Southern boy too, born with a fried drumstick in his hand. I’m going to test his limits.
When the plate arrives, I place it in front of Jimmy and hand him a pair of chopsticks.
“Go for it, little man.”
He takes the chopsticks, separates them, and positions them in his right hand just like any red-blooded American would who is recovering from a horrible accident during which he was stabbed repeatedly in the right hand.
Using both hands, he manages to get a piece of fried kernel between the two sticks and lifts it to his mouth.
Crunch.
Crunch.
Grating of teeth.
Crunch.
Grimace, furrow of brow.
Grinding and then grating of teeth.
Crunch.
Wonderment.
Crunch.
Swallow.
Picking of teeth.
“You like it?” Shunsuke asks, doubtful.
“I like the fried part,” Jimmy responds. “What’s inside it?”
I can’t hold it in any longer.
“It’s chicken gristle!” I hiss excitedly. “Chicken gristle! Gross, right?!”
“Hmmm,” he says.
“Don’t you love and hate it?! Doesn’t it make you want to throw up and eat some more?! Isn’t it just immorally appetizing?!”
He picks up another piece, this time with his hand, and tosses it into his mouth. His crunching is less reticent now, his grimaces and brow furrowing more often giving way to thoughtful expressions of acceptance and, after a few more nuggets, unconflicted, decisive satisfaction.
“Actually, it’s not bad. But it needs better dippin’ sauce.”
Jimmy and I circle Tokyo, and she does her best to show him what she’s got. And what does she got that Jimmy might like? She’s got the Rainbow Bridge that takes you to the Odaiba district on Tokyo Bay, voted the best place for a date in the city, with its miles of shopping, street performers, amusement parks, game centers, and even a fake Statue of Liberty. She’s got the crazy kids dressed in their finest gothic threads and having a pose-a- thon next to Harajuku Station. She’s got the dancing Elvises in Yoyogi Park. She’s got the serenity and heart- stopping beauty of a hidden Japanese garden just off of the bustle of Omotesando Dori. She’s got the tallest building in the country in Ikebukuro and the glass capsule elevators running along the outside of the Mitsui Tower building in Nihonbashi. She’s got the labyrinthine underground malls and subway paths, which are a really fun place to hide behind a pole and watch Jimmy get confused and then a little worried. Best of all she’s got lots of food and, to Jimmy’s delight, an abundance of forks.
“Look, Jimmy! Isn’t it beautiful?” I ask Jimmy as we stare wide-eyed at one of Japan’s most marvelous sights, the majestic Mount Fuji, which on a clear day is visible from Tokyo.
He doesn’t answer. He looks impressed and awestruck, but more than a little scared, like a child sitting up in bed, eyeing his bedroom closet door, fearful of the hideous monster that lurks behind it. But why? Why does Jimmy look so pale, so panic-stricken, so pop-eyed? Is it the experience of looking at something so beautifully formed by nature and nature alone? Is it due to the vertigo one gets sometimes when seeing in person a sight normally only seen in pictures and postcards? Or is it because he’s currently at the Fuji-kyu Highlands amusement park just outside of Tokyo, strapped in beside me in one of the world’s fastest and tallest roller coasters, the Fujiyama (“Mount Fuji”), from which Mount Fuji is clearly visible, and which is currently at the beginning of its great initial ascent of eighty meters? We’ll probably never know.
We clamber up towards the summit, and when we reach it, the coaster momentarily straightens out, allowing us a brief respite from abject terror before nose-diving back to the ground at warp speed. Jimmy’s gleeful screams fill my ears as my cheeks flap in the wind and spittle splashes upon my chin and neck. We drop and drop and drop. Then we twist, turn, twist, ascend, nose-dive again, and finally, finally the carriage slows down and pulls back into the boarding area. The ride is over. With exhilaration, we realize we’ve survived, that everything will be OK, that we’ll live to eat another Japanese pancake. Though just a few moments ago we were tasting our own mortality in the back of our throats and were very close to puking it up, we managed to keep it down and make it through to the finish line. This calls for some green tea ice cream.
“How about it, Jimmy?” I ask.
“Yeah, but while we’re here, we might as well visit the haunted insane asylum. Get that out of the way.”
You know how, in the first blush of romance, you spend so much time with someone because you don’t want to be out of each other’s sight and it’s all great for the first few days because you’re all excited and you start mapping out your future together in your head and then the magic wears off a little bit and a few days later you kind of get sick of the sight of them especially after you catch them using your toothbrush-your toothbrush!-and you start to wonder when oh when they are ever just going to go away and sleep in their own freaking bed? I didn’t want that to happen between Jimmy and Tokyo. So after spending a few days locked in a passionate three-way with this fair city, we decide to take a trip south. It’s preemptive day trip time.
So it’s off to Kamakura to show Jimmy my friend the Big Buddha and then to the small rocky island of Enoshima, just off the coast of Fujisawa city, my old stomping ground. We walk across the bridge from Kamakura and onto the island on a beautiful sunny afternoon. We hike up the narrow, winding paths of the island village, visit small neighborhood temples, and sip green tea at little old-fashioned tearooms where the staff are simultaneously fascinated and horrified by us and our big, ungainly American ways. We follow the paved paths as they cut through thick greenery and eventually find ourselves heading down toward a rock outcropping on the side of the island where the land meets the water. I follow Jimmy down, and we alight on the flat rocks, pushed along by the determined Enoshima wind whispering in our ears, “Hurry up, gaywads, it’s beautiful down there!”
We walk to the edge of the rocks and stare down as the water from Sagami Bay licks at the hard edges of the island, and we wordlessly sit for a rest after our long walk. The cold water laps against the flat rocks and into the deep gaps between them. The sun and wind work in perfect concert, ensuring we are neither too hot nor too chilly as we lie back on the rocks and allow the surroundings to lull us into a brief catnap.
I open my eyes a half hour later and feel a bit of a chill. The sun has fallen behind the clouds, though its rays still pierce them in a few narrow, jagged lines. I look over and Jimmy is lying very close to the edge, dipping his hand in the cold water. I realize that we haven’t really talked much about our relationship since he’s been here, and I get the feeling we’re about to. We’ve managed to avoid the topic for a few days, busy as we’ve been with entertaining ourselves. Now that we’re away from Tokyo and in a place where we can actually hear each other, the time seems right. He needs to know when I’m coming home. And I need to decide.
The setting sure lends itself to a good, deep conversation about where our lives are going. “Jimmy, our love is like this water,” I might say, waxing poetic on our future. “It’s deep, it’s cleansing, it’s salty. And it covers three- quarters of the earth. Yes, Jimmy, our love covers three-quarters of the earth. It leaves Sagami Bay and flows out into the Pacific into all sorts of amazing places like Australia and Poland.”
“Our love flows to Poland via the Pacific Ocean?” Jimmy might wonder.
“It’s just a metaphor, but, you know, our love is deep and blue and has the power to sink many ships.”
At this point Jimmy might sigh and say, “Spare me the double-talk. I need dates. When are you coming home?”
“But…what will Tokyo say?” I wonder. “She loves me. Or at least tolerates me.” (OK, she finds me quite irritating.)
I go over and sit down next to Jimmy on the edge of the rocks.
“This is the most amazing place I’ve ever been,” he says.
“Wow. And
“I feel like I’m in one of those Kuniyoshi paintings.”
