Tune in Tokio

Me: Now please rent a room on the right at the next stoplight.

Y/TD: Um, I don’t understand.

We stop the lesson after thirty minutes and prepare to have our meal. I stand nervously, wondering what I should do, while Fumiko sets the table with plates, chopsticks, and teacups and Yoko finishes the yaki soba and salad in the kitchen. Fumiko looks at the job she’s done setting the table, tilts her head in consideration, and goes back into the kitchen and whispers something to Yoko. This prompts Yoko to come survey the table, tuttut, and do some rearranging. She asks me to sit, and she and Fumiko bring out the food: a heaping pan of yaki soba and one whopper of a salad.

“

!” Yoko says, prompting me to repeat this standard phrase one says when receiving food.

“Itydikimasoo!” I beam, and we all dig in. The ladies enjoy a few giggles over my use of the chopsticks. Don’t get me wrong, I can use them, but since I’m left-handed, I have a special way of holding them, just like we southpaws have a unique way of holding pencils and pens. We don’t hold them, per se, we grab them, as if we were trying to strangle the life out of them. I can feed myself with chopsticks, but I prefer to do it alone in a dimly lit room and not in front of a peanut gallery of Japanese critics.

After dinner, I make my way to the toilet, while Yoko and Fumiko clear the table, clean the dishes, and presumably argue about when the hell Fumiko is going to find a goddamn man and move the hell out of the house. I am delighted to discover in the bathroom a Washlet, one of those high-tech toilets you find in the nicer Japanese restrooms. It has a slew of useful functions, like a butt sprinkler, a heated seat, and a dizzying selection of sound effects to muffle the user’s unseemly emissions.

Toilets are a national obsession in this country of 100 million people and, if all goes well, 100 million daily turds. But the sheer volume of human waste isn’t the main reason these Washlets are so necessary. It’s the waste of water resulting from the tendency of Japanese women to flush repeatedly in order to mask their own excretory noises. These toilets solve that problem, allowing you to have a seat, choose a rushing water or an oscillating fan sound (a laugh track might be fun), sit back, and let it loose, giving yourself a sprinkle afterwards. And even though I’d gone in there just for a piss, I’m unable to leave without sitting my bare bottom on the heated seat (ahhhhh) and giving myself a little splash. I’m sure I’m blushing on the way out.

I return to the dining room table to see it set again for the dessert course. But this is no ordinary dessert. Yoko and Fumiko stand by their chairs until I come back to the table, then gesture for me to sit down. They join me, and Yoko begins an elaborate and carefully executed procedure of making and serving the tea. This here, I think to myself, is a Japanese tea ceremony. Just like I’d seen in The Karate Kid Part II. With any luck, this particular tea ceremony will not end with one of the ladies letting her hair down, reaching across the table, and kissing me full on the lips.

I watch as Yoko performs every action with a studied yet poetic grace. When it comes time for us all to partake, she instructs me on how to turn the cup with three (or is it four?) short, controlled movements and bring it back around to its starting position, at which point she indicates, with nods in my and Fumiko’s directions, that we should now raise the cup to our lips and taste its delicious greenness. We do and then place the cups delicately down onto their saucers.

We also enjoy some small cakes Yoko had picked up from the local bakery. She slices each in half before passing them to us on saucers and providing us each with a fork the size of Homemaker Barbie’s spatula. I see that the cakes are filled with a mysterious thick brown substance and hope to God it isn’t one of those Japanese concoctions that looks to be filled with chocolate when actually it’s stuffed with a semisweet bean paste. I bite into it with a smile and, my fears totally confirmed, swallow it as quickly as possible. Lying through my teeth, I proclaim it “

” or “Delicious!”

No sooner have we finished our tea and cakes than Yoko turns to me and asks, “Do you want hear Japanese harp? Maybe I can play for you now.”

Wow. I’ve had a free Japanese lesson. A delicious free Japanese meal. A front-row seat at a free Japanese tea ceremony. A free Japanese bean paste cake thingy. And now she’s offering to play me music? Of course I want to hear the Japanese harp, that goes without saying. But I have a sinking feeling that I’m setting myself up for some bad karma, accepting all this free stuff without giving anything back. I mean, I had offered her an ear to vent about how awful her husband is, but surely she’s overcompensated me by this point. Let’s see…I could stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, follow this with my famous rendition of “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee,” and finish things off by doing that thing I can do with my left eyeball, but it always takes me so long to uncross my eyes after that.

Plus, I remember something I’d read in the welcome packet that MOBA had sent me before I’d left the U.S.:

If you should lose a personal item, such as your wallet or purse, cheer up. It is highly likely that it was turned into the station master or the nearest koban (local police box). Simply show up and make a clear identification.

No, not that one. This one:

The Japanese are very preoccupied with maintaining the status quo. It is of utmost importance not to offend anyone, and they are generally uncomfortable saying a direct “no” to a request. So instead of saying “no,” often they will utter a noncommittal “maybe.” This should be construed as “no.”

Yoko had said the word “maybe.” So does she really want to play the Japanese harp for me, or is this just her Japanese way of saying, “OK, Tim, look, I’ve given you a lesson, I’ve fed you, introduced you to my daughter, hell, I even did a dang tea ceremony for you, which I’ve never even learned to do properly. What’s next? Need a haircut?”

What to do? I really want to hear that harp. I’d also been hoping that later she would bring out her samurai sword and kendo sticks.

I finally decide that I’ll bring my viola and washboard to the next lesson and give Yoko and Fumiko a little show. I’ll also get Jimmy to send me some Pepperidge Farm Sausalito cookies and S’mores Pop-Tarts so I can impress the ladies with some sweet, sweet Americana.

“That’d be great,” I reply.

Yoko and Fumiko promptly stand and move into the living room, where they start rearranging the furniture. They shove the coffee table against the far wall, open one of the sliding doors and chuck a sitting chair into the bedroom, and move a bunch of potted plants out onto the balcony. The gaping hole left in the middle of the living room is soon filled with the arrival of a humongous Japanese harp-a giant ocean liner coasting into a harbor. Yoko and Fumiko bring out the four-foot-long instrument, place it on two stands, one on each end, and start positioning little white plastic pieces under the strings in order to tune it.

I’d never known the Japanese harp was so massive. I’d seen old drawings of men and women sitting cross- legged on the floor strumming them, but in contemporary Japan, everything seems to get smaller and smaller with time, from cell phones to computers to cameras to paperback books to quantities of breathable air. Seeing the ladies drag in this bulky and unwieldy piece of polished wood with dangling strings and begin to transform it into an instrument, I think how, in Japan, size reduction of modern obsessions is one thing, but respect for tradition is another.

“Shrink everything else,” I can hear the old Japanese samurai say as they collapse their swords down to something the size of toothpicks and place them in their back pockets. “But let the harp remain large enough to demand its own room.”

Yoko finishes setting the harp to the right pitch, grabs some sheet music off the bookshelf, and then brings a chair over and sits down with the harp before her. She slides the little string picks on her fingers, bends toward the harp, and begins to strum and sing along to an old Japanese ballad. It’s a vaguely familiar melody, yet I can’t figure out why.

“I’ve heard this before,” I say as Yoko continues singing and Fumiko starts picking her cuticles.

“Sakura…Sakura…Sana denchi to o-mo-u…”

Yoko stops. “You want play?” she asks.

“Oh, no, I can’t. I…” I can’t think of a decent reason not to. So Yoko stands and allows me to take her place in front of the harp. She instructs me briefly on how to read the notes of the Japanese score she’d been playing. Then