall were beautiful displays of kanji as Asian art. The curtains were made of white linen. The floors were made of tatami. The bathroom was two steps up and enclosed by thick glass. The faucet
and sink and toilet and shower stall were all glistening clean. The air smelled like a very subtle perfume, a clean scent but not antiseptic.

I wanted and needed to hear the important information that led Chiasa to travel all the way down here to help me locate my wife. But I already knew that right after I heard it and discussed it, I would be up and out of her hotel room for my own sake, for Chiasa’s sake, and to keep true.

Chiasa opened her backpack and pulled out a stack of books tied in size order. “These are the books written by Shiori Nakamura,” she said. “While I was in the bookstore, I read one of her poems. So powerful!” Then she pointed out that each book had been wrapped in a beautiful evergreen book cover, with a gold seal that read “Kinokuniya,” the name of the store.

“Thank you,” I said, moving the stack over to my right and pulling out my pocketknife to cut the string. Just as I picked up one of the books, Chiasa said, “They are all written in Japanese and unavailable in English. I checked.”

“What about the author Seth Arrington, did you check him out?” I asked her.

“Looking him up almost made me miss my train. I checked on the shelves first before asking customer service in the Japanese section on the first floor. They could not find anything or even pull up his name as an author. I thought maybe you or I had the name wrong. Then I went upstairs to the seventh floor, the English section. I checked the shelves again and nothing! When I went to the English customer service desk, they actually found his name and told me that the author had only written one book and that the one book he wrote,
Never Surrender
, was out of print and unavailable in Japan. She said that author had a really short career.”

“Out of print?” I repeated.

“She said that means that the book company is not printing any more copies of it. You would have to go to a used book store or something and see if you could find it,” she advised. “Oh, and the lady was like, ‘What do you need this book for? Is it a school assignment? Is it for you or someone else?’ Can you believe her?” Chiasa stared into me for answers.

“Was she Japanese?” I asked.

“Of course, everyone at the English section is Japanese! It’s just
called the English section because you can buy books written in English on that floor, and all of the other floors are books written strictly in Japanese.

“Oh and about Akemi’s diary.”

“I have completed the list for you,” Chiasa said, and handed it to me. “In most cases, Akemi wrote about her friends and family, but she didn’t list their addresses or even refer to their location. It’s a diary, like a daily account of what was happening in her life from right before she left Japan to go and study in New York up until her art show in Manhattan. I believe she probably has a bunch of diaries stashed somewhere else that leads up to this one here.” She held up the diary.

“It’s not an address book. So I had to read carefully a couple of times and figure out who was who from where. Then I went to the library, right after you caught the train earlier today, and got the directory for Kyoto from the reference desk. I looked up each name that she mentioned in her writing, in the Tokyo directory and then in the Kyoto directory. I know you only wanted the names and addresses and phone numbers of the people Akemi mentioned in her diary as well as the names of the places she went to often in Kyoto. But I think you
should listen
to what her relationship is to certain people. She writes about all of them, and that will make it faster for us to locate her,” Chiasa said sincerely, and she had my full attention.

“For example, she writes very affectionately about a woman named Mayu. I put her name on your list. Well later on in her diary when Akemi and her father had a conflict, Mayu took Akemi’s side, although she pretended to support Mr. Nakamura because he is her employer. Anyway, at one point in the diary I found Mayu’s last name—it’s Morita. Then I looked up Mayu Morita’s phone number and her address here in Kyoto. Now, Mayu works at Akemi’s home seven days a week from seven a.m. until seven p.m. as the house manager. Since I now know Mayu-san’s home address, I can go there at say five a.m. and follow her to work. I’ll end up at Akemi’s house, simple!” Chiasa’s stare was intense and she waited for my reply to her detailed detective work.

I smiled and said, “Sounds good, but you could’ve just given me Mayu’s address over the telephone and let me check it out.”

“I could have, but you couldn’t follow Mayu-san at five in the
morning and go unnoticed. Mr. Nakamura and his men are already on the lookout for anyone fitting your description. ‘Young, African, male.’ Probably Mr. Nakamura has no idea that you are even here in Kyoto. We should keep it that way,” she argued. It didn’t take too many seconds for me to see her strategy emerging.

Chiasa was right. I was already imagining that the Kyoto home would be different from the Roppongi house, where security was lax. I expected this location to be Nakamura’s estate, an expensive spread, completely secured and alarmed.

Chiasa opened Akemi’s diary to further express her point of view. “From the way Akemi tells her story in her diary, she has got about four different sets of friends. She doesn’t mix them together because she said each set has their own mind and ideas and none of them want to be any different than they already are.”

“Are those her words?” I asked Chiasa.

“Exactly,” she answered. “So powerful, right? You know, near the end of her diary, on the corner of one page, she had scribbled,

They were flesh without nerves, veins without blood, bodies without heart, these Japanese men.

* * *

“It made my body shake, her words, so true,” Chiasa said. I didn’t say nothing, so Chiasa continued reporting.

“There is one girl that Akemi is really extremely close with. She isn’t part of any of the four sets, and when Akemi spends time with her, it’s usually just the two of them. This girl is from Nepal. She’s two years older than Akemi and she attends Kyoto Seika University. I put her name on your list also. It’s Josna, but Akemi calls her Jo. If everything else fails, based on the story Akemi writes about her life, if you find Jo, she’ll lead you directly to Akemi. This girl named Josna knows all Akemi’s secrets.”