And as mysteriously as she appeared in my life, Naomi was gone. Was she just a vision? A figment of my desperate imagination? A guardian angel sent from heaven’s red-light district to do the community service she was sentenced to for flashing Jesus and the Buddha at last year’s Christmas party? Nah, she was promoted to the next level, which I don’t teach. The next week, when I look down at my class roster and her name is not there, I die a little inside.
But though I’m saddened by her departure, I know that her legacy will live on. Naomi changed the atmosphere forever with her constant indecent proposals. She stirred things up and made seemingly straightforward questions like “What’s the best drink to have with ramen?” dangerous.
Now there will be no more talk of menstrual cycles and their effect on one’s cooking; no more impromptu speeches like the one about that country in Africa that, allegedly, had outlawed sex for two years because of the AIDS epidemic (“I think it would be impossible,” she said); no more sexual harassment; and no more manipulation of the text for her own nefarious ends. No more piss, no more vinegar.
And just like that, it’s back to conversations about Japanese society, vacations, and dreary answers to appalling opening questions like “If today were your birthday, where would you be, who would you be with, what would you be doing, and why?” Of course, I could follow Naomi’s example, throw caution to the wind, and offer questions like “Why is it that in Japan, it is horribly rude to blow your nose in public, yet sniffing, snorting, chewing, and swallowing, or spitting out one’s own snot with the forcefulness and volume of a morning radio DJ is perfectly all right?” But that would cause more problems than it would solve. And I’d probably be asked to repeat the question more slowly.
So my classes have gone back to being placid affairs, with the occasional bit of accidental rude language. (“My son is a really good cock,” Shizue would say, meaning, of course, “cook.”) Tomo has lost his innocence and has probably moved on from Salinger to
But even though Naomi is gone from my class, her spirit can sometimes still be felt. One day, Shizue suggests we discuss our thoughts on Japanese tabloid newspapers, and another time, Kumiko proposes the topic of “sexiest Hollywood actors,” neither of which would have been possible pre-Naomi.
Naomi is now wreaking havoc in the next level, no doubt trying to get people to discuss the prime minister’s favorite sexual positions or whether or not adult incest is a victimless crime. I envy the teacher of that class and would kill to be sitting there as he or she naively replies, “Sure, why not?” to those two magical words that are guaranteed to open up a world of smut and disorder: “Anything OK?”
10
It’s early morning, and the sun is only just beginning to consider poking its way above the jagged Tokyo horizon. Giant black pterodactyls scavenge for scraps from the trash bags lining the concrete outside, dwarfing the trash collectors who are doing their best to remove the millions of pounds of waste and sludge left for them the night before. And me, I’m on my bed shivering, having just woken up from a horrible, horrible early-morning dream in which I was being brutally attacked in my bed by Tare Panda, the wide-eyed, oval-faced character from the Hello Kitty School of Aggressive Cuteness who’s weaseled his way into every corner of Japanese popular culture, from advertisements to greeting cards to cell phone accessories, threatening to usurp Miss Kitty as the national mascot. It was trying to cute me to death.
Admittedly, I’m not just irked because of the panda attack. It’s that it happened to occur simultaneously with an early-morning earthquake tremor deep beneath the city. I wake to the bed shaking. Also the bureau, the television, the sliding wooden door that opens out on the kitchen, and the walls. And since Tokyoites are expecting “the big one” any day now, I quickly jump to the conclusion that that day is today and the panda in my dream was just an adorable li’l angel of death.
I sit frozen on the shaking bed for a few moments, praying for everything to stop wobbling, hoping there isn’t a bigger tremor to come. After a few minutes, I stop writing goodbye e-mails to friends and family in my head and start to calm down. I’ve experienced these tremors before, and it’s always the calm after the shaking stops that is the eeriest; it’s still within the realm of possibility that something has been jiggled loose (a nearby house, a telephone pole, Tokyo Tower), something that will soon come crashing down on my bed without warning.
I gather myself together, clamber out of bed, and slide into the chair at my desk. I figure I may as well watch television while I’m waiting to be crushed, so I switch it on and go out to the kitchen to make some tea and toast. When I return to my room, I’m greeted with a horrifying image on the television screen, one that will emblazon itself on my memory for weeks, maybe years, to come.
It’s a commercial for the Japanese language version of
I. Am. Aghast. There are many things that should never be allowed to leave America’s borders. Adam Sandler movies, for example. Fox News. The McRib Sandwich. But number one on the list, I feel sure of it, is the musical story of that nauseatingly precocious and cherubic red-haired orphan who, whenever she has a problem, is bored, or just has some time to kill, thinks it necessary to sing songs through her nose in a voice that could wilt plants, crash airplanes, and bring about worldwide famine.
“The horror…the horror,” I murmur, convinced I will never fall asleep again.
Later, on the train on my way to Shibuya to do some record shopping, I am still feeling the aftereffects of unprotected exposure to Jap-Annie. As it happens, I’m sitting across from a young office lady holding in her lap a tiny blue purse with a pastel drawing of two dancing bunnies, a chicken, a strawberry, some flowers, and the words “Something Pretty” on it. I think of Tare Panda. I think of little orphan Jap-Annie. I want to vomit.
Looking around me, I see the train is dense with commuters with their heads buried in a variety of reading material. Many read comics full of characters with glistening eyes half the size of their heads. Women read fashion magazines, like
Considering my panda dream again, I decide that my subconscious is desperately trying to tell me something. It is this: the Japanese obsession with all things cute is becoming a little more than I can handle.
I think back to when I opened my first Japanese bank account. I had two choices of bankcard designs. The first one was a lovely drawing of a small boy on a fishing boat staring at the setting sun against a beautiful auburn sky. Elegiac and elegant. The other choice was a picture of a cartoon bunny named Miffy who looks like Hello Kitty with bunny ears and no nose. He was licensed as the bank’s mascot. The friendly bank teller told me it was the most popular choice. After a few moments of quiet reflection, I chose the fishing boat sunset one, ignoring the devil inside me screaming, “Give me that bunny!”
“Tim, really,” I lectured myself. “Calm down. You don’t need the bunny. You want the bunny, but you don’t need the bunny. Yes, he’s cute. But is that really what you need in a bank card? Choose the sunset background and walk away.”
Cuteness is of utmost importance in this country. It’s why the films of chipmunk-faced Meg Ryan have always
